V: Lizard Aliens as a Social Reminder

Screening Room
May 13, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 15 5 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.

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Screening Room

Pandora’s Box: Avatar Sparks Debate in China

Screening Room
January 12, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 5 2 min read

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar is well on its way to becoming a global cultural phenomenon. The director’s latest mash-up of romance, action, and big-budget special effects has, like his previous film Titanic, drawn in record setting audiences across the globe. From New York to Shanghai, people have waited for hours to immerse themselves in Avatar’s 3-D fantasy world, an alien planet called Pandora.

In the West, Avatar has been praised more for its feats of technical ingenuity than its unsophisticated stance on such social ills as corporate greed, environmental degradation, and colonialism. But in China, Cameron’s depiction of the struggle between ruthless developers and the alien Na’vi has opened an unexpected Pandora’s Box. The film has provoked both praise and criticism from Chinese viewers, who see parallels between the movie’s plot and one of the nation’s most prominent social issues: the forced removal of Chinese citizens from their homes for government development projects.

With few exceptions, land in China is owned by the state. Although private citizens can lease land for varying periods, the government retains strong privileges of eminent domain, and it often exercises its power to claim prime pieces of real estate for development. The reasons for these seizures range from the benign to the corrupt. While some lands are claimed for essential public works projects, others become shopping malls and vacation resorts, cash cows to line the pockets of China’s elite.

Public opposition to these seizures has always existed. But as Chinese real estate values skyrocket and land confiscations cost residents more than ever, the number and visibility of protests have shot up. Passive resistance has become a popular strategy for those threatened by eminent domain, and the Chinese media is increasingly filled with stories of brave homeowners facing down bulldozers. In a recent case that galvanized public opinion, a woman set herself on fire rather than allow developers to force her from her home.

In this environment, Avatar has set off a firestorm of controversy. Across the Chinese blogosphere, debate has focused on the parallels between the movie’s story and recent incidents in China, prompting some to wonder if Cameron’s film might be intended as an attack on the Chinese government. Others have rallied behind the film, arguing that it has raised public awareness of the unfairness of China’s eminent domain laws. Writing in the government-run newspaper China Daily, Raymond Zhou noted, “[Avatar has] inadvertently hit… a nerve in a country where the bulldozer is a sign of both progress and threat.”

While in the U.S. controversy often translates into increased ticket sales, in China, it is equally likely to get a movie banned. Chinese officials have become increasingly worried about domestic instability arising from public dissatisfaction with government policies, and they have moved to quash potential sources of disquiet, censoring social networking sites, gagging novelists, and applying pressure to foreign events that feature Chinese dissidents. Now, as the debate surrounding Avatar heats up, prominent media critics are speculating that the film might disappear from Chinese theaters. If that were to happen, the decision would no doubt come as a shock to Cameron, who is more often criticized for his films’ enormous budgets than their political content.

Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 5 2 min read
Screening Room

Ecstatic Truth: Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Screening Room
August 3, 2011 | 10 books mentioned 6 5 min read

Werner Herzog, the director of the new 3D documentary The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, has spent a long career carving out a niche entirely his own. His imagination is unmistakable in both fiction and non-fiction films, though his peculiar vision often suggests a perpetual blurring of the lines between categories. In his latest feature documentary he sets his sights on newly accessible prehistoric cave paintings in a valley in southern France, The Cave of Chauvet Pont-D‘Arc. In some ways, Herzog is just the man to explore such a landscape.

His fictional work over the years marks him as one of the most eccentrically provocative visionaries of the past half-century. Part of his eccentricity has to do with something classically cinematic: the suspension of disbelief. You don’t have to question Herzog’s honesty in watching his films, though you might start to question his sanity. During the filming of the enigmatic, annihilating 1972 masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Herzog and his mercurial leading man Klaus Kinski (equal parts collaborator, muse, and mortal enemy) were occasionally known to hold each other at gunpoint. 1982’s Fitzcarraldo isn’t just a film about a wild-eyed rubber baron building an opera house within a giant imported steamship in the mountains of the jungles of Peru, it’s about how the titular character’s inspiration and mad fixity echoes the filmmaker’s own. CGI need not apply: Herzog and his crew actually hauled the entire ship across the mountain themselves. Of course, a documentary was made, and the film Burden Of Dreams is the fascinating (and occasionally hilarious) result.

Not content to make dramatic fiction his only pursuit, Herzog has consistently and rewardingly made feature-length documentary films about the world’s marginalized, poetic, and just plain odd phenomena. Whether the subject is Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas for Wheel Of Time, exploring the minutia of Antarctica in the Oscar-nominated Encounters At The End Of The World, or tracking Timothy Treadwell’s fatal obsession with wild bears in Grizzly Man, he has made a distinctive, unique mark on documentary style, as well. There is also his personal film school, a seminar really, which promises not to offer anything technical about the aspects of filmmaking unless you include instruction on picking locks, forging shooting permits in foreign countries, neutralizing bureaucracy, and “self reliance”. The reading list includes Virgil’s Eclogues, Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber,” and, of course, The Warren Commission.

One of his recent statements (from the book Herzog on Herzog) has been on virtual reality’s seductive power in today’s world and how “all these tools now at our disposal, these things which are part of this explosive evolution of the means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal – be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever – human solitude will increase in direct proportion.” For Herzog, it is the filmmaker’s (and, by extension, the artist’s) responsibility to try to break through the blare of the virtual and to instead attempt to create or document something which is truer, rawer, more alive, and duly more strange.

Luckily, the French Ministry of Culture gave Herzog the opportunity to film inside the Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc with unprecedented if limited access. There probably couldn’t be a better opportunity to shrug off the babble of modernity than to spelunk among ancient traces of prehistoric imagination, and Herzog does this with sympathy, gravitas, and an eye for the absurd.

The cave was discovered in 1994 and within two years a twelve-person team of researchers was nominated to document and analyze the fossils, artwork, and human traces left behind. The team can only work at half capacity, for two weeks at a time, due to the fragility of the cave’s internal equilibrium. Herzog was limited to shooting by himself, with only a couple of cameramen, using heat-reduced lighting. His crew was limited to a two-foot-wide walkway, wearing special suits and shoes. Shooting was restricted to only a few days for several hours at a time due to the near-toxicity of the environment. It adds to the precariousness of the experience as a viewer – one gets the teetering feeling of witnessing something very precious and very delicate, as the camera eye glides across the surfaces.

The effect is evocative, to say the least. Lambent lights flicker across the etchings, looming ochre walls blur and focus, until you start to realize you’re looking at dozens of ancient painted handprints. Some are smaller, suggesting a woman or an adolescent, others are larger, varying in digit size and solidity. There are streaks of black chalk-thick outlines of horses, lions, and bison. In one panel, two rhinoceroses are butting heads across a wall. What’s amazing is that the researchers can surmise how the forms were scrawled into life. In some cases the artists used the texture of the wall itself, etching with wood charcoal and rubbing fingertips covered in clay across the outline. All of this takes place at eye and helmet level with the filmmakers and scientists themselves, amazedly peering into the glowing darkness along with us. At one point the soundtrack is stopped and we listen to the silence of a lost place.

Herzog’s voiceover narration, often a delightfully strange component of whatever he films, is the guide. His crisp articulation and Germanic depth adds gravitas to the wonder. At one point, Herzog suggests that certain pictures of animals sequenced in different stages of motion might even be a prefigured form of cinema, especially when seen by torchlight. It’s kind of a Herzogian thing to suggest, but it’s not entirely far-fetched. Spreading across a stalactite we see what appears to be a composite outline of a bison and the pubic radius of a woman. Some things never change.

Of course, a film like this wouldn’t be complete without some face time with the researchers and enthusiasts themselves. They’re a pretty interesting bunch. One of them, an affable French scientist who used to be a circus performer, disarmingly remarks that after first seeing the etchings of lions he dreamed about real ones for days afterward. He further explains that he found the presence of all the drawings so overwhelming he had to remove himself from the research for a while to take it all in as a human being. We come across a strange perfumer who attempts to sniff out the scent emanating from the cracks of lost caves. There is also a prehistoric enthusiast fully decked out in wolf hide who dances a merry jig while playing The Star Spangled Banner on a carved bone flute. The short, editorialized coda at the end of the film is noteworthy but disturbingly odd, as only a meditation on civilization involving mutant albino crocodiles could be.

Herzog has written repeatedly about the desire to capture what he calls “ecstatic truth.” The example he is fond of using, as he did for a recent appearance on The Colbert Report, is that of the Manhattan phone book.  Sure, anyone can grab one and read off all the exact names, numbers, and addresses of all the residents listed inside, but what you can’t know is if Mr. Jonathan Smith of 125 East St. cries alone on his pillow at night. Or why, for that matter. Facts alone won’t do the trick. What Cave Of Forgotten Dreams offers is the ability to experience a kind of ecstatic truth, ironically found in the facts of the Chauvet cave as we learn them, unveiled from within the subterranean scenery of the cave itself. Witnessing on celluloid (and, if you’re lucky, 3D glasses) the etchings of early human beings, scrawled for whatever reason thousands of years ago, is to observe something ancient and mysterious with your very own eyes. Art, even documentary art, can’t surpass the immediacy of reality; I can’t tell from merely attending a movie what it feels like to be in the cave, or to duck under looming stalactites with bison shapes running down their sides. Nor do I truly know what they mean. But I can say I’ve seen them. That truth alone is ecstatic enough.

Screening Room
| 10 books mentioned 6 5 min read

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

Will Ferrell Channels Raymond Carver — And It Works!

Screening Room
May 6, 2011 | 10 books mentioned 12 4 min read

The 10th Tribeca Film Festival, which ended May 1, was a richly musical affair.  It featured movies about Kings of Leon, A Tribe Called Quest, Ozzy Osbourne, Miriam Makeba, the irrepressible Haitian band Septentrional, the Academy Award-winning songwriters Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, and a new Cameron Crowe documentary about Elton John and Leon Russell.  Nearly lost in this pleasing din were two quiet movies, a feature and a documentary, that grew, respectively, out of a work of literature and the misguided urge to lionize writers.

Will Ferrell Channels Raymond Carver
Everything Must Go, the writing and directing debut of Dan Rush, is adapted from a Raymond Carver short story called “Why Don’t You Dance?”  Rush makes two crucial creative decisions, one necessary, one risky.  First, he fleshes out Carver’s bare-bones story, which was little more than a sketch after it was edited – some would say butchered – by Gordon Lish’s heavy blue pencil.  Then Rush makes a daring and, as it turns out, inspired casting choice: He puts ham-fisted funnyman Will Ferrell (Old School, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, etc.) in the dark lead role of Nick Halsey, a super-salesman who just got sacked from his job because of his drinking.  As the movie opens, Nick is sitting in his parked car, gulping down a flask of whiskey while chanting salesman mantras and fuming over the indignity of his firing.  His troubles haven’t begun.  After stopping for a couple of 12-packs of beer, he returns to his home in a nameless Arizona suburb to find his possessions scattered across his front yard, the locks changed, his bank account frozen, his wife gone.  A cop buddy from A.A. stops by with a three-day permit for a yard sale.  That’s how long Nick has to get his act together, or fall into the blackest of holes.  The narrative time bomb has begun ticking.

Rush wisely ignores the ticking and sets a leisurely pace, lets the camera linger, lets his actors build emotional momentum slowly, quietly.  This is important to a Carver story, as Marilynne Robinson noted back in 1988: “His impulse to simplify is like an attempt to create a hush, not to hear less, but to hear better.”

And that’s what this movie comes down to – Nick’s process of learning how to hear, and see, better.  Ferrell is outstanding as the wounded soul who can’t hear or see anything at the outset – until he meets Rush’s most inspired addition to Carver’s original cast, Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a chubby kid with demons of his own who becomes Nick’s unlikely ally, his teacher in the art of saving himself.  Another addition is a pregnant neighbor named Samantha (Rebecca Hall), who is moving in across the street and will become the valve that allows Nick to empty the poison from his soul.

It works beautifully because Ferrell conveys an almost impossible stew of emotions – rage, self-pity, insecurity and a dry sense of humor that never comes close to turning hammy.  What a pleasant pair of surprises: there’s a new director worth watching, and Will Ferrell can actually act.

The Creepy World of Mrs. Neal Cassady
The documentary Love Always, Carolyn has the (unintended?) virtue of showing us just how creepy literary hagiography can get.  Directed by first-timers Maria Ramstrom and Malin Korkeasalo, it opens with its subject, Carolyn Cassady, telling the filmmakers, “I’m not known as a writer.  The only reason anyone is interested in me is because I was married to Neal Cassady and was a lover of Jack Kerouac.  No one has ever cared about anything else.  Even you – so far.”  It gets darker.  “I wish I could stop talking about it,” Carolyn continues.  “I have to keep saying the same things over and over.  So it’s very tiresome.”  And darker.  “In a secret way I kind of dig the attention.  So it’s, you know, a conflict.”

We learn other things about conflicted Carolyn Cassady, who is now an old lady with a crinkly, sour face.  We learn that she wrote a book called Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg – “to set the record straight and not be bothered,” she claims.  We learn that she’s still pissed off that she didn’t get a dime of royalties for the iconic photograph she took of Jack and Neal that graces the cover of Neal’s unfinished autobiography, The First Third.  We learn that Neal frequently left her at home to raise their three children while he ricocheted around the country, to Tangier and Mexico City and back, fucking anything that walked upright, male or female, eventually abandoning his booze-marinated buddy Kerouac in favor of Ken Kesey and his acidophilic Merry Pranksters, tripping with them until he collapsed on some railroad tracks in Mexico and died at the age of 41.  As Carolyn dryly notes, “He didn’t quite get the marriage thing together.”

Their son John, who is obviously damaged goods, says, “I was, like, Neal’s fan rather than his kid.”  Yet John Cassady soldiers on, giving talks at the Beat Museum in San Francisco, introducing his mother at readings, exploring potential new revenue streams such as a beverage called “Cassady Wine” that comes in a jug with a handle to make it look like authentic hobo rotgut.

Sitting through this creepy movie was the longest 70 minutes I’ve spent outside a jail cell, and it reminded me of the recent William S. Burroughs documentary, A Man Within, which I wrote about here last year.  They’re both part of the tsunami of beat documentaries, biographies, critical studies, feature films, magazine articles, memoirs, websites and blogs that just keeps rolling along.  I said it last year, but after watching Love Always, Carolyn I’ll say it again: Will you Beat hagiographers please be quiet, please?

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| 10 books mentioned 12 4 min read
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Being Bad Is Sad: Bojack Horseman & Boethius

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August 23, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 5 6 min read

“You were born broken. That’s your birthright.” BoJack Horseman is an unlikely critical darling. A lewd, animated comedy about a talking horse, critics have heralded its “earned tragedy” and “hypnotic, often horrifying” pull. One simply called it “an unblinking, incredibly empathetic portrait of middle-aged melancholy.” So, not comedy as usual. But BoJack Horseman is more than a surprising treatise on depression. The show operates with philosophical heft, stumbling on big truths through bad behavior, felt observation, and anthropomorphic slapstick. There is no escape from despair for our eponymous equine. He brings it on himself and he firebombs it onto others. But BoJack Horseman isn’t a nihilistic show, however hard it sometimes insists on a meaningless universe. That’s not its final message or the most powerful truths it unearths (through season three, at least). Instead, along with self-destruction, the show features a pathology of hobbling regret, and the doggedness with which BoJack cycles through both gives rise to a curious philosophical correlate: We’re born broken, and yet our wicked choices punish us. Somehow, BoJack the alcoholic, humanoid horse has bumped into Boethius the 6th-century Christian philosopher.

A former Roman senator jailed by Theodoric the Great around 524 AD, Boethius produced a treatise called the Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned. And what an apt figure for gross-out animation! In the Consolation, however, Boethius attempts to explain how justice, despite all appearances, is carried out even when evil men seem to prosper and good men to suffer. This is an urgent idea for a guy who thinks he doesn’t deserve to be executed. The explanation isn’t satisfying in total — almost no defense of the problem of evil is — but it’s enlightening all the same. C.S. Lewis summed up the concept this way: “The good are always rewarded and the wicked are always punished, by the mere fact of being what they are. Evil power and evil performance are the punishment of evil will” (The Discarded Image, emphasis mine).

A simpler way to understand the argument is a blunt, distasteful thought experiment. If you are a good person who has never murdered anyone, would you rather become a person who murdered someone, or become the victim of a murder? A crude hypothetical, yes, but being evil carries with it some harm, some tragedy, some awfulness which is recognizable from a general instinct to recoil. We don’t want to be bad, because that’s a hell in itself.

Interestingly, BoJack Horseman builds to this idea by first establishing a personal take on original sin. BoJack can’t re-route a glitch in his system. A former sitcom star, he retains the immortal glow of 1990s success, but is a novelty more than a celebrity. The depression he feels, however, runs deeper than his superficial career or cultural irrelevance. We see how BoJack’s cruelty and narcissism inflict real consequences on others, and we also see that BoJack genuinely regrets these fallouts. His dying mentor and one-time best friend — estranged by the horse’s overwhelming selfishness — cuts to the quick on this front:
You want to think of yourself as the good guy. Well I know you better than anyone and I can tell you that you’re not. In fact, you’d probably sleep a lot better at night if you just admitted to yourself that you’re a selfish, goddamned coward who takes whatever he wants and doesn’t give a shit about who he hurts. That’s you. That’s Bojack Horseman.
BoJack drives home from this conflict in shellshock. His ghostwriter Diane is with him and unsure what to say. They stop, and in the midst of his self-loathing, his genuine ache of remorse, he kisses her. The problem is she’s dating a close colleague, and at the moment he wishes he could change, he just screws up again and regrets that, too.

BoJack’s mishaps and self-induced mayhem escalate. At the end of season one he burns down his relationship with Diane, a confidant as well as his ghostwriter, and then begs her to tell him if he’s a good person deep down. She says nothing as he pleads. In season two, he wins a Golden Globe for a book he didn’t write and is replaced by first-rate CGI for a movie. The situations are as whacky as they sound, only they’re paired with BoJack’s self-hatred and crippling need to find something that lasts, a success that will validate his existence. It’s almost too easy to note the parallels to Boethius’s take on Fortuna’s Wheel, wherein the blind mechanism of nature meets out worldly goods without considering moral conditions. BoJack is awarded and punished in terms of societal well-being arbitrarily, which tells us (and him) nothing of his goodness, happiness, or ultimate punishment. He seems to accept this reality, only to fall so far down a hole of cynicism and escapism that he nearly seduces an old friend’s 17-year old daughter. This occurs after months of receiving the same family’s charity and comfort. He’s a wreck, and feels every splinter of self-devastation.

BoJack decides he needs a friend, one friend, and he might be okay despite the hollowness of success. Season three ruptures even this possibility as he betrays his only intimates again and again, and receives the broad side of a sermon truth: “You are all the things that are wrong with you. It’s not the alcohol, or the drugs, or all the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid. It’s you.” At some point, amidst all the mistakes of our lives, however much we’ve been caught in someone else’s crossfire, we’re left with the ugly truth of our own shame. We are shameful, and we can’t seem to shed the slick of it from our bodies. This is the emotional core of the doctrine of original sin. Which, wow. Heavy, right? BoJack Horseman: like The Simpsons, but depressing.

BoJack, in this light, is Boethius’s successful evildoer, well-paid for bad behavior and unpunished by society for cruel decisions. Yet he can’t escape his self-made pain, whereby the whims of fortune — money, fame, and even friendship — seem as nothing compared with the stings of wickedness. He wants to know if he’s a good person deep down because he can’t live with himself, can’t stand himself, and feels punished by the very fact of his own behavior. And then by the end of season three he might even be a killer. Not a murderer, if such a distinction is possible, but an accessory to a former cast-mate’s overdose. Sarah Lynn, who played one of the children on his old sitcom, becomes his bender buddy, and after they scream across America in a haze of blackouts, they sit together in an illuminated planetarium. BoJack rhapsodizes about the beauty of the moment, and then realizes she’s dead. Even if she was courting disaster on her own, maybe she wouldn’t have died without someone pushing her, a father figure, a horse with drug stamina with whom a skinny former child star could never compete. The zaniness of the show — the fact that its lead is a horse — bleeds directly into its tragedy. BoJack is the problem. “I don’t know how to be,” he says. “It doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get easier… I’m poison.” Boethius’s argument is more nuanced than “bad people feel bad about being bad,” but BoJack’s behavior and subsequent unraveling serve as an emotional outline wherein his selfishness punishes itself.

All of these specific theological and philosophical ideas are no doubt alien to the explicit vision of Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman. For all the moralizing, pseudo-psychology, and downright pontification of its characters, the show is written by comedians struggling with felt truths. The pain of depression, of repetitive and lasting self-deprecation, is their entry into all larger statements. The regret of a hangover, of months of hangovers, of breaking trust with everyone you know and love, is the moral center of this weird, cartoon universe. But the moral center is there, however undercut by the jokes, and the larger truths are there as well. Other dramas dabbling in nihilism lack such a vulnerable heart of regret either because they don’t show enough fallout or because they don’t show enough compunction. Other satires, meanwhile, might match BoJack Horseman joke for joke but rarely plumb the depths of the darkness they acknowledge.

Yet, importantly for any parallels to Boethius, the show retains a concealed romanticism through all this tragic contemplation. The latest season finale shows BoJack Horseman driving into the heart of the West, into big-sky hopelessness, closing his eyes and preparing to die. He can let the car veer. He can be done. But he sees a herd of horses in the distance. He sees them sweating, and he doesn’t kill himself. They look free, and even though he deserves all the pain he’s brought upon himself, BoJack keeps control of his car. This is the hope of something beyond justice, but that only a justice like Boethius’s could allow: some sense of purpose, a whiff of a plan, in the midst of a desert. The tale of BoJack’s brokenness is powerful because he doesn’t want to be broken; while he can’t seem to fix himself, nor can he resist hoping that someone, or something, might.

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| 10 books mentioned 5 6 min read
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The Not-So-Silver Screen: Writers Acting in Film

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July 12, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 28 4 min read

Writers often make cameo appearances in films based on their stories. Occasionally, they play themselves in movies. Some playwrights, by nature of their proximity to actors and the theater, are almost better known for acting than for their writing (Wallace Shawn and Sam Shepard, for example).

There are writers, however, who act in films that have nothing to do with their own writing. Who are some of these authors, and how do they fare on the big screen?

1. Calvin Trillin – Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
In his debut performance as Uncle Milton in Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy, Calvin Trillin can be called subtle. The author of Tepper Isn’t Going Out and About Alice is doing one of the things he does best: eating dinner. He is also relatively avuncular, if your uncles are, like mine, the sort who basically ignore you. (You can catch most of his performance here starting at 1:05.)

Trillin followed up his Sleepless in Seattle performance with a role in another Nora Ephron film, Michael (1996). As the sheriff who throws the eponymous archangel and his entourage in jail, Trillin has a few lines, but he appears acutely conscious of the camera — and determined to turn away from it. How like a writer.

2. George Plimpton – Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The late editor of the Paris Review auditioned for the role of himself in Paper Lion (1968), based on his book of the same name, but the part went to Alan Alda. However, Plimpton brought his transatlantic honk to many movies. He made his film debut as a Bedouin running across the desert in David Lean’s epic and went on to make 18 more big-screen appearances. He donned a cowboy hat in Howard Hawks’ Rio Lobo (1970) and partied with club kids in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998). He logged bit roles in The Detective (1968), L.A. Story (1991), and Good Will Hunting (1997), among others.

3. Jerzy Kosinski – Reds (1981)
George Plimpton appeared as an editor in Reds (1981), which also featured writer Jerzy Kosinski as Grigory Zinoviev, the Russian revolutionary-turned-bureaucrat. Kosinski’s portrayal of Zinoviev is cold, furious, and authentic. Before filming began, Kosinski also convinced director Warren Beatty that the latter was having a panic attack. Beatty says, “I found that for some reason my feet were sweating profusely…Kosinski was hiding under the table pouring hot tea into my shoes very gradually.”

Plimpton and Kosinski also had cameos in A Fool and His Money (1986). Plimpton played God. Kosinski was a beggar. Literary Brat-Packer Tama Janowitz made a brief appearance as a talk-show host. By all reports, the film is terrible. Pre-Speed Sandra Bullock had a small role. She is featured prominently in the re-cut trailer.

4. Maya Angelou – Poetic Justice (1993)
Poetic Justice was directed and written by John Singleton but Maya Angelou supplied the poetry recited by Justice, played by Janet Jackson. Angelou also had a small role as June, one of three sisters whom Justice encounters at a family reunion. Angelou also played a woman named May and read her poem “In and Out of Time” in Madea’s Family Reunion (2006). The writer is comfortable on camera, impressive and sonorous. Really, though, Maya Angelou plays Maya Angelou, even when she’s ostensibly a character named after a month.

5. Martin Amis – A High Wind in Jamaica (1965)
A very blond, 13-year-old Amis appeared in the film based on Richard Hughes’ 1929 novel. The story has been described as The Lord of the Flies meets Peter Pan. British children who are being sent to England for schooling find their ship commandeered by pirates. The pirates prove juvenile, while the children find their blood lust awakened by the plundering and pillaging. Amis describes the making of the movie in his memoir, Experience. Puberty hit the future writer during filming, forcing filmmakers to overdub Amis’ voice with that of a young girl’s.

6. Salman Rushdie – Then She Found Me (2007)
In the film based on Elinor Lipman’s book of the same name, the author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children plays physician to a pregnant Helen Hunt. The film is filled with off-puttingly familiar mugs: Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Colin Firth. Most distracting of all may be Rushdie’s. He tries his best, but let’s face it: SALMAN RUSHDIE, fatwa survivor, ex-husband of Padma Lakshmi, plays an obstetrician who is not using enough gel while operating an ultrasound machine. Disbelief has not been suspended if the audience* starts yelling, “Use more gel, Rushdie! Use more gel!”

*Okay, I was watching it alone in my living room. Still.

8. Norman Mailer – Cremaster 2 (1999)
Mailer acted, directed, and wrote many films (including Maidstone [1970], in which Mailer’s character’s fight with his brother, played by Rip Torn, turns into a real-life brawl). But Mailer also received good notices for his role in Ragtime (1981), based on the book by E.L. Doctorow, in which he portrayed architect Stanford White, and as Harry Houdini in artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 (1999). Barney’s avant-garde film was loosely based on the story of Gary Gilmore, who claimed to be the illegitimate grandson of Houdini, and was convicted of killing two Utah gas station attendants. Gilmore was also the subject of Mailer’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Executioner’s Song.

9. Gore Vidal – Gattaca (1997)
In 1971, Norman Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal in the greenroom of the Dick Cavett show (the on-camera portion of the spat can be found here). Clearly, the two writers shared a sense of theatricality which might explain their attraction to the cinema. Vidal enjoyed turns in Tim Robbins’ political satire Bob Roberts (1992) and the comedy Igby Goes Down (2002), among others. Vidal also had a supporting role as the sinister head of a space agency in the dystopian thriller, Gattaca, which also starred novelist Ethan Hawke. 

10. Anita Loos – Camille (1926)
This 33-minute silent film loosely based on Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias, probably shouldn’t qualify for this list — it’s essentially a home movie of a drunken party — but the cast is completely insane. Paul Robeson! Clarence Darrow! Charlie Chaplin! Loos, writer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame, played the title role. Essayist H.L. Mencken, and novelists Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and W. Somerset Maugham made appearances. Publisher Alfred Knopf also had a cameo.

11. Extras
N+1 editor Keith Gessen had a minor role in Andrew Bujalski’s mumblecore Mutual Appreciation (2005). Beat writer William S. Burroughs appeared in Drugstore Cowboy (1989). Essayist and This American Life contributor David Rakoff acted in Capote (2005) and Strangers With Candy (2005). And finally, novelist and professional egoist Ayn Rand, an uncredited extra in Cecil B. Demille’s The King of Kings (1927), probably spent her life wondering why she wasn’t the star.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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