Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 105

Behind Her Eyes: Ending Pulled Out of Fantastical Hat

There's a fundamental guiding principle about mystery/science fiction hybrids that I've heard endorsed by many on science fiction convention panels over the years, including me, that you shouldn't mix protocols, because your readers and viewers won't like it.  Here's a hypothetical example: a murdered body is found in a room with the doors and windows locked from the inside and completely intact.  The world in which that body is found is ours, in 2021.  You can't solve the crime by suddenly, at the end of the story, have the murderer beaming in from the outside. 

Now I'm telling you this because, although Behind Her Eyes doesn't quite do that, it comes close, too close, and I was irritated by the ending.   It spoiled an otherwise suave, tense, stylish six-part mini-series that just showed up a few nights ago on Netflix.

The set-up is: David is unhappily married to Adele, starts an affair with Louise (whom he meets in a bar and they kiss before they both realize that Louise is working in David's new office), and Adele, not knowing about David and Louise, becomes close friends with Louise.  There's also another character, Rob, who was friends with Adele and David a decade ago, and one of the two may have murdered.  That's a pretty strong and intriguing set-up, and the story is very well played by Eve Hewson as Adele, Simona Brown as Louise, and Tom Bateman as David -- especially Hewson and Brown, who are riveting and exceptional in every scene.   The dialogue is snappy, too, with Louise tossing off lines like "you washed me away" after David takes a shower after he makes love to Louise.

But the plot is good, too, up to but not including the end.   All three major characters -- David, Louise, and Adele -- are occasional liars, and one is very likely a murderer.  It's never clear who is taking advantage of whom, until it all comes to a head and is spelled out at the very end.  

[Spoilers ahead.]

It turns out that Rob mastered the ability, at least ten years ago, to swap his consciousness with someone else.  He does this with Adele, who doesn't like her consciousness inside Rob, and when "he" says so, Rob inside Adele kills Adele inside Rob.   Something similar happens at the end, after six episodes in which the only inkling of such abilities are ephemeral whisps in air when the characters are sleeping and talk of lucid dreams.

Which to me was a rabbit out a hat, a beaming in to solve a murder, in a story that deserved a less fantastical ending.

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For All Mankind: Season 1 and Episode 2.1: Alternate Space Race Reality

Ronald D. Moore is best known for his creation of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Outlander, two very different TV series which were (BSG) and are (Outlander) justly lauded masterpieces of science fiction (maybe Outlander is science fantasy, but the point still holds).  Moore had a lot riding on For All Mankind, another, very different kind of science fiction series.  I just saw the entire first season (which began to air on Apple TV in November 2019) and the first episode of the second season (which started airing yesterday).   It's at least as good as Battlestar Galactica and a little better than Outlander.  In my never humble opinion.

The series rests on a bold premise:  had the Soviets beaten the US to the Moon by just a slight margin in 1969 -- one month -- the result would have been much better for getting humans out into space because the competition between the two superpowers would have continued and intensified.  In literary terms, it would have set in motion an alternate reality in which the two superpowers continued vying to be the lead and dominant humans beyond our planet.

As far as our reality or real history, it's entirely plausible that the Soviet Union could have pulled a fast one and beaten us to the Moon by a month.  It's not really clear, to this day, why the Soviets after the mid-1960s fell so far behind the US, after being first to get a satellite (Sputnik), then a satellite with a dog (Laika), and then a satellite with a human being (Yuri Gagarin) off of this planet into space.  Indeed, the best explanation I've read of why the Soviet Union fell behind the U.S. in the space race comes from a little-known science fiction novel published in 2000, Red Moon, which was also the title of the first episode of For All Mankind.

The alternate history and the real history in For All Mankind was handled plausibly and provocatively, no easy task to pull off smoothly, as the first season and the beginning of the second season did.  My favorite alternate history gambit in the first season is Ted Kennedy cancels his trip to Chappaquiddick, to focus on why the US space program fell behind the Soviets, and is elected President in 1972.  Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters deliver the news without being named via actors who look and sound like them.  Nixon, Teddy, and (at the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2) Reagan are presented in real footage and photographs, via voices that deliver alternate-history speech via impersonators or who knows how they got those voices, but it worked. The second season starts with a nice handful of alternate history touches, including John Lennon surviving the attempt on his life but the Pope not.

Other major changes in the history of For All Mankind include women achieving importance as astronauts and in flight control long before they did in our reality.  Permanent bases are established on the Moon by the U.S. and the Soviets in the 1970s.  By the 1980s, the science of space travel has led to electric cars on Planet Earth.   But the human success in space has by no means wiped away all the inequities we have suffered from in this reality.   Prejudice against gays warp the personal life of at least one astronaut, and immigrants are treated badly by the FBI obsessed with rooting out Soviet spies.

The personal lives of the astronauts of course play a major and tempestuous role in the narrative.   Ed Baldwin (played by Joel Kinnaman who never misses), Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones), and Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger) are my favorites, but all the characters are memorable and well acted.

For All Mankind picked a good time to debut its second season, the day after the NASA Rover landed on Mars in our reality.  I'm hoping that the series continues long enough to show us astronauts arriving on Mars -- I'll be reviewing every episode from now on -- and that this alternate reality converges with our reality, in which we send people to Mars, too.

Further of why our own space program stalled after Moon landing:  The Missing Orientation

And here's an alternate-history space-race novel:

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Trump Impeachment Aftermaths

Here are some of my thoughts about the Trump impeachment acquittal and where we go from here, a week after the conclusion of the Senate trial:

1. Mitch McConnell's vote and statement:  I of course was very disappointed but not surprised by McConnell's vote to acquit Trump.  I was surprised by McConnell's accompanying statement, both the content and the intensity.  In particular, that McConnell said 

There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.... Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen. Unless the statute of limitations is run, still liable for everything he did while he was in office. Didn’t get away with anything, yet. Yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation and former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.  [See here for the transcript of McConnell's statement.]

There's no doubt that the country -- and therefore the world -- would have been better off had Trump been found guilty and thereby prohibited from ever holding public office again.  But McConnell's statement is nonetheless part of the record of the impeachment process, and is and will be of great value.  It shows that, whatever McConnell's reasons for voting for acquittal, he nonetheless thought Trump was responsible for the insurrectionist riot, and, just as important, ought to be held accountable for his actions and non-actions.  Coming from the Republican Senate Minority leader, that's significant, and will be prominently noted by historians.

2. Republican attacks on Republican Senators who voted to convict Trump:  McConnell also said that "I respect my colleagues who’ve reached either conclusion" about whether a conviction of Trump in the impeachment trial would be constitutional.  Not so some other Republicans around the country, including  local Pennsylvania  GOP Chair Dave Ball,  who said

We did not send him [Senator Pat Toomey, who voted to convict Trump] there to vote his conscience or ‘do the right thing' or whatever he said he was doing there.  We sent him there to represent us.  [Interview on KDKA-TV]

Now there's been a debate as old as our republic about whether our elected representatives should vote their conscience or ascertain what the people who elected them want.  I've always been a strong supporter of conscience, on general principle, and also given the unreliability of polling in discovering what the voters want.  But the position of finding out what the public wants and basing your vote on that at least has a logic to it, and is consistent with the democratic process.  Is that what Ball was urging?  I don't think so.  The "we" in that last sentence more likely refers to the Republican Party, who put Toomey up for general election and supported his campaign.   And if that was what Ball was saying, that Toomey should keep in line with his party's policies, that's disturbingly reminiscent of insistence on adherence to the party line in totalitarian societies like the former Soviet Union.

3. Biden Administration response to Trump acquittal:  The Biden Administration clearly wants to focus on the pandemic and other challenges it views as more urgent than what to do now about Trump.  Vice President Kamala Harris said today on the Today Show:

Right now I'm focused on what we need to do to get relief to American families and that is my highest priority, it's our administration's highest priority, it's our job, it's the job we were elected to do, and that's my focus. [See more on that here.]

I agree completely with Biden and Harris.  Not only is the pandemic an obviously immediate life and death matter -- on a massive scale -- but there are other ways to hold Trump to account.  New York and Georgia are already investigating criminal charges against Trump, and the U.S. Attorney General's office, which Biden wants to be non-political, i.e., not serving Biden's political interests as Attorney General William Barr did Trump's, can investigate Trump and seek to indict him, without instruction from Biden.

In sum, although conviction of Trump in the impeachment trial was amply merited and would have benefited the country, we who value justice and freedom and democracy are in a good position to do something about the fascist former President who did so much damage to our country.

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Big Sky 1.9: Crafty Ronald

I saw but didn't have a chance to review last week's episode 1.8 of Big Sky -- I was too busy watching and talking about the impeachment trial -- but I'm back with a review of tonight's episode 1.9, and whew, it easily was one of the best episodes of the series so far.

Let me start by mentioning my favorite line.  That was from Big Rick's lawyer, who says "Bobby Orr voted for Trump".  I already forgot the context, but it's a standalone great line anyway.

And, of course, one big development in 1.9 is that Rick will no longer need an attorney.  His wife hammered him to death.  I'm pretty but not positive he was faking his amnesia, and he certainly remembered enough to convince his wife that he was evil Rick who almost killed her.  Well, for Big Rick's fans, there'll always be that lifelike cardboard stand-up figure of Rick.

The other big news is the brilliant strategizing of Ronald.  After killing his mother and the priest, and kidnapping the boy, and being recognized by Cassie, he manages to escape everyone's best efforts to nab him by employing elements of all three victims:  (1) his mother's corpse, dressed as a boy, nearly gets Jenny blown up, (2) he has the priest's body auto-drive the Tesla with the kidnapped boy next to him, which (3) leads everyone on a wild goose chase.  Well, not a goose chase, because thank goodness the boy is now safely back with his mother, but the chase was one of the wildest I've seen on television.

So Ronald's on the loose, Rick is dead, and the slate is almost clean.  And the show won't be back until April.  It certainly has had a unique narrative structure, with tonight's ending, and the winter break ending last year, which would have worked well as conclusions to a somewhat truncated and a very truncated series.  Is that what David Kelley had in mind, in case the series was cancelled?

Who knows, but I'm glad it wasn't, and I'll be back here in April with more reviews when Big Sky resumes.

See also Big Sky 1.1: A Pretty Big Deal ... Big Sky 1.2: The "Goods" and the Ruined Plan ... Big Sky 1.3: "You Kidnapped the Wrong Girl" ... Big Sky 1.4: Controls on Psychos ... Big Sky 1.5: Winter Finale Indeed! ... Big Sky 1.6: "Sweet Psycho" ... Big Sky 1.7: The Montana State Trooper

 
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Podcast: Review of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

My review of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, on Amazon Prime Video.  If Groundhog Day is a 10, I rate The Map of Tiny Perfect Things a substantial 9.   I explain why.

further reading, blog post:  Review of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

further listing:  Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time

Check out this episode!

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The Map of Tiny Perfect Things: Not Perfect But Close Enough

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, from the short story by Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and screenplay by him, debuted on Amazon Prime video a few days ago.   Its ratings on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are 6-7, but I think it's much better than that, well over 9.  It's said to be a Groundhog Day (the holiday and the movie) meets Valentine's Day (just the holiday), but it's more than that, too.

The similarity with Groundhog Day, which I'd give a 10 on that scale, is Mark is reliving the same day.  He confides this to his friend Henry, who, aware of Groundhog Day, suggests that Mark might be able to break out of this time loop by getting a girlfriend.  (Note: I like movies that explicitly reference other movies.  It's not the biggest deal, but it adds a nice meta-touch.)  Mark is in the process of trying to do that at the pool, by stopping a beach ball from hitting a girlfriend candidate, but not having much luck. Until Margaret enters the picture (literally and figuratively) and everything changes.

Slowly.  Mark and Margaret are clearly having fun, and are really attracted to each other, but Margaret says no when Mark wants to kiss her.  He's a little hurt, of course, and even more so when he connects the demurral to Margaret's leaving each evening after receiving a phone call from a medical student, Jared.  The course of true love never did run smooth, especially when that course is a time loop.

And here the movie takes a crucial turn.   As Mark and Margaret pull apart, we find Margaret at the center of the story.   She's still in the time loop, but it's her time loop.  And as her story unfolds we learn that, indeed, it's more her time loop than Mark's.   Her mind or whatever created the time loop, because her mother is dying, and she didn't want to lose her mother, didn't want that day to end.  That makes perfect sense, and I actually like that raison d'etre for the time loop even better than the reason in Groundhog Day.

But the one thing Margaret didn't expect or count on was finding someone like Mark.  And, ok, I won't spill any more of the plot.   I will say that I thought the title, though well explicated in the movie, doesn't due the truest heart and soul of the movie sufficient justice.  But the acting was great, both Kyle Allen as Mark and especially Kathryn Newton as Margaret, and the music was excellent, too, especially the Bruise's closing "1992," which not only worked just right for the movie but is an apt song for the real world around us today.    (Here's another, much lesser-known song that came to mind as I was watching The Map of Tiny Perfect Things:  "I Knew You By Heart".)

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Crime Scene: Calling Jung and Koestler

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, a four-episode true-crime documentary, debuted on Netflix a few days ago.  On the one hand, it's another example of an emerging sub-genre in True Crime:  the investigation of a crime, or presumed crime, by crowd-sourced Internet sleuths, which has had such notable examples as I'll Be Gone in the Dark (HBO, June-August 2020) and Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer  (Netflix, 2019) (I saw both, but reviewed neither, because enough is enough already).   On the other hand, Crime Scene exposes some coincidences so vexing that they call for Karl Jung or Arthur Koestler for explication, which of course they cannot provide, if only because they are no longer with us.

Crime Scene does provide a refreshing warning about Internet sleuths, refreshing because in most of these documentaries, the amateur web detectives are right when the police are wrong.  In Crime Scene, which details and investigates the death of Elisa Lam at the hotel in 2013, the Internet sleuths are wrong in their conclusion that Lam was murdered, and admit at the end that the police explanation that Lam, suffering from bipolar disorder, jumped in the water tank on the roof of the hotel and drowned in a death by accident. Among the consequences of the pixel investigators' error, they wrongly accused "death" heavy metalist Morbid of the murder (he was at the hotel a year before Lam's death), and ruined his life in an early example of cancel culture.

But the Internet researchers also uncovered at least two amazing coincidences, apparently inexplicable by conventional logic.  1.  Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the Cecil Hotel was situated, suffered an outbreak of tuberculosis when Lam was there.  And ... the name of a major test for tuberculosis is LAM-ELISA.  2. Lam purchased some books from The Last Bookstore on her ill-fated visit to LA.  And ... the bookstore's online registrant's postal code (whatever exactly that is) is V5G 4S2 -- if you put that code into Google Maps, it points you to the place where Lam is buried, in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Canada.

Ok, coincidences do happen.  But these two do seem to be more than the average coincidences that happen in life, like the first name of your new neighbor is the same as a childhood friend, and he or she went to the same high school as you and your friend, in a different city.  Carl Jung calls the more bizarre, all-but-impossible coincidences that can crop up in life -- or death, in the case of Elisa Lam -- a "synchronicity" or "meaningful coincidences," which operate outside of causal relationships.  Arthur Koestler in his Roots of Coincidence builds upon Jung,  and argues that such coincidences are para-normal, or outside and beyond the realm of science.

Whether you're convinced by Jung and Koester or not -- I'm not sure if I am -- there's no denying that the coincidences in Elisa Lam's true crime story are worthy of both theorists, and their appearance in Crime Scene may be its most durable virtue.

  

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Your Honor 1.10: Finale Irony

I just saw the finale of Your Honor: read no further if you don't know the ending of this marvelously well-acted series.

I'll start by saying I didn't like the ending -- not because it wasn't 100% well-motivated, and flowed from everything in the story, but, because, well, it was so unhappy,

Michael did everything he could to save his son.  Most of it worked.  He was willing to sacrifice himself to save Adam.  But there were too many deadly pieces in play.  It was impossible for Michael to account for all of them.  He certainly could not have foreseen that Eugene, with no moves left after Michael did not let him testify, would put a bullet in Adam when Eugene shot at and missed Carlo, who had killed Eugene's brother Kofi and was getting away with it.

I guess the moral of this story is you can't control events with so many deceptions at play.   Part of Adams's fate, though, was also sealed by his falling in love with Fia.  That's why Adam was at the celebration.  Jimmy already knew that Adam not Michael had hit-and-run killed Rocco.  So even if Eugene was not at the hotel, Adam would likely have been killed.

Ironically, or just to add to the irony, Eugene would not have gotten into the hotel had not Jimmy's men not been distracted with keeping Michael out.   And that's really a thumbnail of everything in this story; just about every lie Michael told ultimately worsened the situation for himself and Adam.

Back to the acting: this was a rare series in which every character was memorable.  The lawyers, the Baxter family, each could have a spinoff series of their own.  But most of all Bryan Cranston as Michael Desiasto aka Your Honor, who gave a tour de force (too weak a phrase) performance in this Shakespearean tragedy in New Orleans.

See also Your Honor 1.1: Taut Set-Up ... Your Honor 1.2: "Today Is Yesterday" ... Your Honor 1.3: The Weak Link ... Your Honor 1.4: The Dinner ... Your Honor 1.5: The Vice Tightens ... Your Honor 1.6: Exquisite Chess Game ...Your Honor 1.7: Cranston and Stuhlbarg Approaching Pacino and De Niro ... Your Honor 1.8: Nothing More Important ... Your Honor 1.9: Screeching Up to the Last Stop Before Next Week's Finale

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Why the First Amendment Does and Doesn't Protect Trump from Impeachment Conviction

There's been word that Trump's attorneys in his Senate impeachment trial will say Trump's incendiary words to the crowd before they turned and savagely attacked the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 were protected under the First Amendment, in particular that Congress "shall make no law abridging ... the freedom of speech".   So, Congress cannot punish Trump for the words he spoke on that morning.

Two arguments have been raised against that view.  

The first, I think, is incorrect.  I heard John Dean say on CNN (and other pundits on other channels) that the First Amendment is meant to protect citizens from the government, not the government (Trump as President) from the government (Congressional impeachment and Senatorial conviction).  But that can't be right.  If Trump as an American citizen has no First Amendment protections because he was President, how about the Vice President?  How about members of Congress?  How about Governors and Mayors and anyone who works for any part of the government?  Should First Amendment rights be waived for elected officials but not appointed officials?  How about for firefighters and sanitation workers?  Suspending any citizen's First Amendment rights because they are a government official creates an absurd slippery slope which would start with the President and extend to many millions of people -- as of 2011, the Office of Personnel Management reported 2.79 million people working for just the Federal government.  Do all of those people have no First Amendment rights?  Chances are few of those government employees knew they were surrendering their First Amendment rights when they signed up or campaigned for those jobs.

The second argument, presented by House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin, is much better and, I think, completely correct.  Representative Raskin said yesterday that the First Amendment doesn't protect someone who incites others to riot.   Those words spoken by Trump on that morning to an angry and armed crowd, urged to walk down the street to the U. S. Capitol, provoked not just a riot, but a riot that killed a police officer, and wounded more than a hundred more, not to mention the severe vandalizing and threat to lives of the Vice President, Senators, and members of Congress, and their staffs.  The First Amendment has been repeatedly cited by U. S. Supreme Courts as not protecting speech that directly leads to attacks on life, limb, and property, and that's precisely what Trump's exhortations to the crowd on January 6, 2021 did.

Trump is responsible for his riot-provoking words, which in fact provoked a deadly riot, and that's why the First Amendment offers him no protection for those words.  I think it's important to get right, and not confuse the issue with unspoortable arguments that people lose their First Amendment rights when they become part of government.

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Review of Andrey Mir's Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers

The full title of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization by Andrey Mir says it all:  the delivery of news on Twitter and social media to an increasing majority of people has replaced the attempt to disseminate facts and truth on traditional news media, with the new goal of massive engagement via likes, retweets, and shares, with the result that an informed public, however imperfectly constructed, is being shoved aside by a polarized populace seething with anger.  I would add: this is also the best book on media theory and assessment written in forty years.

Mir brings to bear the media insight of Marshall McLuhan, the political savvy of Walter Lippmann, the radical economy of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and much more in his detailed and probing analysis.  The 20th century began with newspapers selling news to readers and concluded with newspapers and radio and TV selling news to advertisers.  Both systems, though flawed, and for different reasons, were committed to making their utmost efforts to report the truth. Readers wouldn't tolerate too many falsities in their newspapers, and advertisers did not want to be associated with them, either.

All of that changed with the advent of social media, cheered at first, by many, including me, as uncorking the voice of the people, and pushing the haughty gatekeepers aka editors out of the way.   It was a case of Dylan's "Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall." Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring were seen by me and many others as early triumphs of these unshacklings of information.  I still feel that way about social media and their potentials.  But Mir convincingly tags and explains the darkside of this same liberation of news.

On Twitter, readers pay nothing for the news other than their time.  Viewers pay nothing for broadcast news, either, but the advertisers do.  Ads appear on social media, too, but they're barely distinguishable from the myriad bits of news, which all too often are no longer news, but opinion.  And since the posters of these news opinions seek validation via likes, shares, and retweets, a kind of natural selection winnows out the more moderate opinions.  The more controversial and extreme the fact-opinion, the more likely it is to be retweeted.

This tide of polarization engulfs the traditional media, too.  Mir explains, “Centrist experts can appear in the media, but they are not those who generate buzz, virality, and spin-off in the polarized media environment aimed at frustrating and engaging" (p. 316).   When was the last time you saw a Trumpist or even a moderate on MSNBC or CNN?   Once in a blue moon, at most. As a viewer of these two cable news stations, no more immune than any other human to the polarization and anger of our age, I can attest to being annoyed and even angry when a Trumpist or even a moderate appears unchallenged by aggressive hosts on these stations.  I don't watch much of Fox News, but from what I've seen, the same and worse is true in reverse: progressives unchallenged or not by hosts are virtually nonexistent over there.  Moreover, some hosts on Fox have no problem spouting outright lies like Trump won the 2020 election as fact.

Keep in mind that Mir made all of these observations about the intensification of angers in this, our socially mediated age, prior to Trump's mob storming the U. S. Capitol on January 6 of this year.  I just saw, today, the second day of Trump's second impeachment trial in the U. S. Senate, a video that captured the sick fascistic depravity of that mob, and how close they came to killing the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, and who knows how many Senators and Representatives -- how close that Hitlerian, Trumpist mob, who pretend to be Americans, came to dealing out mass death, were it not for the bravery and savvy of the Capitol and District of Columbia police who were so vastly outnumbered.  They were outnumbered by the physical manifestation of the online mobs that Mir describes in Postjournalsm -- physical mobs that sought to cancel democracy by cancelling the lives of its elected representatives.

I remain an optimist, and, like John Milton, a believer in human rationality, and its capacity to stand up to illogical and inchoate emotion.  But it failed before, in Nazi Germany, and it almost failed here in the United States at the end of Trump's term in office.

If you'd like to learn more about how this state of the country and world came to be, read Mir's book.  You'll likely learn more from Postjournalism -- as chocked full of extensive research as it with prescient lines like "There were no revolutions before newspapers, and there will be none after; only riots (yet, maybe, coups)"(p. 451) -- than from the past dozen books you've read or will read on the subject.

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