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.