Golden Words He Will Pour In Your Ear; or, How 50 Years of James Bond Themes Constitute 1 Epic Piece of Musical Theatre

Adele’s title song for Skyfall, the new James Bond movie, was released a few weeks ago, about a month in advance of the film’s release. Eon Productions refers to Skyfall as “the 23rd James Bond movie”—but it’s the 25th if you count such non-Eon productions as the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, not to mention Never Say Never Again, 1983’s virtual remake of Thunderball. 

Barry Nelson as "Jimmy Bond" (1954)

Eon is also making a big deal of the fact that this is “the 50th anniversary of James Bond”—but it’s not the 50th anniversary of James Bond the character. Ian Fleming invented Bond in 1953 in the original novel  Casino Royale. Moreover, the character was first portrayed (after a fashion) by Barry Nelson in a CBS adaptation of the novel the following year, six years before Sean Connery ever uttered the words "Bond. James Bond." to Sylvia Trench at Le Cercle in 1962’s Doctor No.

So, to be clear, October 2012 isn’t the 50th Anniversary of James Bond. It’s the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movies.

As a fictional British character, James Bond lies somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who—people still read the stories but it’s the visual incarnations they tend to cherish. More like the Doctor, it’s the visual incarnations that have really influenced mass culture. A James Bond movie is an archetypal genre. People know what it means, and they know what to expect from that sort of movie.

And almost the very first thing they expect from a James Bond movie is a James Bond main title theme. Truth be told, the idea of what a James Bond theme song is like has been more consistent over the years than the idea of what James Bond is like. Bond songs are almost always genre exercises for their performers, much like a 21st century poet writing an Elizabethan sonnet. The song needs to be big and bombastic, probably with brass, maybe with electric guitar, and frequently with a chord progression based in that original, indelible James Bond theme.

This theme was arranged by John Barry, but it was written by Monty Norman. As Robert Siegel once pointed out on NPR, this song is a little relic of the declining days of British colonialism. The tune, which sets Bond off to Jamaica, was originally written for a musical version of V, S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel about an East Indian community in Trinidad. As the presence in the Doctor No soundtrack of such songs as the reiterated  "Underneath the Mango Tree" and a calypso version of "Three Blind Mice" might suggest, Monty Norman had no qualms as an English composer about mining the source music of the Commonwealth for films about Her Royal Highness' most loyal servant. As I have argued in a previous post, in Fleming’s novels in particular, Bond can often function as the last agent of the old British Empire, tracking down commodities (gold, diamonds, etc.) that have somehow escaped Her Majesty’s excise duties.

John Barry’s arrangement of Norman’s tune didn’t come off as colonialist, however. Its lead guitar line sounded just enough like the Ventures to make it a Top Ten hit in the UK in the fall of 1962. Despite this success, Barry wasn’t the producers’ first choice to replace Norman as composer for the second Bond film, From Russia with Love (1963). They wanted Lionel Bart, who several years earlier had written the most globally successful British musical to date in Oliver!  Bart, however, was an autodidact (not to mention alcoholic) composer, who hummed his tunes to the less well-known Eric Rogers, who then transcribed them. Bart rightfully concluded that this compositional method was not quite adequate for scoring an entire film, but he did offer to write a title song for the film.  Barry was asked to serve as the film's overall composer.

Bart’s “From Russia with Love” isn’t sung over the opening titles of the second Bond film, though. It’s wrapped into an instrumental medley that also includes Norman's theme to the first film.  Then, about a half an hour into the film itself, a vocal rendition of Bart's song is heard, in part, over a passing transistor radio during Bond's punting expedition with Sylvia Trench. It’s not a particularly notable song, and it’s a little hard to figure out what Bart's lyrics might have to do with the film’s plot. The only way the song makes sense in relation to the movie is if you assume it is sung by Tatiana Romanova, Daniela Bianchi’s character, who is a pawn in an elaborate SPECTRE plot to thwart MI6 and kill Bond in the process.

When heard on the radio in that scene, however, Bart's song is sung by a man, minor UK pop star Matt Monro. This sets a precedent that will be repeated a number of times: the sex of the singer of a Bond theme is not necessarily the sex of the character to whom they are giving voice. Men sing as women, women sing as men. The only thing that matters is that singers of either sex belt the relevant song flat out. Evidently, before you save the world, you always have to pull a Merman.

The queen of this sort of Bond song is, of course, Dame Shirley Bassey, who sang the themes to three Bond films: Goldfinger (1964); Diamonds Are Forever (1971); and Moonraker (1979), as well as "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," a song that was written and recorded for Thunderball (1965) but only appears in the completed film as an instrumental. "Goldfinger" may be the best-known Bond theme ever, "Moonraker" the most tangentially related to the movie in which it appears, but "Diamonds Are Forever" is one of my favorite Bond themes of all time (and apparently 'ye shares my preference). Here it is sung by Bassey in the persona of hard-as-nails diamond smugggler Tiffany Case (played in the film by the Vegas-worthy Jill St. John):

One of the reasons I love this song is that it reflects Case's dominant attitudes toward Bond for most of the film: suspicion and rejection.  Almost half the Bond themes are songs written in the persona of a female character singing to 007, but most of the characters singing aren't as fesity as Bassey's Case is here. 

This trend had actually begun with "From Russia with Love," of course, and continued with the mysterious anima figure whom Nancy Sinatra embodied in the theme to 1967's You Only Live Twice.  In the 1970s and 1980s, though, this type of song became a convention in the Bond films.  As Sean Connery's Scottish brawler gave way to Roger Moore's British fop, the so-called "Bond girls" took on more of a pining "Oh, James!" quality, and the theme songs responded accordingly. 

From 1977's "Nobody Does It Better" (the theme to The Spy Who Loved Me) to 1979's aforementioned "Moonraker," from 1981's "For Your Eyes Only" to 1983's "All Time High" (the theme to Octopussy), right down to 1989's instantly forgettable "License to Kill" (quite possibly the worst Bond song sung by an otherwise truly great singer), all these songs give voice to characters who are waiting for their dashing James to rescue them.  License to Kill even added insult to injury by running a second wimpy song over the end credits, a song just as inappropriate for Pam Bouvier, Carey Lowell's well-trained CIA pilot in the film--indeed, a song so passive and saccharin that it would be recorded a few years later by Celene Dion. 

For over two decades, virtually the only female voice in a James Bond theme that could truly match Bond in passion and even aggression was Grace Jones' May Day from A View to a Kill (1985), whose persona fits that film's theme song far better than Tanya Roberts' drippy Stacy Sutton.  In the film, May Day not only matches Moore in his last, visibly older appearance as Bond, she tops him--literally..  Of course, the song itself was sung not by the accomplished Jones--who probably would have nailed it cold--but by the foppish Brit boytoys of the moment Duran Duran. (It was the 1980s: we were all conspicuously performing our sexual identities, and sometimes other people's too.)

The worst part of this two-decade trend was that it presented a slightly unbalanced view of the Bond film universe.  Nearly all Bond movies archetypally have two prominent female characters: one may be indeed be seen as the "damsel in distress," but the other is either Bond's colleague or his sparring partner, and she usually saves him at least once.  Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever was one of those sparring partners.  So was Diana Rigg's Countess Tracy di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).  The Countess was not only (almost) the only woman whom Commander Bond married.  She was also the only female character in the Bond films to whom a song was addressed by a singer standing in for Bond.  (Interestingly, that song was not the main title theme to On Her Majesty's Secret Service--that was an instrumental.)

From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s,  passive female worship dominated the Bond themes.  Then in 1995, something miraculous happened. After a brief hiatus, the Bond films were restarted, with a new Bond, Pierce Brosnan. Eon asked Bono and the Edge (currently on their own hiatus from U2) to write the theme for Brosnan's first Bond film, Goldeneye, and they got Tina Turner, possessor of a truly Bond-ready voice, to sing it:

Yes, Tina Turner is a woman, but once again in a Bond theme the sex of the singer isn't necessarily the sex of the character who is singing.  "Goldeneye" doesn't make sense coming from any of the film's female characters, not even Famke Janssen's murderously limber Xenia Onatopp.  This song only makes sense coming from Sean Bean's Alex Trevelyan, former MI6 agent and Bond's nemesis in the film. 

In other words, what Bono and the Edge wrote for Goldeneye was a love song--or at least a seduction song--from the villain to Bond. There had been a few Bond themes about villains before:  "Goldfinger," of course, as well as 1975's "The Man with the Golden Gun" (nearly everyone's vote for Bond theme with the absolute worst lyrics).  There was also at least one Bond theme about Bond himself: 1965's "Thunderball."  But there had never before been a bad guy in a Bond film crooning over the opening titles about what he was going to do to Bond when he finally got him alone. NBC may think it's news in 2012 that James Bond may be bi, but Bono and the Edge were clearly willing to out him 17 years ago.

The theme for Brosnan's next film, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) was supposed to be another villainous seduction song,  but late in the process a wimpier blast from the past was substituted. The theme for Brosnan's third Bond film, The World Is Not Enough (1999), however, went much, much farther: it featured a love song between two villains, with more than a hint of BDSM.

Many unfairly malign the Brosnan Bond films as lightweight, but the villains in all of them are truly chilling, with both nihilism and torture making an uneasy appearance in every film. Truth be told, Brosnan probably began the role of Bond with a more detailed psychological backstory for his character than any of the actors who had preceded him.  He knew Bond's family history, why the character had fastened onto Sandhurst as a lifeline, why he compulsively pursued his pleasures and in a way refused to grow up. He understood that Bond's frequently inappropriate lightness was a necessary defense for him against the darkness. If nothing else, by the time he took over the role, Brosnan (like Bond) was a widower, and he knew exactly how that could affect a man.

With Brosnan's last film in the role, Die Another Day (2002), the Bond themes took another turn, most obviously with the customarily dancing maybe-naked female silhouettes who appear during the opening titles.  In this case, they are seen to be Bond's hallucination while he is being tortured:

In this theme, Madonna sings in the persona of Bond himself, willing his own death at the hands of his torturers, but determined not to give up the only self-respect he has left.  Madonna is not the first performer to sing a Bond theme as Bond--both Paul McCartney in 1973's "Live and Let Die" and a-ha in 1987's "The Living Daylights" had already done it--but those songs had been fairly flippant.  In this song, there are mortal stakes.  Many fans of the series will tell you that "Die Another Day" is their least favorite Bond title sequence, but that is probably because it makes them uncomfortable.  It should. 

Even though 2006's Casino Royale was meant to reboot the Bond films, "You Know My Name," Chris Cornell's theme for that film, continues following the line set by "Die Another Day." Cornell channels Bond as Madonna had, but his version is a younger, angrier, less worldweary Bond. Even though another theme song had apparently been intended for 2008's Quantum of Solace (possibly one sung by the late, Bond-perfect Amy Winehouse), "Another Way to Die," Jack White and Alicia Keys' collaboration for the film, continues the focus on Bond's professional life rather than his personal life.  The song is sung about Bond by some fellow agent, possibly Jeffrey Wright's dependable Felix Leiter.  But given the song's violent breakdown of an ending, I suspect it is being sung by Giancarlo Giannini's doomed Rene Mathis, perhaps in the last moments of his life.

And all of this brings us back, finally, to "Skyfall," which continues the trend of the last decade of Bond songs, but with a very new twist:

As always, the first question is who's singing.  In this case, it's Bond (you may have my number, etc), but to whom is he singing?  Not the villain, because it's a reconciliation song and they're going to walk hand in hand together at song's end.  It's not a fellow agent either, not quite, and it's certain not a love interest.  In fact, at points, it sounds like he's singing to his mother (In your loving arms/Keeping me from harm).

Given the details of the film's plot that have been released--particularly how it seem to be focused on some questionable past operations run by Judi Dench's M--it seems most likely that this is Bond's love song to his boss.  Certainly lines like What you see I see/I know I'll never be without the security become fascinating when sung by an agent of MI6 to its Director.  Marc Forster, the director of Quantum of Solace, had said that he wanted to feature Dench's M more in that film because that was Bond's most notable nonsexual relationship with a woman.  But just because it's nonsexual doesn't mean it's not erotic.

One key fact of Bond's backstory, a detail that Brosnan explicitly used to sculpt his performance and that I suspect Craig has thought about too, is that Bond is an orphan, like so many other classic English characters.  He turns to the Royal Navy and then to the Secret Service as a second home, when the home he had is torn away from him.  When Dench's M first met Brosnan's Bond in Goldeneye (and why is this the one clip that's not up online somewhere?), she dresses him down for being an immature sexist.  Over the course of the Brosnan films, though they develop a clear affection for each other.  (I suspect this may be because, while Bond may not be a feminist, Brosnan almost certainly is.)  Even though Casino Royale was supposed to be a reboot, Daniel Craig's relationship as Bond with Dench's character becomes even more intimate: he even breaks into her apartment to use her computer, a highly intimate act in our digital age.

As far as I am concerned, "Skyfall" could easily be the last James Bond theme song ever, because the cinematic Bond's fifty-year journey is now complete.  In the 1960s, he launched his brash career as a secret agent. In the 1970s and 1980s, he carried on a succession of unchallenging relationships with women who simply adored him.  In the 1990s, he questioned what this life was doing to him, were his ties to his adversaries stronger than the bonds in his personal life.  In "Skyfall," he achieves sublimation and synthesis: the strongest bond in his life is to his work, yes, but especially to his boss who is also a standin for his late, lost mother.

Am I reading too much into all this? Perhaps. But then again . . .



Admiral Roebuck: What is your man doing?
M: His job.

Pretitles sequence, Tomorrow Never Dies





Seeing Nothing (or, My WTC)

No one ever liked them, for all that time. Anyone who claims they did is a liar, like the people who used to claim they voted for Kennedy, went to Woodstock, or occupied the administration building at their college. Of the city’s more recent additions, you can love the Citicorp Building, the American Express Building, the new Conde Nast Building, but never those fraternal and sterile monstrosities.

“The two milk cartons”—that’s what my dad called them. They went up just in time to be part of the cyclorama behind my adolescence. The block where I waited to catch the bus home from my high school was one of the few places where you could see them, the Statue, and the Empire State Building clearly from the same spot on sea level. For four years, I swear I looked right through them, or past them. The mall underneath them was where I changed from the PATH to the 1, from the way out of New Jersey to the way up to the Theatre District. Clean, wellkept malls were what you had in the suburbs; Times Square, in all its sleazy late 70s glory, was so much more where I wanted to be. And so I ran through the mall as fast as I could to catch the first 1 could get. If the teenage me were more like who I am now, he might have had the good sense to catch an E up to W 4th St back in that era and then run south and east, but the point still holds. Move along now, nothing to see.

For nearly three decades, they wanted to be iconic, but it was rare that you actually looked at them. Yes, Philippe Petit made them visible for a few hours in ‘74, but two years later King Kong only made you remember the Empire State Building. They were characterless, made for pure function. They meant nothing.

On the day itself, I looked too close rather than too far. It was a Tuesday, a primary day, and I was taking the boys to see their first voting booth. (Yes, I really am that square.) Ash fell in their open stroller. I looked west down 3rd Street and saw a cloud of smoke that I just assumed, from the size of it, had to be coming from the Brooklyn waterfront. Jersey-bred as I am, I automatically wondered if it was arson. When I finally saw the Hudson River-side video of the planes hitting—shot from Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken, I’ve always assumed, although I wasted a lot of hours of research last year trying to prove that—I couldn’t make it fit with what I’d seen from Brooklyn. My adolescence was viewing Lower Manhattan through a telescope, my adulthood through a microscope, and I couldn’t collect myself sufficiently to see the middle distance. My clearest memory of that day isn’t sight. It’s smell: that burnt smell that impossibly made it all the way across the East River that night, and made me feel immeasurably worse than something as pesky as interrupted phone service.

Even after that, it was still absences, absences all the way. On Thursday the trains were running, but there were a half-dozen eerily empty stops we passed through downtown. It was good to ride over the Williamsburg Bridge and see the Brooklyn Bridge still standing, because that was a structure that I actually cared about. For weeks, when I stared down Broadway from Herald Square, there was a horizon point of traffic—first at 14th Street, then at Houston, then at Canal—past which there was no gridlock; a welcome absence in any other time, but not now.

After a while, the Chambers St station was open again, although they were already using the word “footprint” and there was an atheist confessional to record your memories of 9/11. By the fifth anniversary, I was passing through the “World Trade Center” station more regularly than I ever had in high school, still walking briskly, still in no mood to linger. Now I regressed: at the end of my schoolday, I took the 1 to the PATH, going back to Jersey as much as I could to visit my mom and then my dad in their final illnesses. When they first reopened the PATH station down there, they put up white banners with blue lettering on them, containing quotations about how exciting New York is, by everybody from Edgar Allan Poe to Gene Kelly to Frank O’Hara to Jackie Onassis. I loved those banners.  They, and Warren Zevon on my headphones, made me smile a lot of days when I sure didn’t feel like it. The historian in me hopes that they’re in a 9/11 archive somewhere, along with all the records of gloom and loss.

The last few years, I’ve had almost no reason to go down there. I don’t work downtown, as some of my friends do. I’ve only visited the site on purpose once, and that was with someone from out of town. To be perfectly honest, Kilmainham Gaol and Vimy Ridge have felt more like sacred ground to me, even though I didn’t know anybody who died at either of them. The hole downtown is a construction site now, a disaster site, not a battlefield. People complain about how long it’s been and there’s still no building. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve spent most of my life seeing nothing down there. Ten years ago, though, I really saw it.

Council Estates and the Cosmos; or, When Fantasy Is Not Escapism

Long time between posts on this blog, but this one will be personally epic: despite my ancestral prejudices, I am actually going to give the British credit for something.

I saw Attack the Block tonight. In case you haven't heard about it, it's basically a British alien invasion movie. Despite the fact that there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of people listed in the end credits as helping to create the aliens, the aliens still looked relatively cheesy. They were essentially jet black dogs whose fangs glowed blue. The filmmakers wisely decided not to show the aliens too much and the film worked much better that way.

What's most interesting to me about the movie, though, is where I saw it: at the Quad Cinema in the Village, which is what we used to call an "arthouse." In the early 1980s, there were two prestige alien movies (Brother from Another Planet and Liquid Sky) but they were about aliens the way Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet was about aliens, the way a utopian novel like A Visitor from Altruria is allegedly about another country. Attack the Block, though, is a popcorn movie, a grindhouse movie. In the old days, it would have been perfect in a drive-in. But in 2011 it's playing an art-house, in limited release. Why?

Well, for one thing, it's British, and therefore sorta kinda maybe foreign. More important, though, it is seen as having a certain amount of "social consciousness." It takes place in a council estate, the Brit equivalent of a housing project, and unemployment, street crime, police harrassment of minorities, even the use of marginally prepaid cellphones are featured in the plot. The British thing may be important--black horror movies from Blacula to Tales from the Hood have played the malls rather than arthouses--but I want to focus on the council estate setting, because I think it says something about British genre work in the twentyfirst century.

Knowledgeable genre fans will remember that the original Candyman starts in the infamous Cabrini Green projects in Chicago, but we enter that world through the eyes of privileged white anthropologist Virginia Madsden.  Attack the Block, on the other hand, completely adopts the point of view of those who live in the council estate, mostly black residents but a few white ones as well.  The police in this movie are outsiders and wholly unequipped to deal with the alien horde.  The climax of the movie in fact depends on a certain realization of analogous values systems between the aliens and the unemployed teenagers who live in the project.  The main teenager is even called Moses, and he is unabashedly shown trying to lead his fellow residents out of captivity and occupation.

As racist as American popular culture can sometimes be, it is far more likely to foreground issues of race that it is to foreground issues of class. See a housing project in an American film (e.g., Clockers) and you can be pretty sure that film will be received as a "social consciousness" film even if it is essentially a crime story.  By contrast, a popular British film like Attack the Block works very hard to show begrudging understanding among characters across the racial divide while insisting that those outside the estate will never understand those who are in it.

This reminds me of another council estate in twentyfirst century British popular culture: the Powell Estate in London, where Rose Tyler of Doctor Who lives.  Before Russell T. Davies rebooted Who in 2005, he was primarily known for social realism in tv, not genre work, and so it came as no surprise that Rose, the Doctor's companion for the first two new series, had a fully realized social life.  She worked in a shop, lived in cramped subsidized housing with her mother, and spoke in a more notably uneducated accent than virtually any of the Doctor's twentieth century companions.

Rose was also a teenage white girl with a black boyfriend, Mickey Smith. whose race drew almost no comment in reactions to the new series.  As in Attack the Block, class trumps race in terms of distinctions between characters.  Few viewers, especially in Britain, questioned that Rose and Mickey belonged together, precisely because they grew up in Powell Estates.  For Mickey, it is the Doctor's toff manners and flashy vehicle (the TARDIS being the blue intergalactic equivalent of a bright red Ferrari) that are more of a threat to his relationship with Rose than the paleness of the older gentlemen's skin.

Because of his open, proud homosexuality, Davies' Who has drawn negative comments from online Neanderthals who claim that his version of the series had a gay agenda (which it didn't), but it's surprising how little comment it drew for having an agrressively multiracial agenda (which it definitely did).  The casting throughout the series is far more racially colorblind than one would usually see on an equivalent US genre program, and when the Doctor travels with his next companion after Rose, Martha Jones, she is notably dark-skinned as well as upper-middle-class.  Martha is a medical student, not only older but much more thoroughly educated than Rose, and her parents are both professionals.  When she and the Doctor are forced to hide at a boys' school in 1913, however, the prejudice based on her visible race is an essential element of the story.

Think of equivalent American science fiction and fantasy series of the last two decades--Lost; Fringe, Buffy, XFiles, etc.--how often of them even deal with race, let alone class?  On a crime show like Homicide or Law and Order, even on a medical show like ER or Grey's Anatomy, class differences and racial differences may come up as a plot point, but not in fantasy and science fiction.  Although the best US fantasy shows reflect real-life emotional problems, they don't often take place in socially realistic worlds.  They're not even shot in as many culturally specific locations--Homicide needed to shoot in Baltimore regularly, ER in Chicago, but Fringe doesn't care if their Cambridge or New York actually looks like Cambridge or New York (except for the WTC reveal at the end of the series' first season).  Even when the BBC substitutes Welsh locations for English ones, it is amazing how lived-in those locations look.  No matter how intermittent the quality of Torchwood's first two seasons of episodes may have been, they all were shot on location and it showed.  The aliens might have been CGI, but the houses they invaded all verisimilarly in Cardiff.

I think this may also be one of the reasons why actors seem to move back and forth between scifi shows and "real-world" shows more easily in Britan than in the United States.  Dick Wolf's venerable Law & Order is currently in the midst of the fifth season of its British reinvention as Law & Order UK with scripts from the original US series, many of them decades old, rewritten to fit a twentieth-century British setting.  Of the casts' six main regular actors, two of them are best known for having done Doctor Who (Freema Agyeman, who played Martha Jones, and Peter Davison, who was the fifth tv incarnation of the Doctor) and a third was best known for having done the twentyfirstcentury reboot of Battlestar Gallactica (Jamie Bamber).  By contrast, the equivalent performers on the orignal US incarnation of the show Americans (Jill Hennessy, Sam Waterston, and Chris Noth) were all best known for playing "real-world" and/or prestige roles.

There are many good things about US genre tv--Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams definitely have votes of confidence in my book--but setting fantasy in the real world is not something American tv showrunners do well.  It breaks my Hibernian heart to say this, but in this specific case I am forced to admit that there is something that Brits do better.

This Thing'll Make Enron Look Like a Pie-Fight; or, Whom Should You Fear? [2008 Edition]

For the first two weeks, most of my viewing of Fringe, J. J. Abrams' new series on Fox, has been focused on asking myself the usual early-in-the-television-season questions: Does this appeal to me? (Answer: not so much) Will each episode just be a repetition of the next? (Answer: quite possibly) Is there enough to uncover in the background if the series goes on for several seasons? (Answer: uhm, I don't think so). Now that I know I don't really want to watch Fringe regularly, though, I can ask myself the really important question about it: what does it all mean? Because good tv isn't necessarily meaningful tv, especially in the cultural sense, nor is meaningful tv necessarily good tv. Saved by the Bell, for example, has cast a longer shadow on our era than anyone up to and including Dustin "Screech" Diamond ever thought possible back in the day.

One way in which a tv series becomes culturally meaningful is, of course, because of its popularity. Contrary to the usual elitist assumptions, it's very hard to maintain widespread popularity in the mass media, particularly in fictional programming. It simply costs too much to make it, especially as core salaries go up with each new season. This means that, even if I never saw the point of Friends, its popularity must say something about its audience other than mere force of habit. A fictional series that can sustain a significant audience in the U.S. over an extended period of time clearly offers a great many American viewers a fictional milieu with which they like to check in with on a regular basis, be it Ben Cartwright's Ponderosa or Jack McCoy's New York.

But TV series don't have to be widely popular to be significant. There is also the question of periodic genre revision, the way in which the same types of shows keep getting made again and again, with slightly different twists each time: from Medical Center to St. Elsewhere to ER; from My Favorite Martian to Mork & Mindy to Third Rock from the Sun. As structuralists have been telling us since Vladimir Propp and A. J. Greimas at least, when it comes to narrative, originality is both less common and less important than we think. Nearly all narrative artists practice bricolage: they use familiar, even pre-fabricated elements, especially when creating settings, characters, and broader narrative arcs. It's not the uniqueness or freshness of these elements that makes them interesting to us (or not). It's how the artists in question rearrange these well-honed fragments of the familiar that grabs our attention, especially on a collective level.

As a case of genre revision, Fringe is almost shamelessly easy to tag. It's The X-Files (1993-2002)--except it's not. As always, there are common elements--weird science bordering on science fiction, female FBI agent--but at least based on the first two episodes, the feel of the show is entirely different. Not only does Anna Torv's Olivia Dunham feel like much less of a rookie than Dana Scully did at the beginning of The X-Files, but Joshua Jackson's Peter Bishop is no Fox Mulder. He's not an intuitive genius, a true believer, or a porn addict. (Lately, we have all begun to wonder how literally Vince Gilligan, Glen Morgan, James Wong and others based Mulder's character on Duchovny, haven't we?) In truth, Peter Bishop is almost a softened noir character, a world-weary, globe-trotting Rick Blaine for the Gossip Girl generation.

And unlike Dana and Fox, Olivia and Peter aren't really the point, are they? Even at this early stage of the series, it seems to be clear that the real relationship structuring the narrative isn't the prospective one between the two younger characters but the retrospective one between Peter's father, Walter Bishop, and his old lab partner, William Bell. In 1991, an assistant died in their basement lab at Harvard: Walter got tried for manslaughter and was institutionalized; William founded BellMedics, home of the nanotech-enabled prosthetic arm and the first piece of the enormous business behemoth that is Massive Dynamics.

From that biomedical start, Bell apparently moved on to aeronautics, computers, telecommunications, entertainment, you name it. Massive Dynamics is Microsoft in the 90s with teeth. It's what paranoid Americans thought Japanese corporations were capable of back in the late 80s before the Japanese economy blew apart. Before that, it's The Phone Company in The President's Analyst--squared. (Part of me thinks the name "Bell" might even have been chosen for that echo, although no one under the age of 35 will probably get it, since their entire lives have been spent in a post-regulated world.) No mystery here about what the Big Bad of the series is: it's Massive Dynamics, and William Bell is its never-seen Mephistopheles.

In real life, of course, no one company could ever pull off what Massive Dynamics supposedly has, which is why the show really hearkens back to that late nineteenth-century trope: the captain of industry. Except now, that captain of industry is a scientist, a post-computerized Thomas Edison as supervillain. The clues in the show seem to point toward Bell and his acolytes using the world as their own laboratory for testing deviant technologies and not really caring what happens to their unsuspecting subjects. The Homeland Security agent who recruits Olivia in the pilot calls all these seemingly random events "The Pattern," and as one eagle-eyed freezeframer has shown, the opening titles flash the near-subliminal message: OBSERVERS ARE HERE. If the Walter Bishop/William Bell relationship is the true core of the show (note the parallel initials, by the way--Doppelganger 101), then the real TV show being echoed here is not The X-Files but Abrams' own Lost, which only revealed in its third or fourth season that Jack Shepherd vs. John Locke is nothing next to Benjamin Linus vs. Charles Widmore. Fringe's Walter is obviously more unstable than Lost's Ben--which is saying a great deal--and yet it is clear that he is the only one who has all the necessary information to take on the show's Big Bad.

Thus Fringe becomes another in a long line of properties in popular culture--including Iron Man most recently, but Batman Begins and even The X-Files itself before that--in which the current rising generation must pay for the (in this case literal) experimentation of their Baby Boomer elders. If such Boomer pop culture makers as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas spent much of the late 1980s and early 1990s symbolically re-establishing ties with their elders, their younger siblings and even children seem poised to call out the Boomers themselves for the free-spirit menaces that they were.

There is a crucial difference, though, between the sins of Fox Mulder's father and the apparent sins of Peter Bishop's. Bill Mulder was an organization man, shaped by the Cold War and consensus culture. (Fox was born in 1961, five days after me as it turns out.) Walter Bishop, however, is much younger than Bill Mulder, only ten or fifteen years older than his son Fox, and shaped by a time in which ambition and glory were probably better motivators than duty or fear. The glee with which he utters the pilot's funniest line (Let's make some LSD!) tells you all you need to know about how he probably liked to run a lab.

As Propp or Greimas could have told you, heroes sometimes say less about a story's structuralist variations than antagonists do. What menace needs to be contained? What fear needs to be poured into a familiar narrative container? In the mid-1990s world of The X-Files, the government ran the businesses, but in the 2008 world of Fringe, it is clearly the other way around. When Olivia Dunham meets with Nina Sharp (oh those names!), the Chief Operating Officer of Massive Dynamics, Sharp asks her, "Do they think this is part of The Pattern? Oh, aren't you cleared for that?" clearly indicating that the C.O.O. of a ginormous corporation has a higher government clearance than a lowly law enforcement officer. As to the plausibility of this particular trope, that the businesses actually run the government in our time, I would refer you to my earlier posting on Spies. Or the newspaper.

Fringe, with all its problems, posits an emotionally plausible villain for the age of Halliburton, but the fears that Chris Carter harnessed to generate narrative and even hermeneutic energy for The X-Files obviously predated that series' own era. Carter is around Fox Mulder's age (no surprise there), and when crafting his mythos, he created a world bracketed by the public events of his adolescence and young adulthood: the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the continuing revelations throughout the 1970s of barely authorized CIA operations both at home and abroad. His model for the show was the inspired sole season of Jeff Rice's Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75). In a sweet homage, Carter even cast Darren McGavin, who had played the title character of that earlier cult series, in several episodes of The X-Files as Arthur Dales, the founder of the freakish FBI unit that Fox Mulder eventually took over. These two or three episodes feature a younger actor in flashbacks to the 1950s (when McGavin had starred in the equally cultish Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer), following his investigations as Carl Kolchak did to a series of doors that are slammed in his face by obstructing public officials.

But even if Kolchak: The Night Stalker gave birth to The X-Files, Carl Kolchak did not give birth to Fox Mulder, any more than Dana Scully has recently given birth to Olivia Dunham. Kolchak was a proud, pre-hippie slob, who wouldn't be caught dead popping sunflower seeds. In the paperback novelizations of Richard Matheson's screenplays for The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, the two Nixon-era TV movies that ultimately spawned the series, newspaper stringer Kolchak is clearly presented as a throwback, a "refugee from a road company of The Front Page," as one of the books puts it. The casting of McGavin in the role reinforced Kolchak's marginal, even private eye status within the pastel-colored world of 1970s America. If you strip away the supernatural trappings, two of the tv characters with whom he shares the most salient features are his more self-consciously "decent" contemporary Lt. Columbo (who matched wits with many similarly smooth Me Decade antagonists) and the much more ironically drawn Tony Soprano. The latter character was created, of course, by David Chase, who early in his career wrote eight episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Even though Kolchak's brief run coincided with the Golden Age of American Paranoia, it's worth noting that the series never posited a single unifying conspiracy, as The X-Files would later do. Of course, network television was different in the 1970s--a complex mythos sustained across a series of episodes was a hard sell until soaps like Dallas began penetrating primetime--but Kolchak was also a different kind of crusader. Even though he seldom went up against the same specific antagonists, he frequently opposed the same kinds of establishment figures: smooth cops and corporate flacks who were well-trained in the then-booming field of public relations. Episode to episode, Kolchak wasn't fighting an organization. He was fighting an ethos, a drive toward presumed perfection, modernization, and marginalizing cultural tidiness. Throwback that he was to the messy mid-century, he instinctively refused to buy into the self-help polish that was slowly turning the 1960s into the 1980s all around him.

Television series, like advertising campaigns, only surely tell us about the culture in which they are launched if they are widely embraced by the public. Otherwise, they only tell us about the people who created them. So while one may argue fairly easily that The X-Files hit some kind of a cultural nerve during the Clinton era, one must make the case for the wider implications of a cult show like Kolchak: The Night Stalker or a just-launched series like Fringe much more gingerly. Still, it's worth noting that, while the former series asked us to fear its near-future, and the latter series is apparently suggesting that we fear its recent past, both series point an accusing finger at the exact same era. In this election year, please remember that--in horror and science fiction television, at least--there is apparently nothing scarier than the 1980s.

Somehow, Once upon a Time . . . Never Comes Again; or, Revolutions of the 1970s, Transatlantic and Transhistorical

This summer, I finally got to chance to watch one of those movies that I've been meaning to see for years: Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (1971) aka A Fistful of Dynamite aka Once upon a Time--The Revolution. It's supposed to be the middle piece of Leone's capitalism trilogy, between Once upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once upon a Time in America (1984). Since I like the earlier movie and am vaguely fond of the later one, I figured I might as well make the acquaintance of Signor Leone's middle child.

It's awful, really really tedious at points. In a couple of ways, though, it's interesting. The rhythm of the story is very similar to the rhythm of West, right down to a teasingly revealed flashback stretched out across the narrative, this one emanating from James Coburn's exiled IRA revolutionary. Unlike Charles Bronson's slowreveal flashback in West--and unlike the flashbacks within flashbacks that provide a lot of the fun in the full cut of America--the point of this one is pretty much clear from the beginning, which makes its slow revelation across two and a half hours pretty much pointless. Then there are the Nixon-era, Butch&Sundance high voices singing "Sean-Sean! Sean-Sean!" during his happier flashbacks, which obviously detract from them as well. And even though I love him, Coburn is pretty hollow (in the bad sense) as the IRA man, although Rod Steiger is surprisingly good at points as the Mexican thief turned revolutionary hero.

The most fascinating thing in the film for me at least was the treatment of revolution. I'm not sure the story even needed Ireland or Mexico as a setting. Truth be told, even though they were pitched at nine-year-olds, the relevant episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles do a better job of capturing the real issues at the heart of Villa's rides and the Easter Rebellion than this film does. Instead, Duck, You Sucker! is just a generalized story that ends up trying to proclaim that blowing things up for a cause is more important than blowing things up to seize wealth.

Really, though, the point seems to be blowing things up. You could do a male-bonding, queer reading of some of the scenes, particularly the flashbacks, but in truth Leone's characters all seem to all be isolatoes, even when they're not played by Eastwood. It's all pointlessness, alienation, and nihilism, not really because of anything--the flashbacks here seem like red herrings--but because blowing things up seems to be a good way to kill time before you die.

That and smoking. [And I'll give Coburn credit for this: from Our Man Flint through Silverfox, the man knew how to smoke a cigar.] In other words, the Mexican revolution was to decadent westerns of the 1960s and 1970s what the French foreign legion was to films of the 1930s and 1940s: a place to fake heroism while fulfilling your death wish. And yes this movie is released three years after The Wild Bunch (which as several of you know, I mostly don't like).

What's most interesting to me is that this film is coming out of Italy, where there really were significant numbers of revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the culture that produces a filmmaker like Bertolucci--and I'm not just thinking of the on-point Before the Revolution (1964) or The Dreamers (2003) here, but even more of a political film like 1900 (1976). Moreover, Bertolucci, we should recall, actually contributed to the screenplay for Once upon a Time in the West. However, a later film like Reds (1981), which is a decent pop critique of the internal workings of a revolutionary organization, is made by Americans and Brits, not Germans and Italians--by people, in other words, from countries whose 1960s youth movements produced reformers, not revolutionaries.

Moreover, if the Once upon a Time movies really do count as a trilogy, it's interesting to trace the decline of ideology as they go on: the West ends with a make-our-garden-grow moment (with Claudia Cardinale distributing beverages); the Revolution ends with Rod Steiger allegedly moving on to be a revolutionary general (although his freeze-frame stare suggests that's not going to work out so good); but America just completes DeNiro's opium dream circle without even a pretense at forward motion. Communitarianism in the 1860s/1960s; nihilism in the 1910s/1970s; consumption in the 1930s/1980s.

Maybe all that difference can be laid down to Leone's collaborators on the separate screenplays. Or maybe, as usual, I'm reading far too much into a bad movie. But based on comments he made, Leone clearly thought he was making a political statement with these films, performing the usual work of historical fiction by mythologizing the movement from past to present in order to project a possible movement from the present into the future. As Simon Schama for one has rather eloquently argued, however, the one sure thing about revolutions is that, once you get them started, they tend to take on a life of their own. The future that revolutionaries map out in advance is very seldom the future they end up with, as anyone who has lived and hoped more than a few decades probably knows all too well.

Forget It Not; or, Is It Friedman's Fault or Rousseau's?

The redo. It's the greatest temptation of the postmodern era. If something goes wrong, if experience or history gets in the way, just erase it. Start from zero. Nothing that has happened before has any implications for what is to come. Create in the moment. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. The redo is the fantasy behind a film like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it's also the premise, according to Naomi Klein, behind almost forty years of conservative thought. In her recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein argues, extremely persuasively, that much of global conservatism since the 1970s can be traced back to the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman, particularly his notion of the "shock doctrine," the idea that societies damaged by war, revolution, or natural disaster can be thrown back to a near-Edenic phase of perfect market capitalism. Much of the influence of Friedman's ideas on 1970s and 1980s Latin America in particular has already been delineated by others, particularly Greg Grandin in his essential study Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U. S. Imperialism. What makes Klein's synthesis extraordinarily striking, however, is the way in which she connects Friedman's notions of systemic shock to the rise, not just of torture, but of psychologist Ewan Cameron's specific use of ECT to "shock" individual psyches back to a blank state in which they can be recreated in a more productive form. Hand in hand, these two ideas--and Klein does show rather convincingly that they have frequently been pursued in deliberate tandem in any number of conservative revolutions since the 1970s--allow for the possibility that both societies and their citizens can be wiped clean and brought to a desired fresh state by suitably resolute functionaries.

What's strange about this sort of Edenic notion is that it's not the sort of ideological orientation one expects from pro-capitalists. Yes, yes, yes, Adam Smith, unseen hand, blah blah blah--but have you read The Wealth of Nations lately? Smith's not talking there about going back to something, he's talking about going forward. According to Smith, capitalism and its markets need to be unchecked because they move society forward, progressively, toward ever greater perfection. The problem with market interference for Smith isn't that it changes things, but that it inhibits natural change.

This is typical of most theorists, conservative or liberal (if those words, as usual, have any real meaning) from the American Revolution through World War II. All throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both rabid Marxists and rabid anti-Marxists were interested in societal improvement and advancement. Simply put, they were all in favor of progress. They just disagreed on what it might look like, inevitably asserting that their side was the one doing the advancing, while the other side was atavistically impeding "nature." Historian David Donald once suggested that early nineteenth-century American Whigs and Democrats differed in that the former conceived of society as a flower that needed to be tended and cared for, while the latter saw it as a machine that would run perfectly if left undisturbed, but even at their most diametrically opposed neither party saw society as static or tending toward some perfect pre-diachronic past. Not just the distinctions between political parties, but the sometimes crucial distinction between religious-based and social-science-based reform in the nineteenth century also makes less difference than one would think on this score. As late nineteenth century reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd once put it , "God is the name we give to the future."

All this changes, for some reason, in the mid-twentieth century. For the purposes of this entry I'm not even going to try to speculate why. Round up the usual suspects from the period (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the emerging consumer ethos, etc.) for yourself, and pin it on one of them if you can. What interests me, though, is that by the 1970s, particularly in the United States, there are very few reformers left of any stripe who want to move forward: they all want to go back to the time before Eden was tampered with. These days, the only people I know who believe in progress are those who work in new media and the internet: they exhibit the same faith in the future that the industrialists and social scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century had. For old school liberals, though, the Golden Age now lies in the New Deal/Great Society technocratic nexus, when government seemed compassionate and the broker state kept big capital at bay. For Friedmanites, the trip back is even more radical: they want to go back to the time--which may never have existed--when capital and exchange were in their original, untampered-with state, the theoretically perfect unimpeded free market.

Consequently, the 18th century theorist that diehard Friedmanites remind me of most is not Adam Smith but Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is odd, because Rousseau is supposed to be a patron saint of liberalism, not conservatism. Things would go much more smoothly here if I linked the Friedmanites up with John Locke and his idea of the "blank slate" of initial consciousness (Locke can be seen as conservative or liberal depending on who's doing the looking), but Rousseau's thought is more resolutely anti-interventionist. Surprisingly, the interventionist/restorationist distinction, like the perfect future/perfect past distinction, is more useful here than throwing around words like Enlightenment or Romantic, let alone liberal or conservative. Even though Rousseau and Friedman would obviously never have agreed in any programmatic way, their work does share a jarring emotional resonance. Everything that's been done before now is clutter. Let's go back to what (I believe) is essential about humanity. Let's deny the relevance of history.

I'm not talking about denying specific sets of inconvenient facts. This is not your gardenvariety Mel Gibson's Dad sort of Holocaust denial here. I'm talking about denying the relevance of change and the specificity of precedent event on general principle. In late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century philosophy, history is a trap, something to be avoided since it can impede action. Not just Friedmanites but existentialists, phenomenologists and postmodernists of nearly every stripe frequently regard the past as a genealogical thicket of obfuscating discourse that must be hacked through and exposed so that one can finally arrive at the clear truth of the current moment. This is one major difference between the standard operating procedure of, say, a (modernist) Freudian and a (postmodernist) Foucauldian: the former disentangles the balled-up threads of past discourse so that future action can be guided in light of a much more evident past; the latter more often shows that all prior logic has been a sham and a scam and need not be taken into account when determining future justifications.

For such latter-day thinkers, there is no God, no Heaven, no Utopia, no future (for you). Only momentary heroism and even bliss may be possible, as in the swim that several characters take as a respite in Camus's The Plague. Hell, of course, may be very real for such thinkers, and it's not just Sartre's other people: postmodern hell is that very thicket of discourse, the paralyzing genealogy of past ways of shared knowing that must be hacked through before any kind of individual action is possible. Maybe the most striking example of this dilemma in 1980s popular culture was Sting's song "History Will Teach Us Nothing" (written by a former English teacher, I might point out), in which an argument is made for the liberation of political prisoners in Augusto Pinochet's Chile on almost exactly the same metaphorical grounds that Pinochet's Friedmanite advisors used to dismantle that country's developmentalist economy: prior discourse is simply superstition--move forward into righteousness in light of what you know.

And here we begin to see why what Donald Schon would have called the generative metaphor of amnesia might be so attractive, not just for conservatives who want to remake the global economy, but for liberals who want to feel happier in their clearly degraded world. In terms of the popular culture versions of such resets over the last three decades, Groundhog Day can be seen as not only ahead of the curve but tied to an earlier form of social philosophy. Like the Back to the Future films that preceded it by a few years, it clings to the idea that one person's incremental knowledge can actually remake things for the better: these films don't present redos predicated not on amnesia but rather on one everyman's ability to remake his environment in light of his augmented knowledge in quasi-technocratic albeit comic fashion. Bill Murray's Phil Conners is not in as excrutiating psychic pain as, say, Dr. Sam Beckett in the "Shock Theatre" episode of Quantum Leap, in which the character literally has to submit to a second course of ECT to stop the experiential memories of all his post-Leap experiences from bleeding back in.

Far closer to our own emotional temperature in the twentyfirst century is a film like Christopher Nolan's Memento. Amnesia has been a commonplace of noir since Cornell Woolrich at least, but even in Woolrich's twisted world, the loss of memory was still usually seen as a bit of a curse. In Nolan's world, though, most of the other characters in the film seem to regard the protagonist Leonard's erasure of memory as a blessing and wonder why he would ever want to have his supposed deficit replenished. In Nolan's world, we don't feel the old school private detective's responsibility that he must close the case so much as the trauma victim's wish that the past be past. Resets are bliss. Accept the present, and don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I'm obviously exaggerating for effect here, but I do wonder if cultural critics fifty years from now will see amnesia as one of the great shared fantasies of the last quarter-century. Even Joss Whedon's upcoming television series Dollhouse seems to be premised in this idea: the so-called "actives" of this show's world have reportedly chosen to have their memories wiped so that they can exist in a state of moment-to-moment, almost childlike enjoyment of their mutiply identified existence. In this formulation, even depersonalized slavery is preferable to excessively personalized history.

If amnesia is the epic quest of our age, then Dashiell Hammett, even more than Cornell Woolrich, may ultimately be seen as our Homer, because of the famous "Flitcraft story" in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man gets to run away and restart his life fresh, only to repeat it in almost every detail in another town. However aboriginal, though, Hammett's embedded anecdote is still too oldschool for our time, too embedded in the idea that each of us has an innate "nature" that will always prove out when tested by circumstances. One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is so much more a story of how we would like to forget in our own era is that its whimsical method of memory wiping (so much more discriminating and easier to take than Cameron's global bulkerase) is based in discourse. You remove memories one by one, following threads of genealogy like a Foucaldian dismantling a panopticon, in order to strip away the traces of instrumentality that have caused you pain or trauma.

But Charlie Kaufman, like Dashiell Hammett, has the good sense to know that this is a fantasy, and not just in a technological sense. As the aftermath of wholesale Friedmanite policies has shown again and again in developing nations (even if true-believing corporatists don't want to accept it), you can't erase history without eradicating life. As Ernest Hemingway observed shortly after commencing the electroshock treatments that would ultimately drive him to suicide, "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." Like it or not, discourse, history, and experience aren't just our prisons. They are the only tools we will ever have to improve our lives and our worlds. Deal with it--and remember.

Roads through Fantasy Last Longer than Maps (or, L. Frank Baum, Oz, and the Ephemeral Nature of Utopian Dreams)

Sunday night, we're going back to Oz again. Actually, this time it's not Oz. It's the Outer Zone or the O.Z. (As in "Welcome to the O.Z., bitch"? Well, those in mourning for Seth and Summer can dream, can't they?) Apparently, though, the Road that runs through this new country is still pretty much the same as the old Yellow one we already know and love, as are the quartet who go down that road, not to mention the humbug and the frightfest they have to face down at its termini.

Since it was published 107 years ago, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has inspired, not just countless passing references, but several dozen distinct adaptations and retellings. These began in 1902, with the original musical stage adaptation (which Baum himself had a hand in), through at least three literal film adaptations (in 1910, 1925, and 1939, as well as one very clever Muppetification a few years back that hewed surprisingly close to Baum, right down to the inclusion of a wonderfully Kalidah-like Statler and Waldorf), as well as the 1970s stage and film versions of The Wiz, and any number of would-be prequels and spinoffs, most notably Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, its print sequels, and its 2003 musicalization.

In many ways, Baum's story has become exactly what he wanted it to be: the classic U.S. fairy tale, an American work that can stand on the shelf next to such British classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, not to mention such post-Baum perennials as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, or even the recent Harry Potter books. In another sense, though, Baum's story has failed over time to achieve its goals, because for most of its fans Oz is only a story and not a world, at least not in the sense that Baum intended.


Between 1900 and 1920, Baum wrote fourteen books about Oz, as well as at least a dozen other fantasy novels for children that were eventually revealed, through overlapping characters and landscapes, to take place in the same "universe" as the Oz books. Incredibly, he did this before comic books and the golden age of the American pulps, about twenty-five or thirty years before all but the geekiest fanboys talked about universes or crossovers. (When you think about it, it was probably before either geeks or fanboys too.) According to pulp historian Jess Nevins, crossovers were more popular in Europe than the United States during these years, and when they did appear, they occurred more in passing than as a self-conscious construction. Quite often, they were simply sales gimmicks. Before Baum, the most lasting authors to have thought of their works as taking place in a holistic "universe" were such French writers as Honore de Balzac, Emile Gaboriau, and Jules Verne, and none of them were as interested as Baum in creating a fully imagined world that was starkly alternate to our own. For a time at least, Baum's vision was so powerful that it was regularly continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, with one new Oz book appearing every year through 1942, for a total of 36 books over 42 years.

There are at least a half-dozen reasons why what Baum called "The Royal History of Oz" petered out after this point, dissolving from this increasingly detailed chronicle of an almost palpable universe into miscellaneous pastiches and apocrypha. But I don't think it's accidental that the decline of literary Oz almost exactly coincides with the rise of cinematic Oz. 1942 was just three years after the initial release of the famous MGM musical adaptation with Judy Garland. In those days before annual TV screenings and repeated VHS and DVD viewings, the movie didn't acquire instant cult status, but the story had been sufficiently reimagined in this mid-twentieth-century version that in retrospect it seems clear that it had now taken a new form. The Old World balkanization of Baum's Oz into four distinctly colored countries--purple Gillikin in the north, blue Munchkin in the east, red Quadling in the south, and yellow Winkie in the west--had been replaced by the simple cultural dichotomy of sepia Kansas and Technicolor Oz. Oz is not as foreign and resolutely monarchist in its MGM incarnation as it is in Baum, but rather a signifying dreamscape that inevitably refers back to our own grounded world. Noel Langley's screenplay for the film makes Dorothy's journey a comfortingly roundtrip one, making sure in the film's last scene that even the youngest members of the audience understand that, although it's fun to visit the colorful Emerald City, you would never really want to live there.

In Baum's books, though, that's exactly what Dorothy ends up doing. Having first arrived there in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), she returns in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), and The Road to Oz (1909). In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), when Uncle Henry defaults on the mortgage for his Kansas farm, Dorothy finally decides that she, Henry, and Em should move to Oz permanently and live in the palace with Princess Ozma. Granted royal status, they can work there as they choose, to be helpful to others, but they will not need money and will never grow old or sick. In that wonderfully odd little book, Dorothy and her family take a tour of Oz to see if they want to live there, visiting such unique sequestered enclaves as Fuddlecumjig, Utensia, Bunbury, and Bunnybury. As Henry and Em discover, Oz is a nation the way Queens or Los Angeles is a city. The more we learn about Oz beyond the original Yellow Brick Road, the more we realize that it is a centrifugal aggregation of distinct, barely connected little villages that are somehow all benevolently presided over by a girl princess who will never age beyond about 10 years and who had previously lived for a time as a boy.

Baum's books are too imprecise to ever be considered science fiction, but they are what some scifi authors like to call speculative fiction. They imagine an alternate mode of social or cultural organization, in which the author retains the features of our world that s/he prefers, and corrects those that s/he believes cause our most obvious social ills. At its early twentieth-century peak, the Oz series falls in that chronological gap between the high tide of the American utopian novel and the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction. Baum's universe, however, obviously lacks the articulated sociological background of Howells' Altruria, Asimov's Foundation, and the like. It imagines a possible community without laying out the practical steps of how to build it.

Neither as rigorous a plan for the future as a nineteenth-century utopian like Edward Bellamy might have imagined, nor as mere a dream of the mid-twentieth-century present as Louis B. Mayer might have wanted us to believe, Baum's Oz is no more or less than a wish, a desire for a land in which children rule with the Romantic wisdom that precedes social theory, and each community is allowed to live on its own terms as long as its inhabitants do not threaten others. Famously inspired by the "White City" of Chicago's 1893 World Columbian Exposition, Baum's Emerald City is much more like the sort of necessary evil of a metropolis that regionalist writer Hamlin Garland imagined in his 1893 collection Crumbling Idols: a nexus through which unfettered provincial creativity may pass from one safely isolated community to another. So much a part of its time, Baum's dream of a rationally ordered large nation is a fantasy of antimodern Progressivism, a unique but telling vision of monoracial cultural pluralism. Seen from the perspective of its own time, Baum's Oz is in some ways a lovely little dream: a quirky if not necessarily practical alternate U.S., with a resolutely agrarian lifestyle no matter how much magic or technology may enter its borders, and a capital city that sits rather sensibly (like Chicago) in the middle of its geography and not off to one side or the other.

But that's not the Oz that most people seem to have wanted for the last seven decades. While such esteemed fantasists as Walter Murch, Philip Jose Farmer and Tim Burton may have tried over the years to relaunch Oz as a fullblown mythos, most audience members don't want to explore Baum's whole land in all its ramifications. They simply want to retell the same story again and again. Even within Baum's lifetime, he almost went broke trying to make a varied series of films about Oz during the 1910s, while continuing stage and film adaptations of his first Oz book flourished.

Moreover, the farther away we get from Baum's time, the more outlandish his dream of an alternate America seems, as impractical as Henry George's land tax scheme or the economic reorganization of the U.S. advocated by a contemporaneous socialist like Eugene V. Debs. In the years after Baum's death, the spread of mass media became so complete that the idea of discrete, culturally isolated villages making up a world, let alone a country, has become as quaint as a day in Bunnybury with the Whiskered Friskers. Tellingly, the transformative 1939 film of Baum's most well-known novel changed the cultural geography of its protagonist's journey, with the all-consuming Emerald City serving as a counterpart, not to the rural sections of Oz, but to Dorothy's own Kansas farm. For the Dorothy Gale of 1900, Oz is a country, with a fairly varied topography. For Judy Garland's Dorothy, however, Oz is a city surrounded by sparsely inhabited land that has been cleared and cultivated to varying degrees. In MGM's latter version, Dorothy's journey is thus from the country to the city and back, reinforcing the neotraditionalism of the period in which the film was made.

But what is so important about Dorothy's journey anyway? In some ways, it resembles the classic monomyth that Joseph Campbell was famously outlining in the same years during which cinematic Oz was waxing and literary Oz waning. Dorothy has a quest, a magical talisman (or two or three) that she must obtain, helpers, opponents, and a descent into darkness if not a literally submerged underworld. In the MGM version, The Wiz, and several other late twentieth century versions of the story, Dorothy even arrives home with the sort of boon of knowledge that good mythic heroes are supposed to attain. Some spin even wilder theories of what the telos of Dorothy's journey signifies, with two characters in the MGM commissary in film scholar Stuart M. Kaminsky's period detective story Murder on the Yellow Brick Road offering rival theories that the novel's most famous film version speaks symbolically of either a girl's discovery of her own menstruation or the United States' imminent entry into World War II.

In traditional mythology, though, the knowledge that a mythic hero gains is supposed to change things, to help her heal the wounded land to which she has returned at the end of the journey. By contrast, when Dorothy arrives back in Kansas, everything is just as bad as it was when she left. She has not come back with knowledge that will improve her world. She hasn't even brought back the beautiful slippers that she acquired during her journey. In nearly every version of the story, it is legitimate to ask why Dorothy wants to go back, when she can have so much more fun in Oz than in the home we have seen. In most versions--but not in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's highly graphic novel Lost Girls--we may even wish in vain for the sort of self-consciously rebellious protagonist for the story that the late Jonathan Larson imagined in one of his lyrics for Rent: "Why Dorothy and Toto/Went over the rainbow/To piss off Auntie Em/La vie boheme!" In Geoff Ryman's wonderful novel Was, the multiple protagonists go to various versions of Oz for almost exactly those sorts of reasons, most of them escaping violent or stultifying home environments.

But most versions' Dorothys are not bohemians or rebels, not bold girls wishing to escape the fatalistically grey (or sepia, if you must) landscape of environmentally precarious and economically challenged Kansas. They're tourists, albeit ones taking a vacation that is a little dangerous for girls of their tender years. And in most instances of Oz, so are we. What makes The Wizard of Oz satisfying in most of its mediated forms is not its destination but its journey--its Road, if you will, and the sights that we can see along its way. We don't want to live in Oz, in the way that some of Baum's original child readers might have wanted to, but we do want to visit it, again and again, to take the journey and see the sights, to stop at our favorite scenic overlooks.

Past a certain level of familiarity, Baum's narrative doesn't even matter at all, except as a touchstone that must not be thoughtlessly contradicted. (This is especially easy if one only knows the first book in the series.) The settings and characters serve their own functions, become their own archetypes, and can be spun off to form entirely different stories. This has happened most famously in the print and stage versions of Wicked, in which two characters that seemed to signify the traditional fairy tale good mother/bad mother dichotomy in the original story now come to serve as types of contrasting passages from girlhood to womanhood.

For Baum, though, I think the journey did matter, especially the reiterated journey that Dorothy takes across all of those early books. His Dorothy is the one version who seems to have most unequivocally had her consciousness raised. She knew she wanted to live in Oz and not in early twentieth-century Kansas, even if it took her five trips to figure out how to get her green card. The ending Baum chose for Dorothy's fifth and final trip, in The Emerald City of Oz, is quite touching. After Dorothy and her family have definitively decided to stay (and the book's nominal villains have been defeated), Glinda the Good seals off Oz, making it invisible to the outside world. "But Toto and I will always love you," Dorothy writes in a final note to Baum's readers, "and all the other children who love us."

For a Progressive-era story for children, this ending is rather stark. It suggests that once your consciousness has been raised enough to see that your surroundings don't necessarily have to be so unpleasant, your only responsibility is to save your immediate family, not to improve the impoverished world from which you came. Not surprisingly, this intended ending didn't stick, anymore than Arthur Conan Doyle's attempt to drown Sherlock Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls a decade or so before had stuck with that author's readers. Baum, like Doyle, ended up returning to the mythos that had made him so popular, but his later stories in this universe were as unsatisfying when compared to the originals as Doyle's post-return Holmes stories are when compared to Watson's pre-Reichenbach Adventures and Memoirs.

And yet the two endings are not exactly comparable. Professor Moriarty was a deus (or demon) ex machina: he was a wholly unanticipated narrative function that Doyle hoped would rid him of a character of which he had grown tired. For Baum's most perceptive readers, though, his story of Dorothy Gale had been tending toward this conclusion from the very beginning. In the original edition of Emerald City, at the top of the page on which the text of Dorothy's letter is reproduced, there is a picture of a plane very like the Wright Brothers'. "I am told," Princess Ozma remarks in another late chapter, "that the earth people have invented airships that can fly them anywhere they want to go." For Ozma and her creator, the arrival of the airplane, among other inventions, means that even fanciful connections between Oz and our world must soon come to an end.

In the long view of modern history, the articulated organization of society changes much more rapidly than any hegemonic notions we may share of the self. Consequently, the alternate societies that we imagine have a much more limited shelflife than any technologies of self-improvement that our latter-day myths may produce. Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry did need a map to Oz, as did many of Baum's original readers. 107 years later, most of us don't need a full map anymore. We just need to know the one road that will get us where we want to go.