★★★☆☆ Mocking Hollywood

Moving Pictures

Terry Pratchett

Moving Pictures, the tenth novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, is nominally about clicks (which is what movies are called in the Discworld), but more than clicks it is about Holy Wood, which is, of course, Hollywood. The premise is that Alchemists invent a way to make clicks. Just as in our world, a click is a projection of a very large number of static pictures in a short time, producing the illusion of motion. There is also, as it happens, a multiverse connection. This is definitely not one of the most strongly plotted Discworld novels. The plot such as it is, is that clicks are a world-endangering technology that needs to be nipped in the bud.

The novel consists mostly of a mockery of Hollywood. It definitely has its moments, for instance a giant female clicks Star climbing the Tower of Art with an ape (the librarian, as it happens) clutched in her hand. There are other such references to famous films.

I described Moving Pictures as a mockery of Hollywood in order to avoid the word parody. NPR's Stephen Thompson has said that "One of the central rules of satire, of parody -- you have to be able to do the thing you're parodying or satirizing as well or better than the source material." Moving Pictures is not a parody in that sense because there is no sense that Pratchett really appreciates what Hollywood does well enough to parody it. In fact, to someone like me, who thinks that some movies deserve to be called "Great Art", with capital letters, even, the mockery of Moving Pictures comes across as just a teensy bit mean-spirited.

Now, you might reasonably object, "Pratchett is just having a little fun with the indisputable ridiculousness of Hollywood's reality distortion field. Can't you just enjoy it?" I would buy that except that there is another rule, "The reward for doing a job well is that you are expected to do it again, and better." Terry Pratchett is an author who has convincingly parodied Bill Shakespeare (see, for instance, Wyrd Sisters). Coming from Pratchett's pen, Moving Pictures is a disappointment. That's not fair, but I don't make the rules.

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