No More Subtlety

August 21st, 2008Blog0 comments

So I noticed that Best Buy has a new slogan: “You, Happier.” Come in here, buy something, and you will be happier. It’s sweet yet ominous.

It takes a lot of balls to make this your corporate slogan. Imagine the irate father of two who screams his head off at a Geek Squad tech because someone left porn on his kid’s Barbie Princess LCD Picture Frame. On the way in he sees the slogan on the door: “You, Happier.” It only throws fuel onto the fire.

I finished reading Generation Kill. Yes, I got the book because of the HBO miniseries.

It makes me wonder if I could kill another man. Theoretically, due to the enormous complexities of modern culture, we are probably doing harm to other people just by existing. By buying that Barbie Princess LCD Picture Frame, I’m probably contributing to slave labor manufacturing in China. Is making someone’s life eternally miserable up there with killing them? Maybe my heart bleeds too much.

But back to this — I wonder if I could pull the trigger on someone. In discussions with friends it seems that it depends on the circumstances. But it also seems that bombs and artillery aren’t so discriminating.

A cool thing is that Evan Wright, the Rolling Stone reporter that wrote Generation Kill, also wrote the teleplay for one of the episodes of the HBO miniseries.

This is interesting because one of the characters in the miniseries is “Evan Wright” (the miniseries is based on the book, which is autobiographically reported).

This must have been one of the few instances where a TV writer was writing a script containing a character based on himself.

One of the actors on the miniseries, “Fruity” Rudy Reyes also plays himself.

The HBO series has taken a lot of direct cues from the book. The way that they adapted the material for television is pretty straightforward and very well done.

For instance, the writers will take something actually said to Wright by one of the soldiers and put it into a dialogue scene between two characters. And they’ll always use it as a source of tension or conflict.

From the start they analyzed the book, figured out where the central conflicts are, and used those to structure out the episodes. Plus there’s always an action/crucible moment in the middle of each episode so that the plot doesn’t meander.

Good work folks!