Back to my home page/intro"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" - Jack KerouacI don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the most subversive thing about Wild Palms was the visual styling. Not that it was new, or extraordinary, or especially creative. The interesting thing about it was that it was all ripped off from television ads. As a result, the ads and the show were virtually indistinguishable using visual cues. I would mute the sound to skip the latest ad for some car or kitchen doodad or inane mini-series, and then start looking for the show to resume. It took some careful peering to tell whether the current tightly-focused brightly-lit skew-angled glossy-surfaced shot of some yuppy decorated hallway was supposed to be selling appliances or moving the plot forward.
My first reaction was to have high hopes that this was deliberate. Hey, it could have been meta-commentary. They're doing a story about how this immense corporate conspiracy brainwashes the public by addicting them to television, and they show it interleaved with litle blasts -- in the _identical_style_ -- of the real corporate conspiracy brainwashing the real American public.
Alas, this delightful notion turned out to be only my oblique thought- processes and hyperactive critical faculties. That was the real story, and they blew it. In the grand Hollywood and network TV tradition, they pissed it away with an inane story line and inept plot development.
At least they did recognize that the only way to make the story line even vaguely credible was to make the evil Senator totally insane. "I'm going to turn the televison-watching public into my slaves." Yeah, right. Only a raving lunatic who was totally out of touch with reality could have failed to notice that the public were already his slaves. If you're near the top of the oligarchy, who gives a shit if you're God? The mega-corporations control every tiniest aspect of the lives of their employees; the poor are powerless and at the mercy of the police; the intelligent and eccentric are marginalized; the mass of the public believe what the media tells them. Who needs any further conspiracy? Who needs slaves? Of course, you can draw any conclusions you like about parallels to the current situation.
As for the alleged revolutionaries. . . . A street gang of illiterate fifteen-year olds could have planned and mounted a more credible revolutionary conspiracy. I suppose the revolutionaries must have been pacifists, as it was rather striking that they don't normally believe in carrying guns. (Funny how we never get to hear what they do believe in.) This is America, for God's sake. Guns floating all over the place in real life, street kids with military-quality weapons, guns floating all through the plot, but the revolutionaries don't bother to carry any when they're worried about getting picked up by the secret police, or when they're trading their most valuable secret for a hostage (and getting it stolen by a shrink in a geisha costume.) No, they only carry guns for sentimental, tactically pointless raids to rescue already dying prisoners. So I guess they're not pacifists (pity we never get to hear what they actually do believe in), they're just extraordinarily stupid.
Hell, I could have mounted a more credible revolution single-handed. Where are the computer networks, for God's sake? Where is the encryption? Where are the revolutionaries' bugs and wiretaps? Where are the broadcast jammers? Where are the home-brewed cruise missiles? I tell you, if I have to start a revolution, I'm going to have some goddamn cruise missiles, if I have to write every line of controller code myself. But these soi-disant revolutionaries can't be bothered. As a result, the villainous Josie gets to strangle one conspirator with her bare hands, and drown another in her underground pool. All they can do is say, "No no, naughty naughty, please don't." Well that's just too fucking bad, and it's all because the revolutionaries don't know how to dress. Ten kilos of Semtex in a girdle under the clothes, with a neural jack and an EEG dead-man-switch, and they would have been scraping bits of Josie off the church rafters. God help us all, if that's the best the American public will ever muster for a revolution.
I will give the producers and director one slim self-adhesive foil star for working in some neat references to pop culture (from slash fiction to Neuromancer) and "high" culture (from Yeats to ukiyo-e), though they were rather blatant and unsubtle about all of it. I even confess that I thought it qool to turn part of a Yeats poem into the Synthiotics liturgy. (And by the way, shouldn't it have been Synth_e_otics, unless they were seeking union with divalent sulfur?) However, I have never yet observed a mob, in the middle of a mass action, start spontaneously chanting poetry by Walt Whitman. Nor do I really think that the emblem of a successful revolution will be the return of 1970-style knit mini- dresses and brass belts.
The real message of this dog is simple: Don't worry, be happy. All conspiracies against the public are inept. All will be defeated effortlessly, by just one good American family man. A family man, who will then ride off happily into the sunset, with his kids, side-by-side with the woman who helped murder the wife whom he supposedly adored. He doesn't give it a second thought, so don't you think or worry either. Don't start thinking about tomorrow.
-- Pope C
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