Under the Influence

I've been traveling a lot the last couple weeks - France last week, back in Pennsylvania for a couple days and now in western Canada for a friend's wedding. Between the time zones and work thoughts I can't really tell whether I'm coming or going; without downtime to meditate on anything in particular I've been taking things more at face value, navigating life one moment at a time. Which is nice. Travel is about the closest thing I've found to true therapy for my affliction, because whenever I can take my daily situation for granted I immediately do; once stimulus is down I give my thoughts permission to wander off in richer pastures of their own. Which is also likely why I seek stressful work - it keeps me present. But with travel, all this travel - it also means a lot of airport and train time, and in those interstitial moments I've been fully enmeshed in the mythology, careening haphazardly through it as it touches off of bits of the landscape fleeting by the train window. I'm so deep in it right now that I couldn't even encapsulate it without signing a three-season sixty-episode contract, so I'll focus instead on something a little less indulgent (at least a tiny bit less indulgent).

My thoughts have still been swarming around the idea of a TV show, a serialized story about people in an office and the weird things that happen to them. The show takes place at an indeterminable point in the future, and though it starts innocently enough it invariably ends (about three seasons later, mind you) with one man at the center of the earth confronted with the controls to the planet. But I haven't been focusing on the whole arc recently, just the initial setup, the first few tactical movements that get the plot moving in an engaging direction, making it familiar-but-captivating enough that my hypothetical audience will track its inevitable path into weirder territory.

I'm going to get into the non-indulgent part in a minute, but first, how's this for a setup? In the intitial half-hour we establish that this show takes place some time in the future (when exactly isn't clear, nor is it vital), and that there are interesting, normal-seeming characters working together at the large and ambiguously motivated Spigot Corporation in some big city. Some are more motivated than others, more entrenched in the office politics of making and selling competitive and cutting edge hand-held electronics, worried about the overseas and youth demographics, worried about streamlining the interfaces and functionality of devices so that they can create a seamless work experience for the consumer, etc. Others are more focused on making their colleague's lives less pleasant and/or finding love in the cubicle across the aisle. Others still are hotly debating the course of government, worried about the larger scale issues of the world that can't be immediately felt in the daily grind of the office. This is normal life in the twenty-first (?) century. And then, suddenly, there are explosions, and lights going off and on, and network-tv sparks flying from computer monitors. People are running around and screaming and hitting their heads on the fluorescent lamps, and when everything finally settles down we find out that everyone is basically okay, but they are now trapped in the building. What's going on outside is unclear - it's political and societal, but by and large it's out there, and in here the lights are still purring and the walls are still intact. And for at least the first season, the Spigot Corporation's employees remain trapped in their sprawling work complex, living together and eventually even continuing their work. And the tensions of close-quarters relationships ensure enough melodrama for at least a 35% crossover audience with Grey's Anatomy, while I slip weirdly mythological science fiction material into the B-plot (and eventually the A-plot) of each episode. I could sell that, right?

But here's the deal. I'm not concerned with the structural padding of the show, only the themes that I'm able to introduce along the way. Among these are all the things I've mentioned earlier in this blog and countless more - the jungle, Internet spirituality, the forms, time travel, all of it. Even a space-adventure TV show fabricated from the unconscious workings of one employee's mind (though help me, I'd never explain it like that). And with all of these things, I'm completely convinced that I've hit upon original ideas never before imagined by the unsuspecting TV audience. While I know statistically that there really are no original ideas left (and philosophically, that original ideas aren't even a desirable goal), I still can't shake this obsession, firmly attached to the mythology that it is, that these characters and settings and plot-points are my own and no one else's. I don't think the ideas behind them are, or even the general themes, but there's still an undercurrent of elitism here that I would just as soon nip in the bud and get on with getting over myself.

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to a couple protagonists from the show, and then tell you about the blatant literary influences that informed their creation in my mind.

The main character - let's call him Jack, because he's played in my mind by the same actor who plays Jack in Lost (whose season finale I'm pretty friggin pumped about). Jack's a higher-up middle manager at the corporation, in charge of overseeing the activity of many divisions. His mind is torn in so many directions by his work that he can no longer keep track of the chronological narrative of his life. Like the protagonist of Quantum Leap he wakes up every morning in a bed in some strange city and tries to piece his life together by the commitments on his schedule and the meetings he's reminded to attend. The only fabric holding him together is his own internal narrative of relationships and personal themes; otherwise he's one of the first true victims of post-time, moving back and forth through the time line of his life according to the dictates of his mind, and oblivious to the essential problems or exploitable opportunities of such a skill. I have all kinds of justifications for how this works, but none as evocative as the absence of justification in Slaughterhouse V. For all extents and purposes, Jack has become unstuck in time. So it goes.

Then there's the "other" main character - let's call him Locke, for the same reasons listed above. He works in the coding pit, exploring and defining algorithms of wireless connectivity and intuitive usability. His job is to make devices that will work the way that people expect them to, and even intuit what the consumer will want before they know they want it. According to the statutes of network TV stereotyping, this means that Locke is really into math and patterns (but unlike the statues of network stereotyping, he's more casually philosophical than humorously nerdy). In the course of his duties he's recently hit upon a very specific pattern that's been coming up repeatedly. It comes up especially whenever he's been able to distill certain complex functions (such as, "what people want") down to their basic formulas. Yes, just like the protagonist of Pi, Locke has discovered the "ultimate sequence" that holds within it the secret to life. And yes, just like in Lost, it can probably be expressed in a series of numbers, or at least some kind of wave pattern, that occurs repeatedly throughout the show.

I've also been thinking about a kind of "other world" that the characters of the show discover and explore through most of the first season. It's kind of like a virtual reality, kind of like the Matrix, kind of like a culmination of the Internet's potential, kind of like a half-dozen episodes of Red Dwarf, kind of like the spiritual world, kind of like a lot of things that probably aren't as connected as they are in my head.

How Not to Make a World

I was reading yesterday about the new Grand Theft Auto game that's coming out at the end of this month, and it got me thinking about the difficult balance inherent in creating accessible mythologies. Even if it's not really your thing I'd recommend checking out their website, because they've basically manufactured an entire culture to support their game about running people over. They've been taking this tact from the beginning, but in this round they've kicked it up a couple notches, adding a scale model of the internet just for in-game use, and consistent global news that progresses throughout the game, accessible via multiple media outlets reflecting various ideological biases. Even if it's especially not your thing, at least look briefly at this, the Starbucks equivalent within their culture, complete with its own unique advertising scheme, mascot, interactive drinks menu and visual back story. The point for me is that they've made a business out of creating a mythology, manufacturing an entire world for people to get lost in.

Now, granted, this isn't really the same thing as the mythologizing that I'm talking about. Their world is basically just a Mad Magazine-level spoof of ours, ensuring that everything presented is an immediately recognizable generalization of those institutions which crest the peaks of our own popular culture. Sprite's called Sprunk, Verizon is Whizz mobile - I'm impressed with the level of detail that they've brought to this exercise, but it's still just a mirror world with more cars and looser moral guidelines.

The point is, there is a potentially lucrative business model for creating mythologies. A show like Lost provides a better example of a somewhat-unrecognizable world with a burgeoning mythology that millions of people are completely obsessed with (myself included). In this case, a person has to immerse themselves in the world one step at a time or it won't make any sense (not that it necessarily makes any sense anyway), and it's wrought with an intriguing mash of themes and places and concepts that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with each other in real life.

But see, that's the thing, and maybe the heart of my problem: I don't think I really have a good sense of where to draw the line between accessible, interesting world and self-indulgent fantasy- land.

From an objective-viewer position, I think I can tell when I'm looking at one or the other, and maybe even explain why something works or doesn't. The guy who made Donnie Darko recently came out with another movie called Southland Tales, which he's been working on incessantly for the last six years. The movie was hugely expensive, and its internal world is bolstered by a series of graphic novels, leaving the film itself as something like chapters eight through ten of a twelve chapter story. But apparently it's just a mess. When he first showed it, people didn't even know how to react, and the studios demanded that he go back and refilm half of it so that something coherent might be cobbled together. After this process the movie experienced an invisible theatrical release and went straight to video. Now here is an example of a horrible mythology with no traction. For every Star Wars, I bet there are two-dozen Southland Tales that no one's ever heard of.

When I look at Grand Theft Auto's miniature culture, my first thought is: man, I wish I could have my hand at that job. I assume that the simple spoofy world they created is successful purely because of the detail put into it, and that they would have conceived something more original and thought-provoking if they'd had a more aggressive imagination behind its creation. But I think I'm wrong when I think that. I think their world is successful because it's stupid and obvious, and to add more nuance to it would be taking away from its accessibility to the target demographic of Grand Theft Auto IV. Even Lost isn't really that original, and its success is probably due much more to its episodic story arcs (what will happen next week?!) than to the depth of its mythology. Because the characters and immediate story are compelling (read: the obvious bits), people are willing to divest more time in the hints of bizarreness (what's up with the smoke monster, seriously?).

I think about all of this, and dream of possessing the resources and time to manifest my mythology in some form in the world. And when I think about it, I know full well that left to my own devices I'd be much more likely to come up with a Southland Tales than a Star Wars. So maybe I'm just doomed to an obsession with an untenable world.

But what about this, internet TV producers reading some random guy's blog? It's The Office meets Lost. We see the world from the point of view of lots of interesting characters, coming from a wide range of relatable-to backgrounds and ethnic resonance. And every one of them works for the same large corporation, but none of them know how large the corporation really is, or what its plans are. And it kind of takes place in the future, but you don't know how far in the future. So it's like The Office meets Lost meets 1984. Every episode starts with a cultural montage of some aspect of society that will be the focus of that episode. And all of this is leading up to the revelation that this society exists after time, in the cultural morass of post-time, where all the options and advances of culture have reached their necessary end-points, and so time itself is not really advancing anymore, so all that's left are the individual choices people make and the relationships they form. This also makes lots of things okay, like time travel, because there are no causality issues if time is no longer actually progressing, you see? And then there's this guy who's actually an archetype, and at the end the quiet systems analyst descends to the center of the Earth where he finds the controls to the planet...

Crap, I lost it. Oh well, it was worth a shot.