EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES

Early Lewis and Morse

Recently I confessed that I watch cop shows, but am not fond of “Blue Bloods” which is mostly an excuse to see Tom Selleck wearing Ralph Lauren — curiously, not Tom Ford.  Most of my favs are BBC Oxford-located series (Morse, Lewis, et al — not so much the BBC Manchester shows), which I love for the scenery and the pretence of being intellectual.  I’ve also have watched all the CSI programs I can access, which is why I can understand articles about the genome.  

There’s enough cross-over among actors and shared context in the West to make “Longmire” and “Saving Grace” sort of like loose repertory, which is something I really appreciate, esp since it delivers us from the Manhattan and Hollywood hegemonies.  In my undergrad years at NU, repertory was as much an ideal and goal as Method acting.  In fact, much of the pleasure of cop shows is watching the careers of actors who recur again and again, not just in the good guys who manage to stay alive, but also the bad guys who only get a few episodes before they are either shot dead or put away for good.  I love all the incidental scrawny old women and aproned shop-keepers.  Each of these shows develops a kind of philosophy and special knowledge.  “Longmire” directly deals with rez issues and “Saving Grace” picks up bits around the edges of rural life.

Longmire

By now I’ve become aware that the writers for TV series are serving the ends that once used to be the work of churches.  The stories are like sermons that explore moral consequences and suggest theories for reform.  It’s not just the cop shows — though they’re more likely to look at serious life-and-death issues.  Doc shows can do the same.  But there are differences between what is produced by one pulpit occupier with a particular denominational education, and the conclusions reached by a set of worldly people arguing out plot points around a table.  The latter are far more likely to have lived through some knotty situations and to have spent time speculating on what they meant.

Script writers, esp. for television and cable shows, do address that limiting Dunning-Kruger effect, the one about not only having a limited knowledge and understanding of the world, but also not knowing that their world is so limited, so circumscribed, so blinded by lack of experience.  Really not KNOWING.  It’s a major problem with techies who are constantly designing platforms for writers who deliberately challenge the limits of public experience.  The techies invent labels (boxes) and tags and impose them to function automatically but could NEVER think of the real and multiple categories that writers use.  

Luckily, they understand enough to leave some free space — partly because of indignation on the part of writers— but those tags added-by-author tags are category-busters.  Techies like categories.  Or the writers want to add fifty possible tags for Google.  But techies need limits.  They deal in IO.  In or Out.  They love questionnaires with four questions, a range of answers with five possibilities.  They put in a space for comments, but I’m betting they don’t read them because they don’t make sense to them.

I’m finding that it’s very hard to describe Dunning-Kruger to people with a limited experience of the world — it’s like trying to write an essay on the keyboard of an ATM.  AND, as the researchers said plainly, the people who believe in the Dunning-Kruger effect and know far more about the world than the people around them, will label the limited people IGNORANT, in other words punish them for not knowing that they don’t know.  

Around here, ignorance is considered willful.  It’s like refusing to accept knowledge and is related to the missionary’s conviction that THEY know what is to be known, without any interest in what their potential converts already know and which may be the reason they resist proselytizing.  People say to me, "Don't tell me stuff.  I worry enough already."

“Showrunners” introduced a new job concept that is particularly relevant in election season.  These are the people who make the product work.  We suspect Hilary is using high-powered (possibly covert) show runners and we don’t like her for it — but Trump’s showrunners can’t get a grip on him and we love the spectacle of it.  Television news is now going in and out of reality.  Elections are the long-running cliff-hangers.

The cop shows pick up on it.  “Awake” has a split but interacting story that even has double shrinks, one for each of two realities.  One is practical and one is sympathetic, but the protagonist won’t accept either one of them.  His own experience is double; he has a Mini-Me.  

“The Tunnel”  (BBC bicoastal) begins with a double corpse: top half of one victim and bottom of another — half on the English “side” and half on the French side, even though the space itself is in the English Channel under water, not land — and two teams of detectives, one Brit and one French, a pair who are the usual blundering but intuitive male with an unusually strict and nonglamorous woman.  They break stereotypes and introduce us to new concepts, for more existentialist than we are used to.  Still, neither has achieved the strangeness of politics, which are just as baffling on the Euro-side. 

The Wire

So far, few have reached the educational and moral significance of “The Wire” or “Oz.”  Those were worlds we didn’t know, but should have.  What others are out there?  We’ll probably never know.  The tangle of funding, recognizing quality, popular taste that is puerile and vulgar, critical feedback that is either wrong or missing, and constantly shifting means of access from huge flat-screens to pocket handhelds, make everything a game of hide-and-seek.  It’s possible to mount a production with almost no money but how do you distribute it without money?  It’s possible to marathon-watch a series all day long, for as many hours as you have the tush for, but then what do you do with that experience?

How do you keep the shaped and edited experience of second hand lives separated from what really happens to you, esp. if your job is repetitious, your home is okay but not special, your friends are boring?  Your family is — well, probably strewn across the continent.  My brain-damaged brother’s reality was "Seinfeld."  My aging mother’s was her memory.  Mine?  I don’t know until I’ve had my first morning coffee.  Until then, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.  But there are landscapes, indigenous people and sometimes lovers.  I don’t mean sex.  There is a lot beyond that.

"OZ" A POSTSCRIPT

"I've been thinking a lot about binary antagonism because I've spent a lot of time this year in alternative socio-political space . . .in fact agonism is viewed as aberrant and even pathological. "  (Art Durkee, complete comment on previous post.)

As it turns out, I spent my blogging time earlier today giving feedback on a chapter in a book about a Blackfeet family.  I was very pleased to be asked to comment and daunted that the scholar asking didn’t know about my bio of Bob Scriver (“Bronze Inside and Out”) or this blog, both of which contain a good bit of info about the person in question.  I mean, the point of both was to inform scholars as well as others.  But I’m not on a faculty anywhere and that still counts.  The advantage is that I can tell the truth as I choose without worrying about tenure.

My attention is now captured by Art Durkhee’s comment on the “Oz” posts.  (Art is not academic but I respect him very much.  We don’t agree sometimes.)  Naturally my point of departure is the Bibfeltian “both/and” principle.  Art interpreted my comments as being down on those big gym-bull alpha males, but they have their uses.  Sometimes a guy built like a grizzly and with a Conan attitude is exactly what is needed.

More than that, I find that I’m really “turned on” by Simon Adebisi, Karim Said, and Chris Keller  NOT Vern Schillinger.  Adebisi because if a tiger came around, he could deal with it.  Though -- if he were ineffective, if he ran -- I’d never pay any attention to him again.  But I also loved his wacky striped sock, magic hat, and general dominance, underlain with constant plotting.  He wasn’t so much narcissistic as in total denial of the existence of any kind of consequences or limits and his willingness to die -- he considered death trivial.  His or anyone else’s.  He’s a true sociopath.  (The CHARACTER, now.  Remember I’m talking CHARACTERS.  The actor is quite a sophisticated lawyer in London.)

But go to the other extreme of mental/emotional/compassionate while keeping the magnificent physique and you’ve got Said, who seemed all the more powerful because of his restraint.  It was not weakness -- it was power kept voluntarily under control.  TERRIFIC Greek drama material.  Nothing to do with being black or Islam.  Excellent for Shakespeare.

For me Chris Keller is the most magnetic of all, a sociopath capable of love in an obsessive way: Tobias is everything he is not and can't be.  Sister Peter Marie was vulnerable to Keller, as much as I am.  (Yes, I remember he’s not REAL and neither were Sister Pete’s fantasies.)  The writers could have made more of his admiration for Tobias Beecher’s mind.  But they did a good job of showing Keller’s voracity for what he thought was love -- he craved, he destroyed,  More even than his physical fuckery, he was a mind fucker.   And yet love to him was only sex -- he couldn’t get past that.   He remained unexplained even as he destroyed himself.

There aren’t a lot of these types around, which is lucky.  I am safe from them only because they don’t think I exist.  They bump into me if they pass too closely because they don’t see me.  They don’t wonder whether I can see them because I'm invisible.  (This is an advantage for a writer.)

The great irony of these Extreme Alphas is that many of them are hurt, partly because they smash into confrontations and partly because they hurt themselves.  The women they need are moms.  (Chris goes for Sister Pete’s breast.)  They can’t even feel gorgeous sexy women.  Which is why they need men for sex.  But they despise their need.  I don’t think it IS caused by nurture.  I think these men are created genetically.  Probably a high proportion are killed young.  They are Beowulf, mythic.  Sampson, pulling it all down on their own heads.  Pre-Greek drama.

On the other hand Chris may very well be a victim of early sexual abuse combined with violence, which is a thread that was explored with the Aryan Nation character -- I never did get his name -- who has a “black” gum implant, whose penis gets the tip bitten off, and who ends up with HIV.  His breakdown is powerful and justified, but it would not have been possible for Chris Keller.  Keller is too armored, too cynical.  Of course, what attracts me and Sister Pete and even the Toby character is the possibility of somehow getting to the core of him.  It’s his inscrutability, the Sphinx dynamic, that pulls us in.  He is naked and entirely hidden at once.  (I think the actor “got” this.)

Which is all begging the question that Art poses:  why can’t the world understand that raw opposition doesn’t go anywhere?  Well, because sometimes it DOES.  Sometimes it WORKS.  The magnificence of the human animal is the ability to produce variety, people of all kinds and abilities.  If we have all gladiators, we’re in trouble.  if we have all civilized guys in togas, we’re in trouble.  The ideal is to find the niche where you fit.  And some niches probably are rat holes that need to be cleaned out.

A specific culture produces specific types.  This is the level I think we should be addressing.  Why are we producing the kind of men in “Oz”?  They must have some use that we like.  (There were no former soldiers in this group.)  Or are they accidental by-products from something else we like too much, like drugs?  Why are we so attached to the agonistic sports of boxing and football, in spite of what it does to individuals?  Why is it so interwoven with sex?  (Ask the football team in Missoula.)  Is it Anabisi’s attitude of being entitled, or is it Chris Keller’s craving for deep sexual intimacy?

My natural “peers” ought to be Tim McManus or Sean McMurphy (the actor actually WAS a Golden Gloves boxer),  I feel friendship for them.  Chucky Pancomo makes me want to run.  I’ve never known any Hell’s Angels -- only Gypsy Jokers.  I did deal with “Oz” types when I was an animal control and being agonistic would have been hopeless in person on the street.  I was “Ms. Friendly Persuasion” the whole way.  

But there was a kid who was siccing his dog on other kids, who were being bitten, and when I grabbed the dog, the kid tried to strangle me.  The dog’s collar broke and the two got away.  Weeks later, I spotted the dog away from the kid, tossed it in the truck and was picking up speed when the kid threw himself on my hood and tried to break the windshield.  I didn’t even slow down.  When we got to court, his file was literally two feet tall.  “Oz.”

You know the “Oz” actor -- not the character -- I’d most like to meet?  Anthony Chisholm.  Now there’s a guy who must know some stories.  Come to think of it, he WAS supposed to be a Vietnam vet and his bunkie was also military -- didn't last long.  But Chisholm has the feel of American frontier cavalry.  Someone ought to put him in a show about the Buffalo Soldiers.