Penning Our Stories

My most recent op-ed in the Jewish Standard  was published on May 29th, and entitled Penning Our Stories. And as is the custom here on Blog Time Passing, you can click on the old link to read it over there, or stick around and read it here:

“The last time I got a fountain pen was for my bar mitzvah.”

That line was uttered during the two-part season finale of the ABC television network’s popular series Once Upon a Time, which aired on May 10. It was a little inside joke inserted by series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who co-wrote the episode; both of them may well have received fountain pens as gifts for their own bar mitzvahs. There was a time when a fancy fountain pen was as commonplace a gift as savings bonds for bar mitzvah boys, so much so that an often repeated bar mitzvah joke was, “Today I am a fountain pen.” (This was a play on the cliché declaration “Today I am a man,” this being a time before the bat mitzvah was fully instituted as an egalitarian religious practice.) Michael Hilton, in his book Bar Mitzvah: A History, reports that “in July 1946, Barry Vine of New Haven Connecticut, received sixteen fountain pens as gifts”! Now that’s the write stuff!

Fischler as Jimmy Barrett

Once Upon a Time’s bar mitzvah boy was played by the actor Patrick Fischler, who perhaps is best known for his role as the Jewish comedian Jimmy Barrett on the recently concluded AMC series Mad Men, and who also appeared on the series Lost, a series that Kitsis and Horowitz previously had worked on as writers. Fischler’s character was introduced in March, during the final story arc of the series’ fourth season, first through references to a mysterious “Author” whose writings set the course of the series’ storybook characters, such as Snow White, Prince Charming, Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Hook, Robin Hood, Maleficent, and Regina (aka the Evil Queen, Snow White’s nemesis); as “The Author” he also had the power to rewrite their stories, and change their fate.

Fischler as Phil from Lost

By the end of the season, we learned that the “Author” is a title and status that has been bestowed upon many different people, that this particular Author is named Isaac, that his last name is Heller (possibly a tribute to Jewish novelist Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame), that he was from Brooklyn, and that back in 1966 he was a novelist who was having great difficulty getting anything published, working to support himself selling television sets, a job at which he was also unsuccessful. Selected to become the next in a long line of magical authors, he is asked to select a pen to use, prompting his remark about his bar mitzvah. Although that comment was the only instance in which the character was directly identified as Jewish, his name, voice, place of birth, look, and manner all allude to his ethnicity, and presumably his religion.

Part of the humor of the bar mitzvah comment comes from the incongruity of inserting a bit of Yiddishkeit into a series that remixes characters from Disney’s animated films, most of whom are derived from European fairytales and folklore. (Disney owns Once Upon a Time’s television network, ABC.) After all, even during the two decades that Michael Eisner was CEO of the Walt Disney Company, the film studio added no characters to its pantheon like Fievel Mousekewitz of Stephen Spielberg’s An American Tail. And we certainly don’t expect to see anyone named Cohen or Levy in Cinderella, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, or Frozen.

Fischler as "The Author"

There is, however, a long tradition of inserting inside jokes that only Jews could appreciate fully into Hollywood films. My all-time favorite is in the 1936 Marx Brother movie Animal Crackers, when the cast sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer,” and Groucho responds, “Did someone call me schnorrer?” I also love the subtle jab in the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagine, in which characters from the future explain that people drive planes instead of cars, planes with names like Rosenblatt, Pinkus, and Goldfarb. In response, the distinctly Jewish character from 1930 remarks (in reference to the automaker’s anti-Semitism), “It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!”

No doubt there also was a degree of identification between Kitsis and Horowitz, as the creators of Once Upon a Time, and their character, Isaac Heller, as “The Author” of the storybook tales that seal the fate of the series’ heroes and villains. And perhaps making Heller a villain involved a bit of self-deprecating humor. Certainly, it was ironic that Isaac’s status as “The Author” is revoked for changing the heroes’ and villains’ stories. That is exactly what Kitsis and Horowitz have done in the series, not the least by making both types of characters less black and white, more morally ambiguous, and therefore more realistic.


Still, portraying Once Upon a Time’s only Jewish character as a villain is more than a little problematic. There are echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock in the explanation that Isaac gives to Snow White and Prince Charming, that it was “a lifetime of bad bosses” who “fancy themselves heroes, pushing around people like me,” that led him to resent the heroes and identify with the villains. The problem with having only one Jewish character in a popular narrative is that the character’s Jewishness becomes more than an individual attribute. Instead, the character becomes a representation of the Jewish people as a whole, in this case a negative representation, indeed, a negative stereotype.


But there is nothing negative about the Jewish connection to the role of “The Author” after all. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we pray that we may be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year, and we wish the same for others. In our tradition, God is an author, indeed, The Author, an understanding that has been adopted by the other Abrahamic religions. Of course Moses, our greatest prophet, was also a writer, and through the Torah and the Tanach, we became the first people to write our own historical narrative. And the stories our ancestors wrote have changed the course of history for the entire world, and continue to capture the imagination of billions of people.


Upon doing a search for “Jewish authors” via Google, a listing of “authors frequently mentioned on the web” appeared, and cited 50 names, including Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Bernard Malamud, Sholem Aleichem, Anne Frank, Joseph Heller, Isaac Asimov, J. D. Salinger, Elie Wiesel, Isaak Babel, Ayn Rand, Primo Levi, Marcel Proust, E. L. Doctorow, Amos Oz, Arthur Koestler, Leonard Cohen, Theodor Herzl, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Art Spiegelman, Tony Kushner, and Boris Pasternak. No doubt a full listing of every Jewish novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter, comics writer, and writer of nonfiction would strain even the Google search engine’s enormous capabilities. Interestingly enough, Google’s list also included King David, Josephus, Maimonides, and Paul the Apostle, and it is certainly worth noting in this context that the Christian Gospels are to a large extent the product of Jewish authors, their impact immeasurable.

So maybe a fountain pen isn’t all that terrible a gift to give on the occasion of a bar or bat mitzvah? Certainly, research indicates that in the classroom, learning and retention is greater for students who take notes by hand as opposed to on laptops and tablets, and there is much to be said for taking pen in hand in regard to creativity. Our tradition of writing extends from Torah and Tanach to Talmud and Zohar, from Maimonides and Karo to the writings of our modern rabbis and lay leaders, from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist branches as well as the Orthodox, and to the secular, scholarly, popular, and artistic works of Jewish authors all around the world. With the magic of the pen, we can continue to be authors of our own history as a people. And with the magic of the pen, we can inscribe our own names into a personal book of life that we each can write for ourselves.

Lost and Found

I've devoted one previous post to the series Lost (Lost Legs), and made passing comments in several others, and for the most part have expressed my frustration with a series that started out strong and went off the rails during its second season. But after viewing the final few episodes, and especially the season finale this past Wednesday, it seems to me that the Lost may be back on track.

A series such as Lost that has a relatively linear story line that is something like a shark in that it needs to keep swimming forward to stay alive (jumping the shark being another matter altogether, as I discussed in a previous post, 24 or 6 to 5). For a while there it seemed like they had either stopped moving forward, or were doing so way too slowly for the typically impatient television viewer.

I even considered making a dumb comment comparing the plane crash survivors on Lost to our troops in Iraq, with all the calls to bring them back home, but this using the name Lost in conjunction with our military action and mentioning the topic of bringing the troops back home might leave me open to charges of being unpatriotic, comparing the situation our soldiers are in with a television show (even though most of us experience Iraq as a TV show as well) would leave me open to charges of being disrespectful of their genuine heroism and sacrifice, and comparing the protestations of members of the antiwar movement to irate fans of a TV series would leave me open to charges of mocking and belittling their sincere efforts. In other words, a lose-lose situation, and look what they did to Imus.

Bu the series moved forward with a vengeance in Wednesday's 2-hour episode, providing exactly the kind of excitement that was missing for so long. Now if only this isn't an aberration, and the creators of Lost have come to their senses and realize that the only significant elements in a linear narrative are the ones that move the story forward. Storytellers have understood this for as long as people have been telling stories.

In oral cultures, the singer of tales would perform for an audience without a script (no writing, no script), drawing on memory and improvising by stitching together various formulas and formulaic expressions. The audience would be heavily involved in the performance, perhaps even singing along at times, or taking part in call-and-response sequences. And if the audience was really responsive and into the song, the singer knew how to stretch it out, elaborate on the details, draw out the various sequences, add new plot elements, characters, etc. And if the audience seemed bored or distracted, the singer could shorten the song as well. The situation allowed for maximum feedback and flexibility.

The written text, in contrast, is more or less fixed (although subject to revision either through scribal copying/corruption or through editing). Moreover, the audience is almost never actually present (as Walter Ong put it, "the writer's audience is always a fiction," so the writer generally does not receive immediate feedback and cannot adjust the story in response to whatever feedback might make its way through (aside from publishing a new edition or writing a sequel).

What's true of writing and printing also applies to the mass media in general--feedback is indirect and delayed, that's what we teach in Mass Media 101. There is no audience present, although it is possible to try to get feedforward (a term that's been around for a long time, but has not been widely used) by using test audiences--standard operating procedure for advertising campaigns and major motion pictures, but not so easy to implement for ongoing series). And anyone who actually writes or calls a TV station or network about the programming is almost always in such a small minority that he or she is immediately written off as unrepresentative of the actual audience. So, in lieu of direct feedback, especially for television programming, there's the indirect sampling technique known as the ratings (see my previous post on Audience Abuse).

Of course, the internet opened things up a bit, so that there can be more direct communication between fans and creators, or at least the creators can monitor fan communication and get a better idea of what the fans are thinking. Mobilizing the fan base can be the key to keeping a series from getting canceled (this began with The Man from UNCLE series in the sixties, followed by the original Star Trek series which gained a third season through fan protests), and for contributing to the financial success of a film (I'm thinking of Peter Jackson's appeals to Lord of the Rings fans here). But fans are not a mass audience, and their support only goes so far. For example, last summer's much-hyped movie, Snakes on a Plane, had enormous buzz on the internet, so much so that the producers were convinced that they had a major smash on their hands, but all the posts on message boards and blogs did not translate into seats in the theaters, and the movie was a flop.

Even taking internet-derived feedback into account, the producers have to sit down and map out their season, have scripts in hand for at least the early episodes and in development for the later ones, be well into the season in production by the time the first episode of the season airs. So, it is very hard to adjust to feedback in mid-season, sometimes impossible.

It's easier, though, when it comes to a series that is episodic, such as a situation comedy. Adjustments are relatively easy, as you can add some new characters, eliminate or downplay characters that are not working out, change the scenario somewhat by adding a new situation (a workplace added to a domestic sitcom or vice versa, for example), etc. But when there is a linear narrative involved, it's tough to make major changes. Producers can, however, stretch the storyline when a series becomes popular, and accelerate it when the ratings go down (when a series is not renewed but there is sufficient notice, we often get a rushed and condensed wrap up to the series, such as occurred on the HBO series Rome, as I noted in a previous post, Rome If You Want To, Rome Around the World), but at least that's better than leaving behind an orphaned narrative, aka televisionus interruptus (again, something I discussed in Audience Abuse).

So, the problem with Lost is that they were spoiled by the success of their first season, and started to stretch the whole storyline until it lost its shape and texture. They actually introduced an entire second cast of characters, gave us their back stories, and then proceeded to kill off almost all of them, the only one remaining being an altogether minor character. Yes, devoted fans still pored over each episode searching for the little clues that generated so much internet buzz, and maybe the creators also started to write for that specialized audience and disregard the mass audience. And that's fine, as long as you're not trying to succeed on the massiest of the mass media, network television, where there's no room in the schedule for cult followings.

One of the creators of Lost, J. J. Abrams, also had the same trouble with a previous series, Alias, which in my opinion totally lost its focus after a strong first season, and never recovered. I wonder if this is a pattern for Abrams, or just a coincidence? I guess we'll see with his next series (assuming there is one), but at least in this instance it appears that all is not lost for Lost. That's assuming it hasn't already forfeited too much of its mass audience, because once the bleeding starts, the wound is very hard to heal. Simply put, it's hard to get new viewers to start watching a linear narrative so late in the game (although the availability of past seasons on DVD does help), but it is very easy to lose viewers who simply no longer care about the resolution to the story.

I give Lost credit for its ambitions. The series is a highly complex narrative in which each episode includes flashbacks for one of the characters, letting us in on their back stories bit by bit. At first, this seemed to just be a device to help us get to know them better and care about the characters, but over time it became clear that their back stories actually are part of the mystery, pieces of the puzzle at the heart of the program. The past also impacts the present in all sorts of different ways in the program, as it turns out that most of the survivors stranded on this island have crossed paths prior to their arrival, even if they don't remember it or didn't take note of it. The biggest revelation this season was that Locke's father, who abandoned him as a child, who turned out to be a con man, and whose reunion with Locke was just an elaborate con, was also the swindler who seduced James/Sawyer's mother, stole his parents life savings, leading to their deaths, the man that James/Sawyer had been longing to confront. And the past comes back to haunt (or maybe help) in that Locke's father (or a simulacrum) is found on the island, giving both men a chance for revenge.

There is a blurring of past and present, and now future, as in the season finale instead of flashbacks we get flashforwards (or is it feedforwards?), seeing that Jack, the physician and leader of the castaways, will self-destruct when they get back (and this of course suggests that they do get back), and will decide that it was a mistake to leave the island). These flashbacks coincide with major developments that suddenly bring them closer to leaving the island. But, unlike the past and present, which we assume to be real, there's some ambiguity about these days of future past that we are witness too. As Scrooge would ask, is it what will be, or what may be? Is time like the Rocky Mountains, or is it fluid and subject to change. Where does this peek into the future come from? With flashbacks, we can assume that somehow we're drawing on the characters' memories, but with flashforwards, might this be a premonition? The character of Desmond already has had numerous premonitions, a new ability gained after surviving the electromagnetic pulse that Locke initiated, and he has demonstrated that knowledge of the future allows you to change the future, at least a little bit, and to stave off fate, at least temporarily, as he was able to keep Charlie from dying until Charlie was in the right place and time to do some good when he sacrificed his life.

Moving back and forth between past, present, and future in this way may be a sign of the break down of a coherent sense of time--the postmodernists use the term temporal schizophrenia, which implies a break down of meaning as well as time, because for anything to mean anything, the signifier must link to the signified (i.e., the word to its meaning) and sign must link to sign (i.e., word follow word to make a statement) in chronological sequence. And maybe this is so, but a breakdown of time and meaning leaves us with a mystery without a resolution, and the sense of incoherence and illogic, and that the mystery is going nowhere, is part of what's been alienating viewers.

But I see a different view of time at work here, one that the great media ecology pioneer and linguistics scholar Benjamin Lee Whorf discovered was characteristic of Hopi and Navajo Native Americans: they only have two tenses in their languages, one for things that are manifest, that is, in existence, which encompasses both of our past and present tenses, and the other for things that will be, or things that could, would, or should be. This is a more mystical, sacred sense of time, which coincides with the sensibility of the island (a sacred space?). The survivors' pasts and their present are interconnected and the intersections move the plot forward (that key requirement again). Their future, and the resolution of the mystery at the heart of the program, remain an undiscovered country--and yes, the theme of death comes up repeatedly in the series. So does the theme of life, especially children and pregnancy, both obsessions of the threatening Others.

The brief title sequence that opens each episode resembles the movie titles from the old film noir films, and although Lost is not all that noirish in visual style, it does present a mystery than is more than a whodunnit, but rather an existential question of the meaning of it all, of whether all coherence is gone, and of how to find our way in a world gone mad. Like so many neo-noirs (in particular, the film Blade Runner comes to mind), the deeper mystery is one of identity. We, as viewers, learn about them bit by bit through the flashbacks over the weeks, and many of the characters seem to have more than one identity, a kind of alias, such as James/Sawyer, and Kate, and Eko, and Locke's conman father, but those characters don't seem to be confused about who they really are themselves, about the real person behind the false front. There's confusion about the island itself, its true nature, the reality of the environment they find themselves in. But the one thing the survivors have yet to question is their own identities, whether they are who they think they are. Now, maybe the series won't end up going in that direction, but it would be consistent with this genre for individual identity to be called into question, for the survivors to at least consider that they are wired to some virtual reality machine Matrix-style, or that they are artificial intelligences/robots/androids/replicants who only think they're real, or that they're clones who think they're the originals (given all the emphasis on pregnancy and birth, a biological angle seems the most likely possibility, and given the hint that the wreckage of their flight was found and there were no survivors, clones are a possible explanation for their waking up on the island, no to mention Locke's miraculous ability to walk again). If I had to put money on it, I'd say that by the end of the series, the question of identity/reality (the two are inseparable) will be called into question directly and significantly.

Like a game, the final score must remain uncertain, or else there is no game (in this sense, games are all about information in the sense that Claude Shannon used the term, whereas narratives are only about information in a very limited way). And Lost, in many ways, resembles a game. On the surface, it resembles that archetype of reality television, Survivor, and I imagine that it was pitched in those terms initially, although in the case of Lost the survivors want nothing more than to be voted off the island. To me, the series more closely resembles an adventure game, otherwise known as interaction fiction, such as the cinematic Myst that once was so popular (and also involved an island), but maybe even more so the old Infocom text adventures like Zork, based on the granddaddy of them all, the public domain mainframe game known as Adventure. These games all were about solving puzzles to move forward in the story (or what passed for one), trying to get to an ultimate goal that also includes trying to figure out the mystery behind the scenario (more so with the later games, especially Myst), while exploring, meandering, and mapping a strange environment, meeting other characters, picking up objects, etc. Those games could get frustrating too, when you get stymied and stalemated (especially in the days before readily available cheat codes on the web). But the player took an active role in trying to solve the puzzles, trying to figure out how to use an object, which object to use, etc., the trade off being an attenuated (at best) narrative.

While Lost resembles a game, and the postmodernists (following Wittgenstein) may look at everything as amounting to nothing more than language games, a TV series is not interactive fiction. Admittedly, all mysteries are games in the sense that they are puzzles, but they have more to do with working out plot lines than with game play involving uncertain outcomes (again, this has come up in previous posts such as The Plotz to Save Socrates and All Blogged Up!). And yes, a touch of the gamer sensibility has added some spice to the series, but the viewer is still unable to participate actively in the events that are unfolding. Yes, Lost fans have made the most of the DVR's enhanced capacity for slow motion and frame-by frame to search for clues, but this kind of active involvement still does not have any effect on the unfolding narrative, we make no decisions on behalf of the characters, no choices as to which path they will follow.

Lost may point the way to a future with increasingly more sophisticated interactive programming (in both the TV and computer sense of the word), but we will still be looking for that eloquent and tuneful singer of tales to sing us a song, to tell us a story, time and time again.

Kudos to Heroes

Kudos to Heroes, the NBC series where a group of super powered individuals save the world, while the series itself has pretty much saved the network from a complete ratings catastrophe (here's their official site). What is the secret of their success?

Well, it's not that Heroes is part of the same trend toward quality, complexity, and mystery that characterize shows such as 24, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica. It's not that this trend is a bad thing, but it's no guarantee of ratings success, a fact that I bemoaned in a recent post entitled Audience Abuse. Even taking into consideration the fact that these shows tend to do best in their first season, being more likely to lose viewers than to pick them up in the subsequent seasons, anyone monitoring the video field for the past nine months would find it littered with the bodies of dead, canceled programs--the dreaded televisionus interruptus!

Neither is the success of the show due to the fact that it is part of the superhero genre, a genre I have some familiarity with, as I mentioned in a recent post about Spider-Man 3. Sure, filmmakers have had some success in adapting comic book superheroes to the silver screen in recent years, but the same can't be said of television, and what's more, this is not an adaptation, but an original made-for-TV super-scenario.

Original, but still derivative, in that it takes its premise pretty much from Marvel's popular X-Men series. The X-Men debuted in 1963, about half a year after DC Comics (then called National) introduced the Doom Patrol, a group of misfits whose powers were in some way linked to accidents resulting in a kind of disability (although they didn't use that language back then)--there was a Robotman, a human brain with an entirely prosthetic body, Negative Man, a pilot all wrapped in bandages who could become catatonic and release for a brief time a negative energy being, and Elasti-Girl, who was able to grow to gigantic proportions or shrink to tiny size, and was viewed as a freak. The Doom Patrol was lead by Dr. Niles Caulder, otherwise known as, The Chief, a genius but also a paraplegic in a wheelchair--the growing awareness that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected to five terms and saw us almost entirely through the Great Depression and the Second World War gave rise to a new icon of the wheelchair as a symbol of leadership and intelligence.

And so we find that the leader of the X-Men, Professor Charles Xavier, was also a genius in a wheelchair, with superpowers to boot, suitably all in the mental realm, as the world's most powerful telepath. Xavier gathers a group of young mutants, teenagers born with powers derived from alterations to their DNA, one with wings (Angel), one shooting force blasts from his eyes (Cyclops), one with the strength and agility of an ape (Beast), one able to generate ice (Iceman), and the lone girl with telekinetic powers (Marvel Girl). It may be that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby saw the Doom Patrol comic and decided to create their own variation, or that DC somehow got wind of what Stan and Jack was doing and beat them to the punch with their own version, or maybe it was just a coincidence, a case of parallel development. In the end, it doesn't really matter, as both books have their merits.

The important point is that Heroes clearly owes much to both comic books, beginning with the fact that the series features a leader type of character trying to gather people with amazing/freakish powers together. In this case, rather than being confined to a wheelchair, the genius Dr. Chandra Suresh has been murdered. His son, Mohinder Suresh, has followed in his father's footsteps in becoming a geneticist, but whether he too is a genius remains to be seen. The fact that his father was viewed as a crackpot for insisting on his radical theories concerning genetic mutation and human evolution has lead to friction and conflict between father and son, a typical motif for American popular culture, significantly less so for that of India, the home of these two characters. Making them Indian, however, gives them a suitably exotic flavor and adds to the overall diversity of the program, as well as suggesting the mystical and cosmic bent that we associate with India and its religious traditions--superpowers as superkarma! While attending to his father's affairs, Mohinder reluctantly finds himself taking over his father's work, and role.

In the comics, the initial motif of the gathering is dealt with quickly, the point being to get the team together already and get right into their adventures. As I mentioned in that recent post about Spider-Man 3, origin stories for individual superheroes tend to be the least interesting part of their ongoing adventures, and traditionally the creators try to dispose of the origin as quickly as possible--in recent years, there have been attempts to turn origin stories into mysteries that unfold over time, but the bottom line is that there is no easy way to explain how someone can fly, or be impervious to bullets, or run 200 MPH, or lift 500 times his or her own bodyweight, etc. There are no rational explanations, we're in the world of fantasy, but superhero stories, while sometimes incorporating supernatural elements, largely rely on science fiction scenarios, and such powers and abilities defy rational analysis or scientific explanation. So, the trick is to dispose of the explanation as quickly as possible, hope no one pays too much attention, and then move on to the adventures, which was the whole point in the first place.

In movies, however, where there's an impetus to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, there's a tendency to make the origin a substantial part of the film--this is why the sequel, at least the first sequel, is usually better than the original movie. One exception is Batman Begins, but Batman isn't really a superhero, so there is more of a story to tell there, and anyway that was a prequel, following four earlier Batman movies. With Heroes, creator Tim Kring splits the difference. He drops us in medias res-into the midst of things--in one sense, as many of the super powered individuals have already used their powers (and as we learn, they are not the first generation of genetic anomalies), and Chandra Suresh has already discovered the presence of mutants and been murdered. But the main characters are mostly isolated from one another, and the story that unfolds over this first season follows the motif of a gathering of heroes--they don't all come together in the same place until the very end.

Of course, this gathering of champions is a kind of origin story, as is the gathering of reluctant heroes (and some combination of the two is also possible). These kinds of stories can be very effective, as at least part of the question is, how will these already existing heroes act when they first meet, how will they get along, will they be able to work together, and how will they do it? Heroes has drawn on exactly this kind of appeal in its first season, as some of the characters form friendships, some find themselves in conflict with one another, some change sides and therefore alliances, and one character discovers she's related to some of the others.

Whether the gathering motif in Heroes will result in some kind of continuing affiliation remains to be seen. Mohinder Suresh has an interest in connecting to them all, but this is not like the mainstream superhero comics where the superpowered individuals come together and agree to form a team to combat crime, fight evil, and the like. Instead, this is an exercise in trying to create a more realistic story about what would happen if regular people suddenly acquired powers. Some feel a sense of responsibility, some withdraw, some use them selfishly, some turn to evil, some try to manipulate and control others, some simply don't know what to do. Comics have experimented with this type of approach here and there, Marvel added a touch of it to their original superheroes, and more so with their failed New Universe project from the eighties, it was developed more fully with the collaborative science fiction literature series, Wild Cards, edited by George R. R. Martin, and experiments have continued over the years.

As an origin tale, the gathering is much more interesting than the origin story where the team members all gain their powers at the same time and in the same way--the Fantastic Four pioneered this latter approach, which was fine for the quick telling found in the original comic, but made for a dismal first film (made even worse by unnecessary changes to the story). As for the X-Men, they also had a similar origin, all were mutants discovered by Professor Xavier and enrolled at his special school "for gifted youngsters." Actually, hardly any individual origin story was necessary, as the designation mutant was considered sufficient to launch the adventures. No need to explain how the powers work, how they came to be, it was just the mutation that made it happen, the power of positive DNA. How convenient! When the series began, the X-Men had almost no origin story to speak of, and just went straight into the action.

The X-Men series was not the most popular of the comic books put out by Marvel, and during the early seventies was only published as reprints. All that changed in 1975 when a set of new characters were introduced in Giant Size X-Men #1, and new stories featuring the new team began to appear shortly thereafter, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by John Byrne. By the eighties, the series had become the most popular in the comics industry, and Marvel was looking to capitalize on its success by launching spin-offs such as The New Mutants, X-Factor, and a solo series for the most popular X-Man, Wolverine. Along with further proliferation of X-comics, Marvel also caught mutant-mania, and started to play the mutant card wherever possible, not only for its popularity, but because it provided a quick and easy explanation for any character's powers.

DC followed suit with the idea of a metagene, a special bit of DNA that some individuals have that gives them the potential to gain superpowers (often some additional event like a lightning bolt is needed to trigger the gene). And outside of the DC and Marvel Universes, in various new superhero universes being created over the past few decades, the tendency has been to provide a single explanation for all superpowers. In Marvel's New Universe, it was the "white event," energy of an extraterrestrial origin bestowing powers on a limited number of individuals. In the Wild Cards books, it was an alien virus. In Heroes, its evolution via mutation.

The appeal of these unified field theories of superpower acquisition is their rationality and consistency. It is easy to attribute a series of impossible events to a single source than it is to multiple sources. But what's lost is the pastiche or mosaic quality of the traditional superhero universe. Both DC and Marvel universes evolved organically, as ecologies involving different editors, writers, artists, characters and stories. The result is that some characters have superpowers because they come from other planets, some gain them by taking a serum or pill, or being exposed to a ray or radiation (or bitten by a radioactive spider), some are basically human but undergo special training or have special skills, some use some kind of technology such as a gun, jet pack, suit of armor, etc., some us a magical object instead, some are magicians, some have powers given to them by magic beings (Shazam!), some gain them from supernatural beings or are supernatural beings themselves, such as the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or Norse gods, some even get them from God Himself, and some are born with them as mutants (and combinations of these different elements are possible). The fun is that these different elements co-exist in the comicbook universe, so that the scientific superhero has to fight the magical villain, or one hero who depends on technological gadgetry must team up with another who is a god out of mythology. This is what is lost in order to gain a coherent universe. Not that there's anything wrong with coherence, and a single television series such as Heroes would have trouble managing the complexity that emerges out of a multitude of separate series such as can be found in the DC and Marvel universes.

So, Heroes does well with a universe that is pretty much like our own, with the single addition of genetic mutation making possible all sorts of different powers and abilities. Again, this allows us to get right into the middle of things, where the action is. And with an ensemble cast and a series of parallel story lines that eventually start to intersect and finally all come together, what's needed are established character types that are immediately recognizable, and can get the plot moving without the need to establish much about personality or mindset. We have in Mohinder Suresh a scientist type, and the estranged son trying to come to terms with his father's work. There's Claire Bennet, the perky, popular blonde high school cheerleader, shades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is all but indestructible having the power to heal from just about any injury. Her father, Noah Bennett, appears to be a nerd with his defining look as the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, but secretly is a sinister company man in conflict with his role as a family man, the latter winning out.

There's the good cop Matt Parkman, who's not too bright and pretty much of a shlamazel (Yiddish for someone who has no luck), but has the power to read minds (and played by Greg Gunberg who played Eric Weiss on Alias). There's Isaac Mendez, the tortured artist, a heroin addict with the ability to paint the future. There's Niki Sanders (played by Ali Larter from the delightful Legally Blonde movie), a hooker with a heart of gold type, in this case doing internet porn to support her young son while her estranged husband is in prison, and with a split personality/evil twin that unleashes her superstrength. Her husband, D. L. Hawkins, a secondary character, can become a phantom and phase through solid objects, and her son Micah, has the ability to control technologies to some extent.

Another major character is Nathan Petrelli, a candidate for a New York Congressional seat, a stereotypical politician who has a nice family, although his wife is in a wheelchair, and he has affairs and has an illegitimate child, is ambitious and compromises his principles to get ahead, but is a good person deep down, and oh yes, he can fly. His mother, a minor character named Angela Petrelli, is a dominating mother and a kind of female Joseph Kennedy. His brother, Peter Petrelli, is a sensitive, caring individual who is a bit of a slacker, but turns out to be arguably the most important of these heroes, with the power to absorb the powers of others he comes into contact with (although not necessarily able to control those powers).

The character find of the century is Hiro Nakamura of Japan, innocent and enthusiastic, and often quite amusing, a comics and science fiction fan himself--since the late seventies, science fiction filmmakers have realized that to be realistic they have to take into account the fact that people know science fiction, so for example, in E.T. Eliot shows the alien his Star Wars toys, and they run into a kid dressed as Yoda on Halloween, and later another kid asks why E.T. can't just beam up, and Eliot answers, "this is reality, stupid." So, Hiro has this postmodern, self-reflexive characteristic, and is constantly being self-conscious, talking about what a hero would do. Adding to the fun, it turns out that his father is played by George Takei, who we all recognized as Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek series. Being Japanese, he adds an element of diversity, but much of the audience is also quite familiar with the massive Japanese contribution to comics and science fiction in the form of manga and anime, and Hiro embarking on his quest with much to learn is no doubt more than a little reminiscent of Ash, the hero from Pokemon. The motif of the hero having a helper who is of lower status and/or ordinary ability, the knight's squire, is included here with Hiro's co-worker, Ando Masahashi. Ando is the doubting Thomas, and lack Hiro's faith in and knowledge of the hero's quest, but he is a good friend and supporting character, and there is a sense in which he is Sancho Panza to Hiro's Don Quixote. Hiro has the power to manipulate the space-time continuum, which I would imagine would make him the most powerful hero of them all, but he has difficulty controlling his power. But it is his name that says it all: he is the Hiro of Heroes.

Both Hiro's power, and in a more limited way Isaac Mendez's power to paint the future, make time travel a part of the story. Hiro travels to the future to witness New York City devastated by a nuclear explosion--why do they keep picking on my hometown?!--and the goal is established to stop this from occurring. After 3 episodes establishing the scenario, the 4th ends with a future version of Hiro encountering Peter Petrelli, and telling him, "save the cheerleader, save the world." This simple formula drives the series, with the first arc being about saving Claire Bennet, and the second about preventing the destruction of New York. Good, serious, concrete goals resolved within a season, not dragging a mystery on forever like Lost. The pacing of the story arcs in this series has simply been excellent. Each episode moves the story forward, not going off on a tangent for unnecessary back story or character development, no padding.

The multiple story lines that the series begins with are not so convoluted as to make them hard to follow, they are complex but marked by clarity, they parallel each other effectively, and intersect at dramatic points in ways that make sense. The 20th episode of the season, 4th from the finale, "Five Years Gone," gave us a glimpse of the future if our heroes do not save New York City, as Hiro travels into the future. His future self has created a model of the intersecting chain of events that led to the disaster to help guide him in his attempts to travel back in time and change what happened. While idiosyncratic in appearance, it is a web of string with notes and pictures hanging, a networked depiction of time (the internet gives us a new metaphor for time, time is like the web, we click from one page to another, until the computer freezes? dies? becomes obsolete and is replaced by a newer model?). And it demonstrates in a visual and concrete way the coherence of the series' plot line, and the fact that this is a plot about plots, actually a plot about plots about plots--I made a similar point in a previous post about Paul Levinson entitled The Plotz to Save Socrates. Paul himself, having written some time travel stories, had this to say about Heroes on his blog:

Heroes Five Years Gone: Triumph of Time-Travel - May 1, 2007

For some reason, people who are supposed to know about fiction and narrative and what makes good storytelling have trouble taking comic books seriously. As recently as 1999, when I was President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, comic book writing was not deemed a satisfactory qualification for membership. That's still the case. I never understood the problem - do pictures along with text somehow render the text invalid?

NBC's Heroes comes from the comic book tradition. In fact, a comic book, based on the visions of a character who can paint the future, animates the series. Monday night's episode - "Five Years Gone" - is about as fine a time-travel story as I've ever seen on television. Well, ok, maybe it's not quite as good as Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" in the original Star Trek series, or "Yesterday's Enterprise" from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it's pretty close, and unlike those standalone episodes, it wove in elements of Heroes we have been seeing almost from the beginning of the series this past Fall.

Time travel's no easy cookie. If you do it right - if you respect the paradoxes of time travel as really happening - you're asking your readers or audience almost immediately to enter a realm in which headaches come along with the thrills, as people in your story meet their future selves, and your audience must struggle to understand how the future self isn't changed by the very meeting with the past self... (My time travel novel, The Plot to Save Socrates, took me three times as long to write as any of my other novels.)

And threading paradoxes through the eye of a needle is just the beginning - especially for Heroes, which not only has a time-travelling Hiro, but Heroes with all kinds of other fantastic powers, like adopting the looks of others, reading minds, and, the most powerful of all, adopting all the powers of the other super heroes.

"Five Years Gone" dished out then dealt with these problems with style and logic, positing a world gone wrong, and all-too-humanly flawed heroes struggling against all odds to pull time and the world inside-out and perhaps back on track again.

If there were one or two tin notes - like a thread of this story a little too close to X-Men - that's ok, because the overall effect, and so many characters and plot twists, were so good.

And Heroes made good on some of its crucial implications from earlier in the year. That's not only good television, and all too rare in a TV world in which series sometimes spin irredeemably out of control, but good time-travel telling - in books, short stories, movies, comic books, or any realm.

Well said, Paul. I can understand how science fiction purists would not want to classify Heroes as true science fiction, as there is no real scientific basis for genetic mutation bestowing superpowers on individuals--by the same criteria, Star Wars is not really science fiction, by the way, and purists see it as more like a fairytale. Heroes owes much to the world of myth, including the archetype of the hero's journey that Hiro repeatedly invokes, and many have said that superhero comicbooks come across as a modern mythology.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn't note the importance of a good villain. In this case, it's been Sylar, not a classic supervillain type, but rather a serial killer who gains the powers of those he kills. As played by Zachary Quinto, I find the character vaguely reminiscent of the Anthony Perkins character, Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho--not surprisingly, Sylar at one point goes home to mother, and ends up killing her. The fact that he is also a watchmaker is perhaps a reference to the debate between those who deny evolution in favor of intelligent design, arguing that life, the universe, and everything is like a fine watch (the clockwork metaphor for the universe was associated with physicist and occultist Sir Isaac Newton actually), as opposed to the scientific point of view which sees nothing more than the work of a blind watchmaker (to use the famous biologist and advocate for atheism, Richard Dawkins' favored phrase), that is, the result of natural physical laws and self-organizing systems. So, as the watchmaker, he is from the start opposed to the evolutionists, but also abandons that occupation, and therefore faith and morality, in favor of forcing a survival of the fittest Darwinian conflict. Additionally, my guess is that the watchmaker element is also a reference to The Watchmen graphic novel, written by Alan Moore, generally considered the best work ever done in the superhero genre, in any medium.

Sylar is not the only bad guy in the series, and Heroes gives us one of the all-time best in this sort of role, Malcom McDowell as the powerful and manipulative mobster, Mr. Linderman. Even though I have seen him play the villain over and over again, I just never get tired of him, although I will always associate him with the wild youth Alex from the brilliant Kubrick film, Clockwork Orange.

The season concluded with a final battle that some found disappointing, but the series is not about brawls and duels, it's about journeys. As such, the last scene is the first scene of the next season, the beginning of an entirely new story. We have a satisfying conclusion, but mysteries remain. Sylar was killed, it seemed, but there is no body, he appears to have crawled down into the sewers (where he belongs), and in good comicbook fashion we can expect that he'll be back. There was mention of a villain even more frightening then him, who we no doubt will see next season. There's a shadowy organization, the one that Noah Bennet used to work for, that's still after these extraordinary individuals. Matt Parkman appears to be in critical condition, but will no doubt recover and rejoin the others. Angela Petrelli is still around, and will be angry about the loss of her sons, and may seek revenge. But Peter Petrelli should have survived the blast up in the sky, and for all we know Nathan may have somehow made it as well. Mr. Linderman might also be back, since he has healing abilities as well, but I think it much less likely that Isaac Mendez or D. L. Hawkins will return.

And Mohinder Suresh will continue to find new mutants to bring into the fold. There is clear potential here for keeping the series fresh and exciting for many years to come, but for now its kudos to Heroes for a journey well begun.

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.

Wild Palms 2007

I'm teaching a course on the Science Fiction Genre this semester, I've been doing it once a year on average for over a decade now, the emphasis is on film, but we also cover other media including books, magazines, theater, radio, television, cable, home video, and we also talk a bit about music and video/computer games. Actually, today was the last class meeting, and the final is next week (good luck guys!).

So, this semester, for the first time, I had the students screen the 1993 television miniseries Wild Palms (copies of the DVD are placed on reserve, students watch it on their own time, then we discuss it in class). I never had a chance to use it before, because it wasn't available on video for about a decade (it came out on VHS circa 1994, but was discontinued not long afterwards), and only came out on DVD late in 2005.

My students were not at all familiar with Wild Palms, hadn't even heard of it, and this is no doubt due to the fact that the miniseries was not only unavailable for something like a decade, but has rarely, if ever, been rerun on television. Many of my students are quite savvy when it comes to sci fi, so I imagine that anyone who was too young to see it when it aired, or otherwise missed it, would be in the same boat, that is, not fully aware of this remarkable production.

So, let me first of all tell you that this is quality television. If you like programs like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Twin Peaks, or The Prisoner, then you ought to check out Wild Palms.

Here's some background for you. The miniseries is 285 minutes long, which means it's almost 5 hours. It was intended to be a miniseries, so the story is resolved in the end, not left open for a series to follow. In this sense, it is like a movie, albeit a very long one, although it is broken up into 5 episodes (it was aired over one week). But it also draws in some ways on the soap opera genre, specifically the primetime soap opera such as Dallas and Dynasty, with a large number of characters involved in complex familial, romantic, economic, and political relationships.

The miniseries was officially billed as

Oliver Stone Presents
Wild Palms

and the famous film director Oliver Stone (Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Alexander, World Trade Center) is seen as the creative force behind the miniseries, although he does not actually direct any of the episodes (in film, the director is generally considered to be the auteur, in television it's the producer). Stone is listed as the Executive Producer along with Bruce Wagner, who is credited as the writer, and Wagner is the writer of the comic that the miniseries was based on, which was illustrated by Julian Allen, and appeared in the magazine Details back in 1990.

Stone's JFK looms large in the background of Wild Palms, which revolves around a mysterious conspiracy, and Stone even appears briefly in a scene in which he is being interviewed on television, the interviewer asking Stone if he's bitter now that the files on JFK have been unsealed and Stone has been vindicated.

The story is set in 2007, which makes it interesting to watch now that it is 2007, but 2007 was 14 years in the future back then. The future that Stone and Wagner envisioned is quite different from our own, but I imagine that many people would say that Wild Palms' image of an America subtly slipping into authoritarianism was not so far off the mark. But images of the future ultimately say more about the times that they were produced in than the times that they depict (and supposedly predict). More on this later, but first some further notes on the production.

The casting is very interesting, and very interestingly television-ish. The main character, Harry Wycoff, is played by James Belushi, who back in 1993 was best known as the brother of John Belushi, and a kind of John Belushi-light on Saturday Night Live (some of my students had trouble with this casting, because they identify Belushi with his more recent sitcom dad persona). It was an unusual choice, because this was basically a dramatic role, although there were some moments where he shifted into a comic persona. Harry's wife, Grace, was played by Dana Delany, who best known for her starring role in the TV series about Vietnam, China Beach, which went off the air just a couple of years before the miniseries premiered. Grace's mother, Josie, is played by Angie Dickinson, a move actress and at one time a sex symbol with a long track record, also known for her television work as the star of the seventies series, Police Woman. Coty, the son of Harry and Grace, is played by Ben Savage, then best known as the younger brother of Fred Savage of The Wonder Years, but soon afterwards to become the star of Boy Meets World. Bebe Neuwirth, a very talented Broadway actress, but best known as Lilith, the wife of Frasier Crane on Cheers, plays the role of the famous actress Tabba Schwartzkopf. Film and television actress Kim Cattrall, who would in a few years become famous for her role as Samantha in Sex and the City, plays Harry's old lover, Paige Katz. Additionally, the character actor Robert Loggia, known for his work in the crime genre, typically as a mobster, plays the villainous Senator Tony Kreutzer; the British actor David Warner plays the imprisoned revolutionary and Grace's father, Eli Levitt; Ernie Hudson, who would become known for playing Warden Glynn on Oz, was Tommy, a friend of Harry's; Charles Rocket, probably best known for getting fired from Saturday Night Live after saying "fuck" on a live broadcast in 1981, played Stitch, a comic revolutionary. And that's just to mention some of the cast!

The Wikipedia entry on the miniseries contains a plot synopsis, as does the TV.com listing. Neither summarizes the complex and convoluted plot in its entirety, nor do they give away the ending. I won't go into much detail here, but what's intriguing about this image of a future America is the sense of slipping gradually into fascism. Individual citizens are beat up and kidnapped in public, in broad daylight, off of the streets, in restaurants, etc., by men in black types, secret service/agents/police, this happens repeatedly, and mostly people ignore it, make believe they don't see anything. In and of itself, it makes for a powerful set of images, and the idea for this comes from the real life situations in countries such as Argentina and Chile back in the 70s and 80s.

The leader of the opposition is imprisoned in a "Perceptory," an image again taken from real life, e.g., Nelson Mandela. And children are kidnapped and indoctrinated, turned against their parents, an idea that has its source in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The rhinoceros is a significant recurring symbol in Wild Palms, and it is an allusion to the 1959 play by Eugène Ionesco in which one individual after another turns into a rhinoceros, symbolizing the spread of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Rhinoceros is a classic example of theater of the absurd, and Wild Palms could be considered a TV miniseries of the absurd, coupled with numerous film noir elements.

There are references to a nuclear event brought on by terrorism at some point in the recent past, which occurred in Florida, Boca to be specific (but actually part of the conspiracy). Now, as a New Yorker it's always a relief when my hometown isn't made to be ground zero in these narratives, as we were always the ones who were hit first in all of the old atomic war stories (but not, refreshingly, in 24 or Jericho). But this event in Wild Palms serves the same function as our 9/11, in changing the political climate of the United States (in the miniseries, there is a reference to Pearl Harbor as similarly pivotal). It is also interesting to note that that region of Florida was ground zero for another kind of era-defining disaster, the disputed 2000 presidential election.

The title Wild Palms, which presumably comes from the Faulkner novella about an ill-fated love affair (which is part of the plot in the miniseries), points to the geographical setting of the narrative, Los Angeles, and we are very much in the world of Hollywood show business here, which perhaps accounts for the noticeable use of Jewish names for many of the characters (and German names as well). There are also several gay characters, unusual especially for this time, but not for Hollywood. And there is a strong Japanese emphasis, which is definitely a west coast thing, but also reflects the ascendancy of the Japanese economy in the 80s, Japan's important role in electronics and computer technology, and also the influx of Japanese popular culture in the past few decades. The use of tattoos for identification purposes follows, I believe, the Yakuza (Japanese mafia), but also presages the recent rash of tattooing in mainstream culture. There's also a lot of play and pun with GO!

Virtual reality technology is the big thing in Wild Palms, and there is a Neuromancer-like interface (William Gibson has a cameo appearance where he is identified as the man who coined "cyberspace") to a virtual world where individuals can interact with one another through avatars that appear to be fully human. But the big breakthrough is its combination with holographic technology to create entertainment that breaks out of the box and projects into the room, and this is used to create a sitcom that takes place in your own living room (the technology is called Mimecom, and the slogan goes, is it real or is it Mimecom?, a take off on the actual advertising for audio cassettes that went, is it live or is it Memorex?). Like I said, this is Hollywood.

The sitcom is part of a conspiracy plot, however, and another technology that's introduced is Mimosine, a drug that makes VR and holograms seem real to us. Note the connection to mimesis here, and also Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, but there actually is an amino acid called mimosine which inhibits DNA replication in mammals, possibly a reference to the child abduction plot element. Mimosine is shown to be addictive (addicts bleed blue liquid out of their noses, reminiscent of the nose bleeds caused by cocaine use, especially associated with the entertainment media), and there are hints of future drug dealers and addicts, and links back to LSD and psychedelics. While most of the story centers on prominent personalities, there is a bit of the cyberpunk scenario in Wild Palms (i.e., Wilderzone), and also some references to technoshamanism.

The sitcom is called Church Windows, and the program, the VR/holographic technology, and the Mimosine drug all have the same source, Senator Tony Kreutzer, who is also the founder of the Church of Synthiotics and the New Realism. This is patterned on L. Ron Hubbard (it's said that Tony wrote science fiction, just like Hubbard), on Dianetics, and Scientology. Tony is a cult leader, and where Scientology hooks you up to some kind of electric device, Synthiotics connects you to VR technology. And just as Scientology has very powerful connections to the entertainment industry (again, a West Coast thing), Wild Palms takes this a step further in making Tony a media mogul. And he is not only a senator, but a presidential candidate, so there is a strange combination of religion, media, and politics at play here. It may seem a bit distant today, when the media tend to be identified with liberal politics, but let's not forget about all that conservative talk radio. And more importantly, Wild Palms looks back to the eighties, and that was the decade when a Hollywood movie actor became president, and there was, and is, a conservative cabal out there in addition to Reagan (John Wayne, Bob Hope, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger). Also recall that Reagan's rise also represented the ascendancy of the religious right, the Moral Majority, and they remain a powerful force in the Republican party. So, a media-religious-political complex is a plot element that reflects trends originating in late 20th century America.

I go into all this not because I'm pushing the politics of Wild Palms, but just to explain where the miniseries is coming from. Conspiracy makes for an exciting plot, and the miniseries draws on the conspiracy theme that begins with the Kennedy assassination, runs through Nixon's Watergate scandal, and culminates in the Reagan era. But instead of the heavy-handedness of films like JFK, the sci fi scenario provides enough distance to handle these themes safely, and even make them fun. The distancing effect of science fiction was put to good use by Gene Roddenberry in the Star Trek series, enabling him to tackle social issues that could not be dealt with in a straightforward manner. But Star Trek's style was realism, the same for Battlestar Galactica, whereas Wild Palms is much closer to David Lynch's Twin Peaks in being mysterious and intriguing, and stylized and yes, artsy (in a good way).

Wild Palms is a delight if you are into symbolism, and quotations and allusions. Towards the end, there are clear allusions to scenes from the movies Videodrome and Blade Runner. There are quotations of Yeats' "Running to Paradise," Eliot's "The Hollow Men," and Whitman's "O, Captain, My Captain" (about the Lincoln assassination, but often invoked in reference to Kennedy). There's an outrageous version of "All Along the Watchtower" done crooner-style, and Tony Kreutzer sings the Groucho Marx song, "Hello, I Must Be Going." The soundtrack in general is terrific if you're into sixties music--I get chills from the way Gimme Shelter is used in the last episode. The two groups at war with one another are The Fathers, which references both hierarchical religious organization and the older generation on one side of the generation gap, and The Friends, which references the Quakers who are associated with peace, as well as the baby boomer peer group (e.g., Woodstock) on the other side of the gap. In this sense, Wild Palms anticipates the culture wars that continue to plague us today.

A further note, Harry's daughter, Deirdre, nicknamed "Buddha," is a late talker who has not started to speak yet. I understand this to be a metaphor for silence in the face of atrocity, cultural trauma, a bit of Pete Townsend's Tommy. But I can't help but wonder if this character wasn't also inspired by an encounter with autism (as was the case for Townsend). I was surprised to see, when I looked up Angie Dickinson, that her character in Police Woman had an autistic daughter who appeared in a few episodes.

Be that as it may, Wild Palms has the kind of depth to it that makes repeat viewing worthwhile.

Battlestar Galactica Finale

I've been mulling over the Season 3 Finale of Battlestar Galactica, the topic of several previous posts (Battlestar Galactica Redux, God and the Machines, and Postscript to God and the Machines), and here are some thoughts about what is coming next.

The season finale makes it pretty clear that they are about to find Earth, and this pretty much fits in with the way the series has moved. The miniseries gave us the Cylon invasion and genocide, with the 40,000 odd survivors escaping in a "ragtag fleet" led by the last battlestar. Season 1 was all about surviving Cylon attacks, and embarking on the quest for Earth, not knowing where it is or even if it exists, but the season ends with the survivors finding the planet Kobol which was written about in their sacred texts, and which points the way to Earth. The quest continues in Season Two, but at the end of the season the survivors find a planet that can (barely) sustain human life and is hidden from the Cylons, and they decide to settle on it, after which they are discovered and occupied by the Cylons. Season Three has Galactica rescue the survivors, and ends with the promise of finding Earth.

In other words, each season advances the plot significantly. Unlike other series that have stretched plot lines out, and consequently lost their way (and I'm thinking here about Lost, and Alias for that matter), Battlestar Galactica advances the plot line in a significant way each season, making each season move in a fresh and exciting new direction. This is a series where the creators seem to know what they are doing, and where they are going. That's not to say that every episode holds the same significance--this is not a miniseries, after all, and each season retains some episodic qualities and includes some digressions. But viewed on a season by season basis (or even half season since they tend to be broken up in that way), it is clear that advancing the plot takes precedence.

So, we can expect to encounter Earth in Season Four. And the producers of the series have demonstrated a commitment to quality. Now, here's another hint. The original 1978 series was canceled with the first season, and consequently the survivors never reached Earth (and I have to again say what an achievement it is to have remade that mediocre program into this outstanding new series), and there were only 22 episodes made. And it was recently announced that the Season Four order for 13 new episodes was increased to 22!

Now, I'm not trying to go all numerological on you, no conspiracy theory here, but maybe a touch of some sentiment or homage?

So, putting the pieces together, we have a series dedicated to quality, but also expensive to produce and with ratings that (sadly) are not all that great; we have a plot line that promises to bring the survivors to Earth next season, which represents the fulfillment of their quest; we have a sudden 40% increase in the number of episodes for one season, and we have a total number of episodes for next season, 22, that matches the total number of the original series.

My conclusion: Season Four of Battlestar Galactica will be the last. I go on record with this prediction: 2008 will bring the series finale for Battlestar Galactica. Remember that you read it here first. I am not saying that I want to see the series end, mind you, but I would rather see it bring the story to its conclusion than leave it hanging or inflate it until it bursts. And it seems as if the creators of Battlestar Galactica have too much integrity and sense to do that, and for that I applaud them.