From: melcher@nets.com
Subject: 90 Minit Man
Date: August 7, 2005 11:07:20 PM MDT
90 Minute Man
"We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being." - Antonin Artaud (1938) Preface to "The Theater and It's Double"
Usually when we look out over the ocean of culture we only see the top of the waves. We've been trained by the movies to expect life to unroll in a series of reels - generally five - 90 to 110 minutes - from set up to confrontation to resolution. Truncated versions of the same arc are made to fit around timed rituals of consumption, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, a little bit of news with commercials; short stories, essays, descriptive paragraphs, routines. I've always preferred epics, continuous, complex and open ended. I like works that are about everything, like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysseus or War and Peace or Dune. I like trilogies and continuing series' and sequels and episodes and the long running miniseries. Although I don't have cable I'm in love with HBO, which I watch on DVD. Subscription television has taken the sensibilities of cinema and returned it to the small screen, yet extended it into long studies of character and complexity that stretch over weeks and years. Here's something that begins to reflect the real complexities of existence, and isn't constrained to the formulas laid in stone that dominate the 90 minute movie or the ten minute segments between commercials.
The magic of storytelling is that we get caught up in identifying with the personalities and characters we listen to or read about or watch on the stage or screen. Antonin Artaud, in his manifestoes for what he called "The Theater of Cruelty," proposed a form of culture in which the audience was engaged not merely as spectators but as the medium itself upon which the artist strives to act. For Artaud the theater was culture and its' purist motivation was to confront society in a manner that caused it to change. He rebelled against the conventional notions of art as entertainment and catharsis, where in proscribed arcs of time good invariably conquers evil or vice versa, or a set of characters are briefly analyzed and a set of problems solved. To Artaud theater should ask the questions and incite an audience to action. In the 30's and 40's when he wrote and acted television had not yet been born. Both theater and the movies were a relatively formal spectacle in which audiences politely took their seats and obeyed the rules of the house. No one fancied that the spectacle could be confined to a small box and placed in the corner of the living room where it would become the actual centerpiece of both domestic and social life as well as the primary vehicle for both social control and evolution.
As we sat around the screen and gazed along with the Captains Kirk and Picard and his crew at what was projected on the surface of another screen which dominating the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, we felt the distance between fictional narrative and social reality narrowing. A television series creates characters and situations that mirror the audience and then responds in turn to the needs and desires of that audience over a hopefully long span of ratings and seasons. Actors live with their characters as the viewers live with the show, growing into them and their situations, allowing them into the day by day conversation and flow of our lives. What we choose to look at both reflects and illuminates our personal superficialities and depth of consciousness.
The other night I watched the DVD edition of the first episode of one of my favorite short-lived television shows in the last years of the twentieth century, Chris Carter's "Millennium." Something about that series captured for me the waves of building dread that accumulated in those years of growing anxiety before 9/11 and the breakout of endless unwinable wars. The main character in the series, Frank Black, could see directly through the gaze of that which upsets all of our moral certainties. Before Chris Carter with his 'X-Files" and "Millennium," David Lynch entered similar psychological territory in his earlier series, "Twin Peaks." From Lynch, Carter borrowed plot and narrative elements and even actors. Both artists are fascinated by the dark layers that lay between the Norman Rockwell facades of American culture and the truth of who we actually are. Both used the FBI as a metaphor for an essentially spiritual investigation into the nihilistic realms where evil born of ignorance and fear threatens those of us in search of something real in which to believe. In the decades of dissolution following the sixties Americans were haunted by dreams of apocalypse and vanished utopias. Gradually many of us covered over both nightmare and dreams with our will to power and the drive for acquisition, all the while floating on an undercurrent of vague dread and the loss of meaning. Many of us retreated from despair into the simplistic world of fundamentalist religious fantasy.
When "Millennium" was cancelled I gave up on watching American network television for many years. Not until the rise of cable and the recent packaging of several long running series' on DVD did I start looking seriously at the form again. In the ensuing years the ninety minute theatrical Hollywood release pretty much lost the nerve that briefly held sway in the seventies when control passed to a new generation of young directors who had honed their skill on television. They turned the tables on the old studio formulas, but were overturned eventually by financial realities. Since then Hollywood has once more returned to the creative control of financier. The necessity of making back huge investments in increasingly competitive and narrow markets has resulted in more and more films that appear to be created by committees. Outside of the occasional breakthrough of independent films mainstream American cinema has pretty much become an extension of Disneyland and Marvel Comics; thrills, spills and light entertainment sprinkled with social commentary at about the level of a Jay Leno monologue. As the price of admission goes up and the technology comes home to living rooms fewer and fewer people are actually going to the movies.
In the 90 minute arc there's really only time for endings, for bringing things to more or less satisfactory conclusions. Movies leave us with little sense of the ongoing, or of the future. We've all wondered when the happy couple fades behind the titles 'what happens next?' How can these people keep things going when they aren't in crisis mode? Television breaks out of these constraints, carrying the narrative from week to week, introducing new characters, getting rid of old ones, creating a sense of something that continues toward ambiguous futures. The ongoing series using its' extended time to create characters with the depth that can only be achieved through exploration and the input of many creative minds. As mainstream movies dive more and more into action and effects, television has taken on the task of exploring character and society. Even in the old fashioned cop dramas and situation comedies, not to mention the plethora of reality shows, the real fascination we have is with the characters and how they expose what's under our own skin. In cable series that aren't caught in the commercial constraints of having to meet the common denominators of mainstream taste America is actually fulfilling somewhat the promise of cinema to hold up a mirror to what we are. In long running dramas like The Sopranos or Deadwood or Six Feet Under we see culture illuminated and perhaps begin to understand the motivations of ourselves and others. This is truly adult television, made for those who are ready and willing to look underneath the skin of who we appear to be.
The ability of Hollywood movies to deal with reality has always been hopelessly compromised by its' own formulas and the demands and economics of of the studio and star systems. Revolutionary creativity mostly takes place around the edges and in the technical and special effects realm. Here imagination and creativity are allowed relatively free reign, particularly within the burgeoning cinematic genre of science fiction and comic book fantasy. Of course, those of us interested in the big picture, and questions of who and what and why have always found refuge in these worlds of speculation and fantasy. Only recently, through the miracles of digital media which enable moviemakers to create entirely convincing imaginary worlds have these genres begun to dominate the popular mainstream. Perhaps in times of great uncertainly and social dislocation we are naturally attracted to works that spring out of the world of dream and vision.
The only thing that carried me through several decades of narrative mediocrity on television was the "Star Trek" franchise which, in all of its' incarnations, stubbornly cast its' gaze back to a more hopeful time when we dreamed of different futures. The trekkies carried forward a uniquely American vision of techno-utopian possibilities. The original series allowed a crew of slightly anarchistic pioneers and explorers to make up rules of engagement on the fly as they encountered alien races and realities in time and space. With "The Next Generation" we had entered the technological expansion that came on the heels of the end of the cold war, when new forms of media and the computer revolution began breaking America out of its' paranoid straitjacket. The crew of Picard's Enterprise approached their journey from the board room, as the new corporate messiahs of a multiracial world order. "Deep Space Nine" took us into the Clinton years, when the dangers of a new world order emerged and we saw ourselves to be the responsible leaders of a still hopeful world, We approached problems with our good faith and superior mediation skills, backed up by the unstoppable force of multinational armies. "Voyager" wanders into new territories of uncertainty. A diverse crew made up of both rebels and soldiers is lost in a chaotic sector of the galaxy, and must come together in common necessity to face a hostile universe. The crew is united under the auspices of an ultimately autocratic captain who enforces the benign but ultimately militaristic order of the Federation. In the most recent incarnation, "Enterprise," the Trek universe turns from a tale about exploration to succumb to a bleak post 9/11 vision of escalating war and paranoia. While echoing the descent of American culture into fear, the show betrayed an essential "Star Trek" vision of humanity embodied in Gene Rodenberry's concept of the Prime Directive, which was essentially a principle of non-interference in alien cultures. Certainly this was in response to a valid threat of extinction, but the choice of preventive war violated something essential to Rodenberry's vision, and once the step was taken the show got stuck in a gear of permanent unresolved conflict, which likely led in part to its' eventual cancellation.
During all this time, in a parallel universe, George Lucas was providing us a mythical dimension where technology and human freedom are continually polarized. In virtually every scene and every character and situation "Star Wars" poses the conflict between a complex and ultimately mysterious natural force and the absolute will to power of human culture entirely in thrall to the logic of unrestrained technological power. As of the more recent 'prequels' he left us facing a too familiar scenario - a society governed by fear where an imperial leader uses war as a pretext to assume absolute power. In this mythical and parallel universe we've been left hanging, although we know from the original episodes that the rebels eventually triumph, and there's twenty years between the rise of the Empire and it's fall. We are now embarked on a process of creating narratives that can fill in the blanks.
It's not surprising that Lucas' original vision of the battle between the Jedi and the Empire was inspired by the Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa,
These days the younger generation is becoming hooked on Japanese cinema, through anime and video games. Our children, who daily watch their culture, community and families being methodically destroyed by the addictive machinery of post capitalist greed, look across the waters to those we once threatened with oblivion. The Japanese have looked directly into the face of absolute technological destruction and survived. You can see it in their narratives and particularly in their movies, going back to the giant rubber monsters like Godzilla and Rodan that used to repeatedly devastate Tokyo, and probably still do. Where the spiritual direction of western culture has always been up and out of the body, until we project our problems in the four dimensions of outer space, the Japanese and Chinese cultures emerge out of the ancient worship of nature spirits. In their worlds of fantasy and science fiction technology invariably confronts and is eventually humbled by the awesome powers of the natural world.
The two most uniquely American genres in fiction are the western and the space opera. Both are apt characterizations of aspects of America's own relationship to the natural world. On the one hand Americans see themselves as restless independent spirits, having escaped the confines of an obsolete social order, always looking to the next horizon where we can newly recreate ourselves. Our heroes in movies and literature tend to be loners who resist submission to the collective while making themselves indispensable for it's survival. These two narratives are in continual tension and generally find their resolution when the lone hero either sacrifices himself for the greater good or takes up the reins of command. Our double nature is reflected in the institutions of governance with the dichotomy between president and congress, and in our spirituality, where we seek personal revelation and yet fall into slavish patterns of submission before both charismatic leaders and media celebrities.
America is a fabrication that emerges not out of relationship to the land, but from the imagination of a Christian culture that visualizes its' future to be in a place apart from the precincts of birth and death. Our collective connection to the physical world is at best indirect, viewed as something to exploit or mine or rape for it's resources in order to construct the fabric of our idealization. Americans don't generally view the earth as protector or nurturing spirit, but rather as an adversary to be conquered and controlled. Between ourselves and nature we exude an insulating layer of well regulated technology. In this sense the wandering space ship is an accurate characterization of America's self image.
Two new narratives in the realm of sci-fi television approach this dilemma from two different directions. The new "Battlestar Galactica" offers the familiar military model, common to the majority of space dramas, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Star Trek" and "Star Wars." In all of these epics the character of the loner, the cowboy, the independent spirit is ultimately submerged to the demands of the collective. The needs of the many supersede the needs of the one. The society within the "Battlestar" is constantly perched on the edge of extinction where the forces of individual desire threaten to pull things apart in many directions, any of which could lead to ultimate destruction. It's an extremely refined model for society tenuously balanced on the cusps of a spiritual crisis. In an interesting variation on classical themes, the machines that seek to destroy humanity worship a single god - a reflection of the scientistic god that has come to dominate human cultures in the modern age - while the humans, true to form, worship numerous gods and goddess in a pantheistic reflection of the true varieties of our spiritual experience. There's little room here for the anarchistic spirit of the outlaw, as the narrative is one of mass exodus versus total destruction.
The other narrative is delightfully portrayed in the short running series "Firefly" and its' spinoff, the upcoming movie, "Serenity." Josh Whedon (creator of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel") has captured the essentially American outlaw spirit, and successfully taken it into outer space. The show could in some ways be seen as the "anti-Star Trek" since none of the heroes wear uniforms. Instead the narrative breaks entirely with the military mythos that defines so much of the American psyche in these days of growing terror. In Whedon's outlaw fantasy the uniformed functionaries of the centralized federated government are mostly adversaries and mostly to be avoided. "Firefly's" lead character, Malcolm Reynolds, is in fact taken from the same mold as the George Lucas' space outlaw Han Solo; he drives a freighter, he wears the clothes of a rebel, he deals in contraband, he distrusts the authorities. Where the Solo character's distinguishing feature was a rather adolescent but endearing persona which constantly fled from responsibility (his trademark line: "It's not my fault!"), the character of Reynolds chooses to be responsible for the well-being of a closely knit collective of outlaws and misfits. He follows an absolute and well-defined code of personal honor and loyalty, and his resistance to the apparatus of the state is a matter of conscious and calculated choice. He is essentially a freedom fighter who lives a life of resistance in the face of an over-weaning government. His most notable line is, "I aim to misbehave."
When I stumbled onto the starship Serenity (pre-emptively cancelled by the brain dead folks at FOX television only to be brought back to life on DVD and at the movies by an overwhelming fan response) I discovered a narrative space filled with the genuine warmth of human respect and kindness. As much as I like science fiction it can very seldom be characterized as having warmth. Here was a story about an isolated island of humanity drifting beyond the authorized edges of the socially acceptable. It felt very familiar. I liked the sense of place created in the show. It felt a little bit like home, and I liked these characters, so flawed and uncertain and determined to find new ways to live.
The closing images of the last two "Star Wars" films are those of war and oncoming darkness. In this collective theater we call western civilization where culture is so much shaped by mass media we increasingly need new images and narratives of rebellion that aren't destructive but instead nurture both the earth and our views of other people. These are the elements that attract me to Serenity's journey and crew.
I will stop gushing now. Check out the movie "Serenity" at the end of September or find and watch the DVD package of the whole single season of "Firelfy."
11:19:28 PM 
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