Che Part One: America Fuck Yeah!

Che Part One is a great movie. It does everything that contemporary film should. I guess that’s the problem. If practically anyone but Steven Soderberg had directed this film, I would probably be rather ecstatic about it. The problem is that I know his capabilities too well to be fooled into thinking that this tremendous achievement is the high watermark of his achievements. It lacks the inventive spirit behind the creative choices made for The Girlfriend Experience or the raw emotional brutality of Traffic. It feels too objective and polished for Soderberg, more his attempt at Kubick than a genuine entry into his body of work.

I suppose it’s only personal preference getting in the way of my enjoyment of the film, but when I go in for a Tim Burton film I expect nothing less than the full force of his idiosyncratic vision, which is perhaps an unfair comparison given that Burton has a very specific visual style, while Soderberg has thus far been more interested in allowing the script to dictate the techniques used whether it’s the gritty shot on video hyperreality of Traffic or the subdued soft focus ambient light of The Girlfriend Experience. Perhaps my consternation is that Che Part One is a film about a revolutionary by a revolutionary filmmaker, and yet somehow is not a revolutionary film.

Everything about the film, even the Post-Tarantino intercut narratives, is familiar to your average American film goer, which has a certain amusing poetic justice to it given that Che Guevara is a formerly incendiary figure from the perspective of American history who today is very little more than a commodity both in the United States and Cuba.

Del Toro’s virtuoso performance will endear itself to audiences, especially the Democrat dominated youth culture eager to embrace any figure who stands in opposition to classical Manifest Destiny America. Guevara is the perfect hero for Post-Bush America; audiences can cheer his battle against oppression and American Imperialism as an exorcism for the lingering guilt of allowing Bush to indulge his disastrous doctrine of pre-emptive warfare with the added bonus of his early death ensuring that the world would never have to face his inevitable transition from revolutionary to dictator. There’s a reason people don’t wear Fidel Castro t-shirts and it has little to do with the good doctor wearing a cooler hat.

The video release also sees American audiences brilliantly prepped for the film in that it closes on it’s eponymous hero at his peak, flush with victory and ready to take on the entire world (which he does literally at the United Nations General Assembly), which mirrors the current arc of President and Pop Icon in Chief Barack Obama. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of Soderberg’s oeuvre is to give Americans the romantic, idealized vision of their own recent history cleverly packaged as a historical drama charting the rise of one of the most enduring political figures of the 20th century. Is the real truth of the matter that politics be damned, Che Guevara is in fact the ultimate American action hero, the President we’ve always dreamed of but haven’t had since Washington?

The 2008 election campaign, when viewed from this perspective, really was an attempt at turning soul grinding machine politics into some kind of mythic struggle of cosmic proportions. Consider how pathetically desperate it is to label a broken, callous old man whose best years ended a generation ago a maverick. Consider the irony of a street artist enthralled and inspired by communist propaganda changing the entire campaign with a piece of artwork informed by the personality politics embraced by tyrants spanning the full depth and breadth of human history. Children in Africa wave banners with Obama’s face on them as a symbol of hope for the future, the perfect recursive image of South American children waving banners of Guevara handed down to them by their grandparents.

We will sit in the hushed silence watching a brash, young Che stand against colonial backed oppression, daring to make enemies of the most powerful nation in the world! America- grown fat and indolent on industry driven imperial conquest- stares at him balefully, unable to recognize the fierce sparkle of it’s own youth in his eye. This is George Washington reborn, revolution at it’s most circular. The hero become the villain, tea stained Indian costume moldering away in the back of it’s closet.

Perhaps this then at last is Soderberg’s genius. He has created for us the vehicle through which we will finally understand how truly American Che Guevara is, how he lived and breathed the mythic bedrock of our republic more truly than any man born on our soil. Che Guevara has achieved ultimate immortality as the Great American Action Hero, dispensing justice and freedom for all with a cigar and a machine gun. Hasta la vista, baby.

I am an Asshole Projecting the Future

The phrase "literary bad boy" has been thrown around a lot since the emergence of the founding fathers of Generation X, but the insistent buzz surrounding first time novelist Mark Osborne seems to suggest he warrants it. Ever since his debut novel Blood Ampersand Ink cracked the New York Times Bestseller's list stories started surfacing about black magic, cross-dressing, and his scandalous girlfriend SG's own Mewsette Suicide. We sent Gene Grey out to the wilds of Vancouver to meet the self proclaimed Rock Star Novelist to sort out fact from fiction.

Gene Grey: I checked the NYT Bestsellers list on the way here, and Blood Ampersand Ink was eighth. What does that feel like?

Mark Osborne: Ambivalent, I guess. I like the idea that I can walk into any bookstore in at least two countries and see my book there, that people can get a copy from Winnipeg to San Diego. That's a nice feeling. But the Bestseller's list doesn't mean anything real. It's all about putting product in stores.

GG: So the numbers don't really concern you.

MO: The real numbers do. I worked at the lowest rungs of the book industry, both in retail and distribution. I know how many copies of my book are going to be shredded or recycled or whatever. At some point, I'll prod Vintage into telling me how many people have actually read my book. It'll mean something when I start my book tour and people actually show up to listen to me. That will be a real trip.

GG: It seems like authors in general are very divided about doing public readings, where do you fall in?

MO: I love reading my stuff, far more than I do handing it to someone and waiting for them to read it. I get anxious, I interrupt them. I'm a real asshole when someone is trying to read my stuff in front of me. (Laughs) When I read something out loud, I can gauge the reactions in real time. I can see people responding in real time. Back before we were even dating I used to read my blogs to my girlfriend over the phone because I didn't want to wait for her to read them.

GG: How does that compare to reading to an audience?

MO: Well, as I found out later, she was mostly masturbating the whole time because she likes the sound of my voice. It would be pretty awkward if I caught people doing that at a reading.

GG: (Laughs) Then you'd be Chuck Palahniuk.

MO: Chuck's gay, you'd have to feel for any poor girl getting off on his voice.

GG: Your girlfriend is Mewsette Suicide, how does that impact your relationship?

MO: My relationship with her, with my peers, or what?

GG: Let's start with her.

MO: I don't know that it really does. She probably denies this now but I harassed her into applying for ages. I was wearing a Suicide Girls t-shirt the day we met, she didn't know what it was yet. At one point she talked about how she had too many tattoos to be in Playboy. I just sort of scoffed at that because to me Suicide Girls was something so much more interesting, and yeah more titilating. Playboy just seemed too manufactured or whatever.

GG: Just to clarify, we aren't paying Mark to say that.

MO: (Laughs) To be fair, she bought me my first issue of Playboy.

GG: That's one hell of a woman, to buy you a Playboy.

MO: Sure, but she knew damn well I'd spend more time geeking out about an interview with Norman Mailler than leering at Kim Kardashian.

GG: It's kind of inescapable that tattoos are an important part of your novel, what kept you coming back to that?

MO: Well, I started the novel at a time in my life where I think that I'd fallen away from myself to work through some issues and try to get back on track. It was months since I'd drawn a thing or even thought about trying to get an apprenticeship in any productive way, so at first it was a bit of a reminder that tattooing was what I was trying to work towards and then it just kind of got a life all of it's own because of how how potent and contemporary it is.

GG: So writing this novel was a kind of therapy for you?

MO: Aversion therapy, I guess you could call it. The idea to write this first came a few months before I started writing, when [Mewsette] suggested I write her a novel as a Christmas present, with the stipulation that it had to have werewolves and vampires in it. We had a bad fight not long after Christmas- nothing to do with the novel or lack thereof- and it was looking like I'd never talk to or hear from her again, which was a very special kind of agony. So, when I sat down and started writing it, the initial idea was to sort of eulogize our friendship and all the ways that in the fairly brief time we'd known each other that she had changed my life.

GG: One of the criticisms that you've faced in the media recently is that you're, and I'm quoting this, "wildly inconsistant" about just what the novel is, what it's about, and what it represents.

MO: Oh sure. A while back, a buddy of mine who appears in my comic that I've been working on, was privy to a conversation where I was asked what the story I was working on was about, and I was struggling with coming up with what Bruce Sterling would call a bumper sticker. Chris just kind of waded in there and he said that based on my influences he'd figured that the geometry, the cross section of my work to be non euclidian. You can't just map it in normal 3d space.

GG: What exactly does that mean?

MO: You'd have to ask Chris, I just like that line. I just sort of, as a consequence of how I think, work on a few different levels at once. I'm never happy doing something simple and straight forward, I have to be hiding shit and pushing a few concepts at once. In one sense, Blood Ampersand Ink is a narrative guidebook to the city of Vancouver. Taken a different way, it's a post feminist subversion of classic vampire fiction. Read it again and you might see it as an attempt at codifying Generation Y into the canon of western literature. I tried to do a lot of things and hopefully there's someone out there to respond to each one if not all of them.

GG: You mentioned that your methods are a consequence of your influences. Have you used a certain methodology or technique that you gleaned from a specific writer?

MO: Not directly, no. You could call it gonzo to a degree. I've done things that were called "pure one hundred percent wild turkey gonzo" before, even though I generally drink Jack Daniels. I have adapted some of Thompson's methodology in writing the novel, for sure. I don't do anything crazy like cocaine or LSD, but I do make liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and sleep depreviation. There's a lot of emotionally raw stuff that I had to write to make this feel legitimate. I couldn't just clam up and shut down the way I would if I was dealing with someone during a situation like that. I suppose I could write Yayo clamming up and fucking off, but when you're writing the narrator doing that, you have to lend it that authentic voice, describe the thought process behind that action.

I've read up on hallucinogenics and drugs. Kesey, Huxley, all kinds of reports of the halluciongenic experience. These drugs, they interrupt the way your brain usually communicates with you and you get this outpouring of sensory information from parts of the brain that do not usually do that. I'm probably doing a really shitty job of paraphrasing something that Pinchbeck or Rushkoff said in a talk somewhere. My point here is that when I'm writing those tough parts, and what I mean isn't how I justify Yayo getting ahold of a kalashnikov and using it to shoot at angry biker werewolves but how I get into the frame of mind where he's standing there on the deck of a ferry talking about how mythology has abandoned him, there's nothing to hold onto, nothing to give him comfort and he is going to die, I have to get in the way of my ego. I have to interrupt my shame and insecurities about laying myself bare. People say shit, real honest unvarnished shit, when they're drunk or sleep deprived or whatever. They lose their filter, put their guard down. So I just had to duplicate that, demolish myself down to that kind of ugly place.

GG: You talked about writing the novel under the impression that [Mewsette] was out of your life permanently, but obviously that isn't the case. What changed?

MO: I don't think anything really changed per say. I think it was more that we both came back to where we should have stayed. It isn't as if we had this big long cry and worked out a ton of deep seated issues or anything as banal as that. I just used her birthday to test the waters. I sent her a text, she responded and we just picked back up into that odd space we occupied before. It was the exact opposite of The Notebook. Neither of us wrote letters destroyed by an evil parental unit or pined away or whatever. We just tried to lose ourselves in whatever came naturally, which always involves alcohol and sex with other people, but for me it was mostly the writing. Then it was her birthday and we were talking and we just sort of started to surface again, until we got back to that part where we remembered that we're stronger together than apart.

GG: Were you finished the novel by then?

MO: Christ, no. Let me tell you it almost sunk the entire novel, getting her back into my life. It's hard to write about falling in love with someone who disappears when they come back. That feels about as phony as mourning Jesus on Good Friday knowing he'll be back in a few days. At the same time though, it completely re-energized the first two acts, where Cat is this amazing whirwind that just sweeps into Yayo's life and flips it completely upside down.

GG: Did you begin writing the novel hoping that you would hear from her again?

MO: Oh absolutely. I started out pretty naive, thinking that oh maybe if she saw it on sale somewhere, that kind of Slumdog Millionaire logic that she might look me up and we could work things out then, at some magical future interval. That she'd crash a book signing. If I wasn't feeling so cynical and down on myself at the time, I probably would have been more honest with myself and known that the act of writing would bring her back into contact with me.

GG: In what sense?

MO: In the sense that for a long time now, I 've had an odd relationship with what I create. When I first met her, there was something that I felt was familiar about her despite the fact that I had never met anyone remotely like her before until one night I was digging through my notes on an old comic idea I'd had back in 2004 and that was 2007, and I found this character who was predicated on Catwoman that had these biographical details that matched her perfectly. I didn't create this character with the idea of her being any kind of ideal mate, but I could see where the signals got crossed somewhere between my creative process and a spell or two I'd fired off since then. It was a really peculiar sense of malaise, given that there were even some dates that correlated between when I'd worked on this character and when certain things had happened in her life that brought her closer to me, closer to meeting me.

So of course I went to my mentor, who I figured would get this. It usually has a more intentional aspect, but it was close enough that I figured he could help, I told him that I had apparently somehow created or manifested this woman in my life. He was very calm about the whole thing, and made it clear I couldn't let it go to my head or anything, that the key was to ask her when she invented me.

GG: That's a lot to process. You're saying that you created each other.

MO: That's the simplest, but not necessarily the most accurate way of putting it. I think something happened for sure. I don't know that anyone's biographical details got retroactively changed because of someone else's daydream or doodle. For all I know, the inspiration for the character was the result of some kind of premonition or omen telling me that she was coming. I can't say that I know in any concrete sense where artistic inspiration comes from, none of us do. But I've seen too much to be able to say that words on a page are never more than the sum of their parts.

GG: You believe there's a mystical aspect to writing.

MO: That sounds a little too pretentious for me. I think that a better way of putting it is that fiction and reality, life and narrative have the potential for a far more open dialogue than most people are willing to allow. There's two breeds of writer in that sense; the kind that read Borges and feel kind of whistful like they think some of his ideas, what he portrays would be amazing if it were real the same way that kids naturally have more interest in going to Hogwarts than a real school, but realize that there isn't an owl coming for them. The other breed reads Borges and decides they're going to make that happen. Guys like Burroughs and Dick.

GG: Burroughs and Dick went crazy, though. Is that something that concerns you?

MO: I'm already crazy in the sense that people like to write off what I say as the product of mental illness so that they don't have to contemplate the implications of it or they write me off as saying whatever to get attention and boost my circulation. But if you're asking am I worried about becoming mentally ill to the point where I become completely incoherent or unable to function normally in every day society because of my pursuits in metafiction, my answer is no. Burroughs and Dick did a lot of hard drugs.

Bad Dreams

Out of everything I read to do with The Girlfriend Experience, the one thing that everyone including me could agree on about the film was that it was somewhat amusing and shocking that the guys who wrote it also wrote Ocean's Thirteen. Roger Ebert mused that they must have been standing around waiting for something better to do. Granted there's a reason that it's "One for the money, two for the show," and not visa versa. I'm fine with considering David Lean and Brian Koppelman to be auteurs in need of rent money rather than hacks hit by lightning.

Akiva Goldsman, well the jury's out on that one. Ever since finishing Dollhouse, I've been carefully following TV writers because I've come to appreciate the fact that more than just pop juggernauts JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon work on their brain children. The opening credits of Fringe season one, episode 14 (Bad Dreams) spat a vaguely familiar name as the writing credit so I scurried off to the IMDB to find out who Akiva Goldsman is. Apparently a man whose entirel body of work I loathe and have made a great deal of noise about. He's done some truly souless hack work in his time including both Dan Brown adaptations as well as the Shoemacher Batman films, some of my most hated films of all time. I was almost expecting his writing credits to include Twilight, but definitely not A Beautiful Mind or Cinderella Man.

So I watched Bad Dreams not with something I'd call apprehension, because up until that point the series had been very consistant in tone and writing, but more along the lines of morbid curiosity. The writing on Fringe is absurdly better than Alias after all, even if it isn't anywhere near Dollhouse. So, enter my surprise as Goldsman- who also directed Bad Dreams- turned in the most compelling and thrilling episode of the series to date. While there was one bit of lurid voyeurism where we get a convenient excuse to have Olivia- bathed in Lynchian neon light- become transfixed with an incredibly bored stripper and share the most tentative, diplomatic kiss I've ever seen, that was the only actual low point for the episode.

While Bad Dreams is ostensibly an Olivia centric episode that pushes her to her psychological breaking point (without mentioning John Scott, which scores Goldsman huge points); Goldsman's script shines brightest in his characterization of Walter, simultaneously exploiting his position as being the comedic relief and building on the pathos of his involvement in the ZTE manifesto.

JJ Abrams must have seen something in Goldsman that no one else has until now, because Bad Dreams isn't just the best episode of the series so far; it's also one of the most critical plot wise, with deftly handled fresh revelations about the conspiracy. Damn good work for the guy who assassinated the Batman franchise, even if there was a really lame pseudo girl on girl scene. Maybe Fox made him do it. I know they make people put motorcycles in things.

JCVD

By this point, it should be fair to say that 2008 was an oddly consistent year in terms of the themes explored by the most widely applauded films in of the year, especially where redemption and rehabilitation are concerned. It’s tempting, but too simple to simply point to the political arena of that same year, as the voting population of America elected Barack Obama on a mandate to rehabilitate the country’s image abroad after the ravages of the Bush double feature. While it’s true that Harvey Milk, Richard Nixon, and even George W Bush were offered up to audiences as martyrs of the American political machine and fictional wrestler Randy the Ram bore much the same cross for his excesses while staring at the wreckage he left behind, two other films bring a more cosmopolitan perspective to 2008’s sobering and painful journeys.

The Reader inarguably provided the most honest and searing portrayal of guilt- that of an entire nation laid on the shoulders of the generation that oversaw the worst crimes of modern history and their horrified, uncomprehending progeny- seen on screens in the past year, and yet bears no discernible connection to the Post-Bush American condition in any concrete way. There are lessons to be learned and applied, to be sure, but there is no evidence of the concurrent American introspection in the English led adaptation of a generation defining German novel.

It seems absurd that JCVD should have anything to do with such sobering issues as rescuing the soul of a nation from the crimes of it’s government, and it truly is, except to say that JCVD is no less instructive or revealing of what the cost of redemption is and whether it is to be allowed at all, perhaps even more so than W or Frost/Nixon display within the films themselves.

Jean-Claude himself is an easy corollary to Mickey Rourke’s Randy The Ram, fusing the wreckage of the character to the shared relative state of Rourke’s career, a process that appears naked in front of the audience in JCVD, but only achieved reality in Rourke’s mind for The Wrestler. Where Rourke was allowed to gain his professional vindication wearing the mask of his character, Van Damme is left naked before the audience to plead his case. Taken against these other films, the narrative of JCVD almost necessarily becomes incredibly trivial and vain in examining the fall of an international movie star, but it retains a peculiar strength through it’s metafictional conversation with the audience and it’s methodical stripping down of the barriers between Van Damme and the audience until he finally turns to approach them directly.

Thus, no matter the successes or failures of any other aspect of the film, it is nothing more or less than Jean-Claude Van Damme that will make or break the film for audiences, a heavier risk than even the producers of 8 Mile could claim, as Eminem’s ferocious popularity could easily insulate the box office draw from critical drubbing. JCVD is a film that dares to believe in a man who has little to no reason to believe in himself and demands that you do the same.

The true suspense of the film is not if Van Damme will leave the post office alive, just as it has never been in any of his films. Instead, the suspense is purely metafictional in nature, which is- refreshingly- the foundation of the film. JCVD is perhaps the first of Van Damme’s films in which the screenwriter sought to defy rather than pander to the audience’s expectations and succeed. The premise and bulk of the plot operates as a serviceable European elevation of the Post Tarantino (and perhaps Post Ritchie as well) heist flick, putting it easily in the same league as Spike Lee’s The Inside Man, but it remains the mis en scene for Van Damme’s personal and public reckoning.

Even the effortlessly immersive camera work, a cut above Luc Besson’s heir apparent Pierre Morel on his best days, is there to support and amplify Van Damme, most tellingly and successfully in the film’s two climaxes, that of Van Damme’s character arc and of the heist itself. In the former, Van Damme recognizes that his hotly anticipated mea culpa cannot be sufficient if delivered to his captors or a fellow hostage, and begins to address the audience as his chair and the camera are elevated above the edge of the backdrop to the massive black lights hovering over the set, signaling a break from the supposedly fictional events unfolding below.

In the second sequence, the absurdity of the unfolding scene- Van Damme being dragged out of the post office at gunpoint by one of the criminals- seemingly causes the film itself to shake and threaten to break, much as the metafictional weight of Tyler Durden addressing the audience at the end of the second act of Fight Club caused the film in the camera to shake until it broke free and the perforations at it’s edges were visible. The cause of this disruption turns out to be Van Damme’s wishful fantasy of the resolution, where he elbows free of and roundhouse kicks his captor, before high fiving the SWAT team and saluting the screaming crowd. Order is restored and the scene is replayed with Van Damme elbowing his way free, only to be tackled to the ground and dragged into a police car over the screaming protests of the other freed hostages.

Despite his heroic role in the film and his disarming candor about his personal life and failings, he is not let off lightly. Any traces of a Hollywood ending disappear with the replay of his exit, and he plays out the epilogue from a jail cell for using the heist to “extort” money owed to the lawyer representing him in a child custody case. This punishment he accepts with the cheery resignation of the samurai way that he confesses to wanting to return to in his speech to the audience. The cost of his redemption is harsh, especially for a film that could have given in to vanity at any time it chose, and he is left to his most daunting task without the audience’s help; reconnecting with his daughter from behind a pane of glass.

This is perhaps where JCVD is allowed to shine the brightest, as many of the resolutions of the other films mentioned here were intentionally less than satisfactory. Nixon leaves the sound stage with nothing harsher than a media indictment and a pocket full of cash. Oliver Stone’s eponymous W stands tall in front of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner. We leave Randy with his relationships shattered, but his final fate as he flies from the turnbuckle is an ultimate mystery. Irony favors death in victory, but with the box forever shut the cat cannot be said to be conclusively dead.

Other than the tragic, yet almost necessary conclusion of The Reader, JCVD is the only film presented to offer lasting closure and hope for the future, perhaps the only notable film of 2008 to do so other than Slumdog Millionaire, but then it is also the only one that holds itself accountable to it’s audience first and foremost rather than history.

Musings

It's a fact that culture is contingent on it's milieu; the here and now of the there and then. The BBC had a lovely photo up the other day of William S. Burroughs sitting beside the wire baskets he used to jumble up his writing while pioneering that whole cut-up thing of his and it got me thinking; what if Burroughs had access to modern computers back in the Beat days? Coding and compiling programs to spit out novels based on some arcane algorithm.

Twitter.

William S Burroughs got ahold of Twitter. Microblogging heroin soaked fever dreams of reptilian rent boys spurting corrosive semen from every pore while a row of disembodied, reanimated womens' heads watch from above on silk pillows neatly arranged on a window sill as they spit and hiss in jealousy.

William S Burroughs junk-sick and disoriented typing useless entreaties to P Diddy, begging to know the arcane knowledge inherent in being "locked on."

Warren Ellis bludgeoning someone to death with his blackberry because he isn't the maddest tweeter on the block anymore.

Boom, Bust and Echo

Fire bad. Tree pretty.

I finished Omega ten minutes ago. I am tabula rasa. I am on the verge of tears. This is a state of mind I know, one I cherish but have only experienced on three previous occasions. At the conclusions of The End of Evangelion, Promethea, and... The Invisibles. Let that last one linger in your mouth a little. Swirl it around and get it's flavour like a fine wine. Anyone who knows my engagement with pop culture even a little knows what The Invisibles is to me. I need to go put on Porcelain by Moby, before I continue. I lied. Extreme Ways.

I'm not really sure where to start this, and how. I suppose I'll start with Nietzsche, even though Omega was sheer Neo-Platonic Transcendent Gnosticism. Nietzsche posited- as have many other philosophers and critics and well everyone- that it's all been done, yet he was somewhat unique by saying that the Greeks had done it all. They were the alpha and the omega of cultural output. Alpha and omega. The Beginning and The End. The best we could do, according to him, was to shuffle things around in new ways. One could then- if one were to be able to quantify a unit of cultural output- mathematically determine how many permutations of Nietzsche's finite cultural elements are possible. This would not be the upper limit of how long it could take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, it's how long it would take them to produce Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel.

That doesn't really take quality into account though. How many of those permutations are going to be worthwhile? If you have cable television, you already know the answer to that question. If you've watched Twilight you know the answer to that question. The ratio of shit to gold once the sum total of possible configurations of cultural units has been completed is going to be absolutely fucking abysmal. Perhaps then, the question is why the massive indefatigable engines of contemporary culture across all mediums are relevant, worthwhile, or necessary as anything other than a near futile intellectual exercise in figuring out how long it will take before the human species has quite literally produced a word for word perfect duplicate of Plato's The Republic because there's literally nothing else possible that has not been done.

Is that it, then? Is all human culture locked in an evil, grim joke? Is all our culture the eventual answer to the question of how long it would take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards to produce the complete works of Shakespeare twice? If your answer is yes, stop reading now and shoot yourself. There's nothing left for you in this life. High five Nietzsche when you get there. Otherwise, we have to reject Nietzsche and continue searching for understanding why pop could possibly mean anything and how we can surpass not only the Greeks, but anyone and everyone who has come before us. No, I'm not implying exactly what you're probably thinking, but you're on the right track.

Perhaps culture is something more. Perhaps the sum total of the canon of human culture is an essentially collaborative Gematria, perhaps the monkeys on typewriters- the ghoulish zero sum game that they are- miss the mark entirely. Perhaps we have the potential as a species to be six billion rabbis attempting to decode existence in both the act of creation and consumption. Perhaps pop is a constantly mutating, evolving entity that expands to grow new organs as each medium changes and adapts to the times and in response to political, social, and technological changes (especially the much vaunted "flattening" of the post-Internet global cultural and economic exchange).

That might be even more tragic given how intellectually disengaged the general masses are these days. Sure, as a species, we're more educated than a hundred or so years ago, but that doesn't mean that we necessarily have any fucking clue of how to put that education in use or that we have any reason to. Hence Twilight. Reading Jane Austen and thieving certain set pieces and broad strokes does not make you her contemporary any more than shooting a tiger makes you George Orwell.

The tragedy of our times is not that people are shooting tigers. The tragedy is that much of both the critical establishment and general audience has lost the ability to tell a poacher from a hunter. A fraudulent hack from a genuine talent. Stephanie Meyer from Joss Whedon. I see a hemisphere of gullible, essentially exploited individuals singing the praises of a regressive misogynist fairy tale to my right and the most daring, provocative, and ontologically progressive tv show in the history of the medium becoming most notable for being the lowest rated show to ever be picked up for a second season (ostensibly because for the first time in history Fox was actively seeking to avoid a hundred million angry emails).

I'm not going to pretend that from the first episode I knew that Dollhouse was going to pancake me. I will say that I knew I was going to have a shitload of fun and that I saw all I needed in the pilot to guarantee my ass in the chair straight through to the finale, however. Bringing in Eliza Dushku to star, casting Battlestar Galactica alumni, and playing both Lady Gaga and Frontline Assembly within the first ten minutes of the pilot was essentially Whedon dedicating the series to me, and me alone. Yes, that's right. Joss Whedon created Dollhouse for me. He was so glad that I finally came around and started worshipping at the altar of The Slayer that he rewarded me just as any benevolent pagan god worth his salt would. Not that I had any idea to what depths that would feel true until Omega.

It's interesting to note that Dollhouse drew cast from the two productions that Whedon and every member of the writing staff and production team must have known the show would attract the most comparisons to given the themes, plot, and even set design of the show. It's especially interesting given that Tahmoh Penikett essentially reprises his Battlestar Galactica role. At first I was somewhat taken aback at how ridiculous the similarities were, and then my jaw hit the fucking floor with the words "There is a vase on the table with three flowers in it."

The brilliant thing about it though is how much more ultimately devious the Mellie imprint turned out to be than anything Battlestar Galactica achieved before it crumbled into a shambling fucking mess. Jumping the shark at the five yard line is unforgivable in that the identity of the final cylon was the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life. It isn't simply the shock factor and pathos of Ballard unknowingly sleeping with a doll, but what the twin deceptions of Dewitt and Dominic's manipulations of the Millie imprint changed Ballard and triggered the endgame scenario.

An important thing to note is that the basic conceit and plot devices shared by Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica originate with Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The producers of BSG acknowledged it in their appropriation of the phrase "skinjob" and the casting of Edward James Olmos, who played a supporting role in Blade Runner as the guy who made the paper cranes. Of course an argument could be made for Ballard being just as informed by Deckard as he is Helo with November as Rachael and Alpha as Roy. Pop, as I said before, is a team effort. From Dick's original story straight through to Dollhouse we see not simply several appropriations but successive incubations and advancements of the same basic concepts towards largely different conclusions.

Case in point is that Ballard's character arc closely resembles a personal favourite template of Clive Barker's in which the protagonist begins investigating some form of fringe behaviour or criminal activity, becomes enthralled with it- utterly obsessed- until they integrate into the originally opposing force. In discussing this on the commentary track to The Midnight Meat Train, Barker quoted The Marquis de Sade ("The greatest pleasure is an aversion overcome,") as the philosophical vindication for his frequent usage of the character arc, especially in the Hellraiser franchise. Incidentally, De Sade appears in The Invisibles working alongside the eponymous subversives to fully explore the furthest fringes of humanity- especially in sexuality- in a way that offers itself up as a potential answer for the taunting riddle of just what the true purpose of the Dollhouse is.

Grant Morrison also used a similar arc in The Filth that resulted in more of a synthesis of the two opposing forces rather than a complete integration. At this point in the series- while it's indisputable that Ballard has to a certain extent integrated into the Dollhouse both as a "customer" and "employee"- it is far too early to close the book on his development considering that if we can expect Ballard (and Dollhouse) to survive Whedon's five year plan, we've only seen a fifth of his overall character arc, which is a microscopic amount for any Whedon character.

Everything Dollhouse borrows, it surpasses. Yes. I did just call one single season of Dollhouse superior to the entirety of Battlestar Galactica. I'm fine with series that unfold over a few seasons and take their time with where they're going. Whedon's done a couple of those that were quite good. However, Dollhouse Daft Punked every mark that Battlestar Galactica aimed for. (Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.)

As for The Matrix? Well fuck The Matrix. No one is clever for making the dentist chair correlation, which is incidental. You score a few points if you noticed that Echo is (a) Buddha though. The imperfection of Topher's tabula rasa and imprinting process have crystal clear parallels with a broad interpretation of Buddhist cosmology and the phenomenon of "past life regression" that several of the Actives- Echo most notably- undergo throughout the series. It's thematically most important in the episode where DeWitt runs a test allowing Echo, Victor, Sierra, and November to escape the Dollhouse essentially unmolested, which functions best as a metaphor for achieving enlightenment or nirvana in the sense of it being equivalent to escaping the constant cycle of reincarnation, the state of duḥkha (suffering) inherent in life in the material realm.

In some interpretations of Buddhism, there is essentially a choice to be made once you reach Nirvana; stay there, or go back and free everyone else. That's why the Dalai Llama- according to dogma- keeps coming back. Or in the Platonic interpretation alluded to earlier, she left the cave and came back to show the other dolls that there is more than shadows and dust. But there's a great deal more to Echo than being what is fast becoming a cliche.

There's Omega.

It's fair to say that Echo and Caroline are still essentially the same person, that the residual bits of Caroline that survived Topher's wipes still inform her actions as Echo in both Tabula Rasa and Active modes to the point where in Needs, Adelle is able to easily make the correlation between Echo's actions during the drill and when she broke into the Rossum lab prior to joining the Dollhouse. "That's Caroline," Adelle says with something bordering on maternal pride. In that sense, Needs foreshadowed Omega and gave us all we'd need to know about why Alpha and Omega are so fundamentally different. The use of the term Tabula Rasa in Dollhouse is mostly ironic, but still critical to any interpretation of the series. The most common usage of the term is in reference to the philosophical position that we are born into life with a blank slate. From a biological perspective it's on the extreme side of the nature versus nurture debate, but is most useful in contemporary discussion in taking a non deterministic view of life, that we are open to write our own destinies. In Dollhouse, Tabula Rasa is less to do with beginnings than it does second chances, as the dolls have all signed contracts with the intent of escaping their previous lives and transgressions with the promise of starting over fresh- Tabula Rasa- at the end of their five years at the Dollhouse. But over the course of the first season, a point most clearly made in Omega, there is a certain irrepressibility about the dolls' personalities. Alpha- for instance- is not an insane criminal because he experienced a composite event and had all of the imprints designed for him loaded at once, but because he was a flawed vessel and thus the result was literal cognitive dissonance. Topher couldn't change the basic nature of Alpha or any of the other dolls, only interrupt and inhibit it. Alpha's character arc is essentially the same as that of Alex in A Clockwork Orange; he is a violent offender who volunteers to be rehabilitated through science, through attempts to alter his behaviour at a physical level with disastrous results. The point of A Clockwork Orange was not that violence is glamorous or that man should be free to indulge the whims of the id, but that to seek to limit that which makes us human- both the positive and the potentially negative (as we see that Alex's treatment robs him of the ability to defend himself or engage in consensual sex)- is to rob us of our humanity. That, and that science can never fully prevail over nature. Of course there are also shades of Phillip K Dick's We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is better known as the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. While Alpha is the more obvious analog to Alex, Echo's character arc functions much in the same way but predicated on very different instincts. I'm sure that many viewers saw the last line in the episode (Omega) as being a subtle reference to Citizen Kane, it also evokes A Clockwork Orange, which ends with a smirking Alex daydreaming a sex scene, implying that the attempts to control him through behavioral modification had failed, much the same as "Caroline," implies that Omega persists in Echo's head. Alpha and Omega are more than simply experiments gone wrong, they represent the point at which Dollhouse begins to explore the concept of identity the deepest and overlaps with The Invisibles (as well as Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol. For nearly his entire career, Grant Morrison has been writing about the mutability of identity and the interpretation of Tabula Rasa that suggests not only is there infinite potential for society to shape identity and human psychology, but that the individual can modify their own identity, which is a re-ocurring theme most notably employed in The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, as well Batman. While identity modification has many sources and implementations across his writing, the inspiration and philosophy behind it is heavily informed by post modern magic and the occult, most notably in the chaos magic approach to invocation, in which the practitioner seeks to take on the desirable personality aspects of a godform. The "Kali in the Disco" chapter of Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos describes methods and means for ritually taking on aspects of the personality of a given mythological figure, the eponymous example being a female acquaintance of his who invoked the goddess Kali in order to be more confident and seductive while clubbing. Morrison himself, in his Pop Magic essay, takes the concept one step further by suggesting invoking pop culture figures such as James Bond or Metron. In many ways the imprints that Topher creates for the dolls are based on the same underlying principle. In the final issue of The Invisibles Dane and his protege infiltrate a corporation about to release a video game based on the training and doctrine of the Invisibles a decade after the end of the main plot of the series, only to find that the corporation is being run by King Mob, who was involved in developing the video game, which takes the form of a virtual reality simulator in which the player lives out several randomized lifetimes. The five year contract of the dolls is very similar in premise to the Invisibles game, given the range of identities and situations that the dolls can be expected to take on over the course of their five years. Which brings us back to Alpha and Omega. While the intent of the imprints is that they are to be used one at a time and forgotten, both the accident that "created" Alpha and the procedure he used to duplicate it and thus create Omega brought them all into interaction. This of course drove Alpha even further insane than the man he was before joining the Dollhouse was, while Echo's strength of character and empathy allowed her to become not a cacophony of competing voices, but a confident and high functioning gestalt, several individual personalities working in tandem. Taken together Alpha and Omega mirror the beginning and eventual end of Doom Patrol member "Crazy Jane's" character arc whose many personalities each had a separate super power. While officially unable to add it into the narrative for copyright reasons, Morrison has suggested that Crazy Jane of his Doom Patrol is the same individual as Ragged Robin of The Invisibles, who creates The Invisibles in the future, travels to the past in order to join them, and then travels into the future through the supercontext (another metaphor for leaving Plato's cave), ending her journey at the apocalypse in 2012 where she provides King Mob with what he needs to defeat the King of All Tears, which frees them to evolve into their next stage of existence. Which brings me to my conclusion. I'm not going to say that it was necessarily written with this intent, but my personal interpretation of Omega is that she's Crazy Jane/Ragged Robin downloaded into Echo's body (slash the Dollhouse world). Hence; Fire bad, tree pretty.