Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 1
Strike the weird outfits, strike the expensive, "world-building" sets, strike the outré cultural habits, references to exotic paraphernalia like "Bejoran Synth-Ale" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office. This is mainly because other shows that take place in offices without such accouterments are always never more than just okay. The workplace is the liferaft which keeps us above a great ocean of dramatic circumstances we'd sooner avoid: mortgages, homelessness, methamphetamine. We don't require television programs to break that trust for an hour a week.
But there is an audience, and I suppose you'd have to call it a small but dedicated audience, that wants to see something that refers to daily experience without muddling it with phony mimesis, which transforms the poverty of reality into something rich and meaningful. We need this. One can only feel so good about, say, getting the spring brochure, with some 500 individual images, done, well under deadline, year after year. Nothing changes the fact that last year's competence is this year's redundancy. You may soon be taken off brochures. Competence these days means not being good at any particular job but being good at capitalism itself. Why pretend there's entertainment in it? There is almost something embarrassing about competence. In most cases it means you've taken on the extra burden of making your boss happy not because you were born to do it but because you've internalized it as a means of self-worth. You once wanted to dance in the street, run your toes through clean, soft grass, be famous, be counted along with your friends and lovers as being the freest and most interesting people one could have the privilege of observing. Now, you're competent. Just competent. You're probably competent at something no one needs you for.
Thus, the tradition of competence (a tradition in full swing when Howard Hawks was making movies and FDR was in the white house) has pretty much been erased by near-homeless blockheads jumping through fireballs and developmentally-disabled men -- grown men -- falling over backwards in elephant feces.
When those sets are up, however, and everyone's got their weird outfits on, something changes. Watch Chief O'Brien: he's competent. His major dramatic building block is that he's competent. He's a weird looking guy, but he's beautiful in his reliability. Commander Sisko is a great middle-manager: he knows when to cut the Gordian knot and when to let it go slack. Jadzia Dax is the person you want to talk to if there's "a sub-space plasma disruption" out near the wormhole or some such delectable nonsense. Everyone on DS9 received a job title and archetype when they walked on the station. Everyone there is not just useful, not just competent, but invaluable. Their job just happens to be the grass they brush with their bare feet.
This could be problematic. In this poor world we call real life, isn't the Prime Directive actually to screw the poor? To be competent but not necessarily to vote in one's own favor? To reward one's paltry competence with consumption? More or less, yes. Setting that aside, shouldn't our true Prime Directive be to build a better world, to dip our real feet into the real grass as soon as possible, after having possibly burned down the banks and the courthouses? If the answer is yes, we'll still require a few competent people to tend to the rutebega farm and fire shots above the heads of the Road Warriors, no? The lesson still stands. Competence is good. Competence also gets boring after a while. To be rewarded, competence requires an archetype: it requires a workplace drama of some displacement, something alien. And besides, isn't revolution always in the periphery in DS9? Doesn't Sisko always treat defiance of the utopic Federation order with some level of balanced inquiry? I'll stop there.
This balance is struck throughout Gene Roddenbery's universe. The same with the Whedonverse. Small collections of specialists getting the job done. They draw from very old models going back to L. Sprague deKamp and Cordwainer Smith. Simply put, they are worlds changed enough from our own that our best selves -- or at least, our other selves -- can have an audience.
Since DS9, the best of these has been Mad Men.
Part 2 coming up... ¶ 10:12 AM
Strike the weird outfits, strike the expensive, "world-building" sets, strike the outré cultural habits, references to exotic paraphernalia like "Bejoran Synth-Ale" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office. This is mainly because other shows that take place in offices without such accouterments are always never more than just okay. The workplace is the liferaft which keeps us above a great ocean of dramatic circumstances we'd sooner avoid: mortgages, homelessness, methamphetamine. We don't require television programs to break that trust for an hour a week.
But there is an audience, and I suppose you'd have to call it a small but dedicated audience, that wants to see something that refers to daily experience without muddling it with phony mimesis, which transforms the poverty of reality into something rich and meaningful. We need this. One can only feel so good about, say, getting the spring brochure, with some 500 individual images, done, well under deadline, year after year. Nothing changes the fact that last year's competence is this year's redundancy. You may soon be taken off brochures. Competence these days means not being good at any particular job but being good at capitalism itself. Why pretend there's entertainment in it? There is almost something embarrassing about competence. In most cases it means you've taken on the extra burden of making your boss happy not because you were born to do it but because you've internalized it as a means of self-worth. You once wanted to dance in the street, run your toes through clean, soft grass, be famous, be counted along with your friends and lovers as being the freest and most interesting people one could have the privilege of observing. Now, you're competent. Just competent. You're probably competent at something no one needs you for.
Thus, the tradition of competence (a tradition in full swing when Howard Hawks was making movies and FDR was in the white house) has pretty much been erased by near-homeless blockheads jumping through fireballs and developmentally-disabled men -- grown men -- falling over backwards in elephant feces.
When those sets are up, however, and everyone's got their weird outfits on, something changes. Watch Chief O'Brien: he's competent. His major dramatic building block is that he's competent. He's a weird looking guy, but he's beautiful in his reliability. Commander Sisko is a great middle-manager: he knows when to cut the Gordian knot and when to let it go slack. Jadzia Dax is the person you want to talk to if there's "a sub-space plasma disruption" out near the wormhole or some such delectable nonsense. Everyone on DS9 received a job title and archetype when they walked on the station. Everyone there is not just useful, not just competent, but invaluable. Their job just happens to be the grass they brush with their bare feet.
This could be problematic. In this poor world we call real life, isn't the Prime Directive actually to screw the poor? To be competent but not necessarily to vote in one's own favor? To reward one's paltry competence with consumption? More or less, yes. Setting that aside, shouldn't our true Prime Directive be to build a better world, to dip our real feet into the real grass as soon as possible, after having possibly burned down the banks and the courthouses? If the answer is yes, we'll still require a few competent people to tend to the rutebega farm and fire shots above the heads of the Road Warriors, no? The lesson still stands. Competence is good. Competence also gets boring after a while. To be rewarded, competence requires an archetype: it requires a workplace drama of some displacement, something alien. And besides, isn't revolution always in the periphery in DS9? Doesn't Sisko always treat defiance of the utopic Federation order with some level of balanced inquiry? I'll stop there.
This balance is struck throughout Gene Roddenbery's universe. The same with the Whedonverse. Small collections of specialists getting the job done. They draw from very old models going back to L. Sprague deKamp and Cordwainer Smith. Simply put, they are worlds changed enough from our own that our best selves -- or at least, our other selves -- can have an audience.
Since DS9, the best of these has been Mad Men.
Part 2 coming up... ¶ 10:12 AM
