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.