Does Anybody Remember Shelly Godfrey?

EDITED TO ADD: According to Tricia Helfer, Shelly Godfrey will be somehow explained in the forthcoming TV movie "we're really done, now, except for Caprica, entitled The Plan (as in, "the Cylons have a"). So I appear to be incorrect that Godfrey - who seemed to me like an obvious tip of the hat that there was a supernatural in the Battlestar universe - was what I thought she was. Still, though, people shouldn't be surprised by the mystical elements of the finale. WE NOW RESUME THE ORIGINAL POST WHERE IT BEGAN:

Without actually spoiling anything re: the Battlestar Galactica finale (not that anybody reading this watches it), which I thought was primarily brilliant with a few missteps, people who are surprised that God comes along and, well, Gods Godself out of a machine, can't have been watching the show I was watching. There's a higher power in the Battlestar universe, despite its impenetrable an ineffable nature, and it's been obvious that this is the case since well nigh the beginning of the show. Or what did you think collective lucid hallucinations and Shelly Godfrey and fulfilled prophecies and Kara Thrace returning from the frakking dead was about, anyway?

Also, I was thinking about writing a post about Dollhouse and how everybody online seems to think it's a massive disappointment (superbrief summary of the unwritten post: dude, go watch the first few episodes of Buffy and get back to me), but I'll hold off and simply observe that last night's episode was, as Whedon advertised, a stratospheric leap forward. It was awesome.

Sláinte Mhaith, As A Matter Of Fact.

Not that I think it should actually do anything to change the cultural meaning of the day, but I always enjoy pointing out that St. Patrick was actually Romano-British (from the area around Carlisle), captured as a teenager and enslaved by Irish raiders.

That said, I must as ever offer up my kudos to Irish Americans, who've done a really astounding and admirable job of overcoming the intensely bigoted attitudes against which they struggled for the better part of a hundred years in trying to make their way in this country. On the one hand, the overwhelming cultural similarity to the English (and English-descended Americans) should have made this a smooth and simple process, but on the other hand, that fact that the English (and English-descended Americans) hated the Irish more than anybody else did kind of overwhelmed the mutual love of beer for a few decades.

The Italians, of course, have done pretty well in getting accepted by the American mainstream themselves, but lots of Italian things are marked ITALIAN in a way that's more decidedly foreign - dusky, scented with olive oil - than those things marked Irish. Italians had a language barrier to overcome, sure, but on the other hand they were bringing much better food to the dinner table. I think the superior integration of the Irish into the American mainstream demonstrates the advantage of having drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by beer and images of four leaf clover, instead of drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by wine and images of the Virgin Mary, weeping.

So even though I tend to ignore the day as much as possible, I say to you: Sláinte.

Of great note: for the first time since I was maybe fourteen, nobody called me out for not wearing green. There's always somebody, and usually multiple people, who will be wherever I am during the day and who will also chastise me for not being sufficiently verdant. On absolutely no evidence, I'm going to use this data to generate a new stereotype: Black people don't give a shit about St. Patrick's Day.

Lynchathon II: Twin Peaks

One casualty of my schizoid attitude towards blogging (I must write things here/I hate the things I write here/No one cares what I write here/I feel an obligation to try and fail to entertain the people who read the things I write here) is that I didn't blog about Twin Peaks back when (or just after) I actually watched it, which at this point is over a month ago. As I worked through the series I had all sorts of thoughts and reactions, but I guess I'll just (!) confine myself to some bullet points.

BULLET --> I highly recommend that anyone reading this check out the first season of the show. If you dig it, move on to the second season. At whatever point you start feeling like maybe you should get off the train because it seems like derailing is imminent, trust your instincts and get off, because actually the derailing happened before you noticed it. I'd be glad to fill anybody in on what happens after you save your time and patience by taking the remainder of Season 2 off your Netflix queue. That's sort of like the advice my friend Phil gave me when he saw me reading the first volume of the Dune series back in college: "Stop with this one. Trust me, don't go forward. I'll tell you whatever you want to know, but for your own sake, don't pick up the next books." I ignored his recommendations, and people, I was Wrong.

BULLET --> Of course, David Lynch directed the unutterably bad adaptation of Dune.

BULLET --> Special Agent Dale Cooper is one of the greatest characters in the history of filmed media. From his introduction (somewhere between ten and twenty minutes into the pilot) he grabbed me, and I have a hard time imagining anyone wouldn't find him charming. He's actually the best explanation for the fact that

BULLET --> Season 1 of Twin Peaks was ridiculously popular. Watching the show almost twenty years later, the idea that a massive viewing audience tuned in for something that weird just blows my mind. My friend Fay suggests that it's because TV was super shitty back then, so very weird but good shows had a better shot at mass success. I also imagine there was a lot of misunderstanding the show in the same way people misread Blue Velvet and make it all about "darkness in the heart of small town America." But I think a lot of it had to do with Dale Cooper, addressing the mysterious Diane by dictaphone, and exulting about "these magnificent trees".

BULLET --> Dale Cooper is played by Kyle McLachlan, who also played Paul Atreides in Dune (ugh) and Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (yay). And actually, Cooper is sort of very like what would happen if Jeffrey Beaumont grew up and became an FBI agent; there's a kind of wide-eyed gumption that the characters share, a fascination for the world and an endearingly sincere, Hardy Boys kind of approach to life and mystery. Cooper seems like what would happen if Jeffrey matured, saw the world, and came to terms with the things he learned about himself in Blue Velvet.

BULLET --> Cooper also reminds me a lot of my aforementioned Phil, completing the little nexus here of mental associations. This is the first time, hopefully the last, and certainly the best possible situation in which I might observe a character in a David Lynch work and think "Hey, I know somebody sort of like that." I mean this in the best possible way, but Phil also has an enthusiastically Hardy Boysish side.

BULLET --> In the things I've read about Lynch, the Hardy Boysishness (and I wish I had a better way to describe it) seems like an undersold element of his aesthetic. David Foster Wallace gestured towards it in his behind the scenes look at the filming of Lost Highway when he observed that it's hard to know whether or not to take Lynch seriously when he says, apparently unironically, things like "Golly" and "Terrif." I presume it's (almost?) entirely sincere, because that kind of American Boy of the Fifties thing is such a big part of Lynch's work. Smiling men who love coffee and give each other thumbses up (which, because it's Lynch, go on a little too long to be truly comfortable), grown up American boys who read adventure comics and never leave home without a pocketknife and dreamed of finding an old Indian arrowhead in the backyard. Consider that (miniscule spoiler) two malevolent spirits at the heart of the Twin Peaks story turn out to be named MIKE and BOB and BOB, in particular, is a greasy middle-aged guy in a denim jacket, the sort of guy who looks like he might brain you with a tire iron behind the gas station and take your money, or leer at children when they make too much noise in the general store. He's creepy in a completely unassuming Americana kind of way, and it's not because Lynch is indicting or exposing the whole gestalt of that aesthetic, it's because he's telling a story he wants to tell (which involves good and evil and mysterious spiritual forces, or in the case of Blue Velvet, about adolescence and corruption) and he's put it into a setting he enjoys or finds interesting (the rural northwest), not because the setting inspires some dissective urge in him, but because he likes it. Again, Lynch's idea of exposing how bad a place can be is Eraserhead, which is among other things about how he hated living in Philadelphia.

BULLET --> The devolution of the show's quality over the second season is pretty sad, both in the filming and the writing. Lynch's idiosyncratic filmic gestures are always motivated by something which caught his painterly eye - even late in the series, you can find meaninglessly meaningful cuts like one that stays with me in particular, where in one instant we're close up on a character's frightening grin and in the next frame we're looking dead on at the side of a pie that's been cut into. The crust and top frame the huckleberry (or whatever) inside like lips frame teeth. It has no story importance, but you walk away for the first time thinking "Wow, it never before occurred to me that from a certain angle, a pie with a few slices missing looks like a smile." In place of that, though, as the series goes on, the camera starts lingering on objects of no especial visual interest, like it's just killing time and trying to seem portentous via the properties of a slow zoom. Look at the black telephone, audience, look at it! It's not ringing! This script was SHORT SO LOOK AT THE PHONE. Also the characters start getting served more and more poorly. By the end of the series, the Indian sheriff's deputy Hawk is talking about the stories of his People and quoting cheesy parables; at the beginning of the series he said something that sounded like a hoary proverb about love, and then instantly clarified: "That's a poem I wrote for my girlfriend: [Girlfriend's Name], Ph.D, Brandeis."

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast doesn't actually seem to be any good at acting.

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast is sufficiently awesome enough at acting that I can't figure out why they aren't in more things.

BULLET --> I don't even know what to say about the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, other than to note that now I understand why it got booed at Cannes.

BULLET --> If people who make a film actually haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the film work, it's going to be apparent pretty quickly; a film is only so long, you know. If people making a continuing dramatic TV show haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the show work, it can take a whole bunch of episodes before that becomes apparent. I'm not interested in dissecting the contributions and failings of Lynch vs. Mark Frost vs. the involvement of the network in the implosion of Twin Peaks, but these were not people who knew what they were doing. These were not people who thought about how to tell a compelling dramatic story over the course of 30+ hours, nor about how dramatic TV might require different rhythms and techniques than dramatic film, nor about how to engage and satisfy the ongoing requirements of an audience that comes to you with open hearts and willing eyes once a week. I'm not a huge fan of J.J. Abrams these days, and he royally frakked up Alias, but he said of the pilot to that show [paraphrasing]: "I knew I'd eventually want to start taking the show in an overt science fiction direction, but I hadn't worked out the details of it yet, so I made sure to seed some unexplained science fiction-y looking stuff in the pilot episode so that when we returned to the more out-there concepts two months later, the viewers wouldn't be asking where the hell it all came from." That's a guy who's thought more about how to approach making a TV show than the Twin Peaks team did. David Foster Wallace wrote that he thought people became dissatisfied with the show (among other reasons) because (mild spoilers) our moral sensibilities require that Laura Palmer's scuzzy life had to be connected to her death. Maybe, but more to the point it felt like a lot of time had been wasted; it's one thing to say (and accept) that the murder investigation is a MacGuffin because what we're really watching is Dale Cooper interacting with a mysterious set of compelling characters, but it's quite another to say that the murder investigation is a red herring because what really happened to Laura Palmer had nothing to do with what we saw and loved in the first season but is in fact vitally important because the series turns out to be concerned with elemental forces of good and evil (which to be fair is something alluded to about midway through the first season, but doesn't come clearly to the fore until much later).

BULLET --> Goodnight, Diane.

And That Right There...

...is an example of why I get dejected writing the blog. I had a point to make, both about the Stewart/Cramer interview in particular (I thought I had some points of analysis that were somewhat different than what I found on the blogs I read) and about the market and CNBC in general, but it was lost in a morass of my off-the-cuffness. I also could've just linked you to this, which would've communicated 70% of what I wanted to say in about 15% of the space and time.