in the hall of mirrors

Post-Pacific

Possibly the worst mistake of my post-Pacific years – since 2002, that is; since I have no longer lived in my beloved San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Hong Kong, since I was kicked out of Australia – is inanely watching television.

I used to watch television very little; since the collapse of my Aussie dreams, since I've been bored and at perpetual loose ends in a leftover northern periphery of island Europe, I watch it too predictably. Many evenings, several hours each evening. And it is even more pointless on an evening when I feel physically and mentally tired, as of course television in Britain, outside of certain few weeks when they are paying attention to what is being watched, is ridiculously repetitive: they buy a few seasons of the same series and show them over and over, and over.

No wonder I can't think clearly enough to keep up with Michael's discussions or his work...

But tonight, as I switch the television off around midnight as so often, there is a sense of relief, of closing a door. I pick up a complex, sophisticated, slightly eerie book, and go to bed; I won't read for long; but perhaps I'll try to redirect myself a bit, in a direction that may bring a few of my brain cells to life. And maybe there will be a fresh wind, cutting through the stale predictability....

Madness

A day of catching up, cleaning up, getting things done... toward evening, rather than getting back to my research or writing (sorry about that), I read the beginning of Lydia Salvyre's The Lecture, and then saw – unexpectedly – the last episode of season one of the television show Dollhouse.

The Lecture is funny, bizarre, ridiculous; an inept minor functionary giving the most clueless and ludicrously self-revealing presentation imaginable. Although thorough-going satire, it really is amusing and not terribly unpleasant – it doesn't take the nasty digs at existence, etc. that much modernist humor often does. Of course he's clearly a bit off-base, not completely coherent or in control. (And clearly it compares rather closely with Chekhov's monologue play, the one about birds where he talks about his wife – in fact the Chekhov might have been her model.)

But that last episode of Dollhouse – the infamous 'Epitaph One' – was arresting, appallingly realistic, vertigo-inducing, and so nightmarish as to now be keeping me awake. Because normally, in the broad world of the speculative arts – science fiction stories, novels, television, movies, even comics – when you have some sort of dystopia, some version of the world gone completely mad, you start there, or at least you lead into it fairly quickly, and we know that's what it's going to be about. And we treat it as sort of a parable, because that is easier psychologically....

But to start with twelve episodes (and yes, it's true, they should have used the original pilot – it makes much more sense than what Fox forced them to use) of personal relationships, close-knit problems, and a world where things are getting subtly, and a teeny bit, dangerous, just at the edges – and then to jump to an awful, apocalyptic extrapolation/result of that same context, one where everyone's minds have been blown to bits and existence has become almost impossible – is really rather frightening... and gives the feeling of being much too, almost unpleasantly much too, real.

As if this world, the world we actually live in now – the world where I go to the corner shop (not just a shop, or some set that resembles a typical shop, but the one I actually use), the world where I talked to my neighbor today, the world where I pay rent and walk down the street and e-mail my sister – as if this one could tilt over into disaster, madness, apocalypse....

Disturbing. But impressive.

And yes, I can see the slight, very slight, metaphorical resemblance to recent events in my own life.

It seems to be slightly difficult to get to sleep....

Carnivale

Another amazing television show, which Bennett and Merrie told me to see: Carnivale. A shame it ran for only two years before cancellation (but no wonder, either, it was so expensive and elaborate).

There's a great deal to say about it, of course – a Gnostic battle of good and evil, brilliant characterization and complex storytelling and deep, intense mystery –

but tonight I am especially seeing some of the startlingly beautiful pictures: this won all sorts of visual/artistic awards, and is one of the most visually conceived of complex television shows.

For example: when Libby is left behind by her suddenly cured husband and the healer, they have the nerve, the daring, to simply leave her in the center of a darkened road as they pull away, and the camera slows –

very beautiful.

Hot / James & time / Dollhouse / Göteborg

It is actually almost hot out: in the low seventies (Fahrenheit – even after living in Centigrade countries for more than twelve years now, I just cannot think in Centigrade, in spite of its logic). In California, of course, it would be merely a normal day out of, say, eight months of the year in the south, or perhaps four months in the north; but here it is frankly rather strange.

Bennett once said, of a day like this, "It's practically tropical outside!". Of course he was born here... I just rolled my eyes and tried to explain the difference between northern England and Hong Kong. Or better: Bangkok... do you know those beautiful old Thai paintings of court life, where everything that happens is outdoors in a series of open pavilions with silk drapery?... quite a different life than here.

•••

Colm Tóibín's The Master – yes, it really is beautifully written; and brings up Henry James' way of thinking, of experiencing, without trying to ventriloquize in his style (and that's a good thing – a po-mo pastiche of James would be, well, nausea-inducing). But the sense of time and of loss, especially associated with poor disoriented Alice James... very real, very subtle; and also the intricacy of being uneasy with being homosexual, with anyone knowing about it, etc. etc.

Of course this is typical of some of Tóibín's thinking – if you ever read Love in a Dark Time you know that he himself isn't always terribly happy with being gay. Well, at least he's honest about it (and he writes beautifully about his doubts).

I should go back and read Edel's biography (never did finish it, hey it's five volumes) and perhaps try Susan Sontag's play about Alice (Alice in Bed), which has also sat on my shelf for ages. (The Sontag isn't particularly graceful, which put me off reading it... but I'm sure it will be intelligent.)

•••

Lately I was completely overwhelmed by Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which has been on American television since January, and is just showing up here. It's a bit strange that I would only notice now, as I'm such an utter Buffy/Firefly/Serenity/Angel/Dr Horrible fan; but I guess that shows I'm pretty much out of the loop. To restate everybody's opinions on a show that has had a rocky start, with which I basically agree: the first five episodes were good but not amazing – approximately like The Pretender, which was always second- or even third-rate (but without as many clunky sentiments as that cheesier show).

But episodes six through nine were astounding... the basic idea is, of course, that secret contemporary technology makes it possible to erase and replace minds, in a way similar to computer software. So there is a 'Dollhouse' in Los Angeles – one of twenty or so in the world – where pretty young people who have had most of their minds removed wander around in pajamas, work out, get massages, and wait to have a personality implanted in them. Whereupon they become ideal sex partners, or ideal nannies or secret agents or... whatever. It recalls a lot of Philip K. Dick, or The Prisoner, but is more sensual and deceptively normal (not to mention corporate).

What's so powerful is the sudden plunge into deeply complex existential questions of being, emotion, thought – if your thoughts can be replaced or modified, do you really have them? Who are you, and how would you know you are that person? One of the edgier plot choices appears when some of the dolls wake up, and engage on a dramatic escape so that they can return to the world – but then we find out they've been programmed to do so, in order to relax them by giving them some sort of closure, so they can be returned to their glass coffins. Just the kind of closure that we need when we're watching the show...

which is of course rather creepy. I recently wrote a piece called 'chemical bodies', where I talked about drugs and surgery and other ways of modifying the body and mind; it's like that, but more so.

Incidentally, episodes 11 and 12 are also very well written – with some of the funniest lines I've heard in a very long time (notably "Carrots! Medicinal carrots!") – but they were also fairly violent, so a bit tough to take, for me at least. I hope Whedon gets to do the whole five years – and I'm curious as to what kind of mixture of dark/violent/funny/sensual he'll end up constructing.

•••

But the taxi will be here in ten minutes, and I am off to Sweden, for the first time ever – to Göteborg, to discuss our university exchange arrangements. And, I hope, to eat some interesting food....

Inevitable

On TV, late: the episode of Sex and the City, fairly early on (season two), where Big threatens to move to Paris. Fights, unhappiness, chaos.

Of course, having seen season six, with its lovely and surprisingly satisfying ending, we know that Carrie will finally end up with Big again – and we will even find out his actual name, which is otherwise concealed up until that last scene of the entire series – and he will come save her from confusion, loss and unhappiness – ironically and cleverly, in Paris.

And it is all made inevitable by the fact that this is clearly the guy for her (Aidan was an indulgence, Berger a faiure – can you tell I liked this show? – and a host of others merely temporary mistakes); and if he wasn't ready for a full relationship in season two, he finally will be by season six. The happy ending is inevitable, because it merely takes him a long time to realize what he needs to do – up until the last episode – at around the same time she realizes that he realizes, etc. etc.

I'd love to be part of an inevitable story – one that must reach some useful resolution, where everything makes sense, where there is some kind of return, some completion. Where time forms an arch of some kind, where events circle around in some way: where they don't merely meander in rather formless curves; and where the great distance travelled from anything familiar, from anything that you think you want, is merely proof of how right the ending is – I want to get the job in New York and discover that my future was always there, or have the guy from my past show up on my doorstep (the right one). Or maybe, I become the person for some younger man that an older man once was for me – I end up smiling, putting my shades back down over my eyes, in the sun, saying words that I didn't understand twenty years ago, to someone else, who in his turn doesn't quite get the cosmic joke.

Inevitable... yes, I know the problem with narrative inevitability: it's based on the exclusion of fragments of real life, the removal of that which just happens, which is why it's not realistic.

I still want to be part of a story – and a good one too: not one of those dismal modernist anti-narratives that just trail off like they're....

Olympian

Having finally done some work today, I watched CSI – and it's my favorite episode, '4x4', an intricate puzzle of four overlapping segments that intersect in unexpected ways. Although the episode initially seems to run along the normal patterns for the show, the overlaps start amplifying the watcher's awareness of the people involved, without them understanding that awareness – even the investigators are never aware of all aspects of the story; we are the only ones who are given an Olympian sense of the whole, and how various small actions and confusions change people's lives.

It reminds me of other favorite scenes that have a particular flavor – that sense of a sort of compassionate grief, implied for instance in Blade Runner (when the first replicant is shot, and the film suddenly slows, transforming the scene from adventure to tragedy), or in some of the more formally constructed episodes of ER (I'm thinking of one where music swelling at the end cuts from one sad, reflective scene to another, and several disparate stories are blended into a single piece of choreography). I'm always impressed by this move – I suppose it's almost a cliché in contemporary film/TV, but I always love the sudden sense of the accidents and confusions of life coming clear, being understood, even though it usually seems to happen in tragic contexts.

I think that's what I keep hoping to figure out in my own life: all the fussy analysis, my shifting from one system to another (Jung to Freud to politics to spirituality to...), and my endless fussing over the meaning of details, my attempt to figure it all out. I keep wanting it to all make sense in some way, to see the point in some global fashion that enables me to know when I'm getting it right. Vain hope, I suppose – I probably need to get a life....