Category: War of the Worlds

We all have to die some time.

Let’s close out the year. It is December 26, 1988. Since last we spoke, the Spitak earthquake killed 25,000 in Armenia. Estonia declared Estonian to be its official language, which probably seems hilarious to anyone too young to understand the whole “Soviet Union” thing. Pan Am 103 was destroyed by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland. US Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud, ruining once and for all his chances of winning the 1992 election. NASA unveiled its plans for a moon colony and manned mars mission. I haven’t looked, but I assume that all went according to plan. Vanessa Hudgens was born, and Roy Orbison died. Tomorrow, Bulgaria will give up jamming Radio Free Europe, and Hayley Williams will be born.

Two days ago, Mega Man 2 was released in Japan. Out in theaters are The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, Rain Man, Working Girl, Beaches, Twins, and, of course, Dangerous Liaisons. Poison leads the Billboard top ten with “Every Rose Has its Thorn”. Also charting are Bobby Brown’s “My Perrogative”, Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting for a Star to Fall”, and Guns N Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle”. New in the top ten this week are Doctor Who-fan-music-video favorite Phil Collins’s “Two Hearts”, The Bangles’s “In Your Room” (Which honestly, I didn’t even know was a single), and Taylor Dayne’s “Don’t Rush Me”. Speaking of Doctor Who, the novelty song, “Doctorin’ The Tardis”, a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme song with Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 by The KLF (performing as “The Timelords”) is on the Hot 100 for its second week at 83. It’ll peak at 66. Former Kids Incorporated star Martika’s “More than You Know” enters the charts at 91.

TV is virtually all reruns this week, including, I am not making this up, a rerun of the made-for-TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor. Is that the one with the big spider? Friday the 13th will not be back for another week. Star Trek the Next Generation is off this week, but while War of the Worlds was on break, they cranked out “Where Silence has Lease” (the one where they get sucked into a Weird Space Hole where a big disembodied face wants to murder them because it’s curious about this whole “mortality” thing), “Elementary, My Dear Data” (the Sherlock Holmes one), and “The Outrageous Okona” (the one where they hang out with a Han Solo-inspired vaguely rogueish antihero and also holographic Joe Piscopo).

You only have to get a few minutes into “The Good Samaritan” to notice two things. The first is that this is densely and effectively written episode. The second is that there’s something seriously wrong on a mechanical level. The audio mix is weird. The foley is awkward. The looping is painfully blatant. Characters speak with odd cadences and tones. Some of this may not be their fault. There’s several audio glitches in my DVD copy — a half-second of the wrong audio warps in during the credits, and the sound track goes out of sync after the commercial breaks. Perhaps these have been fixed in later pressings (I am not optimistic). But other audio oddities must have been audible to the original audience. Maybe stuff like this was less noticeable on a cheap ’80s television set?

“The Good Samaritan” was the third episode produced, after “The Resurrection” and “Thy Kingdom Come”, made while Sam Strangis was still operating with a skeleton crew due to the strike: the writing credit on this one is the obvious pseudonym “Sylvia Clayton”. That might explain some of the technical issues, if the production team was still finding their feet and under pressure.

All the same, like I said, the actual story is really well put-together. We see the best examples we’ve had so far of the writing conveying information to the audience effectively and efficiently without resorting to direct information dumps. There’s also a strong display of the rapport between the characters, which is especially interesting given that this episode was filmed before the relationship development they put on display in “A Multitude of Idols”. There are a few oddities though: Ironhorse is far more casual with the others than he should be, and they’re still clinging to that idea of there being sexual tension between Harrison and Suzanne.

We open with four extremely ’80s-looking thirty-year-olds pretending to be college students in a diner. Noticing that one of them has a cold, the waitress talks them all into trying the chicken soup. When she slips into the back to deliver their order, she lapses into alienese just for the phrase, “and four soups.” Really great way to be discrete: if anyone were listening in, they wouldn’t learn that she’d put in the soup order she’d just been given, they’d only learn that she’s an alien who speaks a language that sounds like backmasking. The line cook adds something from his flask to the soup, while they discuss their plans in alienese which, this time, hasn’t been subtitled, in order to increase the suspense for the ten seconds before we cut to the last survivor of the group being wheeled into the hospital.

If you were hoping that the horrible alien toxin would produce some satisfying body horror, like his chest cavity collapsing or alien goo issuing from his orifices, sorry; it’s not that kind of show. The kid just dies painfully while one of the cooks watches from a distance. Back at the Land of the Lost cave, an alien identified only as “Commander” explains to the Advocacy how they’ve proven that their “spores” are fatal to humans, and they’re ready to start using them to wipe out the locals. They also bring by a bound young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff, which the Commander explains is a “gift” to the scientists to use in their experiments. Also, presumably, a gift to the anticipated target audience’s “dudes who like seeing a young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff in bondage” demographic.

Meanwhile, at a stock image of looking up at a skyscraper that I think I’ve seen before, a businessman with the incredibly unlikely name “Marcus Madison Mason” is giving a press conference. Seems he’s invented some kind of new miracle food-crop which, among its other magnificent properties, is completely radiation resistant, which will come in important after the inevitable nuclear conflict that’s coming. That’s not me being wry: Mason actually literally states this as his reason for adding radiation resistance. Mason speaks in a strangely slow monotone that makes him sound like he’s on something. It’ll probably come in handy when he gets alien-possessed later since no one will think it odd that he suddenly sounds like a robot. A quick pan around the room does a surprisingly modern job of communicating character wordlessly. Mason is disingenuous. The board of directors — which includes future Robocop regular David Gardner — is bored with all this humanitarian bullshit. Mason’s wife, an elegant middle-aged woman is proud of her husband. Mason’s personal assistant, a much younger woman, wants to bone him, and probably already has. The wife is clueless, as indicated by her whispered promise of a “special dinner” when they do their obligatory chaste post-press-conference smooch for the cameras. The secretary looks away, clearly pissed at Mason’s flagrant flirting with his own wife right in front of her.

As soon as they leave the conference, Mason, still speaking weirdly slow, drops the humanitarian facade and starts complaining about recouping their research costs, and making plans to bleed the third world dry and bribe government officials to expedite their export licenses. Once behind the locked door of his office, he starts making out with Teri, the personal assistant. The actress who plays Teri looked a bit familiar to me, and a little research turned up that she’s Lori Haller, who would go on to appear in a handful of things I’ve seen, most prominently, as Josie’s mom in Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, a show that I find kinda wonderful for the way that it is quite obviously an attempt to do a lighter and fluffier version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with all instances of the word “supernatural” struck through and replaced with “SCIENCE^TM!”. For example, there is an episode whose actual plot is that when one of the characters starts to feel unnoticed by his friends, he turns invisible. Only instead of it being due to the hellmouth in the basement, it’s due to the wormhole in the science teacher’s office. He blows off her offer for sex on the claim that he has to work late, and gives her a gold watch to make up for it. We immediately cut to him giving a gold necklace to his mistress, another, more pinup-y kind of young blonde, who responds by taking off her clothes to give the audience an eyeful of the kind of PG-13 near-nudity that could only come about thanks to the ever-laxening broadcast standards that have come with the breakdown of Big Three Network dominance.

Back at the cottage, a nice exchange with the regular cast. Norton’s reading an article about Mason in Plot Convenience Magazine, while Harrison is picking horses from the track list — a very obviously redubbed Norton explains to the befuddled Ironhorse that Harrison’s mathematical genius gives him an impressive betting record, even if it’s only on paper (Harrison likes probability but doesn’t approve of gambling). Ironhorse struggles with a Rubik’s cube, then tosses it away in frustration just as Suzanne enters to vent about how hard it is to genetically engineer radiation-resistant biological weapons.

Norton helpfully comments on Mason’s grain, which inspires them to have General Wilson get Suzanne a meeting. Mason explains the radiation resistance as being purely of his own personal invention, but doesn’t let on any of its secrets. But it’s clear from his thoughtful looks that, despite Suzanne’s high neckline and enormous shoulder pads, he’s concocting a plan to bed her, and she agrees to have dinner with him for further discussion and artless flirting.

The aliens, meanwhile, have decided that Mason’s grain would be a good way to distribute their killer spores, which is a good thing because otherwise, this episode is going to be kind of pointless. They send three possessed little old ladies to acquire him. The little old ladies are played by Anne Mirvish, who hasn’t done much else, Billie Mae Richards, a prolific voice actor best known for the voices of Brightheart Racoon and Tenderheart Bear across multiple incarnations of the Care Bears franchise, and Maxine Miller. Miller is this episode’s second actress who looks really familiar. Not from anything in particular as it turns out, though. In addition to considerable voice-acting credits which include Babar, Double Dragon, The Baby Huey Show, and Martha Speaks, she’s a fairly prolific character actor who pretty much always plays “little old lady” characters, in such shows as So Weird, Seven Days, First Wave, The Outer Limits, Dead Like Me, Smallville, Supernatural and The Flash (Ironically, in an episode titles “Who is Harrison Wells?”)

If you were thinking “Hey, three little old lady aliens, and this Mason guy is boning three different ladies!” you’re actually way ahead of the episode. The little old ladies watch Mason at lunch with his girlfriend, then follow her as she goes shopping. A scene later, the girlfriend, accompanied by only two little old ladies, calls Mason to make a date.

Intermixed with all this, we get some more boardroom scenes with Mason to establish that he’s a pretty typical Robber Baron (According to IMDb, one of the suits in these scenes is our old friend Barry Flatman, but there’s only one guy I can’t rule out, and he doesn’t look much like him), and a scene back at the Cottage where Debi establishes that she likes playing with Suzanne’s lab rat, Caesar. The rat’s name should really be “Chekhov”.

While we’re back at the Cottage, Ironhorse spends a scene ribbing Harrison about Suzanne’s impending date with Mason, trying to get a rise out of him by noting that Mason’s “not a bad looking guy,” which, well, I guess I’ll just take his word for it, and that, “We may be losing our lady doctor to big business.”

So, um. What the fuck? I know it’s the ’80s and it’s a forelorn hope for me to imagine they might treat Suzanne like a human being and all, but “lady doctor”? And what’s up with Ironhorse trying to make Harrison all jealous? I guess Ironhorse sniping at Harrison shouldn’t be too surprising at this point, but this feels sort of dudebro for a guy who’s supposed to be a military hardass-type.

In keeping with the kind of heavily trope-aware show this is, Suzanne walks in on them to seek make approval on her little black dress, because clearly an academic weirdo and a straightlaced soldier are exactly the right guys to help her decide if her hair and shoulder pads are big enough. We get the cliche “Men awkwardly react when the female character they’d always been purely platonic with walks in all dolled up for a date and is Suddenly Hot.”

I do not like this cliche. I don’t like it so much that I am going to read against obvious intention here. Because while it is true that the writing clearly assumes that, yes, Harrison is attracted to Suzanne and is just in denial, and that yes, he’s supposed to be flustered by the thought of her being all sexied up and going out with a rich businessman, the truth is that Jared Martin does absolutely nothing to sell that. Given that we kinda know that Jared Martin can play Stupid Sexy Harrison, I’ve got to conclude that this is on purpose, and someone — the director, perhaps, or Martin himself — is mutinying against hamfisted attempts to ship those two. There’s no indication of repressed desire in Harrison’s reaction to Suzanne. The only emotion he shows in the scene at all is annoyance toward Ironhorse. His glower in the face of Ironhorse’s smug expression is easy to read not as anger at being “caught” by the soldier, but rather as frustration with Ironhorse’s insistence on treating his colleague as some sort of prize to be won. That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Continue reading Thesis: The Good Samaritan (War of the Worlds 1×09)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

We’re somewhere around the end of January, 1898, and readers of the New York Evening Journal have for a couple of weeks now been reading the adventures of an all-star cast of a war-fleet two thousand men and a hundred electrical space ships strong, set out under the command of Thomas Edison on an expedition to make war against the red planet in bloody retribution for the War of the Worlds they’d recently visited.

H. G. Wells had described the Martians as, “Minds which are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish.” Garrett P. Serviss is more direct: “During the brief war with the Martians upon the earth it had been gunpowder against a mysterious force as much stronger than gunpowder as the latter was superior to the bows and arrows that preceded it.” But thanks to the inventive genius of the Wizard of Menlo Park (with some nonspecific assistance by the world’s other great scientific minds), Earth was now equipped to go on the offensive. Though the Martians possessed superior intelligence, Edison had discovered the underlying scientific principles of their warships, the breakthrough which allowed him to develop technology that equaled and in some cases exceeded the would-be invaders — this will eventually be explained as a simple stroke of serendipity: Edison’s most fantastic inventions derived from highly precise manipulation of electromagnetic fields using a particular combination of metals not found on Mars.

Of the original crew of 2000, 940 remained when the fleet descended into the Martian atmosphere. And I can’t for the life of me account for those losses: I put the total number dead at fifty-five (Three to a meteor strike, forty in the two ships destroyed by heat ray, and twelve in the ground battle on the gold asteroid). It’s a bit difficult to square away the possibility of Edison losing half his fleet without the narrative noticing, so I’m going to assume this is just an editorial blunder.

Regardless, really, of whether the Earth expedition numbered just under a thousand or (as seems more likely) closer to two thousand, their initial survey of Mars daunts our heroes a little. Without coming right out and saying it, it seems like they’d taken for granted that Mars was a dying planet, and were surprised to find, “There could be no longer any question that it was a world which, if not absolutely teeming with inhabitants, like a gigantic ant-hill, at any rate bore on every side the marks of their presence and of their incredible undertakings and achievements.” They had somehow neglected to consider that two thousand men was not really a lot to conquer a population that numbered in the millions.

Descending for a better look at the surface, Edison’s fleet runs afoul of a fleet of Martian airships, prompting more concerns that perhaps humanity had not thought this invasion all the way through, and maybe it wasn’t a great idea to stick every competent scientist on the planet on one ship. Returning to orbit, they decide to circumnavigate the planet for a reconnoiter before launching a proper attack. This leads into a brief but enjoyable “marvel at the alien wonders” segment, where everything on Mars turns out to be weird exaggerations of their terrestrial equivalents. Like the canals, much like irrigation canals on Earth, but far vaster in scope. These “canals” had been “discovered” by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, and basically kicked off the whole notion of Mars being potentially inhabited, and thereby being one of the inspirations for this story’s antecedent (though Wells doesn’t reference them directly). Two problems with this: first, that Schiaparelli didn’t actually claim to have seen canals (“canals” being only a loose translation of the Italian word “canali”, which can refer equally to man-made canals and to natural gullies or riverbeds), and second, that the canals don’t exist. In the early 20th century, improved telescopes, photography, and later, satellite imagery revealed that what Shiaparelli had seen was not a network of interconnected straight-line canals, but random disconnected dark streaks in the landscape. But in one last twist, earlier this year, NASA confirmed that liquid water does indeed still seasonally flow on the surface of Mars. And what’s more, the reason we know this is that these seasonal flows are extremely briny, and therefore they leave behind evidence of their passing in the form of hydrated salts in the Martian soil which appear as — I really hope you’ve guessed it — dark streaks in the landscape. Everything on Mars is huge and exciting and classy in a way that if you mix it with the narrative’s casual racism, means it could probably pull 35% of the vote in the Republican primary. The red trees average a thousand feet in height. The buildings are made entirely of metal. The density and composition of the clouds makes them iridescent. They’ve got dogs the size of oxen. The Martian capital stands at the edge of a lake half again larger than the Caspian Sea.

No sooner have they completed their circuit than the Martians mount their defense, shrouding the entire planet in a cloud of black smoke that seems like it must be related to the black smoke from the novel, though the narrator doesn’t seem at all familiar with it. The smoke is identified as stifling, but not poisonous, its main feature being its opacity, which precludes any sort of direct attack on the surface without the risk of being ambushed. Before Edison can consider the logistics of settling in for a long-term siege, the commissary decides that this would be the most dramatically appropriate time to reveal that something’s gone wrong with their food cube storage and they’ve only got about ten days worth of food left before they’re forced to resort to cannibalism.

Which honestly would make an awesome story, but instead, Edison works out the frequency for smoke and sets the disintegrator for it. They rain down disintegration through the smoke at the huge city around the Lake of the Sun until the Martians start shooting back with heat rays (though by now, they’re just straight-up “electric beams”), destroying one ship and damaging three or four more. For no clear reason beyond bloodlust, the fleet descends through the smoke and has a go at laying waste to the city below, but they’re badly outnumbered. Though the flagship “seemed charmed” in escaping destruction, the rest of the fleet is less fortunate, and of the more than 90 ships that had descended through the smoke, only sixty survive to retreat back to low orbit. Down another 600 men, they realize that a direct assault won’t work, but with their provisions dwindling, retreat isn’t an option.

At this point, the narrative gains a new character, Colonel Alonzo Jefferson Smith (who I think must be actually fictional, since I’ve found no reference to a real one), described as an, ahem, “Old army officer who had served in many wars against the cunning Indians of the West.” In another of those moments of over-the-top comedy racism, he later refers to the Martians as “Indians”. Colonel Smith comes up with the idea of sending a third of the fleet around to the opposite side of the planet on a raid, while the remainder stays in orbit over the Lake of the Sun, outside the range of Martian weapons, basically just firing randomly at the planet to keep the Martian defenses focused there. Naturally, the narrator accompanies Smith’s expedition, because otherwise the story would get really dull for a few chapters. Colonel Jefferson’s ship is able to land undetected in a sparsely populated area, and he and the narrator become what they briefly assume to be the first humans on the surface of Mars.

They are disillusioned in this respect very quickly, thanks to the combination of the dumb luck that keeps working in favor of the Earthmen and the sorts of things that always have to come up in this kind of old-fashioned pulp adventure story. To wit, the first building they come to, they find four Martians just sort of hanging out listening to the singing of a human slave girl, a descendant of ancient abductees — if I’m not mistaken, that also makes this the first alien abduction story. After murdering the owners, they get the girl to show them where the pantry is, and are able to reprovision the fleet with food cubes (They call it “compressed food”, one of the few inventions that the Martians and Edison both mastered). Colonel Jefferson’s expedition returns to the main fleet, pausing only long enough for a few paragraphs of exposition about Mars’s moons that is so randomly inserted that you expect it to end with Serviss telling us that knowing is half the battle.

An unnamed linguistics professor from Heidelberg identifies her native tongue as proto-Aryan. I get the feeling he might be based on a real person, possibly a parody, due to his distinctive Yoda-like speech pattern: “I have her tongue recognized!”, “This girl, to the oldest family of the human race belongs. Her language every tongue that now upon the earth is spoken antedates” (Holy fuck, an SOV dependent clause in the middle of an SOV sentence). But he’s no one I could identify. With a month’s worth of food, Edison decides that their only chance at winning the war will be if the human woman can reveal some key weakness. So the fleet withdraws to the shadow of Deimos for two weeks while he asks the linguists from the fleet to learn her language. They say they’ll try. Except for the Heidelberg professor, who says, “It shall we do.”

It takes them three weeks, in the end, during which tensions are raised by a love-quadrilateral between the rescued woman, Jefferson, the Professor and “another handsome young fellow in the flagship”, but the Heidelberg professor eventually “masters the tongue of the ancient Aryans,” which he is confident, “will the speculations of my countrymen vindicate.” Which sounds kind of ominous in retrospect. The woman, who now identifies herself as “Aina”, tells the story of her people, and, um. Wow. This is some prime grade-A Von Daniken stuff. Her ancestors came from “The Vale of Cashmere”, which I think must refer to an old-timey name for Kashmir Valley, and not the section of Prospect Park. The Martians invaded and for some reason forcibly relocated the population to Egypt, where they used their amazing alien technology to build the Sphinx and also the pyramids, as a kind of reproduction of the mountains they’d been so impressed by in Kashmir (Serviss’s Mars being mountainless). Because the pyramids couldn’t possibly have been the work of “puny man”.

The Egyptian Martians were eventually afflicted by disease, just like their modern counterparts. I notice that it seems like Serviss has modified Wells’s presentation of the Martian downfall: it seems not to simply be that the Martians have no immunity to bacteria, but rather that they’re overly susceptible to one specific illness, not unlike the “Martian Flu” in The Great Martian War. They’d abandoned Earth then, but took Aina’s ancestors with them because they liked Earth music, but couldn’t get the hang of playing it themselves. Thousands of Mars-bred human slaves had served as entertainers to the Martian elite for millennia until Edison’s fleet had shown up. Fearful of a slave uprising, the Martians had slaughtered the humans, sparing only Aina, because this is a late nineteenth century adventure story and it always ends up being the undoing of one of the native chiefs that he’s taken a particular lecherous interest in the pretty white woman.

She goes on to explain that Mars is heavily fortified due to a war with, of all places, Ceres, and as such, the human force isn’t nearly great enough to defeat them head-on, but she does, as hoped, know their weakness. What follows is a detailed and boring account of nineteenth century scientific theory about Mars which is detailed and reasonable and which we have long-since learned to be wrong in every major respect. In brief, at the height of summer in the southern Martian hemisphere, the southern ice cap melts rapidly, and what with Mars being so flat (In the story. In real life, Mars is about three times bumpier per capita than Earth. But in 1898, all we knew of Martian topography came from its albedo, based on which Mars appeared to decompose neatly into “uniformly more shiny” and “uniformly less shiny”), the only thing that prevents the whole planet from flooding is that the water can flow from the shallow ocean on the south side of the planet to the shallow oceans on the north side through the Syrtis Major, where, it being winter up there, they rapidly freeze into the northern polar ice cap. Only the Martians threw up a big dam across Syrtis Major in order to control the movement of water back toward the poles and extend the growing season. And Aina reckons, because it seems to be something the Martians had worried about the Ceresans trying, that if they close the floodgates right around the solstice, it’ll flood the planet. That seems a little extreme to me, but I guess maybe they just mean it’ll flood the densely populated parts of the planet. And as luck would have it, the height of the seasonal flooding is happening right as we speak.

Which just leaves it to a small group of five — Edison, Smith, Serviss, Sydney Phillips (the “Handsome young man” from earlier) and Aina — to break into the most heavily guarded facility on the planet and sabotage it… Did Serviss just invent the Five Man Band trope? The actual mission doesn’t have much to it: they break in, shoot the guards, and close the floodgate. There’s two moments that might possibly be described as tense. When they reach the controls, Aina proves unable to help them determine which one closes the floodgates. And immediately afterward, they’re caught unawares by three Martian dam operators. The second problem is solved by the simple expedient of Serviss, Phillips and Smith shooting them with their disintegrators, which isn’t even as exciting as back when they rescued Aina, because it’s three-on-three rather than three-on-two, so they don’t even have to do any clever aiming to hit them all (Yeah, that was a thing. They had to angle their shots to hit two of them at a time because you’ve got to fiddle with the disintegrator for a minute to reset it between shots). The first is resolved by the even less exciting method of “Edison looks at the control panel for a minute and uses his genius to deduce which knob it is.”

Continue reading Deep Ice: We’d bring everybody down to his knees (Edison’s Conquest of Mars, Continued)

It is January 12, 1898. The modern city of New York just came into being when Brooklyn merged with the other boroughs. Tensions escalate between the US and Spain, and war is widely considered inevitable even with the sinking of the Maine a month away. Also, fun fact, some in Congress are suggesting that we ought to annex Japan. Tomorrow, Emile Zola will publish J’accuse, his defense of Richard Alfred Dreyfus. Friday, Lewis Carroll will die.

Topping the charts are “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” by Cullen and Collins, and the Manhattan Beach March by John Phillips Sousa and his band. Also, a bunch of songs I won’t mention because I am fairly sure their titles are now considered racial slurs. Speaking of which, Way Down East opens in New York, a play which will later be adapted to film by pioneering racist filmmaker D. W. Griffith. Yeah, sorry. 1898 is not a time period I have a lot of source materials for.

If you’re the reading sort, though, you may have just finished up reading one of two serials entitled Fighters From Mars, one in the New York Evening Journal, and the other in Boston Post. These two serials were attempts to capitalize on the popularity of a certain serial that had made its US debut the previous year in Cosmopolitan. And by “capitalize”, I mean, “rip the fuck off”, because Fighters From Mars, in both its versions, were just The War of the Worlds with all the geographical references translated to New York and Boston respectively, and all the boring science parts omitted. And they got away with it because I don’t know why. Probably something to do with international copyright law being a total clusterfuck back then, as opposed to the mild clusterfuck it is today.

But in both cities, Fighters From Mars was followed up by a piece of original fiction by science and science fiction writer Garrett P. Serviss. A bit of a late Victorian Carl Sagan, Serviss was a writer and lecturer on science who helped to popularize astronomy at the turn of the century.

At the time, there was a bit of a fad on for a genre of fiction now called the “Edisonade”, fictionalized accounts of the life of Thomas Edison, who, at the time, was basically the Chuck Norris of Science, and because no one had found out how awesome and crazy Nikola Tesla was yet. And as Fighters From Mars wound up, Serviss decided to follow it up with a sequel in the form of an Edisonade, Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

Preemptively fulfilling the promise of Goliath, it’s the story of Thomas Edison and a star-studded cast unlocking the miracles of super-science to take the fight back to Mars. Hilarity and genocide ensues.

If we take The War of the Worlds to be Science Fiction’s Dracula, Edison’s Conquest of Mars is Varney the Vampire. It’s a pulpy action story that does all the tropetastic science fictiony things Wells refuses to. It’s got space battles, disintegration beams, alien abductions, food cubes, even aliens building the pyramids. If it weren’t for the fact that every chapter doesn’t begin with retconning the end of the previous one, you could see this getting turned into a Republic serial. It’s also weirdly star-studded, featuring Thomas Edison, of course, but also Lord Kelvin and Wilhelm Röntgen in prominent roles, with guest appearances by William McKinley, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Emperor Mutsuhito. Which must have been awkward what with Congress grumbling about whether or not we should conquer him. Weirdly, the book retains Wells’s convention of telling the story from the point of view of an unnamed (It’s an author self-insert. He’s named in an illustration caption as “Professor Serviss”, but his name doesn’t appear in the text of the story) science writer.

But just because Serviss’s sequel is aimed at a more lowbrow audience, it’s not simply a big dumb space adventure. Serviss’s science-fetishism has a different focus from Wells’s, but it’s no less prominent. Where Wells would go on lengthy digressions about alien biology and obsess over the horror of something that can be explained and justified enough to sound plausible yet utterly other, Serviss’s interests are based more around engineering. He devotes a lot of time to describing the man-made technological miracles that result from studying Martian derelicts. Rather than an interest in what shape life and technology might take arising under completely different conditions, Serviss’s speculative science is grounded more firmly in being just one or two steps askew of reality. Space flight and death rays are depicted not as something utterly alien, but rather as only a couple of breakthroughs away from the readers’ own reality. It is, in essence, steampunk, but approached from the opposite direction: rather than contemporary writers trying to invoke the trappings of Victorian science fiction, this is a Victorian writer trying to anticipate science fiction of the 1950s. Being just a step askew of reality describes the science of Edison’s Conquest of Mars in other ways too: his Martians are not cephalopods, but large, lumpy humanoids, not far off from the rubber forehead aliens of Star Trek.

The story opens with the final retreat of the Martians. New Jersey briefly reenters our larger story, as the few Martian survivors evacuate the planet from Bergen County in a “projectile car” launched by an explosion so powerful that it collapses the Palisades and levels the remains of New York City (which, don’t forget, literally only started existing in its modern form today). But despite the great destruction around the globe, mankind recovered, with the countries and regions which had been far from the fighting sending aid to help in the rebuilding. Serviss makes a surprisingly insightful observation, and one which is particularly relevant to us, given what I’ve been saying about the “alien amnesia” angle of the TV series:

But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the scenes of death and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was the profound mental and moral depression that followed. This was shared even by those who had not seen the Martians and had not witnessed the destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had imported for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal despair

Further dispiriting mankind were the observations by astronomers of increased activity on Mars, taken to indicate that a renewed invasion was being prepared. “But there was a gleam of hope of which the general public as yet knew nothing,” Serviss tells the reader, though: “It was due to a few dauntless men of science, conspicuous among whom were Lord Kelvin, the great English savant; Herr Roentgen, the discoverer of the famous X ray, and especially Thomas A. Edison, the American genius of science.” Headquartered at Edison’s lab (whose survival is kind of a surprise, given the scale of the destruction to north Jersey: Edison was based, as the story confirms, in West Orange), the world’s most famous scientists had learned from the Martian debris and figured out how to reproduce and counter the power of the invaders.

This is simultaneously the most and least steampunk thing about the book: there’s actually no steam. It’s 1898, the age of the miracles of electricity. Everything, everything in this story is electrical. The word appears over a hundred times. Edison’s key breakthrough from the Martian debris is, “How to produce, in a limited space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and that without danger to the experimenter or to the material experimented upon.” Pretty much everything falls out from that. First and foremost, since (Serviss finds this somehow both too technical and too obvious to need to explain beyond an analogy to the tail of a comet which sounds like complete bullshit to me) gravity can be counteracted by an electrical force, Edison’s discovery leads immediately to the invention of powered flight, a whole five years before a non-bullshit method of powered flight would be invented by a couple of bicycle repairmen. By polarizing the exterior of an airtight metal craft, one of those great old-timey bullet-shaped science fiction space ships, Edison could make the ship repel itself away from the Earth. A test-flight to the moon proves the whole thing plausible enough that humanity gets the bright idea of invading Mars, and it’s on.

Edison’s next miracle invention is… A sonic screwdriver. Sort of. The word “sonic” never comes up — not “electric” enough for this story. But that’s pretty much what it is. A weapon which induces harmonic vibrations in whatever it’s aimed at. Turn the dial to the resonant frequency of the dominant material in something, push the button, and it vibrates itself out of existence. Edison demonstrates this by setting it to 386 MHz (Yes. Edison has documented the harmonic frequency of feathers) and vaporizing all the feathers off of a bird. And then he does a quick frequency sweep to disintegrate the rest of the bird. Because Edison is a dick. To demonstrate that the device had applicability beyond torturing small animals, he deploys a battery of the devices to safely demolish a dangerously unstable condemned building.

A warfleet is commissioned, and ahead of its launch, all the important nations send their leaders to Washington to celebrate, and here things get silly for a bit. Kaiser Wilhelm throws a brief fit, jealous that a good old-fashioned monarch like him should have to take a backseat in the greatest war ever waged by man to a democratic republic. He also gets upset when Edison declines to attempt to make the science of the Disintegrator, “Plain to the crowned heads.” (Czar Nicholas gets a kick out of that). Wilhelm is also bothered by the smell when Edison demonstrates the disintegrator on an inkwell. I know next to nothing about Kaiser Wilhelm, but I do love the idea of him just being a belligerent jackass who wants to prove his length and girth by getting his war on, given that more or less that is how the history of the German Empire is going to go.

There’s a big go-round to fund the mission, whose price tag is estimated at $25 billion (Being 1898, it’s phrased in the delightfully archaic “twenty-five thousand millions of dollars”), about $650 billion in today’s money. Which frankly is ridiculously cheap for an interplanetary war. With no one wanting to be outdone, the US immediately puts up a billion, to the delight of everyone, even, “One of the Roko Tuis, or native chiefs, from Fiji,” who, “Sprang up and brandished a war club.” Yeah. This book is going to be just delightful in its fair and nuanced treatment of other cultures (The author seems to be particularly enamored with the Emperor of China, who’s described as friendly and affable, is amused by everything, prone to dispensing Ancient Chinese Wisdom, and whose dialogue I won’t quote here because it all sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of a white college girl whose YouTube video is about to go viral. Sufficed to say, if this were adapted for the screen, he’d be played by Christopher Lee in yellowface). A bidding war breaks out between the Germans and the British, and the king of Siam throws in a huge diamond. Since the author is American, the US agrees to scratch up the difference after the various countries of the world have all been shamed or goaded into bankrupting themselves, and Edison’s given a no-bid contract not subject to any sort of oversight. Nice work if you can get it.

The fleet launches six months later, a hundred ships strong. The narrator scores a spot on Edison’s flagship. It’s never explained why he’s got so much access to Edison, but you don’t really need to justify a media-savvy guy like Edison singling out a reporter prone to fawning. Also assigned to the flagship are Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Röntgen, Sylvanus P. Thompson, and, randomly, Moissan (the guy who invented Moissanite). During their shakedown cruise to the moon, one of the ships is pierced by a meteor, killing “two or three” of the crew. The others are safely evacuated from the airless ship and eventually recover, because what’s a couple of hours sucking on hard vacuum?

They stop over on the moon to bury the dead and repair the damaged ship, and discover that though it’s just as uninhabitable as in the real world, it had presumably not always been so, as there’s evidence of a long-gone civilization, including a giant footprint. Now, when I was a kid, it felt like it was a convention in adventure stories, children’s and adults’ alike, that the heroes in an adventure story weren’t allowed any sort of material gain: the Grail falls into the pit when the seal opens up, One-Eyed Willy’s ship breaks through the cliff wall and sails out into the sunset, Alexander the Great’s tomb self-destructs, the treasure in the old haunted mansion is “worthless” Confederate money, the Atlantean computer made out of platinum falls into the magma pit, the alien healing device disintegrates when touched, the super-warp-drive engine breaks after one use, that sort of thing. The only stuff you got to take home with you was fake rewards like “self-confidence” and “character”, and if any of the plot coupons you collected along the way actually did have a resale value, they had to be expended in the final battle. I didn’t cotton on at the time, but that was a fairly recent adventure trope when I started encountering it. In older adventure stories, like, say, this one, adventuring was in large part all about that, ahem, booty, with loving descriptions of the valuable swag the heroes won along the way. Accordingly, the moon’s got mountains made of diamond (Probably. Moissan offers that they might be something similar to diamond but even more valuable. Because space.), and everyone resolves that what with the moon diamonds, this invasion will basically pay for itself.

Continue reading Deep Ice: I believe they’re learning how to fly (Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars)

Well, here we are, another of these “obligation” articles, where I don’t really have an angle or know what I can usefully say, but it feels like I ought to cover it all the same. Of course, because I put the article off so long, I don’t get to claim credit this time, since The CW’s new Friday the 13th TV series was announced months ago. But, of course, the newly announced series is going to be about Crystal Lake and the legend of Jason Voorhees. To which you’re probably thinking, “Well duh, obviously. What the hell else would a TV series called Friday the 13th be about?”

So there’s that. I don’t know if you remember, but when I introduced my series on War of the Worlds, I went on a little digression whose point was that you could be excused for thinking that the only reason there is a War of the Worlds TV series is because Sam and Greg Strangis wanted to do an Invasion of the Body Snatchers TV series but couldn’t get the rights. Well, sort of a similar implicit story here; Larry Williams and Frank Mancuso, jr. had this idea for a TV series based around hunting down cursed antiques, and they were thinking about calling it The 13th Hour. But then Mancuso suddenly realized that he had the rights to use the name of the popular horror film franchise he’d been working on for some years, and figured that would trick some unsuspecting audiences into watching their ridiculous little show be a better name. So that’s what they called it.

Our old friend first-run syndication is really what rears its head here. See, for the first few decades of television, the networks pretty much had enough power to keep television in line. If your show wasn’t bland enough to appeal to a big ol’ swath of middle America, your show did not get made, because it wasn’t going to get aired.

But in the ’80s, things were changing. It wasn’t going to last long, to be sure, but technology was changing the economics of running an independent station. In 1986, News Corp bought Metromedia’s little collection of TV stations — the remains of the long-defunct DuMont network. These would form the basis of the FOX network. But of course, FOX took several years to spin all the way up to programming a full prime-time schedule. Paramount too was starting to position itself to build what would, though not until the middle of the next decade, eventually evolve into UPN.

There was a perception that network TV, in its march to pander to the lowest denominator it could find, was largely banal and inclined to play it safe. FOX, of course, from its early days tried to position itself as “edgier”, with the crude humor of Married… With Children, and later with the edgier humor of In Living Color. At the same time, there was increasing tension over the impact of violence in the media. That would come to a head when the decade rolled over, but just at the moment, here in the nexus, really the only limiting factors on violence in television were economic. I mean, the FCC would step in if you showed a boob other than Al Bundy, an ass that didn’t belong to Dennis Franz, or said one of George Carlin’s infamous seven words, but in terms of horror-movie gore, it was a lot more vague where the limits were. And this was the decade when cable television really exploded, which put the pressure on broadcast television to push the boundaries.

In reference to Mystery Science Theater, we talked about the tradition of the TV horror host. Now, that was a phenomenon that attached itself to syndicated airings of old horror movies, but there’s a related tradition of horror hosting from the world of comic books. And it’s that tradition that inspired the 1982 film Creepshow, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero.

The success of Creepshow got TV-makers thinking about the possibility of doing the same sort of gore-heavy anthology horror for television. Of course, Sci-fi/horror anthologies had been a thing already. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Science Fiction Theater, all those. But we had something new here, going into the eighties. So we take just a pinch of The Twilight Zone, and stir in some of that pre-Code comic book horror, and we do it with a very ’80s desire to push the limits of acceptability.

I’d say “It could only happen in the nexus,” but the truth is that it really started out way back in 1983 with Tales from the Darkside, itself pretty much a continuation of Creepshow. Its very name is meant to remind you of the old EC comics like Tales from the Crypt (Which would, of course, get its own direct adaptation, but not until 1989). For some reason, the one that always sticks in my head is a particularly cerebral one, though, “Going Native”, the story of an alien who comes to Earth as an observer, and slowly lapses into depression as she internalizes the human conditon. Tales from the Darkside ended its run in 1988 and its makers moved on to Monsters, which to a large extent was just a continuation of Darkside, though, as the name implies, it was more monster-oriented.  Weirdly, I can’t remember a single episode of Monsters, though I remember watching it (I found the title sequence unpleasant to watch for some reason). And in 1988, Freddy’s Nightmares would see Jason Voorhees’s main ’80s slasher film rival Freddy Kreuger take a spin as an anthology horror host (I remember quite a lot of these. I always inexplicably freaked out at the Nightmare on Elm Street films, but for whatever reason, I rather liked the series). These shows would push the envelope for just how horrific and gruesome you could get on broadcast television.

But why am I talking about horror anthologies now? Well, mostly because I’m still struggling to find an angle for talking about Friday the 13th. Which isn’t an anthology.

Except that kinda sorta it almost is, but not quite. Friday the 13th the Series can’t really be properly called an anthology because it’s got the same characters from week to week in an ongoing storyline. But at the same time, it’s got a large guest cast, and there’s a lot of episodes where the regulars are really only sort of tangentially involved in the story, and every episode is, first and foremost, a self-contained horror story that’s connected to the rest of the series only at its periphery.

We’ve talked before about the concept of the series but I might as well spell it out here. Lewis Vendredi (The titular “Friday”, I guess), was an antiques dealer who sold his soul to Satan, as you do, gaining the power to magically curse antiques. Uncle Lewis and the hoofed man-beast had some sort of falling out, though, and Lewis breaks the deal, resulting in his death. Model, actress and singer (she had a minor Canadian hit with a dance cover of One Night in Bangkok that came out contemporaneously with Murray Head’s version) Louise Robey (credited as just “Robey”) and John D. LeMay play Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion, distant cousins who inherit the cursed antique shop, and sell off half the inventory before they find out what’s going on. They feel super bad about that.

Chris Wiggins plays Jack Marshak, an occult expert who’d spent years acquiring antiques for Vendredi, somehow not realizing what his old friend was up to. He becomes the de facto leader of the group, using his expertise and experience to help them reclaim an assortment of magical items which generally grant the user some magical boon when the necessary conditions are met, typically human sacrifice.

At the start of the third season, a run-in with Satanists transforms Ryan into a small child. Fortunately, his absentee mother just happens to have recently reentered his life and is happy to take another swing at childrearing. Yes, that does sound stupid. He’s replaced by Steve Monarque as Johnny Ventura, a freelance writer and sort of petty ne’er-do-well. He’s more or less playing the same character, except a little bit more naive and a little bit rougher. His more character-specific plots tend to involve him getting in trouble by yielding to temptation.

The guest cast is also full of familiar faces from the rest of our little wander through the nexus of TV shows produced in Toronto in the late ’80s. There’s a weird tendency to recycle actors as a new character who’s basically just a variation on the character they played previously. Denis Forest, for instance, turns up three times, always as a creepy weirdo. Jill Hennessey turns up three times. Colm Feore turns up twice as a brilliant, pretentious artiste — a choreographer once, and a novelist later. Colin Fox turns up three times, always playing a cunning, ruthless killer. Angelo Ricazos turns up three times, always as a guy who starts out trying not to be evil but who gets twisted by circumstance. Gwynyth Walsh turns up once, as do Catherine Disher, Belinda Metz, and Keram Maliki-Sanchez. Among the guests we haven’t run into yet are David Hewitt, Ray Walston, Enrico Colantoni, Sarah Polley, and Tia Carrere.

I’d hardly call the show formulaic, but there’s certainly a general pattern most episodes follow. The bulk of each episode tends to be devoted to watching the week’s guest star win fame, fortune and/or revenge using a cursed antique powered by human sacrifice. One of our regulars, usually Jack, finds evidence of the location of said antique, through either occult research or happening to read the newspaper on a day when “Bizarre and possibly comical human sacrifice victim found” makes the headlines. They try to acquire the antique, are briefly in danger of becoming the next sacrificial victim, and then take the antique back to the antique store vault after the owner runs afoul of the fine print in the curse’s licensing agreement and gets themself killed, dismembered, transformed into a goldfish, telefragged, or in extreme cases, dragged bodily to hell.

There are, of course, any number of variations you can do on it. The owner might be overtly evil, happy to murder for personal gain. Or they might be an otherwise good person in a desperate situation, such as in “What a Mother Wouldn’t Do”, wherein a desperate mother kills seven people, including herself, to invoke the power of a cursed cradle to save her dying child. Or they might be an otherwise good person who yields to temptation after discovering the curse by accident. They particularly enjoy the pathos of showing someone slowly undo themselves trying to do good with a cursed artifact, say, protecting their loved ones or bringing a villain to justice.  A few of the antiques even display agency of their own and are able to manipulate their owners, such as a tombstone radio in “And Now the News” which even attempts to manipulate the heroes at the end, offering to help them safely retrieve the rest of the antiques.

Our heroes might just show up at the end to sweep up, or they might need to intervene to end the cycle: one common twist is that the heroes are able to trick, manipulate or restrain the owner from holding up their end of the deal, thus causing the curse to backfire. Or they get caught up intimately in events — Mickey has a bad habit of being chosen by murderous antique-owners as the next victim. Other times either owner or victim is someone close to them. Jack’s fiancée, Mickey’s friend, Ryan’s father.

There are a handful of episodes that focus on other elements of the series mythology. Uncle Lewis’s break with Satan turns out not to imply he’s turned face, as his vengeful ghost makes a handful of appearances trying to return to the living world. And there are suggestions of a wider supernatural world: Lewis is revealed as the former head of a powerful coven which continues in his absence to scheme at world domination. Vampires are also a thing that exist in this world, independent of Vendredi’s cursed antiques. And word on the street is that the aborted fourth season would have introduced a subculture of independent supernatural-fighters, and you can almost kinda see this show trying to evolve into some kind of proto-Buffy. Another persistent rumor — no one really knows where this falls on the spectrum of “Someone involved in the production might have kicked the idea around briefly” to “They totally wanted to do it eventually” — is that the original plan was to have the final episode send the gang to Crystal Lake to recover a cursed hockey mask, in order to close the loop on why the show had its comically misleading title.

But the show is frustratingly short on follow-through. Uncle Lewis stops appearing after the beginning of the second season. His coven, though built up as recurring villains, only turn up once. There are occasional hits of romance between Micki and Ryan (They’re only cousins by marriage) or Micki and Johnny, but it never goes anywhere. The third season introduces the notion of three “Books of Lucifer”, whose prophecies endanger the world, but only one ever turns up. At the end of season 2, Micki discovers she has latent magical powers, which she temporarily exhausts her first time using them. It never comes up again.

That’s what I was getting at with that digression about horror anthologies. I get the distinct impression watching Friday the 13th The Series that Frank Mancuso Jr. wasn’t all that interested in an ongoing storyline. What he’s really trying to make is more of a thematically linked horror anthology series about ironically cursed objects, the linkage between them being only a bit less tenuous than in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. And that might be the key to understanding what went wrong with his version of War of the Worlds. Because, just as Friday the 13th feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by cursed antiques, War of the Worlds season 2 feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by alien genocide plots. And just like Friday, most of the individual episode premises are pretty good ideas. It takes very little effort to imagine, say, “Breeding Ground” or “Terminal Rock” being adapted as an episode of ’90s reboot of The Outer Limits. But with War, Mancuso was working with an established, and, importantly, character-driven, series, and his approach isn’t as good a fit there.

It’s widely believed among War of the Worlds fans that their show got the short shrift when it was handed over to Mancuso — that at best, he spent his A-game on the other show, and at worst, he actively sabotaged War. But when you really compare the two shows on an episode-by-episode basis, what becomes clear to me is that Mancuso wasn’t giving War of the Worlds a raw deal. In fact, his approach on both shows was strikingly, remarkably similar. It’s just that War of the Worlds was the wrong show to do that way.

A sci-fi-horror genre anthology style just isn’t quite the right way to continue the story that the first season of War of the Worlds started. It makes about as much sense as doing a cover of a song from a musical about chess at the same time as the original version was still on the charts, without even rearranging the music or anything.

The ’80s were weird.

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• Friday the 13th The Series is available on DVD from amazon.com

I explained some time ago…

It’s June 14, 2005. A 7.0 earthquake off the coast of California prompts tsunami fears, but a tidal (not actually tidal) wave doesn’t occur, there are no major injuries reported, and only modest property damage. Voters in Italy fail to overturn the Catholic country’s restrictive laws on fertility treatments. Michael Jackson is acquitted on all counts of child sexual abuse. Darth Vader is on the cover of the Rolling Stone. The Detroit Pistons beat the San Antonio Spurs 96-79 in game three of the NBA finals. It is a fairly quiet month, all things considered, and I hope you like it here, since we will be back.

It’s summer, so TV is mostly in reruns. Will Ferrell guests on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Pamela Anderson and Bob Saget are on Conan. We’re right around when I started getting too old to care about new music. Mariah Carey tops the charts with “We Belong Together”, followed by Gwen Stefani with “Hollaback Girl”. Kelly Clarkson is on there twice with “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, which I actually do rather like, and “Since U Been Gone,” about which I am neutral. The Killers enter the top ten this week with “Mr. Brightside”, or as you probably know it, “The Killers song that isn’t ‘Somebody Told Me’, but which is still pretty good aside from the fact that the second half of the song is literally just them doing the first half over again.” Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is still in theaters, having opened last month. New this week are the ill-advised Cedric the Entertainer-driven reimagining of The Honeymooners, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D, and a spy film called Mr. & Mrs. Smith which has nothing to do with the 1996 spy TV series Mr. & Mrs. Smith nor with the 1941 Alfred Hitchcock comedy film Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Tomorrow, Batman Begins.

But before that, this. I had this whole shtick planned where I was going to pretend that I wasn’t aware of the Stephen Spielberg movie and thought that this was the highly successful big-budget Hollywood blockbuster adaptation of War of the Worlds that came out in June, 2005, with me being all surprised at how great a departure it was for such a famously skilled filmmaker. But then I actually watched the movie, and… This movie does not even deserve the effort it would take to make those jokes. I try very hard to find the good in everything I watch. I can enjoy the basic wrongness of an Ed Wood film, and I can appreciate the zealous glee of a talented actor hamming it up because the script is crap, or an inexperienced actor giving a minor role in a cheap B-film everything they’ve got because they’re just so grateful for the work. And I can appreciate the sheer misguided gall of a Star Trek fan-series doing an episode where the dialog is just straight-up lifted verbatum directly out of an episode of The West Wing. And besides, I’m not a mean guy by nature, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’d hate to imagine Tim Dunnigan or Illya Woloshyn or Keram Malicki-Sánchez or Rod Pyle or Joe Pearson happening upon my blog (That last one actually happened) and hearing me badmouth them. And if I didn’t genuinely love stuff like War of the Worlds and Captain Power, I wouldn’t have spent four years doing this.

I just can’t do it this time. Hitler Meets Christ may have been a seriously fucked up movie, but at least you got to watch Jesus shoot Force Lightning at Hitler. But this movie is terrible. Timothy Hines, if you’re reading this, I know you put a lot of work in on this and I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but your film is awful, borderline unwatchable garbage, and it isn’t going to do either one of us any good to pretend it isn’t. The acting is wooden, the dialog is stilted, the visual effects are toddlerish, and the pacing is like Sapphire and Steel had a baby with Star Trek the Motion Picture, and that child smoked a whole bunch of weed while falling into a black hole.

It would be folly to call anything in particular the “worst” sin of this movie, but at least in terms of narrative, the first huge mistake is that it attempts to stay as faithful as possible to the book. If you’ve ever been annoyed by an acquaintance who complains when they change something from page to screen, show them this movie. In fact, show this movie to anyone who annoys you. They’ll probably leave you alone from then on.

What’s the problem with being slavishly faithful to the book? Remember, this is 19th century Science Fiction. Sure, we’ve talked at length about the outline of the book, but what’s the actual plot of The War of the Worlds? A nameless man walks from Woking to London, describing in detail what he sees along the way. There’s hardly any point where any of the characters express any agency. There isn’t much dialog, and when characters do speak, they tend to not engage in actual human speech so much as they pontificate. They open their mouths and exposition falls out. The book is by no means awful, but it isn’t really much of a story. Rather, it’s a fictional history that, for better or worse, has been structured like a travelogue. And you can do something with that. You could, for example, present it as a documentary. That worked really well for The Great Martian War. But you wouldn’t want to try to make a traditional narrative-based movie out of it; that would make as much sense as trying to make a traditional movie out of, say, World War Z.

And it didn’t have to be that way. When Timothy Hines started work on the film back in 2001, the plan was to set it in modern Seattle, orienting the tale around a news correspondent and arming the aliens with EMPs. But then September 11 happened, and the idea of a sudden, shocking attack out of the blue against major American cities suddenly stopped being the sort of thing folks were comfortable putting in a movie. It had, as Wells and Welles once said, “Ceased to be a game.”  So Hines and his colleage Susan Goforth rewrote the movie as a period piece. The film was scheduled for a theatrical release in March, 2005, but, according to Hines, venues pulled out for fear of reprisals from Paramount, which was getting ready to release their own adaptation.

Or maybe they pulled out because the movie was three hours long and basically unwatchable. Three. Hours. THREE HOURS.

The film was recut in September 2005 as H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds: Director’s Cut trimming it to a still-ponderous two and a quarter hours. It was recut again a year later trimming another ten minutes (and replacing some of the visual effects) as The Classic War of the Worlds. I have seen bits of all three versions, but my own innate sense of self-preservation forbid me from watching more than one of them all the way through and I don’t remember which one. Then in 2012, Hines took the footage, added some new material, and edited the thing in to a mockumentary called War of the Worlds — The True Story, purporting to be a documentary of historical events, with the 2005 film’s footage recontextualized as historical reconstructions and archival photography. And I wish I’d found that one first, because it sounds like that might actually be watchable, but I’ll be damned if I watch another version of this movie. Sorry.

There is hardly any point in summarizing the film. Just read the book. It’s all there, in excruciating detail. Most of the film’s dialog is closely drawn from the book, the nameless protagonist providing voiceover narration wherever it isn’t convenient to just have characters recite passage of the text, such as Ogilvy explaining that the apparent “pulsing” of Mars through the telescope is actually just the telescope vibrating due to the clockwork.

But somehow it gets worse when they go off-book. They insert a comic relief scene where Ogilvy, trying to get help upon discovering the first Martian cylinder, gets briefly locked up by a local farmer who assumes he’s gone mad.  Where Wells says, “One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed,” the movie tries to create a romantic scene. The nameless protagonist and his nameless wife out for a stroll at twilight, him playfully trying to make Mars’s “ruddy cast” sound sexy as he impresses her with his astronomical knowledge as they look up at the—

I don’t even. Night is a thing that actually exists, right? I mean, the filmmakers must have some firsthand knowledge of what night looks like, right? They should realize that night isn’t just day but a few degrees above the treetops the sky instantly turns black, right?

Hardly anything looks real in this movie. And not just the visual effects shots. Lots of the interiors are shot on a greenscreen, I have no particular sense of why. Exterior shots are invariably tinted to suggest the time of day, orange for daytime, and blue for night, these being the only concessions to the concept of day and night as things that exist. It’s basically like they keep beaming back and forth between CSI Miami and CSI NY. An establishing shot of Victorian London uses CGI so piss-poor it it seems to have inspired the Victorian London episodes of Doctor Who. Again, London is a real place, right? I mean, you can actually just go out and take pictures of it? What the everloving—

And it is just so ponderous. I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the privileged spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to find Lord Hilton at his house, but I was told he was expected from London by the six o’clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to waylay him. — The War of the Worlds, Chapter 3. It takes half an hour for the aliens to actually present themselves, though it feels much, much longer. Before they do, we’re treated to five minutes of the protagonist walking from Horsell Common to the local manor house to ask the local lord to help set up a cordon. He isn’t home, so we’re treated to another five minutes of the protagonist walking back to his own house, waiting until six o’clock, then walking to the train station to meet said lord when he gets off the train. Then walking back to Horsell Common. No one will be seated during the exhilarating “walking back and forth to the train station” scene.

Finally, mercifully, a Martian shows itself… Well okay, I will give them that it is consistent with the description in the book, aside from the fact that it looks for all the world like it’s flying. I know it’s supposed to be walking on tentacles, but there is neither any sense of weight to it, nor any sense that those tentacles actually exist in the same spaciotemporal dimension as the background. Also, the alien is weirdly flat. It feels like it should be mounted on a wall demanding a robot bring it five teenagers with “attitude”.

And then suddenly it’s night and Ogilvy and his entourage are planning to approach the pit under flag of truce. If you haven’t read the book, you basically have no chance in hell of figuring out what the heat ray is meant to look like. To wit, it’s a wobbly mirror. Again, true to the book, the ray itself is invisible. They just wave their mirror around and stuff bursts into flames.

Or rather, they wave their mirror around, and we cut to the victims, and there are some little gold sparklies on the screen, and everyone just sort of stands there for a good ninety seconds looking alarmed and sort of dancing, and then they burst into flames, some instantly turning into still-dancing skeletons that kinda remind me of the skeletons from that high-end porno movie Pirates from a few years ago.

Oh, and one of the victims looks for all the world like being heat-rayed gives her an orgasm.

After what feels like about six hours of people very slowly gurning and not trying to run or anything until the special effects department gets around to drawing some flames on them, the horrified protagonist runs back home, stopping only to chastise some people by the side of the road who, not having born witness to the destruction, think the whole thing sounds a bit silly. This too is taken straight from the book.

I get the feeling that literally all the filmmakers knew about Victorian England came down to “They were kind of repressed and prim.” With absolutely no indication of excitement at all, the protagonist deadpans to his wife this bit of narration: “I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways.” She smiles nobly and suggests that it is, “Something of your schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism,” with far less passion but exactly the same sense of this as something that has real consequences for real humans as a Presidential candidate talking about the possibility of starting another war in the middle east.

But shit gets real when their CGI house starts getting grazed by the heat ray and starts dropping CGI bricks and roofing before catching on CGI fire.

We’re almost an hour in before we see a tripod. It’s… Not the worst thing in the world. Still very bad, though. It’s just about passable when it’s not trying to interact with anything. The illusion completely collapses when they do. The curate’s demise looks like something from Photoshop Disasters, and the black smoke is even worse, having, I think, been added in MSPaint. The whole “slavishly translate the whole text of the book verbatum” thing means that this is also the only adaptation to show us the less-common types of Martian machines, such as the flying machine (It serves absolutely no purpose in the story, and is clearly only there because it’s mentioned in the book that they had one) and the “handling” machine that collected humans for consumption.

The scene where we witness the aliens exsanguinating a human victim should be gruesome. And it would be, except that at the key moment, the live actress magically transforms into a low-poly CGI model. Not a model of a human, even, but, like, a ragdoll or something. What I’m getting at here is that this is an intensely ridiculous-looking movie.

But hey, at least the acting is terrible too. When people talk, they rarely seem to be talking to each other, just pontificating for the benefit of the audience. The artilleryman seems to be just reading from a prepared speech (and the protagonist’s abandonment of him is handled in a montage). Most of the dialog is delivered by actors staring vacantly off into the distance, which is terrible, but also probably the right way to do it, since most of the dialog doesn’t actually read like dialog, but rather as narration. Instead of freaking out at their impending demise, people will somberly declare their scientific theories about how Martian technology works or what their strategic plans are. Upon watching the Martians feed, the writer’s reaction is not to wet himself and crawl off into a corner to whimper, but rather to explain through his tears that the Martians, being highly advanced, must have evolved beyond the need for a digestive system. And when, again, as in the book, he finally decides to end it all by throwing himself in front of a tripod (The damned things pick that exact moment to die, forcing us to keep going with this interminable movie), he does so only after declaring his intentions. The single best performance in the entire thing is the newspaper boy who tells the protagonist about the Martian cylinder, excitedly chattering about the possibility of “Men from Mars, roasted alive inside a meteor.”

The tone is radically inconsistent. I assume they’re trying to convey Victorian stoicism again, but mostly, everyone just alternates between bored and a very low-key histrionic (That is, a degree of histrionic that does not interfere with all their dialog sounding like someone reading off a placard at the museum). Possibly the most egregious is any scene with The Writer and The Wife (Played by producer and cowriter Susan Goforth), which I think genuinely tries to suggest affection between these two despite a complete lack of chemistry, a complete lack of anything useful to this end in the book they’re adapting, a strong belief that as Victorians, no one should show emotion unless they’re having a panic attack, and neither one of them being any good at acting. When he returns home after the attack on Horsell Common, she listens to his shellshocked description of events with what’s supposed to be sincerity, but comes off like she’s humoring a small child who had a bad dream. The next day. the two of them apparently go about their business as usual, her, I think, pressing flowers as he reads the newspaper over tea. And though the narration dutifully tells us how compelling the writer found the artilleryman’s plans to build a brave new world, the actual speech is dull and passionless, and the rest of their time together is handled via a montage ending with the writer waving back to him as he walks away.

This movie is kind of a perfect storm of terrible. Bad in practically every way a movie can be (The audio levels are okay. That is the one common low-budget sin this movie doesn’t commit). I hope you can believe me when I say that its low budget is far from the worst of its problems. We’ve talked about low-budget productions before. Some people are able to squeeze out a masterpiece on a tiny budget, and some people can squeeze out… Something that has a kind of indie low-budget charm. You know what you can’t do on a shoestring budget? A three hour special-effects extravaganza. You could maybe do something with intense character-driven drama, but you know what the worst possible way to build compelling characters is? To slavishly adhere to the text of an H. G. Wells novel. Out of the entire cast, there’s only five characters who have names (And that’s counting “Greg the Butcher” and the Writer’s servant, who only has a name so he can shout at her to evacuate the burning house). Everyone else, including the nominal protagonist, is just “The Writer” or “The Wife” or “The Writer’s Brother”.No one was crying out for a completest, novel-accurate adaptation of The War of the Worlds. You couldn’t have given Spielberg this brief and had him turn out a functional movie. It’s just bad. Badly acted, badly written, badly made and a bad idea in the first place.

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• H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is available in its original 3-hour cut from third-party sellers on amazon.com.
• The two-hour recut, The Classic War of the Worlds is available via Amazon video
• War of the Worlds: The True Story is available via Amazon video.

Instead of my regular column, I’m going to do some special programming today in honor of the brave soldiers who died in The Great Martian War.

We’ll return Saturday with new tales from an alternate universe’s Doctor Who, and War of the Worlds will be back next week. Here’s a sneak peak…

 

 

And coming soon, I’ve told you about the big 40th anniversary revelation, and I’ve alluded to the arrival of The Terrible Zodin for the 2004 series finale. But surely, for the half-century, they’d have to come up with something to top that, wouldn’t they?

 

What is this “it” which is to him “up”, and which he can perhaps “handle”?

It is the not-too-distant future, next Sunday, AD. With War of the Worlds on hiatus at this point in the nexus, I find myself in a situation not too dissimilar from where I was about a year ago when it came time to talk about Max Headroom. You can’t talk about music in 1988 without mentioning “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, you can’t talk about movies in 1988 without mentioning Die Hard, and you can’t talk about Science-Fiction TV in 1988 without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. But really, at this point, what’s left to say about any of them beyond, “They’re really quite good,” and “Okay, I think by now I finally understand all the references.”

From my ramble about Out of this World, you might remember that back in the ’80s, TV stations had a lot more independence, and unaffiliated stations in particular had to scrounge for programming where they could get it, and even very small stations would often end up making some of their own shows. Locally produced TV for a purely local market is something you don’t see a lot of any more, but it used to be a common model (Particularly for kids’ shows. See also: Romper Room).

One of the most popular forms was the Late Night Horror Movies We Can Get the Rights To For Cheap Anthology, and that form’s become kind of enshrined in our culture. Get some crappy old horror movies on the cheap, stick your weather man in a Dracula costume, and have him introduce it. The form had originated in 1954 with Vampira, a Los Angeles-area hostess playing a sexed-up vampire inspired by Morticia Addams (Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was born out of an ’80s attempt to revive the character). By the late ’50s, Screen Gems had packaged the Universal monster movies and early Columbia horror films under the label Shock! for licensing to independent stations, leading to a spate of local shows often titled some variation on “Shock Theater”. By the ’60s, the Creature Features package added many of the films of Roger Corman, Hammer Studios, Toho and Daiei. Hosts such as Vampira, Morgus the Magnificent, Joe Bob Briggs, Zacherly, Count Gore de Vol ( Washington, DC-area host Dick Dyzsel, better known as the host of the local kids’ show Bozo the Clown) and Svengooli would introduce the movies, usually with a short comedy sketch, and reappear at the commercial breaks. For the most part, their schtick and material varied from “bad” to “worse”, but there were more than a few stand-outs, and lots of the hosts became minor local celebrities. Coast to Coast AM‘s George Noory has cited Morgus as an inspiration, Drew Carey was influenced by Ghoulardi. And Roddy MacDowell’s character in Fright Night is an homage to ’60s host Sinister Seymour. So influential was the format that these sorts of Horror Hosts still exist today, despite the fact that the TV environment has changed so much by now that they’re pretty much entirely redundant.

In another part of the late ’60s and early ’70s, CBS had brought back ’50s puppets-and-live-actor trio Kukla, Fran and Ollie to host the CBS Children’s Film Festival. Unrelatedly, in 1972, Douglas Trumbull made an environmentally themed science fiction movie called Silent Running (no relation to the 1985 song by Mike + the Mechanics), about an astronaut who hijacks a space ship carrying the last existing plant life from Earth (the rest having been wiped out by capitalism, because fuck the environment, it’s the ’70s) and heads out into deep space with no companionship save for two maintenance robots he’s reprogrammed in an attempt to keep his sanity. Fast-forward a bit. If you somehow don’t know this, back in 1988, Minneapolis-area prop comic Joel Hodgson came up with a premise for a comedy series and pitched it to the independent Twin Cities TV station KTMA-23 (Now CW-affiliated WUCW). Drawing inspiration from the tradition of late night horror hosts, from Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and from Silent Running, he concocted a backstory about an inventor who’d built a “Satellite of Love” and launched himself into space, where he built three robots, Gypsum (voiced by J. Elvis Weinstein, going by his maiden name “Josh”), Crow (voiced by Trace Beaulieu), and Beeper (voiced by no one, as he spoke only on beeps), to look after the place while he watched movies and offered color commentary. With producer Jim Mallon and cameraman Kevin Murphy, they produced a 30 minute pilot in which Joel demonstrated his latest invention (a chiropractic helmet), saved the station’s plant life from a space virus, and watched selections from the 1969 film The Green Slime.

So here’s the deal. After our little investigation into Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness, I thought to myself, “Hey, you should maybe look into that show that the other guest child actor from the second season of War of the Worlds.”

I didn’t think much of Illya Woloshyn in the role of Torri. It was a terrible role that no one could have saved, but he’s Carrie Fisher in The Star Wars Holiday Special levels of glazed over. And, I mean, okay. He’s eight. Hardly any eight-year-olds are decent actors, and the fact that he could take direction, say his lines, and keep a straight face puts him way out ahead of the child actors they keep giving small parts to on Power Rangers.

Despite appearances, Illya Woloshyn must have had some skill, as by 1989, he was already a successful stage actor, having played Gavroche in the 1988 Toronto production of Les Misérables and later in the Canadian touring company. All the same, his TV credits are modest, a string of smallish guest roles, with one exception. From 1992 to 1994, he played the lead in the CBC fantasy adventure-series The Odyssey. So I reckoned I’d watch a bit of it and write an essay about it and that would be the end of it, since clearly, I should not be expecting much, given my past experience with the actor and the most ninetiestastic CGI opening sequence I’ve seen in years.

But here’s the thing: it turned out to be really good. Awkward in some places, sure, derivative in a few ways, okay, and with all the attendant problems of having a large, young cast. But still, really good. And kind of trippy. And it is, to a large extent, exactly the sort of thing that is in my wheelhouse. Not technically post-apocalyptic, but definitely eschaton-adjacent.

And so what I’m going to do is not give you a quick rundown on the series as a whole and then be done with it. What I’m going to do is talk about the first episode. And then I’m going to put it on a shelf and come back to it in more depth at some point in the future. Because you, dear reader, deserve it.

Because here is the basic idea that underlies The Odyssey: It’s Life on Mars crossed with The Tribe. In 1992. There’s other stuff mixed in there too, like shades of The Wizard of Oz and The Prisoner (weirdly, the interesting but misguided 2009 miniseries), but those are the big ones. The Odyssey is, of course, a Castaway Story, a theme that’s come up on this blog before. Specifically, it’s a children’s castaway story, which is a genre that seemed really common when I was a kid. They always had the same setup, more or less. A kid falls down a rabbit hole or gets sucked up by a tornado or gets lost on a carnival dark ride, or gets sucked into a mirror, or falls into a wormhole, or gets kidnapped by a weirdo in a police box, or steps into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and ends up in a surreal otherworld under the rule of a mad queen or witch or sorcerer or music company executive or the Borg, who they have to defeat and/or avoid as they look for a way home, a task at which they continually fail in ways which become increasingly contrived as the series progresses.[br]Seems like you don’t see this kind of castaway story so much these days. Certainly, none of Dylan’s favorite shows revolve around the idea, The Doctor gives his companions free cell phone upgrades, and while Stargate tried it twice, Atlantis only stuck out the whole “We’re stranded and can’t go home” thing for a season, and Universe revealed the communication stones in the first episode. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve got some guesses. The most obvious and banal might be that it sounds exactly like the sort of thing that the focus-group-driven 1990s would crush out as being “inappropriate” for children in much the same way that it was decided that it was probably a bad idea to base a running gag about Big Bird trying to tell adults something very important and true about his buddy Mr. Snuffleupagus (Big Bird can call him “Snuffy”; they’re besties. I will call him Mr. Snuffleupagus) and have them constantly dismiss and disbelieve him. As much as I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to 1990s focus groups, I can kinda see that perhaps it is not the best idea in the world to have children’s media constantly normalize parental abandonment, and that maybe the constant nagging fear that you might be whisked off to a weird place where supernaturally powerful status-quo-preservation forces keep you from ever getting home or seeing your family again is not something with which we ought to burden our children.[br]But even beyond that, I wonder if the whole idea of being whisked off to a new world and never seeing your family again is something that just doesn’t speak to millennials the way it does to older folks. As the world’s become exponentially more connected over the past few decades, the idea of “We’re moving to a new town so you will never see your old friends again,” doesn’t track with their experience the same way as it did with people from a few decades earlier. In an age before cell phones, Skype, and unlimited long distance, a family member who moved across the country may as well have moved to Mars. And a generation of people who moved back in with their parents after college don’t have the same relationship with the classic American narrative of sticking everything you own in a car and heading off to start a new life on your own in a distant city, so the classic fantasy narrative of being zapped away to Oz (The fictional fantasy land, not Australia.) isn’t one they relate to in the same way: it’s not one that serves as a metaphor for the same real-world anxieties.[br]Or maybe it’s just that it’s played out. After seven years of watching Captain Janeway spuriously sacrifice her crew in order to find new ways each week to sabotage Voyager’s attempts to get home, lest she break the real Prime Directive (Never ever disrupt the status quo), people were just sick and tired of the series of contrivances. Maybe they used up their ability to watch failure be the only option over and over again. The reasons and excuses just weren’t good enough any more. I still get annoyed at an episode of Kidd Video from 1984 where, to save the status quo, Whiz Kid tells a genie, “I wish my friends and I were safe at home,” and the genie insisted that “safe” and “at home” counted as two separate wishes, in order to grant the former without granting the latter. Cheating bastard. The long and short of the premise is that this kid Jay lapses into a coma due to a head injury and is transported to a surreal otherworld (Apparently called “Downworld”, though I haven’t watched far enough to hear anyone use the term yet), drawn from his subconscious and yet apparently with its own independent existence, populated only by children, counterparts of people from Jay’s waking life, who subsist by scavenging and organize themselves into The Warriors-style flamboyantly themed street gangs.

​​And the bad guy is played by 16-year-old Ryan Reynolds dressed as a Nazi. Though we don’t actually meet him in this episode. But still.

They waste little time getting started. Jay and his friend Donna (Also inexplicable, a pre-teen girl in 1992 being named “Donna”, as the name had gone pretty much extinct among names for newborns in North America by 1980) are, kind of inexplicably, standing by the side of a suburban street with his dog, playing chess. The local middle school bully Keith has offered Jay membership in his tree fort club in exchange for showing  the gang the antique brass pocket telescope he inherited from his missing-presumed-dead father, and Donna thinks this is a terrible idea, what with Keith being a jerk and obviously setting him up. Jay won’t be swayed though, because man is that treehouse hella cool. I  mean, it’s got trap doors and a climbing rope on a pulley and it’s surrounded on three sides by a stream and the only way to it is over its own private bridge, and it’s just freaking awesome.

So despite Donna’s reservations, he goes home and retrieves the telescope from a little shrine that includes a framed black-and-white childhood photo of his father in a navy uniform, holding the antique. Okay. Technically there’s nothing weird about someone Jay’s age having a black-and-white photo of his father. All of the childhood photos I’ve seen of my dad are black-and-white. But… Is that the most recent photo they had? That photo is of Jay’s dad at (we will learn by implication) fifteen. And why was his dad in the navy at fifteen?

Jay’s cool spyglass meets with the approval of Keith and the treehouse gang, because World War I-era boy scout gear is all the rage with early ’90s suburban Canadian bullies, and grant him membership in the club. Then Keith pretty much immediately gives the game away by declaring the spyglass their new official lookout device, despite his promise to give it back. Honestly, I don’t know how much to blame Keith here since it didn’t actually seem like he was trying to hide the fact that membership dues consisted of contributing something with which to enrich the fort. He spies Donna approaching via the footbridge — she never gives any specific reason for being there, presumably she’d anticipated the sudden but inevitable betrayal Jay’s about to suffer — and they use the pretense of ordering Jay to send her away to shove him out the (trap) door and shoot water guns at him until he leaves.

Jay has a brief exchange with Donna where neither of them say very much, but it’s communicated pretty clearly that (a) she told him so, but (b) he doesn’t need her rubbing it in right now, however, (3) she’s got his back. Donna gets a lot better as the show goes on, but for right now she kinda bugs me. She’s like every female character in a Dr. Seuss book (Sorry for ruining Dr. Seuss for you, but he’s basically complete shit at writing female characters, and at least once was rude and insulting to “silly women” who called him out on it. There’s some evidence that he did occasionally <em>try</em> to do better at it, but never managed to succeed), existing purely to look disapproving and remind heroic boys that their mother would not approve of him having fun adventures.

All the same, she runs interference for him by… Standing there and looking dour. Realizing that perhaps they should have waited until after Jay completed his assigned task to lock him out, the entire tree fort gang climbs down to get rid of her, taunting her and stealing her glasses and crutch (Donna has some sort of disability and uses a forearm crutch), though Keith seems to realize this crosses a line and gives it back to her a moment later, his indignant bully sneer turning to a look of shame. She just stands there and gives them a resigned, disapproving look.

Jay circles around and slips back into the tree fort, but that treasonous dog gives him away. As the gang forces their way back into the fort to catch him, he tries to escape via the climbing rope, but, what with the whole thing having been designed by twelve-year-olds, the pulley breaks off its mount and drops him down the side of the hill, where he rolls until his head whacks a large rock in a way that does not look at all realistic but nevertheless conveys unambiguously that he’s seriously injured his brain. As he falls, the beloved telescope goes flying into the air, landing in Keith’s hand as though magically drawn to him. He panics and throws it into the stream before hoofing it with the rest of the gang. Donna prods Jay with her crutch and tries to rouse him.

Continue reading Grapevine: The Odyssey

Oh, I wish I was blowing up Prince Edward Island,
And going on to bomb Ontario!
The destruction of Canada and all of its culture,
Is by far my favorite scenario![br]— Tom Servo, The Canada Song[br]Mystery Science Theater 3000[br] Episode 9×10[br]The Final Sacrifice

It is September 1, 1988, probably. Peter Gabriel tops the charts with “Monkey”. Super Mario Bros. 2 is released in the US. A momentary lull in world events makes this a slow news day. Nothing much is going on in the world, especially Seattle, which is in the second day of a blackout that’s going to last until Sunday. Nothing much is going on on TV, what with the strike.

In Canada, as usual, things are weird. Canada, of course, isn’t quite a real place for most Americans. We have some basic understanding that it exists, and that it’s distinct from the United States, primarily in ways that seem slightly silly to us. But mostly it’s a kind of abstraction: a place that seems like nowhere in particular, but still somehow familiar, and we kinda understand that its cities look like every major US city we see on TV, and its forests look like every alien planet on Stargate SG-1, and its hospitals look like every spooky hospital on The X-Files, and people pronounce “About” funny and are suspiciously polite, and that they didn’t think that being independent of the rule of a tax-raising, gun-grabbing, insane tyrant was a big enough deal to be worth fighting a war over. We know it as the semimythical land of origin for characters who seem like they could not be so mundane as to have come from any real place anyway, like Alanis Morisette, William Shatner, Drake, Pamela Anderson, the Barenaked Ladies, Keanu Reeves, Ryan Reynolds, Avril Lavigne, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Justin Bieber, Peter Cullen, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. We know it as a place we can describe someone as being from to excuse them being just a bit peculiar, as in Sliders, where they’d frequently claim to be Canadian to justify their ignorance about the local customs. We know it as a place that produces dimes which treacherously hide themselves in our change, waiting to foil our attempts to use a vending machine. But I kid, of course, which is a thing we know we can do because Canada’s a tremendously polite sort of country with an unbounded capacity to just sit back and listen to people say absolute crazy bullshit and remain polite to them without flying off the handle even if they’re clearly asking for it. They’re sort of the Jon Stewart of countries.

About twenty-five years ago now, my sister had to write a report about Canada for a grade school class, the angle of which was something along the lines of explaining the pros and cons of being forcibly relocated there from the US (I have no idea). In helping her to do her research, my mother was shocked to discover such factoids as that Canadians enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free assembly, an elected government, [herein was meant to be a reference to freedom from the quartering of troops in peacetime, but none of the Canadians I talked to knew whether or not that was actually legal in Canada], and private property. She was doubly shocked to discover that being transplanted unexpectedly from the US to Canada basically had no downside, at least, not if you already speak a little bit of French.

But Canada is not merely a convenient place for American television makers to send a camera crew to record some footage on the cheap. In fact, Canada produces a great deal of its own media, the Canadian government recognizing the value of maintaining and reinforcing their own cultural identity in the face of being right next door to a gigantic superpower whose only remaining export is massively popular pop culture artifacts.

And a result of that is that Canada produces a lot of TV which is, in Canada, entirely mainstream, entirely respectable, non-marginal programming that could never possibly get made in the US with Hollywood’s cultural imperative to never do anything that might make less than the absolute maximum amount of money by not doing anything too weird or alienating like including fantastical elements in a show that is primarily a straight drama. So you get shows like Being Erica, about a young woman trying to make her way in the publishing industry. Whose therapist has the power of time travel. Or The Listener, about an EMT who consults for the Canadian equivalent of the FBI. Using his power to hear the thoughts of others.

Your standard Canadian shows don’t get a lot of time on US broadcast TV, of course, since that’s time that could be more profitably devoted to Law and Order spin-offs and reality shows. But there’s one big exception. Children’s television, particularly in the 1980s, is infamous for being made and distributed by people who gave zero fucks. As I’ve repeatedly said, quality in children’s shows of the 1980s was largely accidental, the result of writers who happened to be talented allowed to do whatever they wanted because the people in charge didn’t care. And if there happened to be a nearby country that was producing a bunch of children’s television on the cheap that fulfilled network standards for educational programming, heck, they’d take it. And thus did American children of the 1980s and 1990s learn the wonders of such programs as Arthur (A series in which Dudley Moore played a loveably alcoholic anteater), Read All About It! (A rather amazing series about three kids who learn English and Canadian history from ghosts while fighting an intergalactic warlord who plots to take over the Earth through subverting local zoning ordinances), Today’s Special (A long-running series about the cursed existence of a department store mannequin who’s been granted sentience but only during the nighttime hours and so long as he never sets foot outside the store), Inspector Gadget (A fusion of The Pink Panther, Get Smart! and Robocop, featuring hilariously criminal child endangerment), The Magic Schoolbus (A political tract opposing tenure for teachers by chronicling the history of child endangerment by an unfirable grade school teacher with satanic powers), Are You Afraid of the Dark? (In retrospect, the least scary show on this list), and ReBoot (A weaponized form of motion sickness), or as they call it in Canada, “Rebout”.

Today, we’re going to talk about one that did not, as far as I know, ever get any airplay south of the border. You’ll recall that back in our discussion of “Loving the Alien“, we were introduced to Canadian actor/singer/writer/director/producer Keram Malicki-Sánchez, who played the alien boy Ceeto. Already an established child actor since at least 1984, Keram had just recently starred in an educational series for TVOntario that would allegedly garner a cult following over the years as VHS copies became a regular fixture in grade school health classes for years afterward.

I say “allegedly” because for a “cult” show, there’s remarkably little concrete information about it on the internet. No two sources have the same episode list. IMDb lists nine episodes, but a catalog listing from an educational resources company refers to it as a twenty-part series. I haven’t found exact airdates. There’s no fansites I’ve been able to locate or capsule summaries of the episodes. It’s technically possible the whole thing is a complicated hoax.

Except for what does exist. Which is two episodes of the series that were uploaded by Constant Change Media, Keram’s media group. They’re out of context, and seem like they might be part of a continuing storyline, but who can tell? The two episodes seem intended to go back-to-back, but the one episode listing I found that had both of them placed them at opposite ends of the season.

So what exactly is Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness? Nothing less than that most obscure of television genres, Single-Topic Science Fiction Made-for-public-TV Educational Miniseries. If you’ve been hanging around long enough to remember my coverage of Tomes and Talismans, you’ll know that this sort of thing is absolutely my bag. And more than that, I sort of love in general things that have an entirely inappropriate level of detail. Like highly detailed scale models, and model railroads, and PSAs with plots, and the stop-motion/tilt-shift/cgi title sequence to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the overbleed in a pop-up book where there’s some detail under the flaps that is legitimately part of the picture but isn’t meant to be visible.

Zardip is like that, in its way. There’s a curious intersection here: this is a low-budget educational series. No one was making a lot of money for making it, and it was intended for an essentially captive audience. There is basically zero incentive to put any effort into this. But paradoxically, it’s not inherently ephemeral. Almost exactly the opposite. As an educational project, the pittance spent on its production was meant to produce a product that could be used for educational purposes for a very long time: we watched Read All About It! in my fifth grade reading class a full decade after it had originally aired.

And, as I hope I’ve made clear, you don’t get to be the sort of person who succeeds in the media industry by being inclined to halfass it. And Keram Malicki-Sánchez has a resume that makes Disney Triple Threats look like slackers. Let’s be clear here: Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness is not what one would call a “good” television show by any of the usual standards. But it is a show that is packed full of little moments which are… Well, “good” is too strong of a word. But certainly far better than this concept actually deserves.

What’s the concept? You’ll probably want to be sitting down for this. Zardip Pacific is an alien robot from a distant planet of robots. Zardip’s people are suffering from chronic mechanical breakdowns. The overmind of this robot planet, known as “The Highship”, has, I gather, discovered that the people of Earth are self-maintaining, and has Zardip transformed into some kind of human simulacrum and sent to Canada in order to learn the, ahem, secret of Healthy Wellness.

And if that does not sound like the most wonderfully bonkers setup for a TV show, I would dearly like some of what you’re drinking. Obviously, you can’t expect the content to live up to the premise, but still. Robot. Comes to Earth. To learn grade-school health and hygiene. To save his planet. Of robots.

The opening sequence is a beautiful piece of eightiestastic Video Toaster cheese. It looks like the title sequence from Blake’s Seven mated with the title sequence from Kids Incorporated. The smooth sounds of ’80s easy listening performed on a Casio SK-1 inform us that, “From a place far, far away / Comes a friend to find the way / To be healthy and be strong / Come with him, come along…” A title screen that is way too metal for this show gives way to a cast of actors who aren’t in either of these episodes (Or, for that matter, anything else. Hardly any of these performers went on to do anything else), using that old-school transition effect where each image sort of flies off into the distance leaving behind a ghostly purple trail.

Continue reading Grapevine: Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness

Content Warning: The following article includes discussions of sexual and emotional abuse and coercion.

It is March 23, 1782, September 9, 1959, September 24, 1985, December 21, 1988, November 17, 1989, and March 5, 1999. Yep. It’s going to be another of those weird ones.

In Ohio, 96 Christian Lenape are massacred by Pennsylvania militiamen at the missionary village of Gnadenhutten. The Netherlands officially recognizes the United States of America. Charles Watson-Wentworth becomes the Prime Minister of England. Atlas Missile 10-D carries an unmanned Mercury capsule into space, testing its heat shield. Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 is the first man-made object to smack into the moon. A week later, Nikita Kruschev would present President Eisenhower with a reproduction of the pennant it carried. The wreck of the Titanic is located by Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel. Steve Jobs leaves Apple to found NeXT. An 8.1 earthquake hits Mexico city, killing ten thousand and injuring another thirty thousand. Pan Am flight 103 is blown up over Lockerbie. Roy Orbison dies. Benazier Bhutto becomes the Prime Minister of Pakistan. The Berlin Wall falls in Germany, and the Velvet Revolution begins in Czechoslovakia. The Dow closes for the first time at over 10,000. NATO launches air strikes against Yugoslavia.

Topping the charts are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with String Quartet in G and Symphony No. 35 in D, Joseph Haydn with Symphony No. 73 in D, The Browns with “The Three Bells”, Dire Straits with “Money for Nothing”, Poison with “Every Rose Has its Thorn”, Bad English with “When I See You Smile”, and Monica with “Angel of Mine”. On the stage, you can watch Richard Cumberland’s comic play “The Walloons”, or stay home and enjoy radio host Robert Q. Lewis guesting on on I’ve Got a Secret, the pilot for Growing Pains, Christmas specials of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Night Court, the second part of that Perfect Strangers episode with James Noble, an episode of Just the Ten of Us coincidentally titled “Dangerous Liaisons”, the pilot episode of short-lived FOX demon-hunting series Brimstone, the Stargate SG-1 episode “1969”, or Olympic Gold Medalist Michelle Kwan skating to Disney’s greatest hits.

I mentioned recently that the very first thing I bought on amazon.com was a hardcover copy of the eighteenth century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos on March 14, 1999. What prompted me to pull the trigger was, and I don’t recall the exact circumstances leading up to it, I ended up going to see this movie Cruel Intentions which had just come out in theaters, and about five to ten minutes into it, I suddenly realized that this hip and sexy teen movie was a straight-up adaptation of a play I’d seen about a year prior when either the Charles Street Players or the Evergreen Players (Can’t remember which) put on a performance of Christopher Hampton’s 1985 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which I’d rather liked. And besides, I’d also recently read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, another 1780s epistolary novel which I’d… I won’t say “liked”, but it was very meaningful to me (I was going through some stuff).

In a lot of ways, Liaisons is kind of the anti-Werther. Where Goethe (and most epistolary novels, really, and, for that matter, found footage movies) use the device to increase intimacy, giving the impression that we are privy to the characters’ most private thoughts, the letters in Liaisons are full of contradictions and deceptions. They lie to each other. They concoct complex deceptions. Even characters who are conspiring together will misdirect each other. Rather than “legitimizing” the narrative, it instead keeps us constantly aware of the artifice: we are seeing exactly what each character wishes to present.

Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a career military man. He’d wanted to go to America to help in the revolution, as many prominent French generals had done, but couldn’t afford it. Instead he got stuck on a boring assignment fortifying a little island I’ve never heard of whose most notable feature seems to be that it kinda looks like a penis and scrotum. To pass the time, and, I assume, inspired by the local geography, he decided to take a stab at literary immortality by writing a novel about the decadent hedonism of the minor aristocracy. Nailed it on the first try, really. The novel was fantastically successful, and spurred on by that success, he never wrote another novel again, but did go on to several lesser accomplishments such as inventing the artillery shell and numbering the streets of Paris. He was a staunch believer in Republican Revolutionary-era French sense: someone who wanted a constitutional republic rather than an insane, inbred, terminally daft monarch who reckoned the peasants were essentially a funny sort of farm animal ideals, and supported the revolution aligning himself with the Jacobins, but eventually got himself (fairly or not, I don’t know) branded an Orleaniste (That is, someone who wanted modern UK-style constitutional monarchy with a representative government and a king as a largely ceremonial head of state) and thrown in jail. He was narrowly spared from the guillotine by virtue mostly of just running out the clock on the Reign of Terror. He tried and failed to get into banking and diplomacy before returning to the army under Napoleon until his death in 1803.So when it turned out that our little trip through the nexus with War of the Worlds brought us, at the same point in the overarching narrative, in two different years, to the point where a film adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses was released in the US, well, that was just too weird of a coincidence not to take a closer look.

The story had already been adapted to the screen once before. Roger Vadim had made an adaptation set in a contemporary French ski resort back in 1959 with a jazz soundtrack by Thelonious Monk (Downside to being a child of the ’80s, the cool Jazz soundtrack for the seduction scenes makes me think of nothing so much as Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood), which had been the most successful French-made film in years, but was barred from export by the French government as it was, “unrepresentative of French film art.” When it finally made it to the states several years later, its frank sexuality prompted censorship and protests.

Both 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons and 1989’s Valmont return the story to its original setting in the last years of the Ancien Régime, but the former is based on the Hampton play, while the latter is adapted more directly from the book. Cruel Intentions rewrites the story to revolve around socialites at a modern New York prep school.

There’s been a handful of further adaptations: 2003 gave us Untold Scandal, retelling the story in Joseon Dynasty Korea and a French TV miniseries which, like the first movie, moved events to the 1960s Parisienne social scene. In 2005, Michael Lucas’s sexually explicit adaptation shifted the setting to the New York fashion industry, and the 2012 Chinese Dangerous Liaisons moved the setting to 1930s Shanghai. But I haven’t seen any of those, and don’t have the time to work past the language barrier, since my French isn’t passable, and I don’t speak a word of Korean, Mandarin, or Gay Porn, so I’m going to be focusing on the pre-century versions.

So, the plot. Okay. Deep breath.

I think it’s a bit interesting that there seems to be a bit of a tradition of casting a nontraditional romantic lead in the role of Valmont. I mean, I know that Alan Rickman and John Malkovitch and Colin Firth have all inspired their share of happy-pantsfeels, but I tend to think of them as the sorts of actors who you’re always meant to be surprised by in romantic roles. And one of my roommates may have had a crush on Ryan Philippe, but even he spends most of the movie playing down his looks.  When I saw it back in ’97 or ’98, Valmont was played by Ian Oldaker, who, college theater being what it is (that is, a place where you’ll get a talented and versatile young actor from time to time, but getting more than one at the same time probably requires collusion), got a lot of the leading roles during that part of the ’90s. I remember noting at the time that he seemed maybe just a bit sinister for a role that involved many easy seductions. But a bit later, he also played the lead in Richard III, and that really drove home something about the character of Valmont for me: he isn’t meant to be straightforwardly handsome: Valmont is possibly the literary antecedent of the Sexy Bad Boy. In direct contrast to Merteuil, who, as she admits, is forced due to her societal role to trade on her looks, Valmont’s primary weapon is not his appearance but his charm. And ever since, I’ve implicitly imagined a kind of kinship between Richard of Gloucester and the Vicomte de Valmont, most particularly in Richard’s easy seduction of Lady Anne at the end of the second scene:[br]Was ever woman in this manner wooed?[br]Was ever woman in this manner won?[br]…[br]Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,[br]Myself to be a marvellous proper man.[br]I’ll be at charges for a looking-glass,[br]And entertain some score or two of tailors,[br]To study fashions to adorn my body:[br]Since I am crept in favour with myself,[br]Will maintain it with some little cost.[br]But first I’ll turn yon fellow in his grave;[br]And then return lamenting to my love.[br]Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,[br]That I may see my shadow as I pass… In 1780s France, or 1950s France, or 1990s New York, The Vicomte de Valmont (Gérard Philipe as “Valmont de Merteuil”, Alan Rickman, John Malkovitch, Colin Firth, Ryan Philippe as “Sebastian Valmont”) and the Marquise de Merteuil (Jeanne Moreau as “Juliette de Merteuil”, Lindsay Duncan, Glenn Close, Annette Benning, Sarah Michelle Gellar as “Kathryn Merteuil”) are former lovers and present, let’s say, “frenemies” (Or a married couple in an open relationship, or stepsiblings), whose hobbies include dueling, the theater, and seducing, abusing, humiliating, and eventually discarding the young gentry. Merteuil wants Valmont to seduce fifteen-year-old Cécile Volanges (Jeanne Valérie, Leslie Manville, Uma Thurman, Faruzka Balk, Selma Blair as “Cecile Caldwell”) to get revenge against her former lover, Le Comte de Gercourt (Or “Court”), to who Cecile is engaged. Valmont isn’t initially interested, as he considers bedding underage girls too easy, and prefers the challenge of pursuing the married and notoriously prudish Présidente de Tourvel (Annette Vadim as “Marianne Tourvel”, Juliette Stevenson, Michelle Pfeifer as “Marie de Tourvel”, Meg Tilly, Reese Witherspoon as “Annette Hargrove”). He comes around when he finds out that Cécile’s mother, Madame de Volanges (Simone Renant, Fiona Shaw, Swoosie Kurtz, Siân Philips, Christine Baranski as “Bunny Caldwell”) has been badmouthing him to Tourvel. Also, Valmont is still lusting after Mertuil, and they make a side-bet that if he can provide written evidence of having successfully bedded Tourvel, she’ll sleep with him.

Cécile has meanwhile fallen in love with her music teacher, Monsieur le Chevalier Danceny (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sean Baker, Keanu Reeves as “Le Chevalier Raphael Danceny”, Henry Thomas, Sean Patrick Thomas as “Ronald Clifford”), a thoroughly unsuitable match as he’s poor (or in one case black) or something. Mertuil and Valmont use the pretext of helping the two lovers to take advantage of them while simultaneously outing them to Madame de Volanges, and encouraging her not to let the two be together (Though she’s never thrilled about it, in some versions, Mme. Volanges is willing to allow a match between her daughter and Danceny, but what Merteuil wants is a disgraced Cécile married to Gercourt). Valmont seduces and/or rapes Cécile, and Merteuil persuades her to accept Valmont as an, ahem, private anatomy tutor. This may or may not lead to Cécile getting pregnant, after which she may or may not miscarry. Merteuil seduces Danceny, and possibly Cécile as well, but not at the same time (There’s a passage where it kinda sounds like Valmont bangs Danceny too at one point, but I’m not sure).

While this is going on, Valmont is also sleeping with Émilie (Mary Jo Randle, Laura Benson), a courtesan. After bedding her in scene four, he flips her over, slaps a piece of paper on her back, and composes a love-letter to Tourvel (Which, naturally, begins, “I have just come… To my desk.”). Later in scene thirteen, after he’s won her over, Tourvel sees them together and accuses him of making time with a socially unacceptable person. Valmont insists that their relationship is entirely innocent, and that Émilie is trying to rehabilitate her image. Now, in the script (and in Dangerous Liaisons), what he says is, “She’s done a little secretarial work for me on occasion.” But when I saw the play, what Valmont actually said was, “I’ve been employing her as a secretary​.” It is just about the funniest callback joke I have ever seen on stage, even if I was the only one in the audience who got it. If there’s time, Valmont’s manservant and/or buddy Azolan (Christopher Wright, Oh, hey, hi there Peter Capaldi, Ian McNiece, Joshua Jackson as “Blaine Tuttle”) seduces Tourvel’s maid and/or closeted ex-boyfriend in order to get insider information, possibly by blackmailing her after he contrives to walk in on them. Through an uneasy combination of subterfuge, genuinely trying to be a good guy, and guilt tripping, Valmont eventually wins the heart (and other bits) of Tourvel, but falls in love with her in the process. Merteuil either becomes jealous or just wants to mess with Valmont and manipulates him into breaking Tourvel’s heart, whereupon she either retires to a convent and dies of one of those broken-heart-related illnesses that was always striking down women from books written prior to World War I, or goes insane, or goes back to her forgiving husband, or somehow ends up inheriting Valmont’s Jaguar.

Merteuil refuses to hold up her end of the deal with Valmont (It’s not in the rehearsal script, but if I’m remembering correctly, in the production I saw, she does offer him a half-hearted pity-fuck to add insult to injury, which also kinda happens in Valmont), leading the two to declare war on each other. Valmont breaks up her and Danceny by telling him how he was being used, but Merteuil counters by telling Danceny what Valmont had been up to with Cécile. Danceny challenges Valmont to a duel, or sucker-punches him when he’s falling down drunk, or chases him down in the street and throws down with him, and Valmont is either bested because Danceny is a better duelist, or because he gets cocky and isn’t taking the duel seriously, or because he’s heartbroken and no longer caresThe script to the play says he gets careless after Danceny gets in a lucky hit, but in the performance I saw, Valmont easily dominates the fight, then just sort of gets tired of it, throws up his arms, and literally walks into Danceny’s sword. Dangerous Liaisons is similar, but more ambiguous: Valmont drops his sword and turns around, possibly intending to concede, and gets run through by a charging Danceny who can’t stop in time. We don’t even see the climax of the fight in Valmont, instead opting for a comical reaction shot from Ian McNeice. , or he falls onto the hearth and breaks his skull, or because Annette got knocked into the street trying to break up the fight and he got hit by cab saving her. Before he dies, he professes his love for Tourvel and gives either her or Danceny his collected letters and/or memoirs of the whole sordid affair.

Cécile goes back to the convent to become a nun, or she marries Gercourt while pregnant with Valmont’s kid, or maybe her and Danceny get together if he manages to avoid jail time. Merteuil is publicly shamed by the release of her letters, or privately shamed and tacitly blackmailed by the non-release of her letters, or expelled for carrying around a cocaine-filled rosary, and may or may not end up physically disfigured either because she set herself on fire trying to burn Valmont’s letters or because she caught smallpox while fleeing to the countryside. And then you put the fox in the boat and bring the chicken back.

I mean, lots of stories have love triangles. Les Liaisons Dangereuses has love parallelepipeds. Well, for a certain value of “love”.

A salient question at this point might be, “Why do I like it?” Fair enough. It doesn’t really sound like the sort of thing I should like. It is, basically, a story about terrible people doing terrible things to each other. We’re encouraged by the way the narrative is structured to view Valmont as the nominal hero despite the fact that he is, I do not intend to let this slide, a rapist the style of the novel is sufficiently coy, and its narrators sufficiently unreliable that it’s not entirely clear just how predatory his actions really were — it’s not even entirely clear, since we only have Cécile’s vague and emotional accounting of the incident, whether he forces anything more than a kiss on her — but the Hampton play is explicit on this point. Other adaptations vary considerably on this point, generally making Valmont manipulative but not necessarily coercive— in fact, he seems to inhabit a subculture that makes meaningful consent impossible. And Merteuil’s treatment of Cécile afterward sounds no different from the sort of rape apologia you still hear today, accusing her of having enjoyed it and attributing her lamentations purely to puritanical regret after-the-fact. Most of the female characters end up dead, deformed, or removed from society, and Valmont wins Tourvel largely through Urkeling: he begs and nags and publicly laments and ignores her refusals until she finally wears out and gives in. And I fucking hate Urkeling.

Would it surprise you tremendously to learn that Laclos was a feminist? I mean, it was the eighteenth century so it’s unlikely his feminism would be something hugely recognizable as such to a modern feminist. But he did write a book advocating for women’s education and women’s rights, and he did get caught up in all that French Revolution stuff about being a hard-liner for Capital-É Égalité.

And remarkably, this comes through in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Many of the Marquise de Merteuil’s letters — practically all of the sincere ones — make reference to the fraught position women held with respect to the sexual double-standard (ideas that would be echoed, say, by Wollstonecraft): Valmont is happy to be reputed a cad, while Merteuil must exercise the utmost care in her dalliances to ensure that she never leaves her lovers in a position to discredit her — indeed, there’s a parallel plot thread in the novel rarely included in adaptations (Though it somehow makes its way into the plot of Cruel Intentions 3) that not much prior to Valmont’s assault of Cécile, Merteuil had allowed herself to be seduced by another infamous philanderer, and disposed of him by falsely accusing him of rape. When she advises Cécile to take Valmont as a lover, she explains that their culture grants few enough advantages to women, and that she ought to enjoy them. It reminds me a bit of Iago warning Othello about, “the green-eyed monster”: yes, she’s deliberately misleading and abusing Cécile to her own ends, but what she’s actually saying is still a hard truth she’s learned from experience.

And how about that Urkeling? Remember the cliché of the Urkel: the character pursues relentlessly, ignores rejection, and eventually wins the girl largely because he’s “paid his dues”, as though a woman were like a twelfth-level spell that you’re due once you’ve grinded enough XP. And we are meant to accept and approve of this because he’s a “nice guy” who loves her way more than those handsome but immature jocks and bad boys she keeps dating, and she would totally see that if she weren’t such a shallow bitch.

But does Valmont measure up on that scale? It starts out well enough, only halfway through, it all kind of falls apart. Valmont is not a “nice guy”. Valmont is a cad. His love is not pure; it’s a pretense. He isn’t way better for her, and she isn’t more interested in shallow, attractive jocks (Her husband never appears in person, but he’s apparently much older and seems for all the world
like a stand-up guy). The Urkel Plot is about a woman who needs to be made better by learning to accept the love of a suitor deemed unworthy. That is just about the furthest thing in the world from what happens in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: lowering herself to love Valmont is Tourvel’s undoing. Becoming a better man (Valmont commits himself to charitable acts to help rehabilitate his image) and legitimately falling in love is Valmont’s salvation, insofar as anyone in this story can be “saved”. This is practically a parody of an Urkel plot.

And that, in large part, is what I like about it. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is not a love story. It is not even a story about sex. It is not a story that cares about loveIn fact, there’s a charming little footnote in the novel to Letter 39, where Cécile declares to a friend from school her intention from this point on to write to Danceny to, “only talk to him of my love,” and cut out all the intriguey bullshit. To this, a footnote explains, “We shall hereafter suppress Cécile Volanges and Chevalier Danceny’s letters, being uninteresting.” It is a story about power and control. In fact, this odd little eighteenth century French novel does more to indict rape culture than you see in most modern works. Valmont pulls out every trick from the Nice Guy handbook, but unlike Xander Harris or Ross Gellar or Steve Urkel, the narrative doesn’t demand that we go along with it: it tells us from the start that he’s a jerk and an asshole who’s manipulating and abusing people. It completely dismisses the popular rape-apologetic myth of the “boner werewolf”: all Valmont’s protests about being unable to control his passions are transparent lies, and even his rape of Cécile is very explicitly about power rather than passion. Liaisons does what most depictions of sexual predation drop the ball on, and remains clear that Valmont’s treatment of women is not based around an uncontrollable sexual desire, but rather around a rapacious ideology. It’s not about getting his end away, or even about something as banal as collecting a list of conquests, but about what he can compel out of people. In Dangerous Liaisons, for instance, Tourvel’s maid Julie offers herself to him when he threatens to expose her affair with Azolan, but he’s utterly uninterested: what he wants out of that conquest isn’t sex but inside information. In a minor side-plot of the novel (Which hasn’t been included in any of the adaptations I’ve seen), he manages, just to prove he can, to shag a Vicountess while her husband and her boyfriend are downstairs, then convinces her to fake a robbery attempt to help him cover his presence, and then gets her boyfriend to shag him in gratitude for his “heroism”.

They may be framed as libertines, but the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are practically Ayn Rand characters, ruled not by their passions but by their philosophies. And apparently (per French author and statesman André Malraux), they’re the first characters in European literature to be like that. But unlike actual Ayn Rand characters, we’re supposed to despise them for it. Like a pair of Sith Lords, they pull strings and arrange events such that forwarding their goals becomes the best interest of their victims. Only flirt with those you intend to refuse; then you acquire a reputation for invincibility, whilst slipping safely away with the lover of your choice. A poor choice is less dangerous than an obvious choice. Never write letters. Get them to write letters. Always be sure they think they’re the only one. Win or die. —Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), Act I, Sc. 4 Victory for Valmont is for the target of his game to willingly give him what he wants. For Merteuil, it’s to convince her victim that he’s taken what he wanted, only to find that claiming his prize will be his own destruction.

And yet… Valmont is capable of true love, even if it undoes him. And it’s difficult to argue with Merteuil’s logic about her own position and pursuits. If there is a moral lesson to be found in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and I’m not entirely sure there is, perhaps it’s this: that Valmont and Merteuil are not evil simply because of some flaw in their characters or some stain in their souls or because their hearts are two sizes too small. Rather, they are evil because they are part of a society which shapes their particular inclinations and tendencies into something evil. Merteuil must play the manipulative seductress because for an aristocratic woman in France in 1782, the only publicly acknowledged relationship between a man and a woman must be one of subjugation. Valmont must play the cad because for an aristocratic man in France in 1782, masculinity can not be separated from conquest.

Continue reading Grapevine: Les Liaisons Dangereuses / Dangerous Liaisons / Valmont / Cruel Intentions