Posts Tagged ‘television’

The Simpler Times of Early X-​​Files Episodes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Alien inva­sion, gov­ern­ment con­spir­acy.  Feathered hair.  I’ve been watch­ing a lot of X-​​Files (up to sea­son 3 right now) on Netflix, and it’s mak­ing me very nos­tal­gic for the 90s.   Despite being a show about evil con­spir­a­cies, it still has this inno­cent vibe to it, a feel­ing that the world was sim­pler then.  It was still con­sid­ered dark fic­tion that the gov­ern­ment would tor­ture peo­ple, for instance. America pre-​​2001 really was a dif­fer­ent place. 

It takes watch­ing a show like this to really remind me of that.  There’s a scene in which Scully pre-​​buys an air­plane ticket to one loca­tion and then, at the ter­mi­nal, buys a new ticket for another des­ti­na­tion, and the attendee doesn’t bat an eye.  No iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is shown.  Off she goes.  Shocking!  And yet I can remem­ber how in high school I took the place of another stu­dent on the Model U.N. team and flew to Chicago on his ticket, in his name.  No prob­lem at all.  I held the ticket and that’s all I needed to board.

Certainly, the show reminds us of the olden days, but not always in good ways.  I’m appalled at how often Scully is used not as a pro­tag­o­nist but as a moti­va­tor or plot point.  It seems like she’s being kid­napped or held hostage in every other episode, and it’s always up to Mulder to save the day.  There was finally a moment where Scully was in peril, about to be devoured by a fat-​​sucking vam­pire when, out of nowhere, the mon­ster is shot.  And it’s not Mulder!  It’s the other woman who was about the be the vampire’s vic­tim.  The scene shocked me for no rea­son other than how it broke the for­mula finally.  I imag­ine it passed with­out notice when the episode aired, but it seemed like a move for­ward as far as the gen­der roles.  Additionally, the episode fea­tured an old-​​fashioned detec­tive who doesn’t think women like Scully should be work­ing such cases, and he gets eaten by the mon­ster in the sec­ond act. Methinks the writer of that episode knew what he or she was doing when they wrote it.

On another tan­gent, I learned that the writer of my favorite episodes, the ones with darkly comic sen­si­bil­i­ties, Darin Morgan, now con­sults on Fringe.  This guy wrote bril­liant, hilar­i­ous episodes such as “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (in which a psy­chic sug­gests that Mulder will die via auto­erotic asphyx­i­a­tion and that Scully never dies), or my all-​​time favorite, “War of the Coprophages” about cock­roaches.  Digging around on Wikipedia revealed to me that not only did he write for the show—he got his start play­ing the creepy fluke man in an early mon­ster of the week episode.    Darin Morgan, if you’re out there listening—you’re a hero of mine and have had a huge impact on my sense of humor.  Sorry you had to spend so much time dressed up as a human fluke.  That episode gave me and count­less other kids night­mares though, so you could say it paid off in a way.

This is how I know I’m get­ting older.  I begin to obsess about things from the past more than I do about mod­ern things.   Nostalgia is not a young man’s emo­tion.  But I miss those days when the biggest worry we had was that the gov­ern­ment was lying to us about the exis­tence of extrater­res­tri­als. I miss the days when I was cred­u­lous enough to believe in UFOs, ghosts, and the like. The world was both more sim­ple and more won­drous then.  As I grow older, the world merely grows more com­plex.  But per­haps that’s my own fault.  Wonder is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.

Mad Men: Sadomasochism For the Enlightened Modern Person

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week­end, Sarah and I tucked into the first sea­son of the AMC series Mad Men.  The con­cept of the show is in essence a look at the lives of Madison Avenue adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives, their office staff, and their fam­i­lies.  Oh, and their mis­tresses.  Infidelity is the fuel that ran Madison Avenue, appar­ently.  The show begins in 1960—one the back­ground plots is the elec­tion of Kennedy vs. Nixon and the focal agency has to work for Nixon (with­out being paid).  In the first episode, the audi­ence wit­nesses enough social injus­tice in the form of sex­ism and racism to erase all ide­al­is­tic notions of the time period.  It almost crosses the line into par­ody ter­ri­tory, and per­haps for some it will.  I found myself rolling my eyes by the end of the first episode.  As the sea­son goes on, they tone this down a lit­tle bit (while crank­ing up the existentialism).

Much of the show’s appeal is the self-​​righteous indig­na­tion I feel when I see African Americans being treated like 3rd class cit­i­zens, chil­dren being slapped around by the neigh­bors, or women being com­manded by their hus­bands like ser­vants.   I sus­pect self-​​righteous indig­na­tion for the lib­eral may be in short sup­ply with our side tak­ing over things for a few years.  I rec­om­mend pick­ing up the DVD to every­one look­ing to keep the flames indig­na­tion burn­ing so as to not real­ize that your anger is all that makes you feel alive and fill the hole inside your soul!  It’s work­ing great for me so far.

Beneath the obvi­ous “oh my god, they were SO prim­i­tive and evil” aspect of the show, I sym­pa­thize with the exis­ten­tial dread that much of the cast feels.   No one is happy, despite hav­ing it all and liv­ing the American Dream.  The cen­tral the­sis of this show at least early on is that the American Dream is hol­low and mean­ing­less and has noth­ing to do with our true happiness.

I didn’t really have any inter­est in the show until I saw it par­o­died on Saturday Night Live in some of the bet­ter sketches they’ve done in the past few years.  Despite never hav­ing seen the show, and even through the layer of par­ody, I was intrigued by the premise of the show.  For me, it’s the best thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in years.

Clay Shirky and The Cognitive Surplus

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a tran­script of it, or watch a video. I highly rec­om­mend check­ing out one or the other and com­ing back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here”s a choice bit that explains much of it:

If I had to pick the crit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy for the 20th cen­tury, the bit of social lubri­cant with­out which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enter­prise, I’d say it was the sit­com. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, ris­ing edu­ca­tional attain­ment, ris­ing life expectancy and, crit­i­cally, a ris­ing num­ber of peo­ple who were work­ing five-​​day work weeks. For the first time, soci­ety forced onto an enor­mous num­ber of its cit­i­zens the require­ment to man­age some­thing they had never had to man­age before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watch­ing TV.

…

And this is the other thing about the size of the cog­ni­tive sur­plus we’re talk­ing about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ram­i­fi­ca­tions. Let’s say that every­thing stays 99 per­cent the same, that peo­ple watch 99 per­cent as much tele­vi­sion as they used to, but 1 per­cent of that is carved out for pro­duc­ing and for shar­ing. The Internet-​​connected pop­u­la­tion watches roughly a tril­lion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. con­sump­tion. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describ­ing the under­ly­ing force behind the New York Times arti­cle from yes­ter­day. The cog­ni­tive sur­plus is lead­ing to many peo­ple using the time for­merly soaked up by the one-​​way media to cre­ate things them­selves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actu­ally con­sum­ing, and results in the para­dox of choice. Making things col­lab­o­ra­tively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but hav­ing all those other options makes us unhappy. Another para­dox, of sorts.

Wikipedia is a bit of a dif­fer­ent from, say, writ­ing fan fic­tion, because Wikipedia has a core use­ful­ness that is more broad in appeal. You could say that Wikipedia pro­vides a clear ben­e­fit to soci­ety, whereas the ben­e­fit to soci­ety of more fic­tion, or more music, or more pho­tog­ra­phy is less read­ily appar­ent. I’m not say­ing that your X-​​Files/​Evil Dead crossover fan­fic doesn’t pro­vide a ben­e­fit. I just think it’s harder to make the case for it. I’m not going to do it for you, anyway.

The real mind blower here for me is this idea of think­ing about the cog­ni­tive surplus–not think­ing about it as leisure time, but think­ing about it as hours spent think­ing. That sur­plus has always existed, but some­thing about the Internet has pro­vided an entirely new means of tap­ping into it. Sure, some have cho­sen to express their sur­plus by launch­ing flame wars over which Doctor was the best (clearly the 7th), but I think Shirky is right in point­ing out that this is all embry­onic still. We’re going to see some amaz­ing things soon. What forms will they take? My think­ing along these lines before was lim­ited to the idea of crowd­sourc­ing, but I’m start­ing to see that it’s so much more than that. I really need to read Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.

What prob­lems can we solve using the inter­net and our cog­ni­tive surplus?

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