For your consideration: Joe Keenan’s 1988 screwball comedic novel Blue Heaven for the screen. But how? When to set it? With whom?
After Mr. Lousy’s reading list was published, followed by the shocking (to Lousy) revelation that Doris W and I had dined with the book’s author Joe Keenan, I dug around the house for my own dog-eared paperback copy, which I found nestled between some film review compilations by Pauline Kael.
I re-read the novel (personally autographed – I had no idea that I’d brought it to dinner!) for the first time in 20 years, and perhaps as my copy spent at least a decade on a shelf fermenting with Pauline Kael, I have been wondering why the story never found its way onto a screen.
I do believe that this came up during dinner, though I don’t remember the specifics being discussed. Joe Keenan has gone on to have a career writing for TV, so surely an adaptation must have been floated at some point, and just as surely he himself must have been considered to write or supervise the script. What happened?
It’s the screwball comedy that the eighties never rightfully got. Until the late nineties, I doubt a gay screwball comedy would have gotten produced. Ellen and Will & Grace had some paving to do, and even now, Steven Soderbergh couldn’t get his Liberace pic a distributor (too gay) and had to turn to HBO to get it produced. I imagine cable is where I would prefer Blue Heaven to take shape: where the story could stay truest to form.
And by true to form, I wonder if that means setting it in the eighties. I can envision an easy update to 2013, a 25-year jump from 1988, the year it was originally published. But will it lose any charm? Or could the late eighties give it a good shot at a fun period piece without sending it over the top into campy nostalgia?
1980s-specifics that struck me upon re-reading Blue Heaven:
Cocaine! While rather casual in use, the drug does factor heavily into the denouement with The Duchess. Ecstasy too!
No smart phones. Any shift to the present day would entail some re-writes to carry plot twists that would have been cut dead by ubiquitous smart phones, not to mention Skype.
Italian mafia. This seems a little dated even for ’88, though we hadn’t even been subjected yet to The Godfather III, which sort of put the nail in the coffin for me. Now a Mexican drug cartel might work better, but making the dynamics comedic would be daunting.
The art and the fashion: both are outlandish and satired in the book. The outlandishness and satire would need new targets for art and fashion, which really wouldn’t be a challenge, for although both are always changing, both always offer a generous field for target practice.
One NY 1980s-specific not found in the book was any mention whatsoever to AIDS. When I turned up in NY around 1990, it was completely inescapable. Maybe AIDS doesn’t have a place in screwball comedy, and maybe in 1988 gays needed a respite, but in retrospect, the absence of any reference is striking, more so now than then.
I do believe at our dinnerJoe Keenan brought up casting, though I don’t know that he made any specific recommendations. Now they would all have to be shifted at any rate. Maybe some of the same players, but in different roles to account for the quarter century elapsed.
Some characters would need to be cut for time, but some simply can’t be sacrificed. So please consider who might take on:
Gilbert – The part has the now typed, put-upon, barely-coping-surrounded-by-disfunction, grimacing-but-going-along-with-it Jason Bateman from 2003 written all over it. Who’s the 2003 Jason Bateman in 2013?
Philip – Someone has to make a selfish and lazy character magnetic, if not likable.
Moira – Who can cackle with cruelty and still present a winning smile? This one is key.
Claire – I’m going to nominate Melissa McCarthy right outta the gate.
Vulpina – This role can be more cartoonish and demands that presence.
Gunther – See note on Vulpina.
Philip’s naïve mother: Ditsy like Goldie Hawn but not cloying like Goldie Hawn.
Philip’s mafioso stepfather: Murderous, affable, and attractive.
The Duchess!!! (really two characters): I refuse to consider Eric Stonestreet from Modern Family, though I think he would draw an audience. Too easy. Let’s be inventive here!
Freddy Bombelli: the ancient mob boss controlling three families. I don’t want Al Pacino. I don’t need any reminders of The Godfather III. How about Alex Rocco? He’s actually a Godfather veteran (though not of the full trilogy, thankfully), and he played a similar role in the series finale of Party Down. In fact, please review this clip in which he does a Jewish variation on Bombelli, complete with near expiration:
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As far as directors go, can ban the Glee gay who is branching out in all sorts of horrible directions? Part of me wants to see if Peter Bogdanovich could recapture the glory of What’s Up Doc, because despite nearly everyone else’s opinion to the contrary, I still find it a wondrous ode to 1930s Hollywood screwball comedy. If not him, then let’s see what Tina Fey could pull off. She has proven with 30 Rock to fully accomplished in rapid-fire dialogue set off in pointedly preposterous scenarios, not just week after week, but year after year. Or maybe David O. Russell? He could take the nuttiness of Flirting with Disaster a step further, and though he’s awful to his actors, he’s brilliant with them.
I want to line this up right now! And Mr. Lousy, in case you are thinking of a sequel, bear in mind that I have not yet read Putting on the Ritz or My Lucky Star. They’re newly arrived and waiting on the bookshelf. Next to Pauline Kael.
So this is how it ends. I think my December is a fairly good reflection of all the movies I like – classics, documentaries, heavy dramas, smart comedies and those movies I just never got around to before. I thought about coming up with something insightful and clever about my movie habits. But I don’t feel like it. I’m feeling very optimistic for 2013 and dwelling on 2012 seems antithetical to that purpose.
I will say this – I’ve never kept track of how many or which movies I watch. I always knew I saw more than most but even I am surprised to find that I watched 134 movies. That’s 11.16 movies a month, 2.58 movies a week. I’m surprised I’ve managed to do anything else. Because I know I also watch an awful lot of television and I’d like to think I read a fair amount. As a holiday bonus, I’m listing the books I read this year too. So here it goes – the last list for 2012.
120 – Street Fight – politics + race = scariness
121 – Trespass – Schumacher must stop
122 – 50/50 – not too goofy
123 – Waltz with Bashir – harrowing, frightening, gobsmacked
124 – Mulan (Disney) – cute little dragon
125 – Hitchcock – fun, light, entertaining
126 – Looking for Richard – Pacino’s gross ponytail
127 – The Killers – Lancaster is foxy
128 – Shaun of the Dead – smart, funny z-story
129 – State and Main – so that happened
130 – Lincoln – DDL is god
131 – Skyfall – best Bond cinematography
132 – This is 40 – it kinda is
133 – Life of Pi – reading the book
134 – Central Park Five – depressing power abuse
My Books – 2012 – Don’t Judge, It’s Just a List
1 – My Lucky Star/Joe Keenan
2 – E-Myth/Michael E. Gerber
3 – James and the Giant Peach/Roald Dahl
4 – Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?/Mindy Kaling
5 – The Graveyard Book/Neil Gaiman
6 – Spain/Rick Steves
7 – Tale of Sand/Jim Henson
8 – Shenzhen/Guy Delisle
9 – The Hunger Games/Suzanne Collins
10 – Moneyball/Michael Lewis
11 – Neverwhere/Neil Gaiman
12 – Divergent/Veronica Roth
13 – The Book Thief/Marcus Zusak
14 – Matched/Ally Condie
15 – Insurgent/Veronica Roth
16 – Eat, Pray, Love/Elizabeth Gilbert
17 – American Gods/Neil Gaiman
18 – A Discovery of Witches/Deborah Harkness
19 – Act Like a Man, Think Like a Woman/Steve Harvey
20 – World War Z/Max Brooks
21 – Shadow of Night/Deborah Harkness
22 – Fifty Shades of Grey/EL James
23 – I Feel Bad About My Neck/Nora Ephron
So about 2 books a month. Again, I don’t really know how much other people read but I feel pretty good about that number.
Overall I think 2012 was a better year for movies than 2011 and I generally liked the books I read this year. There are always some stinkers but I finished them all and liked more than I disliked. You can’t really complain about that.
Frank Langella used his eyes, tousled hair, and a turtleneck to seduce you with ease. His youthful seduction has been exchanged for an aged gravitas. He’d rather not have to look at the gradual transformation.
Frank Langella recently said in an interview on NPR that he doesn’t like to look at his movies. He made the analogy of going up into an attic and paging through photo albums, which forces you to look at your own aging over the years – and, as I extrapolate – the loss of the past, which is now contained only in a fragile image and perhaps an even more fragile memory.
For me, I don’t have to page through photo albums. Just watching old films, especially ones from childhood, sometimes brings me an acute sense of time passage and loss. Since I associate movies, TV, and music with specific periods of my life, I am often drawn back to my first viewings. I could never watch Star Wars without a little residual pulse of the electric jolt I received watching it cinematically and repeatedly until my mother forbade me from further viewings at the run-down Rogers Theater.
The Rogers Theater after closing in the mid-eighties. In the late seventies, it didn’t look all that different, but the marquee did feature Star Wars for about six months, long enough for my mother to forbid me from wasting any more of her money on it.
So that analogous photo album in Frank Langella’s attic awaits me on every screen that I activate. Sometimes I don’t know it’s coming.
With the interweb, this takes the form of an instant obit that lands a sucker punch while I’m sipping my first cup of tea in the morning. A recent punch arrived with Phyllis Diller.
Phyllis Diller died last month. 95 is a pretty good damn run, and I think mentally she was sharp for almost all of it. That’s the way to go, I guess.
Phyllis Diller. The serious look must have been brief.
She led a pretty fantastic life, and the fact that the back half was probably the more fantastic makes it all the better. I feel sad that Phyllis Diller died, for her, but for me too, as she somehow took a little bit of me with her.
That would be the nine-year-old kid who sat watching the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts in the seventies, when the humor was barbed but not venomous, crude but not obscene, insulting yet still delivered with a wink of admiration at the target.
I didn’t get half the jokes, but I knew everyone on the daïs, from Nipsey Russell to Buddy Hackett to Ruth Buzzi to Don Rickles to Phyllis Diller. The podium was a place to shoot zingers, but most of them were extensions of the stars’ already self-deprecating humor or public personae. Behold LaWanda Page at George Burns’ Roast. This was an era when insult comedy routines could be followed by kisses that seem genuine, even to the grown-up Raúl:
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Phyllis Diller needn’t have been insulted by LaWanda Page. If anything, Diller might have been cribbing notes for her own act.
It’s different now, meaner, with more authentic insults using real personal crises and career failures as fodder for cruel routines that aim more to shock than bring out laughs. Times change.
I missed out on Phyllis Diller’s vinyl recordings, but this record just downloaded. Trust me, she was better on TV later.
When a public personality passes, I really do feel a sense of mourning, part of it for the person who I’ve never met but appreciate for how they’ve entertained me or informed my life, but more for myself, as the loss means another tether severed from my own past. I’ve still got the memories, but if I want to access them concretely, I’m back at a strangely distanced screen, looking at a forty-year-old image through the eyes of a child as well as the eyes of an adult.
The growing chasm between the child and adult’s eyes remind me that I’m getting old. I’m starting to reach the age of some of the comedians on the daïs, and they had to be seasoned to get up there, Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker excepted.
I don’t really mind growing older; I’ve always expected it and I’m not investing much energy in fighting it. What I mind is the disappearances that come with death. When a public figure dies, a fragment of my memory flashes like lightning and then settles in for a permanent dim. It’s not as if I ever even met Phyllis Diller, but knowing she was still on the planet made her Roast routines more a part of me. Now they’re a part of my childhood. Over.
This year a lot of lights have been dimmed on Raúl’s Memory Lane.
Don Cornelius hosting Soul Train.
Dick Clark on American Bandstand.
My teenaged self, planted in front of the TV on Saturday mornings, got a double-whammy with Don Cornelius and Dick Clark both permanently leaving the schedule. Neither music show host would fit in today’s splintered music scene. They were both far older than their core audiences even during their peaks, which, in today’s youth society, would have made Soul Train and American Bandstand the subjects of mockery.
I still remember feeling disheartened when MTV fired their first slate of hosts while I was in college. I thought these guys were the video age answer to Don Cornelius and Dick Clark. I would have to adjust to a faster rotation and shorter shelf-life of music hosts.
The five original MTV VeeJays. J.J. “Triple J” Jackson crossed over in 2004.
Actually, I think this is where I checked out of pop music. Part of me must have wanted familiar faces to introduce new music. Without the guidance of an enthusiastic Martha Quinn or a veteran J.J. “Triple J” Jackson, I figured that I could find my way on my own, which I did, and stumbled my way into used record stores to find older folk music, Tin Pan Alley classics, and treasure troves of sixties and seventies music that had been forgotten by radio, not to mention the later discoveries of boleros and French chanson. Maybe cutting the cord was good for me in the long run.
So change can be good, but death is always hard. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying on the same day? There went a chunk of childhood in a single newscast.
Sure, there is a legacy left behind. Dick Clark, low on personality but high on reliability, takes me back with his onstage chats after (often badly) lip-synched performances. His presence, vanilla though it may be, seems ideal for introducing relatively green performers to a television audience. Note him shepherding The Go-Go’s through an interview, acknowledging each member, and encouraging their future.
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Don Cornelius, high on cool charisma, gave Raúl a chance to see the Black performers from the hit charts then labeled Soul , hence the name of the train. Speaking of the Soul Train, what more can one hope to give the world than the Soul Train Line? Check out the respect Don Cornelius rolls out for Mary Wilson before consenting to join the line himself!
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Don Cornelius may not have stood for any competition in showcasing soul on TV, but he knew how to treat the post-Ross Supremes without making them look like leftovers, and he even knew how to rib himself for being too old for the line – and I wholeheartedly disagree on that count.
Raúl knows his priorities aren’t proper, but he can’t help what he feels. Dr. Jonas Salk, I may have hated the shots, but they beat a childhood without being allowed to go to the swimming pool or contracting the polio virus. But somehow we never got down to a personal level.
So Dick Clark and Don Cornelius aren’t Jonas Salk. They were both savvy capitalists with cutthroat instincts against rival intrusion into their respective markets. Jonas Salk made sure that I never got polio, but he wasn’t on my TV once a week, so I never really connected to him. Dick Clark and Don Cornelius were familiar strangers, ones who stamped their mark on my childhood and teenage years, which, rightly or wrongly, were largely consumed by pop music. Over.
Donna Summer – On the Radio.
Maybe the biggest divorce from my adolescence came with the unexpected death of Donna Summer. She was far and away my favorite singer, and though I eventually lost interest in her music and patience with her piety, her voice still brings me to a halt when I hear it.
Her 1980 album, The Wanderer, got the most repeated play on my record player, and surprisingly, stands up 32 years after its release, and the adult Raúl can far better appreciate it for what it is: a musical account of a spiritual awakening. She really should have gone gospel after this one because she never regained its musicality or intensity.
The Wanderer, Donna Summer’s 1980 LP on David Geffen’s new label.
Even though I hadn’t really given Donna Summer much thought in decades, I did feel my heart sink when I saw her death announced in a headline. We never made amends. I know, it’s preposterous. She didn’t know Raúl, but he knew her, and he hates leaving important things unresolved, which is what often happens when someone dies without warning.
That cord to adolescence snapped in a second and left me wobbling with dizziness.
Who am I without my touchstones? Touchstones that I’m no longer temporally touching. Somehow, occupying that same slice of history links a part of me to a broader culture, to the outside world, even one that goes back 35 years. Donna Summer’s passing makes the link to her Soul Train appearance tenuous. Even Don Cornelius is gone. I’m watching apparitions now, ones not connected to anyone left.
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Somehow occupying the same time, if not space, forges a connection that is tenuous but meaningful. I identify points in my life with songs, shows, and films that I came of age with and grew older with. The milestones are still with me. When they’re gone, I find myself grasping into the air.
Unseen are the reflections from the hidden mirror that expose not contradictions, but parallels between Indigenous South & Central America and Spain. Raúl needed Carlos Fuentes to spell it out explicitly with prose and photographs of art and architecture.
How do I choose these milestone-bearers? Some of it is just demographics, some of it is quirk, and some indicative of a real identification or fascination with a person. Usually a pop star or film star.
While I enjoy reading, the confinement of the written word somehow lacks the same personal connection for me. The experience of reading for me is solitary, and therefore less of a phenomenon that I can share and plot on a personal or even societal timeline. Moreover, I seldom read books when they are published, and frequently read them by authors who are already dead. This doesn’t weaken their words, but it does lighten the personal stamp that the works and the authors leave on me in terms of time and place.
Carlos Fuentes, whose El espejo enterrado, (The Buried Mirror) gave me a deeper insight into the formation of Latino identity through a weaving of prose and photographs of art than I could have ever imagined. But when he passed, I quickly thought of Gregory Peck, who played the title role in the film version of Fuentes’ unfilmable novel, Old Gringo.
Carlos Fuentes. 1928-2012. Writing prolongs one’s stamp on individuals and even cultures, but even Fuentes will fade.
Gregory Peck as American writer Ambrose Pierce adrift in Mexico in the middling film version of Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo viego – Old Gringo. Admit it, the resemblance to Carlos Fuentes is quite strong here.
Movies and music seem to trump even intellectual epiphany. What does that say about me? I don’t feel guilty or stupid or even shallow, but I do feel like I need to spread the love, or sorrow, as the case may be, to a broader set of personalities. Either that, or I need to narrow the set considerably, which is difficult, for as public figures die, they not only flip open and then immediately snap shut chapters in my personal history, announcing the passage of time like an unwanted bell tower, they remind me of my own mortality and what I have done and not done with my life.
Marcel Proust’s flood of involuntary memories famously came from a madeleine cookie from his childhood. Mine flood in unexpectedly from death announcements, often regarding people who I’ve not thought of in years, people whose brand-new ghosts burst into the room, show themselves as vivid apparitions from my childhood or adolescence, and then quickly fade away, taking with them what feels like a bit of my soul that had been built up decades ago but lying dormant until awakened by death.
Robert Hegyes as Juan Epstein from Welcome Back, Kotter.
When the Sweathogs started dying off this year, I didn’t think much of it, until I realized that I’d considered them something close to peers at one point, when as a child I watched them play high school students on Welcome Back Kotter in the seventies. First Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein, the Puerto Rican Jew who always had an excuse for not doing his homework. (My brother sent me his death announcement via an email which read, “Dear Mr. Kotter, please excuse my son for not doing his homework. He has died. Signed, Juan’s Mother.”) Then recently, Ron Palillo, who played Horshack, passed away.
I became somewhat intrigued by Ron Palillo’s story, as death had outed him, just as it had Sally Ride around the same time. Both had long-term partners who became uninivisible, not because they were with their famous partners, but, ironically, because they were standing alone without them.
Ron Palillo as Arnold Horshack in Welcome Back, Kotter.
A homosexual Horseshack. Who knew? The story of his post-Kotter life seems rather pathetic. His Horshack character and the trademark snorting laugh stereotyped him and probably exhausted the public with his presence. He couldn’t get back on track, even when agreeing to appear on Celebrity Boxing in the match-up of the TV geeks, Palillo’s Horseshack from Kotter vs. Dustin Diamond’s Screech from Saved by the Bell.
Not a fair fight. Horshack vs. Screech.
I recall watching the match – yes, I watched it on purpose – with a visiting out-of-town friend, who I’ll call Jackie, who flew into a rage before the two has-beens even squared off: “Horseshack is like 25 years older, 25 pounds lighter, and a foot shorter. This isn’t fair!” The match went even worse than Jackie had feared, with Diamond landing one punch after another onto his senior’s face, making Palillo angrier and the fight all the more futile. Half of Horseshack’s energy rode straight into his eyes, which shot out blistering bolts of anger.
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Was he angry at Screech, for whomping him in the ring and not respecting his TV forerunner, or was Palillo raging against himself for submitting to a public humiliation so supreme that it didn’t even draw laughs. The crowd even booed Screech as he strutted around the ring in the thrall of victory while Horseshack panted fumes of frustration and fury over a badly swollen eye and very badly dyed bleach blonde hair. It didn’t work as comedy and was simply too sad for Schadenfreude. Ron Palillo became the object of pity, puffing away in the corner as we saw the extent of his bruised face and damaged soul.
At least someone was in Palillo’s corner, though unseen by the camera: Palillo’s partner, who lashed out at Diamond, warning karmic retribution for what Screech had just done to his boyfriend in the boxing ring. The whole account is right here.
Let’s give Ron Palillo a better send-off. Sharp in a tux. No Kotter. No boxing ring. It’s too bad his partner didn’t make the shot. That would have brought a little positive publicity.
Reading about Ron Palillo and his real life outside of mine – with its sadness and hidden layers under a silly surface – popped up repeatedly rather than bursting and fading. There was a real person there behind the Horshack laugh and hand-raising “Ooh-ohh” that made him a temporary phenomenon and a more permanent figure of ridicule. Ron Palillo wasn’t Horshack; I already knew that. I didn’t know how badly he tried to continue acting, the great pains he must have taken to hide his homosexuality, or the failed career and possibly financial desperation that led him into that boxing ring. I certainly could have imagined all of that, but reading it after he died made that Horshack-Ghost take on new forms, unconfined to Welcome Back, Kotter.
It wasn’t about me.
Snap out of the solipsism, Raúl!
Horshack still occupied the 1978-ish spot on my timeline, and indeed, my chronological radar still issued a blip on Ron Palillo’s passing, but his ghost drifted away from ’78 and spilled spectral ink all over the place, as if to announce to me what he’d been trying to tell the world: he wanted more than Horshack.
I was left wondering, in an age where coming out is no longer instant career ruination or necessary limitation, why didn’t he show up at an opening with his partner and kiss him on the lips in front of the one camera that a low-rent paparazzo might have trained on him? It certainly couldn’t have hurt his career by that point. In his sixties, was he still cowed by familial influence or just sitting inside the closet out of anxiety, having made it a way of life for his public adulthood?
What did he think when acting elders like Richard Chamberlain and Tab Hunter and George Takei came out? Did it not register that he could too?
George Takei as Sulu in Star Trek. There are about one million Star Trek shots to suggest a queer take on Sulu. This is one of my favorites.
George Takei is now bigger than he ever was as Sulu, his character on Star Trek that he had never really slipped away from. Takei put his name in a political spotlight and walked away with a new generation of social media fans and a real influence on how the public views gays and lesbians. (I’m less certain of his effect on the BT in LGBT.) With eyes back on him, he had a new audience to hear about life in Japanese internment camp during World War II, raising consciousness about something not related to gayness that drew in the shared experience of an entire generation of Japanese Americans. Hear his testimony about his childhood experience in the camps:
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And it isn’t all heavy. George Takei’s sometimes cute and sometimes political interweb quotation/photo collection gets posted and re-posted on Facebook, frequently by my high school acquaintances who in their greener days were not hesitant to slurs to denigrate others. But now they celebrate his wit and kindness, rather than dismissing him as a Jap faggot, the phraseology of which now seems mostly confined to anonymous message boards and Youtube comments. The closet has been reversed, and Takei is now out enjoying the natural light.
Publicly coming out is not career-killer when you’re a figment of the pop culture past; it thrusts you into the immediacy of the present for multiple generations and forces the public to reconsider your real life and reflect anew on what it means to them.
Kristy McNichol and Meredith Baxter – a micro-cluster of lesbianism from the 1970s show Family, just made public announcements. I doubt Baxter would have landed on The Today Show otherwise. McNichol seemed to just want it out of the way. Done. She’s got that off her shoulders. I don’t know if a book deal is in the works, and I don’t think she wants to act again, but in thinking about Little Darlings, I realize that if she has even a sliver of the purity she put on the screen then, Raúl would throw his arms open to welcome her back. She gets to find her blip on my radar while still keeping both feet planted in our earthly dimension.
For McNichol, her official announcement was met by some confusion among many lesbians and gays who assumed that she had come out years ago.
What did Ron Palillo think of the younger generation of actors going public as gay? Ricky Martin? Neil Patrick Harris? That guy who plays the nerdy genius on The Big Bang Theory, the one who wins Emmys for playing a simple caricature that Raúl finds just as horribly unfunny as the sitcom itself - despite unbridled family enthusiasm for the program, expressed both in conversation and in the audible volume that seems to publicize to the entire neighborhood that the show is on.
This guy – okay, Jim Parsons, I looked it up – is like the Horshack of today, except he’s gay, not unapologetically, just incidentally. I don’t see any real difference when I have to watch BBT; it’s an easy, broad character with quirks repeated ad nauseam for laughs. Sheldon and Horshack fall into the same category of characters for me, but Parsons is winning Emmys and doesn’t think twice about picking them up with his boyfriend in tow.
Anyone older than 40 can tell you that this tabloid piece would have been unthinkable in 1978. We celebrate that Jim Parsons can do this. Do we then also acknowledge that Ron Palillo simply couldn’t?
Did Ron Palillo feel a little resentful that the premiere geek of American TV outed himself with no fanfare and continued to perform on his hit show without a ripple? Was there a lingering bitterness that he had been born into the wrong generation?
Did Palillo fear the catty homosexuals who would not embrace Palillo, but ridicule Horshack, preferring their mainstream gays to be young-ish with viable careers, rather than laughingstocks from yesteryear, with the most recent public achievement being beaten to a pulp by a disgraced actor from Saved by the Bell?
Did he feel out of place, not having twins like Ricky Martin and Neil Patrick Harris?
Neil Patrick Harris and partner with twins in a full- spread celebration rather than condemnation.
Ricky Martin gets cross-cultural approval from the mainstream media as he raises twin boys.
Palillo was not of the openly-gay-celebrity-dad-raising-a-wholesome-family generation.
Neither is George Takei. The opportunity was there. Why Palillo didn’t take it before he crossed over is a mystery to me, an unknown that makes him more real to me as I’m forced to ponder his existence beyond the set of Welcome Back Kotter.
I’m of a generation in between Ron Palillo and Neil Patrick Harris. As a result, I think I understand both. I feel happy for NPH and the success he’s forged out of genuine talent which supersedes his gayness. People respect him. But let’s face it, his life would have turned out very differently had he been born twenty, or even ten years earlier. We need to focus on the present but keep a sharp eye on the past. LGTB people can stand taller now, but they need to remember they’re taller from standing on the broken bones of their forebearers, who carried heavy burdens that crushed some spiritually and physically.
Horshack doesn’t seem funny to me right now. I see Palillo’s ghost instead, and I’m not sure he can leave just yet.
Everybody has a real life, but not everybody’s life gets serious consideration from me.
What happens when a real person, as in someone I know, slips away as suddenly as a Ron Palillo? When someone passes away without warning or without any goodbyes?
Solipsism takes a back seat. I wonder about God. I think about all the people whose lives have been touched and who are now mourning. The standard stuff, I suppose.
Frank Langella’s Attic is now online.
Last month this happened. An unexpected passing. After a flood of photos began to appear on the facebook, some including me, I looked at my friends and myself from ten and twenty years ago. Frank Langella’s figurative attic is now a mainstay of social media. You don’t have to pull down a ladder from the ceiling and fight through cobwebs to get at the old photos. They’ve already been scanned and posted. Lo and behold, I no longer look 22. Thankfully, I don’t claim to feel it either.
Strangely, I can’t place when most of the photos were taken. I can usually guess within a couple of years, but that’s not what occupies my mind. These real events take place on a time line semi-parallel to the distinctly linear pop culture one, this other one full of inaccuracies and grey zones rather than plotted points that can be substantiated by looking up sitcom runs on Wikipedia or IMDB.
Zingers take the shape of an astrological sign to celebrate a birthday.
But it strikes me in a different way. I see a recent birthday party that I showed up hours later for, but then I marvel at the cake, intricately engineered from fucking Zingers™ and splendiferously, lovingly decorated in shimmering, probably toxic red – by someone who is now suddenly, permanently gone. I wonder at the passage of time and the joy of life captured in a proudly displayed birthday cake – and that moment in isolation, when a memory was captured in a blurry photo, though the reproduction carries more than the scanned image suggests, at least to the person who bit into the cake. It was an experience that cannot be watched or listened to again. The cake serves as an access door. What lies behind is for me to find for myself.
And one memory blends into another. I jump from a backyard birthday party to a communal video viewing in a apartment. When? I dunno. Five years ago? More? It’s in the grey zone – the time, not the experience. I remember everyone draped on armchairs, crashed on couches, lying belly-down on the floor, all facing the old tube TV playing a completely unknown 1974 Italian film starring Elizabetyh Taylor, titled in English The Driver’s Seat, picked up at the Dollar Store by our sharp-eyed hostess. Nobody knew what to expect; what we got was gasp after gasp, repeated calls for pausings to examine frames, and demands for rewinds to fully take in what we thought we’d just witnessed. When Liz has a shocking, inexplicable encounter with Andy Warhol, we had to stop the film entirely for a recovery period:
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The clip, I realize, serves a mirrored purpose. Instead of making me feel forlorn about a shared group of friends that can never be reunited on this earth, it brought something back that was lost, something that I wanted to share, something that could be recreated. I instantly feel the shared shock shot out from the screen into the room. It wasn’t my experience; it was our experience. When I see it now, even alone, in an entirely different context, I have that moment again. I don’t relive it. I just have it and I clutch it tightly. Is it Proust’s madeleine? No, not an involuntary memory – I sought this one out, though I didn’t realize how deeply I would feel what came with it.
My first birthday abroad alone. I know this was a vacation in Bangkok. I didn’t think much of my birthday, but my parents did. I am fairly certain in this conversation I beg for some money and they explain to me how to get a cash advance with a credit card and how much it is going to cost me. Thanks, Mom. Lesson learned early.
Not knowing that depth can be scary. I’ve been toting around a set of cassette tapes for almost twenty-five years, from the first year that I lived abroad. My parents would phone me once a fortnight at great expense, I imagine just to hear my voice, since I actually wrote letters back then. (Oh, letters, how I miss you.) My father’s toys were his technology, and he used to tape record all of our trans-oceanic conversations. I used to feel irritated that everything that I said would be recorded, listened to repeatedly, and then maybe shared with grandparents. Couldn’t we just have a simple conversation, albeit one that took place in two hemispheres? I was a young adult, but I’m now stunned at how much went past me without thought: my parents missed me, they worried about me, they wanted my grandparents to hear me speak because my absence to them in their old age might be permanent. I just wanted to chat, and I blithely ignored what my voice, not my words, meant to my family.
Unbeknownst to me, my phone calls were recorded from Germany back to the States. Here I discover a tape that straddles Europe and the U.S., where I must be falsely explaining my extended presence in NY, which was actually sleeping on people’s sofas in Manhattan with no real job and no money left. I promised to come soon. And the dates! Who needs Wikipedia when I had my father penciling in dates all over cassette labels? I was in Hamburg exactly 22 years ago. Thanks, Dad. Duly noted in 2012.
Appreciation comes with age and with loss. My father died over ten years ago. I cleared out his piles of tapes after his death. The ones from my first year abroad now sit in a drawer in a bureau in a closet, about as far removed from my eyes and ears as I can make them without ascending to the attic, that Frank Langella attic. I want the tapes close but invisible. I’ve never listened to them. Not once. Of course I am curious. But more I’m afraid and unprepared. I mended a very damaged relationship with my father before he passed away. Listening to our conversations would take me back to a point in my life when I felt I’d escaped my family by moving across the Pacific Ocean, but the physical distance could not overcome the bonds, healthy and unhealthy, that still tied me back to them. I don’t know what I will hear in my voice. Youthful giddiness, post-adolescent insouciance, gratitude, ingratitude, sugar-coated lies, badly concealed homesickness mixed with glee at my first taste of adult semi-independence? I’m betting on everything.
What I can’t bet on is hearing my parents’ voices, and if I remember correctly, the occasional contribution of a visiting grandparent. My own voice I’m almost ready to confront. The voices of the dead I am not. Their spirits don’t scare me. The old voices do. They’re gone and this is the closest I can come to revisiting them. But I haven’t been able to because I will feel the overwhelming rush of the loss again.
Or maybe not. Maybe, like the Liz Taylor movie, the cassette recordings can bring me back without breaking me. I know even the tapes have an analog shelf life. I’ve got to listen to them before they degrade and can’t even preserved in a digital format.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s about memory and loss. I don’t believe in the good old days and I don’t long to return to my past, but I do want a connection to it, be it a stunning moment of cinematic revelation shared with close friends, my own recorded conversations with people I loved who died ten and twenty years ago, or hearing Shalamar’s irresistible Make That Move while watching the Soul Train Line.
***
I just got home from meeting the same friend who graced us with the Liz Taylor experience. Another friend with us noticed that conversations always seem to circle back to parents’ deteriorating health or how we are taking care of them. And a peer just passed, making death seem more present and real than ever. My time lines are filling up. My friend, I’ll call her Hostess, gave me a hug on parting and said, “It’s going to get tougher for this second half of life.” Yeah, I replied, wishing I had something more soothing to say, but what can you say to the bare truth?
There is something already heavenly about this shot of Liberace with Phyllis Diller. It seems like Liberace wasn’t even possible now that he’s gone, but here he is, and Phyllis Diller will one day seem just as impossible, but here she’ll be. Unreal and real, stamped in my mind and a not insubstantial part of me.
I just watched Goodnight, I Love You, a 2004 film about Diller’s final stand-up performance. As showbiz documentaries go, it’s a lot like a middling project for cable, save for Diller pulling off the mask of the cackling comic and letting us see what it takes to become another persona. She’s extremely proud of her career and wants to leave it while she can still perform without cue cards. Touring and traveling have gotten too difficult, and her pacemaker literally makes the standing part of stand-up too grueling. She’s gotten too old for the gig; the good thing is that she knows it.
Watching her in rehearsal demonstrates that she’s still a pro, ensuring that the lighting, sound, and musical cues are all to her specifications. She even directs the announcer with moments for pausing, just in introducing her longtime opening act, magician Robert Strong. Phyllis Diller may have had a hard time getting to the stage, but once there, she’s in her element.
Phyllis Diller has always insisted on five minutes of complete silence before going onstage. Even at the end of her career. Especially. She loves the silence as much as the laughter and applause.
She likens getting a room maintaining laughter in a dark room full of people to Atlas lifting the world – and loving it. But she’s tired, her memory isn’t as sharp, and the light is dimming.
Her best moments come in both the rehearsals and her interviews, from which we learn that unlike her stage persona, she is a gourmet cook, auto enthusiast, and accomplished pianist. She even plays the harpsichord for us! What we’ve seen on the stage and on the screen is a magnification more of something she recognizes in others than in herself.
By walking onstage in the 1950s stinging herself her self-deprecation, she was unthreatening to male audiences and comics, and slyly appealing to women, who may not have heard a woman in public proclaim herself a horrible cook who hates housework, doesn’t enjoy her children, and thinks her husband is a numbskull – with jokes to back everything up. Roseanne is quite right in acknowledging her as an important forerunner. I did not get that until now. Phyllis Diller may have had to look ridiculous to get our attention and to keep us from identifying with her observations too closely, but she found her schtick and worked it like she does the keyboard on her piano: she knows where to put every note, set each pause, and how hard to tap the key to make her routine work. The fact that it looks like a casual performance brings her the greatest reward.
On the way home after that sad note with my friend on the second half of life, I thought of Phyllis Diller. Her second half, as I mentioned at the beginning of this now Proustian piece, was her greatest half. She was well into middle age when she made the zingers stick and became what her obituaries trumpet as the queen of the one-liners. What we saw was an act, but reportedly, the crazed staccato cackle was for real. Phyllis Diller was real, and even though she’s gone, she flared up once again in my mind, this time in a new light. An inspiration. The second half is harder, but it can also be, in some respects, better. We don’t really get to choose how we go out. Ron Palillo had a rough go and ended early. Phyllis Diller made the back half the better half. George Takei has become the biggest star of Star Trek by embracing social media to gain laughs and make influential political statements. And Frank Langella? Though he claims not to look at his old films, he certainly looks unflinchingly back at his long life, at least judging from his filterless memoir. And he’s still at it. The Frank Langella Attic is still filling up, and we’ve got plenty to rummage through after he’s gone.
Frank Langella in 2012: writing a tell-too-much memoir and taking star turns as an old man. The eyes say something different. Maybe I’m still too young to understand exactly what.
After compiling my personal ballot of candidates to play the role of Mags in the upcoming film adaptation Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, I knew I was still missing key players, even those in my relatively narrowed field: actresses over 80, like the character Mags, who could hold the screen despite having no lines – just movement and presence. Mags is wisdom without words, a living callback to the near origins of the Hunger Games, dragged back from her golden years to relive the horror of her youth. The part could be choice if cast correctly.
Today, I discovered a striking and embarrassing omission in my original line-up:
Angela Lansbury, 86 and still working.
Mags can’t use words. Lansbury will use her eyes instead, as seen here in Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
She has a fucking Fansbury page on Facebook that I secretly monitor, and I still couldn’t pull her obvious name from the my brain. Of course she would be ideal as Mags. Shame on me. I even participated in a semi-miraculous homemade video adaptation of Murder, She Wrote in the 90s. In it, you could see the love. I still feel it.
Angela Lansbury as mystery author/amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. I think she may be licking her lips in anticipation of another homicide in the murder capital of the world, Cabot Cove, Maine.
Lansbury, all legs.
But it’s not all Murder, She Wrote. She’s been around forever, usually playing characters far older than she was at the time. She could be a naughty wench with ill intent (Gaslight); the worst, most manipulative mother in the world (still leaving me in shock from The Manchurian Candidate); a frail Miss Marple in the superstar adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d; or theperpetually soused author of steamy roman à clefs in Christie’s Death on the Nile, which Raúl holds close to his heart.
Lansbury as an alcoholic author of libelous potboilers in Death on the Nile.
Lansbury as Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d.
Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett peddling meat pies in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd from 1979
Plus, she’s been on stage forever! She was the original singing Mame, played nutso in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and took the role of the ambitious, cynical, wholly corrupt “mayoress” in Raúl’s personal Sondheim favorite, the infamous, misunderstood Anyone Can Whistle. She can do everything. Including playing an octogenarian stroke survivor/Hunger Games champion in a soft-sci-fi sequel that would introduce her to a new generation of fans. Wait till they see The Manchurian Candidate!
Malice masked in maternity: Angela Lansbury in the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate.
Mags could be a piece of cake for Lansbury, but she won’t phone it in. I suggest getting Sondheim on the set for inspiration.
Now the kids will have a new star to visit on Hollywood Boulevard:
So I’ve just read that Melissa Leo has been under consideration for the role of Mags, the oldest District participant in Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games.
In Suzanne Collins’ book, Mags is in her eighties and cannot speak due to a stroke. She needs help keeping up, though she’s still sharp as a tack despite her difficulty communicating and still knows how to survive in the arena. It’a a good role, not a great one, and it should go to a performer who is at least as old as the character. I want somebody who I can really identify as a Mags, not someone three decades younger fishing for another Oscar.
Melissa Leo is 51. Maybe she should be reading for President Coin, though I already have already stated who should play that part.
Mags?
There are dozens of actresses in their eighties and beyond who could make an strong impression as Mags. Most of them don’t get enough work because there aren’t roles for old women in movies – unless the movies are British.
Accent is not an issue since Mags does not speak, so I’m going global, which might make casting even more exciting, since I disqualify some obvious choices with excessive plastic surgery. Good news for Europe. North and especially Latin America, you’re on notice.
Also, while I think either everyone’s choice of Maggie Smith is fine, she has not reached my octogenarian age minimum, and she’s getting plenty of limelight as it is. Betty White, I love you, but let’s give the other ladies a chance to shine like you’ve had.
Mags?
OK. Raúl will now brainstorm. Nominees are presented in random order. All are eighty years old or more, and all have a long history in acting. Clips from various career highlights are included.
I expect Mags to be played for dignity and courage, not laughs just because she’s old and disabled. The lack of speech means that the performer will have to communicate even more through body movement and facial expression. Again, sorry plastic surgery junkies, you’ve disqualified yourselves. You’ve got to use your face. Mags has to come through it.
So, we begin:
Cloris Leachman *. Still working at 86. Though she’s known best for playing Phyllis – spectacularly – on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the underrated, short-lived Phyllis spin-off, she’s an established dramatic actress. Watch her in some seventies TV-movies on the youtube. Watch her in The Last Picture Show!
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Jeanne Moreau. Still working at 86. She takes no interest in nostalgia and hopes to keep moving forward instead of backward. She’s never had a role like Mags! Plus, having this French film legend, the film will find itself in filmographies that also feature directors Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Goddard, Michel Antonioni, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Louis Malle, Elia Kazan, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The director of Catching Fire should have to walk over coals in order to get Jeanne Moreau and join the ranks of her directors. And Moreau can have a biting presence onscreen. She might add some fire to Mags. Plus, she sings! Maybe she can bring something unexpected to Mags’ limited vocalisms.
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Ruby Dee. Still working at 87. She nearly won an Oscar™ for American Gangster. This could be her next chance. She played an ancient woman in the mini-series of Stephen King’s The Stand. Mags isn’t quite so old, but she’s getting close, and Ruby Dee can assuredly play ancient. Plus, look into her eyes. They will tell you what Mags cannot say in words. This clip, however, shows you what she can do with words.
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Doris Day. Happily retired at 88. What will it take to coax her out of retirement? I listened to a radio interview this year, and contrary to tabloid reports, she was not only lucid, she was as warm and engaging as ever. This is my pipe dream, I know. Doris Day is happier in Carmel with the dogs. I would be, too. But she’s been game for surprises: I was somewhat surprised by how randy she gets in this clip!
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Eva Marie Saint *: Still working at 88. I last saw her in the awful Superman reboot, so she needs something else to close her career on. She’s always referred to herself, not as a star, but as a working actress. Let’s keep that up. She’s worked with Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Liz Taylor, Karl Malden, and Brando, to name a few. She can hold her own with the kids of today. And she still has the simple loveliness that she’s exuded since On the Waterfront.
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Julie Harris *. Working intermittently at 86 after recovering from a stroke. Mags can be part of the recovery. She kicked off her career sixty years ago in the Broadway and film versions of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and since has been in one of the scariest movies ever, The Haunting as well as the best nighttime soap ever, Knots Landing. Yes, that is Alec Baldwin as her most unfortunate son. Bathe in the glow of Julie Harris as Lilimae Clements.
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Della Reese *. Still working at 80. She’s got a lot more than Touched by an Angel in her. If you think Mags needs an undercurrent of toughness, please refer to the clip below. She is not very angelic.
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Honor Blackman. Still working at 86. She’s no stranger to action, as one of the most enduring Bond girls, Pussy Galore, from Goldfinger, as well as a pre-Diana Reed Avenger on British TV.
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Rita Moreno *. Still working at 80. Did anyone see her as Vincent D’Onofrio’s mentally ill mother on that Law & Order show? She’s ready for anything, and she’s willing to go out on a limb. Case in point, The Ritz.
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Carol Channing *, still working at 91. Really, I wasn’t sure about this one, but I knew that Doris W. would throw a tantrum if I didn’t at least float the idea. And actually, I can see it. I believe that Mags did do some communicating through moans and grunts, and I know that Doris W. would delight in hearing Channing’s approach to this, employing the squeaks, whistles, and low groans that she incorporates into her acts and impressions. Doris W., you’ve got me sold!
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And finally, Olivia de Havilland *, now retired at 96, but I want her back anyway. She dates back to Gone with the Wind! Plus she was an integral part of the 1970s disaster movie craze, leaving the childhood version of Raúl absolutely spellbound during Airport ’77, when the plane she was on sank to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. Then there’s Lady in a Cage, which has one of the best trailers I have ever seen. And the movie is exactly what the trailer promises:
Watching The Thirteenth Floor was for me sort of like going back in time, but not skipping alternate realities like in this movie – going back in time to the nineties video store in Chicago that was housed in the garden apartment on the corner of Clarendon and Irving Park, right down from a cobbler’s shop where I had my roommate’s never-worn Italian shoes remarkably restored after my puppy chewed them up. I wonder which folded first, the video store or the cobbler… Days of yore.
Quick research taught me that not only Nationwide Video, where I wasted collective weeks of my life selecting shitty films, had long shuttered, but the seemingly nice coffee shop, The Fix, which took its place, has also closed down. What is there now, and why did Nationwide Video get such low reviews on Yelp! when they always had treats for my dogs at the register? No info on the cobbler.
But my time machine experience: I used to spend forever perusing the VHS covers, scrutinizing the synopses on the back, deliberating as I checked off stars and directors, cocking an eyebrow in doubt at the stills they used to tempt me into rental.
All that intense consideration, and I still ended up with so much unwatchable shit.
Back then, I was always wary of The Thirteenth Floor because I’d heard that it paled in comparison to the similar simulated-reality films, The Matrix and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, both of which I liked immensely. Something about infusing the 1930s into virtual reality left me cold, and I couldn’t really place any of the actors or the director. “No, no Thirteenth Floor tonight. What about this Leprechaun in the Hood? I’ll go with that one.”
And so it was that I missed out on The Thirteenth Floor. Thing is – it was more or less what my 1999 video store recidivist peruser imagined it to be: a lesser version of The Matrix and eXistenZ, though the 1930s era was not the problem.
Instead, a murder mystery without much tension and uninspired leads sank it. The murder – and the revelation of the culprit in the final third – held very little interest, especially since the victim was probably the most compelling character, also played by the best actor, Armin Mueller-Stahl, with a second place going to Dennis Haysbert as the take-no-shit modern-day detective trying to solve the murder. Vincent D’Onofrio also has roles – plural, remember, there’s a simulation – and I liked him better as the bartender/heavy in the thirties piece as opposed to the scraggly-haired computer genius in the contemporary scenes. Also, he should never appear blonde ever again.
Not a great look for anyone, even Thor, but it’s especially wrong on Vincent D’Onofrio.
I prefer Vincent D’Onofrio in the segments taking place in the simulated thirties.
Craig Bierko is better suited to a sitcom format. Gretchen Mol needs more acting classes on femme fatalery™ before she can take on a role that Veronica Lake could have made work.
Craig Bierko has the lead role, and while he might have been better suited to nineties television, say, as one of the Friends‘ friends, he was far out of his league trying to forge a wedding between film noir and simulated reality. Not a leading man, but maybe a clumsy sitcom figure. As the femme fatale, Gretchen Mol has only slightly better luck. There’s no mystery behind her eyes, just a plot convention we’re waiting to unravel. Maybe as technology advances, someone will remake this film with the simulations of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck to add another layer to the already multiple layers of simulation. Scratch that. I want Ava Gardner and John Garfield as long as I’m casting simulations as simulations.
I think I did have a greater appreciation for the film today as opposed to a dozen years ago because I’ve been immersed in shows like Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse, which pose questions about the intersections of life, memory, being, simulation, and simulation-as-being. Who is real and what constitutes real is a question in The Thirteenth Floor, but only superficially, as if the mystery were more important than people discovering that they are simulations.
Daniel F. Galouye wrote the source novel, Simulacron-3, the title of which sort of serves as a spoiler, as does the word simulacrum and its interpretations: here, when a simulation begins repeating itself until it becomes a thing apart from its original source. At what point does the copy of the original become distanced enough so that it now exists as an independent entity? After how many copies? At what degree of the simulation’s cognizance or non-cognizance? Where does will emerge and how does it evolve? I wonder if the book drove this home harder than the screenplay adaptation by writer/director Josef Rusnak and co-writer Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez. It should have.
And I’m curious as to who edited the trailer, as they give away the twist: the reality world that created the simulacrum 1930s Los Angeles is itself a simulacrum of another unidentified, assumedly real Los Angeles.
Fassbinder’s German television project, Welt am Draht, which uses the same novel, Simulacron-3, as its source.
Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), which looks worlds better than The Thirteenth Floor.
Now I’m really yearning to see the two-part 1973 German television project, World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder! It’s set in 1970s Paris and based on the same novel by Daniel F. Galouye! Why am I not watching this right this minute?
Maybe I best stick to Philip K. Dick stories. Or maybe I need to think more closely about Dollhouse. Note to self and anyone who watches Dollhouse: Dr. Saunders (Amy Acker) was afraid to find out her original identity because she was afraid of dying, of Dr. Saunders, the simulation, dying. Does one feel being as a simulation? Does one mourn the passing of a simulation? Maybe only once it transcends simulation into simulacrum? One terrific, terrifying speech from Amy Acker in the Joss Whedon series summed up more than the whole of The Thirteenth Floor.Dollhouse and and especially Battlestar Galactica took the simulation/reproduction/simulacrum further than The Thirteenth Floor, which in the end becomes so enamored of its own somewhat predictable mindfuck attempt that it slips away from the questions about identity and being that should ground the film and make it great, as I’m assuming Fassbinder’s will be.
Dollhouse doesn’t have a lot of good times. Let’s celebrate this one, even though it’s provoked by the accidental and possibly catastrophic release of a chemical agent that has the potential of a weapon of mass destruction.
In working my way through a second viewing of the series Dollhouse, I believe I have now reached the point at which Mr. Lousy and I can finally now watch episodes in tandem. This might be just the right spot for our summit.
“Echoes” is one of my favorite Dollhouse episodes. I won’t say favorite because I’m re-evaluating as I make my second trip, and I don’t want to be presumptive, especially about my own tastes.
I know the episode has notoriety for its humor: everyone goes on a weird drug trip and it’s hilarious.
True and not true. There is a lot more going on besides straitlaced control-freaks flipping out on something between highly potent weed and LSD. The weaving of the comic, the tragic, character revelation, and partial exposition proves that the series could produce not only a fantastic episode, but also an episode that would move the story forward (by looking backward), plant clues about motivations and deceptions, and propose further questions about the human body/mind connection/disconnection, this time through chemical, rather than neural manipulation.
Dollhouse writers and showrunners Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain.
The episode was written by Sarah Fain and Elizabeth Craft, who were also showrunners for Dollhouse. The pair had previously worked as a team on Angel, and before that The Shield, which I watched very occasionally and wished it had been regularly.
Their status as showrunners is quite evident to me as a work through the series a second time, as suggestions abound about what’s to come, though I won’t point them out and ruin Mr. Lousy’s party. I will say this: Previously, I’d thought that the series being cancelled was actually a blessing because it prevented missteps that made chunks of Angel and Buffy (Cordelia’s possession/pregnancy/coma resulting in the goddess Jasmine on Angel; season seven of Buffy) rather unenjoyable for me. However, the Dollhouse creative team had its ducks in order, and the show may have stayed course even had it escaped cancellation after two short seasons. Whedon, Fain, and Craft knew where this series was headed, and they
“Gray Hour”: Sierra steps in as Taffy after the original Echo-Taffy is remote-wiped and returned to her Doll state in the middle of an assignment. ”Did I fall asleep?” does not elicit the requisite “for a little while,” and “Shall I go now?” is not an option. A Doll needs her Dollhouse.
were steering ever so subtly, a fact quite evident by the middle of the first season. I became more aware of this in “Gray Hour” (S1e4), also written by Fain and Craft, and now have my ears on red alert: there was an end game that they were working towards, even with seemingly tossed off, almost random lines of dialogue that I appreciate only on my second time through.
Sure, there were explicit flashbacks of Echo as an animal rights activist planning to expose Rossum for animal testing, with an introduction to her ill-fated boyfriend, as well as an explanation for how she ended up in the very unfortunate position of sitting across the table from Adelle DeWitt making the deal that launched the series.
As I understand it, this exposition was set up as a linear presentation in the original pilot, then jettisoned for a jigsawed rollout of how Caroline (Echo’s real name) ended up on the wrong side of the negotiating table with DeWitt. Although I would like to see the original pilot,
the above fan, RazMan, and I believe they made the right decision in with the fragmented structure, especially with “Echoes,” which successfully works a great chunk of missing exposition into the story. Moreover, the fragmentation makes sense with the theme of memory loss/robbery and reconstruction. It’s patchwork.
In this episode, the patches form a coherent pattern that reveals itself in an unexpected turn: Dolls on drugs.
Drugs. College. Multinational corporations with hidden agendas. They all go together, right? Well, they make the last element central here: Put shortly, Rossum has been developing a chemical that tampers with memory to further control on the human brain. Somehow, we’ll find out later how in a twist, the chemical has gotten loose on a university campus, leading to one rather ugly death and a lot of other students – and at least one staff member – tripping wildly and publicly.
Clutching her Oscar™, Olivia Spencer recalls the steppingstone role she had on Dollhouse as a flipped-out professor somewhere in a state between flower child and MDMA tripper.
I must mention now that the history professor flipping out on the sidewalk is portrayed by future Oscar™-winner Octavia Spencer. Her tripped-out character wobbling blissfully down the sidewalk is probably not a career highlight for the actress, but the appearance isn’t just for laughs. The professor recognizes Echo as Caroline, even through the drug-induced haze, and attempts to re-connect. This is the first time Echo hears her real name and makes direct contact with someone from her real life.
Caroline, however, is traveling under another Imprint (one of the sex-purposed ones, who we have seen before, racing motorcycles and engaging in light bondage), and doesn’t understand when her former professor calls her out, though a part of her does recognize the woman. In fact, Caroline, even in her Imprint persona, recognizes almost everything about the campus and the Rossum lab; she just can’t name it. Echo is glitching even before she arrives on the scene, and once she’s exposed to the drug, she, and we, get a semi-clear view of how she and Rossum intersected, and a rather explicit (though not wholly complete) explanation of why she ended up a Doll.
Caroline had been tracking Rossum for years, but she had no concept of the direction that the corporation’s research was leading. She was out to expose the HOW. Far more terrifying is the WHY. And it’s going to get more terrifying.
Echo is glitching. It’s happened before. It infuriates Dominic. It troubles Topher. It intrigues Adelle.
Topher and Adelle! Put them in a room together when they’re not mutually terrified by a possible Alpha massacre, and you’ve got wry humor spinning off the screen!
Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz play off each other’s characters perfectly.
While “Echoes” has gained popularity for the comic relief of placing the Dollhouse non-Dolls into a trippy state, I found equally funny the early scene in which corporate head Clive Ambrose has come to DeWitt’s office with news of the Rossum drug-release fiasco looking for a solution, which Topher may possibly provide. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz have already established such distinctive characters, with Adelle DeWitt: intimidating, hyper-self-controlled, hyper-controlling, stiff, tailored, armored, and somewhat sphynx-like in her sometimes unreadability; and Topher: goofy, brilliant, socially inept, rumpled, virtually self-censorless, and freewheeling enough so that his gesticulating and stuttering as he forms thoughts make him readable even when his actual dialogue comes in spurts rather than streams.
They are almost polar, and putting them in Adelle’s pristine office for a very formal meeting makes for some uproarious comedy; that is, if you find Topher’s percolating train-of-thought rippling about and ruffling the feathers of the stern CEO, while Adelle firmly re-directs Topher, sometimes verbally, other times with a glare, and at one point, I believe, just with a slight tilt of the head.
This is where the ongoing story, the writing, and the acting pay off: Adelle almost imperceptibly tilting her head in disapproval followed by Topher stammering as his fingers manically draw ideas into the air. The contrast is sublime.
This doesn’t turn out so great.
Their routine really erupts when they discover that the drug is not ingested, nor airborne, but rather transmitted through physical touch. This realization occurs, unfortunately for them, because they have just unknowingly been dosed themselves. Topher, mistakenly believing that the Dolls are immune to the effects of the chemical, exposes off-assignment Mellie to the chemical with an injection, and then puts her in the chair to monitor her brain activity in hopes of finding an antidote.
This would not have been imaginable at the outset of the episode.
In the meantime, Adelle and Topher have unwittingly exposed themselves through touch, and in a conversation they hold while Mellie’s brain scan lights up like a Christmas tree, their banter becomes rather… odd. Topher, out of character, critiques Adelle, as being too… he can’t find the word. Adelle suggests “British” and makes a declaration about pronouncing her r’s. Now something is up. DeWitt wouldn’t have even dignified Topher’s character observations with a response, and now she’s musing aloud about her own British-ness.
Before long, they have both kicked off their shoes, Topher has lost his pants, and they are climbing around on the rails near the activation chamber like it’s a jungle gym. The character contrast is evaporating, and the humor moves from sublime to slapstick. It still works.
Mellie is not so nice after hearing about flowers in a vase. Just don’t tell about the third flower and you might live to see another day.
Then we’ve got Mellie, who we will soon come to know as her Doll name: November.
I have to stop there because I need to write an entire post about Mellie. I’ll limit myself for once. Here Mellie partially activates her own default imprint, that of “killing machine,” by stating her own trigger phrase, or at least the first part of it. How is this possible!
Topher made a false assumption – the drug does indeed work on the Doll brain, even though part of it has shut down, but instead of making the Dolls comically loopy, as it does Topher and DeWitt at the headquarters – and Dominic and Langton at the campus – the drug takes longer to kick in for the Doll brain (maybe not so long with direct injection), and when it does, rather than sending the mind on a trip, it triggers suppressed memories.
Mellie conjures her own activation key, much to the chagrin even to the wigged out Topher and DeWitt, though even in the face of possible demise at the bare hands of the killer Doll, the comic tone continues, with the two of them squabbling over who should approach Mellie, who is literally a partial phrase away from snapping both their necks.
Topher insists DeWitt approach her; DeWitt counters, “I’m your superior!” to which Topher retorts, “in every way,” before making it clear that, as usual, DeWitt would have to do the dirty work. The usually deadly serious Dollhouse turning farce comes as a pleasant surprise and deserves its place in a Joss Whedon pantheon of funny, though like most other entries in such a collection, you’d have to know the characters to understand the humor.
Angel as a grumpy puppet, anyone?
Topher and DeWitt are happily stoned as the Rossum Corporation threatens collapse around them. They’ve got chips, so it doesn’t matter so much.
The superior crack also introduces something into the Dollhouse that had not yet been addressed so explicitly: hierarchy. If power were a pyramid, the bottom layer would be the Dolls, who in their inactive state resemble lobotomized members of a feel-good, no-think cult wearing pastel uniforms. Next would be handlers: Boyd Langton has to follow orders, and Sierra’s handler faced an abysmal fate after abusing what little power he had. Dr. Saunders might be just a notch above them. Then… I would guess Dominic, who is sort of “chief henchman” in a suit, in competition with Topher, whose strengthening status derives from how much he knows and controls with his knowledge. After them, DeWitt. She’s head of operations at the L.A. Dollhouse unit, though she’s still answerable to some sort of board of the Rossum Corporation, in this episode represented by the appearance of Clive Ambrose. Even his name screams upper-echelon.
Once Adelle’s guard is down, I believe shortly after her exposure, she remarks that the only reason he has his job is that he couldn’t do hers. And let’s face it, who could? Still, Adelle would normally never critique the Dollhouse aloud, nor would she reveal any resentment toward her own superior. Cracks are showing.
Victor takes charge as a federal agent. Everyone jumps. Even Dominic, begrudgingly.
The cracks are more obvious between Topher and Dominic. First, Dominic is angry that Topher has programmed Victor to outrank him at the scene of the campus. It’s a double-punch: Topher purposefully places not only himself, but also an imposing, wildly confident, and comically commanding Victor - in another great performance from Enver Gjokaj – above Dominic’s head. After Victor’s federal agent persona dresses down him before the entire squad, Dominic is left to mutter bitterly, “An hour ago you were discussing how much you loved applesauce.” Even the angry, frustrated Dominic is funny here.
Yes: The drug brings out the softer side of Dominic.
He gets funnier! When the drug affects him, he gets particularly loopy, dangling his gun around, whining because it’s so heavy, and confessing to Echo in a chance meeting that he’s sorry he knocked her unconscious and left her alone to be burned alive. ”I mean, who does that?” he asks a still confused Echo, who accepts his apologies as she marches to the lab.
Is Dominic all bad? Part of him is sorry for trying to murder Echo/Caroline. Does the part revealed only by some sort of hallucinogen count?
Do the drugs open the door to a part of the mind that exists suppressed or unknown, or do they create sentiment or sensation from nothing? How do foreign chemicals affect being? Dominic confessing and begging forgiveness, Topher running amok in his underwear and sock feet, Adelle prattling with loose lips, and of course, Boyd, insisting that he has everything under control, by playing piano in a makeshift mental ward – there is something to what comes out of these characters as they fall under the influence. It’s not ether. It’s them. Rather than having foreign Imprints foisted upon their brains, their minds lose inhibition and another facet of their being slips out.
There is nothing comical, however, about the drug’s effect on the Dolls. The memories that begin
Sierra and Dominic arrive at the scene. Sierra’s Active’s cool composure is shattered after prolonged exposure to the drug triggers traumatic memories.
flashing are more than glitches: they are deep trauma bursting through layers of heavily programmed Imprints and deeply buried Inactives. Mellie jumps to her near murder and subsequent murderousness. Sierra, in the Imprint of some kind of pathologist, flashes back to the rapes by her handler. Victor gives a glimpse of his former life as a soldier with a battle scene ending in an ominous explosion.
These chemical-induced fragmentary flashes of murder, rape, and war put up a dark contrast to the spaced-out Dollhouse staff.
Bad guy. Wrong guy. A treatment will make it all better. For a little while.
And then there’s Echo. She’s glitching as soon as she sees the news report about trouble on the campus, particularly around the Rossum laboratory, but when the student, Sam Jennings (Mehcad Brooks) she was leading to the lab turns out to be a corporate spy and gives her a massive dose via standard chloroform-method, she experiences far more than the now-familiar glitches. She’s transported back to the moment when she and her boyfriend were trapped in the very same lab where she stands drugged and left to die, and we get to see what she sees in the past: a desperate attempt at escape ending in her boyfriend’s death and her capture on the greens of the campus. In the present, she wrestles Jennings to the ground, but her boyfriend is lost to her forever.
The Dolls on drugs are not funny. But they tell us plenty.
Note on the writers/showrunners: Is it coincidence that Whedon has two women taking the lead here, or does he purposefully want women pulling some strings on his dolls this time around? They are doing a magnificent job. I just didn’t realize it the first time because I didn’t see how coherent the story would become. Mr. Lousy may want to investigate Craft and Fain’s young adult series: Bass Ackwards and Belly Up and its sequel, Footfree and Fancyloose. They look way too upper-class and girly for Raúl, but maybe someone else could do an investigation. I believe the two were also part of the recently cancelled Secret Circle, which I never watched. They may have a new show in the works: The Selection based on the novels by Kiera Cass. These also look too upper-class and girly for Raúl, so I may rely upon Mr. Lousy once again for a review.
Her worst outfit yet, even including the diva episode costumes. What the fuck is this? It looks like a half-assed dirndl with a mini and lace leggings. I hope the client had to pay an extra million dollars for something this atrocious.
Note on Eliza Dushku: Although I hated her outfit and her Active’s date in this episode, I thought her performance was stronger. She didn’t have to dance, and she can run convincingly. I guess I am softening a bit on her on this second outing. She was the producer, so she did have a major hand in her character, and she was ready to address the sexual exploitation, ickiness and all, head-on. I’m not sure how much of that might be the vanity appeal of wearing sexy clothes – and I HATED her sexy clothes here – but Dushku is willing to make her character as sexually manipulated as the other Dolls. Maybe we need to extend a peace offering. Could the show have gotten off the ground without her?
Out of options. Sign here.
Note on the closing of the episode: We’ve now seen how Caroline ended up a Doll. The same fate awaits Sam Jennings, the student acting as corporate spy who’d stolen a vial of the chemical to sell to Rossum’s top competitor – and I shudder to think of their business line. In the end, he is sitting across the same table from DeWitt with the same tea set between them, and like the other Dolls, he’s out of options. You don’t turn down Adelle, even if it means five years of your life doing unimaginably horrible things that you will never remember – if you survive. We’ve seen the recruitment. We’ve seen the deployment. What will we see when a Doll reaches the end of the contract? It’s coming.
Oh raspberries! It’s a special occasion for Doris W. Mr. Lousy just celebrated one, and right on its heels comes another. So much May mirth just as the month closes and summer opens wide. While Mr. Lousy may be singing the praises of Tatum Channing, Channing Tatum, there is another Channing always ready to pounce:
Carol Channing.
Doris W. doesn’t always wax sentimental; in fact, I don’t think she waxes as much as she should, at least on this blog.
So on this, her special day, I write as a stand-in, recollecting some of the many exclamations, proclamations, and incantations that legendary performer Carol Channing has elicited from Doris W. over the years – as well as I can.
First, the shocking Larry King interview from 2002, for which we had been promised “a startling revelation.”
“ONE startling revelation!?!” cried a delighted, near delirious Doris W. panting on the telephone, as Channing announced one punch of astonishment after another.
First and foremost, there came an extremely confusing tale of how Carol Channing was part African American, the transcript of which can be found on Mulatto Diaries. Many commenters there point out that her muddled account suggests obfuscation and some lingering shame at passing for so many years. I must counter that the full transcript of the rest of the interview is almost as confusing, and perhaps even more evasive, especially in terms of her decades-long marriage to alleged gay Charles Lowe, with whom she had sex once or perhaps twice in over forty years of marriage, or the relationship with her estranged son, celebrated political cartoonist Chan Lowe. She also neglects to mention to the hopelessly inept Larry King that she did not do two movies as claimed but three. The world will never forget Otto Preminger’s LSD mob comedy, Skidoo! The Preminger estate tried to suppress it for years. Now re-discover its glory. Doris W. did.
A later appearance on the Wendy Williams show did very little to clarify Channing’s race saga, though Doris W. did find the Pebbles Flintstone hair-do Channing sported for the taping “just marvelous, the perfect peak of pearliness swirling to the heavens from her platinum pantsuit.”
While Doris W. insisted that a crypto-racial Channing “paved the way” for the election of bi-racial President Obama, the race revelations and subsequent baffling appearances on Larry King and Wendy Williams’ shows came no surprise to the longtime fan, especially in consideration of the Soul Sisters number from a long-ago broadcast of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In performed with Get Christie Love! star Teresa Graves:
Doris W. does lament some lost opportunities, including the senseless re-casting of Channing’s stage roles of Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Marilyn Monroe and of the titular character of Hello, Dolly! to Barbra Streisand in the film versions, though Doris W. frequently contents herself with videos from performances as the characters made decades and decades and decades after the shows’ original runs -
as the gold-digging Lorelei:
or as matchmaking Dolly Levi, before a horde of homosexuals brandishing smartphones as they worship at the altar:
Another disappointment was the failure of Channing’s desperate attempt to re-create the controversial classic The Boys in the Band with an all-female cast. “We’ll never know,” pined Doris W., “how unintentional drag subverted into intentional drag thrust upon a landmark, highly divisive stageplay simultaneously excoriating and exalting homosexual identity in the mid-twentieth century might have transformed the work within the subtexts of gender deconstructionism, queer theory, and Marxist revisionism.” Doris W. went on to add, “I can only see Carol as a top. And in my mind’s eye, I see it a lot.”
Though for each missing gem in the Channing tiara, Doris W., ever the optimist, has found a replacement, such as Channing’s 1982 appearance on The Love Boat, alongside rivals Della Reese, Ann Miller, and Ethel Merman.
“Just look at how totally smoking hot and motherfucking goddess-like she was in that Wonder Woman outfit,”oozed Doris W., trading amazement at wardrobe for belly laughs at Channing’s deep-throated, playful punnery.
The Love Boat episode culminated in a showstopping, shipshaking performance of I’m the Greatest Star with rival guest stars, Della Resse, Ann Miller, and Ethel Merman.
“It’s the final fuck-you to Streisand,” crowed Doris.W with a twinkle in her eye and a tingle of venom in her heart.
“Those dicks gave Barbra Hello, Dolly! and then Carol Channing snatched a Streisand standard from Funny Girl(in which BS actually played her breakthrough role of Fanny Brice both on stage and on screen) and fucking dusted the floor with it!”
“And it was outfuckingrageous to see her as Julie the Cruise Director’s Aunt Sylvia on that big, crazy, beautiful boat!”
“I gotta say,” Doris W. then intoned in an almost somber turn,“Duran Duran, Wham! UK, The Dazz Band, Heaven 17, The Cure, and Carol Channing. That IS 1982 to me. It will always be.”
Since the banner Channing year of 1982, however, Doris W. has continued to bask in Channing’s presence, be it
Doris W. finds a meditative quality in Carol Channing’s treatment of the great spirituals.
or her 1985 performance as The White Queen in what Doris W. has called “the one and only version of Alice in Wonderland that even matters, including that fucking book”:
or PORING over her autobiography
Doris W. finds strength and solidarity in the words of Carol Channing.
Why, sometimes Doris W. contents herself all alone, save for the Carol Channing ventriloquist dummy that she keeps in a tiny wooden cradle and takes out only for private playtime with Lady Fairchilde, Mrs. Beasley, and Madame.
And! tonight there is cause for celebration! I’ll lay odds that one very special tea party is taking place, and with those five ladies at the table, there’s bound to be trouble!!! I hear at least three of them are real talkers! I’ll bet Mrs. Beasley just does what she can to keep the peace!
So happy special day Doris W. and friends!
I wish I could be there to help celebrate, but don’t worry, I’ve got the recent documentary lined up for your summer vacation with Mr. Lousy. It will come when you least expect it, so let the anxiety start to sink in.
There is also the possible biopic of Carol Channing starring Johnny Depp – as Carol Channing. This could restore his credibility as an actor. We’ll talk directors later.
I was recently in London and went to the Harry Potter studio tour. This is the park that merchandising built, where they have preserved the actual sets, costumes, props and models from the Harry Potter films for fans to go gaga over for years to come. More on this later.
But I want to address something here. Crookshanks in the HP books is angry, ugly orange cat. There is a bulletin board with all the different Crookshanks from the HP films. So Hunger Games producers, here’s your chance to make Buttercup right. The Potter films are done. The cats need work. Since you couldn’t manage to find an orange cat in the States, maybe you need to extend your search overseas. It happens. American television is littered with secret Brits.
They’re all here. All you have to do is pick one. You’re welcome.
Why am I so irritated with the fourth season of the series Damages, the legal drama starring a Rasputinesque, Machiavellian Glenn Close as ruthless attorney Patty Hewes, and a lovely, doe-eyed, not-as-guileless-as-she looks Rose Byrne, on whom I harbor a difficult-to-explain, unrelenting crush?
(Actually, I think I have a crush on her character, Ellen Parsons, a bit more than the actress, but that’s not the Damages confusion that I plan to address here.)
As in the past, this season has given me a great actor, this time John Goodman, as well as a near -zeitgeist case (against a corporation stand-in for Halliburton doing black ops in Afghanistan), plus more of the edgy, shifting dynamics between its two principal leads.
What is bothering me?
Time.
The fourth season begins “three years after” the third season closed. Perhaps a good reason for this will be revealed as I progress through this season, gradually discovering more clues about the case and more details about the characters’ lives during this long interim. (Damages always holds a surprise, usually sinister, readying itself for ambush around any corner.)
Maybe the missing three years have something to do with the series being dropped by FX and then being picked up by DirecTV, though I am not sure how moving from cable to satellite includes time travel.
The three-year lapse makes no sense to me. Was the show I had been watching in the prior seasons three years behind my contemporary viewing; in other words: Was it set in the three-years-ago past? Was the 2007 season actually 2004? Or is the current season actually three years into the future, 2015, which would be a terrible idea, since we have no solid idea how U.S. troops, Hamid Karzai, the Taliban, and corporate black ops might converge in three years’ time. I don’t think we could set that even three months in the future. So when is it occurring on Damages?
Does any of this matter? Can I just sit back and enjoy the treachery, vitriol, and Shakespearean tragedy that I’ve come to expect from the show?
Am I too constrained by my rigid Western linear concept of time?
Can I not give season four of Damages the same leeway that I might give, say, this year’s sensation, The Hunger Games trilogy, which takes place in a very debatable territory like the U.S. (using geographical descriptions as allusions but avoiding naming explicit markers) at an undetermined time in the future? Can’t I immerse myself in the story without imposing temporal conditions? Can’t I simply take delight in the characters?
Can’t I just get over it?
No. I feel like Damages has been having an affair behind my back for three years, and now it just expects me to forget it. I’m a fucking Scorpio. I will never let it go.
The key word lingering from my Hunger Games musing is future. You can do what you like with the future, as long as it doesn’t completely contradict the past, interfere with the present, and isn’t going to be proven laughable within the next decade.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is still one of my all-time favorite films, one that I have dragged my ass to midnight showings just to experience cinematically.
I am no less rapturous in watching now, even though we have not sent humans past or even to the moon in over a decade since the movie was set.
At the time the film was released, 1968, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were engaging in Cold War brinkmanship that spilled into an astro-cosmonautical race to send people into space. The U.S. managed to leave the first human footprints on the moon, and who was to think then that the hyper-nationalistic race or the astounding progress in spatial exploration was to slow its pace?
I contend that in 1968 it was almost certain that we would be reaching farther into the solar system by 2001 – okay, maybe Jupiter is a little ambitious – and that space travel to space stations and to the moon would be somewhat akin to taking a ferry in zero gravity.
Note, this is coming from someone who has no problem with Pan Am (defunct since 1991) serving as the 2001 space ferry,
not to mention an unexplained monolith,
or a lengthy introduction with primates discovering what is proposed as the missing link to humanity.
By the end of the film, time itself becomes some kind of transforming, pulsing, looping, streaming prism of fantasic light.
The titular year of 2001 becomes insignificant at the conclusion.
So I’m not that fussy about time!
Except for these time lapses that are set in the present day. What is the “present day” if you can jump forward three years?
The convoluted spy drama Alias committed the same narrative atrocity years ago, when Sydney Bristow, the lead character played by Jennifer Garner, woke up from a blackout into a busy Hong Kong street, only to discover that she had two years of her life missing.
She had two years missing? What about me? Where were my two years? What was my temporal relationship to this semi-mindless espionage television program? I had thought it was a deep, meaningful relationship, but suddenly I felt not just disappointed, but deceived. I’d accept one year, maybe, but two? No. The show was already running off the rails with a Nostradamus-like figure whose prophecies were becoming a farcical focal point. Time-skipping seems minor in my file cabinet of complaints about the show, but I can’t write it off. Thank heavens I knew that J.J. Abrams had no clue how to follow a story to its conclusion – I knew better than to fall into the Lost trap when that show took off.
Actually, if time travel is at least acknowledged, as it was in Lost, I am far more accepting. I only saw a few episodes of that series, sitting with my brother, a loyal viewer who turned to Lostpedia whenever questions arose. He forbade me from asking any more of my own questions during one episode that seemed to take place on the island in some nebulous point in time, in 1970s California, and in present-day California, all simultaneously.
I wasn’t condemning, just confused and curious. My brother finally ordered me into complete silence after I posited that “the fat one has the power of telepathy.” This, apparently, did not figure into the Lost world, though it seemed quite plausible given the circumstances of the episode.
I did warn my brother that the show would collapse into an infuriating morass by the end, and he ultimately and angrily agreed after the series finale. I’m not sure time travel was at fault since that was one pop culture phenomenon I knew I had to sit out on, but I know that once you tamper with time on TV, you had better have a plan with an ending that won’t irrevocably stain the series upon conclusion.
Am I revealing some Asperger Syndrome traits in my inflexible and arguably obsessive timeline demands? Possibly. People on the spectrum do make some good points, after all. Or am I so fixated on a detail that it stops me from seeing the whole? That’s the flip side.
Still, as with soft sci-fi like Hunger Games, I am able to suspend belief, and I am able to suspend it even further if the setting is somewhat open to interpretation. The Hunger Games is sketchy about when (sometime in the future) and where (competing fan-made maps of the U.S./Panem are everywhere – and I love them) it takes place. Pinpointing geography has been carried out and critiqued by obsessed teenagers, some of whom may be learning where the actual lower 48 states are located by matching them up with Panem Districts through their forays into digital cartography.
Suzanne Collins leaves the where, and especially the when, rather open in the trilogy, so in the broad scope, the exact setting is left to the reader. I do wonder if she could have imagined just how far her readers would run with this license she had granted.
How many ways can the boundaries of Panem be gauged? As many as there are readers who understand the term “Appalachia”?
While the fans are quite busy with setting the boundaries of space, I wonder if any of the rabid readers have an equally intense curiosity for setting boundaries of time. I’ve only come across a few speculations, though at least one has adopted its own timeline with its own terminology to replace our Western millennial measurements. Readers can do this because Collins has released the power to them by omitting explicit setting in relation to the contemporary world.
Some authors explicitly remove the relation themselves. Recently I got a shipment of French books written for adolescents. My office mate, a Parisian planted in the Midwest, and I poured pored over them, and she noted that I had selected a number of books that would fall into the fantasy genre. She asked when and where one series, La rivière à l’envers (The River Flowing Backwards - my translation until someone publishes it in English) by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, was set. I said that I didn’t think it mattered – the author just wanted us to think of another world, not another planet, but a setting apart from our own reality and history.
The world is still relatable to ours through experience, allegory, and language; it’s Earth but not our Earth.
Another series aimed at adolescents, the trilogy by Lois Lowry, The Giver, along with its sadly neglected follow-ups, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger, seems similar, but cast into a sense of future rather than of past. The setting is undefined still relatable, almost recognizable. (And a fourth book in the series will be released in October!) I wade into these books without much question because the time and place are so far distanced from my own that I have no alternative but to accept the far-removed setting, which in turn leads me to compare fantasy and reality, and in doing so, circle back to question how I perceive and question the world that I am in, the real world, with new holes poked through by the fantasy world. In that regard, an undefined distance from the here-and-now is an asset in fiction.
My office-mate mused that these types of books, fantasy fiction, seemed popular with kids today, but that she preferred something more exact in terms of where and when – and that she could live without the fantasy component as well. I respect that, and a part of me really understands that, but I can also rather easily divorce myself from reality.
Maybe French people prefer to see the divorce documents themselves? The Rivière series begins with a prologue explicitly stating that it takes place at a time when there were no cars with airbags, no shopping centers, and not even mobile phones. Then it emphasizes that it was a place where there were still rainbows and midnight swims, as well as heartaches and hay fever, which we haven’t managed to solve even in our own world. The author explains the series’ world in relation to ours pre-emptively – before we can even formulate a question about it. In essence, “It’s like your world in elemental ways but at a simpler time (technologically); don’t fret about the rest.” I don’t really need such a prologue since I take it as a given with the genre, but I appreciate that someone else needs one. It makes me feel less extremist.
What does a French series of fantasy books written for the Young Adult market have to do with
Author Jean-Claude Mourlevat might watch Damages dubbed in French.
Damages and and its maddening three-year time lapse? It’s about different genres, media, and structures. A fantasy can take liberties without rousing my ire. It is a self-contained series that I read at a pace that I choose. A switch or leap in time causes me no distress, and I will work to make the connections myself. Most TV shows that I watch and presume to be set at the time they are produced do not get the same liberty. To me, a consistent setting shows respect for the audience and its expectations for a connection to their realities. If it was made in 2007, looks like 2007, and bears significant relation to 2007, I expect it to be set in 2007, and it isn’t allowed to fly willy-nilly into the future because I am not there yet. Of course it’s make-believe; if you make me believe it, you have to stick to a reasonable timeline that matches mine.
Damages has perhaps unknowingly already put itself on a timetable. When Patty visits her stillborn daughter’s grave, we find a date engraved on the tombstone: May 24, 1972.
So how many years ago was that? What is the relationship between 1972 and now? Was it forty years ago? When is now?
Now is important, more so on Damagesthan similar shows.
The drama might be overblown and rather fantastical from a legal standpoint, but it’s unquestionably set in our time to capture what is happening right now; in fact, each season takes a swipe at a major legal/financial scandal that has been a running headline and lead story in both national and international news.
Season One points straight to Enron, with Ken Lay and executives dumping stock and leaving worthless leftovers for stockholders and pensioners:
Season Two turns to Enron, again, and its manipulation of energy prices through monopolization of the market and the vigorous fixing of both price and demand:
Season Three dives directly into Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi scheme, in which his family’s involvement seems hazy:
And I believe from the first few episodes, Season Four hits Halliburton and war-profiteering.
I admire Damages for looking to big-picture reality for its stories. It isn’t quite the same as the Law & Order franchises aping more fleeting and usually bizarre headlines for a single episode. Damages is one of the few programs on television that seems to be connected to major national phenomena that are twisting history. Like Patty, the writers don’t like bullies. They actually follow current events outside of their industry. Granted, they then embed tremendous turmoil for characters, a whopping dose of soap operatic drama, and a measure of suspense that led me to watching the last seven episodes of the first season spellbound in a single sitting.
I think that is what bothers me most about the Damages three-year time lapse: In addition to being unnecessary, it weakens the thread to my reality and creates a new distance between what I follow in the news as a peon and what I see as a dramatic re-enactment made for peons who follow the news.
Yeah, it’s that plus my intractability on time jumps. I know it’s trendy now. I’ve read that Weeds (long abandoned by me) has done it, as well as Desperate Housewives (never watched, no interest). Is it to make things more dynamic? To add an air of mystery about the missing time? I didn’t really care when Sidney Bristow on Alias was brainwashed and turned into a robotic assassin, and she was a fucking international spy with the best wig collection in network history.
If brainwashed international secret agents in outrageous wigs and Chanel sunglasses tricked out with spy-cams cannot get me through time lapses in stories, I don’t know what can.
I do not object to tinkering with time, especially in the form of a flashback, which I appreciate when done well to complement the present narrative. Whenever Angel featured a flashback, I reveled. Angel flashbacks were like rewards for conscientious viewing, showing me what I had previously had only vague visions of: Darla biting Liam, Angelus stalking Drusilla, Spike slaying slayers. It all fit into place, like a half-told, centuries-old legend springing into the present and then receding into the past, leaving the audience that much wiser and more invested in the characters’ attachments, feuds, and continually shifting interplay.
Battlestar Galactica made some stabs at flashbacks, though I craved more, especially once the Final Five were revealed as Cylons. The somewhat deflated series finale could have been ramped up with an entire episode detailing the plan to create sleeper Cylons while destruction rained down around Earth One. Instead, we got snippets, seconds of dialogue or shaky scenery. Flashes, not flashbacks.
I still look to Angel as the gold standard for integrating flashbacks with current storylines to draw us closer and piece together a timeline stretching back to moments I thought I would only see in my imagination. And in this case, my mind’s eye came up a distant second to the desperation of Darla as she lay dying, the cruelty of Angelus, and the innocence of Drusilla, none of which were in evidence in the present, but were wholly comprehensible in the past.
Innocent Drusilla senses her doom as Angelus stalks her, slowly driving her mad.
My inability to access the time lapse into the future, my insistence that it is lazy and cheating, sets my mind a-wander to someone else who won’t put up with this shit: Annie Wilkes, the flourishingly insane fiction fan from Stephen King’s novel Misery. (I’ll stick to the novel here because I wasn’t a big fan of the movie. Check Kathy Bates as the title character in Dolores Claiborne if you want to see her knock a Stephen King character out of the ballpark.)
Annie Wilkes is a big fan, obsessive, demanding, and unfortunately for the author who she closely follows, unhinged enough to make him her captive, hobble him, and point his book series in the right direction under what might very politely be called extreme duress. And in regards to the right direction, I’m sure that Annie Wilkes knew where to steer the fictional fiction. Sometimes fans know better than creators.
When I was reading Misery, not long after it was published, I couldn’t tell whether Stephen King was more tightly connected to the imprisoned author, Paul Sheldon, the obvious choice, or to Annie, the antagonist. There was something about her insistence on consistency, on making a story play out as she felt it had to be, on not cheating her out, that made me suspect that Stephen King, who openly critiques other authors (good news for Hunger Games and Harry Potter fans; not so for Twilight), had more than a little Annie Wilkes coursing through him. Perhaps he wrote Misery with Annie Wilkes standing in for himself as a reader, and conversely, Paul Sheldon, the author held as her hostage, standing in for himself as a writer. Is Annie the critical reader he takes into account as he forms a story? Does Stephen King channel or consult Annie Wilkes as he drafts to keep himself in line? She is one tough editor.
I felt a bit alarmed at my own identification with Annie Wilkes when an incident from her childhood spells out her frenzied frustration with narrative laziness and cheating on continuity. She went to the theater to watch the serials (I think they must’ve been like the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials that I used to watch as a child on Sunday mornings) and followed each frame with the anticipation, the expectation, the trust, that the next one would be faithful to the last. When it wasn’t, her rage went uncontained:
“The bad guy stuck [Rocketman] in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out, but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned, and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting, ‘This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!’”
I am Annie Wilkes.
I become that angry.
But not all the time. Damages, after all, uses time juxtaposition as a frame for hyping suspense. Episodes almost always begin with a confusing, jumbled fragment of what will eventually form the finale, and we are left in the beginning, stunned and excited, wondering how on earth we will get from A to Z. How can the glimpse of what we are viewing in the future possibly connect to the events in the current episode? The fragments are often misleading, but they are consistent and true to the story. They successfully build suspense without sacrificing narrative cohesion.
Season Two: What is Ellen going to do with that gun and who is she talking to?
On this count the Damages team are masters: Doris W. and I have resorted to making pacts and scheduling joint viewings in order not to burn through an entire season in one harried night to figure out the fragments – why is Ellen running around Manhattan streets half-dressed and covered in blood (S1); who is Ellen pointing a gun at while while rattling a cocktail and cocking her smoky eyes (S2); what led to Patty being purposefully broadsided in her car and what in the name of heaven happened with Tom (S3); what military torture does Ellen burst in upon and who does she see as the daylight pours in and she gasps (S4)?
Season One: How did Ellen end up in a police interrogation room with her hands covered in blood? You’ll have to watch 12 more episodes to find out.
I can only speak to the first three seasons, but thus far I have no qualms with the structure. In fact, I love it. Though the fragments are filled with red herrings, usually through toying with our expectations, they ultimately fall into place in the framework of the season taken as a whole. I enjoy being toyed with and outsmarted, but I am very unhappy with sloppiness and dishonesty. Annie Wilkes would nod her head in accordance at the non-chronological composition of each season of Damages.
But I think years-long time lapses between seasons would send her out to fetch an axe from the woodshed for some venting.
If I am so stern about leaping forward in time by major increments while maintaining a tight correlation to the now, why am I not so flummoxed by Breaking Bad?
If I am to consider each season of Breaking Bad as approximately one year, then it is moving in extreme slow-motion. Skyler was pregnant for almost two entire seasons, and at the beginning of S4e1 (where I am right now), the kid is still an infant.
Walt Jr. seems to be perpetually 15, almost like Bart Simpson is always
ten. Shouldn’t I be fuming about this? Truth be told, it does distract me slightly, but the slow-down doesn’t stop me cold because it serves a narrative purpose. We see the characters develop slowly, unpredictably, making ascents, and more often, descents, in what feels like contemporaneous chunks, but in reality, runs at about a third the speed of the viewers’ time.
If I have watched 40 episodes, that might translate to about 40 weeks, which is how much time it would have taken for Skyler to be a few months pregnant at the outset of Season One and still be carting around her infant daughter in Season Four.
Is Breaking Bad actually the most accurate chronological model for time and television?
Formula:
one episode = one week in real time; 40 episodes = 40 weeks in real time.
Is anyone else tracking this? I would check, but spoilers lurk and abound everywhere. Even images, like Hank sitting in a wheelchair, give away what’s to come for me. I want to be conversant, but with strict limitations on my intake of information. I want to maintain my own place on the timeline, after all.
Is this more evidence of my stringently linear mind demanding a measured, linear storyline? No interference!
Just when is Breaking Bad set? 2008? 2012? This is the nitpicking lodged in the recess of my mind that holds petty frustrations. It’s a minor preoccupation, though, because Breaking Bad makes no reference to major real-world events. Its world is hermetically sealed by the writers as Walt might seal a drum of meth-making material. Both acts are to maintain the purity of the product.
In that sense, Breaking Bad shares some of the temporal freedom that Jean-Claude Mourlevat and Lois Lowry have in their fantasy series. The world exists on its own plane. It doesn’t have to follow the chronology of ours.
And Breaking Bad does fiddle with chronology, going the Damages seasonal-structural route, though more with images than fragments of recognizable action or specific plot points. Note the second season, beginning with something odd being fished out of the pool by men in haz-mat suits, and the third season, showing a man in a black fedora seemingly walking to either his doom or to someone else’s.
These somewhat surreal scenes do make sense by the finale, but the opening image is not just a tease. It encapsulates the essence of the whole season when the audience reflects upon the finale, when the image becomes a part of the narrative, though more in an atmospheric manner than a point in the plot.
Walter White and Patty Hewes exist in different worlds, though I’ve been thinking of creating a Venn Diagram to see how their characters intersect. They can both be venal, calculating, selfish, and murderous; but they are also comprehensible, and at times, sympathetic. The Walter/Patty compare & contrast exercise will have to wait. (I suppose this means I’ll need to start a diagram for their counterparts, Jesse and Ellen, as well.)
Back to basic chronology.
I’ve known what Walt was doing for the past one year – over the stretch of three years. On the other hand, Patty has suddenly been missing for three years. Which character am I going to truly invest myself in? I can’t make predictions for either one of them because I’m not as cunning – or ruthless – but I do think I’ve come closer to Walt because he moves in slow motion, even if I didn’t realize this before now.
This isn’t to dismiss Damages at all. I maintain it is one of the best shows on television. It takes me into a world of empowered corporate malfeasance, to the apex of financial fraud, to the shady, illegal operations tied to my own government. I like to feel the pulse of the show. It’s outlandish, but it’s connected to now and it’s relevant to now.
Rául, stop everything.
Look closely at the shot of below of Ted Danson, standing in for Enron’s Ken Lay (and maybe mingled with Jeff Skilling) as Arthur Frobisher from Season One.
Look at the damn date in blue at the bottom. Look at it!
The ticker on the bottom says 2001. Arthur Frobisher is testifying before Congress in 2001.
Ken Lay had to be subpoenaed by Congress in early 2002.
So far, the dates more or less match. Damages debuted in 2007.
Arthur Frobisher was found not guilty in after a criminal trial, but he faced a civil trial with Patty Hewes representing pensioners as plaintiffs.
When was Arthur Frobisher’s criminal trial? What year? What fictional year? How long between 2001 until the civil suit began? Tell me how long! Do I have to watch Season One again? Was the first episode of Damages actually set a few years in the past? This sets my nerves jangling.
If the series premiered in 2007, and the civil suit brought against Ken Lay’s estate began in 2006 not long after Lay’s supposed death, then it appears that Damages is faithfully matching story to scandal chronologically. Is Damages, in its roman à clef story outline, historically accurate?
And does this affect my discontent with the time lapse?
No. I still resent being left out of three years and still consider the narrative device a form of cheating. I don’t get where we are on any timeline, despite my desperate delving into the fictional Frobisher court case for dates to match them against the real Enron case from a decade ago.
Damages has made me feel unbalanced – in an Annie Wilkes sort of way. They’ve not only tampered with the precision of their own zeitgeist, they’ve feebled the show’s sense of urgency and immediacy that makes the suspense feel visceral. We depend on what precedes to get to such an extreme.
What’s more, I don’t appreciate newborns (or not-yet-borns) who are suddenly pre-school age. I don’t like how everyone looks more or less the same despite the passage of time. And I detest how major plot threads don’t get follow-through. It makes it easy on the writers and a lazy audience if we don’t have to push forward with the scenarios built up previously.
Tom and Patty smiling, unknowing that they are standing on the edge of a cliff. Well, Patty kind of knew.
How did Patty cope after losing Tom Shayes, which was the big build-up from last season?
What led Ellen back to the firm she’d initially been accepted by? How did her sister get straight and keep custody of her child after Ellen walked out on her? What did Ellen do after her meeting with the woman who nearly adopted her? What confrontation took place with her own mother after learning this? What exactly was the point of last season?
I imagine most of this will be addressed – it had better be, mutters Annie Wilkes – but for now we seem to be focused on what Patty’s son has been doing in three years, going from crashing cars to riding incognito in the back of limos. I think this is meant to intrigue, but it just frustrates. Strangely, this storyline does not even interest me. I’d rather see Patty in a daze of shock and open grief, and I’d prefer to catch Ellen cautiously and suspiciously approaching her parents after her vexing visit brought a disturbing revelation about her childhood. And I want to feel it happening, flowing straight out of the final scenes of Season Three. No flashbacks. Real time. As real as it can get. Now.
It’s 2012 here. What calendar is on the wall at Hewes and Associates? I wish it were 2012.
Doris W.
mrlousy
Raúl Zingle
