JM: Themes, tropes and/or characteristics which almost shout "this work is by an American".

[selenak]

Last meme entry! It has been fun (again). Will do it next year, too.

So, let's see. For the purposes of a reply, I shall have to indulge in some over the top generalizations, for which I apologize in Advance, US Americans.

A North American origin is easy to spot if:

- a tv show or movie employs only thin, beautiful actresses who are made up to look like they could be on a magazine page (not just kidding: I remember the (welcome) shock when I started to watch more British origin tv shows and movies, and while many of the women there were at least pretty, it wasn't usually of the glossy magazine type, and there could be female main characters who looked over forty, or fifty, with imperfect figures and non ideal faces)

- people lying in bed who have to get up suddenly for some reason do so while wrapping the sheet of their bed around themselves (may be an out of date criteria in the age of HBO, but I suspect it still applies for cable network); I noticed this sheet wrapping weirdness first in ye olde 1980s when Dallas was airing)

- characters in books or in movies and tv employ baseball metaphors (whether or not there is also baseball on screen) and love baseball, even if they happen to be in a sci fi work and their planet of origin never heard of the wretched game

- DADDY ISSUES are rampant (which isn't to say that European works don't use daddy issues as a trope, but not as much, and they use them somewhat differently; jesuswasbatman once joked that if Blake's 7 had been an American show instead of a British one, Avon wouldn't have met the brother of his supposedly dead girlfriend in s2 but his previously unknown son. You could add that if Doctor Who was an American show, the Doctor's issue with Gallifrey and the reason why he left the planet would be because his father didn't give him enough attention. And if the German movie The Lives of Others ever had been given an US remake treatment as was intended for a while, you can bet that one of the three main characters (or several) would have clashed with their dear or not so dear old dad, and that was really at the heart of their issues with the state

- the special effects are generally better (there are exceptions, like Sanctuary, which could have been made in Europe in that regard) than they are in contemporary European productions

- not true for pay tv: the episodes are structured in a way that has the emotional beats match with advertisement breaks (this was v.v. odd to notice back in the 80s when we didn't have ad breaks on German tv, and then later when we did get them, we still didn't have that many compared with US tv, plus our broadcasters placed them at different points, so you had the scenes with dramatic close ups and swelling music sometimes followed by a repeat close up because the ad break didn't happen)

- sympathetic characters are fighting "for freedom" no matter which era their narrative is placed in, and even if they're busy invading someone else's country/planet

- there is an evil German or Brit around somewhere, and if there can't be due to the setting of the story, and it's a movie/tv series, said person is at least played by a British or German language actor

- characters get congratulated for their command of German/French/Spanish/Japanese/Whatever foreign language by "native" characters after the US actors mangled the language in question

- non US geography is somewhat questionable (golden example: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Robin landing on the beaches after returning from a crusade and being in Sherwood Forest a short walk later; though I'm also fond of Hamburg, sea harbor city right next to the Atlantic, in An American Tail).

There are more, but these are the ones which come most immediately to my mind. :)

The other days

Comments

[jae]

a tv show or movie employs only thin, beautiful actresses who are made up to look like they could be on a magazine page

I thought about this when I found out recently that an American novel I really liked was going to be made into a movie. It's a novel where it's extremely important that while this small group of friends are all decently attractive women, one of them is mind-blowingly gorgeous. I have no idea how they'll make that distinction at all.

And if the German movie The Lives of Others ever had been given an US remake treatment as was intended for a while

??? You are freaking kidding me. How on earth?

-J

[selenak]

I have it from the horse's mouth, i.e. Florian Henckel von Donnersmark himself told me, years ago, about two years after the movie, that a US remake was in the pipelines. It obviously didn't happen, but they wanted to do one.

[ratcreature]

Baseball metaphors are the worst. After many years of them and actually trying to read the wikipedia page about the gameplay once, I still have no idea idea how the game works. I don't get it. I mean the British and much of their Commonwealth love their cricket, but you don't run into that all the time in their fiction.

And seriously, someone but Hamburg on the coast? The major feature/problem this harbor has is that it is further inland on a river but tries to cater to ocean transport too, making it hellishly difficult even with perfect tidal window timing to navigate large ships into it, with endless environmental controversies about digging it out and toxic mud disposal.

[selenak]

Hamburg on the coast: check out Feivel der Mauswanderer ("An American Tail") to see it in its full glory. :)

Baseball metaphors: aren't they just? When Peter David inflicted them on the Centauri and the Vulcans in different fandoms, I nearly wept.

[muccamukk]

And on the X-Men as well. Though the Paul Cornell comic, Captain Britain and MI:13, retaliated by making everyone of the team play cricket, leaving the one American very confused.

[kore]

....OK that's awesome. /American who has never gotten baseball despite being REQUIRED to play it in school

[muccamukk]

You should read Captain Britain and MI:13! It's aMAZing.

[ratcreature]

You'd think American writers would get a hint at some point that baseball has a rather limited appeal. I mean aside from the Cubans and the Japanese does anyone else besides Americans even really like it in great numbers? I sometimes wonder why Americans are so infatuated with convoluted sports. I mean, their American football is not quite as bad but still much worse than most ball games, where really the only thing you have to know to follow them is that opposing teams try to get a ball into a goal.

[selenak]

One of the reasons why Jed Bartlett is my favourite fictional US president: he doesn't get Baseball, either. An American tv character meant to be sympathetic who is not into baseball and isn't converted to like it in the course of the narrative, either! Nothing short of revolutionary, and definitely unique.

[aris_tgd]

Okay, as someone who loves both movies and baseball, I feel like I gotta step up and say that baseball is a very cinematic game, and structured into bite-sized pieces, each one of which has its own place in the narrative. A movie is structured like a baseball game and vice versa, and a season of a TV show is structured like a season of baseball and vice versa. I think that American writers who are also fans of baseball pick this up instinctively and it works its way back into their writing.

And if you'd actually like an explanation of the game, I can attempt, but I won't assume it matters that much to you. ;)

[ratcreature]

Somehow it seems really wrong to me for a ball game to have narratives. I guess the problems is that to me basically anything in game rules beyond the simplest concepts like "a ball needs to go into a goal" comes across like the noises the adults in Peanuts cartoons make...

[aris_tgd]

Heh, well, in baseball, the action stops and starts, and every time it stops the players and the game are in a new setup. And it's sort of fractally narrative--each play has a beginning, middle, and end, and then each inning has a beginning, middle, and end, and then the game as a whole has the beginning, middle, and end, and out to the series and out to the season. And even further, when you talk about a hundred years of rivalries and team histories.

It's not necessarily always a good narrative--I've seen some really dull baseball games, too!--but the potential and the setup is there.

[lilacsigil]

I do know how the game works (I lived in Japan and went to a few games there) and I still find it weird and confusing how much it shows up in fiction.

[muccamukk]

Canada's in North America too!

Though yes to all of this otherwise, though US shows seem confused about their own geography too sometimes. (As least based on how I can tell where something's supposed to be set by which portion of my flist is going, "What? No!")

[minim_calibre]

I was going to say, US shows basically just have no concept of distance or geography, period. Convenient bodies of water appear to be everywhere, and it never takes more than a few hours to go between states.

[muccamukk]

Lo! The mighty mountains of Florida! How glistening are their peaks!
(I know it's cheaper to shoot everything in Vancouver, but Jesus.)

[aris_tgd]

"That's one of my favorite mountains in Illinois, right there."

[gehayi]

It even happens in animation! Remember the towering cliffs of coastal Virginia in Pocahontas?



Coastal Virginia, which looks like this:

[selenak]

He. Go figure. (I've never been to the Virginian coast myself, but that doesn't surprise me one bit.)

[neotoma]

Yes, my reaction of "This seems like an awful lot of trees and hills for Kansas..." in a show that was ostensibly set in western Kansas (which is prairie, and almost as flat as pancake) but actually filmed in southern California.

[jesuswasbatman]

The Doctor Who example isn't hypothetical - see the notorious John Leekley pitch for a rebooted US-made series, during the process that eventually gave us the Paul McGann TV movie. The Doctor and the Master would have been good and evil half-brothers, with the Doctor being half-human and the Master pure Gallifreyan. When not fighting the Master, the Doctor would have spent all his time searching for their lost father, the Time Lord named, I am not making this up, Ulysses. Oh, and "Barusa" would have been their paternal grandfather, who would have been murdered by the Master, but then uploaded into the Doctor's TARDIS to continue acting as a mentor to him.

[onyxlynx]

What your icon said.

(And I know nothing very little about Doctor Who, but that retrofit makes no sense.)

(Also, I'm sitting on a really bad pun here.)

[selenak]

"Ulysses": that's why satire always pales compared to reality. Or, well, thankfully aborted reality. Good lord.

[nenya_kanadka]

Seriously, whenever anyone rags on the TV movie, the only answer is It could have been SO MUCH WORSE. (And also that young!Eight is an adorable puppy.) Your icon says it all really. :D

[wee_warrior]

Given that every planet in any sci-fi series looks like Canada (and the first six seasons of X-Files), an American Dr. Who would at least have had the same familiar locations, only in a slightly different way than currently.

Other things that come to mind: Endlessly spacious apartments even for the poorest characters in New York.
Fraternities.
Prom being *the* important social event in a teenager's life.
So many Wizard Of Oz references. (Yes, I watched a lot of David E. Kelley shows back in the day.)
Monstrous creatures all live in Maine (or where landscape is concerned, Virginia or Georgia).
Even on a show set all over the world (hi, Heroes!) everything looks suspiciously like California.
No sense of timezones at all. (Yes, Alias, it's the same time in Zurich and LA, why are you asking?)
Even though religion is almost never really a topic, everyone is somehow vaguely Christian (unless it's a plot point they are not).
There is always this one man, he is the leader, even though he is reluctant to take up the mantle, but in the end, he is always right, because he's a MAN. (a white one.)
Everyone is comfortably middle class, except the one token poor kid, who has to work to be able to drive his car, and his sister is a slightly dangerous "bad girl."
One of the female characters will have a highstrung mother much too involved in her daughter's (love) life.

[selenak]

So many Wizard Of Oz references.

"I get that reference." (Steve Rogers, finally getting a pop culture reference because it's Wizard of Oz, in The Avengers.) Indeed. I still haven't seen the movie or read the book(s), but because it's everywhere, I gathered a lot via fannish osmosis.

Maine: that's Stephen King's fault, though, isn't it? My parents couldn't understand why I laughed evilly when we crossed the stateline on our Indian Summers tour of the New England states 16 years ago...

I've seen too many high strung mothers in British shows to see them as Usian.

[wee_warrior]

I actually had a fairytale book with an excerpt of the Wizard of Oz, so I knew Dorothy was pretty clumsy and tended to accidentally land her house on witches or dump buckets of water on them before I ever started Picket Fences. :D That girl had a knack for accidental villain disposal worthy of Monty Python.

Maine is both King's and Lovecraft's fault I think (Unless Lovecraft's stories take place in other Eastern states, I don't remember).

I just remembered poor Donna's Mum, so yeah, true on the high strung mothers being more international.

[ratcreature]

Prom being *the* important social event in a teenager's life.

LOL. I still remember my final school year when we planned to have this fancy prom-like ball to celebrate the end of our school career and passing the exam, and initial plans for it were all for fancy dress, with dancing, and it set on a historical museum ship you could rent for such purposes, but obviously a festivity like that would have taken actual *work* to organize and the responsible committee just collapsed due to laziness. (I wasn't on that one, having been utterly indifferent to proms, but honestly decades later I'm still appalled at how little people cooperated with our yearbook, which was the committee I was on, which didn't collapse btw, but at the end of it most people not on the yearbook committee seemed to think of us as some kind of harpies, constantly after them with annoying requests for contributions and deadline reminders, even though our bar for contributions was appallingly low. Like one stoner kid just photocopied a cigarette package over a dope leaf picture with some scribble declaring how awesome it would be if he passed the final exam despite having been high most of the final year, or something along those lines, and we were fine with that, because he gave us at least *something* for his personal page).

Ultimately we ended up just having a party on school grounds with no dress code but a fair amount of booze instead (wine and beer were allowed since we were all over the German drinking age for those, but not hard liquor, but of course people brought vodka etc anyway), and the majority got drunk, in particular after the chaperoning teachers left. So the main responsibility of the party organizing group was just to make sure that everybody who puked did so outside or into toiletss, that the hard liquor bottles were disposed of in trash cans outside of the school grounds, and that no school property was trashed. The trust the school officials extended worked out surprisingly well, all things considered, in that we left the rooms and the bathrooms fine for use the next morning. But yeah, that was not really a prom. Somehow social life didn't collapse.

[wee_warrior]

Wow that sucks. And I thought we were bad, but our yearbook worked pretty well, with articles, etc. We didn't do much apart from that, though. There was an Abi-Party, which was much like yours, and a prank, which was a traditional thing at our school done by the Abiturklasse before they left school for good. But nothing aside from that. (Nobody checked if we had hard liquor I think. ;) )

[ratcreature]

Oh yes, we had the traditional prank as well (though ours wasn't very memorable, I can't even remember now what we did exactly, I vaguely recall locking out teachers was involved and such, but it was all very conventional). And we did have some decent content in our yearbook, course portraits, photo portraits with short quotes by others what they thought about the student, reminiscences what school experiences meant to us and all that as well, but those were mostly created by people on the yearbook committee. The problem was that my year at the school was very small, like we were only forty people or so to start with, and not all made it through. So to have a decent amount of content students who were not interested had to do something, and we wanted at least one personal page from everyone.

[yvi]

Having sex with bras on. I find that so weird - you can show people making, well, "sex motions" and noises, but breasts? Nah, that's too much. I don't think British shows do that.

Also, since I just watched this on Parenthood, children over the age of 10 getting their first sex education from their parents. And being completely oblivious to anything they say up until that 'talk'.

[kore]

YES THIS. What the hell is it with the bras?! No woman is going to want to have sex with a bra on! Presumably her partner, male or female, isn't going to want it either! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXxi4iClbYE

[nenya_kanadka]

OMG this is my pet peeve. Though I can never figure out (when it's a fade to black/wake up the next morning thing) if they're meant to have had sex in their bras or if they're meant to have had sex naked and then put their bras back on to sleep in? Because the dudes wake up in boxers half the time, which is presumably a "puts back on after sex" thing, and kind of makes sense. But IDEK.

(I have had sex with my shirt on, lo back in the day when I was a lot more body-shy, but somehow I doubt that is what is going on with all these TV characters.)

[kore]

Dude, we JUST SAW THAT, in a PoI episode. Not-Reese seduced the number he saved, which made Harold and us disgusted, and then the morning after, the woman's in his bed....he has to go....and the covers slip down, and she is STILL IN HER BRA! WTF? Did she sleep in it all night?

....altho now I kinda want to write Harold and Reese not-all-that-accidental-voyeur fic. Dammit.

[parlstickare]

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Robin landing on the beaches after returning from a crusade and being in Sherwood Forest a short walk later
You forgot to mention that they cross Hadrian's Wall on their way to Nottingham from the beach at the cliffs of Dover... Robin could really have done with a map.

[selenak]

No kidding. Yes, the Hadrian's Wall placement was another crowning jewel in that movie's geography.

[nenya_kanadka]

I am crap at geography and even I am stunned.

[kore]

OMG, right there with you. And I know British geography mainly from Viclit!

[onyxlynx]

- non US geography is somewhat questionable (golden example: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Robin landing on the beaches after returning from a crusade and being in Sherwood Forest a short walk later; though I'm also fond of Hamburg, sea harbor city right next to the Atlantic, in An American Tail).

They're not too good on US geography, either (the canonical examples have escaped memory, but it would be wise to ignore any scene portraying a transit system, because it's wrong).

[selenak]

I got some canonical examples from other commenters, don't worry.:)

[kore]

Fear of the Naked:

People lying in bed after sex with sheets up to the waist (For Him) and to the chest (For Her).

The sheet-wrapping!

A guy getting out of bed while presumably naked does this: he has boxers by the bed, he pulls them on while sitting down, he gets up while still pulling them on and is fully covered. I have never met a guy who does this. Ever.

Women having sex with bras/camisoles/negligees/whatever on. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO.

If it is a movie/show where you do see tits, they will be on full gratuitous display. You will not see full frontal for guys (or most women). You may see a guy's ass. Possibly.

Cunnilingus does not happen, or, if it does, it is an Event reviewers remark upon.

Lesbian sex: maybe some kisses and bed shots. (Some of these happen while the women are fully clothed, and no, it didn't appear to be a "we have to fuck so bad we don't want to take off our clothes"/"let's do it fully clothed" thing.) Guy-on-guy sex: maybe some kisses, rare bed shots.

If we see het sex it is almost always with the woman on top (still in a bra) and a horizontal guy or the back view of the guy pumping away and the woman's face over his shoulder.

(Full disclosure, I don't have cable or watch shows like Girls so maybe some of these are better than what I remember!)

[selenak]

A guy getting out of bed while presumably naked does this: he has boxers by the bed, he pulls them on while sitting down, he gets up while still pulling them on and is fully covered. I have never met a guy who does this. Ever.

Me neither. All these men must be from the same US narrative universe, clearly. :) And I hear you on the bras.

Cunnilingus, though: here I have to sing the praises of Joss Whedon. BTVS had Willow going down on Tara and Spike going down on the Buffybot (!), and AtS had Wesley going down on Lilah.

[watervole]

the reunion with estranged father is the worst one for me. That got really cliched at some times.

I've just watched an old episode of 'House' and that's got yet another version of it.

[nenya_kanadka]

This is fascinating! I definitely recognize some of these tropes.