The Unsung Romance of Incompetence

Did you ever watch “Callan”?

This is almost ‘The Wire’. Minus the four ‘natural PO-leece’, most of the supporting cast display aggressive incompetence or, at the very least, and indifference to any notion of justice. Prez blinds a young teen, Herc is an abusive brainless beast, Carver aspires to base competence but continues to be drawn to bullying, and Sydnor is obviously parlaying his considerable gifts to advance his career. And their leadership is, at best, aggressively amoral.

Displaying a spectrum like this probably adds more artistic nuance than what you are proposing, imho, although I’d certainly argue that Simon’s worst characteristic as a writer is an inborn cow-towing to some authority structures even as he critiques others.

Again, Matt, I’d argue this is less interesting than the extant X-files, where Mulder was often wrong and his gullibility was sometimes intentionally used to manipulate him.

The guy-who-can’t-stop-terror-attacks idea sounds right for a series on Adult Swim.

Oh, and on the comedy side you have the opener to The Other Guys, as well as most of Childrens Hospital.

Also, I think a point missed here (and in the original article) is that while they’re individually incompetent, they are able to function effectively *as a team*. Having seen the movie, it undercuts that point a few times.

I think there is a certain heroism to Lonely. Not that it’s very attractive.

It just occured to me of course that your series has already been made, it’s called the Pink Panther.

Have not seen the movie (does not open in Spain till… pfff), but I guess that what the reviewer is trying to say is that at the end of it our heroes have not discovered how to overcome their flaws and that is the point where they actually can save the galaxy or whatever. You know, the typical Disney thing of “now I’ve learn an important lesson”. Or like Thor in the first movie.

But by all means some of those ideas do sound interesting. Kinda bored about the whole ultracompetent people in TV.

My understanding is that something is classified as a romance when it takes all the elements of a tragedy and turns it into a happy(ish) ending. It is also called a tragi-comedy – but this also show the direction – from tragedy to comedy. The rude mechanicals’ play does the opposite – they have mirthful moments leading to tragedy – so the Ancient Greeks in the audience critique them . I haven’t studied the matter but I presume it has something to do with Classical genre theory.

The Sopranos was not a romance. Wells’ work he called romances likely did not have incompetent wrongdoers send innocent people to prison as the nominal ‘happy ending’ (how – because the awful characters saved their jobs it was a happy ending?)

Breaking my word: according to a large number of Amazon reviews, Fight Club the novel is brilliantly satirical too. So maybe I just had an off day the first time I read it and need to try again.

Engrenages/Spiral contains a fair few incompetents, with Gilou taking the biscuit. But Berthaud is usually willing to seduce someone to cover for him.

The hero of Good Cop was spectacularly incompetent and dug himself in ever deeper.

Oedipus Rex. Romeo and Juliet. Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Death of a Salesman.

Narutaru (Shadow Star). Texhnolyze. Space Runaway Ideon. Rose of Versailles. Berserk. Basilisk. Wolf’s Rain.

Cabin in the Woods.

“How about we just say the thing I’m talking about is anything that matches the descriptions I give, minus the word romance.”

Well, I do think that perhaps is a better idea indeed if you are definitely set on having a plot where your characters’ corruption and incompetence are irredeemable and lead to the false imprisonment of innocent characters and other tragedies.

For dramatic rather than parodic writing examples you might look at Checkhov’s plays which all have flawed characters I think and sad endings, or the ‘superfluous man’ genre, or Gogol’s Dead Souls – although he was going to reform his characters, but couldn’t manage it, burnt his papers, and took to his bed to die.

We’ll, call it a tragic romance then.

For marketing purposes I think we’re going to have to go with “romantic tragedy” here.

My intuition matches the subtext I get from the rest of the comments section – it does sound too good to not already have been done. But I can’t come up with a really good example, either.

Seems like Tony Soprano, Chief of Police would get pretty close, especially if you transpose in his merry band of incompetent Captains.

Get Smart?

Viewing Fight Club as satire was the only way I could wring any enjoyment out of it too. Sadly, Palahniuk doesn’t seem to think he wrote satire.

http://chuckpalahniuk.tumblr.com/post/93439737271/i-work-at-my-universitys-bookstore-and-every-semester

Conrad. O’Neill. All the King’s Men. Cormac McCarthy.

Where’s your protagonist?

1) Drama is sometimes defined as desire + obstacle => overcoming.
2) Romance, after the French Revolution expanded and internalized drama to incorporate failure, we identify with the person who tries really hard and and retains or obtains her ideals under stressful circumstances, even if the world kills her. Or fails and becomes corrupted, in which case we have a true tragedy.
3) In a lot of stories or widespread corruption and incompetence, we still have a naif to identify with as the protagonist. All the King’s Men. Yossarian.
4) In stories of almost universal corruption without an innocent observer, we will tend to identify with the victims. Sometimes it takes a lot of searching, but we will find some dead little children. They become in a sense our protagonists.

Avengers, or the Heart-Rending Tragedy of Loki.

What are you looking for, a drama about guards at a concentration camp, from the PoV of the guards, without empathy for the victims? It’s tough, because win or lose, the corrupt and incompetent for most of us will resolve to being the antagonists.

Dirty Pair!

Or, if all else fails and we are presented with a total world of shit, we ourselves, reading the text, become the protagonists who must overcome the obstacle of the story. The terror and pity in the audience for Oedipus Rex.

There are always effective good guys as protagonists, somewhere around a narrative. Can’t really have incompetence and corruption without their opposites.

How about a cop show where the main character constantly gets in trouble for his incompetence?

Like, he gets transferred to Murder and he spends four days proving that the original suspect was innocent and he finds the real killer. He gets in trouble for spending far too much time on the investigation when it could have been wrapped up much quicker.

He gets transferred somewhere else and discovers city funds being embezzled by somebody important in the Mayor’s office and he actually files the case. This is incompetent because he should have privately shown it to his boss and the higher-ups would decide whether it was useful leverage on the Mayor, or maybe use it for blackmail.

He is put on a regular beat and by sheer good observation and quick thinking he stops the kidnapping of a little girl. The mother calls the media and they make a big production of it, and his boss points out that by looking so good he made everybody else including the boss look bad. How can he hope to do well this way?

Make it completely obvious that what this poor shlub thinks of as doing the job is in fact utter incompetence, and he has no business being in that job.

I would actually say that the X-Files is almost an example of this kind of show. They lose almost as often as they win. Scully and/or Mulder are always dropping their firearms or getting kidnapped/beaten up/knocked out.

“a procedural about people who can’t follow procedure, or work out good procedures to follow.”

Okay, last comment for awhile. Archer is a great example of this. They are all spectacularly incompetent and often fail to even come close to successfully completing the various missions they are assigned.

/Also if you haven’t watched Archer please do. It is really funny and well drawn.

“oth Fight Club and Starship Troopers (the movies) have sparked constant debate about whether/how-much-of the audience realized that the film was basically laughing at the book.”

Can’t comment about Fight Club–I’ve only seen part of it on TV. But I’ve seen all of “Troopers” (on TV–you think I’d pay to watch that?) and am amazed that people can’t see the satire. It’s not exactly subtle. Maybe they were too focused on the gross out scenes with the Bugs.

I just thought of a better example than Unstoppable (catastrophe is not avoided), but spoilers. It’s another trolley problem movie though, interestingly enough.

At the beginning of X-Files, I thought the story arc was to play Scully’s rationalist explanations off Mulder’s paranoid fantasizing. I thought it would remain ambivalent about which was correct. Or at least, part of the time, Mulder would just be crazy. When it became obvious that the show was going to move toward Mulder’s vision, I pretty much lost interest.

The protagonists of True Detective do screw up their big case, tell themselves they did the right thing, and lie about it. Their arc at the end is in part a matter of making up for their earlier mistake, and even then it is explicit that a lot of guilty people are going to remain untouched.

See also: Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder.” And, of course, David Simon’s book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Murder

The movie To Live and Die in L.A. fits your description. It starts William Petersen as a charismatic renegade cop who doesn’t play by the rules, but also does not get results. Complete with a wimpy and cowardly sidekick who turns out to be right about a lot of stuff, and a creepy villain (Willem Dafoe) who outsmarts our hero.

J Thomas @ #45: Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series. As far as I know, Gorky Park, the first in the series, was the only one ever filmed, and it made practically no money.

It seems to me that “Unforgiven” (the Clint Eastwood picture) verges on this territory. Every major piece of information in it is misreported or misconstrued. Classical tragedy.

I liked Guardians. Go see it. Film design spoilers ahead: The characters are goofily disparate; the unusual use of old music hits makes it fresh and pleasingly off-handed; and the sets, special effects and even the color compositions in the special effects are beautiful, intricate, and constantly changing. Somebody on that team has a truly great eye.

Forgot “Chinatown.”

In the fantasy realm, the Game of Thrones books fit the bill. By any objective measure, everyone of the major characters is utterly incompetent in what the author would have us believe is their supposed area of talent. Somehow I managed to slog through five books. It’s at least plausible that the author intended it as deep satire from the beginning (e.g. two “R’s” as middle initials) and was chagrined when to story was taken at face value. More likely, the lack of competence flows from the limits of the author’s imagination. But hey, if I could imagine wisdom, I’d be wise too.

Card 54 where are you?

Isn’t there some party game where you add a letter to the title of something to get something wildly different? Maybe here our protagonist is an incompetent (!) poker player who always needs a joker for his inside straight.

Elmore Leonard’s protagonists are desperately incompetent. The protagonist of ‘Killshot’, for example, makes really stupid decisions. Similarly, the characters from the novel “Pronto” all display a believable but forehead-slapping level of foolishness. Raylan Givens is also a character whose competence is called into question quite frequently (both in the novels and in the ‘Justified’ television series). He may be a crack-shot, but that trait is insufficient to make him a good law enforcer.

Inspector Morse quite frequently misunderstood evidence and accused the wrong person of murder with some significant consequences.

“That better be it, otherwise obviously this film is just like all the other stories about heroes who are kind of damaged but awesomely effective.”

I’d disagree with that. The basic superhero story is about a guy (or group) who’s flawed in a way that doesn’t let him use an awesomely effective powers, and the flaw is cured/overcome in some way so that he can.

Take the Avengers. The Avengers can pretty obviously destroy all of the villains whenever they want; Loki is quite literally powerless against most of them. But they can’t work as a team because they don’t get along for a variety of reasons (they’re flawed). They need to cure their flaws and work together to win the bad guys. Or the first X-Men movie. Wolverine (and Rogue) both have the ability to stop the villain’s plans, but can’t because of various human flaws. They have to overcome their flaws (basically, trust issues) to defeat Magneto. Superman’s whole deal is overcoming “flaws,” either kryptonite, or some threat to Lois Lane, or just not killing people, to win.

I’d say Guardians of the Galaxy is different, but people can disagree. I thought the heroes were still the flawed creatures they were at the beginning, but they find a way to win anyway.

See, now I know moderation is random.

In my experience it is oriented toward censoring spam.

You shouldn’t mention pcker. Or a collection of other keywords that are often used by schlock spammers.

I think Gabriel, above, is right. The Wire fits your bill best. Incompetence is widely distributed, on both sides of the law. Those who are incompetent are as likely to be indifferent or oblivious to the suffering they cause as not. And importantly: although there are instances of competence– you don’t want *everyone* to be bad at what they do, do you? That would have to be a comedy– no one is good at their work because of their anti-social quirks.

God dammit, screwed up the tags.

>The whole system is just a giant moral hazard waiting to happen in every average officer’s life.

The show you are looking for is Margaret thatcher’s favorite TV show, Yes, Minister. Admittedly it is a comedy, not a drama, but it perfectly captures the moral hazards inherent in politics.

And you know what? I am going to stop criticizing people’s suggestions now as I am starting to sound like that person that no one wants to talk to at parties.

/Sorry.
//Yes, Minister is an awesome show.

“The Wire, minus the competence.” Prez in The Wire was competent at following paper trails, but his racism led him to bungle (or commit a crime to be accurate,) in the encounter at the projects. Then when that other cop, an acknowledged hero, bungled identifying himself and Prez shot him, Prez’ career is over. I think that nicely encapsulates what the OP was talking about.

And I agree that The Wire as a whole was far too infested with unbelievable competence. Natural police my ass. Even more of a problem is the show’s belief that its heroes were capable of recognizing genuine incompetence. I think a notable example was Carcetti’s reversal of policy due to the (clumsily manufactured by the script) school funding crisis. The show’s heroes are sure that if he delivered on his promises that would have made all the difference. The single most glaring example of preposterous competence was Omar of course, so glaring that even the writers realized they had to kill him off in a supposedly humiliating way. (For what it’s worth, I think Simon’s real problem is the determination to pretend now is the human condition. That’s why there were never any left wing unionists in Baltimore, ever!)

But as novel as it would be to see some reality on TV or in the movies, the OP’s series will never happen. But it’s not because cop shows and movies are wish fulfillment genre, but because an implicit critique of society is not going to be acceptable to the first audience: The producers paying the bills.

The trailer for Dirk Gently demonstrates the tone of the series.

I’ve just started watching The Shield and the strike and the episode with Marcy and Bob as the killers seems to fit this. Dutch is interviewing Marcy sure that he will get the truth by playing the role of an angry father, while she plays the role of a daughter who’s disappointed not to be able to help the victim dies in the trunk of the car in the police parking lot.

This is virtually a genre in Korean cinema (I’ve no idea about TV). Films like Memories of Murder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353969) are based around the notion of Korean cops being generally well-meaning but brutal and incompetent, and usually only succeed in convicting the wrong man. ‘Mother’ and ‘Poetry’ are two other examples that come to mind (although only ‘Memories of Murder’ narrative centres around the cops in a genre fashion).

The Wire – suggested by several and my first thought as well – does not with fit the premises of the OP. Even if there is both competent and incompetent characters in the series it is about systemic flaws, not individual ones. The clearly competent individuals, while sometimes sucessful in their endevours, ultimatly fails because of the system. Would not mean a shit if McNulty was not a drunken womanizer, he wouldn’t still fail.

I’ve had similar thoughts when watching police procedurals. For once, I’d like an episode where they use the Reid Technique to squeeze false confessions out of people , get them falsely convicted despite no matching DNA evidence or fingerprints and then the murderer just silently continues his spree. I think the ideal vehicle for this would be a whole season of the criminally unscientific Criminal Minds.

The HBO series Oz might quality. Tim McManus — probably the character that’s closest to a protagonist in the show — makes a lot of mistakes while attempting to manage his unit and the prisoners. Those contribute to prison riots, him temporarily being replaced, injuries or deaths of prisoners, etc.

Also, re: Guardians, I see the main characters as dedicating their pre-existing skills to lawlessness due to feelings of alienation based on their various deficits, and their face-turn has less to do with their deficits being resolved (which they aren’t) than with their alienation being resolved by ThE pOwEr Of FrIeNdShIp!.

Matt@98 – That’s what I meant by “cropped all stakes out of scope”. None of those stakes belong to the protagonist, and the impression I have been getting from the comments is that they would not, at any point, come back to the protagonist, or else this would simply be a tragedy. And if there is not concept of long-term repercussions in the show, then aren’t we just literally talking about Law & Order?

Perhaps we should think small? Imagine a movie where the hero tortures a terrorist for the location of the ticking time bomb. Nobly shouldering our burden of original sin, he (or she, for those with louche tastes,) hears the vital information. The hero races to the location, risking not just his (or her) virtue but his (or her) life in the effort to disarm the weapon at the last second (usually literally the last second, never minutes to spare, much less hours.) The hero desperately rips apart the scene, only to discover nothing. Suddenly, there is a dull boom, or possibly a loud one, as the bomb goes off, safe in its true hiding place. The hero stares, slack jawed with amazement at the way the victim of torture lied.

#100- this was, more or less (without the torture) part of the plot of a recent episode of the new BBC-on-PBS series Endeavor. But in the end Morse figures out who the bad guy is and they get him.

I like this series, btw. The plots are moronic but the acting is good and the period atmosphere is fun.

The aforementioned Game of Thrones, Thomas Covenant, plus anything by Joe Abercrombie, there really are a lot of fantasy books that fit the description in the OP, taking your standard naive/brainless fantasy heroes, asking “what would happen if these people tried to save the world” and carrying on the thought experiment for a thousand humourless pages to the inevitable bathetic conclusion. (the ending of Last Argument of Kings actually threw me, I thought at that point the hero’s betrayal was so obvious there had to be some of your more typical fantasy hero succeeds through pure luck/destiny planned. But no it really is just a thousand pages and then “rocks fall, everybody dies, life is pain and the bad guys always win”)

Which I guess explains why it doesn’t happen elsewhere so much, all those witless fantasy ‘deconstructions’ are terrible and pointless, Game of Thrones only just about works because of the traces of comedy and horror, which the tv writers sensibly play up.

Actually that’s a point, how does horror fit into this discussion? Plenty of incompetent, corrupt scientists screwing up and getting other people hurt there, not to mention washed up alcoholic cops/priests who fail to save the day.

I forgot Working Dog productions in Australia sort of do what you are writing of (but more satirical again – I think your genre is a tragedy if done straight, or you need an arc to reform your characters?) in Frontline and The Hollowmen, anyway their new production is called Utopia about flawed departmental nation builders – it doesn’t look likely to have a happy ending.

“Set inside the offices of the “Nation Building Authority”, a newly created government organisation responsible for overseeing major infrastructure projects, Utopia explores that moment when bureaucracy and grand dreams collide. It’s a tribute to those political leaders who have somehow managed to take a long-term vision and use it for short-term gain.

The eight-part series follows the working lives of a tight-knit team in charge of guiding big building schemes from announcement to unveiling. Constant shifts in priorities are the order of the day as the staff are asked to come up with plans for everything from new roads and rail lines to airports and high rise urban developments. In short, Utopia examines the forces that go into creating a very well-designed white elephant.”

http://youtu.be/FwSQsc47oDQ

Also, have you ever read any Sinclair Lewis?

Not all of his novels fit your formula, but the best-known ones come about as close as you can get while still including the dramatic element you’ve omitted: resolution.

Though I suppose omitting resolution is perfectly OK if what you really want here is yet another dramatic TV series that gradually exhausts the possibilities of its characters, loses audience, gets cancelled, and leaves the script of the last few episodes to a skeleton crew.

“Burn After Reading” seems to fit the bill. It’s spy craft as numbing bureaucracy and desperate mediocrity.

Marvel’s shtick in general is flawed heroes who manage to be heroes regardless.

As for Guardians, the bad part is they overcome their differences and Learn to Work Together as a Team. The good part is, they know how cheesy that sounds.

The ultimate iteration of this paradigm, made for one of the great movies of all time: “Memento” — spectacularly incompetent protagonist being spun by a nefarious cop for his own purposes. There is a sort of payoff, but nobody gets his man exactly, and nobody learns any one or certain truth.

Possibly the most efficient and masterful parceling out of narrative info ever written.

The protagonist in Memento was being spun because he preferred it that way. He even deliberately deceives himself so he’ll still have a goal to work toward.