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.

Time Travel is Stupid, I Know, But I Can't Help It

Just to dredge up Southland Tales one more time, about half-way through the third act some basic expository dialogue lets us in on the "crux" of the plot: a rift in the fourth dimension (space/time) has opened up somewhere near Lake Meade, and as a result, many of the characters have been traveling through time all along. This is also meant to explain the weird behavior of the movie's supposed 'twin brothers' (thought it doesn't). Not until the fourth season of Lost do we get time travel as premise - Heroes had it from the start, but lost most of its audience when it became an easy solution to every problem in the second season. More directly science-fictiony stuff always gets there eventually, as does fantasy set in the current day (ie Superman), but that's a more natural progression.

Anyway, this is all in support of the argument I'd like to make that given enough time (and forgive the meta-pun), time travel will find its way into a mythology. If the world of the story isn't pre-limited, and one obsessive visionary (or in a pinch, a team of television producers) is given free reign to let the world continually incubate, expanding and growing beyond its wildest ambitions, then eventually the biggest thing that can happen will happen, and the only corner left to turn, though stupid, will be the ability to travel through time.

And sure, its introduced most regularly as a convenient fix for bad storytelling. It allows writers to kill off an entire cast in one blow, or detonate the planet without pesky repercussions. Also, it just doesn't make any sense, and no storyteller can really craft the web tight enough to sufficiently cover the gaping holes in logic and causality that result from the effort. But there it is anyway, time and time again (more incidental meta puns for your consideration), rearing its head usually when an audience is already fully committed to a world, so that maybe its sins will be looked upon more lightly.

Time travel is stupid, and obvious, and already done. Yes. But, as previously mentioned, my mythology also features time travel, and although it definitely is, I can't shake the conviction that it's somehow not as stupid, obvious and already done as all those other times.

I mentioned it in relation to Swedenborg, and I've had one of my avatars expound upon it further here , but I've never really gotten to the heart of what it's all about, mostly because I don't think I can. The thing is, my rationale for time travel isn't really a succinct and easy-to-encapsulate central premise, but more a loose constellation of concepts and observations that I've willfully taken out of context and crocheted into a blotchy quilt called post-time. It does involve cellular technology, Swedenborg's description of spiritual time, and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, but narrowing it down more than that gets pretty tricky and convoluted.

I can tell you that I was initially struck by the idea in a college English class, while contemplating the observation that until a couple-hundred years ago, a person could know everything there was to know. All of the collected wisdom of art, science and literature was finite enough that it could be attained by a single person in one lifetime, and a handful of scholars and 'renaissance men' did just that. And then science grew too big for its britches, and since then the percentage of overall knowledge that a person can collect has been steadily shrinking, so that each generation of scientist or scholar must choose a smaller and smaller niche of study in order to achieve mastery of their subject. I was thinking about this in terms momentum. If this is a trend, where is it headed? Will we keep splitting fractions forever, defining a perpetual asymptote of scholarly ambition, or will we eventually transcend knowledge altogether? Okay, that sounds stupid, but now think about the Internet. As people are able to retain less and less in the grand scheme of knowledge, the Internet has made it so that the availability of knowledge is increasing at an inversely proportional rate (let's just say it is, for the sake of argument). The time it takes to attain knowledge is also decreasing steadily, to the point where I'm incensed if it takes longer than a fifteen second wikipedia search to find out something I don't know. So, to recap, our knowledge of the world and our ability to access that knowledge is increasing steadily every day; but, as a result, any given person knows less and less about the total state of affairs as time goes on, while they study more in-depth the nuances of a particular subject. Another result: ADD. We've all got it. There's just too much to know, and too many different items of information in a single day (or minute) that we need to access at any given point. It's all about learning quickly now, and not about still knowing it a day from now (because we can just learn it again tomorrow). People a hundred years ago would spend ten years learning one stupid thing, and now I'm ready to abandon the venture if I can't achieve satisfying results in the first couple minutes (and I may be an extreme case, I'll grant you that, but I don't even technically have ADD, and I promise you my kids will be even more impatient than I am).

So, lots of stuff. But, where does it all lead? For me, and my obsessive thematic mythology, it results in a world where people eventually have instantaneous access to all the information in the world, but at the same time zero ability to retain any of it. And so everyone is forced to live purely in the moment, unaware of what came before and unprepared for what will come next, existing practically in post-time.

I don't think it would actually work as a premise, but the office show iteration of the mythology that's currently grinding away like an ambitious round of Animal Crossing in my head sure thinks it would. Because although the results would be the same for every character in the mythology (the ability for time travel, for example, since no one would retain anything anyway, thus obviating the dangers of interfering with their past) they could each have their own perspective on what it meant. A Historian figure might draw on the rationale I just espoused, but a more quietly religious figure could just attribute it to the apocalyptic "end-times", as in, the end of time. When the 5000 year Mayan Calendar runs out in 2012, maybe time will just stop running.

And though it may seem stupid to have a cast of characters who couldn't remember what just happened to them, the beautiful thing is that it wouldn't actually matter, because normal people don't really act on the basis of what's just happened to them either. The way I see it, most people interact with reality on a day-to-day basis according to a set of preconceived themes. A life-long cop may begin to look at everything in terms of criminal and non-criminal; a psychologist, in terms of known disorders and defense mechanisms; a historian according to recorded historical precedent, etc. I know I'm obsessed with the world inside my head, but I think everyone else is too, just that most people happily mistake their interpretation of the world with how the world actually works. This explains why children tend to vote like their parents (or the opposite of their parents), and why one person's terrorist will always be another's hero. I'm venturing into some pretty preachy and over-generalized waters here, so I'll stop, but I'd like to just leave you with with the wisps of truth beneath the stereotypes and cliches I've laid out.

But what am I doing, defending myself? This isn't therapeutic at all! In fact, I think I'm back-pedaling. I can leave the Undigestible Man if I have to, and I can live without the Fish Master in a second, but if and when I do fall of the wagon it will be because of time travel.