Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 9
March 2, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "T.J. HOOKER"
Stakeouts used to be a terrific deterrent. Smoke one bandit, robberies would drop to zero overnight. Stay that way for months. I'd vote for that one...unfortunately it's not on the ballot. Progress. -- T.J. Hooker
Ah, Memory Lane. Where else can we wander with such a sense of self-indulgent purpose as upon this charming little road, whose houses are so full of fond memories? There is an especial pleasure in the idea of revisiting the entertainment of yesteryear. I would be lying, however, if I said every stop on this journey yielded the same set of emotions. Some of the showhouses we visit are full of almost painful nostalgia; some contain unexpected surprises; a few still retain their old power to shock or terrify or amuse; still others are disappointing because our memories have betrayed us, and what was magic viewed through the golden haze of childhood is merely silly and cheap and obvious now. But when we come upon the rather stern-looking, barracks-like home of T.J. HOOKER, we feel none of these things. What we experience, mainly, is happiness. We do not experience this happiness because what lies behind the door is good: oh no. We are happy because we know it is bad, but it is entertainingly bad, and yet, if we care to probe a little deeper into what we are seeing, discover it offers us some insight into ourselves and the society in which we once lived -- and may live in again. So let's kick down the door and get this party started.
Way back in 1982, William Shatner made his much-anticipated return to television with an Aaron Spelling-produced melodrama originally and revealingly titled THE PROTECTORS. Shatner was cast in the role of T.J. Hooker, a hardass veteran cop reeling from a painful divorce, now assigned as a partner a cocky, happy-go-lucky young trainee named Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed). The embittered, hard-drinking, all-knowing Hooker tries to educate the naive "Junior" in the ways of the streets while fighting the department's sluggish bureaucracy, epitomized by oafish stickler Captain Dennis Sheridan (Richard Herd), who dislikes Hooker's take-no-prisoners attitude. And in fact Hooker is, and is meant to be, a walking embodiment of the "club-'em-'n-shoot-'em" school of law enforcement popularized by DIRTY HARRY. Hooker is a man who would rather blast a crook with his .357 than arrest him, who doesn't believe in pesky things like Miranda or search warrants, and generally feels society is crumbling at the foundations because of excessive liberalism and overtolerance for evildoers. In the show's pilot episode, he rails against criminals and the laws and lawyers which he believes enable them, and slaps heavy coats of sentimental gloss over the Old Days, when justice was swift and brutal. As an instructor at the Academy, he presents police work as war, and trains his probationary cops as soldiers who must shoot to kill, jeering at all soft-headed, well-intentioned, newfangled ideas and technologies. "I've seen the past," he laments over his bourbon. "And it works."
The PROTECTORS name was quickly scrapped in favor of the eponymous HOOKER title, probably to flatter Shatner's ego, or because of the cold realization that most of the viewers were STAR TREK fans tuning in solely because their captain was now once more available each week, albeit in a different uniform; however, the idea behind the original title -- that the police are all that keeps the ordinary citizen from being robbed, raped and murdered, and that cops are unappreciated and unfairly hobbled by red tape and pettifogging laws that favor the crooks -- remained not close to the show's heart but its actual center for its entire five year run. Over and over again Hooker would pound away at the idea that criminals needed to be scared of the police, at one point even saying that if you killed one bandit, robberies would go down for months afterwards. In another episode, he fumes that a murderer who beat a rap is "laughing at us, and at the system." I italicize this for a reason. Hooker may be frustrated as all get out by the inequities and failings of "the system" but he cannot abide it being mocked. His power, the power to beat the hell out of crooks and gun them down if he sees fit, devolves from it: he is both its beneficiary and its guardian. Like Charles Dickens, whose thesis was essentially that capitalism was not evil but rather that individual capitalists sometimes behaved wickedly, Hooker does not feel "the system" is bad, merely that it is in the wrong hands and using the wrong tactics. There is no deeper social criticism in T.J. HOOKER, just an implication that if "they" (courts, politicians, social workers, journalists, the big public) stopped trying to interfere and gave the cops a free hand, justice would be served and served cold. Shatner himself, a Canadian who is wisely uninterested in American politics, later noted that the show was a big hit with the real-life LAPD cops he encountered during its broadcast run: as over-the-top and melodramatic as it was, it presented "their side of the story" to an anxious and conflicted public caught between touchy-feely 70s ideas of rehabilitation and Reagan-era "law & order" hardassery.
HOOKER's plots tended to be simple to the point of idiocy -- you could describe many in half a sentence -- and therefore the series relied heavily on the repartee and chemistry between Shatner and Zmed, which was very good and livened up unimaginative storylines such as "Hooker must protect a witness," "Hooker must stop a serial killer," "Hooker must hunt down armed robbers." Romano's excessive virility was an ongoing joke, as were Hooker's alimony payments and terrible diet, and both cops' penchant for destroying patrol cars during pursuits; indeed, the series was at its best when it climbed down from off its soapbox and had a little fun at its own expense. Although objectively mediocre and occasionally laugh-out-loud dumb, HOOKER was usually fun and sometimes even a little charming, especially in its first two seasons. By the end of the second, it had expanded its cast to include both Heather Locklear as Stacey Sheridan (another trainee cop) and James Darren as her training officer and partner, Corporal Jim Corrigan. This added some depth to the roster and a surprisingly progressive male-female dynamic, but reduced Romano to one-fourth of an ensemble rather than one half of a partnership, and cooled off the show's strongest asset, the buddy-buddy relationship between the lead and the sidekick. An unrealistic series is always strengthened by humor: it invites the audience to laugh with rather than at the series, and removing some of the humor simply highlighted HOOKER'S scribbled-on-a-napkin plots and lazy writing. This was exacerbated when Adrian Zmed left the show at the end of the fourth season, giving Shatner no one to facetiously banter with as he prowled the streets. The producers -- or maybe it was the network -- compensated by making the stories darker and grittier, which probably improved HOOKER's objective quality, but killed its sense of fun stone dead.
HOOKER was an extremely formulaic show, and one quite at odds with its own concept. The whole raison d'etre of the character was that he'd willingly given up his detective's badge to return to street policing, yet in almost every episode, he acts as a detective, either because “the [actual] detectives are spread too thin right now,” or because the case was “personal” to Hooker. In one scene, later lampooned by THE SIMPSONS, Captain Sheridan tells Hooker he's off a case; Hooker barks, “Wrong – I'm ON the case!” and storms off, leaving the Captain to scowl impotently into the middle distance, as usual. Even as a kid this kind of insubordination insulted my intelligence, but you can't apply logic to a show like T.J. HOOKER, in which gunshot wounds can be shrugged off with gritted teeth and will-power, getting thrown off a car going 40 mph doesn't hurt, and nobody ever seems to have to do any paperwork. Hell, I have never, in my entire life, seen a series in which more cars explode. Literally anything will make a car explode on T.J. HOOKER, and an episode where a car or a truck (or both, if one collided into the other) didn't blow itself to pieces in a holocaust of flame. In one unforgettable scene, a police car catches fire and then explodes so violently it splits in two as it is lifted into the air, bathing the entire street in oily flame...simply because it spun out. I laughed at this in 1983, and I laugh at it now, but I confess if watch an episode of HOOKER and I do don't see car annihilated by explosives, I'm disappointed. Like inexplicable jumps in the DUKES OF HAZZARD, the absurdity was baked into the concept.
Most episodes followed a strict pattern. A crime would be committed, Hooker would be assigned (or assign himself) to the case, and following a predictable series of car chases, foot pursuits, fist fights and shootouts, punctuated by lectures from Hooker to all and sundry and arguments between Hooker and lesser mortals who couldn't see he was right in his hunches, there would be a culminating final fistfight or shoot-out, where the criminal or criminals would either be captured (as was the case early in the series) or killed off (as was the case later). It is interesting to note that while he shot plenty of people, Hooker seldom killed anyone directly: they would swing at him with a knife, overbalance and fall off a roof; or he would shoot them during a gun battle, and then they would stagger and fall off a bridge. This applied to the other characters as well. The subtext here seemed to be that, as The Shadow had warned a couple of generations earlier, "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit:" that criminals end up destroying themselves through their own short-sighted wickedness. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it: "The schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."
Because the formula was so repetitious, and because as the years wore on Hooker became increasingly all-knowing and invincible, the real pleasure in the show rested entirely in watching Shatner growl insults at hapless hoodlums – “maggot,” “scum” and “dirtbag” were his favorites – and say things like, “Resist arrest...resist arrest, PLEASE!” as some drug dealer or hit man trembled in his sights. Also in the boyish hijinks of Vince Romano and the somehow wholesome sex appeal of Stacey Sheridan, who was dressed in a bikini or hot pants at every possible opportunity. Occasionally the writers dug deeper and produced stories of genuine merit, or tampered with the formula enough to create a feeling of freshness, and there were episodes where the actors got hold of a decent script, seemed to come alive and put real blood, sweat and tears into their performances; but HOOKER remained until its final episode an enormously predictable affair, striking over and over again at the same "law and order" note in which the cops always get their man, and police are well justified in bending the law (and civil rights) to get the scum off the streets. It's worth mentioning that Mark Snow, that brilliant creator of TV themes (THE X-FILES is probably his most famous work), composed for HOOKER the most exuberant, pulse-pounding, bombastic score imaginable for this series, one which seems to encapsulate the view it takes of police and police work. I must say that even while it was on the air, HOOKER was regarded as fully disposable entertainment, a sort of shake 'n bake mix of scenery-chewing and explosions, and to its credit, it seldom pretended to have larger ambitions. Jack Klugman once famously explained his crusade to turn QUINCY, M.E. into a social justice campaign with the remark "it can't all just be screeching tires." Well, by 1987 audiences had grown bored with the screeching tires of HOOKER and it disappeared into what Shatner referred to as "syndication, and then oblivion." When I saw Shatner do his one man show in Los Angeles some time ago, he devoted no words, and only a single slide of an old publicity photo, to the five years of his life he spent portraying the role. HOOKER is not going to be the subject of any fan conventions or reboots. If the name is uttered today, it is generally as a punch line.
So why bother opening this door, you ask? Why not simply pass on by and discuss a better TV show, like MAGNUM, P.I. or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? The fact is that despite its shallowness and predictability, HOOKER is culturally quite significant. It presents us not merely with a a whole slideshow of 80s-era thought on the subject of crime and policing, and more than that, with insight as to how we as Americans tend to look at the world.
One does not need to be an expert on criminology to know there was a huge upgrade in crime in the late 1960s which had by no means exhausted itself by the early 80s when Sergeant Hooker first drove through the streets of my old hometown, Burbank, CA, on his quest to spit justice out of his Magnum. A lot of this was simple Baby Boom demographics at work: the massive Boomer generation hadn't yet aged past the point where its meanest members were too gray in the muzzle to rape, murder, rob banks or burn down buildings. The surge in street crime, however, scared the shit out of millions of ordinary people who, by the end of the 70s, often felt that law and order had collapsed or was collapsing and that it was the crooks and not the citizens who owned the streets of America's cities. This surge pushed its own wave of vigilante and cop-vigilante movies into theaters, where audiences could experience some make-believe wish-fulfillment as Bronson or Eastwood mowed down criminals without compunction or remorse and made the world safe again. HOOKER's conception and its success were reflective of the desire Americans had to see crooks get bashed in the teeth. But it was also emblematic of a desire, perhaps even a need, to live (if only for an hour each week) in a simpler world.
The simplicity of the view HOOKER takes on crime and society is incredibly seductive. I work in law enforcement, and if you don't think if I dreamed of smashing a smug little street hood in the face so hard his teeth flew out of his asshole then you're sadly and sorely mistaken. But actions of this type only provide momentary satisfaction: they don't solve anything. And the deeper roots of social problems and crime hardly exist in Hooker's universe, just as they do not exist in the world of The Shadow or any DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY film. The drug dealer is inevitably called a "drug pusher" because this view of life demands that your children smoke dope or shoot heroin because they were basically forced to do it, not because they want to. The embezzler in the suit and tie steals because he is greedy, not because he is desperate. The woman beaten by her alcoholic slob husband is purely an innocent victim and never codependant and an enabler. Crime and evil are almost indistinguishable from one another in this morality model, just as the motivation to commit crime is always wickedness, laziness, amorality, lack of discipline, etc., and there is never any other driving force (except wrath, and even that is condemned; governmental sanction is necessary before you can mow down criminals like so many rusty tin cans parked on a fence; then it's just peachy). The idea that laws can be unjust, and that factors other than an evil disposition can motivate illegal acts, scarcely enters the mind of Sergeant Hooker or Rick Husky, the writer who created him. Individuals in office can be bad, but the office itself is never. The deeper and more sinister factors that drive a great deal of the problems any society faces go entirely unmentioned, either because they are too complex, have no recognizable solution, or would point the finger in the wrong direction. Hooker often nosed out corrupt cops or dirty city politicians, but there is never any suggestion that the system itself is corrupt, racist or classist: it is merely presented as having been hijacked by sniveling liberals, paper-pushing bureaucrats and amoral ambulance-chasers. If only we took a fat black marker to some of those pesky amendments and Supreme Court decisions, Los Angeles would look like Mayberry!
Mind you, I no longer occupy the inevitable collegiate position that crime is entirely a function of poverty, racism and inequality and all the rest of that nonsense they drum into everyone's head at university: life in law enforcement beat that out of me with alacrity. There are indeed many crooks who would be crooks even if they were born into extreme wealth, and infinities of poor people who never turn to crime no matter how desperate they become. My point here is merely that a simple view of the world carries with it great comfort. Shades of gray go cheerfully unacknowledged. Life is now heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Us and them. It's why the WW2 narrative is so sacred to Americans: it appeals to our sense of simplicity. After WW2, things got very blurry indeed, and Americans cannot cope with blurriness. They want everything as clear and sharp as a John Wayne movie, and in essence, that is what all five years of T.J. HOOKER amounted to: five years of watching a walking archetype of traditional American values and attitudes punching one-dimensional bad guys through plate-glass windows.
My father used to say that American politics are pendular: they swing from one extreme to the other, touching on the middle along the way but never resting there. The 70s saw a whole slew of what Sgt. Hooker would describe as "bleeding heart" criminal justice reforms which failed to curb the rising tide of crime. Perhaps unfairly, these measures were blamed for a condition which was neither created by them nor in the final analysis curable through them. Nevertheless, there was a perception that "the system" was coddling criminals, and that harsher medicines were required. The success of T.J. HOOKER was in part a reflection of this fact, for he embodied harsh medicine. You would not, in today's virulently anti-police political climate, be able to make a show even remotely similar to T.J. HOOKER now, but unless I miss my guess, the nationwide shortage of cops will soon bring about another swing of the pendulum, and the climate will change once more, and before long the streets of Burbank -- my old stomping ground -- might once again reverberate with the sound of screeching tires.
Ah, Memory Lane. Where else can we wander with such a sense of self-indulgent purpose as upon this charming little road, whose houses are so full of fond memories? There is an especial pleasure in the idea of revisiting the entertainment of yesteryear. I would be lying, however, if I said every stop on this journey yielded the same set of emotions. Some of the showhouses we visit are full of almost painful nostalgia; some contain unexpected surprises; a few still retain their old power to shock or terrify or amuse; still others are disappointing because our memories have betrayed us, and what was magic viewed through the golden haze of childhood is merely silly and cheap and obvious now. But when we come upon the rather stern-looking, barracks-like home of T.J. HOOKER, we feel none of these things. What we experience, mainly, is happiness. We do not experience this happiness because what lies behind the door is good: oh no. We are happy because we know it is bad, but it is entertainingly bad, and yet, if we care to probe a little deeper into what we are seeing, discover it offers us some insight into ourselves and the society in which we once lived -- and may live in again. So let's kick down the door and get this party started.
Way back in 1982, William Shatner made his much-anticipated return to television with an Aaron Spelling-produced melodrama originally and revealingly titled THE PROTECTORS. Shatner was cast in the role of T.J. Hooker, a hardass veteran cop reeling from a painful divorce, now assigned as a partner a cocky, happy-go-lucky young trainee named Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed). The embittered, hard-drinking, all-knowing Hooker tries to educate the naive "Junior" in the ways of the streets while fighting the department's sluggish bureaucracy, epitomized by oafish stickler Captain Dennis Sheridan (Richard Herd), who dislikes Hooker's take-no-prisoners attitude. And in fact Hooker is, and is meant to be, a walking embodiment of the "club-'em-'n-shoot-'em" school of law enforcement popularized by DIRTY HARRY. Hooker is a man who would rather blast a crook with his .357 than arrest him, who doesn't believe in pesky things like Miranda or search warrants, and generally feels society is crumbling at the foundations because of excessive liberalism and overtolerance for evildoers. In the show's pilot episode, he rails against criminals and the laws and lawyers which he believes enable them, and slaps heavy coats of sentimental gloss over the Old Days, when justice was swift and brutal. As an instructor at the Academy, he presents police work as war, and trains his probationary cops as soldiers who must shoot to kill, jeering at all soft-headed, well-intentioned, newfangled ideas and technologies. "I've seen the past," he laments over his bourbon. "And it works."
The PROTECTORS name was quickly scrapped in favor of the eponymous HOOKER title, probably to flatter Shatner's ego, or because of the cold realization that most of the viewers were STAR TREK fans tuning in solely because their captain was now once more available each week, albeit in a different uniform; however, the idea behind the original title -- that the police are all that keeps the ordinary citizen from being robbed, raped and murdered, and that cops are unappreciated and unfairly hobbled by red tape and pettifogging laws that favor the crooks -- remained not close to the show's heart but its actual center for its entire five year run. Over and over again Hooker would pound away at the idea that criminals needed to be scared of the police, at one point even saying that if you killed one bandit, robberies would go down for months afterwards. In another episode, he fumes that a murderer who beat a rap is "laughing at us, and at the system." I italicize this for a reason. Hooker may be frustrated as all get out by the inequities and failings of "the system" but he cannot abide it being mocked. His power, the power to beat the hell out of crooks and gun them down if he sees fit, devolves from it: he is both its beneficiary and its guardian. Like Charles Dickens, whose thesis was essentially that capitalism was not evil but rather that individual capitalists sometimes behaved wickedly, Hooker does not feel "the system" is bad, merely that it is in the wrong hands and using the wrong tactics. There is no deeper social criticism in T.J. HOOKER, just an implication that if "they" (courts, politicians, social workers, journalists, the big public) stopped trying to interfere and gave the cops a free hand, justice would be served and served cold. Shatner himself, a Canadian who is wisely uninterested in American politics, later noted that the show was a big hit with the real-life LAPD cops he encountered during its broadcast run: as over-the-top and melodramatic as it was, it presented "their side of the story" to an anxious and conflicted public caught between touchy-feely 70s ideas of rehabilitation and Reagan-era "law & order" hardassery.
HOOKER's plots tended to be simple to the point of idiocy -- you could describe many in half a sentence -- and therefore the series relied heavily on the repartee and chemistry between Shatner and Zmed, which was very good and livened up unimaginative storylines such as "Hooker must protect a witness," "Hooker must stop a serial killer," "Hooker must hunt down armed robbers." Romano's excessive virility was an ongoing joke, as were Hooker's alimony payments and terrible diet, and both cops' penchant for destroying patrol cars during pursuits; indeed, the series was at its best when it climbed down from off its soapbox and had a little fun at its own expense. Although objectively mediocre and occasionally laugh-out-loud dumb, HOOKER was usually fun and sometimes even a little charming, especially in its first two seasons. By the end of the second, it had expanded its cast to include both Heather Locklear as Stacey Sheridan (another trainee cop) and James Darren as her training officer and partner, Corporal Jim Corrigan. This added some depth to the roster and a surprisingly progressive male-female dynamic, but reduced Romano to one-fourth of an ensemble rather than one half of a partnership, and cooled off the show's strongest asset, the buddy-buddy relationship between the lead and the sidekick. An unrealistic series is always strengthened by humor: it invites the audience to laugh with rather than at the series, and removing some of the humor simply highlighted HOOKER'S scribbled-on-a-napkin plots and lazy writing. This was exacerbated when Adrian Zmed left the show at the end of the fourth season, giving Shatner no one to facetiously banter with as he prowled the streets. The producers -- or maybe it was the network -- compensated by making the stories darker and grittier, which probably improved HOOKER's objective quality, but killed its sense of fun stone dead.
HOOKER was an extremely formulaic show, and one quite at odds with its own concept. The whole raison d'etre of the character was that he'd willingly given up his detective's badge to return to street policing, yet in almost every episode, he acts as a detective, either because “the [actual] detectives are spread too thin right now,” or because the case was “personal” to Hooker. In one scene, later lampooned by THE SIMPSONS, Captain Sheridan tells Hooker he's off a case; Hooker barks, “Wrong – I'm ON the case!” and storms off, leaving the Captain to scowl impotently into the middle distance, as usual. Even as a kid this kind of insubordination insulted my intelligence, but you can't apply logic to a show like T.J. HOOKER, in which gunshot wounds can be shrugged off with gritted teeth and will-power, getting thrown off a car going 40 mph doesn't hurt, and nobody ever seems to have to do any paperwork. Hell, I have never, in my entire life, seen a series in which more cars explode. Literally anything will make a car explode on T.J. HOOKER, and an episode where a car or a truck (or both, if one collided into the other) didn't blow itself to pieces in a holocaust of flame. In one unforgettable scene, a police car catches fire and then explodes so violently it splits in two as it is lifted into the air, bathing the entire street in oily flame...simply because it spun out. I laughed at this in 1983, and I laugh at it now, but I confess if watch an episode of HOOKER and I do don't see car annihilated by explosives, I'm disappointed. Like inexplicable jumps in the DUKES OF HAZZARD, the absurdity was baked into the concept.
Most episodes followed a strict pattern. A crime would be committed, Hooker would be assigned (or assign himself) to the case, and following a predictable series of car chases, foot pursuits, fist fights and shootouts, punctuated by lectures from Hooker to all and sundry and arguments between Hooker and lesser mortals who couldn't see he was right in his hunches, there would be a culminating final fistfight or shoot-out, where the criminal or criminals would either be captured (as was the case early in the series) or killed off (as was the case later). It is interesting to note that while he shot plenty of people, Hooker seldom killed anyone directly: they would swing at him with a knife, overbalance and fall off a roof; or he would shoot them during a gun battle, and then they would stagger and fall off a bridge. This applied to the other characters as well. The subtext here seemed to be that, as The Shadow had warned a couple of generations earlier, "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit:" that criminals end up destroying themselves through their own short-sighted wickedness. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it: "The schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."
Because the formula was so repetitious, and because as the years wore on Hooker became increasingly all-knowing and invincible, the real pleasure in the show rested entirely in watching Shatner growl insults at hapless hoodlums – “maggot,” “scum” and “dirtbag” were his favorites – and say things like, “Resist arrest...resist arrest, PLEASE!” as some drug dealer or hit man trembled in his sights. Also in the boyish hijinks of Vince Romano and the somehow wholesome sex appeal of Stacey Sheridan, who was dressed in a bikini or hot pants at every possible opportunity. Occasionally the writers dug deeper and produced stories of genuine merit, or tampered with the formula enough to create a feeling of freshness, and there were episodes where the actors got hold of a decent script, seemed to come alive and put real blood, sweat and tears into their performances; but HOOKER remained until its final episode an enormously predictable affair, striking over and over again at the same "law and order" note in which the cops always get their man, and police are well justified in bending the law (and civil rights) to get the scum off the streets. It's worth mentioning that Mark Snow, that brilliant creator of TV themes (THE X-FILES is probably his most famous work), composed for HOOKER the most exuberant, pulse-pounding, bombastic score imaginable for this series, one which seems to encapsulate the view it takes of police and police work. I must say that even while it was on the air, HOOKER was regarded as fully disposable entertainment, a sort of shake 'n bake mix of scenery-chewing and explosions, and to its credit, it seldom pretended to have larger ambitions. Jack Klugman once famously explained his crusade to turn QUINCY, M.E. into a social justice campaign with the remark "it can't all just be screeching tires." Well, by 1987 audiences had grown bored with the screeching tires of HOOKER and it disappeared into what Shatner referred to as "syndication, and then oblivion." When I saw Shatner do his one man show in Los Angeles some time ago, he devoted no words, and only a single slide of an old publicity photo, to the five years of his life he spent portraying the role. HOOKER is not going to be the subject of any fan conventions or reboots. If the name is uttered today, it is generally as a punch line.
So why bother opening this door, you ask? Why not simply pass on by and discuss a better TV show, like MAGNUM, P.I. or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? The fact is that despite its shallowness and predictability, HOOKER is culturally quite significant. It presents us not merely with a a whole slideshow of 80s-era thought on the subject of crime and policing, and more than that, with insight as to how we as Americans tend to look at the world.
One does not need to be an expert on criminology to know there was a huge upgrade in crime in the late 1960s which had by no means exhausted itself by the early 80s when Sergeant Hooker first drove through the streets of my old hometown, Burbank, CA, on his quest to spit justice out of his Magnum. A lot of this was simple Baby Boom demographics at work: the massive Boomer generation hadn't yet aged past the point where its meanest members were too gray in the muzzle to rape, murder, rob banks or burn down buildings. The surge in street crime, however, scared the shit out of millions of ordinary people who, by the end of the 70s, often felt that law and order had collapsed or was collapsing and that it was the crooks and not the citizens who owned the streets of America's cities. This surge pushed its own wave of vigilante and cop-vigilante movies into theaters, where audiences could experience some make-believe wish-fulfillment as Bronson or Eastwood mowed down criminals without compunction or remorse and made the world safe again. HOOKER's conception and its success were reflective of the desire Americans had to see crooks get bashed in the teeth. But it was also emblematic of a desire, perhaps even a need, to live (if only for an hour each week) in a simpler world.
The simplicity of the view HOOKER takes on crime and society is incredibly seductive. I work in law enforcement, and if you don't think if I dreamed of smashing a smug little street hood in the face so hard his teeth flew out of his asshole then you're sadly and sorely mistaken. But actions of this type only provide momentary satisfaction: they don't solve anything. And the deeper roots of social problems and crime hardly exist in Hooker's universe, just as they do not exist in the world of The Shadow or any DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY film. The drug dealer is inevitably called a "drug pusher" because this view of life demands that your children smoke dope or shoot heroin because they were basically forced to do it, not because they want to. The embezzler in the suit and tie steals because he is greedy, not because he is desperate. The woman beaten by her alcoholic slob husband is purely an innocent victim and never codependant and an enabler. Crime and evil are almost indistinguishable from one another in this morality model, just as the motivation to commit crime is always wickedness, laziness, amorality, lack of discipline, etc., and there is never any other driving force (except wrath, and even that is condemned; governmental sanction is necessary before you can mow down criminals like so many rusty tin cans parked on a fence; then it's just peachy). The idea that laws can be unjust, and that factors other than an evil disposition can motivate illegal acts, scarcely enters the mind of Sergeant Hooker or Rick Husky, the writer who created him. Individuals in office can be bad, but the office itself is never. The deeper and more sinister factors that drive a great deal of the problems any society faces go entirely unmentioned, either because they are too complex, have no recognizable solution, or would point the finger in the wrong direction. Hooker often nosed out corrupt cops or dirty city politicians, but there is never any suggestion that the system itself is corrupt, racist or classist: it is merely presented as having been hijacked by sniveling liberals, paper-pushing bureaucrats and amoral ambulance-chasers. If only we took a fat black marker to some of those pesky amendments and Supreme Court decisions, Los Angeles would look like Mayberry!
Mind you, I no longer occupy the inevitable collegiate position that crime is entirely a function of poverty, racism and inequality and all the rest of that nonsense they drum into everyone's head at university: life in law enforcement beat that out of me with alacrity. There are indeed many crooks who would be crooks even if they were born into extreme wealth, and infinities of poor people who never turn to crime no matter how desperate they become. My point here is merely that a simple view of the world carries with it great comfort. Shades of gray go cheerfully unacknowledged. Life is now heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Us and them. It's why the WW2 narrative is so sacred to Americans: it appeals to our sense of simplicity. After WW2, things got very blurry indeed, and Americans cannot cope with blurriness. They want everything as clear and sharp as a John Wayne movie, and in essence, that is what all five years of T.J. HOOKER amounted to: five years of watching a walking archetype of traditional American values and attitudes punching one-dimensional bad guys through plate-glass windows.
My father used to say that American politics are pendular: they swing from one extreme to the other, touching on the middle along the way but never resting there. The 70s saw a whole slew of what Sgt. Hooker would describe as "bleeding heart" criminal justice reforms which failed to curb the rising tide of crime. Perhaps unfairly, these measures were blamed for a condition which was neither created by them nor in the final analysis curable through them. Nevertheless, there was a perception that "the system" was coddling criminals, and that harsher medicines were required. The success of T.J. HOOKER was in part a reflection of this fact, for he embodied harsh medicine. You would not, in today's virulently anti-police political climate, be able to make a show even remotely similar to T.J. HOOKER now, but unless I miss my guess, the nationwide shortage of cops will soon bring about another swing of the pendulum, and the climate will change once more, and before long the streets of Burbank -- my old stomping ground -- might once again reverberate with the sound of screeching tires.
February 16, 2024
THEMS THE (POINT) BREAKS EDITION
This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls, inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human sprit is still alive. -- Bodhi
I have long wanted to release audiobook versions of my entire catalog of novels, novellas, and short stories. As of tonight, this process has finally begun: DEUS EX and THE NUMBERS GAME are now available as audiobooks on Amazon -- the latter even read in an appropriately British accent. Aside from exposing a few grammatical errors and repeated or missing words which somehow survived gauntlets of drafts and editors, I enjoyed the process of putting them into this format, a process which was considerably easier than I was expecting, and far cheaper (by which I mean it cost me nothing) than doing it myself in a studio. As a friend recently explained, studio time cost between $50 - $75 an hour, which was fine for my short stories and novellas, but more problematic for my lovels, especially the lengthier ones.
These thoughts got me thinking about the role of money in life. The actual role, not the obvious one. Perhaps it is merely the somewhat grim or Darwinian view I take of existence, but it seems to me my take on money is different from that of most people. The majority of my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances view it merely as the means by which things are acquired. I view it in an almost opposite manner. For me, money symbolizes not the keys to a better life but a bar to same: money, as a concept, is an obstacle to the things we most want rather than a facilitator. This is of course merely a variation on the glass half-empty versus half-full argument, but there is more to it than that.
Since the audiobook process is somewhat tedious, or at least time-consuming, I played various "soundscapes" in the background while I sipped my whiskey and made notes and corrections in the virtual studio. One of these soundscapes is called "Point Break," after the classic 1991 movie. It's a combination of atmospheric music inspired by the film and waves lapping a beach. Very beautiful and inspirational. It did, however, spark some festering resentment within me. Back in 2017, when I was at rather a low point in my personal and professional life, I attended a double feature of "Point Break" and "Roadhouse" somewhere down in Santa Monica. At that time I was both struggling with both my health and my happiness, and I cannot tell you how inspired I was by the message of "Point Break," a movie that had meant little to me when I originally saw it as a college student, but everything as a man facing the proverbial crossroads of middle-aged American life.
For those who have never seen it, "Point Break" is something very rare in cinema -- a style-heavy cop-crook action movie which also aspires to say something profound, or at least important, about human existence. While no "Heat" in terms of its acting, writing, or storytelling, it is nonetheless a profound experience if you watch it at the right time in your life, because the message of "Point Break" is not just that cops and crooks are often mirror images of each other, but that there is an ironic paradox buried at the very center of life: that fear of death prevents us from living.
Having spent a half century on this planet, however, I am now of the opinion that it is not fear anywhere near much as money -- lack of money, I mean -- that prevents us from truly living. Because when you really think about it, the world we live in is in essence a tier system. Those without money occupy the lowest tier, and in doing so, are debarred from the things which, to use the movie as an example, are what allow people to suck the sweetest juices out of life.
In "Point Break," the crooks, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) rob banks to fund what amounts to an Endless Summer: they travel the world to obtain the best surfing possible, and spend the rest of their time making campfires on the beach, where they drink beer, chase girls, and make pot-fueled observations about life. Their favorite observation, once precisely articulated in the quote above but also continuously implied for the entire film, is that only they truly understand what matters -- excitement, adventure, freedom -- and everyone else is gray, dead, and cowardly: emasculated by the rat race, by morning commutes, by flourescent lights and industrial carpeting and 401Ks they'll never live to spend. Even Johnny (Keanu Reeves), the FBI agent tracking the "Ex Presidents" (as the gang calls themselves) down, is drawn to and largely accepts this philosophy as he learns more and more from his quarry-cum-target, Bodhi. But the gang's supposed enlightenment, and their superiority, their campfire bull sessions and supplies of beer and dope, not to mention their surfboards and supplies of Sex Wax, are nonetheless purchased with cold, hard cash. Rebels they may be, but such is the nature of modern society that they can only rebel if they too can pay the freight. In short, there is a paradox within their philosophy just as there is a paradox within the society they despise: free as they are or think they are, their entire lifestyle still requires a hefty income.
You see, when I lived in Southern California, what struck me harder there than anywhere else I've lived is the fact that, in order to be free as the "Ex-Presidents" were -- I don't mean free to rob banks, mind you, I just mean free to spend all your time surfing and trying to bang beach bunnies by bonfire light -- you have to be rich. Or if not rich, at least plugged in to an upper middle class income, which in California is well into the six figure range. I dearly love Malibu, but living in Malibu is impossible unless you truly have some wealth in your pockets, and even Santa Monica costs a pretty penny for extremely modest accomodations well out of sight of the water. Money stands between the poor, the working class, and most levels of the middle class, and Bodhi's dream of surfing by day and philosophizing by starlight. I presently live in the heart of a large town, and when my car is out of service I am debarred even from something as simple interacting with nature. There are no woods, no forests or hills, safely reachable by foot. For people who are poor or struggling worse than I, this is often a permanent or pervasive condition. It is not merely that they cannot afford a "nice" house or a "nice" car or "nice" things, but that they cannot even go to the beach, or hike a mountain, or swim in a river, or go camping or fishing or any other of a million activities which should cost nothing or next to nothing. Like the Beatles, "Point Break" tells us that the best things in life are free, but then admits, without much if any sense of contradiction, that they are also unobtainable unless you pay for them.
George Orwell once remarked that it gave him pleasure that London was home to half a million birds and not one of them paid a penny in rent. Mel Brooks satirically depicted a society in which people paid for clean air. "The Simpsons," through the character of Mr. Burns, found a way for a rich man to block out the sun because he could not abide the poor getting their light for free. These japes reflect a very real and troubling trend which has been unfolding for centuries, and
one does not have to possess great genius to see that life, in its modern iteration, is a place where our birthrights are stripped from us and then returned, one at a time, as privileges for which we must pony up the dough. Nobody who is not a fool expects something for nothing when the "something" is a product of labor, but nobody who is not a swine finds endless ways to wring sheckels out of people for things they themselves did not create and have no right to keep from others.
It strikes me further that most adrenaline-pumping exercises in modern life, the shit that really makes you feel alive, also require liberal doses of cash. If you want to learn how to fly an aeroplane, how to skydive, how to mountaineer, or cliff-dive, or if you want to ride a Harley, ride horses, moto-cross, ski, snowboard, scuba dive, surf or just ride way up into Canada to see the Northern Lights, you'd better be prepared to melt that plastic, son. In any one of a hundred obvious ways, enjoying ourselves is made further difficult by our status and economic class. A thick green paper barrier separates us not only from living life up to its edge, but sometimes even from observing the edge from a distance. When I was at my poorest, living in a dirty, spider-infested, uninsulated garage apartment in Burbank, I would often long for a day at the beach, but between the price of gas, the crumbling state of my car, the lack of cash in my pocket, and the general malaise of the poor, which often prevents them from enjoying even those aspects of life that are within their grasp, I seldom bothered. The almost unbearable longing for adventure, for life, that films like "Point Break" evoked in me dissolved in the ugly glare of humiliating economic realities. The stark fact is that a great deal of what makes life enjoyable or at least endurable is either unavailble to the ordinary person or arranged in such a way that he can enjoy it only infrequently and at great inconvenience and hardship to himself. A Medieval peasant's life was brutish and hard and full of suffering, but even he could put an onion, bread and cheese into a sack, walk into the woods, and enjoy a picnic by a pond once in awhile, without asking anyone's permission or having to clink a coin into someone's bucket.
I am by no means as poor or as broken, mentally and spiritually, in 2024 as I was in 2017, and I make a point, each year since I moved East, of coming up with plans to drink as much of life's wine from its vine as I can get away with. This year is no different, and in fact is even more ambitious than others, but that ambition is tempered by economic reality -- by the barrier money presents in doing anything truly worthwhile in life. Last year my brief trip to Miami to celebrate winning the Readers Favorite Gold Medal required a month of belt-tightening afterwards, just as my lengthy stay in Quebec province necessitated several months of the same. And I will never forget how quickly my carriage-ride to Hollywood's red carpet back in 2019, when I was invited to the Writers of the Future Awards and took a beautiful actress as my date, turned into a pumpkin after the tux was returned, the limo paid off, and I had to return to my spider-populated shack on Avon Street.
The point I'm trying so clumsily to make here is that the finest things life has to offer are ever-increasingly available to us in the manner of the cable packages of the late 90s: basic, expanded, plus, deluxe. Anything halfway decent has to be paid for in cold, hard cash, and the more decent it is the more cash has to be laid down. To get to the decency one must scale the green wall. It's one thing if we're talking about cars or yachts or condominiums, or some other direct offspring of civilization; it is quite another when we're discussing that which is our actual, human heritage: stars, beaches, northern lights. Why I have to save for months to feel beach sand beneath my bare feet will forever be a mystery to me.
I have long wanted to release audiobook versions of my entire catalog of novels, novellas, and short stories. As of tonight, this process has finally begun: DEUS EX and THE NUMBERS GAME are now available as audiobooks on Amazon -- the latter even read in an appropriately British accent. Aside from exposing a few grammatical errors and repeated or missing words which somehow survived gauntlets of drafts and editors, I enjoyed the process of putting them into this format, a process which was considerably easier than I was expecting, and far cheaper (by which I mean it cost me nothing) than doing it myself in a studio. As a friend recently explained, studio time cost between $50 - $75 an hour, which was fine for my short stories and novellas, but more problematic for my lovels, especially the lengthier ones.
These thoughts got me thinking about the role of money in life. The actual role, not the obvious one. Perhaps it is merely the somewhat grim or Darwinian view I take of existence, but it seems to me my take on money is different from that of most people. The majority of my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances view it merely as the means by which things are acquired. I view it in an almost opposite manner. For me, money symbolizes not the keys to a better life but a bar to same: money, as a concept, is an obstacle to the things we most want rather than a facilitator. This is of course merely a variation on the glass half-empty versus half-full argument, but there is more to it than that.
Since the audiobook process is somewhat tedious, or at least time-consuming, I played various "soundscapes" in the background while I sipped my whiskey and made notes and corrections in the virtual studio. One of these soundscapes is called "Point Break," after the classic 1991 movie. It's a combination of atmospheric music inspired by the film and waves lapping a beach. Very beautiful and inspirational. It did, however, spark some festering resentment within me. Back in 2017, when I was at rather a low point in my personal and professional life, I attended a double feature of "Point Break" and "Roadhouse" somewhere down in Santa Monica. At that time I was both struggling with both my health and my happiness, and I cannot tell you how inspired I was by the message of "Point Break," a movie that had meant little to me when I originally saw it as a college student, but everything as a man facing the proverbial crossroads of middle-aged American life.
For those who have never seen it, "Point Break" is something very rare in cinema -- a style-heavy cop-crook action movie which also aspires to say something profound, or at least important, about human existence. While no "Heat" in terms of its acting, writing, or storytelling, it is nonetheless a profound experience if you watch it at the right time in your life, because the message of "Point Break" is not just that cops and crooks are often mirror images of each other, but that there is an ironic paradox buried at the very center of life: that fear of death prevents us from living.
Having spent a half century on this planet, however, I am now of the opinion that it is not fear anywhere near much as money -- lack of money, I mean -- that prevents us from truly living. Because when you really think about it, the world we live in is in essence a tier system. Those without money occupy the lowest tier, and in doing so, are debarred from the things which, to use the movie as an example, are what allow people to suck the sweetest juices out of life.
In "Point Break," the crooks, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) rob banks to fund what amounts to an Endless Summer: they travel the world to obtain the best surfing possible, and spend the rest of their time making campfires on the beach, where they drink beer, chase girls, and make pot-fueled observations about life. Their favorite observation, once precisely articulated in the quote above but also continuously implied for the entire film, is that only they truly understand what matters -- excitement, adventure, freedom -- and everyone else is gray, dead, and cowardly: emasculated by the rat race, by morning commutes, by flourescent lights and industrial carpeting and 401Ks they'll never live to spend. Even Johnny (Keanu Reeves), the FBI agent tracking the "Ex Presidents" (as the gang calls themselves) down, is drawn to and largely accepts this philosophy as he learns more and more from his quarry-cum-target, Bodhi. But the gang's supposed enlightenment, and their superiority, their campfire bull sessions and supplies of beer and dope, not to mention their surfboards and supplies of Sex Wax, are nonetheless purchased with cold, hard cash. Rebels they may be, but such is the nature of modern society that they can only rebel if they too can pay the freight. In short, there is a paradox within their philosophy just as there is a paradox within the society they despise: free as they are or think they are, their entire lifestyle still requires a hefty income.
You see, when I lived in Southern California, what struck me harder there than anywhere else I've lived is the fact that, in order to be free as the "Ex-Presidents" were -- I don't mean free to rob banks, mind you, I just mean free to spend all your time surfing and trying to bang beach bunnies by bonfire light -- you have to be rich. Or if not rich, at least plugged in to an upper middle class income, which in California is well into the six figure range. I dearly love Malibu, but living in Malibu is impossible unless you truly have some wealth in your pockets, and even Santa Monica costs a pretty penny for extremely modest accomodations well out of sight of the water. Money stands between the poor, the working class, and most levels of the middle class, and Bodhi's dream of surfing by day and philosophizing by starlight. I presently live in the heart of a large town, and when my car is out of service I am debarred even from something as simple interacting with nature. There are no woods, no forests or hills, safely reachable by foot. For people who are poor or struggling worse than I, this is often a permanent or pervasive condition. It is not merely that they cannot afford a "nice" house or a "nice" car or "nice" things, but that they cannot even go to the beach, or hike a mountain, or swim in a river, or go camping or fishing or any other of a million activities which should cost nothing or next to nothing. Like the Beatles, "Point Break" tells us that the best things in life are free, but then admits, without much if any sense of contradiction, that they are also unobtainable unless you pay for them.
George Orwell once remarked that it gave him pleasure that London was home to half a million birds and not one of them paid a penny in rent. Mel Brooks satirically depicted a society in which people paid for clean air. "The Simpsons," through the character of Mr. Burns, found a way for a rich man to block out the sun because he could not abide the poor getting their light for free. These japes reflect a very real and troubling trend which has been unfolding for centuries, and
one does not have to possess great genius to see that life, in its modern iteration, is a place where our birthrights are stripped from us and then returned, one at a time, as privileges for which we must pony up the dough. Nobody who is not a fool expects something for nothing when the "something" is a product of labor, but nobody who is not a swine finds endless ways to wring sheckels out of people for things they themselves did not create and have no right to keep from others.
It strikes me further that most adrenaline-pumping exercises in modern life, the shit that really makes you feel alive, also require liberal doses of cash. If you want to learn how to fly an aeroplane, how to skydive, how to mountaineer, or cliff-dive, or if you want to ride a Harley, ride horses, moto-cross, ski, snowboard, scuba dive, surf or just ride way up into Canada to see the Northern Lights, you'd better be prepared to melt that plastic, son. In any one of a hundred obvious ways, enjoying ourselves is made further difficult by our status and economic class. A thick green paper barrier separates us not only from living life up to its edge, but sometimes even from observing the edge from a distance. When I was at my poorest, living in a dirty, spider-infested, uninsulated garage apartment in Burbank, I would often long for a day at the beach, but between the price of gas, the crumbling state of my car, the lack of cash in my pocket, and the general malaise of the poor, which often prevents them from enjoying even those aspects of life that are within their grasp, I seldom bothered. The almost unbearable longing for adventure, for life, that films like "Point Break" evoked in me dissolved in the ugly glare of humiliating economic realities. The stark fact is that a great deal of what makes life enjoyable or at least endurable is either unavailble to the ordinary person or arranged in such a way that he can enjoy it only infrequently and at great inconvenience and hardship to himself. A Medieval peasant's life was brutish and hard and full of suffering, but even he could put an onion, bread and cheese into a sack, walk into the woods, and enjoy a picnic by a pond once in awhile, without asking anyone's permission or having to clink a coin into someone's bucket.
I am by no means as poor or as broken, mentally and spiritually, in 2024 as I was in 2017, and I make a point, each year since I moved East, of coming up with plans to drink as much of life's wine from its vine as I can get away with. This year is no different, and in fact is even more ambitious than others, but that ambition is tempered by economic reality -- by the barrier money presents in doing anything truly worthwhile in life. Last year my brief trip to Miami to celebrate winning the Readers Favorite Gold Medal required a month of belt-tightening afterwards, just as my lengthy stay in Quebec province necessitated several months of the same. And I will never forget how quickly my carriage-ride to Hollywood's red carpet back in 2019, when I was invited to the Writers of the Future Awards and took a beautiful actress as my date, turned into a pumpkin after the tux was returned, the limo paid off, and I had to return to my spider-populated shack on Avon Street.
The point I'm trying so clumsily to make here is that the finest things life has to offer are ever-increasingly available to us in the manner of the cable packages of the late 90s: basic, expanded, plus, deluxe. Anything halfway decent has to be paid for in cold, hard cash, and the more decent it is the more cash has to be laid down. To get to the decency one must scale the green wall. It's one thing if we're talking about cars or yachts or condominiums, or some other direct offspring of civilization; it is quite another when we're discussing that which is our actual, human heritage: stars, beaches, northern lights. Why I have to save for months to feel beach sand beneath my bare feet will forever be a mystery to me.
February 11, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXII: EXTINCTION & THE SUPER BOWL EDITION
As I write this, the Super Bowl is playing on tens of millions of televisions and mobile devices all over North America. I am not watching. I can't remember the last time I did. There was a time -- before I'd heard the words "Dan Snyder," and after I heard the name "Bill Belichick" -- that I cared to some degree about football, and indeed, for a few years after; but the interest evaporated completely over time, leaving not even nostgalia in its wake. Given that I prone to a concerning degree to sentimentality, nostalgia, sehnsucht, "hiraeth" and so on, this is a remarkable fact, but some things are really not worth missing. Of course, this is subjective -- entirely subjective. That which I miss you may not consider worth missing; that which I write off without a qualm you may mourn very deeply indeed. And this sent my easily-distracted mind into a very deep rabbit hole with many branching corridors. Come with me?
* Today I was watching an episode of Matt Houston, circa 1985, in which the killer works at a clipping service. Hearing the words "clipping service" really gave me a turn, because it belongs to the realm of now-extinct professions, or at any rate professions that have changed out of recognition because of technology. Imagine going through newspapers, cutting out articles and pasting them into books all day long, and then filing the books away, to be bought by people who had need of them -- florists, for example, wanting stacks of upcoming wedding announcements so they could drum up business. I don't have to imagine it because in 1989, I had a part-time job doing just exactly that. But now the very profession is extinct. It's as extinct as the television, telephone repairman, operator or typesetter. It's as extinct as the milkman or the coalman.
* Speaking of the coalman. My parents moved into the house I presently consider "home" in 1977, when I was four or five years old. My mom still lives there today, and in fact I was just there, yesterday. I know every inch of that house, and yet I must have been in my twenties, visiting from college and building a fire, when I noticed a hinged metal slot on one side of the stone hearth. It had been painted over ages before, and was so flush with the bricks that I had never noticed it. I discovered this was the "coal slot" used for shooting coal down into the "coal bin" which, in 1948 when the house had been built, was a standard feature in every home. In the days before oil was used to heat homes, huge coal trucks rumbled all day and night through every neighborhood: coalmen in leather jerkins dragged hundredweights of coal up to each house and made it disappear down chutes and into bins. Consumption was massive: a home might order a half ton a week. Range top stoves in kitchens burned tons of the stuff a year. On the radio, commercials frequently featured advice on how to keep the firebed in the furnace properly stoked. And now all of that is gone. An entire ecosystem gone extinct.
* In the attic of my mom's house is a 1979 edition -- entire -- of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's something like twenty-seven gilt-edged volumes bound in pebbled white leather. As recently as 2007 I had them in my apartment: not because I needed them or found them particularly useful, but for their sheer aesthetic beauty alone. That, and the fact that within each book still remains a pleasure unknown to anyone born after the Encyclopedia became extinct: you would go to look up a certain thing for, say, a homework assignment, open it to the wrong page, and instantly get lost in whatever map, chart, picture, schematic or article you accidentally discovered. The internet has a very similar effect on people, but it is not the same, because it lacks the tactile feeling of those glossy, gold-edged pages: in particular I remember the fold-out diagrams of the human body, which overlaid in a way that allowed you to see all the systems simultaneously or one system at a time. Beautiful. One day I'll have that set back again.
* In detective programs like Matt Houston, a key plot element is often the pay phone. In fact, in any movie or TV show, even in novels of the period, pay phones are available or not available, work or do not work, as the plot requires; they can even be death traps if the script requires them. And now that I think of it, Superman's favorite changing place of choice was the phone booth, which makes me wonder how he takes care of that business nowadays. But now, this staple of my youth is well and truly exterminated. Once in a great while I'll encounter the scarred, battered, graffiti-covered wreck of a pay phone stand on some forlorn street somewhere; but the actual pay phone booth, with its folding door and phone book secured by a jointed cord, is simply gone, as is the pay phone on the wall of your local tavern or high school. I remember, clear as day, the sound the quarter would make in the slot; and I remember as well the technique we used, in school, of unscrewing the receiver part of the handset, and touching a ring tab or a paper clip to the metal transistor, which would provide us a free phone call. That's gone. But once in a while, I'll stay in a grand old hotel, and see, in the lobby or a hallway, a long-disused luxury booth from the 1930s or so; these are beautiful things to be behold, done up in varnished wood, with a transom light, velvet cushions, the whole nine yards: the only thing missing is the actual phone.
* This in turn reminds me of the huge, ornate shoeshine stand they used to have in Callendar's, one of my favorite watering holes in L.A., on Wilshire Boulevard. In the lobby of this sadly extinct bar-restaurant, where my friend Jimmy the Bartender used to hold court amid a cathedral of polished glasses over the black marble countertop, was a shoeshine stand. I don't think I ever saw a shoeshine boy there: it was a relic of a bygone era. But I am just old enough to remember how, in the Washington D.C. of the early 80s, shoeshine boys plying their trade near the National Press Building where my father used to work. Does anyone get their shoes shined anymore? The last time I formally shined a shoe was probably when I was in the Academy, twenty years ago, and even then my lieutenant was pissed because I used that liquid boot polish you apply through a circular sponge, rather than a tin of polish and a rag -- a method that was outdated before I was even born.
* The record store was once the heart and soul of every mall in America. Today the record store exists only as a kind of nostalgic, faux-snob niche boutique, or in vintage stores where the dust lays so thick you need an allergy shot before you enter; but back in the 80s, and well after that, every mall worth its salt had a goodly-sized record store, and every record store was the certified, approved hangout of kids from the age of 12 - 21. If you wanted an obscure album, there was a great yellow tome, like something Gandalf might own, with thousands of onionskin pages you had to crinkle through as you thumbed endlessly through it, trying to find Shok Paris' Steel and Starlight. When CDs began to overtake LPs in sales, the industry tried to accomodate the shift by selling CDs in ridiculous 12" rectangular packages, which were twice as large as a CD actually required. I was reminded of this today when I opened an old steamer trunk in my living room and found a still-unopened copy of Guns 'n Roses Use Your Illusion which I got as a birthday gift in 1991.
* The mall, too, is dying -- nearly dead, in fact, if the statistics are to be believed. I myself was never sentimental about malls, but I am sentimental about certain stores within the malls. Department stores like Wooward & Lothrop were very satisfying to enter, in part because of the dark, quiet, civilized atmosphere within: if you were 18 or 81, the shopwalkers treated you with grave dignity. I remember buying sunglasses at Woody's when I was 22 or 23 years old and from the servility and formality of the clerk, you'd have thought I was the King of England waiting for someone to polish my scepter.
Does any of this mean anything? Yes and no. Technology is a butcher. Cavalry was wiped out by the machine gun. The pony express was wiped out by the locomotive. The locomotive was largely destroyed by the eighteen wheeler and the highway. Fax machines have been slogging toward extinction since e-mail was invented. My dormitory in college had cigarette machines in the lobby, and U.S. postage stamp machines, too, neither of which I have seen in longer than I can remember (in the latter case, outside the Post Office itself). And when was the last time anyone sent a telegram? Just as saddlers and blacksmiths gave way to auto mechanics, the world I came up in has yielded, is yielding, to another. Sometimes it tugs at me a little; sometimes it does make me a trifle sad. Not everything that is outdated deserved to be consigned to junk shops, and nobody under the age of thirty will ever know or even suspect the pleasure of reading the TV Guide. On the other hand, nobody under forty will ever endure the tedium of dialing an overseas number with a rotary phone, either.
* Today I was watching an episode of Matt Houston, circa 1985, in which the killer works at a clipping service. Hearing the words "clipping service" really gave me a turn, because it belongs to the realm of now-extinct professions, or at any rate professions that have changed out of recognition because of technology. Imagine going through newspapers, cutting out articles and pasting them into books all day long, and then filing the books away, to be bought by people who had need of them -- florists, for example, wanting stacks of upcoming wedding announcements so they could drum up business. I don't have to imagine it because in 1989, I had a part-time job doing just exactly that. But now the very profession is extinct. It's as extinct as the television, telephone repairman, operator or typesetter. It's as extinct as the milkman or the coalman.
* Speaking of the coalman. My parents moved into the house I presently consider "home" in 1977, when I was four or five years old. My mom still lives there today, and in fact I was just there, yesterday. I know every inch of that house, and yet I must have been in my twenties, visiting from college and building a fire, when I noticed a hinged metal slot on one side of the stone hearth. It had been painted over ages before, and was so flush with the bricks that I had never noticed it. I discovered this was the "coal slot" used for shooting coal down into the "coal bin" which, in 1948 when the house had been built, was a standard feature in every home. In the days before oil was used to heat homes, huge coal trucks rumbled all day and night through every neighborhood: coalmen in leather jerkins dragged hundredweights of coal up to each house and made it disappear down chutes and into bins. Consumption was massive: a home might order a half ton a week. Range top stoves in kitchens burned tons of the stuff a year. On the radio, commercials frequently featured advice on how to keep the firebed in the furnace properly stoked. And now all of that is gone. An entire ecosystem gone extinct.
* In the attic of my mom's house is a 1979 edition -- entire -- of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's something like twenty-seven gilt-edged volumes bound in pebbled white leather. As recently as 2007 I had them in my apartment: not because I needed them or found them particularly useful, but for their sheer aesthetic beauty alone. That, and the fact that within each book still remains a pleasure unknown to anyone born after the Encyclopedia became extinct: you would go to look up a certain thing for, say, a homework assignment, open it to the wrong page, and instantly get lost in whatever map, chart, picture, schematic or article you accidentally discovered. The internet has a very similar effect on people, but it is not the same, because it lacks the tactile feeling of those glossy, gold-edged pages: in particular I remember the fold-out diagrams of the human body, which overlaid in a way that allowed you to see all the systems simultaneously or one system at a time. Beautiful. One day I'll have that set back again.
* In detective programs like Matt Houston, a key plot element is often the pay phone. In fact, in any movie or TV show, even in novels of the period, pay phones are available or not available, work or do not work, as the plot requires; they can even be death traps if the script requires them. And now that I think of it, Superman's favorite changing place of choice was the phone booth, which makes me wonder how he takes care of that business nowadays. But now, this staple of my youth is well and truly exterminated. Once in a great while I'll encounter the scarred, battered, graffiti-covered wreck of a pay phone stand on some forlorn street somewhere; but the actual pay phone booth, with its folding door and phone book secured by a jointed cord, is simply gone, as is the pay phone on the wall of your local tavern or high school. I remember, clear as day, the sound the quarter would make in the slot; and I remember as well the technique we used, in school, of unscrewing the receiver part of the handset, and touching a ring tab or a paper clip to the metal transistor, which would provide us a free phone call. That's gone. But once in a while, I'll stay in a grand old hotel, and see, in the lobby or a hallway, a long-disused luxury booth from the 1930s or so; these are beautiful things to be behold, done up in varnished wood, with a transom light, velvet cushions, the whole nine yards: the only thing missing is the actual phone.
* This in turn reminds me of the huge, ornate shoeshine stand they used to have in Callendar's, one of my favorite watering holes in L.A., on Wilshire Boulevard. In the lobby of this sadly extinct bar-restaurant, where my friend Jimmy the Bartender used to hold court amid a cathedral of polished glasses over the black marble countertop, was a shoeshine stand. I don't think I ever saw a shoeshine boy there: it was a relic of a bygone era. But I am just old enough to remember how, in the Washington D.C. of the early 80s, shoeshine boys plying their trade near the National Press Building where my father used to work. Does anyone get their shoes shined anymore? The last time I formally shined a shoe was probably when I was in the Academy, twenty years ago, and even then my lieutenant was pissed because I used that liquid boot polish you apply through a circular sponge, rather than a tin of polish and a rag -- a method that was outdated before I was even born.
* The record store was once the heart and soul of every mall in America. Today the record store exists only as a kind of nostalgic, faux-snob niche boutique, or in vintage stores where the dust lays so thick you need an allergy shot before you enter; but back in the 80s, and well after that, every mall worth its salt had a goodly-sized record store, and every record store was the certified, approved hangout of kids from the age of 12 - 21. If you wanted an obscure album, there was a great yellow tome, like something Gandalf might own, with thousands of onionskin pages you had to crinkle through as you thumbed endlessly through it, trying to find Shok Paris' Steel and Starlight. When CDs began to overtake LPs in sales, the industry tried to accomodate the shift by selling CDs in ridiculous 12" rectangular packages, which were twice as large as a CD actually required. I was reminded of this today when I opened an old steamer trunk in my living room and found a still-unopened copy of Guns 'n Roses Use Your Illusion which I got as a birthday gift in 1991.
* The mall, too, is dying -- nearly dead, in fact, if the statistics are to be believed. I myself was never sentimental about malls, but I am sentimental about certain stores within the malls. Department stores like Wooward & Lothrop were very satisfying to enter, in part because of the dark, quiet, civilized atmosphere within: if you were 18 or 81, the shopwalkers treated you with grave dignity. I remember buying sunglasses at Woody's when I was 22 or 23 years old and from the servility and formality of the clerk, you'd have thought I was the King of England waiting for someone to polish my scepter.
Does any of this mean anything? Yes and no. Technology is a butcher. Cavalry was wiped out by the machine gun. The pony express was wiped out by the locomotive. The locomotive was largely destroyed by the eighteen wheeler and the highway. Fax machines have been slogging toward extinction since e-mail was invented. My dormitory in college had cigarette machines in the lobby, and U.S. postage stamp machines, too, neither of which I have seen in longer than I can remember (in the latter case, outside the Post Office itself). And when was the last time anyone sent a telegram? Just as saddlers and blacksmiths gave way to auto mechanics, the world I came up in has yielded, is yielding, to another. Sometimes it tugs at me a little; sometimes it does make me a trifle sad. Not everything that is outdated deserved to be consigned to junk shops, and nobody under the age of thirty will ever know or even suspect the pleasure of reading the TV Guide. On the other hand, nobody under forty will ever endure the tedium of dialing an overseas number with a rotary phone, either.
February 7, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART THREE OF THREE)
And now we arrive at the end of the road.
As you may remember, I have been taking an unusual journey down Memory Lane of late -- a journey by installments. It began with a reminiscence of the mini-series "V" (1983); it continued with a further reminiscence of the follow up mini-series "V: The Final Battle" (1984); and now it concludes with a knock on the door of the last cottage on this particular cul-de-sac of the Lane: "V: The Series" (1984-1985), an abortive attempt to turn the universe originally created by Kenneth Johnson into an episodic TV show.
I've no wish to burn a lot of oxygen recapping my previous blogs -- they are readily available on this site -- so I'll keep it brief: The original "V" was a television mini-series that debuted in 1983 to smash ratings. The story revolved around the arrival to Earth of seemingly benevolent, seemingly human aliens ("Visitors") who claimed that their homeworld was in dire need of certain raw materials, and in return for those materials they would supply humanity with all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs, and then depart in peace. Naturally, the Visitors weren't telling the truth: they weren't human, their agenda was decidedly nastier than they let on, and they had no intention of leaving...ever. "V" was an allegory about fascism: how it seduces people with false promises, warps the minds of its followers, and, once in power, crushes any resistance without mercy while it pursues its violent and selfish ends. It was also an allegory about resistance to fascism: specifically the way it unites people from all races, creeds and walks of life, but only at the price of turning them into embittered, hardened warriors who have to make all sorts of moral compromises and live in an atmosphere of terror and suspicion. "V" was enormously entertaining and very well done, and led to a follow-up seres, "V: The Final Battle" (1984), in which the Visitors and the Resistance ultimately went head-to-head in a climactic confrontation which left the Earthlings back in control of their own planet -- and the Visitors fleeing into space, evidently defeated. "The Final Battle" was more exiting than the original, with ceaseless action and tremendous brutality, but not quite as elegantly produced or written due to the absence of its creator Kenneth Johnson, who was trying to do more then merely entertain: still, it was satisfying and fun as hell to watch. It is still enjoyable after all these years, and in fact more timely in 2024 than it was forty years ago.
"V: The Series" was an attempt to capitalize on the huge ratings and fan enthusiasm for the two mini-series. It reunited nearly all of the surviving cast and carried the story forward quite literally from the moment "V: The Final Battle" ended. As a fan of the movies, I was slavering with enthusiasm when the series debuted...and like most people, ended up being bitterly disappointed with the result at the time. Even as a boy, I thought it was a cheesy, campy, ill-concieved and clumsily-executed mess that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or even why it existed. To quote the review of the St. Louis Times-Dispatch: "How a TV series with so much promise – based on two successful, highly rated science fiction miniseries on NBC in the early 1980s – produced such a silly, loathsome mess is beyond comprehension. NBC tried to make a weekly series out of [the mini-series that created the show] so terribly it must surely rank as one of the worst TV sci-fi experiments ever. The cast becomes dangerously unstable. Michael Ironside quits in the middle of the show's run with no apparent reason. Others are killed without meaning. The special effects are cheapened and the use of stock footage – previously filmed scenes used again and again – is maddening. (At one point, they actually used stock footage from the previous week's episode.)... What was once a pretty decent science fiction saga with good drama, humor and suspense ends up becoming Dynasty with lizard makeup and laser guns."
All of this is true, and "V: The Series" was canceled in 1985. But now, having rewatched the 19 episodes of this first and only season of the TV show (and actually read the unproduced twentieth episode, meant as its season finale) I now view this move with some regrets. My first regret is that the story wasn't told better -- something which was entirely unnecessary even though it was rushed to series without the proper creative and logistical groundwork. My second is that it wasn't concluded: it ends on a cliffhanger. Why do I regret it? That's a complex question. "V: The Series" is bad, indeed at times it is awful, but it is not as bad as I remembered, it is more than occasionally entertaining, and there are quite a few things it does surprisingly well. There are important lessons to be learned from how it came about and why it met its demise, but first, since we've entered this abandoned and musty cottage, let's poke around and look at the furniture -- its premise:
Following the events of "TFB," the Visitors have finally been run off, and Earth is now supposedly unihabitable to them thanks to the creation of the "red dust" -- a bacteria harmless to humans but lethal to lizards -- which was the maguffin by which "The Final Battle" was won. Life has more or less returned to normal, and a year later, with the old Resistance members having gone back to their lives or sought out new ones, the Visitor leader, Diana (Jane Badler) is now on trial for crimes against humanity. It seems like justice is finally going to be done on this loathsome creature, but suddenly she is rescued from the noose by an amoral businessman named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), who wants Diana to explain captured Visitor technology to his scientists in exchange for her life. Diana agrees, then promptly escapes and makes contact with a new Visitor fleet which has just arrived. The persistent Diana swiftly attempts to reconquer Earth, but is hampered by both the "red dust" virus, which is lethal now only in cold weather areas of Earth,
and by infighting with her co-commander, the sultry Lydia (June Chadwick). She must also contend with the powerful Bates, who controls the surviving supplies of red dust and thus has her at a constant disadvantage, one she works hard to undermine.
Naturally, the re-appearance of the hated Visitors re-unites most of the surviving resistance: Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), Willie (Robert Englund), Martin (Frank Ashmore), Elias Taylor (Michael Wright), Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Elizabeth Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), the "Starchild," Elizabeth Maxwell (Jen Cooke), and Robert Maxwell (Michael Durnell), who struggle collectively to defeat the Visitors once more, but are also confronted by a new player -- The Bates Corporation, which takes control of Los Angeles and declares it an "open city" where neither the Resistance nor the Visitors are in control. Bates company, Science Frontiers, is rather an intriguing comment on the almost unexplored area of post-governmental capitalism: pure corporate power without law.
As you can see, the cast alone -- and it's actually much larger than what I listed here -- would have been difficult to wrangle even if the show had possessed first-rate writers and a clear technique for revolving storylines. It did not, and killing off various characters here and there didn't really alleviate the pressure. The "Open City" storyline, which for my Monopoly money was the best thing about the show by half, being an original idea and introducing a third party to the a-deux Resistance-Visitor dynamic, must have failed to ignite audiences, which in the minds of the network meant "drastic changes ahead." Thus, about 8 episodes in, the cast was suddenly cut nearly in half by a mass firing which Robert Englund called "The Coup." The Coup also changed the direction of the show, abandoning the "open city" angle and returning "V" to more of a Visitors-vs-Resistance thing with a sudden and extremely heavy emphasis on soap-opera conflict between characters; also a very cartoonish, silly, cringe-worthy exploration of Visitor culture which fell to the level of farce. This didn't work -- the decision to get rid of the show's most popular character, Michael Ironside's Ham Tyler, must rank as one of the dumber decisions ever made by studio suits -- and when the show was finally canceled, eleven episodes later, it was in the process of setting up yet another and even more drastic identity shift. As I said above, I have read the script for the unproduced season finale, and I can say that Ironside was to make a surprise return, whereupon the whole premise was to change to a kind of Mad Max style "roadshow" in which the surviving heroes would wander a dystopian landscape, each week encountering, one supposes, antagonists of either human or Visitor origin. I don't remember what fictional character once said in lament, "We've come so far from home," but this was very far indeed from Johnson's original, allegorical vision about fascism, and it may be for the best we never got to see it.
I must reiterate that at its worst, "V" sucked badly even by the wobbly standards of the mid-80s. Supposedly it was the most expensive show on TV at the time, but God knows where the money went because the production values, special effects and so forth are often absolutely terrible. On top of this, the continuity is poor, the editing makes use of stock footage way too often, and in general the show has a cheap, low-budget feel, in addition to some very bad writing and way too many damned characters. One of the most annoying tendencies of the series was to have the "Starchild," Elizabeth, a half-reptile, half-human hybrid, serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card who could save any situation with her conveniently vague super-powers that, like KITT in “Knight Rider,” were altered to suit the needs of each week's script. But probably nothing summed up the directionless nature of the show as the fate of Elias, a charismatic character who had featured prominently from the very start of the entire "V" universe. What should have been a heroic, or at least a shocking, death was treated with all the dignity of a dinnertime burp. Elias is casually disintegrated in a scene that is not even shot in close-up: he's actually barely a blip on the screen when he glows out of existence, and the scene has no setup, no resonance. Interestingly enough, in the unproduced final script, the Julie character met the same casual, unlamented fate -- an even greater sin, since she was literally the co-lead of the entire series. This kind of slovenly approach to critical moments made watching "VTS" a challenge even for tweens. It was occasionally fun to watch even in its latter days, but I could never get away from the feeling that a mighty opportunity had been lost.
Such was "V: The Series," a much-panned disappointment which died a sluggish, painful, and anonymous death, abandoned not only by its audience but, in spirit, by its cast, who were rightfully embittered at its mismanagement. And that leaves us to the part where I say, "So where does that leave us? What was this show's legacy, or does it even have one? Can we learn anything from looking back over four decades at this virtually stillborn failure of a TV series?"
There is basically a single answer to all of these questions. Unlike its progenitors, "V" as a TV series in itself has no legacy: it is merely a cautionary tale. But as a cautionary tale it has great value. "V" is a prime example of several cardinal sins:
1. It abandoned its original concept to the fullest degree.
2. It has no clear reason to exist within its own universe.*
3. It vandalizes its own characters.
Let us tackle the last point first. The way characters like Julie and Elias were treated is the absolute halmark of hack writing, a failure to handle characters with consistency or integrity. If one is a successful storyteller, you may know him by this sign: you can predict what his characters will say or do in any given situation with a high degree of accuracy, because they are "real" people with "real" characteristics. Human beings act as variations on a theme, and we call that theme "personality." Fans instantly detect when a character is acting out of character, and a writer's duty in this regard is to know what said characters would, and would not, do or say. Elias is almost unrecognizable when the show debuts, so his death his meaningless; Julie, on the other hand, seems to literally forget she's half in love with Donovan. Nor does she assert the same level of aggressive control over the Resistance she did in the previous series. Writers and producers would do well to remember that fans notice shit like this, and do not like it.
But really, I am diagnosing bruises on a headless corpse, because to speak to point 2, "V" failed much more fundamentally, in that it had no purpose other than to exploit the success of the two far superior mini-series. It was a simple cash grab, and a rushed one at that. "The Final Battle" ended in triumph. The pilot of "The Series" reverses that triumph and puts us collectively back to square one, minus the revelation that the Visitors are really aliens, and do not come in peace. "V: The Series" was clearly rushed to series without a proper Bible or a stack of finished scripts or even treatments for same, and even at its best looks like a hasty improvisation in search of a story. The folks who greenlighted this mess did so to make money, which is no sin, but they did it in such a half-assed, cynical way that they damned any chance of it succeeding almost from the gate. (Though the quality was much better, the same fate befell the original "Battlestar Galactica.") The one original aspect of the show, the intriguing "open city" premise, was scrapped after only eight or nine episodes: after that it was a vacuum of ideas.
The last point is simply that one can only wander so far afield from one's original premise before everyone forgets what the hell they are actually watching or why they are bothering with watching it. Kenny Johnson wanted to warn us, in a clever kind of way, about how fascism comes to power in a democratic society: that was his whole purpose in the original 83 miniseries. The follow-up series, in which he had little if any imput, was more on the level of simple entertainment, a movie about resistance against tyranny, but it stuck close enough to its guns that the difference was only noticeable and not fatal. "The Series" however had almost nothing more to say -- it neither continued the narrative of V1 nor expanded on V2. Its one attempt to do so -- the "open city" idea -- was successful in my eyes, but rapidly abandoned in favor of tawdry soap opera drama which was both distasteful and utterly ludicrous. And before I close this windy missive, I want to address this specially:
When I sit down to write anything, I always have an overriding purpose. My purpose may be to frighten, to titilate, to educate, to amuse, or merely to entertain, but regardless of my specific motive, I have one: there either is something definite I want to say about life or human nature, or a particular way I want to say something so as to achieve an emotional effect; I never write just to write and expect anyone else would want to pay for it...or even read it for free. Storytellers have one purpose which is paramount and overrides all the others, one which can not be abandoned even if all the others are: they must entertain. And the best way to entertain is to know why the hell you started telling the story in the first place. Anything else begins to sound like Grandpa Simpson.
“V” will always stand out to me as a kind of cautionary tale of why a television show, especially one based on TV movies or films, must have a very clear through-line, that is, a theme and a direction which it is following from episode one. It must grasp the mechanics of its own universe and also possess an understanding of how to employ its cast to the fullest effect. And when it hits upon something that works (the Open City) it must stick to that something in the hopes audiences will eventually catch up with it. “V” did none of this, and the best thing I can say about it is that there is, in pockets here and there, just enough of its original magic to be occasionally fun. But you have to poke around pretty thoroughly in those ashes.
As you may remember, I have been taking an unusual journey down Memory Lane of late -- a journey by installments. It began with a reminiscence of the mini-series "V" (1983); it continued with a further reminiscence of the follow up mini-series "V: The Final Battle" (1984); and now it concludes with a knock on the door of the last cottage on this particular cul-de-sac of the Lane: "V: The Series" (1984-1985), an abortive attempt to turn the universe originally created by Kenneth Johnson into an episodic TV show.
I've no wish to burn a lot of oxygen recapping my previous blogs -- they are readily available on this site -- so I'll keep it brief: The original "V" was a television mini-series that debuted in 1983 to smash ratings. The story revolved around the arrival to Earth of seemingly benevolent, seemingly human aliens ("Visitors") who claimed that their homeworld was in dire need of certain raw materials, and in return for those materials they would supply humanity with all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs, and then depart in peace. Naturally, the Visitors weren't telling the truth: they weren't human, their agenda was decidedly nastier than they let on, and they had no intention of leaving...ever. "V" was an allegory about fascism: how it seduces people with false promises, warps the minds of its followers, and, once in power, crushes any resistance without mercy while it pursues its violent and selfish ends. It was also an allegory about resistance to fascism: specifically the way it unites people from all races, creeds and walks of life, but only at the price of turning them into embittered, hardened warriors who have to make all sorts of moral compromises and live in an atmosphere of terror and suspicion. "V" was enormously entertaining and very well done, and led to a follow-up seres, "V: The Final Battle" (1984), in which the Visitors and the Resistance ultimately went head-to-head in a climactic confrontation which left the Earthlings back in control of their own planet -- and the Visitors fleeing into space, evidently defeated. "The Final Battle" was more exiting than the original, with ceaseless action and tremendous brutality, but not quite as elegantly produced or written due to the absence of its creator Kenneth Johnson, who was trying to do more then merely entertain: still, it was satisfying and fun as hell to watch. It is still enjoyable after all these years, and in fact more timely in 2024 than it was forty years ago.
"V: The Series" was an attempt to capitalize on the huge ratings and fan enthusiasm for the two mini-series. It reunited nearly all of the surviving cast and carried the story forward quite literally from the moment "V: The Final Battle" ended. As a fan of the movies, I was slavering with enthusiasm when the series debuted...and like most people, ended up being bitterly disappointed with the result at the time. Even as a boy, I thought it was a cheesy, campy, ill-concieved and clumsily-executed mess that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or even why it existed. To quote the review of the St. Louis Times-Dispatch: "How a TV series with so much promise – based on two successful, highly rated science fiction miniseries on NBC in the early 1980s – produced such a silly, loathsome mess is beyond comprehension. NBC tried to make a weekly series out of [the mini-series that created the show] so terribly it must surely rank as one of the worst TV sci-fi experiments ever. The cast becomes dangerously unstable. Michael Ironside quits in the middle of the show's run with no apparent reason. Others are killed without meaning. The special effects are cheapened and the use of stock footage – previously filmed scenes used again and again – is maddening. (At one point, they actually used stock footage from the previous week's episode.)... What was once a pretty decent science fiction saga with good drama, humor and suspense ends up becoming Dynasty with lizard makeup and laser guns."
All of this is true, and "V: The Series" was canceled in 1985. But now, having rewatched the 19 episodes of this first and only season of the TV show (and actually read the unproduced twentieth episode, meant as its season finale) I now view this move with some regrets. My first regret is that the story wasn't told better -- something which was entirely unnecessary even though it was rushed to series without the proper creative and logistical groundwork. My second is that it wasn't concluded: it ends on a cliffhanger. Why do I regret it? That's a complex question. "V: The Series" is bad, indeed at times it is awful, but it is not as bad as I remembered, it is more than occasionally entertaining, and there are quite a few things it does surprisingly well. There are important lessons to be learned from how it came about and why it met its demise, but first, since we've entered this abandoned and musty cottage, let's poke around and look at the furniture -- its premise:
Following the events of "TFB," the Visitors have finally been run off, and Earth is now supposedly unihabitable to them thanks to the creation of the "red dust" -- a bacteria harmless to humans but lethal to lizards -- which was the maguffin by which "The Final Battle" was won. Life has more or less returned to normal, and a year later, with the old Resistance members having gone back to their lives or sought out new ones, the Visitor leader, Diana (Jane Badler) is now on trial for crimes against humanity. It seems like justice is finally going to be done on this loathsome creature, but suddenly she is rescued from the noose by an amoral businessman named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), who wants Diana to explain captured Visitor technology to his scientists in exchange for her life. Diana agrees, then promptly escapes and makes contact with a new Visitor fleet which has just arrived. The persistent Diana swiftly attempts to reconquer Earth, but is hampered by both the "red dust" virus, which is lethal now only in cold weather areas of Earth,
and by infighting with her co-commander, the sultry Lydia (June Chadwick). She must also contend with the powerful Bates, who controls the surviving supplies of red dust and thus has her at a constant disadvantage, one she works hard to undermine.
Naturally, the re-appearance of the hated Visitors re-unites most of the surviving resistance: Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), Willie (Robert Englund), Martin (Frank Ashmore), Elias Taylor (Michael Wright), Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Elizabeth Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), the "Starchild," Elizabeth Maxwell (Jen Cooke), and Robert Maxwell (Michael Durnell), who struggle collectively to defeat the Visitors once more, but are also confronted by a new player -- The Bates Corporation, which takes control of Los Angeles and declares it an "open city" where neither the Resistance nor the Visitors are in control. Bates company, Science Frontiers, is rather an intriguing comment on the almost unexplored area of post-governmental capitalism: pure corporate power without law.
As you can see, the cast alone -- and it's actually much larger than what I listed here -- would have been difficult to wrangle even if the show had possessed first-rate writers and a clear technique for revolving storylines. It did not, and killing off various characters here and there didn't really alleviate the pressure. The "Open City" storyline, which for my Monopoly money was the best thing about the show by half, being an original idea and introducing a third party to the a-deux Resistance-Visitor dynamic, must have failed to ignite audiences, which in the minds of the network meant "drastic changes ahead." Thus, about 8 episodes in, the cast was suddenly cut nearly in half by a mass firing which Robert Englund called "The Coup." The Coup also changed the direction of the show, abandoning the "open city" angle and returning "V" to more of a Visitors-vs-Resistance thing with a sudden and extremely heavy emphasis on soap-opera conflict between characters; also a very cartoonish, silly, cringe-worthy exploration of Visitor culture which fell to the level of farce. This didn't work -- the decision to get rid of the show's most popular character, Michael Ironside's Ham Tyler, must rank as one of the dumber decisions ever made by studio suits -- and when the show was finally canceled, eleven episodes later, it was in the process of setting up yet another and even more drastic identity shift. As I said above, I have read the script for the unproduced season finale, and I can say that Ironside was to make a surprise return, whereupon the whole premise was to change to a kind of Mad Max style "roadshow" in which the surviving heroes would wander a dystopian landscape, each week encountering, one supposes, antagonists of either human or Visitor origin. I don't remember what fictional character once said in lament, "We've come so far from home," but this was very far indeed from Johnson's original, allegorical vision about fascism, and it may be for the best we never got to see it.
I must reiterate that at its worst, "V" sucked badly even by the wobbly standards of the mid-80s. Supposedly it was the most expensive show on TV at the time, but God knows where the money went because the production values, special effects and so forth are often absolutely terrible. On top of this, the continuity is poor, the editing makes use of stock footage way too often, and in general the show has a cheap, low-budget feel, in addition to some very bad writing and way too many damned characters. One of the most annoying tendencies of the series was to have the "Starchild," Elizabeth, a half-reptile, half-human hybrid, serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card who could save any situation with her conveniently vague super-powers that, like KITT in “Knight Rider,” were altered to suit the needs of each week's script. But probably nothing summed up the directionless nature of the show as the fate of Elias, a charismatic character who had featured prominently from the very start of the entire "V" universe. What should have been a heroic, or at least a shocking, death was treated with all the dignity of a dinnertime burp. Elias is casually disintegrated in a scene that is not even shot in close-up: he's actually barely a blip on the screen when he glows out of existence, and the scene has no setup, no resonance. Interestingly enough, in the unproduced final script, the Julie character met the same casual, unlamented fate -- an even greater sin, since she was literally the co-lead of the entire series. This kind of slovenly approach to critical moments made watching "VTS" a challenge even for tweens. It was occasionally fun to watch even in its latter days, but I could never get away from the feeling that a mighty opportunity had been lost.
Such was "V: The Series," a much-panned disappointment which died a sluggish, painful, and anonymous death, abandoned not only by its audience but, in spirit, by its cast, who were rightfully embittered at its mismanagement. And that leaves us to the part where I say, "So where does that leave us? What was this show's legacy, or does it even have one? Can we learn anything from looking back over four decades at this virtually stillborn failure of a TV series?"
There is basically a single answer to all of these questions. Unlike its progenitors, "V" as a TV series in itself has no legacy: it is merely a cautionary tale. But as a cautionary tale it has great value. "V" is a prime example of several cardinal sins:
1. It abandoned its original concept to the fullest degree.
2. It has no clear reason to exist within its own universe.*
3. It vandalizes its own characters.
Let us tackle the last point first. The way characters like Julie and Elias were treated is the absolute halmark of hack writing, a failure to handle characters with consistency or integrity. If one is a successful storyteller, you may know him by this sign: you can predict what his characters will say or do in any given situation with a high degree of accuracy, because they are "real" people with "real" characteristics. Human beings act as variations on a theme, and we call that theme "personality." Fans instantly detect when a character is acting out of character, and a writer's duty in this regard is to know what said characters would, and would not, do or say. Elias is almost unrecognizable when the show debuts, so his death his meaningless; Julie, on the other hand, seems to literally forget she's half in love with Donovan. Nor does she assert the same level of aggressive control over the Resistance she did in the previous series. Writers and producers would do well to remember that fans notice shit like this, and do not like it.
But really, I am diagnosing bruises on a headless corpse, because to speak to point 2, "V" failed much more fundamentally, in that it had no purpose other than to exploit the success of the two far superior mini-series. It was a simple cash grab, and a rushed one at that. "The Final Battle" ended in triumph. The pilot of "The Series" reverses that triumph and puts us collectively back to square one, minus the revelation that the Visitors are really aliens, and do not come in peace. "V: The Series" was clearly rushed to series without a proper Bible or a stack of finished scripts or even treatments for same, and even at its best looks like a hasty improvisation in search of a story. The folks who greenlighted this mess did so to make money, which is no sin, but they did it in such a half-assed, cynical way that they damned any chance of it succeeding almost from the gate. (Though the quality was much better, the same fate befell the original "Battlestar Galactica.") The one original aspect of the show, the intriguing "open city" premise, was scrapped after only eight or nine episodes: after that it was a vacuum of ideas.
The last point is simply that one can only wander so far afield from one's original premise before everyone forgets what the hell they are actually watching or why they are bothering with watching it. Kenny Johnson wanted to warn us, in a clever kind of way, about how fascism comes to power in a democratic society: that was his whole purpose in the original 83 miniseries. The follow-up series, in which he had little if any imput, was more on the level of simple entertainment, a movie about resistance against tyranny, but it stuck close enough to its guns that the difference was only noticeable and not fatal. "The Series" however had almost nothing more to say -- it neither continued the narrative of V1 nor expanded on V2. Its one attempt to do so -- the "open city" idea -- was successful in my eyes, but rapidly abandoned in favor of tawdry soap opera drama which was both distasteful and utterly ludicrous. And before I close this windy missive, I want to address this specially:
When I sit down to write anything, I always have an overriding purpose. My purpose may be to frighten, to titilate, to educate, to amuse, or merely to entertain, but regardless of my specific motive, I have one: there either is something definite I want to say about life or human nature, or a particular way I want to say something so as to achieve an emotional effect; I never write just to write and expect anyone else would want to pay for it...or even read it for free. Storytellers have one purpose which is paramount and overrides all the others, one which can not be abandoned even if all the others are: they must entertain. And the best way to entertain is to know why the hell you started telling the story in the first place. Anything else begins to sound like Grandpa Simpson.
“V” will always stand out to me as a kind of cautionary tale of why a television show, especially one based on TV movies or films, must have a very clear through-line, that is, a theme and a direction which it is following from episode one. It must grasp the mechanics of its own universe and also possess an understanding of how to employ its cast to the fullest effect. And when it hits upon something that works (the Open City) it must stick to that something in the hopes audiences will eventually catch up with it. “V” did none of this, and the best thing I can say about it is that there is, in pockets here and there, just enough of its original magic to be occasionally fun. But you have to poke around pretty thoroughly in those ashes.
January 30, 2024
VIRTUALLY REALITY
In the spirit of "Why Not?" which has both plagued and enlivened my life, I recently allowed myself to be persuaded to book an Instagram promotion for my most recent novel, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, as well as my other works. At the same time, I made sure I was running no other promotions of any kind anywhere else, nor even mentioning my books in formats or forums like this: I wanted absolutely flat sales so that any spike could be clearly attributed to the effect of the Instagram ads. This is an old tactic I use for my conventional book promotions and gives fairly accurate results. And what happened next, and what did not, is illustrative of the strange reality in which we live.
The promotion began around the first of January and is now winding down as the month itself comes to a close. In that intervening time, the separate posts about my writing garnered approximately 120,000 likes. Please note that I did not say 120,000 sales. I said "likes." And during that corresponding period I made exactly $8.26 in sales.
You read that right, folks: Eight dollars and twenty-six cents.
My math sucks, but unless I'm mistaken that means for every 14,000 people who clicked "like," I sold about a dollar's worth of books. To make even $82.00, I'd have had to get 1.2 million likes. To make my rent, which is $825, I'd have to get 10.2 million likes. In other words, the entire population of Greece would have to click "like" on Instagram.
But even this is assuming a great deal. Or, as we say in the criminal justice field: "assuming facts not in evidence." For I am deeply suspicious of whether most of these "likes" were clicked by human hands. In fact, I am morally certain the majority were liked by fake accounts or bots. My posts go up electronically, are "seen" by robots and then "liked" by robots, and then come down. The numbers, the analytics, are impressive, but since little of it is real, there is no corresponding result in the real world.
Many, many years ago, when chat rooms were very much in vogue, a writer on "Law & Order" called the internet "a place that's not even a place." He was quite right. But the reality is that this unreality now occupies at least -- at least! -- fifty percent of our very real, physical, tangible lives. Our brains have, through continuous use, become rewired to crave validation and attention from online audiences -- audiences which may not actually exist. I can't count the number of people I have seen, in the last 15 years, boast about how many "friends" they have on social media, as if all but a handful of them were actually friends! (At least the word "followers" more closely fits the cold, impersonal reality.) I have even, this very week, witnessed the grotesque sight of an Instgram influencer and YouTuber who struts around in bikinis and measures herself by the amount of lust she generates in anonymous men, moaning almost hyterically about how lonely she is...almost as if the stream of online validation and adulation had no actual substance, because even a million "subscribers" can't make you a candle-light dinner.
This bifurcated existence, in which we give equal import to things which aren't there and people we don't know, as we do to our actual friends, family, lovers, pets, jobs, hobbies, etc., is the salient feature of the 21st century to date. It has gotten so the seemingly harmless phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has taken on a chilling quality, because to a whole generation (or three) of people, this is factually true. Their sense of reality has been redefined, so that an unshared experience is no experience at all, but rather a kind of scientific-philosophical conundrum, like Schroedinger's cat. If you go to a concert, or to some scenic overlook, or a sports event or a nightclub or even a restaurant, it is now customary to document and record the event. Many people post almost professionally edited and mixed videos of their gym workouts. Warren Beatty famously jeered at Madonna that "she doesn't want to live off camera." The same insult could now be levied at the rest of us. And it is not mere narcissism that drives this impulse. It is an acknowledgement that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and one virtual. The problem, however, is not that this situation exists, but rather when both worlds are treated as if they have equal value, for the slope is slippery indeed. As someone who worked in the video game industry for nine years, and correspondingly met many from the vast community of cosplayers, Youtubers, Instragram influencers, etc., etc., I can say with assurance that there are many who have taken this a step further, and are more comfortable and more active in "the place that isn't a place" than in their actual, physical lives.
On the surface of things, this is understandable and was inevitable. Even in the 70s and 80s, there were millions who found safe harbor only in eccentric fantasy worlds -- Dungeons and Dragons addicts would be a literal example, but this could be extended to metalheads, punks, and other isolated communities of semi-or-full outcasts, be they tied together by role playing games, video games, music, drug-music culture, or what have you. I myself was one such kid: from the age of ten to about fifteen or sixteen, I lived primarily in my own head. Had I the resources of todays similarly aged kids back then, I'd have been no different than they are now: so there's no judgment here. I am simply pointing out that technology has allowed what the people of my generation (X) and those before us could only dream about: a way of making everyday reality optional. The internet has not been around long enough for us to say definitively what the consequeces of this will be, but anyone with eyes can see the downside goes lower than the upside rises. People are fatter than ever. They are unhealthier than ever. They are more anxious, more depressed, more nihilistic, more angry, and more suicidal than they have ever been, and a lot of this can be traced, circumstancially at least, to the pervasiveness of the internet. Life is hard: virtual reality is easy, and humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you want to be an unstoppable badass killer covered in medals and stripes and held in awe by your peers, you can join the military and spend a couple of years working and sweating and bleeding your way through basic training, advanced training, airborne school, Ranger school, Special Forces school, and so on...or you can just get really, really good at Call of Duty, all without doing a single sit-up or even rising off of the couch. The distinction between the actual and the virtual has blurred to the degree that the very definition of reality no longer has a clear, sharp, obvious definition.
This is a problem for which no solution, short of an electromagnetic pulse which would destroy the internet entirely for the foreseeable future (and plunge the world into chaos as a result), presents itself. And indeed, short of such apocalyptic disaster, there may be no solution at all. Like atomic energy, this particular genie ain't going back into its bottle. This problem is, however, one which has come about in my lifetime, and watching it grow has been a fascinating process. I was certainly not among those who foresaw the troubles that are now with us, but I do remember being especially taken by a line of dialog from "I Robert, You Jane," an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which did, all the way back in 1997. It is a point of view which back then was considered laughable, but today has gained a great deal of currency indeed:
The only reality is virtual. If your'e not jacked in, you're not alive.
The promotion began around the first of January and is now winding down as the month itself comes to a close. In that intervening time, the separate posts about my writing garnered approximately 120,000 likes. Please note that I did not say 120,000 sales. I said "likes." And during that corresponding period I made exactly $8.26 in sales.
You read that right, folks: Eight dollars and twenty-six cents.
My math sucks, but unless I'm mistaken that means for every 14,000 people who clicked "like," I sold about a dollar's worth of books. To make even $82.00, I'd have had to get 1.2 million likes. To make my rent, which is $825, I'd have to get 10.2 million likes. In other words, the entire population of Greece would have to click "like" on Instagram.
But even this is assuming a great deal. Or, as we say in the criminal justice field: "assuming facts not in evidence." For I am deeply suspicious of whether most of these "likes" were clicked by human hands. In fact, I am morally certain the majority were liked by fake accounts or bots. My posts go up electronically, are "seen" by robots and then "liked" by robots, and then come down. The numbers, the analytics, are impressive, but since little of it is real, there is no corresponding result in the real world.
Many, many years ago, when chat rooms were very much in vogue, a writer on "Law & Order" called the internet "a place that's not even a place." He was quite right. But the reality is that this unreality now occupies at least -- at least! -- fifty percent of our very real, physical, tangible lives. Our brains have, through continuous use, become rewired to crave validation and attention from online audiences -- audiences which may not actually exist. I can't count the number of people I have seen, in the last 15 years, boast about how many "friends" they have on social media, as if all but a handful of them were actually friends! (At least the word "followers" more closely fits the cold, impersonal reality.) I have even, this very week, witnessed the grotesque sight of an Instgram influencer and YouTuber who struts around in bikinis and measures herself by the amount of lust she generates in anonymous men, moaning almost hyterically about how lonely she is...almost as if the stream of online validation and adulation had no actual substance, because even a million "subscribers" can't make you a candle-light dinner.
This bifurcated existence, in which we give equal import to things which aren't there and people we don't know, as we do to our actual friends, family, lovers, pets, jobs, hobbies, etc., is the salient feature of the 21st century to date. It has gotten so the seemingly harmless phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has taken on a chilling quality, because to a whole generation (or three) of people, this is factually true. Their sense of reality has been redefined, so that an unshared experience is no experience at all, but rather a kind of scientific-philosophical conundrum, like Schroedinger's cat. If you go to a concert, or to some scenic overlook, or a sports event or a nightclub or even a restaurant, it is now customary to document and record the event. Many people post almost professionally edited and mixed videos of their gym workouts. Warren Beatty famously jeered at Madonna that "she doesn't want to live off camera." The same insult could now be levied at the rest of us. And it is not mere narcissism that drives this impulse. It is an acknowledgement that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and one virtual. The problem, however, is not that this situation exists, but rather when both worlds are treated as if they have equal value, for the slope is slippery indeed. As someone who worked in the video game industry for nine years, and correspondingly met many from the vast community of cosplayers, Youtubers, Instragram influencers, etc., etc., I can say with assurance that there are many who have taken this a step further, and are more comfortable and more active in "the place that isn't a place" than in their actual, physical lives.
On the surface of things, this is understandable and was inevitable. Even in the 70s and 80s, there were millions who found safe harbor only in eccentric fantasy worlds -- Dungeons and Dragons addicts would be a literal example, but this could be extended to metalheads, punks, and other isolated communities of semi-or-full outcasts, be they tied together by role playing games, video games, music, drug-music culture, or what have you. I myself was one such kid: from the age of ten to about fifteen or sixteen, I lived primarily in my own head. Had I the resources of todays similarly aged kids back then, I'd have been no different than they are now: so there's no judgment here. I am simply pointing out that technology has allowed what the people of my generation (X) and those before us could only dream about: a way of making everyday reality optional. The internet has not been around long enough for us to say definitively what the consequeces of this will be, but anyone with eyes can see the downside goes lower than the upside rises. People are fatter than ever. They are unhealthier than ever. They are more anxious, more depressed, more nihilistic, more angry, and more suicidal than they have ever been, and a lot of this can be traced, circumstancially at least, to the pervasiveness of the internet. Life is hard: virtual reality is easy, and humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you want to be an unstoppable badass killer covered in medals and stripes and held in awe by your peers, you can join the military and spend a couple of years working and sweating and bleeding your way through basic training, advanced training, airborne school, Ranger school, Special Forces school, and so on...or you can just get really, really good at Call of Duty, all without doing a single sit-up or even rising off of the couch. The distinction between the actual and the virtual has blurred to the degree that the very definition of reality no longer has a clear, sharp, obvious definition.
This is a problem for which no solution, short of an electromagnetic pulse which would destroy the internet entirely for the foreseeable future (and plunge the world into chaos as a result), presents itself. And indeed, short of such apocalyptic disaster, there may be no solution at all. Like atomic energy, this particular genie ain't going back into its bottle. This problem is, however, one which has come about in my lifetime, and watching it grow has been a fascinating process. I was certainly not among those who foresaw the troubles that are now with us, but I do remember being especially taken by a line of dialog from "I Robert, You Jane," an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which did, all the way back in 1997. It is a point of view which back then was considered laughable, but today has gained a great deal of currency indeed:
The only reality is virtual. If your'e not jacked in, you're not alive.
January 25, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART TWO OF THREE)
When "V" debuted in 1983, I was not quite eleven years old, and found myself sleepless with anticipation. The 80s were the Golden Age of TV movies and mini-series, of course, but the vast majority of these were historical melodramas like "The Thorn Birds," "Shogun," "The Winds of War," "North & South," "Masada," etc. A sci-fi mini-series about a "soft" alien invasion of contemporary Earth was a big deviation from the norm. In fact, it was unique. And since every kid my age had been raised on "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica," our thirst for fresh science-fiction adventures was pretty keen. "V" provided a lot of satisfaction for that thirst, but it ended on what might be called a cliffhanger, leaving me and my schoolmates keen for a resolution. "V: The Final Battle" certainly provided that. It's a slam-bang "finish" to one of the most interesting and innovative ideas ever put on television. But the emphasis is on the "slam bang" and not the "imaginative" or "innovative." In retrospect it is still enormously entertaining, but leaves the viewer -- this one anyway -- with a feeling that it might have been much more.
To position us in the right spot on Memory Lane, the place where "V: The Final Battle" resides -- 1984 -- it's necessary to walk backward a year, a perform a swift recap.
In the original "V," conceived and executed by writer-producer-director Kenneth Johnson, a huge alien fleet appears unexpectedly over the skies of Earth, disgorging aliens who look...just like us, and even use prosaic, comfortably familiar human names. The "Visitors," as they call themselves, pose as benefactors of humanity, offering their advanced technology in exchange for certain chemicals required for their dying homeworld. In reality, of course, the Visitors are humanoid lizards wearing prosthetic skins, whose real aim is to suck Earth dry of its natural resources and devour that of the population they aren't going to turn into slaves. Taking control of the media, government and military, exterminating the scientific community, and actively courting human collaborators, the Visitors soon established de facto control of the planet and go about their grisly scheme, only to be confronted with a home-grown resistance movement in Los Angeles led by handsy journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and scrappy scientist Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). At the end of "V," with the Visitors' secret exposed, the battle lines are clearly drawn: Visitors and their human collaborators versus the resistance and the "Fifth Column" -- sympathetic Visitors working with the humans to sabotage the evil aims of their fellow reptiles.
"V," as you will recall, was a heavy-handed but nevertheless brilliant analysis of how fascism comes to power -- not merely the methods it uses to destabilize and destroy democracy, but the nature of its appeal to the ordinary person on the street, the person who seemingly has nothing to gain by embracing it. The Visitors are not only dangerous because they have nefarious motives and employ violence to bring them about, but because they are so able at recruiting -- or rather seducing -- humans to do their dirty work for them. These collaborators run the range from cold-eyed opportunists to unstable weaklings thirsty for power, to merely the naive and credulous. Kenneth Johnson had a point to make, and he made it both grossly and subtly.
"V: The Final Battle" is cut from rather different cloth.
The second miniseries begins not long after the first left off. The Resistance, led by Mike and Juliet, is waging a brutal guerrilla war against the Visitor occupation, but floundering in the face of superior alien technology. Enter bloodthirsty mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), a resistance fighter from Chicago, who brings special weapons and a demand: join the larger, nationwide resistance movement or be wiped out. Tyler's appearance exacerbates existing tensions within the Los Angeles resistance, as well as despair over how they are ultimately going to drive the Visitors from Earth, but things aren't much better on the Visitor side of things: Supreme Commander John (Richard Herd) has to juggle the ambitions of his sadistic chief scientist Diana (Jane Badler), and their equally cruel security chief Steven (Andrew Prine), while dealing with the arrival of a new fleet commander, Pamela (Sarah Douglas), who arrives determined to exterminate the resistance and suck the planet dry. He must also contend with the Fifth Column, led by the brave dissident Martin (Frank Ashmore), which is feeding the resistance information and aid. Meanwhile, Robin Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), who was impregnated with the first human-alien hybrid baby in the last series, finds herself the potential key to ridding the Earth of the Visitors once and for all...but first she has to give birth, and only God knows what she's going to give birth to.
"The Final Battle" is densely packed with characters and even more densely packed with sub-plots, some carried over from the original series. As I just said, that series was essentially an allegory about how fascism infiltrates, seduces, and finally throttles a democratic society into submission: the second, far more violent and brutal, is about the price that must be paid to resist such tyranny, and not only the blood price, but the moral one. Families, including Donovan's, are broken apart by the war -- his mother is an arch collaborator. The resistance performs horrible acts fighting for freedom: experimenting medically on prisoners, setting up collaborators to be horribly murdered, using seduction and betrayal to obtain information, etc., etc, and these acts, in turn, set up fresh conflicts between the resistance members themselves. If there was one thing 80s TV was good at, it was the soap-opera dynamic of "constant conflict, constantly occurring." Everyone fights as much with each other as the enemy. This may be melodramatic, but it's also realistic, and compelling.
There are some commendable performances here. Andy Packer as the traitor David Bernstein is at once horrifyingly degenerate and truly pathetic as the sniveling, deluded misift who only the Visitors would accept and empower. Andrew Prine as Steven manages to look remarkably like a reptile wearing a human face -- he has a sort of cold, pitiless hunger in his stare at all times. Robert Englund is remarkably sweet as as Willie, and Frank Ashmore brings a grave dignity to the Stauffenberg-esque character of Martin. Though the cast is largely unchanged -- most everybody who survived series one is back for series two, with a few exceptions -- one of the great additions to "The Final Battle" is Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler. Tyler is a walking weapon, as cruel as the Visitors, and just as bloodthirsty, the sole difference being that he is human and they reptilian. If Donovan is the heroic "do-gooder" with a smoothly functioning moral compass, Ham epitomizes the ruthless resistance fighter who has zero scruples and would just as soon shoot a reluctant or collaborationist human as one of the lizards. The chemistry he has with Singer is terrific, and he elevates every scene he is in, even the bad ones.
There is also plenty of action, much more than in the first series, and much of it enjoyable. The Visitors, of course, don't shoot much better than Imperial stormtroopers or Cylons, and with the exception of the opening battle, the humans are far too successful in firefights and dogfights, but what the hell. If bad guys could shoot, Hollywood would be out of a job.
On the debit side, "The Final Battle" lacks some of the elegance of the first series, probably due to the lack of involvement by Kenny Johnson, the series creator, who had little or nothing to do with this sequel and lamented the less visceral, less philosophical script that was ultimately put on screen. The 80s were, tonally, as addicted to melodrama as they were teased hair and pancake rouge: some of the brain of Johnson's concept was crudely cut out in favor of Dynasty drama and shoot 'em up action. What's more, the rather tenuous suspension of disbelief the plot required to work at full pressure was pierced by logical holes at many points. The Visitors are so predatory and treacherous it's hard to believe they could get through a single day without killing each other all off, the "star child" plot is silly and scientifically nonsensical, and the alien baby sequences come off as utterly ludicrous due to rubbish make up effects. The "conversion" scenes with Julie are also intolerably long and in the end, tedious -- how long can we watch Faye Grant in a body stocking, acting as if she's having a heart attack? I was also disappointed that a plotline from the first film -- the Resistance trying to contact another race of aliens who are enemies with the Visitors -- is abandoned here. Finally, the solution the humans come up with to rid themselves of the reptiles, while workable as an idea, is executed in a laughable way -- laughable even to me as a twelve year old boy. Although this series is actually more fun than the first, being replete with shootouts, escapes and fist-fights, it is not actually better: in fact it is not as good. But the difference is probably not worth bothering with. Each miniseries has its own distinct flavor, bitter and sweet.
Such was "V: The Final Battle." It was not Shakespeare, not even bad Shakespeare, but it had a lot to handle and it handled most everything, if not necessarily well, then at least decisively.
So where does that leave us now, as we stand at 1984 Memory Lane and peer through its ivy-covered windows into the dusty living room of TV history? Is "The Final Battle" worth remembering or celebrating? Does it withstand the test of time? And did it leave a legacy?
Having just rewatched the series, I can say that, despite all its hokum, its cumbersome plot armor, its logical contradictions and cheesy silliness, "The Final Battle" is largely a very satisfying watch even forty-odd years down the road. Stories of resistance against tyranny are almost always enjoyable despite their inevitable brutality -- and "TFB" is indeed quite brutal, sometimes even to the point of mild shock. Allegorical stories have a great strength to them, allowing us to make fanciful takes on real history, and "V" so clearly being the story of resistance to Nazism specifically and Fascism generally, it is nonetheless even more fun to see the allegory handled with laser rifles and green blood. From the standpoint of execution it may fail the time-test as all "old" television fails in the face of ever-advancing technology and changes in societal mores, but on the most critical point -- as a warning against fascism, and a reminder that democracy is fueled by the blood of ordinary people with moral and physical courage, not "influencers" or the punditry -- it is actually more relevant than ever. America, now, today as I write this with my cat staring at me, is in a surprisingly similar-looking boat to the fictive Los Angeles of 1984. Like the characters in the miniseries, we real flesh-and-blood Americans have a choice to make, between clunky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass democracy, or the sugar-coated poison pill that is fascism, that dark medicine that goes down so smoothly and leaves such a bitter aftertaste.
I close this second of the three chapters of this trip down Memory Lane by pointing out "The Final Battle" did indeed have a legacy: Following the huge rating success of this mini-series, a TV show was commissioned which continued the story and characters for another year...and we will soon be discussing this (mercifully?) forgotten chapter of television history: but but for today's purposes, this is the climax. And a fitting one. "The Final Battle" is not brain food as its predecessor was: it is greasy, overbuttered county fair popcorn, but damn tasty nonetheless. Entertaining as hell, it rides roughshod over its own flaws and delivers a brutal, satisfying, rather ridiculous finish to one of the more exciting moments in television history.
To position us in the right spot on Memory Lane, the place where "V: The Final Battle" resides -- 1984 -- it's necessary to walk backward a year, a perform a swift recap.
In the original "V," conceived and executed by writer-producer-director Kenneth Johnson, a huge alien fleet appears unexpectedly over the skies of Earth, disgorging aliens who look...just like us, and even use prosaic, comfortably familiar human names. The "Visitors," as they call themselves, pose as benefactors of humanity, offering their advanced technology in exchange for certain chemicals required for their dying homeworld. In reality, of course, the Visitors are humanoid lizards wearing prosthetic skins, whose real aim is to suck Earth dry of its natural resources and devour that of the population they aren't going to turn into slaves. Taking control of the media, government and military, exterminating the scientific community, and actively courting human collaborators, the Visitors soon established de facto control of the planet and go about their grisly scheme, only to be confronted with a home-grown resistance movement in Los Angeles led by handsy journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and scrappy scientist Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). At the end of "V," with the Visitors' secret exposed, the battle lines are clearly drawn: Visitors and their human collaborators versus the resistance and the "Fifth Column" -- sympathetic Visitors working with the humans to sabotage the evil aims of their fellow reptiles.
"V," as you will recall, was a heavy-handed but nevertheless brilliant analysis of how fascism comes to power -- not merely the methods it uses to destabilize and destroy democracy, but the nature of its appeal to the ordinary person on the street, the person who seemingly has nothing to gain by embracing it. The Visitors are not only dangerous because they have nefarious motives and employ violence to bring them about, but because they are so able at recruiting -- or rather seducing -- humans to do their dirty work for them. These collaborators run the range from cold-eyed opportunists to unstable weaklings thirsty for power, to merely the naive and credulous. Kenneth Johnson had a point to make, and he made it both grossly and subtly.
"V: The Final Battle" is cut from rather different cloth.
The second miniseries begins not long after the first left off. The Resistance, led by Mike and Juliet, is waging a brutal guerrilla war against the Visitor occupation, but floundering in the face of superior alien technology. Enter bloodthirsty mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), a resistance fighter from Chicago, who brings special weapons and a demand: join the larger, nationwide resistance movement or be wiped out. Tyler's appearance exacerbates existing tensions within the Los Angeles resistance, as well as despair over how they are ultimately going to drive the Visitors from Earth, but things aren't much better on the Visitor side of things: Supreme Commander John (Richard Herd) has to juggle the ambitions of his sadistic chief scientist Diana (Jane Badler), and their equally cruel security chief Steven (Andrew Prine), while dealing with the arrival of a new fleet commander, Pamela (Sarah Douglas), who arrives determined to exterminate the resistance and suck the planet dry. He must also contend with the Fifth Column, led by the brave dissident Martin (Frank Ashmore), which is feeding the resistance information and aid. Meanwhile, Robin Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), who was impregnated with the first human-alien hybrid baby in the last series, finds herself the potential key to ridding the Earth of the Visitors once and for all...but first she has to give birth, and only God knows what she's going to give birth to.
"The Final Battle" is densely packed with characters and even more densely packed with sub-plots, some carried over from the original series. As I just said, that series was essentially an allegory about how fascism infiltrates, seduces, and finally throttles a democratic society into submission: the second, far more violent and brutal, is about the price that must be paid to resist such tyranny, and not only the blood price, but the moral one. Families, including Donovan's, are broken apart by the war -- his mother is an arch collaborator. The resistance performs horrible acts fighting for freedom: experimenting medically on prisoners, setting up collaborators to be horribly murdered, using seduction and betrayal to obtain information, etc., etc, and these acts, in turn, set up fresh conflicts between the resistance members themselves. If there was one thing 80s TV was good at, it was the soap-opera dynamic of "constant conflict, constantly occurring." Everyone fights as much with each other as the enemy. This may be melodramatic, but it's also realistic, and compelling.
There are some commendable performances here. Andy Packer as the traitor David Bernstein is at once horrifyingly degenerate and truly pathetic as the sniveling, deluded misift who only the Visitors would accept and empower. Andrew Prine as Steven manages to look remarkably like a reptile wearing a human face -- he has a sort of cold, pitiless hunger in his stare at all times. Robert Englund is remarkably sweet as as Willie, and Frank Ashmore brings a grave dignity to the Stauffenberg-esque character of Martin. Though the cast is largely unchanged -- most everybody who survived series one is back for series two, with a few exceptions -- one of the great additions to "The Final Battle" is Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler. Tyler is a walking weapon, as cruel as the Visitors, and just as bloodthirsty, the sole difference being that he is human and they reptilian. If Donovan is the heroic "do-gooder" with a smoothly functioning moral compass, Ham epitomizes the ruthless resistance fighter who has zero scruples and would just as soon shoot a reluctant or collaborationist human as one of the lizards. The chemistry he has with Singer is terrific, and he elevates every scene he is in, even the bad ones.
There is also plenty of action, much more than in the first series, and much of it enjoyable. The Visitors, of course, don't shoot much better than Imperial stormtroopers or Cylons, and with the exception of the opening battle, the humans are far too successful in firefights and dogfights, but what the hell. If bad guys could shoot, Hollywood would be out of a job.
On the debit side, "The Final Battle" lacks some of the elegance of the first series, probably due to the lack of involvement by Kenny Johnson, the series creator, who had little or nothing to do with this sequel and lamented the less visceral, less philosophical script that was ultimately put on screen. The 80s were, tonally, as addicted to melodrama as they were teased hair and pancake rouge: some of the brain of Johnson's concept was crudely cut out in favor of Dynasty drama and shoot 'em up action. What's more, the rather tenuous suspension of disbelief the plot required to work at full pressure was pierced by logical holes at many points. The Visitors are so predatory and treacherous it's hard to believe they could get through a single day without killing each other all off, the "star child" plot is silly and scientifically nonsensical, and the alien baby sequences come off as utterly ludicrous due to rubbish make up effects. The "conversion" scenes with Julie are also intolerably long and in the end, tedious -- how long can we watch Faye Grant in a body stocking, acting as if she's having a heart attack? I was also disappointed that a plotline from the first film -- the Resistance trying to contact another race of aliens who are enemies with the Visitors -- is abandoned here. Finally, the solution the humans come up with to rid themselves of the reptiles, while workable as an idea, is executed in a laughable way -- laughable even to me as a twelve year old boy. Although this series is actually more fun than the first, being replete with shootouts, escapes and fist-fights, it is not actually better: in fact it is not as good. But the difference is probably not worth bothering with. Each miniseries has its own distinct flavor, bitter and sweet.
Such was "V: The Final Battle." It was not Shakespeare, not even bad Shakespeare, but it had a lot to handle and it handled most everything, if not necessarily well, then at least decisively.
So where does that leave us now, as we stand at 1984 Memory Lane and peer through its ivy-covered windows into the dusty living room of TV history? Is "The Final Battle" worth remembering or celebrating? Does it withstand the test of time? And did it leave a legacy?
Having just rewatched the series, I can say that, despite all its hokum, its cumbersome plot armor, its logical contradictions and cheesy silliness, "The Final Battle" is largely a very satisfying watch even forty-odd years down the road. Stories of resistance against tyranny are almost always enjoyable despite their inevitable brutality -- and "TFB" is indeed quite brutal, sometimes even to the point of mild shock. Allegorical stories have a great strength to them, allowing us to make fanciful takes on real history, and "V" so clearly being the story of resistance to Nazism specifically and Fascism generally, it is nonetheless even more fun to see the allegory handled with laser rifles and green blood. From the standpoint of execution it may fail the time-test as all "old" television fails in the face of ever-advancing technology and changes in societal mores, but on the most critical point -- as a warning against fascism, and a reminder that democracy is fueled by the blood of ordinary people with moral and physical courage, not "influencers" or the punditry -- it is actually more relevant than ever. America, now, today as I write this with my cat staring at me, is in a surprisingly similar-looking boat to the fictive Los Angeles of 1984. Like the characters in the miniseries, we real flesh-and-blood Americans have a choice to make, between clunky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass democracy, or the sugar-coated poison pill that is fascism, that dark medicine that goes down so smoothly and leaves such a bitter aftertaste.
I close this second of the three chapters of this trip down Memory Lane by pointing out "The Final Battle" did indeed have a legacy: Following the huge rating success of this mini-series, a TV show was commissioned which continued the story and characters for another year...and we will soon be discussing this (mercifully?) forgotten chapter of television history: but but for today's purposes, this is the climax. And a fitting one. "The Final Battle" is not brain food as its predecessor was: it is greasy, overbuttered county fair popcorn, but damn tasty nonetheless. Entertaining as hell, it rides roughshod over its own flaws and delivers a brutal, satisfying, rather ridiculous finish to one of the more exciting moments in television history.
January 20, 2024
I'LL SEE YOU(TUBE) SOON
Who gives a fuck what you think? -- Freddy Krueger
Folks, I'm going down the rabbit hole. As much as I've railed about the dangers, the stupidities, the ugliness of life online generally, and of social media specifically, I'm about to join that life...albeit at the entry level.
I'm starting a YouTube channel.
I've been considering a larger online presence for many years, perhaps as long as I've been actively publishing fiction, say since 2016. But because it goes against my grain -- and also, because I dislike new things and am somewhat lazy -- I was hesitant to actually take the step. My largest reservation however came from a natural, generational conservatism. The publishing world I wanted to enter my entire life was a static model, the same in the 90s as it had been in the 80s, 70s -- or 30s, for that matter. Minor changes in technology aside, it had actually existed more or less unchanged for centuries. When I was first submitting novels to agents in the mid-late 00s, many did not accept electronic submissions; some did not even have e-mail accounts. They wanted physical query letters and physical copies of sample chapters and manuscript. The Kinkos and Office Maxes in Los Angeles took a lot, and I mean a lot, of my money. Hell, on top of printing 300 page manuscripts on high-quality paper, I had to have the 'scripts shrink-wrapped before placing them in a box, strapping it shut, and mailing it via USPS or FedEx. It was a slow, expensive, cumbersome process, but it was the process I understood, and thanks to graduate school, it was the process I had formally trained in: much like the infantry officers of 1913 had trained to fight the wars of 1860, I had been rigorously and thoroughly indoctrinated to participate in a system which was manifestly obsolete.
The process by which I entered hybrid/micropress publishing in 2016 ran entirely contrary to this antiquated model. Everything was done electronically, and what's more, between Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook author page, personal website, press kit, etc., etc., my platform was also purely electronic. I cannot tell you much time getting all of that stuff up and running took, or how much frustration was involved, or how alien it was to my nature and training. Even now, when my Instagram promotions are routinely garnering 10,000 likes, when I am asked to guest on well-established podcasts fairly regularly (we'll talk more about this next week), I feel uncomfortable promoting them on my various platforms. The operative word in social media is, after all, social, and while I'm a good public speaker and can be gregarious when I wish, boasting does not come naturally to me, and what is social media but boasting? There is an implicit egotism in offering one's unsolicited opinion to the world, and it is with this idea that I am generally ill at ease.
I just got over it.
I am starting a YT channel late -- the platform is rather gray in the muzzle, and increasingly unpopular even with its own content creators, who lament demonitization, censorship and shadowbanning -- but late is the schedule upon which I generally operate. And the reason is very simple. In the eight years since I published CAGE LIFE I have won the following awards:
Best Indie Book Award -- three times
Book Excellence Award -- twice
Literary Titan Gold Medal -- twice
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award -- three times
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Zealot Script Book of the Year
Eric Hoffer Awards Finalist
Readers Favorite Five Stars -- twice
Writers Digest Honorable Mention
Shelf Unbound Runner Up
IAN Awards Finalist
I think you'd agree this is a lot of hardware: yet I have done a grossly inadequate and slovenly job of building my brand, of letting people know I actually exist. And this in many ways is the first and only role of the self-published/independent/micropress writer: even his writing is second to marketing, to advertising...in short, to boasting, or at least drawing attention to himself. And let's face it. If you read this blog, you know I don't lack for things to say, for topics to talk about. I'm a writer, yes, and can talk about writing. By extension, I am also a reader and can talk about reading. But I'm also a ten year veteran of the criminal justice system, and a twelve year veteran of Hollywood (from make up effects to video games). I'm also an amateur historian with a massive, multi-lingual library. I'm also a kid who grew up in a highly political family with strong connections to everything from the White House to the intelligence community. I'm also a hiker, martial artist, periodic console gamer, and former "Chad," among other things. In short, I have a lot I can talk about, and the time has come for me to talk about it.
Don't misunderstand me. Given the sheer number of YT channels and the merciless way the algorithms direct viewer traffic, I don't foresee getting more than a hundred subscribers and, at most, a thousand views per video, and this only after a long difficult struggle in total obscurity, during which I will doubtlessly question why I'm even bothering to do these things at all. I harbor few delusions, too, as to the toxicity of the internet, and the way any firmly held opinion on anything can trigger frenzies of anger and hatred. But as the old saw goes, a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and if I may double down on my fortune cookie epigrams, when the student is ready the master will appear. I'm ready. It's just time, and in spite of the massive obstacles involved, I'm actually excited to climb them. I'm a lot of things, but dull isn't one of them. My strategy, such as it is, is to lead off with the entertainment industry/pop culture angle, and from there segue into deeper subjects more appealing to the sort of person who is probably reading this.
So, dear reader, in the next few months the channel will launch, like a tiny sailboat into a crowded sea. And I hope to see you on the voyage.
More to follow.
Folks, I'm going down the rabbit hole. As much as I've railed about the dangers, the stupidities, the ugliness of life online generally, and of social media specifically, I'm about to join that life...albeit at the entry level.
I'm starting a YouTube channel.
I've been considering a larger online presence for many years, perhaps as long as I've been actively publishing fiction, say since 2016. But because it goes against my grain -- and also, because I dislike new things and am somewhat lazy -- I was hesitant to actually take the step. My largest reservation however came from a natural, generational conservatism. The publishing world I wanted to enter my entire life was a static model, the same in the 90s as it had been in the 80s, 70s -- or 30s, for that matter. Minor changes in technology aside, it had actually existed more or less unchanged for centuries. When I was first submitting novels to agents in the mid-late 00s, many did not accept electronic submissions; some did not even have e-mail accounts. They wanted physical query letters and physical copies of sample chapters and manuscript. The Kinkos and Office Maxes in Los Angeles took a lot, and I mean a lot, of my money. Hell, on top of printing 300 page manuscripts on high-quality paper, I had to have the 'scripts shrink-wrapped before placing them in a box, strapping it shut, and mailing it via USPS or FedEx. It was a slow, expensive, cumbersome process, but it was the process I understood, and thanks to graduate school, it was the process I had formally trained in: much like the infantry officers of 1913 had trained to fight the wars of 1860, I had been rigorously and thoroughly indoctrinated to participate in a system which was manifestly obsolete.
The process by which I entered hybrid/micropress publishing in 2016 ran entirely contrary to this antiquated model. Everything was done electronically, and what's more, between Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook author page, personal website, press kit, etc., etc., my platform was also purely electronic. I cannot tell you much time getting all of that stuff up and running took, or how much frustration was involved, or how alien it was to my nature and training. Even now, when my Instagram promotions are routinely garnering 10,000 likes, when I am asked to guest on well-established podcasts fairly regularly (we'll talk more about this next week), I feel uncomfortable promoting them on my various platforms. The operative word in social media is, after all, social, and while I'm a good public speaker and can be gregarious when I wish, boasting does not come naturally to me, and what is social media but boasting? There is an implicit egotism in offering one's unsolicited opinion to the world, and it is with this idea that I am generally ill at ease.
I just got over it.
I am starting a YT channel late -- the platform is rather gray in the muzzle, and increasingly unpopular even with its own content creators, who lament demonitization, censorship and shadowbanning -- but late is the schedule upon which I generally operate. And the reason is very simple. In the eight years since I published CAGE LIFE I have won the following awards:
Best Indie Book Award -- three times
Book Excellence Award -- twice
Literary Titan Gold Medal -- twice
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award -- three times
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Zealot Script Book of the Year
Eric Hoffer Awards Finalist
Readers Favorite Five Stars -- twice
Writers Digest Honorable Mention
Shelf Unbound Runner Up
IAN Awards Finalist
I think you'd agree this is a lot of hardware: yet I have done a grossly inadequate and slovenly job of building my brand, of letting people know I actually exist. And this in many ways is the first and only role of the self-published/independent/micropress writer: even his writing is second to marketing, to advertising...in short, to boasting, or at least drawing attention to himself. And let's face it. If you read this blog, you know I don't lack for things to say, for topics to talk about. I'm a writer, yes, and can talk about writing. By extension, I am also a reader and can talk about reading. But I'm also a ten year veteran of the criminal justice system, and a twelve year veteran of Hollywood (from make up effects to video games). I'm also an amateur historian with a massive, multi-lingual library. I'm also a kid who grew up in a highly political family with strong connections to everything from the White House to the intelligence community. I'm also a hiker, martial artist, periodic console gamer, and former "Chad," among other things. In short, I have a lot I can talk about, and the time has come for me to talk about it.
Don't misunderstand me. Given the sheer number of YT channels and the merciless way the algorithms direct viewer traffic, I don't foresee getting more than a hundred subscribers and, at most, a thousand views per video, and this only after a long difficult struggle in total obscurity, during which I will doubtlessly question why I'm even bothering to do these things at all. I harbor few delusions, too, as to the toxicity of the internet, and the way any firmly held opinion on anything can trigger frenzies of anger and hatred. But as the old saw goes, a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and if I may double down on my fortune cookie epigrams, when the student is ready the master will appear. I'm ready. It's just time, and in spite of the massive obstacles involved, I'm actually excited to climb them. I'm a lot of things, but dull isn't one of them. My strategy, such as it is, is to lead off with the entertainment industry/pop culture angle, and from there segue into deeper subjects more appealing to the sort of person who is probably reading this.
So, dear reader, in the next few months the channel will launch, like a tiny sailboat into a crowded sea. And I hope to see you on the voyage.
More to follow.
January 17, 2024
READING: A LOVE AFFAIR
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. ― Anna Quindlen
The other day I found myself sitting in a chair with a cat on my lap, reading. If this seems like underwhelming news, especially in a blog written on a platform called "Goodreads," consider the following: I have a been a voracious reader for most of my life, but when I moved from California to Pennsylvania in 2020, I had to do so without my books. For reasons I won't get into now, I had to leave my entire library in storage. As a result, neither my considerable pile of Go To books nor any of the To Be Read books (all bibliophiles know what I'm talking about here) were at hand. As a result, I began to watch more television and film than I was used to doing, and play more video games, too; the total number of books I read in '20 was the lowest in at least a decade. The subsequent year, when I had more books around me, I read only a few more. The same story obtained in 2022.
This was a source of considerable worry. Reading is, for me -- as for most of you I imagine -- not merely an activity, but a way of life; indeed, it is a large part of my identity. Yet for three years I read, on average, about one new book a month at the maximum. Whenever I had spare time and wasn't hiking, working out, drinking beer, etc., I was not reading, but in front of the tube or the computer. Granted, I was writing at a furious pace, but I always write at a furious pace: the one never detracts from the other. The truth is that I had quite gotten out of the habit of reading, something I thought impossible. Indeed, the very act of sitting down and reading became almost a chore to me -- I had to bear down, to force myself to sit still and to concentrate, and even then, I found myself unable to finish a good, well-written novel by one of my favorite authors: a first for me, and not a good one.
In 2023, however, I was able to hit my modest goals for reading, and take more pleasure in the act itself: the old habit of reading myself to sleep became, once more, a reflex. And the other day, on my lunch hour, I did something which in recent years was almost unthinkable: instead of loafing on the couch and watching an 80s TV show, I opened Unconditional Surrender, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, and spent that hour reading and listening to my cat purr. Evidently I have clawed my way back to a point where books are once again taking center stage in my life, to the point where they seem more appealing than the fabled lures of the television.
I mention all of this because if you'd asked me, before I moved, whether anything could truly replace books in my life, I'd have laughed in your face (politely, I hope, but still -- laughter). I took it for granted that this love, this need for reading which dated back to early childhood, would always be with me. I learned the hard way that we are, in the last analysis, what we do: not what we did. The past cuts very little in the way of ice, and reading is like any other skill: if you neglect it, it atrophies; and like any other atrophied muscle must be slowly and torturously brought back into firm condition.
We all have besetting sins: mine is entitlement. And entitlement, as a friend pointed out to me, is the enemy of gratiude. You cannot be grateful for something you feel you are entitled to, and the more entitlement you feel, the less gratitude -- a truly unhappy condition, for gratitude is close kin to appreciation, to pleasure, to joy. For many, many years I carried in my heart a depth of gratitude to my parents for bringing me up in a household of books. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with that. Took it for granted. Forgot my roots and who planted the seeds that gave birth to them, and that joy -- you know the one -- of sitting there beneath a lamp with a drink close to hand and a cat purring away on your lap and some music playing in the background? As Orwell once remarked through one of his characters, "It's bliss, pure bliss." I let it rust, and now I am in the process of cleaning it, polishing it, putting an edge on it. A process, slow and not always steady. But it is rewarding. A theologian once claimed that God has more love for the sheep which strays from the flock and returns than the one who remains the whole time. This always struck me as horribly unfair, but from an emotional standpoint I understand it. I have strayed, and now I have returned, and it feels good, but it is not a proud feeling. Rather, it's a feeling of acceptance, and gratitude at the acceptance. Because you may turn your back on books, but books never turn their back on you. Stray as far as you wish: the road remains.
The other day I found myself sitting in a chair with a cat on my lap, reading. If this seems like underwhelming news, especially in a blog written on a platform called "Goodreads," consider the following: I have a been a voracious reader for most of my life, but when I moved from California to Pennsylvania in 2020, I had to do so without my books. For reasons I won't get into now, I had to leave my entire library in storage. As a result, neither my considerable pile of Go To books nor any of the To Be Read books (all bibliophiles know what I'm talking about here) were at hand. As a result, I began to watch more television and film than I was used to doing, and play more video games, too; the total number of books I read in '20 was the lowest in at least a decade. The subsequent year, when I had more books around me, I read only a few more. The same story obtained in 2022.
This was a source of considerable worry. Reading is, for me -- as for most of you I imagine -- not merely an activity, but a way of life; indeed, it is a large part of my identity. Yet for three years I read, on average, about one new book a month at the maximum. Whenever I had spare time and wasn't hiking, working out, drinking beer, etc., I was not reading, but in front of the tube or the computer. Granted, I was writing at a furious pace, but I always write at a furious pace: the one never detracts from the other. The truth is that I had quite gotten out of the habit of reading, something I thought impossible. Indeed, the very act of sitting down and reading became almost a chore to me -- I had to bear down, to force myself to sit still and to concentrate, and even then, I found myself unable to finish a good, well-written novel by one of my favorite authors: a first for me, and not a good one.
In 2023, however, I was able to hit my modest goals for reading, and take more pleasure in the act itself: the old habit of reading myself to sleep became, once more, a reflex. And the other day, on my lunch hour, I did something which in recent years was almost unthinkable: instead of loafing on the couch and watching an 80s TV show, I opened Unconditional Surrender, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, and spent that hour reading and listening to my cat purr. Evidently I have clawed my way back to a point where books are once again taking center stage in my life, to the point where they seem more appealing than the fabled lures of the television.
I mention all of this because if you'd asked me, before I moved, whether anything could truly replace books in my life, I'd have laughed in your face (politely, I hope, but still -- laughter). I took it for granted that this love, this need for reading which dated back to early childhood, would always be with me. I learned the hard way that we are, in the last analysis, what we do: not what we did. The past cuts very little in the way of ice, and reading is like any other skill: if you neglect it, it atrophies; and like any other atrophied muscle must be slowly and torturously brought back into firm condition.
We all have besetting sins: mine is entitlement. And entitlement, as a friend pointed out to me, is the enemy of gratiude. You cannot be grateful for something you feel you are entitled to, and the more entitlement you feel, the less gratitude -- a truly unhappy condition, for gratitude is close kin to appreciation, to pleasure, to joy. For many, many years I carried in my heart a depth of gratitude to my parents for bringing me up in a household of books. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with that. Took it for granted. Forgot my roots and who planted the seeds that gave birth to them, and that joy -- you know the one -- of sitting there beneath a lamp with a drink close to hand and a cat purring away on your lap and some music playing in the background? As Orwell once remarked through one of his characters, "It's bliss, pure bliss." I let it rust, and now I am in the process of cleaning it, polishing it, putting an edge on it. A process, slow and not always steady. But it is rewarding. A theologian once claimed that God has more love for the sheep which strays from the flock and returns than the one who remains the whole time. This always struck me as horribly unfair, but from an emotional standpoint I understand it. I have strayed, and now I have returned, and it feels good, but it is not a proud feeling. Rather, it's a feeling of acceptance, and gratitude at the acceptance. Because you may turn your back on books, but books never turn their back on you. Stray as far as you wish: the road remains.
January 13, 2024
CAPTAIN KIRK, UNPERSON
I'll give this to Paramount Pictures: they're consistent. Going back as long as I can remember, Paramount has taken a snobbish, contemptuous attitude to fans of franchises the studio itself doesn't care for. Horror afficianados discovered this decades ago, when DVD releases of classic or cult-classic movies and television shows were either conducted on the cheap (with poor image quality, cropped format, no special features and wobbly sound), or simply never took place. The lucrative FRIDAY THE 13TH slasher series, which netted Paramount countless millions over the last 40 years, got especially shabby treatment. But recently an event transpired which was so jarring that even I, who expected nothing from P-mount to begin with, found myself appalled and dismayed.
They done deleted Captain Kirk.
Paramount recently released an advertisement for "Star Trek Day" which featured images of various cast members of various TREK shows which have come along since the inception of "TOS" (the original series) in the mid-1960s. Nowhere to be found among this imagery is the face of the most important character in the show's history, James Tiberius Kirk, originally portrayed by William Shatner in live action series, animated series, and numerous feature films stretching over decades before yielding (unwillingly) to Chris Pine, who was handed the role for Jar Jar Abrams regrettable franchise reboot. Shatner has been an outspoken critic of his erasure from the franchise, and equally outspoken about the fact this erasure has been going on for many years. But contrary to what his detractors may think, these complaints are not merely those of an actor whose signature role has been appropriated from him while he is still alive and in harness: they speak to a larger issue Shatner has -- which I share -- about why this erasure is actually taking place.
Audiences were first introduced to Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets starship whose "five year mission (was) to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before" in 1966. Kirk was inspired to a great degree by "Horatio Hornblower," a seafaring adventurer who appeared as the hero of a long series of adventure novels written by C.S. Forester, which were published between 1937 and 1967. Kirk, however, was a more simplified and perhaps idealized character than the troubled, complex Hornblower. Shatner's Kirk was courageous to a fault, superb in a crisis, bound almost to the point of torment by a sense of duty to his ship and his crew, and isolated by command. While he relied heavily on two subordinates (Spock and Dr. McCoy) for advice and moral support, all roads of ultimate responsibility lead to and ended with him. He wanted to do everything himself, could be ill-tempered and petty, and was clearly more comfortable with giving orders than with taking them from his own superiors. Although he detested killing and would go to enormous lengths to spare the lives of his enemies -- including, in the feature films, the life of the man who murdered his son -- he had a physical approach to problem-solving and was not the least bit shy about socking a perceived threat on the jaw. Unthreatening but persistent obstacles got the same treatment, as witnessed by this exchange in "Errand of Mercy:"
KIRK: ...where are those phasers?
AYELBORNE: I cannot tell you.
KIRK: You've told us a great deal about how you hate violence. Unless you tell me where those phasers are, you're going to have more violence than you know what to do with.
AYELBORNE: You mean you would actually use force?
KIRK: It's entirely up to you.
But it is Kirk's love of the ladies which was one of his most distinguishing characteristics. In the original series, he is relentless in his pursuit of women, so relentless that in the episode "Bread and Circuses" he beds a slave girl whose body is offered to him as a sort of last meal before his scheduled execution. (Most men in his position would be a little too preoccupied for casual sex, but not Kirk.) Nor is he above using them as means to achieve ends. In "By Any Other Name" and "Wink of an Eye" he romances women for the express purpose of producing jealous reactions in his enemies. And in "The Conscience of the King," he chastely seduces a 19 year old girl (he himself is about 33 at the time), using her to determine the identity of her father, whom he suspects is a war criminal. While Kirk is demonstratably capable of deeply romantic love, his propensity for putting ship and career over relationships (as well as, we can safely presume, some difficulty with the concept of monogamy) condemn him to never-ending isolation: every romantic partner from his past, and we meet quite a few, is very much -ex. Kirk's deepest love (he admits this more than once) is not for any woman: it is for his mistress, the starship Enterprise.
In short, Kirk is a paradigm of masculinity in its traditional and most understood form: he's brave, disciplined, proud, duty-bound, leads from the front, never shies from a fistfight, is a cocksman of the first water, and trusts his heart only to an inanimate object. Equally in short, he is everything Western culture has been trying to destroy for -- George Orwell would have argued this point -- the last 100 years.
Orwell's concept of the "unperson," deleted from history so thoroughly that it is as if they never existed, has haunted us since the publication of his masterwork, 1984: in fact it is an ancient concept, going back thousands of years to the Romans and Greeks and perhaps civilizations before them. In recent years, however, we have seen this concept applied to the field of entertainment rather than the political sphere, not merely through cancel culture, but via the subtler means of simply and quietly downplaying or making unavailable that "content" which runs against the grain of current thought. Nobody is actively trying to "cancel" Kirk: the character still exists within the STAR TREK universe. He is, however, a representation of everything Hollywood now despises: a rugged, self-reliant, charismatic, physically capable, sexually dominant male. Nowadays that label comes with consequences.
The war on masculinity is admittedly a right-ring talking point, which is why those who lean left gaslight themselves, and the rest of us roughly at the political center, by telling us there is no such thing. But one cannot entirely ignore the evidence of one's eyes in this regard, and both anecdotal experience and the facts, data and statistics demonstrate that masculinity in its traditional form is sharply on the downgrade, both in the number of males who fit the definition, and in the broader sense of masculinity being perceived by society as something valuable and virtuous, rather than "toxic" and threatening. And this is particularly painful and alarming to me for reasons both intensely personal and otherwise.
As a kid, growing up on STAR TREK reruns, I idealized Kirk to the point where I actually grew and maintained the up-and-over hair part and sharp sideburns that adorned him in the show. To me, Kirk was everything I was not, but aspired to be: a leader of men, a lover of women, a warrior with philosophical principles...in short, an adventurer. I cannot tell you the number of crises in my young life that I overcome at least in part because I relied on Kirk as an example of how to behave. And indeed, it seemed to me, looking at life in a broader and more historical perspective, that America had become as successful as it was in large part due to the fact that Kirk, in his own way, was a reflection of idealized American masculinity (I appreciate the irony here: Shatner is Canadian, and Hornblower was British, but on we go). The men who had defied King George III, who had stood up to each other at Gettysburg, who
had stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, were very much in the Kirkian vein. Like everyone living in this land, I owe them a debt, and while I never went farther down that road than registering for Selective Service (the draft) when I was 18 years old, I was prepared to pay it if called to do so. I think most of the men of my generation were as well, provided they felt the cause worthy of their life's blood and in tune with the principles of their conscience. This is, after all, still a democracy, and living in a democracy means nothing if one is not prepared to defy the government over a matter of sincere principle. But the fact remains that Kirk is an archetype of masculinity and nations that wish to survive in the long run must not only have such archetypes in their popular culture, they must be able to produce reasonable facisimilies of them in the general population. Nowadays, watching the Ukrainians defend their homeland against relentless assaults from a larger, more populous, and more powerful neighbor, I am grateful for their moral and physical courage, but I am also troubled, because I sincerely doubt my own country could produce a similar effort from its men if duty required it. I am not referring to those already in uniform, but to the vast body of men who are not, but may be needed. Questions of patriotism thrust completely aside, it boils down to whether a sufficient supply of real men -- of Kirks -- exists to take up arms in the crises to come. Too many of us have abrogated the responsibilty that comes with our balls, the obligation to be first in harm's way when the ship is sinking. The credo of the supposedly toxic man of yesteryear was, after all, "women and children first."
Generations ago, Orwell warned us in his essays about the practical consequences of discrediting physical courage in popular culture: he was a farseeing man, and he understood that societal mores are a weathervane which predicts the future weather of a nation. The question the erasure of Kirk brings to mind is: will there be enough Kirks left to withstand the storm which all of us know is coming?
They done deleted Captain Kirk.
Paramount recently released an advertisement for "Star Trek Day" which featured images of various cast members of various TREK shows which have come along since the inception of "TOS" (the original series) in the mid-1960s. Nowhere to be found among this imagery is the face of the most important character in the show's history, James Tiberius Kirk, originally portrayed by William Shatner in live action series, animated series, and numerous feature films stretching over decades before yielding (unwillingly) to Chris Pine, who was handed the role for Jar Jar Abrams regrettable franchise reboot. Shatner has been an outspoken critic of his erasure from the franchise, and equally outspoken about the fact this erasure has been going on for many years. But contrary to what his detractors may think, these complaints are not merely those of an actor whose signature role has been appropriated from him while he is still alive and in harness: they speak to a larger issue Shatner has -- which I share -- about why this erasure is actually taking place.
Audiences were first introduced to Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets starship whose "five year mission (was) to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before" in 1966. Kirk was inspired to a great degree by "Horatio Hornblower," a seafaring adventurer who appeared as the hero of a long series of adventure novels written by C.S. Forester, which were published between 1937 and 1967. Kirk, however, was a more simplified and perhaps idealized character than the troubled, complex Hornblower. Shatner's Kirk was courageous to a fault, superb in a crisis, bound almost to the point of torment by a sense of duty to his ship and his crew, and isolated by command. While he relied heavily on two subordinates (Spock and Dr. McCoy) for advice and moral support, all roads of ultimate responsibility lead to and ended with him. He wanted to do everything himself, could be ill-tempered and petty, and was clearly more comfortable with giving orders than with taking them from his own superiors. Although he detested killing and would go to enormous lengths to spare the lives of his enemies -- including, in the feature films, the life of the man who murdered his son -- he had a physical approach to problem-solving and was not the least bit shy about socking a perceived threat on the jaw. Unthreatening but persistent obstacles got the same treatment, as witnessed by this exchange in "Errand of Mercy:"
KIRK: ...where are those phasers?
AYELBORNE: I cannot tell you.
KIRK: You've told us a great deal about how you hate violence. Unless you tell me where those phasers are, you're going to have more violence than you know what to do with.
AYELBORNE: You mean you would actually use force?
KIRK: It's entirely up to you.
But it is Kirk's love of the ladies which was one of his most distinguishing characteristics. In the original series, he is relentless in his pursuit of women, so relentless that in the episode "Bread and Circuses" he beds a slave girl whose body is offered to him as a sort of last meal before his scheduled execution. (Most men in his position would be a little too preoccupied for casual sex, but not Kirk.) Nor is he above using them as means to achieve ends. In "By Any Other Name" and "Wink of an Eye" he romances women for the express purpose of producing jealous reactions in his enemies. And in "The Conscience of the King," he chastely seduces a 19 year old girl (he himself is about 33 at the time), using her to determine the identity of her father, whom he suspects is a war criminal. While Kirk is demonstratably capable of deeply romantic love, his propensity for putting ship and career over relationships (as well as, we can safely presume, some difficulty with the concept of monogamy) condemn him to never-ending isolation: every romantic partner from his past, and we meet quite a few, is very much -ex. Kirk's deepest love (he admits this more than once) is not for any woman: it is for his mistress, the starship Enterprise.
In short, Kirk is a paradigm of masculinity in its traditional and most understood form: he's brave, disciplined, proud, duty-bound, leads from the front, never shies from a fistfight, is a cocksman of the first water, and trusts his heart only to an inanimate object. Equally in short, he is everything Western culture has been trying to destroy for -- George Orwell would have argued this point -- the last 100 years.
Orwell's concept of the "unperson," deleted from history so thoroughly that it is as if they never existed, has haunted us since the publication of his masterwork, 1984: in fact it is an ancient concept, going back thousands of years to the Romans and Greeks and perhaps civilizations before them. In recent years, however, we have seen this concept applied to the field of entertainment rather than the political sphere, not merely through cancel culture, but via the subtler means of simply and quietly downplaying or making unavailable that "content" which runs against the grain of current thought. Nobody is actively trying to "cancel" Kirk: the character still exists within the STAR TREK universe. He is, however, a representation of everything Hollywood now despises: a rugged, self-reliant, charismatic, physically capable, sexually dominant male. Nowadays that label comes with consequences.
The war on masculinity is admittedly a right-ring talking point, which is why those who lean left gaslight themselves, and the rest of us roughly at the political center, by telling us there is no such thing. But one cannot entirely ignore the evidence of one's eyes in this regard, and both anecdotal experience and the facts, data and statistics demonstrate that masculinity in its traditional form is sharply on the downgrade, both in the number of males who fit the definition, and in the broader sense of masculinity being perceived by society as something valuable and virtuous, rather than "toxic" and threatening. And this is particularly painful and alarming to me for reasons both intensely personal and otherwise.
As a kid, growing up on STAR TREK reruns, I idealized Kirk to the point where I actually grew and maintained the up-and-over hair part and sharp sideburns that adorned him in the show. To me, Kirk was everything I was not, but aspired to be: a leader of men, a lover of women, a warrior with philosophical principles...in short, an adventurer. I cannot tell you the number of crises in my young life that I overcome at least in part because I relied on Kirk as an example of how to behave. And indeed, it seemed to me, looking at life in a broader and more historical perspective, that America had become as successful as it was in large part due to the fact that Kirk, in his own way, was a reflection of idealized American masculinity (I appreciate the irony here: Shatner is Canadian, and Hornblower was British, but on we go). The men who had defied King George III, who had stood up to each other at Gettysburg, who
had stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, were very much in the Kirkian vein. Like everyone living in this land, I owe them a debt, and while I never went farther down that road than registering for Selective Service (the draft) when I was 18 years old, I was prepared to pay it if called to do so. I think most of the men of my generation were as well, provided they felt the cause worthy of their life's blood and in tune with the principles of their conscience. This is, after all, still a democracy, and living in a democracy means nothing if one is not prepared to defy the government over a matter of sincere principle. But the fact remains that Kirk is an archetype of masculinity and nations that wish to survive in the long run must not only have such archetypes in their popular culture, they must be able to produce reasonable facisimilies of them in the general population. Nowadays, watching the Ukrainians defend their homeland against relentless assaults from a larger, more populous, and more powerful neighbor, I am grateful for their moral and physical courage, but I am also troubled, because I sincerely doubt my own country could produce a similar effort from its men if duty required it. I am not referring to those already in uniform, but to the vast body of men who are not, but may be needed. Questions of patriotism thrust completely aside, it boils down to whether a sufficient supply of real men -- of Kirks -- exists to take up arms in the crises to come. Too many of us have abrogated the responsibilty that comes with our balls, the obligation to be first in harm's way when the ship is sinking. The credo of the supposedly toxic man of yesteryear was, after all, "women and children first."
Generations ago, Orwell warned us in his essays about the practical consequences of discrediting physical courage in popular culture: he was a farseeing man, and he understood that societal mores are a weathervane which predicts the future weather of a nation. The question the erasure of Kirk brings to mind is: will there be enough Kirks left to withstand the storm which all of us know is coming?
January 10, 2024
DUMBING IT DOWN
Like Grandpa Simpson, I need little in the way of provocation to go on a tirade about something I find annoying, wicked, or just plain stupid. In this case I was set off by a single line of dialog in Denise Villeneuve's cinematic adaption of Frank Herbert's all-time sci-fi classic, DUNE. The most cerebral character in the entire sprawling cast, a man who is quite literally a human computer capable of staggering feats of mental computation, Thufir Hawat, gets on the radio and tells his fellows, "OK... we're good to go."
I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.
You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."
One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.
It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."
Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."
The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.
You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.
I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.
You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."
One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.
It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."
Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."
The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.
You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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