What You Think You Know...You Don't Know
One of my college roommates was a huge fan of Alias and in turn he made me into a huge fan of Alias, and the title of this post was one of our favorite lines. This is not a post about Alias.
Now that The Wire is gone from TV, it's pretty commonplace to say that Battlestar Galactica is the most politically relevant show going. Even when The Wire was on, there were many who would say that, and I'd be one of them.* This is not a post especially about the ways in which Battlestar is politically relevant, but rather about how I think it treats of one universally important idea.
*(The Wire's political concerns were as immediately relevant to the 90s as they were to the 00s, and the series drew heavily from David Simon's reporting on the police beat c. twenty years ago. Baltimore on The Wire was at least as much the Baltimore of the late 80s and early 90s as it was the Baltimore of today and also an Every City standing in for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Newark, Gary, St. Louis, etc. The Wire's political social relevance exists on a much longer timescale than the Bush administration, and really covers everything from the 60s into an unknown future; it's not, thematically, a show that's grounded in the time it was made. Battlestar's political/social questions are going to be worth consideration at any historical moment, but they particularly resonate with the last seven years; there are basically no Americans who are worried about the ethical status of torture or the proper way to think about violent resistance movements who were equally concerned about those topics ten years ago.)
We are, essentially, fundamentally ignorant, of the world around us and of the people we interact with and, maybe most damningly, of ourselves, and this ignorance binds us into blindly held ideological stances we can't see our way out of. One of my perpetual bete noirs is "the idiot plot" - classically, a story which is only made possible by the characters behaving like idiots. This is extremely common on sitcoms; the other day I happened across a Friends rerun in which 90% of the plot was generated by the consequences of Chandler not wanting to admit to Joey that he wrecked one of their recliners, and of course this only makes things worse, or if you will, hilarity ensues. If you think about the sitcom as a genre, you'll realize how much of what we see onscreen relies on one character not sharing information with somebody else for no good and understandable human reason. What bothers me more is when similar things happen in dramas, but what I find incredibly frustrating as a viewer is when a character is simply ignorant for no good reason, and the plot relies on the consequences of his ignorance. This is maybe a failing of mine as a viewer: I find the experience of watching something like this so violently frustrating on a personal level that it disrupts my enjoyment unless that ignorance is elevated to a thematic level.
In the last two years especially Battlestar has absolutely expanded on and expounded on the consequences of ignorance - wholly understandably and justifiable ignorance, no less - both of self and of other. Tonight's episode of the show was entirely about people being ignorant (well, and one example of Adama being very clever, but).
If you step back a few episodes, to the last episode before the long hiatus, the humans and the cylons are engaged in what was, frankly, a ridiculous standoff. D'Anna looked the most ridiculous because she had the most reason, since she'd been out of action for at least six months of in-show continuity-time. She instantly took command of the situation despite being the least caught up of anybody on the status quo. Her justification for the ridiculous standoff was that "The humans will never forgive us for what we did to the twelve colonies." This is actually perfectly logical, and maybe accurate, but the level of her self-absorption is so extreme (and realistic) that it doesn't occur to her that this is actually reasonable of the humans - why should they forgive an attempted (and almost successful) genocide? She also says, "we attempted cooperation on New Caprica, and it failed" - in what frakked up universe can she believe that New Caprica was a cooperation? It was an occupation, by force, and D'Anna's blinders almost led to further catastrophe and possibly the completion of that genocide. She can see that she can't trust humans, but she can't see the human position or understand that she could actually be wrong. She's trapped by her ignorance, and it makes her worse. She has to know that by spacing one hostage every fifteen minutes until the "Final Five Minus One" are released into her custody she's doing something abominable, because she has to know that the humans don't have any control over what the F5-1 do, since she has to know that the don't know who the hell they are. She's pretending to negotiate while actually trying to goad the F5-1 into revealing themselves in the way most convenient to her, all without actually being able to project how the F5-1 might feel about the situation - this capable, intelligent woman is actually surprised that Saul Frakking Tigh would expose himself to the people he loves rather than give in to her demands?
And (applicable both to that episode and to this one) the humans. Good lord. Tory, who I think had the least reasonable response to finding out that she was a cylon, said the smartest thing when she asked Roslin to consider that if she didn't know Tory was a cylon, she ought to wonder what other things she'd been wrong about. This is a question everybody should ask themselves on this show. The funny thing about the last two years especially, when (I think to the show's detriment) the "secret"/"mystery" aspects were hyped beyond their real importance to the overall story, is that the audience is in a state of hungering to know what's really going on and being pained by its ignorance, but we know VASTLY more than the characters do about the world they inhabit, and we can synthesize the new information MUCH better than they can. The human race has in a very short time period (I think the show covers about three years) received a number of completely staggering revelations:
(1) That there are humanoid cylons, the provenance of which remain unknown
(2) That some of these cylons can be programmed as sleeper agents who do not know that they are cylons and are absolutely invested in their fictional biographies and in their very real human relationships
(3) That cylons have completely valid emotional lives
(4) That individual cylons can choose to side with the humans and be trustworthy
(5) That there are models of cylon which the cylons know exist but do not recognize
(6) That these last cylons turn out to be people they've been friends with for years
(7) That the cylons have internal disputes so severe that they resulted in a shaky alliance in which one group helped the humans to a staggering military victory with profound consequences for the development of the cylon race.
And yet with very few exceptions on the part of the people closest to these events (and often not even them), none of the above matters because once the cylons attempted genocide, no new information can be allowed to complicate human hatred and mistrust of cylons. If you don't watch the show - and nobody I know reading this watches the show, I believe - then I'm surprised if you made it this far because a lot of this probably looks impenetrable without a thirty minute primer. But trust me when I say this is tragic, tragic shit going down, and the apparent direction of at least the next few episodes, where it looks like the human fleet is going to erupt into civil war over the issue of whether, essentially people who have risked their lives to fight alongside the humans can actually be trusted and actually, if we're talking about Gaeta, and really most of the humans in the fleet, whether they can even be worth a modicum of shared sapient decency...The commonplace joke about the racist is that he'll say "Black people can't be trusted," and when you ask him about Bob from work, he'll say "Oh, Bob's different, he's a great guy." The tragedy is that all too often, as right now on Battlestar, Gaeta finds out that Tigh from work is a cylon, and this doesn't complicate his thoughts on cylons, it just makes him hate Tigh, who really had no fucking say in the matter and has done nothing but risk his life for the sake of humanity since finding out the truth, let alone his years of honorable service before.
But what goes around come around, right? Because Gaeta sits down with Starbuck and reminds he that she sat on a secret tribunal which nearly executed him for collaborating with the cylons because, essentially, they were being ignorant fools. This was a horrible thing and wrong, and Starbuck to her understandable discredit, can't really hear him on this. Because he feels the need to point out the irony that as it turned out, that tribunal was full of cylons and people who were married to cylons (even though exactly nobody knew it at the time). But does he consider his own ignorance now, does he respect the things he doesn't know? Of course not, he can't, because he's too full of hate at the way the universe has treated him, and all he has is bitterness, so he can't learn from his own mistreatment; he must seek out a way to visit it on others.
I'm fond of saying things like: I'm humbled by the universe, I'm humbled by everything I don't know, by the scope of existence and how far it is from my grasp, etc. I find it, for one thing, a valuable corrective influence on my native intellectual confidence. But I also think it's truly valuable shit to believe those things. The weight of our ignorance should bend our backs from time to time as a reminder to be humble in our doings and our judgments of each other. But - and the thing to remember is that every piece of text I produce which makes it this long is ultimately about my own dissatisfaction with the nature of humanity, because given enough space and time I'll always become a misanthrope - we never do. We're never humbled by our own ignorance, only emboldened by it. Battlestar has an immediate cultural relevance but a universal resonance, because there are going to be many times in our history when we should be open enough to resonate with the horror of two peoples gearing up to destroy each other because they're nothing more than ignorant fools and blind.
Now that The Wire is gone from TV, it's pretty commonplace to say that Battlestar Galactica is the most politically relevant show going. Even when The Wire was on, there were many who would say that, and I'd be one of them.* This is not a post especially about the ways in which Battlestar is politically relevant, but rather about how I think it treats of one universally important idea.
*(The Wire's political concerns were as immediately relevant to the 90s as they were to the 00s, and the series drew heavily from David Simon's reporting on the police beat c. twenty years ago. Baltimore on The Wire was at least as much the Baltimore of the late 80s and early 90s as it was the Baltimore of today and also an Every City standing in for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Newark, Gary, St. Louis, etc. The Wire's political social relevance exists on a much longer timescale than the Bush administration, and really covers everything from the 60s into an unknown future; it's not, thematically, a show that's grounded in the time it was made. Battlestar's political/social questions are going to be worth consideration at any historical moment, but they particularly resonate with the last seven years; there are basically no Americans who are worried about the ethical status of torture or the proper way to think about violent resistance movements who were equally concerned about those topics ten years ago.)
We are, essentially, fundamentally ignorant, of the world around us and of the people we interact with and, maybe most damningly, of ourselves, and this ignorance binds us into blindly held ideological stances we can't see our way out of. One of my perpetual bete noirs is "the idiot plot" - classically, a story which is only made possible by the characters behaving like idiots. This is extremely common on sitcoms; the other day I happened across a Friends rerun in which 90% of the plot was generated by the consequences of Chandler not wanting to admit to Joey that he wrecked one of their recliners, and of course this only makes things worse, or if you will, hilarity ensues. If you think about the sitcom as a genre, you'll realize how much of what we see onscreen relies on one character not sharing information with somebody else for no good and understandable human reason. What bothers me more is when similar things happen in dramas, but what I find incredibly frustrating as a viewer is when a character is simply ignorant for no good reason, and the plot relies on the consequences of his ignorance. This is maybe a failing of mine as a viewer: I find the experience of watching something like this so violently frustrating on a personal level that it disrupts my enjoyment unless that ignorance is elevated to a thematic level.
In the last two years especially Battlestar has absolutely expanded on and expounded on the consequences of ignorance - wholly understandably and justifiable ignorance, no less - both of self and of other. Tonight's episode of the show was entirely about people being ignorant (well, and one example of Adama being very clever, but).
If you step back a few episodes, to the last episode before the long hiatus, the humans and the cylons are engaged in what was, frankly, a ridiculous standoff. D'Anna looked the most ridiculous because she had the most reason, since she'd been out of action for at least six months of in-show continuity-time. She instantly took command of the situation despite being the least caught up of anybody on the status quo. Her justification for the ridiculous standoff was that "The humans will never forgive us for what we did to the twelve colonies." This is actually perfectly logical, and maybe accurate, but the level of her self-absorption is so extreme (and realistic) that it doesn't occur to her that this is actually reasonable of the humans - why should they forgive an attempted (and almost successful) genocide? She also says, "we attempted cooperation on New Caprica, and it failed" - in what frakked up universe can she believe that New Caprica was a cooperation? It was an occupation, by force, and D'Anna's blinders almost led to further catastrophe and possibly the completion of that genocide. She can see that she can't trust humans, but she can't see the human position or understand that she could actually be wrong. She's trapped by her ignorance, and it makes her worse. She has to know that by spacing one hostage every fifteen minutes until the "Final Five Minus One" are released into her custody she's doing something abominable, because she has to know that the humans don't have any control over what the F5-1 do, since she has to know that the don't know who the hell they are. She's pretending to negotiate while actually trying to goad the F5-1 into revealing themselves in the way most convenient to her, all without actually being able to project how the F5-1 might feel about the situation - this capable, intelligent woman is actually surprised that Saul Frakking Tigh would expose himself to the people he loves rather than give in to her demands?
And (applicable both to that episode and to this one) the humans. Good lord. Tory, who I think had the least reasonable response to finding out that she was a cylon, said the smartest thing when she asked Roslin to consider that if she didn't know Tory was a cylon, she ought to wonder what other things she'd been wrong about. This is a question everybody should ask themselves on this show. The funny thing about the last two years especially, when (I think to the show's detriment) the "secret"/"mystery" aspects were hyped beyond their real importance to the overall story, is that the audience is in a state of hungering to know what's really going on and being pained by its ignorance, but we know VASTLY more than the characters do about the world they inhabit, and we can synthesize the new information MUCH better than they can. The human race has in a very short time period (I think the show covers about three years) received a number of completely staggering revelations:
(1) That there are humanoid cylons, the provenance of which remain unknown
(2) That some of these cylons can be programmed as sleeper agents who do not know that they are cylons and are absolutely invested in their fictional biographies and in their very real human relationships
(3) That cylons have completely valid emotional lives
(4) That individual cylons can choose to side with the humans and be trustworthy
(5) That there are models of cylon which the cylons know exist but do not recognize
(6) That these last cylons turn out to be people they've been friends with for years
(7) That the cylons have internal disputes so severe that they resulted in a shaky alliance in which one group helped the humans to a staggering military victory with profound consequences for the development of the cylon race.
And yet with very few exceptions on the part of the people closest to these events (and often not even them), none of the above matters because once the cylons attempted genocide, no new information can be allowed to complicate human hatred and mistrust of cylons. If you don't watch the show - and nobody I know reading this watches the show, I believe - then I'm surprised if you made it this far because a lot of this probably looks impenetrable without a thirty minute primer. But trust me when I say this is tragic, tragic shit going down, and the apparent direction of at least the next few episodes, where it looks like the human fleet is going to erupt into civil war over the issue of whether, essentially people who have risked their lives to fight alongside the humans can actually be trusted and actually, if we're talking about Gaeta, and really most of the humans in the fleet, whether they can even be worth a modicum of shared sapient decency...The commonplace joke about the racist is that he'll say "Black people can't be trusted," and when you ask him about Bob from work, he'll say "Oh, Bob's different, he's a great guy." The tragedy is that all too often, as right now on Battlestar, Gaeta finds out that Tigh from work is a cylon, and this doesn't complicate his thoughts on cylons, it just makes him hate Tigh, who really had no fucking say in the matter and has done nothing but risk his life for the sake of humanity since finding out the truth, let alone his years of honorable service before.
But what goes around come around, right? Because Gaeta sits down with Starbuck and reminds he that she sat on a secret tribunal which nearly executed him for collaborating with the cylons because, essentially, they were being ignorant fools. This was a horrible thing and wrong, and Starbuck to her understandable discredit, can't really hear him on this. Because he feels the need to point out the irony that as it turned out, that tribunal was full of cylons and people who were married to cylons (even though exactly nobody knew it at the time). But does he consider his own ignorance now, does he respect the things he doesn't know? Of course not, he can't, because he's too full of hate at the way the universe has treated him, and all he has is bitterness, so he can't learn from his own mistreatment; he must seek out a way to visit it on others.
I'm fond of saying things like: I'm humbled by the universe, I'm humbled by everything I don't know, by the scope of existence and how far it is from my grasp, etc. I find it, for one thing, a valuable corrective influence on my native intellectual confidence. But I also think it's truly valuable shit to believe those things. The weight of our ignorance should bend our backs from time to time as a reminder to be humble in our doings and our judgments of each other. But - and the thing to remember is that every piece of text I produce which makes it this long is ultimately about my own dissatisfaction with the nature of humanity, because given enough space and time I'll always become a misanthrope - we never do. We're never humbled by our own ignorance, only emboldened by it. Battlestar has an immediate cultural relevance but a universal resonance, because there are going to be many times in our history when we should be open enough to resonate with the horror of two peoples gearing up to destroy each other because they're nothing more than ignorant fools and blind.
posted by medrawt at
00:34
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