Query

Obviously, this show hasn't come out yet, and it might be too early to judge, but is HBO really producing a show called Hung about a guy with a huge penis? Seriously? I guess the glory days of HBO's praised literary era are gone indeed.

Meditations on Galactica

So, Battlestar Galactica's final half season has begun.

I have to say that I'm glad the show is ending, because I think its moment has passed. Actually, had there not been a writers' strike it might have ended at the right moment. But it's possibly the dawning of the Era of Obama. Hopelessness went out with Dubya. Back in 2005 everything seemed hopeless, but there is now the promise of renewal. BSG is pretty much stuck in 2005, in terms of its emotional appeal.


Then again, one might forgive the show if it hadn't begun to feel tired already. Galactica had lost its driving force and vision long before this season. If I had to pinpoint where it went away, it would be right after the secret tribunal episode in Season 3. Before that, the show was definitely relevant: its explorations of faith and politics were interesting, and it had finely drawn characters. The political aspect was most interesting: the most forceful rebuke of the Bush worldview in pop culture might well have come from Battlestar Galactica. But since the tribunal episode the show has made almost no political observations of any worth. Instead, the third season junked most of the show's ongoing themes and emphases but kept the storylines and characters. Season 3 became fixated on lesser stories: Kara and Lee! The final five! Starbuck's destiny! Baltar's trial! All of a sudden, a show which had been about a desperate attempt to escape from the Cylons became entirely Cylon-less, and despite a gem here and there it was a wasteland of boring and pointless episodes. Honestly, they could have done the Baltar trial in a single episode and gotten back to Cylon action. BSG's third season felt more like the first season for a show that I would never have gotten into in the first place.


And its more recent season feels like that show's second season. It really is like the alternate 1985 from Back to the Future Part II where things are just askew. There were actually quite a few things to like in this episode, but upon further reflection, I really miss the old BSG. Y'know, with Admiral Cain and the Pegasus? That was some entertaining, allegorical, dense stuff. You had the sense then of a point to all this dreariness. That's what has gone away. The urgency. Or maybe I'm just ODing on dreariness. Honestly, I don't know. I can tell you that I never had that problem with Deep Space Nine.


I will be the first to admit that Deep Space Nine had its flaws, because it did. There were lots of silly episodes sprinkled in with the serious ones. But it never got depressing. There were a few stretches where things were rough during the Dominion War, but DS9 found a balance between that business and lightness in a way that BSG never did, and this makes me think that DS9 will stand the test of time better than Galactica will. BSG can be compelling but it isn't really balanced, and after a while, one gets tired of ODing on sorrow.


I really do think that that has changed as well: earlier episodes were dark but they didn't lay on the sorrow too thick. Not only that, but there seemed to be actual forward momentum to the show, a feel that everything mattered and that important things were happening. The dark tone of the show was established from episode one, but there always was that little bit of hope. After a while, though, the unrelenting and progressively increasing grimness begins to feel meanspirited. The show might yet tie it all together satisfyingly, but it's begun to feel like the darkness has become an end in and of itself, especially since we've seen the ruined Earth.

At this point, my investment in the series is largely intellectual: I want to see how Ron Moore wraps it up. Emotionally, I've been through with Galactica for a while.

A Shield and a Battlestar: Two shows that shine a light on Bush's America

The Bush Era is now (gratefully) ending, and along with it the vibrant art that commented on its intellectual and cultural underpinnings and implications. Unfortunately, due to a media structure that is still incredibly hierarchical (though it seems to be decentralizing fairly rapidly these days), much of the most significant aesthetic accomplishments of the past decade or so have been unjustly kept secret. Such is life.

One of these accomplishments--perhaps the most popular--was the television show The Shield. As a television show it was exceptional: fast-paced, darkly humorous, packed with compelling and diverse characters, and consistently outstanding during its entire run. One could watch the whole thing just for the stories and not have to think about the moral and political implications of the show.

Those layers, however, are at the very heart of the show. The Shield centers on Vic Mackey, a bald-headed imposing cop played indelibly by Michael Chiklis. Mackey heads up the Strike Team, a semi-autonomous elite anti-gang task force charged with taking on gang violence in Los Angeles. At the heart of the show is an acknowledged moral paradox: Vic's team is effective at locking up the bad guys, no doubt about it. Even Vic's detractors on the show cannot help but admit it. There's just a little wrinkle, though: Mackey is totally, completely, epically corrupt. During the course of the show he commits murders, shakes down drug dealers for money, steals drugs, robs from gangs and cheats on his wife, for starters. Such behavior is typical for members of the Strike Team. Why is this? From what flashbacks we've seen, Vic and his crew were decent guys and good cops before they joined the team. What gives?

The show's answer to this is simple: power corrupts. It's a simple message that a lot of people tend to forget, and that other shows like 24 tend to obfuscate. I'm not going to go on a rant about 24--it is not one of my favorites, and I am prepared to leave it alone for the time being. But in addition to being a tool to desensitize the country into giving up our liberties and values in exchange for "freedom" (sorry, I couldn't resist), 24's largest failing--and why it should never be taken seriously--is that it doesn't believe that power corrupts. Jack Bauer & Co. do what they have to do every week, day in, day out. The show's argument is that we should let intelligence professionals do what they need to do in order to protect America and not ask questions, to just trust their love for America as a guiding light instead of hindrances like the Bill of Rights. And that's certainly a viewpoint, and a debatable one. But the show never really considers that giving a guy like Jack that kind of power is a bad thing. Jack isn't corrupt. He's not haunted by what he's done. Killing and torturing don't bother him, and his brain's rationalization center seems to be quite well developed that he can explain it all away as being in defense of America. Actual intelligence officers who did what Bauer did were not so lucky: as the book The Very Best Men by Evan Thomas tells us, many of them went literally mad after realizing what they had done. And people who inflict violence upon others--especially in the form of torture--find that it takes a toll on their egos. Many of them commit suicide. To me, the idea of power and corruption go so neatly together that it almost makes sense to speak of them as two sides of the same coin. Just take a guy like Ted Stevens, the outgoing Alaska Senator who was convicted of taking bribes a few months back. These days Stevens is known as a particularly clumsy crook or, failing that, a notorious porkmeister, but Stevens actually made his career as a tough prosecutor of political corruption. Or take the Bush Administration. Give someone vast quantities of power, and even upstanding people will turn into crooks. 24's primary philosophical assertion is that you can have both justice and absolute power concentrated in a small group of people. This is a pretty foolish and, dare I say, not a particularly American worldview, at least according to what our Founding Fathers might have said.

Consider the counterexample posed by The Shield. Vic and his team pretty much do whatever they want for the first few seasons, and spend the rest of the series paying for their sins. Their corruption is evident from the very first episode, in which they kill a Strike Team member who is snitching to the feds. What's more, the corruption feeds forward, requiring ever increasing acts of immorality--notably the murder of one team member by another--in order to survive. Importantly, though, the show posits that all that extra garbage really isn't necessary to doing the job: we see throughout the show that the Strike Team's more straight-laced counterparts are able to do their jobs perfectly well within the bounds of the law, and get criminals off the street just as effectively. All the moral compromises and corruption that are inevitable in the acquisition of power turn out not to be necessary to do the job, and they wind up to be disastrous to those who practice them. Vic's ultimate fate is actually rather poetic: he is consigned to live out his days in a bureaucratic McJob in order to remain out of jail, effectively shut out of power and consigned to work at a place where everyone knows he's a cop killer and then to be out of a job and unemployable in three years. My guess is that Vic eats his gun at some point shortly after the end of the show rather than go through life without having the sort of power he once wielded. It's fitting, though: Vic allowed himself to get turned into a monster, everything and everyone that mattered to him, and it all turned out to be for nought. One could not have asked for a better ending to the saga.

The other major political show of the Bush years, Battlestar Galactica, was acclaimed by both the left and right because of its material. On the surface, there is certainly enough there to allow differing ideological readings of the show, but it is pretty unambiguously a critique of the Bushian worldview. The central question of the Bush years has actually been pretty simple: what can a civilized people reasonably do to survive when surrounded by vicious and uncivilized killers? In other words, should we do anything in order to survive? The film answers the question in words that any viewer ought to remember: "It is not enough to survive," Commander Adama [Edward James Olmos] says, "one must be worthy of survival." The show has sought to portray the challenges of being civilized in an uncivilized world, of preserving liberal democracy in a universe that has suddenly become less hospitable to those ideals. And, despite some hiccups here and there, the humans in Battlestar generally stayed true to their ideals. It's an inspiration to us all.

The show has also shown us the alternative to staying true to liberal democratic values. This was done during the show's second season in a several-episode arc that centered around Admiral Cain, played with scary self-assurance by Michelle Forbes. Cain cuts a very Bushian figure in the show: she is definitely "the decider" and if you disagree with her, you are not likely to like the consequences. Cain's reaction to the Cylon war, as it turns out, was eerily similar to George W. Bush's response to 9/11: rather than thinking of the future like Adama, Cain responds with visceral anger. She promises payback for what the Cylons did, her own personal War On Cylons every bit as ill-conceived, dangerous, endless and ultimately nihilistic as the War On Terror has become. She doesn't plan for the future because she doesn't see one--her limitations as a leader prevent her from seeing the forest, and instead of having experience and wisdom like Adama, Cain has only ambition and self-assuredness to fall back upon. These qualities served her well in advancing up the ranks and getting her flag at such a young age, but they prove positively toxic in the post-human genocide world. Cain's payback mission, naturally enough, comes to include torture of a Cylon prisoner, which has the entirely predictable effect of turning the surviving Pegasus crew into a deeply nasty group. One can only debase other peoples' humanity for so long without realizing that you've lost your own. It doesn't seem to bother Cain too much that her crew seems to consist entirely of rotten apples and decent people who have been so thoroughly cowed to stand up to her (like her XO). Like Bush, Cain polarizes her people. And like Bush, rather than seeming tough, Cain comes off as a rather weak leader who can only act tough despite not having a clue about what the situation is and what to do next. The analogy isn't perfect, as BSG is wont to do: Cain is actually a technically proficient commander who knows her stuff and isn't a total incompetent like Bush. Still, watching the BSG episodes with Cain is a lot like watching the past eight years all over again: you can't help but ask yourself what was she thinking? before it becomes clear that she never thought about anything, aside from the mission at hand. It represents the frustrations of the Bush era in a particularly vivid format. One wishes that the show had kept up this level of political relevance in its past two seasons.

Between these two shows, a viewer decades from now ought to be able to piece together what was going on with the Bush Administration: it was an administration that opportunistically used circumstances to enhance its own power, and when it came time to flex that power, it has done so in ways that betray a lack of vision, a disconnect from civilized Western values and an inability to lead. To know the Bush Era is to know the most base of humanity: brutality disguised as concern, contempt for civilization disguised as caution, mere words disguised as a strategy. Never in my lifetime has the exit of a group of people from power been so eagerly awaited, and they will not be missed.

Bond and Star Trek

I enjoyed the most recent Bond film. Quantum of Solace was a thoroughly solid action flick, which is generally a genre I tend not to like because it comes second only to the romantic comedy in terms of its obsequiousness to the old formula. Still, QoS continued in the tradition of its immediate predecessor: it has retained its darker and grittier vision of James Bond, to its great credit, and it has constructed a second villain who is less a crazy strongman or world domineer, but rather a pathetically effete European jetsetter. During the Pierce Brosnan years, that description would have sufficed to describe Bond himself. How the times have turned...

I was a great admirer of Casino Royale, and I'll admit that that film was better than Solace in several ways. Royale was, in my humble opinion, pretty much damn near a perfect film. Solace is more flawed, but not as flawed as one would imagine from reading the reviews. I think that much of the vituperation from reviewers is more of a reaction to the realization that the old Bond is dead for good, and that the Bond people are going with the "newer" Daniel Craig model of James Bond. I put newer in quotes because it's actually the older version of James Bond from Ian Fleming's books, though with more of a leftward twist, of which I definitely approve. Brosnan as Bond was an upper-class, uber-suave spy who seemed to generally enjoy life and had no palpable toughness. Daniel Craig is the complete opposite: he looks good in a tux but there wasn't the practiced poise, no whiff of eveningwear and elegant soirees. Craig's Bond is working class, all the way, and as a man he's damaged goods--lethal, dangerous, dark, able to seduce women easily, but at heart he's a disappointed romantic who shrugs off all the emotional entanglements. Sean Connery is, of course, the gold standard for movie portrayals of James Bond, but Craig is the only other actor--with the possible exception of Timothy Dalton--who makes any effort to portray Bond as an actual dude instead of an icon (or a caricature). People who were fond of the Brosnan Bond and the intermittently fun escapism of his time on the clock who liked the old formula--and who probably figured that Casino Royale would lead to a revival of the old Bond, with a return of John Cleese and all the gadgets--are realizing that that is not going to happen, and they're upset. On its merits, though, Quantum of Solace announces, for all those who chose not to see, a new era of Bond. And I'm pretty enthusiastic about it.

I'm rather less enthusiastic about the upcoming Star Trek movie, partly for the reason Peter Suderman identifies here--that J. J. Abrams tends to concoct shallow melodramas that go through the motions aptly enough but are pretty soulless (like, say, Mission: Impossible III). I don't expect action movies to be especially soulful--soft bigotry of low expectations and all that--but I would like Trek movies to tell a Trek story every once in a while. The last one that tried was Star Trek: Insurrection, which was middling but not bad, although the ideas were hoary. I expect Star Trek to be a big slab of red-blooded action-adventure that doesn't really bother to try to communicate optimism for the future or any vision of society, and certainly not any sort of political message. (BTW, it really dismays me to see Spock engaging in hand-to-hand combat in the trailer--has he ever thrown a punch? What about the Vulcan nerve pinch?). We wouldn't want to get Trek in the middle of a red-vs.-blue conundrum, despite the fact that it was sort of an arch-left show back in the 60s.

Trek became irrelevant as a result of many factors. Surely, the subpar storytelling that plagued later seasons of Voyager and the two most recent movies is important to this discussion. The sheer amount of product that those folks put out might have led to some fatigue, and the now plentiful sci-fi offerings on TV and elsewhere have made Trek a victim of its own success. Then again, the fact that the Star Trek curators decided to turn Voyager's worn-out ass into the flagship Trek while ignoring the superior Deep Space Nine gives you some hint as to why the franchise has gotten so dire.

The Deep Space Nine Collective

Looking over some of the new "Fan Collective" Star Trek boxed sets--in which ST fans pick episodes to go in themed sets--I was struck by a few things about the Star Trek phenomenon that I had already known but hadn't really thought of for a while. I noticed that, between the Alternate Realities, Time Travel and Borg sets, you can get pretty much all of the episodes of Star Trek: Voyager that are worth watching. I'm particularly gratified to see "Before and After" included in the former set--it was the rare Voyager episode that managed to be both compelling storytelling and strong character-wise, and the reverse-chronology storytelling (but linear from the character's POV) was pretty mind-bending (and it was several years before Memento came out).

In any event, the Voyager selection in these sets is fairly strong. Voyager was generally a fairly weak show that spent too much time with uninteresting characters without making a legitimate attempt to develop them. Aside from Seven and The Doctor, none of the show's characters were engaging, and few were well-written. And this was always the case. Even the first two seasons--probably the show's best--were weak overall, but they showed quite a bit of promise. The promise of Voyager was having a Star Trek show that coupled the challenging and difficult moral and political quandries of the superior Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the good ol' formula of tearing around space and exploring new worlds. The idea of the "two different crews working together" had juice, and that the characters were weak made little difference--they'd get better, presumably, as the show went on. Actually, they got much worse: the crews effectively merged by the end of Season 1, bad boy Tom Paris swiftly became a trusted senior officer, and Captain Janeway went from half-mommy, half-taskmaster into the worst sort of hypocrite, swaying from strict inhibitions at sharing technology to doing so with a shrug if it were called for. The show had its moments, and while there are a handful or so of them that aren't on these DVDs you get pretty much what you need from the show on these sets.

As pertains to Deep Space Nine, though, the situation is reversed. Virtually all the episodes contained on the three aforementioned sets hardly represent Nine's best. Quite the opposite, in fact: the "Alternate Realities" set contains all mirror universe episodes, and the "Time Travel" set contains "Little Green Men" and "Trials and Tribble-ations", all of which are good shows but that don't exactly tell the story of Deep Space Nine. It merely proves that DS9 fans are not typical Trekkers, and vice versa.

It is true that DS9 did not exactly OD on time travel stuff as much as, say, Voyager did. DS9 generally eschewed the usual Star Trek trappings in favor of human drama, and the crew did little time travel during its run, but it usually had the best time travel episodes of all the Star Trek shows because DS9, unlike the others, usually didn't bother with all the cerebral wrinkles of time travel and continuity and all the rest. DS9's shows focused more on the emotional effects of time travel. The best time travel show the series ever produced (and probably one of the finest DS9s ever) was "Children of Time", in which the crew meets their ancestors on a distant planet where the crew crashed 200 years earlier, due to a time travel mishap. The scientific implications would, in all the other Star Treks, take center stage: how do we continue the timeline? On this show, though, such things are a background subplot, and the stakes are quickly resolved: either the crew has to recreate the accident or their descendants die. Characteristically for Deep Space Nine, the fix that solves everything (that other ST shows would come up with) is quickly discarded as impossible. Instead, the show forces its characters to confront difficult questions and work through them. And what follows is not one for the annals of heroism, but a gut-wrenching choice that clearly bothers everyone. And there is, of course, the deepening of the love story between Odo and Kira, which is handled as sensitively and winningly (and melancholically) as possible.

And this is how DS9 differed from the rest of the Star Trek universe. I have great affection for the other ST shows, but Deep Space Nine is the only one that ascended above mere entertainment coupled with the occasional paean to liberal conscience. It seriously grappled with the difficulties of a progressive vision of the world, but in a far more incisive and hard-edged fashion before ultimately concluding that such a vision is possible, but you have to work like hell to achieve it, and then you have to work like hell to maintain it. A lot of people said that the show was a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of humanity, but I disagree. It was a fulfillment of said vision, only with a bit of the details of how to achieve it fleshed out. DS9 presents the most compelling case for Roddenberry's ideas, since it tries to advance a more sophisticated argument on their behalf that seeks to give shape to form.

This might be why Deep Space Nine was ultimately so polarizing: it was the most forthrightly liberal of all the Star Trek shows, the original series included. But it also had a few "fun" episodes, from time to time, and those episodes have unsurprisingly become the favorites of the general ST fandom who weren't quite as interested in the sophistication of Deep Space Nine. I actually don't mind this too much--hey, they're good shows, after all!--but they do give a somewhat distorted view of one of the best TV shows of the 1990s.

(I am aware that the "Captain's Log" set does, in fact, include some of the more biting episodes of DS9's run. From what I understand, some of these episodes were chosen by the captains themselves, so my point still stands.)

Just wondering...

Is American Idol adding a fourth judge because they want to dump one of the existing three? Like, perhaps, a certain lush who often sounds as though she's talking with the flower people? Perhaps the producers want to add someone a bit younger to the lineup?

Watch your back, Paula...

Sweet, sweet Oliver Stone hate

I didn't realize that Oliver Stone was doing a movie about George W. Bush. He's true to form, if nothing else. And that form largely consists of...the directorial equivalent of shouting at the audience for three hours (and three hours is a floor in terms of his movies' length). He doesn't respect his audiences at all to get his point (witness Nixon where Tricky Dick orders the Cambodia bombing while eating a rare steak, so that he has BLOOD ON HIS HANDS!). This is what passes for clever in Stoneland, and it doesn't look like the Dubya movie is going to be any different.

But Stone really has lost his mind looking at this cast list:

W stars Josh Brolin as George W. Bush, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, James Cromwell as George Herbert Walker Bush, Academy Award® winner Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, and Ioan Gruffud [sic] as Tony Blair.

Not one of those choices seems right. None of them look anything like the people they're portraying (Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell?! The Jeffrey Wright from Casino Royale who played Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter? The one who helped him stay in the game after he lost to Le Chiffre? Seriously?). Sure, I don't suppose they don't all have to look like the real people (though I think a 6'10 President George H. W. Bush is going to be interesting to see) but it's hard to see exactly why Ollie Stone thought, say, that Ellen Burstyn would make a good Babs. The personae of the Bush White House are ripe for fictionalization, but this is like a crazy, crazy joke, right? Like casting pretty boy Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great? Oh, wait...

I suppose I'm tired of Hollywood trying its hand at Bush agitprop. I'm tired of it largely because Hollywood sucks at it. Every time they try it, every time, they only succeed in reinforcing Bush's support among Bush lovers (although these days they would probably all fit into one theater) and they tell Bush critics nothing new. I sure hope that this movie does more than sneer at how dumb Bush is, because of all his crimes his infelicity with the English language is surely at the bottom.

As for Oliver Stone--why do studios still do business with this madman? He hasn't made a good movie since The Doors (JFK, if one wants to be extremely charitable). And Platoon, despite unquestionably being Stone's masterpiece and a Best Picture winner, really isn't that special overall. I mean, it's anchored by a Charlie Sheen performance. It seems authentic in its depiction of Vietnam, but it comes to no original or interesting conclusions about the conflict. Meanwhile, Stone's become a Hollywood fixture who still secures funding for big blockbusters that have uniformly been shitty money-losers for ages. He couldn't film a six year old's birthday party without turning it into a hamfisted political message, and a boring one to boot. Hollywood does seem to have basic reflexes to stop it from hurting itself--I haven't seen Jessica Simpson in a major motion picture for a while now, for example. And yet Oliver Stone, a man with no discernable talent who is, to put it charitably, a has-been that hasn't done anything worth seeing in two decades still makes a movie every other year? Words fail...