Sopranos Second Coming

The title of last night's Sopranos episode, "The Second Coming," is a reference to the famous poem by Yeats, which I included in a post not too long ago (Reversals of Fortune), and on The Sopranos there was a scene where Tony Soprano's son AJ (Anthony, Jr.) is sitting in a college class, listening to his English professor reading the poem out loud. And this is a minor point, I know, but the reading, while not done poorly in any overt way, struck me as much too bland for a work of this magnitude. It requires a dramatic reading, but then again many English professors are molded by the silent reading of the printed page, better versed in deconstruction and poststructuralist theories than in, well, verse and oral interpretation. And this is evidenced by the kind of writing they themselves produce, writing for the eye, not the ear, a complaint that has been registered, in turn, by Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and Camille Paglia, and by any media ecologist who has had anything to do with the study of literature. One point that I made at the end of my book chapter on The Sopranos which I posted on my blog (The Sopranos) is that the characters on the program live in a world of sound rather the abstract visual world of the written word, but a world of electronically-mediated secondary orality.

In the beginning was the spoken word, the world of sound, and electricity brings on the second coming of voice, song, and acoustic space. The second coming is a reference to Christian eschatology, of course, and this episode further fleshes out some of the themes I discussed in my last post about The Sopranos, entitled The Passion of Christopher. Tony Soprano remains the "chosen one" that the opening song by A3 makes reference to, the chosen boss of the North Jersey mob (messiah means "anointed one," and being anointed means you are chosen to be king). But is it Christ or Antichrist that Yeats refers to as the "rough beast" that "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born"? Or is Phil Leotardo, recently anointed as the chosen one for the New York City mob, and whose hostility towards Tony is increasing geometrically, Tony's opposite number 666? Or is it just a reference to the end of the series itself, with only two more episodes to go, "its hour come round at last"?

Is it armageddon or anarchy, a bang or a whimper, or a bit of both? It is perfectly in keeping with the cultural geography of North Jersey that Tony has to deal with the upstart Phil from a position of insecurity. After all, Brooklyn is taking away our basketball team, the NJ Nets (not that we didn't get them from Long Island, but let's not go there).

But the interactions between family and family are part of the shows attraction. AJ's depression and suicide attempt, while finally bringing out Tony's soft side--the scene where Tony is cradling AJ like a baby after rescuing him from almost drowning in the pool, and after his initial angry reaction is comforting him by calling him baby and telling him everything is all right, was another brilliant moment. We know that Tony has a sentimental side, and is capable of nurturing, from the very beginning of the series when he became so enamored of the ducks raising their young in his swimming pool, and the parallel in this scene is quite powerful. And we are also reminded of his brutality when, reacting to the vague insults and threats received by his daughter, Meadow, from New York mobster Coco, he loses his temper and beats Coco within an inch of his life, which pushes the already strained relationship between the two mobs over the edge.

Depression and aggression, suicide and homicide, are twin manifestations of the mental instability that plagues the family members. It is fitting that the pool looms so large as a symbol throughout the series. A body of water is an archetypal symbol of the unconscious mind, hence depth psychology, and it is also symbolic of the mother and the womb. AJ's botched suicide attempt, ridiculously ineffective (being the home of a mob boss, he surely had access to firearms if he really wanted to end his life), was an attempt to return to the womb, as he ties a cinder block to his leg and jumps into the pool, the rope being just a bit too long to actually keep him completely underwater. At the same time, he ties a plastic bag over his head to suffocate himself (why is this necessary if he is going to drown anyway?), almost like a deep sea diver wears a helmet, to penetrate the mysteries hiding below the surface of the water and learn its secrets. He's on a voyage of self-discovery, paralleling in an odd way the epiphany that Tony had in the previous episode, which he was unable to communicate adequately in this episode--Tony takes peyote, sees the sunrise in the desert--the antienvironment to the pool--and shouts, "I got it!"

But whether explorations of the unconscious have any efficacy in Sopranoland is at best unclear. Is AJ sinking lower and lower into the pool, or is he fighting his way back to the surface? Was he baptized and reborn, or is he still drowning? In a family therapy session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Vogel, AJ whines about all the things that his parents have done wrong to him, including making him wear a raincoat in 2nd grade (note the connection, a raincoat, to keep from getting wet) that got him beat up by some kids. It's the standard kind of blame the parents stuff that comes out with psychoanalysis, and there's no indication that this is at all helpful. Not surprisingly, Tony loses his temper and calls AJ a momma's boy. The end of the episode, where Tony visits his son at the institution where he's been staying since the suicide attempt, while not showing what actually occurs, seems somehow hopeful in regard to their relationship, and AJ's future. Unlike Tony, who struggled with a monstrous-feminine mother, AJ's relationship with his mother seems fine. Instead, AJ is in a position similar to Luke Skywalker--having discovered that his father is Darth Vader, will AJ, too, try to redeem him?

But whether AJ goes down with the ship or swims for shore, it is not at all clear whether therapy has done him any good, or just fed his depression. A similar question was raised regarding Tony's relationship with his therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. This has been one of the most intriguing aspects of the series, and one of the main elements of the scenario as it was set out in the pilot and over the first season: the mafioso undergoing psychoanalysis. As I noted in my last post on The Sopranos, the series never quite recovered from the death of Nancy Marchand, who played Tony's mother Livia, and what's therapy without a mother to inveigh against? Sure, she's still there symbolically and psychologically, but she stopped being a source of new issues long ago. Without Livia, Melfi lost some of her relevance.

But the relationship between Tony and Melfi played itself out. At the end of the first season, Tony demonstrates the danger he poses and his protective side by telling Melfi that she has to leave town and hide because Uncle Junior and his mother found out he was seeing a shrink, and may want her whacked for knowing too much. At the start of Season 2, Melfi is able to return home, but refuses to treat Tony any longer. But there's this sense of flirtation coming from her when she sees him in a restaurant and says, "toodle-loo," much to her chagrin and embarrassment. Still, she decides to resume his therapy, but starts drinking before their sessions to get over her distaste for Tony's criminal behavior. In the Season 2 finale, while suffering from food poisoning, Tony has dreams heavily laden with symbolism, including one about having sex with Melfi.

Season 3 is a major turning point in the role of Dr. Melfi, and for the role of psychoanalysis in the series. It begins with the 4th episode of that season, "Employee of the Month," where Tony, having returned to therapy sessions, is feeling liberated by the death of his mother. But then Melfi has a therapy session with her own therapist, Dr. Kupferberg, a recurring role filled admirably by Peter Bogdonavich, where she realizes, "I've let myself be charmed by a sociopath." She also mistakenly reveals Tony's identity to Kupferberg, who urges her to stop treating the mobster. She seems to agree. But then, she becomes the victim of crime herself. The Wikipedia entry on this episode describes the sequence of events very well:

Meanwhile, as Dr. Melfi leaves her office late in the evening, she is approached in the deserted parking garage by a young man named Jesus Rossi. He grabs Dr. Melfi from behind and pushes her into the stairwell where he brutally rapes her and leaves her crying for help. She is taken to the emergency room where she learns her leg is badly bruised. She also has bruises on her face. Her son, Jason, wants revenge on the rapist, but Richard (Melfi's ex-husband) tells Jason to let the police handle it. The following day, Richard phones the detectives, who inform him that Rossi was released on a technicality, due to a breakdown in the chain of custody. Upon learning of Rossi's release, Melfi becomes very emotional and afraid. While buying a sandwich at a sub shop, she notices a plaque indicating that Rossi is the establishment's "Employee of the Month." In fear, she drops her soda and runs out of the building.

Dr. Melfi later dreams about buying a soda at a vending machine and getting her hand trapped in the machine (effectively symbolizing the helplessness Melfi experienced when she was raped). While trapped, she dreams of a large Rottweiler that scares her, but then she sees her rapist coming to assault her again. The dog attacks Rossi, mauling and killing him. When Melfi awakens, she feels a sense of relief. Later, she describes the dream to her therapist, Dr. Elliott Kupferberg, and realises its meaning: the large dog protecting her was actually Tony Soprano — someone who could take revenge on her behalf. However, Melfi assures Kupferberg that even though the justice system has failed her, she will not turn to him for help. However, she mentions that the dream of watching that man suffering brought her great pleasure and it could be argued that if it weren't for Melfi's staunch record of stringently following professional ethics, she may consider or even follow through with bringing Tony into the matter.

Wikipedia does not do justice to the conflict inherent in the situation. Given her previous flirtation with Tony Soprano, and the tacit approval of both Jason and Richard for seeking revenge, it is no easy decision to follow through with her "staunch record of stringently following professional ethics," which have been called into question already due to her decision to continue to treat Tony--in her defense, as a psychiatrist, she is a physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath, and is as obligated to help him, just like the doctors who saved his life after he was shot (in following their oath, they didn't stop to consider whether saving him would allow him to murder others). But keeping quiet about this would have been the most difficult task of her life. How could she not want to run to daddy, or any available father-figure, including Tony, following such a devastating trauma. This truly was The Last Temptation of Melfi. Hence, when she next has a session with Tony, as Wikipedia describes it:

When Dr. Melfi becomes tearful during Tony's next therapy session, he tries to comfort her. Tony asks her what is wrong, but she persuades him to sit back down and continue the session. Then Tony asks Melfi if she wants to tell him something. After a tense pause, Melfi declines and the scene changes abruptly to a black screen and the end credits. The issue of Melfi's feelings of helplessness and dread are never again brought up in a way in which any actions of retribution or justice are taken.

There should be no doubt that this was the greatest struggle of her life, and her greatest victory. Fans who took pleasure in the empowerment they experienced vicariously via Tony's violence were frustrated by this turn of events, and even the best of us called out for revenge on behalf of this sympathetic character. And it is to David Chase's credit that he resisted the pull towards narrative closure and popular formula and left the story as unresolved as so many real-life crimes are. Artistically, a courageous move that set a moral standard against which all other actions in the series could be measured against. But this also in effect ended the story of Dr. Melfi as a character. While therapy sessions continued in some of the episodes, no further growth or development seems possible with her character, and the narrative function of therapy also receded into the background after this point.

With one exception, I should add, which made for one of the most poignant scenes in the entire series, paralleling the temptation of Melfi in setting up a moral bellwether. In the 7th episode of the season, "Second Opinion," Melfi has a session with Tony's wife Carmella, and gives her a referral to a colleague, an elderly Holocaust survivor who tells Carmella to leave her husband and give up the blood money that she has been taking from him--he himself refuses to accept her payment for the session. This one psychiatrist stand out as a moral exemplar who forces Carmella to confront the fact that she is an accomplice to unspeakable crimes, even though the result is that she simply continues on, now with no delusions about her own culpability. But it is not simply his psychiatric training that has given him moral clarity, it seems, its his familiarity with the genuine evil of the Holocaust.

Towards the end of the 3rd season, Tony starts an affair with a sexy Mercedes saleswoman he meets at Melfi's office, another indirect association between therapy and sex for him. Therapy sessions continue here and there through the end of Season 3 and the very beginning of Season 4, and then fade away until the 6th episode, when it turns out that this sales rep that he had an affair with, and later dumped when she proved to be as crazy as his mother, had killed herself. Drunk and angry, he yells at Melfi for not being able to save this woman, but this leads to the realization that he himself felt guilt over the situation. By the 11th episode, Tony wants to quit therapy, admitting that he was no longer interested in trying to change his life. But in the first episode of Season 5, he is back to see her, but proposing that they start an affair rather than continue the therapeutic relationship. Melfi says no, no doubt feeling little of the temptation she felt in refusing to ask for his help following her rape, and in fact having her resolve strengthened by the experience. In her own therapy session, she admits that she found Tony a bit sexy in the past, but is ultimately repulsed by him. Eventually, Tony resumes therapy, but the sessions are few and far between last season or in this one.

Now, in this more recent episode, Melfi is back in session with Dr. Kupferberg, and she refers to Tony as Kupferberg's favorite patient. Is this projection on her part? Perhaps, but it also reflects an unprofessional fascination on Kupferberg's part with Tony's notoriety, and he in turn tells her about a recent study that shows that therapy actually validates sociopaths and makes them more likely to commit crimes. This is the fundamental question that remains unresolved throughout the series. Is therapy bullshit, as Tony sometimes would maintain? Is it an exercise in self-absorption and narcissism for the patient? Mental masturbation, Tony would say in an angrier mood. Worse yet, might it help make a mobster be a better mobster, a more effective criminal--there was some hint of that in the first season, when Melfi inadvertently gives Tony the idea to let Junior be the titular head of the family, let him feel like he's in charge, while Tony to operated behind the scenes.

Chase gives ample indication that therapy is not always effective, that therapists can be enablers, that they have hang-ups of their own that interfere with their professionalism, and that they form their own in-group, a psychoanalytic mafia (just as academics do, and filmmakers, and priests, and just about any profession or group). But they also have provided the only moral standards to be found in the series. For better or worse, they are the prophets predicting the second coming, which can only be the children re-enacting the conflicts of their parents, in a cycle of violence through the generations, a cycle that will continue coming and coming, unless their warnings are heeded.

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.

The Art of the Blog

Now that I am an award-winning blogist (see my recent post, Thinking Blogger Award Goes Here ↓), I feel an enhanced sense of responsibility (as Spider-Man maintains, with great power comes great responsibility) not only to the blogging community or blogosphere, or as I like to put it, the blogal village, and I want to give back to blogging since blogging has given so much of itself to me.

And so, I want to raise the question of how are we to consider, analyze and evaluate the blog as an art form. Now, awards such as the Thinking Blogger Award--hey, let's trot that one out again and take a moment to admire it...


...ahhh, that felt good, now where was I? Oh yes, awards such as this one, as far as I can tell, are given on the basis of the content of the blog, the material that blogists have written or displayed. Yes, such awards are based on more than the mere individual post, they point to the sum of all posts, the cumulative impression that the posts have made, but are the awards really based on the blog itself as a medium and a form? I think not.

Talking about the aesthetics of the blog seems like almost a contradiction in terms. Blog is such as ugly word. It's that sound, og! Sounds like ugh, ugly, argh, etc. I came across a cartoon in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months ago that cracked me up. It showed two cavemen (not the metrosexual Geico cavemen, mind you, real, honest-to-goodness cartoon cavemen), and one is saying to the other, "Someday your name will be a household word, Blog!" Yes, Blog would be an excellent name for a caveman--look out, Alley Oop!

So, blogs are downright blogly. And that is assonant with ugly, it is true, and remember that when you are assonant, you make an ass on an ant, or so I would assume. But blogly also sounds like godly, and you can hear the young people say, that's blogly dude, surf's up, let's catch the web. By the way, the Russian word for god is bog, and the Hebrew word for god is el, which yields the formula, bog + el = blog, the blog in the machine. So, maybe we can say that blogs can be sacred (the Talmud as a blog, the Bible itself as a blog--the Holy Biblog), some might even say that God is keeping a blog, and it is hidden somewhere online, and whoever finds it gains true enlightenment, but I don't think that Jerry Falwell would find that funny if he were still with us. So, I better keep this clean, because cleanliness is next to blogliness.

But, back to the aesthetics of the blog, when I made my own choices for the Thinking Blogger Awards, one of them was Douglas Rushkoff's Weblog, and you may note that Doug uses a longer version of the term, the longest being web log. Doug is joined in holy weblog due, no doubt, to an aesthetic decision--restoring the web syllable blunts the bl sound that we associate with the ugly more than the good or the bad. J. R. R. Tolkien believed that the sounds of words holds intrinsic meaning of this kind, as I noted in my essay on Tolkien, language, and media ecology that I posted previously (see Tolkiens of My Affection).

But, let's run counter to this stereotype and declare:

Blog is beautiful!

There, that felt good!

But, now, the original point of this post was to think (this being a thinking blog) about the aesthetics of the blog, and I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan's first book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man which was a pioneering piece of popular culture analysis, and in many ways anticipated blogging itself in terms of its format--the book consists of numerous exhibits (ads, comics, and other popular culture items) followed by short analytical essays, arranged in no discernible linear order (out of print for decades, it was finally reprinted several years ago by Gingko Press in the aesthetically pleasing manner that is typical of their publications). In the first exhibit that appears in the book, McLuhan shows us the front page of the New York Times, and asks us to consider it, not as a source of information, not as a collection of separate articles, but in its entirety as an art form, a mosaic. He goes to point out the similarity between this form of popular art and cubism in modern art, as well as symbolist poetry, also noting the parallel to Einstein's theory of relativity (he would later trace all of these developments back to the original annihilation of time and space, the invention of the telegraph in 1844). In fact, the mosaic front page of the newspaper precedes those other developments in art and science, which raises the question, what forms of art, literature, and music might appear in the wake of the blog?

But, what of the blog itself. If McLuhan were with us today, I am certain that he would ask us to look at the blog itself as an art form, just as he asked us to do with the newspaper front page. So, taking McLuhan's media ecology approach myself, and understanding blogs to be an exercise in narcissism more often than not, I would say that blog as an art form is an expression of the ecology of the self, which includes the ecology of mind (to use Gregory Bateson's phrase).

The self-ecology of the blog may then be evaluated along the same lines as other types of ecologies, based on its sense of balance, interdependence, complexity, and evolution.

And that's it, sorry, there is no more that I have to say. Just, good night, and may blog guess us, each and every one...

Spider-Man 3 and the Limitations of Adaptations

So, I finally got to see the movie Spider-Man 3 (note the correct spelling, Spider-Man, not Spiderman). Before sharing my thoughts on the film, though, I guess I should confess that I've been reading comics since, well, since before I could actually read--in fact, my parents were quite relieved when I learned how to read well enough that they no longer had to read the comics to me.

Back then, reading comics was frowned upon (nowadays we're happy when kids read anything at all), and comic books themselves were not valued (I'm one of many of my generation whose mother threw out what would have been a fortune in comics back when I was a kid). But, I persisted, and insisted, on maintaining my relationship with these heroes of my youth, all in color for a dime as they used to say--actually, my earliest purchases were 12¢ a piece (although unscrupulous merchants started charging a non-existent 1¢ tax until the authorities put a stop to it).

And, I've always felt a special connection to Spider-Man in particular. He's a native New Yorker, from the Borough of Queens, in fact, he's from Forest Hills, and I grew up just over the border in the neighboring town of Kew Gardens--Forest Hills was my old stomping grounds (I took particular delight in seeing a brief glimpse of the Baskin & Robbins on the corner of Austin St. and Ascan Ave. in the first Spider-Man movie). I also connected to Spider-Man, and I think a lot of other boys in my situation did as well, because my father passed away when I was 9-years-old--Spider-Man, as part of his origin story, loses his father-figure, Uncle Ben (murdered by a criminal that he could have stopped from getting away at an earlier point, setting up a guilt-trip that motivated him to use his new powers to help others rather than trying to make money off of them, an alternative he seriously considered). Of course, being orphaned is a common motif in American popular culture, Batman lost his parents to crime, Superman lost his whole damn planet and then (in the original version) his elderly adopted parents passed away as well. The Lone Ranger was a symbolic orphan, as the last of the Texas Rangers, the only survivor of a trap in which all of his colleagues were murdered. Luke Skywalker starts out as an apparent orphan, loses his aunt and uncle, then surrogate father-figure Obiwan Kenobi, then surrogate-surrogate father-figure Yoda, and finally his real (dark) father, Darth Vader.

But what made Spider-Man a little different was that, while his parents were gone and he lost his uncle, he was still raised by his aunt, who was doting and overprotective. This, I could relate to, as could, I imagine, many others growing up in a single parent family. And there's also a sense in which Spider-Man was a very Jewish character, even though there never was the slightest overt suggestion that he was anything but a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the series. As has been acknowledged more and more of late, Jewish editors, writers and artists were intimately involved with the comic book industry from the beginning, so there is a sense in which the basic formulas and general conceptions of the superhero genre have a Jewish quality, although that aspect had been strongly masked by adherence to the stereotype of the WASP hero. But the mask was pulled down a bit for Spider-Man, who was Woody Allen in a costume, a nebish, insecure, full of hang-ups (there's a great old word from the sixties), neurotic even, but also full of wisecracks, always with the shtick, a regular comedian, at least when he was in costume. So, a Jewish personality merged with a WASP persona, easy to relate to for someone like me, the son of immigrants.

Oh, and Marvel Comics had Spider-Man graduating college the same year that I completed my undergraduate degree, 1978. Of course, time works very differently in the comics, so this was a brief moment that we were in sync, but college graduation is an important rite of passage, and it was great having Spider-Man share it with me.

Now, I don't want to give any false impressions here. I have not read every Spider-Man comic ever published, not by a long shot. But I have followed his stories off and on since the late sixties, and I'm pretty familiar with it all. So, in once sense, I'm in a good position to evaluate the film, but in another sense, I know too much to ever be entirely satisfied with an adaptation.

But I know enough about adaptations to know that you just cannot expect them to be faithful translations of the original (as if faithful translation is ever a possibility), and it's best to look at the original as raw material out of which something new is fashioned. Otherwise, you can't help but be disappointed when there's an adaptation of something you like, although by the same token you can find yourself pleasantly surprised by the adaptation of something you didn't care for.

Some forms or media make for an easier adaptation into a feature film (and therefore seem to be more faithful to the original) than others. The theater is the closest form to the movie, so plays are the easiest to rework into film form, which is not to discount the fact that it takes some effort. Short stories seem to provide just the right amount of material for a standard length film (somewhere between 90 minutes and 3 hours), and adaptations of novels are common enough, but the longer they are, the harder it is to reduce them down to the level of the motion picture. There have been increasingly more adaptations of television programs lately, capitalizing on the fact that there is no need to start from scratch in generating awareness among the potential audience, and in fact there may be a ready-made fan base, and certainly an easy appeal to nostalgia. Filmmakers adapting a television series have the advantage of working with material that has already have been thought out visually. But it's not so easy to distill a cinematic narrative out of numerous episodes produced over several years of a series, and the majority of these movies have been at best mediocre.

Comic books have many of the same advantages for adaptation, including consumer awareness, existing fan-base, and nostalgia-appeal, and they also have been thought out visually to an extent--filmmakers often make storyboards prior to actually shooting the film, and storyboards are comics by another name, and for another purpose. At the same time, comics art has borrowed heavily from film over the past century, mimicking the various shots and scenes, and transitions used by filmmakers, so they already are a storyboard of sorts, albeit one that will almost certainly be significantly changed.

Of course, one of the biggest problems in bringing comic book characters to life on the screen has been the problem of technical limitations. In the low resolution, cool medium (as McLuhan puts it) of comics, it is possible to portray fantasy in ways that the photographic medium of film just cannot. allowing the imagination to fill in the details. But as Computer Generated Images took over from more traditional means of generating special effects (and it has been pointed out that all of film is a special effect, after all), fantasy could become, not a reality, but realistic. The first Spider-Man movie demonstrated this to a degree unprecedented, and Spider-Man 3 moves the process further along with its stunning depictions of aerial combat, 3-dimensional not in the special glasses sense, but in the incredible movement through the x, y, and z-axis in several of the fight sequences. This type of movement is unique to Spider-Man, as he does not soar up in the sky, where a sense of depth and distance is lost, but instead moves through the city streets and roof tops, swings between buildings, crawls up and down the sides of skyscrapers, jumps and falls, etc. CGI is also very well suited to depicting Spider-Man's longtime foe, the Sandman, as it is second nature for digital media to break images down into pixels much like the grains of sand that join together to form the Sandman's body or come apart as he moves and morphs. It is, relatively speaking, an easy task, but still a pleasure to see it done well.

The alien creature that became Spider-Man's black suit (which was missing the white design elements that were used in the comic, but then again the new costume was not used on an extended basis as it was in the comic) looked OK, as did the suit itself. The character of Venom, the suit transferred from Spider-Man to Eddie Brock, looked all right as well, not too over the top thankfully--despite his popularity, Venom is not one of my favorites from the Spider-Man comics, and I was satisfied that his screen time was very limited, although I imagine he will probably be back in a sequel, especially since it seems that the Green Goblin won't be.

One difference between comics and film that became quite apparent for me was the relationship between heroic persona and secret identity. In comics, the secret identity is secondary, and the emphasis is on the hero in costume. In film adaptations, this relationship is reversed, as was painfully apparent in Ang Lee's disappointing adaptation of the Hulk comic book character. There are a number of reasons for this, one being simply the desire to appeal to a mass audience, to give the audience a point of identification, and to balance the fantasy with more realism (which requires the human identity to take time away from the superhuman). So, what we get in all of the Spider-Man movies is the story of Peter Parker, a regular, nerdy guy who gains superpowers, and sometimes becomes Spider-Man, rather than the story of Spider-Man, a superhero whose secret identity is Peter Parker. This is no small difference.

Along the same lines, in comics the origin story is typically uninteresting, the idea being to get past it quickly in order to get into the action, or to begin in medias res (into the middle of things) and fill in the origin later (sometimes its a combination of the two, often the origin story is modified or fleshed out later, after the character is sufficiently established and explored). In movies, the origin story is often emphasized, as it shifts the focus to Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, et al, that is, to the regular person behind the mask.

Visually, given the lack of detail possible in the low resolution medium, it is difficult to communicate very much via facial expression, posture and proxemics are used instead, and the hero's costume and mask are the central icons of the narrative. In film, there is much greater reliance on the face as a medium of communication, and on its aesthetic value, movie actors typically being good-looking and expressive, not to mention familiar--why pay a fortune for a movie star only to have his face hidden behind a mask all the time? So, there is a constant unmasking that seems strange from a comics-based point of view. For example, just before Spider-Man makes his big entrance to the celebration in his honor, we see him watching from up on a skyscraper, in costume but sans mask, seemingly confident in his solitude despite the fact that he is exposed in public--cameras do have telephoto lenses (as he should well know as a photographer himself), people can look out of the windows of other buildings, helicopters and some planes do fly by and over Manhattan, etc. And, towards the end, when the Green Goblin comes to the rescue, Harry Osborn removes his mask for no apparent reason other than to say hello. Further, in fight scenes, the mask frequently gets ripped up, exposing more and more of that shayna punim (pretty face) for the audience (and presumably by-standers) to see.

This is a minor problem, admittedly, but it reflects the difficulty of going from relatively simple drawings to real actors. Casting is always an issue as well, Michael Keaton as Batman being the decision that raised the most eyebrows, although it turned out satisfactory for the most part. Tobey Maguire seemed like a decent choice to play Spidey at first, but I must confess that I am getting tired of him, and in retrospect he lacks the angst that was so central to the comics character--in contrast, Tom Welling's pre-Superman teenage Clark Kent on Smallville introduced an element of angst that had never been associated with the character, to great effect (although the series has become a little tired since high school graduation). He's too white-bread, too gentle, too happy and optimistic! Spider-Man is the type of character who knows that even when things are going well, maybe especially when things are going well, something will always goes wrong--he needs that touch of cynicism.

Kirsten Dunst makes for a lovely Mary Jane Watson, but she's too gentle as well, not lively enough. Mary Jane requires an outgoing, powerful personality, someone who takes over a room, and in the context of New York, more of an assertive ethnic personality, whether it's Jewish, Italian, or Irish. Dunst would probably have been better as Gwen Stacy, but that's another story. Another casting decision that leaves me cold is James Cromwell as Capt. Stacy. Cromwell is well-suited to playing villains such as Jack Bauer's father on 24, or otherwise abrasive and unsympathetic characters (Six Feet Under comes to mind), but in the comics Capt. Stacy was a father-figure for Spider-Man (of course, he then was killed), and even if the filmmakers have no plans to use him to that extent in the movie, they should still respect the character (and after 24, Cromwell is just too over-exposed to work as a character in this context). Of course, compared to the Fantastic Four film, Spider-Man 3 casting is brilliant, and I will say that the cameos by Stan Lee and Bruce Campbell were great fun.

But adapting comics characters is not the big challenge for filmmakers, it's adapting the narrative. Of course, when you have a self-contained graphic novel, such as 300, it's not a problem. But an ongoing comic book series is episodic, like a television series, and individual episodes are not enough to serve as a basis of the movie, while the series as a whole is too much to boil down into a feature film. Even when you can pull out a storyline, the general thrust of the comic book series is to keep things open, keep the reader coming back, create a never-ending story.

The motion picture, on the other hand, favors closure, a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, albeit not so closed as to preclude a sequel. The comic book narrative works on a cumulative basis, villains are defeated, go away as new villains surface, and return again in cyclic fashion, returning from defeat and apparent death time and time again. Story lines are repeated as well, each time gaining new resonance, e.g., hero gives up and abandons heroic identity, hero goes bad (through some outside agency), hero must set aside love interest to save others, hero's loved one is in danger, etc.

The open episodic narrative of the comic book series is therefore more like real life in certain ways than the closed narrative of the film or novel, where the impetus is to tie up loose ends. For example, there is no problem with the fact that the criminal who murdered Uncle Ben in the comic book is a nameless, insignificant thief. But in Spider-Man 3, they shift the blame to Flint Marko, the criminal who becomes the Sandman, to tie the origin story into the current narrative and tie up those darn loose ends--the same thing occurs in the first Batman movie, where the murderer is no longer an everyday, run-of-the-mill thug, but instead the man who becomes the Joker. This gives the story more mythic significance, but loses the connection to ordinary crime, replaced by a sense of interdependence between hero and villain that reduces the basic heroism of the hero.

Director/writer Sam Raimi also tries to tie it all together with a theme of redemption and forgiveness, the black costume yielding to shades of gray, but this dissolves the distinction between Spider-Man as someone who struggles to do the right thing and is fundamentally good and decent (his "bad" behavior being caused by an outside agency, the alien symbiote/black uniform), as opposed to Flint Marko who makes a conscious decision that the end justifies the means in stealing to pay for his sick daughter's treatment (bearing the guilt for the accidental manslaughter of Uncle Ben), and Harry Osborn/the new Green Goblin, who is motivated by hate, jealousy, and revenge, perhaps a bit misguided and maybe a little mad as well, but still basically responsible for his actions, notwithstanding his decision to help Spider-Man in the end and sacrifice his life in the fight to save Mary Jane. Moral equivalence? Not the stuff that heroes are made from.

Another problem with the adaptation involves the appearance of Gwen Stacy, a major character in the comic book narrative. Gwen was Peter Parker's first, great love, a love made all the more difficult by the fact that she blamed Spider-Man (wrongfully) for the death of her father, Captain Stacy (the afore-mentioned father-figure, who approved of Peter's relationship with his daughter, and actually had figured out his secret identity before he died)--that motif of having a loved one hate his costumed identity was first used with Peter's Aunt May who, in the film, instead seems to like Spider-Man. That's another mistaken turn towards the optimistic, as there is much more angst involved in having his aunt disapprove (unknowingly) of her nephew's activities, and it is much truer to teenage experience of identity formation and rebellion.

Anyway, Peter loves Gwen more than anything, the original Green Goblin discovers Peter's identity, and tries to kill Gwen, and in a moment of supreme tragedy, Spider-Man snags her with a web line, thinking he's saved her, but it turns out that there was too much force applied, her neck is broken, and she's dead. And so he lives with this tragedy, which haunts him for the rest of his life, as his relationship with Mary Jane slowly develops into a mature love leading to marriage.

This is the kind of story that develops over an extended period of time. Adapting it for film (and even reworking the Spider-Man story in streamlined from for the Marvel Ultimate series or for animation), the tendency is to cut out Gwen Stacy altogether, and rewrite it so that he loves only Mary Jane, and always loved her (or maybe inserting Gwen as a minor character). What we lose is the complexity, depth, and tragic sensibility of the comic book series. I find this unfortunate, as a long-time reader, but understandable given the limitations of adaptation. But, then, why introduce Gwen Stacy, and Captain Stacy, in the first place, and make Gwen the subject of superficial flirtation and jealousy? Maybe a hedge in case Dunst doesn't want to reprise her role for Spider-Man 4? But it's already been established that Mary Jane is Peter's one true love, so there really is no way to do the Gwen Stacy story any justice. Better to leave her out altogether, I would say.

The bottom line is that, in this genre, the third installment is usually a let-down, and this is no exception. It does seem like there was an attempt to recreate the complexity of the comic book series with interlaced plot lines, including an extension of the Green Goblin/Harry Osborn story, revisiting the origin story/murder of Uncle Ben now linked to the appearance of the villain Sandman, the introduction of the alien symbiote in the form of a new costume storyline giving rise to a "bad" Spider-Man through outside influence, the origin of the villain Venom following Spider-Man's rejection of the symbiote, along with plots about Spider-Man being a celebrity (another unnecessary departure from the comics story where he is more typically rejected by the mainstream media and public), Mary Jane failing as an actress, and Peter's aborted attempt to propose to Mary Jane. The problem is that this is all too much, you can't make a good movie by trying to recreate the complexity of an entire series, a feature film needs a closed narrative with a beginning, middle, and end (in this, Spiderman 2 worked exceptionally well). It would have been sufficient to just concentrate on the Sandman, or Spider-Man wearing the symbiote suit, or Venom for that matter.

Also, there were too many silly crowd scenes, the kind that were often used in the Superman movies. Seeing a crowd of people gather to watch a battle up above them, and stand there while debris rains down on them, makes me feel uncomfortable, as a New Yorker who remembers 9/11.

Despite being weaker than its two predecessors, and manifesting more of the problems associated with the process of adaptation, Spider-Man 3 was still good fun, and I'm sure the inevitable Spider-Man 4 will be as well. But it will never take the place of the comics.

Thinking Blogger Award Goes Here ↓

So, Paul Levinson, who got me started on this blogging thing of ours in the first place, seems pleased with my efforts, and consequently has bestowed upon me the coveted Thinking Blogger Award.

High honors indeed for this humble blog. He made the announcement over at Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress blog, in a post entitled The Thinking Blogger Award and I note with some amusement that he chose to list this blog as Time Passing, whereas others have referred to it as Blog Time Passing, and as Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing. In case you were wondering, I realized that there was some ambiguity about how to punctuate the title of this blog when I came up with it (which was on the fly), and I liked that ambiguity as a matter of fact, so I'm not saying that Paul is wrong or anything, I'm just noting that this is the first time that someone has referred to my blog as just Time Passing. Hey, you can call me anything, just don't call me late to din--errr, ahhh...

But I digress. The beauty of this Award is that it is self-replicating, being deliberately designed as a meme, as explained in the original post on The Thinking Blog, where this Award originally originated in the before-time, the long, long ago (namely, February 11, 2007)--here's a Wikipedia entry on blog Memetags which provides further explanation of how this memetic approach works. Anyway, this award may be an exercise in memery or memecraft, but the intent is to choose blogs that are genuinely interesting and thought-provoking.

So, having been tagged (which makes this the IT-Blog, I suppose) means that this is one of 5 blogs chosen by Paul (A Model Media Ecologist by Bob Blechman, a blog I've made reference to on a number of posts, was also chosen--congratulations, Bob!), and you can go to Paul's post to see the other three. Paul's blog was one of 5 chosen by someone else as a blog that made that other person think, and to accept the award he had to write a post with links to 5 blogs that make him think.

So, to accept this award from Paul, I have to write a post with links to 5 blogs that make me think. That's the first of the 3 participation rules. Actually, there's nothing in the rules that would keep me from naming blogs that already have been named by others, such as Paul's and Bob's. But I think that would go against the spirit of the award.

So, what can I say. The competition was fierce, but here are my Final Five:

5 Blogs That Make Me Think

Digital Ethnography ... a blog made by Michael Wesch and his colleagues and students, "a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography" ... Most recent post (May 15, 2007): "Great video about our project by The Chronicle"

Machina Memorialis “the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating ‘things’ stored in a random-access memory scheme” ... a blog kept by John Walter while completing his PhD in the Department of English at Saint Louis University where he also works as the processing archivist of Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection... Most recent post (May 14, 2007): "CW 2007: Session 8.2: Orality and Literacy 2.0"

..towards the knowledge society.. where the real and the virtual converge ... a blog written by Charlene Croft... Most recent post (May 11, 2007): "A new survey... On social networking sites..."

Douglas Rushkoff's Weblog ... a blog courtesy of Doug Rushkoff, natch. Most recent post (April 20, 2007): "New Interview"

Corey Anton's Blog ... written, directed, and produced by Corey Anton. Most recent post (May 10, 2007): "MUST READ: Heady Aphorisms"

*Please note that the opinions expressed in these blogs are not necessarily the opinions of the management of this blog.

Now, please join me in congratulating these 5 fine blogists, Mike, John, Charlene, Doug, and Corey. Take a bow, people!

Now, being listed on my list is honor enough, I know, but to actually claim the award and participate in this memetag (sounds German, doesn't it: Ve getz? Das es verbotten! Gutt memetag! Schweinhunt!) you have to follow the following instructions (which I take from that original post):

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog). [You can display the award in a post and also on the layout of your blog.]

That was that! Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!

It's all very self-reflexive, but after all, that's Alfred Korzybski's Third Non-Aristotelian Principle of Thought, speaking general semantically. But it's also very communal--those who would be honored must give honor in return.


And it's a way for me to say, "I like you, I really really like you."

A Man in Time: James W. Carey

It is almost a year ago that James W. Carey passed away, and the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication will be publishing a special tribute to this great scholar and media ecologist in their next issue. Among the contributions that will be included will be a short essay that I wrote for a memorial session held at the National Communication Association's annual meeting last November. It was just about a month ago that I reviewed the proofs for my piece, and signed the contract, so it seems that the timing is as appropriate as the theme of time, and according to the contract I can make this article available online with the following acknowledgment:

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 177-180, © 2007 National Communication Association; Critical Studies in Media Communication is available online at http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/.


Understanding A Man in Time:
James W. Carey and the Media Ecology Intellectual Tradition

Lance Strate

I can speak of James W. Carey as a role model, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend, but terms such as these are never sufficient to describe a life, or even that small slice of a life that we call a relationship. What I have to say about James Carey is necessarily incomplete and inadequate, but nonetheless necessary. He was, after all, first and foremost an extraordinary human being, a great mind balanced by an equally great heart. Carey excelled at connections, by which I mean that he connected to others as human beings, in both his personal and professional interactions. And he also excelled at intellectual connections, at uncovering the interrelationships among ideas, perspectives, and schools of thought.1 He was an ecological thinker and, among other things, a scholar in the intellectual tradition known as media ecology.2 And like all great media ecologists, Jim Carey understood time. He had a sense of the deep time of history, and also a profound understanding of his own time. He was aware of time's arrow, its wounds and tragedies, and he also understood time's cycles, its healing gifts and its divine and profane comedies.

Like Harold Innis (1951, 1972, 2004), Carey recognized the space bias of modern civilization, which was intensified by technologies such as the telegraph, and he echoed Innis's plea on behalf of time. Like Lewis Mumford (1934), Carey realized that we have moved from keeping time to serving time, that a genuine sense of time is missing from our collective consciousness. Carey understood that time was the original invisible environment, that we live in time, and that, as we have sped things up, we have come to think of time in threatening terms, time as fleeting, and flying, and running out on us—time as an elusive enemy, time as the terrorist that we fear the most. Jim's response was: Be patient! Slow down! Don't be in such a rush! Take your time, give yourself the time you need, in scholarship, in administration, in life. This runs counter to the contemporary bias of our culture, and consequently Jim's approach was not always understood, or appreciated, or rewarded. But it was true wisdom, nonetheless.

Media Ecology

Carey's criticism of the transmission view of communication is a common theme in the field of media ecology, where we prefer to understand media, technology, and culture as environments. Marshall McLuhan (1995), for example, said that he was concerned with media not in terms of transportation, but transformation; Tony Schwartz (1974) offered as an alternative the sonic metaphor of resonance; and Walter Ong (1982) rejected the pipeline perspective in favor of human communication. Of course, Carey was influenced by Raymond Williams, who identified the double meaning of space and time in communication, as reflected in such related terms as commute and commune (see Williams, 1983). But more importantly, Carey followed Innis (1951), who argued that communication takes place over time as well as space, through commemoration and conservation as much as through delivery and dissemination.3 Carey's often-cited ritual view is an understanding that communication take place across time, through time, and in time. Rituals are, after all, all about repetition and cycles, about perseverance and preservation, about memory and tradition. For Carey, the ritual view is a cultural approach, and cultures are formed through time, cultures are grown in time. Over time, a population binds itself together as a group, and over time, a group maintains its identity. In other words, community comes from continuity. This I learned from James Carey.

Within the field of media ecology, I would group Carey together with Walter Ong and Neil Postman as part of a generation of paradigm builders. An earlier generation consisting of scholars such as Lewis Mumford, Benjamin Whorf, Dorothy Lee, Susanne Langer, Eric Havelock, Jacques Ellul, and of course Harold Innis, were largely concerned with explorations. McLuhan was at his best as an explorer, although he also dabbled in paradigm-building. But it was Ong, Postman, and Carey who excelled at synthesis—theoretical, curricular, and practical—and in doing so made it possible to establish media ecology as a coherent field of study.


Taking on McLuhan

Of the three, Carey is known as the sharpest critic of McLuhan, but neither Ong nor Postman accepted McLuhan at face value. Ong generally avoided discussing McLuhan's work, rather than engage in direct criticism of his mentor. Postman cited, quoted, and credited McLuhan, but also chided him for his lack of clarity, and ultimately would say that McLuhan asked the right questions, implying that his answers were less than reliable. But it was Carey who took on McLuhan directly at the height of the media guru's popularity, arguing that Harold Innis was the superior scholar (see Carey, 1967). The simplified version of Carey's argument, "McLuhan bad, Innis good," became an oft-repeated mantra and meme in communication studies, and, unfortunately, an easy way to dismiss McLuhan's work altogether. But Carey was not dismissive of McLuhan. He grappled with him, sought to understand him and the larger intellectual tradition that he had sprung from, which included Innis and Mumford. Carey's criticism of McLuhan was criticism from within media ecology, criticism that ultimately would advance the field, not undermine it. Moreover, Carey softened his stance on McLuhan over the years, especially over the past decade or so, although much of that work has not been published.4

Carey's reading of Innis served as an important corrective to McLuhan's, and stands as the single most influential interpretation of his work. The grand historical theories that Innis devised excited McLuhan (1962, 1964), but what Carey emphasized was the careful accumulation of detail that make up Innis's scholarship, and the identification of a multitude of interconnections in his research. Carey is not the only media ecology scholar to shy away from theorizing— scholars such as Lewis Mumford (1934), Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), and Denise Schmandt-Besserat (1992) also come to mind, but Carey was unusual in his distrust of abstraction and his resistance to generalization. Instead, Carey's media ecology was an ecology of the particular. He also insisted on viewing scholars as the product of a particular time, and place. This meant that Carey excelled at intellectual history, and consequently helped to identify some of the important roots of the media ecology intellectual tradition in the Chicago School, and in the work of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. In other words, he not only contributed to our field, he played an important role in defining our field, and helping us to understand who we are, where we come from, and therefore where we might go from here. In all things, James W. Carey was a man in time, and to our great good fortune, a man of our time.

Notes

1 Carey's remarkable ability to recognize intellectual connections is readily apparent in the two major collections of his work, Communication as Culture (1989) and James Carey: A Critical Reader (1997).

2 I discuss the relationship of Carey's work and American cultural studies to the field of media ecology in greater depth in Echoes and Reflections (Strate, 2006a), and see also Frederick Wasser's (2006) chapter along with Casey Man Kong Lum's Introduction in Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media Ecology Intellectual Tradition (Lum, 2006), and the special issue of Explorations in Media Ecology devoted to James Carey (Strate, 2006b) which includes the text of his Keynote Address to the 4th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (Carey, 2006).

3 Paul Heyer's (2003) recent study of Harold Innis notes the centrality of Carey's views to subsequent scholarship relating to Harold Innis. It is also worth noting, in this context, Carey's (2004) introduction to the new edition of Changing Concepts of Time (Innis, 2004).

4 Paul Grosswiler (2006) discusses this largely undocumented shift in Carey's thinking, which was readily apparent in his 1998 Keynote Address, "Where Do We Go With Marshall McLuhan?" given at the 56th Annual Convention of the New York State Communication Association at Kutsher's Country Club in Monticello, NY, in which Carey discussed the book about Innis and McLuhan that he had been working on (which he was not able to complete before he passed away).

References

Carey, J. W. (1967). Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Antioch Review, 27(1), pp. 5-39.

Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Carey, J. W. (1997). James Carey: A critical reader (E. S. Munson & C. A. Warren, Eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Carey, J. W. (1998). "Where do we go with Marshall McLuhan?" Keynote Address given at the 56th Annual Convention of the New York State Communication Association, October 9-11, 1998, Monticello, NY.

Carey, J. W. (2004). Introduction to the Rowman & Littlefield edition. In H. A. Innis, Changing concepts of time (rev. ed., pp.vii-xx). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Carey, J. W. (2006). Globalization, democracy and open communication: Can we have all three? Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey], pp. 103-114.

Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe (2 vols.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grosswiler, P. (2006). The transformation of Carey on McLuhan: Admiration, rejection, and redemption. Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey], pp. 137-148.

Heyer, P. (2003). Harold Innis. Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield.

Innis, H. A. (1951). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Innis, H. A. (1972). Empire and communications (rev. ed., M. Q. Innis, Ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Innis, H. A. (2004). Changing concepts of time (rev. ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lum, C. M. K. (Ed.). (2006). Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McLuhan, M. (1995). Essential McLuhan (E. McLuhan, & F. Zingrone, eds.). New York: Basic Books.

Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992). Before writing : From counting to cuneiform (2 vols.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Schwartz, T. (1974). The responsive chord. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books.

Strate, L. (2006a). Echoes and reflections: On media ecology as a field of study. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Strate, L. (Ed.). (2006b). Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey].

Wasser, F. (2006). James Carey: The search for cultural balance. In C. M. K. Lum (Ed.), Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition (pp. 255-274. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (rev. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

The Passion of Christopher (Sopranos Spoiler)

If you haven't seen last night's episode of The Sopranos, "Kennedy and Heidi" (May 13, 2007), and haven't heard about it, and don't want to spoil the surprise, then stop reading now, dear reader.

Most viewers, I believe, enjoy The Sopranos for its realism, for its ability to convey a sense that this is what life in the mob must really be like, and for its ability to get us to relate to the bits and pieces of everyday life they show as being true to our own life experience, apart from the criminal activity, of course. We view the program mostly through a mimetic framework, not a mythic one. Even when an occasional episode moves into the world of dreams and archetypes, we view them through the larger psychoanalytic frame set up by the therapy subplots, and again relate to the fantastic, bizarre, or unusual imagery as the work of an overactive unconscious overdosing on repression, rationalization, narcissism, and projection.

But there is a touch of the mythic floating around the fringes of the series, more easily spotted in the early episodes that featured Tony's mother. Livia Soprano embodied the great mother archetype in its negative sense, the monstrous feminine force that devours its mate and its offspring. There was a marvelous energy that she brought to the series, and the death of Nancy Marchand, the actress who portrayed Livia, while not unexpected, removed an entire dimension from the program.

In one sense, you might say that the show is about the banality of the evil and the illegal (which almost everyone takes part in to a greater or lesser extent). Whatever the final fate of Tony Soprano may be, I don't see him going out in a blaze of glory, like Jimmy Cagney in the 1949 film White Heat, shouting in defiance: Made it, Ma! Top of the world! Or like Tony Montana in the 1983 remake of Scarface. The end of his world won't be mythic on that grand scale, he won't go out with a bang, but with a whimper. Which is how Christoper's world came to an end.

You might say it was pathetic, ironic, the final indignity, for Christopher to be critically injured in an automobile accident, and after admitting he was using cocaine, suffocated by Tony. But this was simply the last in a series of painful episodes for the character, who has suffered more abuse, physical and emotional, than any other member of Tony's crew. His was a slow march towards death, as he was repeatedly wounded, ridiculed, and subject to temptations over six seasons. He was a scapegoat, made to carry the sins of his criminal society, ritually sacrificed to achieve a form of purification for them.

Christopher was the "son" of the family, as Tony often admitted, Tony himself being the godfather figure, or god-the-father. So he sends Christopher to the slaughter, and in the aftermath is himself redeemed and rejuvenated. As for the Holy Spirit, that's this thing of ours, the mob itself as the church of crime, with its creed of omerta, more and more often violated, but still acknowledged and respected. Like the Roman Catholic Church, their organization is in decline, but still powerful, still magnetic. As for Mother Mary, we have Carmela, who is Christopher's blood relation and a mother figure in general within the program, not a virgin but ignorant if not innocent of the specific criminal activity that Tony, Christopher, and the rest are involved in.

This is not to imply that Christopher is at the center of the show, he's not, and we still have a few more episodes to go. But Christopher's fate may be a sign of what's coming down the pike for Tony, given that the two are so closely identified with one another. Christopher's passion either presages Tony's, or like a scapegoat he has taken Tony's place on the sacrificial alter. After all, it was Tony who was the archetypal son when the series started, with Livia as the great and terrible Virgin Mother, and Uncle Junior as the surrogate father. If this seems farfetched, consider the song that David Chase chose for the opening credits, and therefore as the theme song of the series, "Woke up This Morning [Chosen One Mix]," a song that mixes violence with messianic imagery. Tony was the Chosen One, and now that Christopher is an unmade man, Tony is the Chosen One again.

Christopher's world ends with a whimper, but also reflects the reality of the No(rth Jersey) Sense of Place. New Jersey's car culture naturally results in an extraordinarily high fatality rate from automobile accidents. Consider the line from Bruce Springsteen's anthem, "Born to Run":

At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines

It's a romantic vision, nonetheless:

I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight
In an everlasting kiss

And a vision of heroic tragedy:

The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

Christopher, the broken hero, the scapegoat hero.

And there's more Jerseyana to report. In an article in today's North Jersey Record entitled How a Belleville Funeral Home Became a Fixture on the 'Sopranos' staff writer Virginia Rohan reports:

One July day in 2000, James J. Cozzarelli Jr. got an out-of-the-blue call from an assistant location manager for "The Sopranos," who'd happened to drive by Irvine-Cozzarelli Memorial Home on a crucial scouting mission -- to find the right North Jersey spot for matriarch Livia Soprano's wake.

Jason Minter told Cozzarelli how much he liked the classic Georgian-style facade of his Belleville funeral home -- which convinced the funeral director that this was not a prank call -- and asked if he could look inside. He did and he liked the "expensive old world look," Cozzarelli recalls.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

"I became the established Soprano funeral home," says Cozzarelli, whose business' name, as well as his own, is used in the show.

Ever since that second episode of the third season, when Livia suddenly died, after actress Nancy Marchand succumbed to cancer, Cozzarelli's has been the final resting place for the Soprano family -- at least the members in good standing who are not unceremoniously buried at sea, in landfills or other dump sites.

And the colorful Cozzarelli has become a celebrity. Although an elder actor (Ralph Lucarelli) played him for the first few episodes, the real man has since appeared as the show's funeral director.

Here too, as with other locations in New Jersey, a kind of aura is created, and an element of chic established:

People from around the country write to ask for autographed business cards. His place is a regular stop on the popular Sopranos location bus tour, and Cozzarelli often finds folks posing outside under the canopy by the front door.

"We've had people call here wanting to rent the place for baby showers, bridal showers, receptions," Cozzarelli says. "And people are actually calling now and bidding on the place. To buy it."

What do they want to do with it?

"It's run the gamut from these boutique six-star hotels, which are a new trend now, to a private business-person's club, banks, all kinds of stuff. Someone even wanted to do a gambling casino, and I started laughing. I said, 'That's illegal in Belleville.' "

His magic number is $3.2 million. "When you hit that, you can have everything, and I walk away -- all the furniture, the sets, everything," Cozzarelli. says. And then there's the inevitable question he gets during real consultations with the bereaved -- who ask if this is "the funeral home."

"I'll say yes, and they'll say, 'Which room was Mrs. Soprano in?' and I'll say, well, the Georgian reception chapel.' ... 'Would you put my mother in there also?'

The article goes on to describe the locations and situations:

All but one of Cozzarelli's "Sopranos" funerals were held in the Georgian reception chapel. This is where Uncle Junior broke down sobbing, and Frankie Valli huddled with Tony Soprano and Paulie Walnuts talking business. (The viewing room across the hall, done in Roman-Imperial style, was used as the room where Tony and his sisters picked out a coffin for their mother and even once, as a "big mob conference" room.)

Cozzarelli has lost count of how many characters have been laid out there -- for awhile, they were "knocking them off like flies," he says -- but distinctly remembers the wake of Jackie Aprile Jr., played by Jason Cerbone.

"Poor thing. He said, 'Please, Mr. Cozzarelli,' I don't want to get in [the casket]. I said, now, I don't blame you, but you realize by contract that you have to. ...so, with great reluctance, and sweat pouring off him, he got into the casket."

In the lobby, he points out the Renaissance-style painting of one woman leaning over another's shoulder with finger extended, as if to say, " 'You better watch out,' " Cozzarelli notes. "Sopranos" directors have taken care to show it in the background, he said.

And the piece concludes with:

The show even prints up prayer cards, Mass cards, and guest books, and Cozzarelli, who worked at Manhattan's famed Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel before opening his own business, gets a credit as technical adviser, and another for being "designer of the funeral home set."

When Cozzarelli bought the brick building on Belleville's Washington Avenue in 1972, it housed what he calls a "forgotten funeral home." He totally restored all the rooms -- including the upstairs, where Cozzarelli lives. One artisan came from Italy and spent almost 10 years working on the woodwork.

"He actually carried the title of a don. The Mafia has bastardized the term but 'don; actually means someone that's achieved perfection in their field," says Cozzarelli, who also put two restoration artists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his payroll for many years.

Cozzarelli, who now has his own design business, calls his upstairs home the "secret rooms." Though viewers never got to see them, because "Sopranos" creator David Chase was afraid of damaging the priceless, palatial-style finishes and furnishings (including several optically pure crystal chandeliers that are so sensitive one has to don surgical gloves to touch them), Chase and his cast loved to hang out up there during breaks.

"Except Paulie," Cozzarelli says of actor Tony Sirico. "He never came up. Deathly afraid."

Death is a major theme of The Sopranos, it was Livia's preoccupation, and Tony seems to have inherited it as well. Fear of death, denial of death, we now must come to terms with the death of a favorite character as a prelude to the death of the series itself. Of course, in the Roman Catholic religion embraced by the two Soprano families, death is not the end.

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.