Posted on 02/25/2005 10:18:40 AM PST by Destro
RESHAPING THE FANTASY
Reflections on modern sci-fi, and why the new ‘Battlestar Galactica’ is perfect for our times
~ By MICK FARREN ~
As Battlestar Galactica successfully flees the Cylon menace under the command of Edward James Olmos on the Sci-Fi Channel, it also gauges how far our fantasies and visions have mutated over the quarter-century since Lorne Greene was the Battlestar patriarch. The first Galactica took flight at the end of the hedonist Carter/Quaalude ’70s, all big hair and disco costumes. Owing much to Star Trek, even more to Star Wars, and a little to Studio 54, its mission was in a universe that was fecund and fertile, where every planet had a bipedal life form – although some were nothing short of dopey, as in the episode that featured silver Vikings with winged helmets, and bad Mylar architecture.
The mood was silly but optimistic. The Cylons were bad but would ultimately be eluded, if not defeated. The 2005 version has no such guarantees; the fleet of refugee ships crosses a bleak and threatening emptiness. The Cylons have infiltrated even the basic software, and can look exactly like us anytime it furthers their agenda. Nothing and no one can be trusted, and the truly depressing kicker is the revelation that we made the Cylons in the first place. Humanity sowed the seeds of its own destruction, and is now reaping the exterminating whirlwind.
Getting a tad portentous about a TV drama show? Maybe, but I’ve always figured that the underlying themes of fantasy entertainment can expose vital signs of the psychological (and maybe pathological) condition of the mass condition. (And here I’m using the term “fantasy entertainment” to lump together everything from space opera to Tolkien, because, although styles and fans may differ, the social function is the same, be it cyberpunk or unicorns in Narnia.)
The 20th-century debate was whether science fiction/fantasy entertainment was mere escapism or a medium for social comment. Was Robert Heinlein a pop Ayn Rand advocate of capitalist national socialism who was unfortunately embraced by David Bowie and the Manson Family? Did Arthur C. Clarke intimate that the cosmos was infinitely beyond human imagination, and divinity could exist as a black monolith or the silver saucers of Childhood’s End? Or were both merely tellers of amazing stories?
The easy answer is that fantasy entertainment was both comment and escape, multitasking, sometimes in the same production. The distinction hardly mattered. The function of a book, graphic novel, film, or TV series could be a wake-up call or a sanctuary. The need for either was shaped by the same social reality, and it’s in the need that you read the collective Jungian pulse. Would Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have hit the mass imagination if they hadn’t spanned a time of pop gender confusion and HIV? (And, if the cult of celebrity wasn’t so out of hand, would she have had a public shitfit on Amazon.com?) And would Bill’s showstopping musings about Superman, before his death in Kill Bill Vol. 2, have held an audience – who came for CGI swordplay and full auto firepower – if that audience wasn’t subjected to a regular diet of inner-vs.-outer, Dr. Phil-style psychobabble?
The new Battlestar Galactica was conceived, produced, and aired during the Bush II era. The old show may have debuted under Carter, but it was canceled as the Reagan revolution dawned. It aired in a time of transition, in both society and sci-fi itself. The last great conservative debauch was heralded by no less than the movie Alien, and, in very empty space, the silent screaming started. In that film, humanity had been traversing the cosmos for maybe a century and had failed to find a single alien life form. On the mining vessel Nostromo – named for a Joseph Conrad plague ship – Harry Dean Stanton’s character smoked dope to maintain his equilibrium, Yaphet Kotto argued union contracts, and, when first contact was finally made, the ET turned out to be bug-nasty, ultra-lethal, and bleeding corrosive acid. We were not alone but suddenly wished we were. (And the alien was only brought on board at the underhanded instigation of a mega-greedy corporate conglomerate. What could be more Reagan era?)
Five years after Alien, in the sci-fi-significant year of 1984, William Gibson published the novel Neuromancer, and suddenly science fiction – previously lost in space or in post-Hobbit, dragon-infested, paperback medievalism – had a relevance and even a future. Fantasy entertainment found, with no small relief, a future when the Sex Pistols had claimed there wasn’t one. But cyberpunk dystopia had a sadly short shelf life. Reality caught up too fast. Speculative future cyberscapes became The X-Files’ realtime. Aliens didn’t crawl in the air ducts of the Nostromo, but operated out of secret NSA installations in Virginia. Bill Clinton may have been in the White House, but Y2K was bearing down, and it was hard to tell the creative from the psychotically paranoid. John Shirley was no longer writing about black helicopters; the damned things were flying over Montana and frightening the Aryans. Whitley Strieber swore the novel Communion was about his real abduction by aliens, and many started wondering if speculative fiction would have any place at all in the 21st century. The future was now, and the speculation was over. Who could think up anything more grotesque than Kim Jong Il? It seemed that only the religious right could turn that trick, as millions of demented semi-literates snapped up copies of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s dozen or more Left Behind novels and all the spin-offs.
Some, like Poppy Z. Brite, John Skipp, Jack Ketchum, and Joe R. Lansdale, matched the horror with the even more horrid. From Buffy to Francis Ford Coppola, a retreat started into the polymorphous and often gothic paranormal, or alternative worlds of Newtonian retro-kitsch. The term “steampunk” was coined to describe recherché fantasies in which everyone wanted to be Victorian, and that culminated with Alan Moore’s stunning comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which heroes and villains of 19th-century pulp combined to ultimately repel a Martian invasion, but were torpedoed by the worst fantasy movie ever.
When I made my own modest venture into alternative-world work with the 2004 novel Kindling, I wondered if somehow it was a cop-out. Was I pulling the blankets of fantasy over my head and demanding the Bush world go away? In that case, I was no better than the huge and generally tedious resurgence of medievalism provoked by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. But then I decided that wasn’t true. As a youth, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis won World War II, set me thinking hard about moral adaptability. Attempting to create a world in which the Crusades never happened, or the Roman Emperor Constantine had never sanctioned Christianity, or Elvis had looked after his health, is both intricate and fun, and does pose the question: Is the mutated fantasy world better or worse than the one we really inhabit?
The sociological appeal of the new Battlestar Galactica is that it’s a second-generation alternative fantasy totally defined by the updating of its faux-history; a dumb TV show of yesteryear reconfigured into something that may still be dumb, but – by luck, judgment, or market research – is also a depressingly accurate analogue of these forsaken and threatening times. The message: Life is grim, and trust no one. The only nobility is self-preservation. One of the characters even has cancer, for chrissakes. Can’t deny it’s apt, though, and at least worth the Zen-pop goof of taking it seriously for an L.A. minute.
Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi, Fri. at 10 p.m.
Mick Farren blogs at doc40.blogspot.com.
02-24-05
Can dogs smell them out like in "Terminator?" Does it take three of them to drive a ship? Is there software running on a MS OS? BY YOUR COMMAND!
Only in the feeble minded, drug addled, paranoid fantasies of the communist infiltrated American "Left".
Hopefully the Sci-Fi Channel will take over the Star Trek franchise from CBS & UPN and reinvigorate that franchise with something new and more reflective of our times than the tired, left-wing one-world socialism being promoted on "Enterprise".
I...love...this...show.
It is a commonly held assumption - true or not - like it or not. I see you had no problem with his description of the Carter era?
Wow, there's about five non-sequiturs in that one sentence.
It is my favorite show. Twenty more episodes coming in June too...I understand.
In the words of William Shatner "Get a Life!"
This is the ONLY TV I have watched in years. I am blown away at how well they are telling this very sad story.
ping
All these sci-fi shows Startrek, Battlestar, pale in comparison to the best show of all time Stargate SG-1.
Just good bad guy butt kicking each week with great characters and good villians. Colonel Carter is also very hot.
Everything is primitive with lots of marines and armed boarding parties.
I think Roddenbery based Kirk around Horatio Hornblower books which were precursors to the Master and Commander book series. If you watch Master and Commander its Star Trek - right down to the doctor playing a combined Spock and McCoy role and even a version of the cloaking device!
I need to go to Hollywood.
Unreadable.
This is the ADMIN.......this frakkin' Poster has been "dealt with"....resume normal discussions.
I read it fine.
Idiot alert.
Why?
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