V: Lizard Aliens as a Social Reminder

Screening Room
May 13, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 15 6 min read

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coverThe revamped V (for those who don’t tune in: V stands for Visitors) on ABC has me completely hooked. Crazy but true, I DVR Giada De Laurentiis cooking shows in the same click as human-munching reptile aliens. And I’ve got my husband addicted too. He’s been away in Salt Lake City since the show’s March return. During the commercial breaks, we dial each other like high school kids.

Me: “The kid just got lizard licked!”

Hubs: “Whatever, that’s a hot alien. I’d let her lick me.”

Me: “That’s her candy coating. Underneath she’s got snake eyes.”

Hubs: “Still, she’s hot.”

Me: “You’re despicable. Don’t you have any human pride?”

These are the not-so-adult conversations between us.

I grew up in a sci-fi loving home courtesy of my dad who’s a product of the Final Frontier generation—Shatner and Nimoy and the Lost in Space Robot. A child of the 80s, I was suckled on Star Wars and Quantum Leap. However, as I grew into adulthood, I became something of a sci-fi snob, rolling my eyes and shaking my head at laser beams and the Galactica crew heroics. I acquiesced to my dad’s 24/7 Sci-Fi Channel whenever I visited home, but beyond that my interest in extraterrestrials and spaceships was nonexistent. Until now. Like I said, I’m completely bewitched. Some of this could be blamed on my aforementioned childhood.

coverThe original V miniseries aired in 1983. I watched it, snuggled beside my dad who attempted to cover my eyes during the “bad parts.” To this day, my mom denies this memory—because she would never, never have allowed such a thing. And maybe so, but obviously she wasn’t invited to the daddy-daughter sci-fi party. I distinctly remember burying my face in my dad’s arm when Diana (the V leader) expanded her jaw and swallowed a guinea pig whole. My dad yelled, “Dadburnit, she’s a snake!” (Note: This is probably the basis of my fear of snakes, lizards, frogs and turtles.) It was terrifying! Yet even then, I was completely captivated.

coverThere was something about the miniseries that transcended the average “Beam me up, Scotty.” Despite the lizard thing, it was intellectual and deeply affecting. So it comes as no surprise it was inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. A novel chronicling fascism in the United States. According to television lore, the director-producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation of the book entitled Storm Warnings in 1982. NBC executives rejected it. Too heavy for average American viewers who were lining up at the box office for films like Tron and E.T. So they dumbed it down: made the American fascists into man-eating reptilian humanoids, and the show premiered to rave reviews on May 3, 1983.

Johnson later explained that the series was intended to be a political thriller and a Nazi allegory. From the Swastika-like emblems on the Visitor’s uniforms and the “Friends of the Visitors” youth movement to the mass broadcasting of messages mimicking Nazi radio propaganda. Humans in the show were forced to choose sides: collaborate with the occupying forces or join underground resistance movements, like the Fifth Column. While the brunt of Nazi persecution was targeted at Jews, the Visitors attacked anyone opposed to their dogma. Their infiltration of human society begins as a subterfuge but eventually transitions to a full-fledged military coup d’etat. The original series went so far as to incorporate a Holocaust survivor, the grandfather of Daniel Bernstein, who duly noted history’s repetition.

covercoverV ran roughly three hours and twenty minutes and was so successful in the ratings that the 1984 sequel V: The Final Battle was produced, supposedly to conclude the saga. But viewers couldn’t let go and the network wouldn’t pass up capitalizing on its popularity. V: The Series ran from 1984 to 1985 without Johnson as director. He left during The Final Battle after a disagreement with NBC executives on how the story should progress.

2.
Twenty-seven years later, the story is as fresh as it was in 1983. As fresh as it was in 1935.

Let’s face it—fascism still scares the hell out of us. The idea of social interventionism to promote the state’s interests is terrifying. Social indoctrination by way of state-regulated education and media propaganda makes our skin crawl. Eugenics for the purpose of social hygiene is monstrous. Discrimination based on culture, gender and sexuality is a nasty battle we fight daily. A hunger for expansionist imperialism, ideologically and physically, lingers on. Turn on the nightly news, tune into reality, and notes of Lewis’s novel and Johnson’s script continue to echo.

This may be exactly why V has seen such popularity with the 2010 audience. We live in a world where history repeats itself; where old ideas cloak themselves in various contemporary skins and pretty packages for each budding generation. The series continues to strike a chord because in a non-didactic way, it reminds us that the catastrophes of our past are but a handful of forgetful seasons away.

3.
Currently on the show, V spaceships loom over all the major cities. Anna (the 2010 V leader) promises peace, opens cure-all health centers and introduces advances in technology that surpass anything the world has ever seen. Using mass media, she seeks to indoctrinate a devoted following of humans involved in her Peace Ambassadors program. From the outside, the arrival of the V’s looks rosy, but beneath is a diabolical agenda to take over the Earth.

The updated series has been hit by a tidal wave of controversy. Rumor has it that it’s an allegorical representation of President Barack Obama’s administration. Many critics have pointed out the subtextual nods. In her review for The Washington Post, Lisa de Moraes noted that the series debuted on the first anniversary of Obama’s election, and that carefully embedded catchphrases like “hope”, “change”, and “universal health care” are frequently used by the Visitors.

Glenn Garvin of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the show was a “rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it’s also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors.”

Additionally, critical bloggers were quick to point out lines that hold an uncanny resemblance to quotes by Obama staff members. In one episode about a natural disaster that the V’s intervene to solve, Anna tells a news reporter, “There’s tragedy every day, all over your world—so many opportunities to help.” Likewise, Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is quoted as saying, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste… it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

At the 2009 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour session for V, the three producers Scott Peters, Jace Hall and Jeffrey Bell discussed the controversy. Peters explained, “Listen, I think that shows are open to interpretation. People bring subjective thoughts to it. And if you want to ascribe those words to the Visitors or to whatever is going on in our society, that’s sort of up to the viewer, but there’s no particular agenda to hone in on those specific things.”

Bell followed up, “We are talking about the metaphors and allegories here, and at a certain level, I just want to remind people it’s a show about spaceships on ABC at 8 p.m.”

Peters went on to clarify: The show is about the dangerous side of blind devotion. “ What happens when you don’t ask questions about the things you believe in?” he said. “And I think that can be applied across the board whether you are talking about a political issue or a religious issue or a relationship issue, any number of things.”

Alien spaceships making us pause in our prime time television consumption and (gasp!) think? Wouldn’t that be revolutionary! The producers’ comments may not lay the Obama controversy to rest, but we could use a little social reminder these days—even if it comes as science-fictionalized reptile aliens masked in hot human form plotting world conquest and mankind annihilation. Like the namesake characters, there’s more than meets the eye in V.

is the author of the international bestseller and 2012 Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Baker's Daughter (Crown) and The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico (Random House). Her novella The Branch of Hazel will be a part of Grand Central anthology (Penguin, July 2014). She is currently working on her third novel, to be published by Crown in 2014. You can learn more about Sarah at www.sarahmccoy.com or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.  Married to an Army doc, she currently lives in El Paso, Texas, but calls Virginia home.

Reviews Screening Room

Speculative Evidence: Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration

Reviews Screening Room
September 18, 2013 | 10 books mentioned 1 7 min read
Adolf Hitler loved Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s Fire Brigade, Mickey’s Polo Team, Pluto Outwits Mickey — for Hitler, Mickey Mouse was magic. Hitler loved Mickey Mouse so much that, in 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Reich Ministry of Popular Entertainment and Propaganda, sent the Führer 12 Mickey Mouse films (plus “a wonderful art album”) for Christmas. The box set was a gift that Goebbels hoped would bring his dictator “much joy and relaxation” as Hitler proceeded with his plans to conquer Europe, systematically annihilating two-thirds of its Jewish inhabitants along the way. Ben Urwand’s book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler begins with this startling juxtaposition. It is the unholy alliance of Hitler and Mickey that tees up Urwand’s central claim: from 1933 to 1939, the Jewish moguls who ran Hollywood’s studio system “collaborated” with the Nazi regime, censoring and even quashing films that represented the German state in a negative light. According to Urwand, the studios were motivated by profit, pure and simple. In 1932, Germany represented Hollywood’s biggest foreign market, a business opportunity complicated by the fact that the German Foreign Office claimed the right to deny import permits to any film whose “tendency or effect” was “detrimental to German prestige.” It was no accident that Germany’s tightening oversight of its film imports came at precisely the same moment that writers and directors — ranging from Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz to Hitler parodist Charlie Chaplin — sought to expose Nazi evil on the silver screen. But markets trumped morals. Films like The Road Back (1937) and Lancer Spy (1937) were hacked up according to German demands, while anti-Nazi films like The Mad Dog of Europe and It Can’t Happen Here were relegated to dustbins on Hollywood Boulevard.    Urwand finds evidence of “collaboration” (Zusammenarbeit) everywhere. He finds it in the letters of studio heads, like Universal Pictures’ Carl Laemmle and MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, who allegedly pulled films that alluded to Germany’s “Jewish Problem.” He finds it in records of meetings between the Hays Office, Hollywood’s chief censorship organization, and a revolving door of German diplomats, each more unctuous than the last. And crucially for Urwand’s purposes, he finds it in Hitler’s incoherent scribblings on film and propaganda in Mein Kampf (1926). If Hitler “derived a lot of pleasure” from Mickey and friends, “he was also seduced by them. He believed that they contained a mysterious, almost magical power that somehow resembled his own abilities as an orator.” And so Urwand claims that “Hitler himself” sits “at the center” of the studio system’s complicity with the Third Reich, dictating from his private screening room in the Chancellery which movies were “good,” “bad,” or needed to be “switched off.” Armed with an embarrassment of archival riches, Urwand draws a conclusion that would make Hannah Arendt sit up and pay attention were she alive today. Indeed, it seems impossible to read The Collaboration without hearing echoes of Arendt’s reasoning in Eichmann in Jerusalem — her indictment of the “Jewish ‘collaborators’” who “had cooperated [with the Nazis] because they thought they could ‘avert consequences more serious than those which resulted.” While Hollywood studios “had the chance to show the world what was really happening in Germany,” he argues, they were too busy kowtowing to the bottom line to “expose the brutality of the Nazi regime” in action. Although Urwand stops just short of offering his readers a full counterfactual history, his implication is clear. There is blood on Hollywood’s hands. Since word of The Collaboration got out this past June, the hype surrounding it has given way to a firestorm of personal and professional trash talk. Perhaps it began with the cover letter that Urwand’s publicity team at Goldberg McDuffie Communications, Inc. sent to reviewers, which talks up The Collaboration while simultaneously dissing film historian Thomas P. Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, a strikingly similar account of the Third Reich’s dealings with the studio system that came out only six months earlier. "Whereas Doherty relied on flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers, Urwand discovered a vast array of primary source materials,” wrote Urwand’s publicist, seeking to undermine Doherty’s far milder claim that, when it came to Nazism, “the motion picture industry was no worse than the rest of American culture in its failure of nerve and imagination, and often a good deal better in the exercise of both.” But Urwand’s team seems to have forgotten that all publicity is good publicity, especially where academic historians are concerned. So baited, Doherty struck back in the pages of The Hollywood Reporter. Urwand’s charges of collaboration were “scandalous and ahistorical,” Doherty argued, an irresponsible retro-projection of the Vichy and Soviet government’s political collaboration with the Nazis onto the Hollywood studio system. He was, however, much nicer in print than Hollywood heiresses Cass Warner and Alicia Mayer, the latter of whom attacked Urwand’s “sickening claims” on her blog Hollywood Essays. “I need your help,” Mayer begins her petition to blacklist Urwand’s book. “Imagine for a moment that your family has been accused of collaborating with Hitler and the Nazis...How could one book destroy the amazing legacies left by my family and those of the Warners, the Goldwyns and others?” Spurred on by her outrage, Mayer calls on Doherty along with film historian Michael Greco and director Quentin Tarantino to strike down Urwand’s “terrible libel.” By now, Urwand has surely realized that someone had blundered by riling up Doherty, who proves a far better critic than Urwand. Hollywood and Hitler is a tighter, more riveting read than The Collaboration, and Doherty displays the methodical prowess of a historian who doesn’t have to scandalize to sell his story. More importantly, Doherty’s unwillingness to stretch the limits of interpretation throws into relief The Collaboration’s many sleights of hand, the dark magic of a historian’s misreadings across a series of otherwise fascinating archives. At its best moments, The Collaboration covers ground well tread by Doherty and others, offering by-the-book sketches of the Nazi riots at the 1933 screening of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), the failed anti-Nazi film The Mad Dog of Europe, and the proto-fascist spectacle of films like Gabriel Over the White House (1933). At its worst, The Collaboration proceeds by insinuation rather than proof, clumsily contorting its archival findings to fit Urwand’s agenda of character assassination. Consider, for instance, how Urwand treats Twentieth Century Fox’s Oscar nominated movie The House of Rothschild (1934), an attempt to allegorize the rise of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century by narrating the history of Mayer Rothschild’s banking empire. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, The House of Rothschild was praised at the time of its release by rabbis and Jewish affiliates of B’nai B’rith. Six years after The House of Rothschild premiered in the U.S., the Nazis spliced footage from The House of Rothschild into The Eternal Jew (1940), a vicious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda directed by Fritz Hippler. From this, Urwand concludes that The Eternal Jew was “unthinkable without The House of Rothschild,” as it “provided structure to what otherwise would have been the regime’s usual anti-Semitism.” But Urwand fails to tell us how long this footage lasts — a mere 4 minutes — nor does he draw attention to the long history of “The Eternal Jew” as a folklore figure, a Yiddish-language play, a British film, a 1937 anti-Semitic book, or a Nazi art exhibit, all preceding or contemporaneous with the American film. If the actual details of The Eternal Jew deflate much of Urwand’s overblown rhetoric, they’re also beside the point. To label Hippler’s cut-and-paste job an act of collaboration between Hollywood and the Nazis is a little like calling shoplifting collaboration between a thief and a shopkeeper. The Collaboration is littered with such analytic missteps. Pick a page, and read it carefully, and some thread of Urwand’s argument is bound to unravel in your hands. There are conclusions that feel shaky the instant you land upon them — for example, his claim that Germany’s ban on Warner Brothers’ film Captured! (1933) somehow scared the other studios into “collaborating with Nazi Germany” seems both vague and implausible. There are instances where Urwand cites anecdotal evidence only to undercut it, only to rely on it in pushing his argument forward. His introductory chapter “Hitler’s Obsession with Film” is especially troubling in this regard, as he introduces his sustained analogy between Hitler’s oratorical skills and movie magic on the testimony of Hitler’s friend Reinhold Hanisch, an account he first flags as “dubious in several respects.” And finally, there are whole chapters in which Urwand’s fascinating and contradictory strands of evidence are muted by an overly pat conclusion. When, for instance, Urwand can’t find any solid proof that Louis B. Mayer personally pulled Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist film It Can’t Happen Here for fear of the Third Reich, he reads Mayer’s “no comment” as an obvious admission of his guilt. Of course, this ignores Urwand’s earlier evidence that Mayer repeatedly “decided to push ahead with It Can’t Happen Here” despite the German government’s protests.   All of this is simply to say, if you only read one book this year on Hollywood and the Nazis, don’t read this one. And it’s a shame, really, because there’s an extraordinary book to be written using the evidence that Urwand extracted from his German and American sources. As a critic, the best part of reading The Collaboration is fantasizing about the book it might have been — something less sensational, but more patient and responsible with its raw materials. I was beckoned time and again by flashes of archival mystery: Hitler’s childish fascination with not just Mickey, but the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy and the sentimentality of musical theater; the genesis of national typecasting in Howard Hughes’s World War I film Hell’s Angels; the unspecified and fluid relationship between the studio centers in Hollywood and their foreign branches. The list goes on, but it matters little. After all, critics can’t be collaborators.
Reviews Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 1 7 min read
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Essays Screening Room

Screenwriting 101: What Fiction Writers Learn from Star Wars

Essays Screening Room
July 28, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 5 5 min read
For the last twelve years I have taught fiction writing at Delta College in Michigan. For six of those years I have also taught Introduction to Screenwriting as part of Delta’s Film Production program. Arguably, screenwriters and fiction writers are going about the same thing, even if in different forms: they are trying to tell a good story. I certainly can’t say that the ways I teach screenwriting and fiction writing are universal, but I have noticed that, while the two courses essentially focus on storytelling, my pedagogical approaches for each are very different. When I teach fiction, I usually focus on the “craft” of fiction. I use words and phrases like “conflict,” “character development,” “backstory,” “interior landscape,” and “dialogue.” When it comes to plot, though, I find myself saying something cryptic like, “Plot comes out of character. Whatever your protagonist does must be true to his or her character.” It’s good advice, I suppose, but it doesn’t really help students understand what makes for a solid plot. When I talk about fiction writing, the vibe is mystical: “You don’t need to know where you’re going. Just sit down and write. Discover what you have to say sentence by sentence. Let the journey surprise you.” Sometimes I’ll even quote E.L. Doctorow who said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love that simile, but the more realistic side of me notes that it’s also a perfect situation for crashing and going nowhere. Screenwriting often seems so much more practical and story-oriented. Right out of the gate, I am talking with students about the importance of movie-mapping. Much more time is spent on the plotting of the story to make certain that “something happens” and that the movie is always escalating tension and conflict as it moves toward the climax. For such a modern form of storytelling – barely 125 years old – screenwriting seems to draw much more of its understanding of plot from Plato’s dissection of narrative structure. Before my students begin to learn screenplay format, I first ask them to consider their film’s major dramatic question, or MDQ. In screenwriting, the major dramatic question is a yes-or-no question that is answered by the climax. For instance, in the 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope, the MDQ would be, “Will Luke blow up the Death Star?” Before ever writing, my students are encouraged to know their MDQ and to know the answer. They have to know what they are writing towards in order to make every scene lead the audience there naturally and believably. To understand how movie structure works, we talk about a movie’s Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Mid-Point, Plot Point 2, and Climax. Screenwriters are encouraged to know their ending before anything else, which seems very different from all of that driving blind in the fog business. Star Wars: A New Hope provides a good example of the rest of the plot points. The inciting incident of a movie is the event that is necessary to get the movie going. Usually the first ten minutes of a film focus on character and situation introduction, but right about ten minutes in, something happens that calls the protagonist to his or her quest. In Star Wars, the inciting incident occurs when the droids escape Princess Leia’s ship with the plans to the Death Star inside R2-D2. (Notice how the inciting incident already alludes to the MDQ.) If the droids don’t escape Leia’s ship, then we don’t have Star Wars…or at least not the Star Wars that we know. Right around 25 to 30 pages into the script, the screenwriter must begin to think about Plot Point 1. This is a moment in the movie that makes action on the part of the protagonist necessary. In Star Wars, Luke isn’t really sure what he’s doing with the droids. He’s chasing R2-D2 rather than making his own choices. Even when Ben asks Luke to join him, Luke says that he can’t leave his uncle’s farm. It’s only when Luke races back to the farm to find his uncle and aunt dead at the hands of the Empire that he can commit to his quest. Nothing is holding Luke back, and his hatred toward the Empire has been fueled. About halfway through the script, screenwriters need to give thought to the Mid-Point. The Mid-Point often shows us a strength in the character that we have not seen up until this moment. In the first half of Star Wars, Luke takes a backseat to the much more interesting Ben Kenobi and Han Solo. It’s only when Luke is free of them that he can truly shine. Rescuing Princess Leia, Luke faces a daunting chasm. Storm troopers are slowly opening the door behind him. Across the chasm, stormtroopers fire upon him and Leia. Oh, and as you’ll remember, the bridge across the chasm is no longer functional. Probably unknowingly using the Force, Luke flawlessly tosses a grappling hook up to an overhead pipe and swings himself and Leia to safety. He does this on his own. That’s the movie’s midpoint, which helps the audience believe what happens in the climax because it reveals that strength of character that the audience had yet to see. Finally, to escalate conflict and to make success that much more difficult, a screenwriter has to think about Plot Point 2, which is a major setback to the protagonist. In Star Wars, the setback happens when Ben is killed by Darth Vader. It’s a major blow to Luke, and it makes their entire mission against the Death Star seem that much more hopeless. Watch nearly any movie, and right around three-quarters into it, something really bad will happen to the main character. That event serves to escalate tension and keep the audience uncertain. The rest of the movie now plays out toward answering the MDQ. If the movie has been plotted well, the climax is not only satisfying but believable. It’s my belief that no novelist would be hurt by taking a screenwriting course or by studying a screenwriting text, not for jumping ship and becoming a screenwriter, but to understand storytelling from a new vantage-point. At Delta College, the students who take creative writing courses represent a small but passionate pool. They often take every creative writing course available. In Screenwriting, I will sometimes get students who want to adapt a novel that they are working on into a screenplay. More often than not, they actually end up learning what they have to do to make their novel work as a novel. It is the strict attention to plot involved with screenwriting that helps them see how they can make their story work better in prose form. At the end of the class they’ll tell me, “This class helped me understand my novel so much better, and now I’m going to rewrite the entire thing.”
Essays Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 5 5 min read
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15 comments:

  1. I am more curious than ever to watch this show now that I have read Sarah’s comments. Thank you for your insightful take on this series.

  2. Pingback: Essay on The Millions: Reptilian Humanoids! « sarahmccoy.wordpress.com

  3. One vital aspect of the original miniseries: Kenneth Johnson had read WAR AND PEACE before starting work on the script, and the alien component came later. In other words, Johnson had always planned grand things to say about the human condition (and he would later go on to produce the ALIEN NATION television series with similar success). So for Peters, Hall, and Bell to declare their vile remake merely “a show about spaceships” says more about their chicanery, their lower artistic ambitions, and their capitulation to market forces. You also have to remember that in the 1980s, it was still possible to sneak subversive subtext into genre television. But it was becoming less possible, as Harlan Ellison learned with his infamous “Knackles” script for the 1980s Twilight Zone series. At least you didn’t have producers outright denying their artistic intentions the way they do today — whether it’s the V bunch outright denying their reactionary agenda or the LOST producers claiming that they always had a grand masterplan.

  4. One more thing (while I’m on the subject). Sam Egan, one of the writers for the 1990s OUTER LIMITS series, has worked on the V remake. (Curiously enough, he also worked for Kenneth Johnson during THE INCREDIBLE HULK.) He wrote some of the best episodes of THE OUTER LIMITS, including “Tribunal,” which dealt with Auschwitz., often embedding his scripts with interesting moral questions. That a writer of his talent hasn’t been permitted the same degree of latitude with the V remake says much about how genre television has drastically changed in the past twenty years.

  5. I get the subtext, the subversiveness, and the scaly satire. What I can’t get past is the bad acting and even more dreadful dialogue.

    That being said, my wife and I religiously TiVo “V,” unable to resist the embedded subliminal messages to “Watch or Die.”

    We don’t however, sit on the couch and give each other lizard licks.

  6. I’m with David on this one. My husband and I watch it weekly–we even started watching it with friends lately. But that’s only because we’ve started to play a V drinking game along with it: drink when Tyler gets HUGZ, drink when someone talks to a marble, drink when there’s obvious CGI (clearly, we drink a lot!). The concept is great, but the execution is just resoundingly terrible, and the science fiction conceits are very poorly thought out. As a fan of Kenneth Johnson, I’m afraid, very afraid, for what’s coming with the Alien Nation reboot.

  7. Holy wow do I ever have an issue with how this new twisted V has caused you to have a majoy lapse in terminology. This may be a very small point but it is one Kenneth Johnson has loudly defended. It’s in this sentence:

    “when Diana (the V leader) expanded her jaw”

    The V leader? Good lord, V never ever was used in the ridiculous way the new series uses it! Are you assuming your readers have bought into the ridiculous notion that these aliens were called the “V”s in the original? It’s a term MANY old time fans (and many new comers from what I read all over the web) still finds sounds absolutely laughable! (oh and I could go on and on and on about how they’ve completely twisted his story into a senseless pile of…)

    They were the Visitors in the original, plain and simple without a species name. V always and always has stood for Victory- as in the “V” that was flashed throughout the world for Victory during the second world war, which was what V originally was an allegory for!

    You do Kenneth Johnson’s brilliant V a huge disservice by applying this nonsense when describing his V.

    It’s a quibble I agree but it strikes at the very heart of why many, many see this new V as a piece of garbage (and I’m not even talking about the horrible plotting, acting, 2-dimensional characterizations and shockingly bad green-screen effects!).

    On this one, I stand firmly behind KJ and his attempts to bring his V back to the big-screen.

    Sorry for the little rant but I’m such a huge fan of KJ and his V that it breaks my heart seeing what they’ve done to his amazingly dark, adult and complex vision!

  8. also… “This may be exactly why V has seen such popularity with the 2010 audience” ummm where did this come from? It’s on the verge of being canceled with consistently under-performing ratings. How does that translate into being popularity with the audience?

    If ONLY what the producers squawk about constantly in articles (and as quoted above) actually showed up onscreen! They go on and on about social commentary this and WTF moments that but it’s all ends with cardboard characters, painfully obvious cliffhangers and “just HOW many times can we fit v-daughter into her underwear in an episode” moments!

    Hopefully by next Tuesday it’ll all be over with it’s cancellation and maybe, just maybe some intelligent sci-fi can take it’s place.

  9. Thank you to everyone for your comments! I knew this topic would illicit some impassioned responses.

    Lady by the Lake, I’m happy you enjoyed reading!

    Edward, Great information. Thanks for adding to the dialogue!

    David, Glad to hear you and your wife don’t lizard lick. I imagine it’s a good way to get a wretched hairball.

    Phoebe, Hilarious! I may have to give your game a shot.

    Christopher, You are a true V aficionado! The 2010 series has obviously not stood up to your expectations. So it is with many remakes of 80s classics. (I hear they are remaking The Karate Kid and I balk!) Actually, V did well enough in its January 2010 premiere to solidify a March comeback. And, yes, while longtime fans might despise it, V has captured the attention of a new generation, applying many of the fundamental issues of Sinclair Lewis’s novel to today’s society. As bad as the show may be in some opinions, it is stirring emotions, thoughts and perhaps even action, which is never a bad thing.

    I hate to point this out, but I see a pattern in sci-fi TV history. Shatner was criticized as ridiculous; Star Trek was panned and canceled after only three seasons. They ran it in syndication through the 70s and now look at it. I’m not saying V will have the same good fortune, but you can’t discount that it has an audience that for one reason or another simply can’t turn it off.

    It’s great to hear so many people’s opinions. Keep them coming!

  10. And, yes, while longtime fans might despise it, V has captured the attention of a new generation, applying many of the fundamental issues of Sinclair Lewis’s novel to today’s society.

    Sarah . . . really? Where are you seeing/hearing this? I’m genuinely curious (and as a Trekkie and a huge SF fan generally, I don’t think you can accuse me of anti-SF bias!), as even my 20-something, LOST loving peers seem to view V with either complete disinterest or derision. I mean . . . action?! What action has it inspired?

  11. Shatner was criticized as ridiculous; Star Trek was panned and canceled after only three seasons. They ran it in syndication through the 70s and now look at it. I’m not saying V will have the same good fortune, but you can’t discount that it has an audience that for one reason or another simply can’t turn it off.

    First off, Roddenberry, for all of his faults (and there were many), was careful to hire Grade-A talent to write the scripts (Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, just to name a few) in the first season. And it was the WRITING that caused Star Trek to endure. Just as it was the WRITING that causes the original V to be remembered s fondly in this thread. Just as it is the BAD WRITING that causes the V remake to be roundly ridiculed and not particularly likely to find some future syndicated gold.

    As Ring Lardner once pointed out, it is the writing that matters first and foremost THAT is the pattern to study. And it is the basis for all the complaints in this thread.

  12. Phoebe, Maybe I hang around too many sci-fi lovers bantering about the show. When I say “action” I’m referencing this very moment if nothing else. The fact that people are willing and wanting to fervently discuss, defend and/or criticize the series. That fans and anti-fans are looking past the cartoonish CGIs to the message–to the writing! As Edward so wonderfully pointed out.

    Edward, Bravo! I wholeheartedly agree. As I wrote in the essay, the original V rose above the average because of its underpinning–the excellent script inspired by Lewis. I’m no fortune-teller. I can’t foresee how history will remember the revamped series. What I can say is that it’s caused a ripple, however small. It’s been controversial and brought the original series with all its inspirations back into the momentary spotlight. I can’t help but be excited by that.

    Note: I’m somewhat playing the devil’s advocate. I’m interested in hearing all sides–lovers and haters. So THANK YOU for your thoughtful comments. Nothing beats a witty parley with intelligent readers!

  13. But Sarah, regardless of what history will remember about this series, you’ve yet to say anything about what makes the series compelling or interesting beyond its concept (which, of course, is a retread, and thus you’ve got to wonder why you’re not just recommending that we watch the original on DVD or something). I don’t mean to come poop in your blog entry or anything, but it seems like you’re being a bit obtuse about the show’s very obvious flaws, instead choosing to talk in broad strokes and platitudes about history repeating itself and people “taking action.” I mean . . . do you find the characters interesting and believable? The writing well-thought out and well-developed? The concepts firm, the science fiction conceits effective?

    I hang out with sciffy folks, too (proofread for the mag Strange Horizons, for one), and I’ve yet to hear any banter about it, impassioned or not; in fact, this, and the equally baffling, but at least more explicitly explained, fairly positive recaps over at tor.com (which frequently get a resounding lack of comments) by Mur Lafferty are pretty much the only positive reception I’ve seen of the show by SF fans. I can’t help but shake my head, mostly in disbelief.

  14. I think Phoebe nailed it. To praise the new V series without citing specific examples why it is so compelling (which I would likewise be curious to hear), while simultaneously suggesting that it will be a big hit in years to come is a very disingenuous position, regardless of your amicable intentions. The “controversy” you purport to identify here has less to do with something vanguard or revolutionary (such as Ralph Bakshi’s films, PINK FLAMINGOS, Bret Easton Ellis’s AMERICAN PSYCHO, Lars van Trier’s films, et al.), but more to do with derivative writing or pedestrian filmmaking that props up a facile reactionary viewpoint that the very producers don’t possess the guts to address. So explain yourself, Sarah. Why is the V remake the best thing since sliced bread? Where is the vital “social reminder” that these new folks have cooked up? Is there any indication that they’ve even read Sinclair Lewis?

    “Revolutionary” art doesn’t reinforce the artistic status quo. It advances the form with a fresh take. It need not even be left-wing. (TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and THE BIRTH OF A NATION are both revolutionary films, even if the intent is reactionary.) But there’s no such advancement of the form with the V remake, despite its second season renewal. Nor, I would argue, is there much in the way of a “social reminder” other than the entrails taken from the original. Rather than err on the side of caution, as you have in this essay, I’m wondering why you can’t just tell it like it is.

  15. Folks…
    Let’s not get too haughty with our exhaustive critiques of a sci-fi, pop culture resurgence. Apparently the slouches at salon.com don’t castigate the retreaded “V’s” as such an abomination ( http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/v/index.html?story=/ent/tv/feature/2010/05/18/v_original_vs_remake_open2010 ). So let’s call a spade and spade and not seek the panacea to moral turpitude in a prime time show about reptillian world domintation.

    Thoughtful piece, Sarah, and a nice throwback to my youth.

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Screening Room

The Audience, The Accused: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Screening Room
March 5, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 3 4 min read
In both the original and the American remake of Funny Games, Michael Haneke, always the gracious host, invites us to the theater for what has become known as torture porn, only to scold us for showing up, for enjoying ourselves, and for eating all the popcorn. The film, in which two teenaged boys wreak havoc upon a married couple and their son, unfolds like any other house-invasion story, until a “surprising” moment reminds us of our roles as voyeurs: the film rewinds. The joke is on us. That type of irony isn’t ingratiating, specifically to us Americans, unapologetic consumers of mass-entertainment, who don’t like it when a man atop a high horse comes across the Atlantic to lecture us about our viewing habits, in our own theaters and in our own homes, especially if the messenger speaks in a foreign tongue and looks like a white-bearded wizard. This is the knock on Haneke, a gifted artist with the visual chops of Bresson and Tarkovsky, but at heart a film-theorist and cultural-critic. Fair enough. Even in films less devoted to a critique of cinema, Cache and Code Unknown, for example, there seems to be a misplacement of artistic intentions. The problem lies not in how Haneke forces us to question, to examine, and to reexamine what we see, but in his insistence on reminding us that he’s a serious artist and by nature a contrarian: Do you see? Do you see how my films are different than Hollywood films? Fortunately, The White Ribbon, the Austrian director’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games, allows Haneke to marry his masterful style with a subtler point of the finger. The best evidence of this is the film’s nomination in the best foreign film category at the upcoming Academy Awards. Already the winner of the Golden Globe, the film should win the Oscar, which considering Haneke’s anti-Hollywood stance, may surprise some viewers. A whodunit set in a German village before the outset of WWI, the film turns what looks to be innocent and routine into something ominous and unsettling. Take the opening, a routine establishing shot of a figure riding his horse, from the distance, toward an unmoving camera. There is no cut, and the shot’s duration makes us uneasy as we watch the rider’s long approach. Finally, the horse trips on an unseen wire tied between two trees. The figure, a doctor, falls, breaks a shoulder, and the horse, as we see later, dies and is dragged off. That puts in motion a series of incidents that grow in number along with the members of the accused. Haneke takes great care to make us suspicious of everyone. The story you are about to see, the unnamed narrator tells us, may or may not be hearsay. And it’s not until later when we learn the narrator’s identity, a minor and subtle choice which again makes us question his honesty, if only briefly. The mouthpiece fits the mold of the unreliable narrator, though his job as the visiting schoolteacher marks him with outsider status. The question is: should we trust him? We ask that question of most characters. Through repetition, the predominance of faces fills the air with suspicion. Everyone, from children to adults, deserves a look-over. And as the incidents accrue, what seemed liked an innocent prank begins a chain of events that may or may not be connected: a destroyed cabbage patch, a murder or a suicide, the beating of a boy or two, a barn burning. At first, the causal links seem simple. The trip wire is the work of children. The destruction of a cabbage patch is the act of farmer’s loyal and angry son who is avenging the death of his mother caused by a baron’s malfeasance. When the villagers find the baron’s son beaten, common sense would lead you to the farmer’s son, but he has an airtight alibi. And when the farmer is found dead, who did it? Did he hang himself in shame? Did his son kill him? Was it the baron or a crony? And who burned the baron’s barn? And so on. The complexity of the plot—the multiple causes for every effect—leads to purposeful dead-ends. At every turn, Haneke plays with our expectations made numb by heavy doses of Hollywood's methods: employing causal logic, identifying with characters, and finding motivations for their actions. Even when he does offer clear causes and effects—he shows us the culprit(s) in action—our inability to form an obvious link between these and other events only reinforces the notion that nothing is as simple as it seems. The same goes for the characters. We want to damn the pastor who coldly receives his son holding a wounded bird, but in a subsequent scene, the pastor fights back tears as the son offers his beloved bird as solace. The effect here is there is no ideological getaway car. A local problem, you say? The limited visual style slowly expands to include shots of the landscape beyond the village. We can’t blame this on small village ignorance. Could we say it’s the effect of a bad social structure? Well, the baron is a somewhat sympathetic character: his son is beaten, and his wife finds a lover when she flees with the kids to Italy. The film, thankfully, deflates our ideological muscles. What Haneke does is transform an allegorical tale about the rise of fascism into a profound look into human nature. We see, or better yet, we experience how silence has destructive consequences. Because the film expands from the individual to the local to the global (with the news of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination), the silence, the real villain here, isn’t custom to a specific time and place. Left with a spool of loose ends, all of us, even the innocent, are made accomplices. We too are sitting on our hands when the sound drops to silence. The wrongdoer(s) could be anyone or everyone.
Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 3 4 min read
Screening Room

The Implications of Artificial Intelligence: On Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’

Screening Room
April 30, 2015 | 10 books mentioned 14 4 min read
I thought of Shirley Jackson’s short story "The Lottery" as I watched the opening sequence of Ex Machina, a new film by Alex Garland. Caleb, played Domhnall Gleeson, peers into his computer in a techy looking office. He receives a message that he has won a lottery. As text messages pour in to congratulate him and co-workers clap his back, a look settles onto his face. Just as the opening of "The Lottery" glorifies our pastoral past too perfectly with flowers, “blossoming profusely,” Caleb, lit by the glow of his screen, seems to question. In a post-Edward Snowden world where our identities are tracked and online movements are monitored, is there such thing as random selection? After his win, Caleb is flown by helicopter to a remote spot in the mountains and told to follow the river, which isn’t easy with a rolling suitcase. He finds the house of the CEO Nathan, played by a perfectly hollow-about-the-eyes Oscar Isaac, and is asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Nathan’s house is actually a high tech research facility and Caleb has been brought in to conduct a test of a machine’s intelligence ability to pass as human, a Turing test. The rest film is structured around Caleb’s testing of Nathan’s artificial intelligence, Ava. Ava, in a subtle performance by Alicia Vikander, is visibly robotic, though parts of her have soft, perfect skin. Her arms, legs, and waist show her mechanics, shaped curves hug her breasts and bum. When I first saw her, with my tongue in cheek I thought: Ah, a female character reduced to the important parts. And in this kind of reaction lies the cleverness of this film. It plays out as a test of theory of mind, or "awareness of mind" as the film calls it -- the ability to understand your own beliefs, intents, and desires, but also to understand that someone else has a different set of the same. Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who specializes in primate behavior, studies how we hold several people’s intentions in our minds at the same time. In his book, Lucy to Language, he uses the example of Othello, that the plot requires audiences to understand, “that Iago intends that Othello imagines that Desdemona is in love with Cassio.” William Shakespeare requires the audience to understand four levels of mental representation. He raises it to a fifth level when, “Iago is able to persuade Othello that Cassio reciprocates Desdemona’s feelings.” To Dunbar, that is how Shakespeare weaves a narrative spell. Ex Machina works on a similar level. Without spoiling the plot, the fun of the film lies in that Nathan intends that Caleb imagines that Ava is or is not feeling about Caleb, who may or may not believe Nathan. Kyoko, Nathan’s servant becomes involved, the plot gets another twist. Dunbar makes an interesting point about writing. Most of us can follow to the fifth level of intention and enjoy a good story. However, far fewer have the ability to compose an interesting tale because the fifth level is most people’s natural limit. The ability to work at the sixth level, what makes a really interesting story, is rare. Shakespeare was able to, “intend that the audience believes...” Garland also successfully works a level higher and this is where the film soars. In taking and subverting current ideas about gender, sci fi, and the thriller genre, he gives us a sharp tweak and delivers a film about theory of mind that is deliciously hard to read. Garland is author of The Beach, a novel that defined the darker side of backpacking in the 1990s and later became a movie staring Leonardo di Caprio. His next novel, The Tesserat, was called “taut, nervous and often bloody,” by The New York Times and was an early sign of his willingness to play with structure. He wrote the script for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for the screen. As an Ishiguro fan, I asked Garland about adapting Never Let Me Go. He was able to form an accurate belief about my intentions and said he felt “an acute sense of duty." He had moments where he wondered why he could not just leave it as a novel, but, as with any project he works on, “it’s not a calculation, it’s a compulsion. You do it because you have to.” With Ex Machina, Garland wrote the script and directed the film as well. At first he said it was a bigger step to go from novelist to screen writer, whereas moving from writing to directing felt smaller. The more we talked, however, the more Garland came around to seeing his work in novels and on the screen as very similar: “You start with a blank page. You engage the imagination. The problems of how it hangs together are the same.” Like the best short stories, Ex Machina is sparse, taut, and precise. Every word of dialogue has weight and each shot has a purpose. As with Jackson's "The Lottery," the film ultimately shows the power of thinking about what we are doing and why. While the action in Ex Machina  shifts in sharp pivots, many of the scenes play out almost as if they are on the page with Caleb and Nathan debating the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. In other words, it’s fascinating.
Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 14 4 min read
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Lists Screening Room

A Breaking Bad (and Beyond) Reading List

Lists Screening Room
August 26, 2013 | 10 books mentioned 7 4 min read
Only five new episodes remain in AMC's high-octane drama about a milquetoast family man who transforms himself into a cunning drug kingpin. Within the next two months, we can expect to see Walter White's reckoning, whether through spectacular downfall or a final ascension to cartel royalty. Blood will spill and secrets will be revealed. Breaking Bad promises us the rush and pulse of the best Shakespeare dramas, cinematically captured in the saturated blues and bleached out beiges that signify the Southwestern landscape. One of the strengths of Breaking Bad is its richly layered storylines. There are worlds and worlds behind Walter White's character arc. The story of the land and people of Northern New Mexico alone could be its own fascinating spinoff of Breaking Bad. Not to mention the history of The Drug War, cartels, and race relations in the borderlands. The books on this list range from the personal to the mythological to the journalistic, and some intertwine all three. They all depict a world of stark contrasts. There is danger here. There are hardscrabble heroes and self-made gods dripping with hubris. Each book is infused with the poetry of landscape, in which humans like Walter White and Jesse Pinkman try to craft their own story with what their realities have handed them. Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West by Ruben Martinez: Martinez deftly blends memoir and reportage, giving us an essential new way of thinking about and seeing the West. He goes into the complicated multiracial history of Northern New Mexico and brings the landscape and the people into stark relief as he tells his own story of settling there; he is part native, part interloper, both an advocate and gentrifier. It is from this ambiguous identity that he feels compelled to research the painful and fascinating history of the West, both its economic reality and its role in the Great American Imagination. It's a perfect book to read in tandem with Breaking Bad, to get an intimate sense of the place where Vince Gilligan's drama unfolds. Alburquerque: A Novel by Rudolfo Anaya: World Literature Today described Anaya's famous novel as “a quest for knowledge... a novel about many cultures intersecting at an urban, power-, and politics-filled crossroads, represented by a powerful white businessman.” A description that could easily apply to Breaking Bad. Anaya is often described as the father of Chicano literature and his novels are richly woven tapestries of memorable characters and an evocative sense of place. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Early on in the show, there were some comparisons of Skyler to Lady MacBeth. I disagree. She may have eventually accepted her role as accomplice and money launderer, but she began as the Daisy to Walt's Gatsby. She was the pure (but greedy) representation of love and family that Walt ironically corrupted himself to protect and secure. There are plenty of places where Breaking Bad departs from Gatsby, but they share the story of an American nobody's contraband-funded rise to infamy and inevitable tragic end. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell: The book that inspired the Oscar-nominated film, Daniel Woodrell's novel is populated with the same kind of down-on-their-luck folks who make do with what they can in a harsh ecology, who rally around their own kind and protect family until the bitter end. Even if that means cooking and dealing meth. To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War by John Gibler: The cartel murders in Breaking Bad are highly dramatized and sensationalized. John Gibler's clear-eyed, well-researched reports remove many of the stereotypes and misconceptions about Mexico's multi-billion dollar drug war, and will give the reader blood-curdling facts about the real Tuco Salamancas and Gus Frings and their impoverished, routinely executed employees. This highly praised book promises to sadden and enrage, and possibly to change your thinking about the War on Drugs. A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca: New Mexico's own American Book Award Winner spent six years of his early life in prison for selling drugs as a homeless youth. This memoir chronicles his life before, during, and after his time served. It's a story of hope and remaking. Think of it as the photo-negative of Walter White's arc. Far from the relative comfort of the White household, Baca began his life abandoned and destitute. He honestly writes of transforming himself in spite of desperate adversity, and of working for the nourishment and empowerment of the underserved communities around him. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko: Tucson has a similar history to that of Albuquerque – a modest desert metropolis that means many things to many people: colonized sacred land, dangerous, heavily policed border town, bohemian enclave, nexus of social ills. Both towns are weird clashing intersections of demographics and material interests; from the fancy-free cultural events of the college town to the radical activism of border justice advocates to the sleepy insularity of hippie-crystal business ownership. Leslie Marmon Silko's novel centers on a veteran of the drug trade who sees the ghosts of colonialism in present day Arizona. Her story is a terrifying shadow history of the world that allowed someone like Walter White to exist.
Lists Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 7 4 min read
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Screening Room

Middlesex on the Tube

Screening Room
July 8, 2009 | 10 books mentioned 2 3 min read
I just discovered that HBO is going to turn Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex into a series. Immediately all was untrammeled rapture. I love Middlesex, and I am a big fan of HBO series generally. The Sopranos. The inimitable Wire. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Rome. Deadwood. And yes, Sex and the City. I know that Sex and the City oppresses women and is an embarrassment and there's no way she can afford those outfits on that salary and all of that. I still like it. I have a, uh, friend who once bought a DVD boxed set of dubious authenticity in China because it cost a very low, but not actually as low as she thought, number of Chinese yuan. It soothes me to have it playing in the background on the rare occasions when I try to perpetrate a hairdo on myself. The fun thing is that the episodes are not in order, and Chinese characters can show up at any time! But that's neither here nor there. Soon my untrammeled delight was tempered with anxiety. I have very low expectations of television, so when a show is even remotely entertaining, I am swiftly ensnared. It makes me nervous, though, when beloved books are threatened with The Screen Treatment. I didn't love the Virgin Suicides (novel), so I was dazzled by an Air soundtrack and Josh Hartnett in a mullet-type thing. But I loved Middlesex. I read it when it came out, and immediately read it again. Then for a while afterward I was in a lather trying to find out whether J. Eugenides was working on a new book, and when I might be able to read that. One thing I loved about the novel was what I believe is called "the scope" (typically accompanied by adjectives like "breathtaking"), which is not easy to achieve on the screen (easier with a series than a movie, but still not easy). How will they pace it? How many seasons? I hope they don't truncate the beginning, wherein Calliope's grandparents make haste, and then incest, out of burning Smyrna. Or the long and sort of gross courtship of Calliope's parents. What of Lina, and Jimmy Zizmo, and Marius Wyxzewizard Challouehliczilczese Grimes? Who will play the Obscure Object? Will she have freckles and heavy thighs? Who will play Apollonian Calliope? And then Dionysian Calliope? And who will play Cal? The show is going to be written (adapted?) by playwright Donald Margulies. It's embarrassing how little I know about theatre, but I see that he won the, whaddaycallit, Pulitzer Prize. Presumably, then, he is good at writing things that are meant to be performed. So that's a solace. Unfortunately, since my worldview has been warped, no doubt, by Sex and the City, the main thing I knew about Rita Wilson is that she is married to Tom Hanks and she looks great. However, I subsequently learned that she has produced a number of things. And that she, like Cal, is American-born to Greek parents. Not only is she Greek Orthodox, according to Wikipedia, but her father is a Greek-born Pomak convert to Orthodoxy, and her mother grew up on the Greece-Albania border. Not that ancestry need define a person, but Ms. Wilson would seem optimally placed to understand a thing or two about the complexities of identity on and around the Balkan peninsula. And since Middlesex is a lot about the complexities of identity (defined or not defined by ancestry), and not a little bit about the complexities of identity as they pertain to the Greek nation, I feel optimistic about her role as a shepherd for this project, even if Middlesex deals with significantly weightier issues than earlier (and also Hellenic-themed) projects like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Mamma Mia!, and My Life in Ruins.As we collectively wrote about in a recent post, not all screen (big or small) adaptations are an exercise in futility. The fundamentals here seem strong. What do you think?
Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 2 3 min read