Pirates of the Revolution

So, my son and I went to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie the other day, which is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. If you're not familiar with this or the other two movies, you can check out the official Disney site.

And here I am transformed into a pirate, courtesy of the official Disney site. Arrrhhh, mateys, shiver me timbers, yo ho ho and a bottle of RUM!!!!



Anyway, these are movies based on the popular ride first established at Disneyland, later supplemented by a variation at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, and you can also play and battle in a virtual reality version at DisneyQuest in Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney, I've done all three multiple times and they're all worth your while. But I have not, so far, gone on the other versions of the ride in Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and Hong Kong Disneyland (which has an entire Pirateland!).

Anyway, the ride is a classic, as is the theme song, which goes like this:

YO HO (A PIRATE'S LIFE FOR ME)
Lyrics by Xavier Atencio and music by George Bruns

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot,
Drink up me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We extort, we pilfer, we filch, and sack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Maraud and embezzle, and even high-jack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We kindle and char, inflame and ignite,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We burn up the city, we're really a fright,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

We're rascals, scoundrels, villans, and knaves,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We're beggars and blighters, ne'er-do-well cads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

It's a fun song, a song that makes pirates seem childlike, or rather that's about children pretending to be pirates. Which is what kids did, sometimes, when I was growing up, and still do some extent. Back then, pirate costumes were a popular alternative on Halloween, but then again so was dressing up like hobos--ho boy, you couldn't get away with that today, now that hobos are known as the homeless.

The romanticized image of the pirate is odd, when you think about it, as pirates were basically criminals, the Sopranos of the sea, I guess you could say. But maybe it's not so odd to be celebrating an ocean-going mafia when we also celebrate the western outlaw (such as Billy the Kid), the Prohibition-era gangster (such as Al Capone), and of course the modern mobster.

But, how about if we called them aquatic terrorists? No more yo ho then, eh hobo? If you've ever gone on the ride, then you'll know what I mean when I say that the attraction makes light of a scenario where pirates are, in fact, terrorizing a town. In fact, they had to make some changes to take the edge off of scenes where the pirates are chasing women, which if you really think about it reflects the reality of sexual assault, although a scene where women are being auctioned off remains in tact, made humorous by the fact that it's a chubby lady who's being offered, one who presumably is pleased at the prospect of finding a man. (I'm just reporting what I've observed, mind you.)

But look, I'm not here to argue for political correctness. The generalized image of the pirate, which is occasionally parodied in the popular cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, has been reduced to a children's character. And the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is a part of our popular culture, charming and amusing, yo ho! Moreover, in the film adaptations, the imagery has been brought up to date so that there are strong assertive women, some of whom are pirates themselves, even pirate captains in this third movie, even the pirate king, er, queen.

I should add that it is hardly news, but worth mentioning nonetheless, that it came as an unexpected but altogether pleasant surprise that Disney was able to make an adaptation of a ride (a film adaptation of a ride!) into an entertaining and successful feature film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. They then were able to surpass the original with a very funny sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest.

A third film was obviously pushing their luck, and as I've mentioned in other posts (Spider-Man 3 and the Limitations of Adaptations, Shrek It Up, Baby), it's pretty much a rule that the third film in a series is the weakest of the bunch in quality, and popularity. And what I had read of the initial reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seemed to be consistent with that rule. I recall the criticism that the film is too long, too much action that accomplishes little in the first hour or so, etc. Of course, I also knew that, with lowered expectations, I'd probably enjoy the film just fine, albeit with the understanding that it would not match the quality of the first two.

Well, rules are made to be broken, and my son's verdict is that this is the best of the 3 Pirates movies. I'm not that certain myself, but I will say that it is at least as good as the other two. The second, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest, was funnier, and the first was the biggest surprise, because who knew what to expect? But this one was equally entertaining in its own way, and had the best action and adventure (in a fun sort of way, not in the sense of a movie like Die Hard) of the three, yo ho! It was long, it's true, but it wasn't a problem as the pacing of the movie was just fine, so it was long in a Lord of the Rings sense of long but I didn't mind.

What makes all three Pirates movies so entertaining is the absolutely brilliant performance of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. I am confident that this character will be recognized as one of the all-time greats of film comedy. He is the movie, and that's no yo hokum. Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa is fine as his rival, an older and more straightforward kind of pirate. Orlando Bloom as Will Turner moves the plot along, but adds little to the film. And Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann is interchangeable with any number of attractive young actresses. Jack Davenport is fine as the elitist British bad guy.

And I could go on, but the point is that it's Depp's movie, and there even are a few scenes where there are multiple copies of Jack Sparrow, albeit all in his head as he converses with himself (call it Depp psychology). Hey, the more Depp the better, yo ho! And seeing as Depp used Keith Richards as his model for creating the character of Captain Jack, it was great to see the Rolling Stones guitarist (whom I met a few times when I was a graduate student working for a store called Video Shack in Manhattan circa 1980-1982) as Sparrow's father, however briefly (and it was way cool when he played guitar, and broke a string!).

I should add that the cinematography and effects make the film easy on the eyes, and there's lots of light-hearted action, capped off by having Captain Barbossa conduct an impromptu wedding ceremony for Will and Elizabeth in the midst of a massive sword fight on board which they all take part in--cute choreography there, as they fight off attackers and take their vows at the same time. And there are interesting scenes of the world's end, which leads to a otherworldly limbo known as Davy Jones' locker. For those familiar with the rides, there are a couple of magic moments, one when the Black Pearl goes over the massive waterfall at world's end, and we go to black and hear sounds from the ride, and one where the little dog with the key that you see towards the end of the ride appears in the film.

There was a plot element about Will's desire to save his father, and their ultimate reconciliation, which should have been moving but came across as fairly bland, as well as an interesting storyline concerning the love, and betrayal, between Davy Jones and the goddess Calypso, that also did not excite. But the film became a bit poignant at the end with the parallel love between Will and Elizabeth. The connection between Elizabeth and Calypso, referred to in the middle of the film, and implied in its ending, was never fully spelled out, however, and it seems to me that something significant was left out, or more likely, cut out of the film, some bit of verbal explanation, if not a more substantive scene. It's as if they got to the end, and the movie was already so long that they had to edit out something, so they decided to leave the final bit of exposition on the cutting room floor. I wouldn't be surprised, though, to see something reinserted in a director's cut or expanded edition on DVD.

Ultimately, though, what make this pirate story palatable for a popular audience is that it becomes a reenactment of the American Revolution, a theme that we long for, as can be seen in movies like Star Wars, Red Dawn, Independence Day, even Die Hard, and on TV shows like Jericho (as I discussed in a previous post). In this case, the bad guys have British accents because they really are the British, and the Redcoats represent an overwhelming force that is threatening to wipe out all of the pirates and anyone who is at all sympathetic to them (the movie begins with multitudes of civilians being hanged, including women and children, for being in some way associated with the pirates). The Brits are once more the evil empire.

It is a bit of a stretch, of course, to turn pirates into rebel freedom fighters, but that's what this movie accomplishes, as a multicultural, international fellowship of pirates reluctantly unites to defend, you guessed it, FREEDOM!!!! That they are thieves, and cutthroats, is all cast aside, or overboard, as they are shown to have a higher code that they answer to--they respond to the rule of pirate law, while the British military have suspended all of their citizen's legal rights. The problem for the pirates is to find a way to overcome their excessive individualism (which manifests itself as selfishness, greed, and cowardice), and come together as a community. Into this mix comes the character of Jack Sparrow, who is a classic self-centered rogue in the mode of Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca, and Harrison Ford's Han Solo from Star Wars, claiming to only look out for number one, but in the end putting ego aside for the greater good.

And, yo ho!, the British are defeated, the pirates preserve their freedom, and freedom for all, and a new world's end order is established. Just in time for the 4th of July, mateys.

Yo ho!

Last Minute Bloginess

So, between the three days of MEDIA: Overseas Conversations (IV): An International Conference on Media Literacy-Ecology-Studies-Education that I reported on in my last 3 posts, and getting ready for the MEA Convention in Mexico City (see Media Ecology Mexico), which begins on Wednesday morning, there just hasn't been time for the old blog.

I'm not sure how much time, if any, I'll be able to devote to blogism for the next week, but please feel free to tune into the convention. I am told by our hosts, Tecnológico de Monterrey,
Campus Estado de México, that a live video feed will be available from the official convention website, http://www.media-ecology.org.mx/, and you can also review the schedule there to see what you might want to catch, if anything.

I had hoped to squeeze in an entry on last night's penultimate Sopranos episode, which was a very powerful piece of television, but I really don't have the time to compose an entry that would do it justice, so it will just have to wait until I get back, and have time to work on it, which means I'll write an entry for the final two episodes together in about a week and a half.

I did want to note that my prediction about Battlestar Galactica (see Battlestar Galactica Finale and Battlestar Galactica Finalized) has now been confirmed on the SciFi Channel website:

Battlestar Ending Next Season

The producers of SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica confirmed that the upcoming fourth season will be the show's last. Executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said that it was a creative decision to end the acclaimed series with the upcoming 22-episode season.

"This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end," Eick and Moore said in a statement on May 31. "Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we've decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms. And while we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming, they should brace themselves for a wild ride getting there: We're going out with a bang."

In November, a special two-hour Battlestar episode, "Razor," will air. The fourth season kicks off in early 2008.

At last month's Saturn Awards, Edward James Olmos said that the upcoming season would be the show's last, prompting Eick to say at the time that no decision had been made. "I promise you that when Ron and I make a decision about Galactica's future, we'll let you know," he said then.

There also was a column by Michael Cassutt on the same site where he expressed similar sentiments to my own about the quality of Jericho, and its unnecessary cancellation (see my previous posts, Jericho Fit and Audience Abuse), and also introduces the welcome news that CBS may at least approve a TV movie to wrap up the storyline. Here's what he had to say:

June 04, 2007
The Cassutt Files
The Walls Come Tumblin' Down

By Michael Cassutt


The science behind science fiction suddenly makes sense, thanks to Hard SF novelist and working scientist Wil McCarthy.


Award-winning critic John Clute informs and entertains as he shines a light on the most important new books in SF and fantasy.


Scott Edelman, Science Fiction Weekly's editor-in-chief, sounds off about everything and anything that matters in the sci-fi universe.

Apocalypses are hot right now. So saith no lesser authority than Entertainment Weekly, at least when looking at recent novels.

For example, Cormac McCarthy's The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction—though the novel is impossibly grim, the reading equivalent of being stomped in an alley by monks from A Canticle for Leibowitz. Even more strangely, it was picked up by Oprah's book club. Less strangely, The Road is going to be filmed from a script by Joe Penhall.

Two other recent novels, James Crace's The Pesthouse and Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, have also been much discussed and possibly even read.

My family's fave, 28 Weeks Later, is still somewhere in theaters, those that aren't running this year's trequels.

Yes, apocalypses are hot—except at CBS, where the promising sci-fi series Jericho, about a small town in Kansas dealing with the horrific aftermath of a nuclear strike on several American cities—was canceled in mid-May.

As the John Mellencamp classic says, more or less, the walls "came tumblin' down."

Jericho was the bomb

Like all baby boomers, I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. I had nightmares from exposure to early Twilight Zone episodes. I went through the "duck-and-cover drills." I remember feeling a good deal of fear—and sleeping in the basement, as we did during tornado alerts—during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. My small hometown in Wisconsin was near a Nike missile base—for shooting down not Soviet ICBMs, as everyone assumed, but only Soviet bombers.

I read more apocalyptic post-nuclear literature than was probably good for me, notably Pat Frank's chilling Alas, Babylon (1959), about the aftermath of a nuclear war as seen from a small town in Florida, and the classic Walter Miller Jr. novel cited above—the wonderful A Canticle for Leibowitz. I was disappointed (as an action-seeking youth) and later chilled (as a more mature adult, or so I fool myself) by the book and movie On the Beach.

Even that creepy sequence in George Pal's version of Wells' The Time Machine—the atomic satellite looming in the London sky—left an impression on me.

Oh, heck, it would be difficult for me to compile a comprehensive list of the post-nuclear stories I've absorbed.

So I was both pleasantly surprised by CBS' announcement last May that Jericho would be on its fall 2006 schedule, and more than pleased by its first episode.

Here's what I liked about Jericho: That instead of dealing with the nuking of America at the level of, say, 24 (where you talk to the president of the United States on your cell phone), it focused on a small town. It felt like the proper way to view such an event. ...

I also loved the character of Jake Green, the prodigal son who returns to town after a long, painful absence and is forced not only to stay, when the mushroom cloud rises in the west ... but to deal with his estranged family, and his ex-girlfriend.

The casting was good—particular Gerald McRaney as mayor of the troubled town and Lennie James as the mysteriously knowledgeable Robert Hawkins. The writing was smart. The events proceeded with a ruthless logic: the breakdown of civil authority, shortages of food and medicine, the problems of refugees and freelance paramilitary groups ... Jericho touched on all of them.

It also perfectly captured what is alluring about a post-nuclear world—the chance to be free of the past and the complications of everyday life, and to start over.

When the series returned in February, it was with a striking story that explored Jake's backstory as well as the larger conspiracy behind the nukes.

(By the way, has anyone commented on the similarities between Jericho and the climactic revelations on Heroes? I'm not talking about influence and certainly not plagiarism, but that whole zeitgeist thing.)

Unfortunately, the gap between the first half of Jericho's season and its return—from late November to early February—was fatal. The 2007 episodes reached 1.9 million fewer viewers than the first bunch. With viewership falling below CBS' threshold for renewal, Jericho was gone.

Too much flash, not enough bang

Tempting as it is to blame the network, it isn't entirely fair. Jericho's writing and production team made several choices that hurt the show's chances.

NOT ENOUGH LIGHT—Here I'm talking about tone. Yes, we've had a nuclear exchange; yes, people are starving; yes, the citizens of New Bern are being badasses. Every now and then you've got to lighten it up. Jericho permitted itself no jokes, none of the battlefield humor found in, say, Band of Brothers. There ought to have been a storyline about, say, what happened to the high-school basketball team—or some citizen with a quirky hobby. Something with a few laughs.

TOO MUCH LIGHT—In this case, I mean physical light. Limited by a television budget and schedule, downtown Jericho was a backlot and its outskirts some of the same locations seen in C.S.I.—the golden hills around Valencia, a town north of Los Angeles. You can get horror out of a sunny sky: look at the Mad Max movies. But it never played as a convincing Kansas winter to me.

BACKSTORY VS. FRONTSTORY—The writers who originally developed Jericho—Josh Schaer and Jonathan E. Steinberg—reportedly imagined a fabulous five years' worth of developments. But the series didn't get a go-ahead until that original pilot was reshaped by Stephen Chbowsky into the compelling first episode we saw, with Jake's return. The backstory as finally teased was interesting, however, and should have been exposed earlier.

HEROIC CONFUSION—I noted this in my last column ("The Mikeys"). Jake Green failed to be the central hero—am I detecting resistance by actor Skeet Ulrich? There were great action set pieces where he was off to one side observing, or letting some other character seize the moment, or absent. The series let Lennie James' Robert character dominate the screen time. It was a natural mistake—Robert was the mystery man with the cache of weapons and the ties to the forces behind the bombs.

Maybe Jake needed to be the one who knew about the big conspiracy.

CBS executive Nina Tassler, responding to criticism from fans over the cancellation, has opened the door to some sort of concluding episode—perhaps a TV movie? I hope so, but it won't change the fact that Jericho joins the long list of promising sci-fi series that died a premature death.

Too bad. I would have enjoyed seeing it develop.

Some good points, not that I agree with everything he had to say, but when does that ever happen?

So, so much for my last minute bloginess, time to go finishing packing, get a few hours sleep, and it's off to the airport and south of the border.

Audience Abuse

So, the networks have all released their prime time schedules for next fall, and the CBS television series Jericho, the subject of one of my recent posts, has been canceled. How rude! Here I go to all the trouble of writing about the series, and saying some nice things I thought, and they go and cancel it on me.

This is getting to be a problem. I'm getting a little tired of investing my time and mental energy, getting all involved in a series, and seeing it get cut, sometimes without even a full season. This past year, I followed The Nine, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Daybreak, and I know there were one or two others that I've forgotten about, and last season there was Surface, Invasion, and some others, all series that delivered an intriguing mystery, a high degree of complexity, a continuing narrative that required more mental participation than the typical television show, and above all quality. They were promising us programming to rival HBO's achievements, such as the incomparable Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, Entourage, Big Love, etc. And they were promising us programs like Lost, and Alias (before those series went off the deep end), and 24.

The problem with these cool (in McLuhan's sense of low definition, high ambiguity), involving shows is that they require viewer commitment and participation. If you're in, you're all in as the Texas Hold 'Em crowd likes to say. This is a fine strategy for attracting loyal and dependable fans, a cult following, but not for reeling in the massive audiences that have been the networks' bread and butter. So, they get some of us hooked, and when it turns out that the sum of us is not enough, they leave us hanging out to dry on an unresolved story line.

Of course, the fact that it's millions of viewers who are left high and dry matters little, or not at all, given the scale on which network television operates. It is odd, indeed, to use the same term, mass media, to refer to television and to forms of printing that may only result in tens of thousands of copies being produced. Television is the massiest (it actually is a word) of the mass media, it's a nuke, in contrast to print media which are nothing more than machine guns and grenades.

And, television is a business, but it is a business that is now abusing and alienating its product. Not its customers, mind you, because viewers do not buy the programs. The programs are nothing more than the bait that lures us in, so that the networks, stations, and channels can deliver the audiences that they've created into the hands of advertisers. We are the product of television, in more ways than one. This is basic media economics, as taught in Mass Media 101 courses, of course.

The advertisers pay for eyeballs, as they put it, but the cost of producing the commercials and advertising campaigns is tacked on to the price we pay for our products and services, at least those that are advertised. That's why it's been said that we don't pay when we watch, we pay when we wash, meaning that we pay extra for the advertising and marketing of the laundry detergent that we use, and everything else that we consumers purchase and consume (everything that's advertised, that is). We have no choice in the matter, it's taxation without representation, media tyranny.

And it's like an addiction for the advertisers, they know that they could stop if they wanted to, but they just don't want to, in part for fear of losing sales if they do. So, they're TV junkies, paying through the nose, or put another way, advertisers are the johns, the TV industry, they're the pimps, and guess what that makes us viewers?

The rates advertisers pay are based on ratings, which are based on a small sample of viewers who are given electronic devices that record what they watch, or are asked to keep track of them by keeping a diary or log. So, a few hundred people in effect decide the fate of our television programming. Here's another analogy, we're the product, like chickens on a farm, and every so often the inspector comes and examines a few of us, and gives us a rating of Grade A, B, or C. There's no guarantee that either rating is necessarily accurate, although the law of large numbers says that it probably is fairly accurate, but the main thing is that it makes everyone feels better and provides data to back up decisions about rates and renewals.

So based on what this small group of people say and do, estimates are made as to how many people are actually watching, and based on that advertising rates are set, and if not enough people are watching this threatens to lower the rates too much and, oops I canceled it again.

It's an unstable, volatile system, and that's fine for a medium whose best programming, as Neil Postman pointed out long ago, is its junk. That's why the quintessential television show is the sitcom. Not much commitment needed, you can pick it up any time without much problem, nothing much changes from episode to episode, there is no real beginning to the story, and no need for much in the way of a conclusion.

I don't mean to imply that sitcoms can't be good, there have been absolutely brilliant comedies aired on the networks over the years, for example, The Burns and Allen Show, The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Get Smart, Green Acres, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, MASH, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, South Park, and now The Office. And if the show gets canceled after only one season, like The Honeymooners, it doesn't damage the overall quality of the series, nor is it terribly damaging to stretch out a series, as long as the laughs keep coming, as was the case for Seinfeld and continues to be for The Simpsons.

But trying to turn commercial television into an art form, trying to produce complex, continuous, involving television series while operating in this sort of economic environment has turned into a form of audience abuse. Traditionally, the networks understood that quality television could not co-exist with an open-ended series. Instead, it could take the form of an anthology series such as Playhouse 90 in the 50s, each week presenting a new theatrical production adjusted for the TV set; Rod Serling's innovative Twilight Zone also worked because it was an anthology series. Quality also came in the form of the stand-alone special, the documentary film made by television news crews, such as Harvest of Shame, the made-for-TV movie such as Brian's Song, and the television miniseries such as Roots and The Day After.

It was understood that quality television meant never having to say you're sorry about having a beginning, middle, and end, it meant knowing exactly how long you need to tell the story you want to tell, making sure you have the resources to complete the number of episodes needed to bring the story to completion, and not stretching the story out just because you've attracted a lot of viewers (as Lost has done, and even Battlestar Galactica has suffered from a little padding). Again, none of this applies to comedy, only drama, tragedy and melodrama.

We have only to turn to BBC programming, for many years the staple of PBS stations, to find examples of programs that knew how to stay within their limits, The Prisoner being a prime example. The reason that the BBC was different was because it was public television, like PBS, not commercial television--as Postman has pointed out, public television networks place certain limits on television programming (often based on other forms and media such as print and the fine arts), while commercial broadcasters let their television programming go with the flow, giving carte blanche to the medium's bias towards immediacy and discontinuity (and now, this...).

HBO, being primarily a movie channel, and having dabbled in made-for-TV movies, produces television series that are more or less cinematic, a term that once referred to a certain kind of material and machinery (celluloid, film projectors, etc.), but now mainly means a certain level of quality. Artistically, there are coming from the right place for complex, involving programming.

Also, HBO is in certain respects similar to the BBC and PBS, in not trying to sell its audiences to advertisers. They do try to sell us to cable companies as subscribers, but that's at least a bit more direct. We may not be able to pay only for what we watch, but we can decide whether or not to pay for the package that includes The Sopranos. Their business model must intrinsically include a healthy respect for their audiences. We are, at least in some respects, their customers.

But we will always be nothing more than product for commercial television. Specialty networks like SciFi Channel treat their product with more care, hence programs like Battlestar Galactica, and as the audiences for CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, and CW continue to shrink, they no doubt will pay more attention to quality control as well, quality of viewers that is. But we'll always be packaged goods to them.

Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with selling ourselves, as long as we know that's what we're doing. And as long as we get a fair price for our goods. If we put in the time and effort needed to watch their programming, then we need a reasonable guarantee that our efforts will be rewarded with the minimum wage of wrapping up a narrative appropriately. If viewers invest in a series like Jericho, and the return is not sufficient to warrant its continuation on network television, then make sure it continues on a cable channel instead, or at least give us a TV movie or miniseries to wrap the story up.

At the same time, I can only imagine that many viewers, having been burned by all of the cancellations, will be reluctant to commit to the next round of complex, continuous narratives that the networks present in an attempt to create the next Lost, or now Heroes. Expect a viewer revolt as a natural response to the networks' audience abuse. With online viewing and on demand services on the rise, commercial TV's days are numbered, and mark my word, the network walls will come a tumblin' down.

Jericho Fit

I've been wanting to comment on the CBS series Jericho which premiered last fall, and finished its first season this past Wednesday. And for starters, the fact that I've watched all 22 episodes is a testament to the success of the new strategy of making them available over the internet. I saw the promos for the series and remember being intrigued, but there were a lot of interesting series premiering last fall, and Jericho didn't stand out from the crowd, and September is always a busy time, so I missed the first episode and figured, oh well, I'll just skip this show. And that would have been that in the old days of a year or two ago, with the possible alternative of catching it on reruns. But I started to watch the episodes online in November while I was away at a conference, and got hooked, got caught up, and here I am.

Jericho tells the story of the aftermath of a nuclear attack, a genre that has been around since the fifties. I confess to having a perverse love/hate relationship with such atomic scenarios ever since they ran the movie Fail-Safe (1964) on TV when I was a kid (circa 1967), and I made the mistake of watching it. That movie ended with the bomb being dropped on New York City, and they just showed that everything stopped, still images, then nothing! It scared the hell out of me, and I had nuclear nightmares for many years afterwards, and used to get shivers whenever I heard a plane go overhead (in the film, the bombs were still being dropped from planes, not rocketed on missiles)--I guess that might be consider a bit prescient, post-9/11. By the way, Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), was something of a parody of Fail-Safe, and ended with a cowboy-type airman riding a bomb down like a wild bull, after being dropped from a plane.

It wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that in Fail-Safe and a multitude of other apocalyptic narratives in a variety of media, it was always New York that was getting nuked or otherwise destroyed--that's New York, as in my home town. Pretty chilling to realize that you live at ground zero, again a speculative phrase that became a reality post-9/11. And looking out at the Manhattan skyline after 9/11, I couldn't help but be reminded of all of those scenarios, and wonder about the future. The popular series Heroes, which I'll write about in a future post, is the latest to depict the destruction of New York City in very vivid terms. As I mentioned in a previous post, Wild Palms 2007, I find it a bit of a relief when some other place gets the honor, like in the miniseries Wild Palms where it was Boca Raton of all places, or the movie The Sum of all Fears where it was Baltimore, or on the series 24 where there have been a few nuclear explosions and meltdowns, but all out west.

In Jericho, rumor has it that New York was not destroyed because the NYPD discovered the terrorists and bomb at the last minute, although central to the scenario of the show is the fact that nobody knows anything for certain because there are no reliable channels of communication, almost no broadcasting whatsoever. I assume that, post-9/11, it was thought to be insensitive to subject New York to another disaster, plus it also draws on the heroic image of our first responders that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Anyway, according to the Jericho wiki, the cities that are certain to have been nuked are Denver (whose mushroom cloud is seen in the distance in the first episode) and Atlanta (a phone message of the last moments of a character's parents serves as the evidence), and the cities that appear to have been nuked include Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle on the west coast: Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and St. George/Cedar City in Utah; Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, Hartford, CT, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Norfolk, VA, Charlotte, NC, and Miami (not Boca?); and Lawrence, Kansas!

It's interesting to see that the folks who are watching the series closely enough to gather this evidence have noticed some inconsistencies from episode to episode, and between the episodes and information found on the CBS website. Perhaps its unintentional, but the problems that the fans are experiencing in obtaining definitive information on what happened parallel the problems that the characters in the series have in finding out exactly what happened. The breakdown of reliable communications and the consequent isolation of the town of Jericho, Kansas, is a central element of the series. It's also interesting that Jericho is at the center of a controversy about payments and royalties for writers working on webisodes, and CBS canceled and removed a preliminary web series called Beyond Jericho, and replaced it by another set of webisodes called Countdown. The strategy of adding narrative elements online is becoming more commonplace, having been pioneered in relation to films such as The Matrix trilogy, and the Blair Witch Project and its sequel, and I would certainly support appropriate compensation for the online writers and producers.

Anyway, Jericho is part of the nuclear apocalypse genre, one of the most memorable being the 1959 film On the Beach, which starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire (in a non-dancing role!), and Anthony Perkins. Like others that would follow, On the Beach (which was the subject of an inferior TV-movie remake in 2000), depicted the slow death of humanity due to radioactive fall out. Of course, there was a whole slew of post-atomic adventure stories, where the survivors fought off mutants with a combination of futuristic, contemporary, and medieval technologies, not to mention the whole Mad Mel, oops, sorry, I mean Mad Max trilogy. But attempts at realistic depictions hit their stride with the No-Nukes movement of the early eighties, and include movies such as Testament (1983) and Threads (1984). One of the most original is Miracle Mile (1988), beginning as it does with a young man answering a pay phone, receiving a call to the wrong number warning that a nuclear war has started and that the missiles will hit in 70 minutes, and showing what a he and other people do up until the bombs hit.

On television, the big event was the TV miniseries The Day After in 1983, in which it was assumed that the east and west coasts were destroyed, along with the other major cities, and even Kansas was hit due to the missile silos located there. The story took place in the area of Lawrence, Kansas, and I can only imagine that the inclusion of Lawrence in Jericho is an homage to The Day After. Like most viewers, I found the miniseries very believable when it first aired, but having recently had the opportunity to see it again on the SciFi Channel, I was amazed at how hokey it looked. Either way, it was pretty depressing, the idea that the living would envy the dead and all that. Ah, well.

Because The Day After reflected a liberal political perspective, conservatives asked for equal time and were given Amerika, a 1987 miniseries in which the Soviets take over the US, depicting the horror of totalitarianism, but also providing an opportunity for some Americans to become rebels once more and fight for their freedom. While there was no nuclear armageddon in Amerika, it was very similar to Red Dawn, a conservative fantasy in which a sneak attack by the Communists leads to World War III, and a large part of the U.S. is occupied by the Soviets and the Cubans, forcing a group of high school football players to wage guerrilla war against the occupiers. More than anything, this film demonstrates the powerful desire that exists in our culture to re-enact our origins, to be the revolutionaries fighting the evil empire. Some sense of celebrating the creation and reenacting the defining moment exists in all religious and cultural traditions, the sense of what Mircea Eliade calls sacred time, but in the U.S. we've grown so distant from our revolutionary origins that it takes a more drastic scenario to set up the symbolic reenactment. Or we have to resort to a more distanced fantasy, such as the highly popular Star Wars trilogy where we identify with the rebels fighting the empire, and even Han Solo and some of the others dress in a way that's vaguely colonial. This helps to explain the let down accompanying the second trilogy, which is not about rebellion, but about the decline and fall of the republic, the antithesis of our creation story.

Jericho provides the same opportunity for us to relive our origin story, but there is no evil empire to fight. The enemy appears to be terrorists, but reflecting current events, there also is a threat from government officials with suspicious motives--three's a kind of Dick Cheney type that's way, way in the background of the story--and also from mercenaries called Ravenwood that I can't help but connect to Halliburton. This time around, we have met the enemy and he is us, to quote Walt Kelly's famous line from the comic strip Pogo, as threats also come from within Jericho itself, mostly due to selfishness, from outlaws outside of Jericho, and even from the neighboring town of New Bern, led by Sheriff Constantino (in name at least, somewhat foreign sounding, not to mention imperial, although the character is as middle America as the rest). There are a few precedents for this type of story, not many but a few, one being the vastly underrated 1997 Kevin Costner film, The Postman (an adaptation of the David Brin SF novel by the same name), which I think has some very interesting things to say about the imagined community of the American nation and believe it or not, the importance of the postal system, a point made by the great media theorist, the late James W. Carey.

Jericho is more like a story about the American pioneers, about homesteading and settlement. and defense against outlaws and savages. It's a post-nuclear western, Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, but without the stability, with the addition of the mystery genre, the whodunnit relating to the greatest crime ever committed. And the threat level is much wider in scope, ranging from the reduced circumstances of the locals, to the contemporary level of various military elements, to the threat of further nuclear detonations.

But at its heart, it is a story about community. Jericho is the good community, a small town that's hard hit but better off than the surrounding area. That's where the biblical allusion comes in, Jericho as the walled city under assault by invaders. But it's an odd reversal, since in the book of Joshua, Jericho was conquered by the underdog Israelites come to claim the land promised by God. The fall of Jericho is a good thing, and a miracle that results from the blowing of the sacred ram's horns, the shofars. Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, and the walls came a tumblin' down, says the old Negro Spiritual. The obvious connection is not to the town of Jericho, but to the United States as a whole, which has always enjoyed the advantage of being far from the maddeningly crowded Europe, at a distance from the theaters of war, protected by two oceans, Fortress America. But the walls have come a tumblin' down, and what's more, it's looks like Humpty Dumpty was sitting on those walls, because the rumor is that there are several different presidents and regions claiming sole legitimacy in the aftermath.

But Jericho too is under assault from without and within, as I mentioned, and this presents us with the classic conflict of values that can be found time and time again in American popular culture, that of community vs. individualism. This conflict is paralleled by the conflict between equality vs. freedom, and democracy vs. capitalism. Of course, all of these values are, well, valued in American culture. The problem is that they are inherently contradictory, and while the contradictions can be ignored some of the time, they do come into conflict from time to time. Popular culture helps us to deal with the conflict by mediating between the oppositions (a function of myth, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss). Often in American culture, individualism, freedom, and capitalism is favored slightly over community, equality, and democracy, but ultimately balance must be maintained because excessive individualism, freedom, and capitalism tends to cross the line of morality and threaten to destroy the community.

As is often the case in the western genre, the community, in this case the town of Jericho, is the ideal that must be defended, that is in need of defense and clearly worth defending. Jericho is an egalitarian society, and although there are some status differences, things are pretty much leveled after the attacks, so for example the rich girl Skylar forms an alliance with the poor boy Dale (nice touch that the salt mine that her parents own turns out to be an extremely valuable commodity in the new economy that emerges, reminiscent of how salt was used as money to pay workers, a practice that is recorded in the book of Ezra, making for another biblical connection, albeit a later one, but is more famously associated with the payment made to Roman soldiers, which is why the word salary comes from the Latin root for salt, and even the word soldier may come from the same root). Equality is also demonstrated in the salt of the earth demeanor of the first family of Jericho, the Greens (it's not easy, but it is environmentally sound). Democracy is also upheld, to the extent that an election for mayor is held at the appointed time despite the circumstances (reminiscent of the presidential election held during the Civil War), and Johnston Green who is clearly the better man is defeated in his reelection bid by Gray Anderson. The will of the people, even when wrong, must be honored (shades of 2000 and 2004). In contrast, in the neighboring town of New Bern, Sheriff Constantino appears to have usurped mayoral powers.

So, Jericho essentially upholds the values of community, equality, and democracy, but in classic Western fashion, these values are shown to be insufficient in and of themselves, and the settlers incapable of adequately seeing to their own defense. While the forces that threaten the town represent excessive individualism, freedom, and capitalism, the heroes who come to the defense of the town use those very same qualities in defense of community, equality, and democracy (thereby mediating the opposition between the two). The main hero is Jake Green, the prodigal son returned just in time for the crisis, with enough military training and related experience to do what must be done where others are lost. The second hero, a rogue hero who at first is ambiguous as to whether he is a hero or a villain, is Robert Hawkins, an FBI agent with knowledge about the attacks, access to information and resources that go beyond the town, and training like Jake's that allow him to be an effective defender. In a smaller way, Dale use entrepreneurial energy and sometimes coercion in ways that ultimately serve the best interests of the town. And the criminal Jonah, while exceeding the boundary and threatening the community at times, rises to the defense of the town on more than one occasion, temporarily using his "bad methods" in the service of a good cause and saving them from destruction.

In its first season, the program has shown a good balance between elements of the classic western applied to the post-nuclear scenario in a way that reenacts the American Pioneer Myth. None of this is original, but the combination of elements is novel and entertaining. And the mystery is unfolding at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow. There's a great deal to work with assuming the series continues, much left to be revealed, but the pieces of the puzzle are provided often enough to keep us coming back for more.

The season ends with a shocker that I would compare to the ending of the original Planet of the Apes film, where the hero discovers the half-buried Statue of Liberty. Without giving it away, I would describe it as being the equivalent to the American civil religion in which we worship our democracy and creed, as the Satanist use of the inverted cross or crucifix is to Christianity.