Joss Whedon explains, 2005

I interviewed Joss Whedon and wrote this article back when our Firefly-fan backstory was still fresh and it still seemed the spirit-winds could again lift out collective dreams aloft.


About how Firefly was the Brave Little Toaster of TV shows, attempting a seemingly impossible yet brilliantly realized fusion of soap, space, and horse opera.

How characters cursed in Chinese, action scenes were shot like ’70s revisionist westerns and, as with Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the dialogue featured whipsaw quipping o’plenty.

And from there, you know the story and I'll let the piece run as it did, just before Serenity failed to set box offices aflame. Metaphorically, of course, what with we being a peaceful people.

Our narrative delight ran a crushingly wee 11 episodes before Fox pulled the plug. But the damned thing wouldn’t die, mainly thanks to the show’s die-hard fans, DVDs that flew off retail shelves like rocket-powered griddlecakes, and Whedon’s conviction that “it was just too good for a silly thing like cancellation to make it stop.” The sheer existence of Firefly’s movie incarnation, Serenity (which opens Sept. 30), is payback for its supporters’ crazy faith.

But what sparked a fandom so bounteous and vociferous that it in part convinced Universal to blow about $40 million on a movie version of an axed TV show? Speaking via cell phone from Los Angeles International Airport, Whedon speculates, “I think Firefly gave fans characters they either identified with or just loved watching.”

Sounding just a mite tuckered out—understandably, what with months of traveling around the planet to attend genre-centric conventions and not-so-secret screenings of Serenity—Whedon continues, “And that kind of feeling breeds a different kind of fandom. When you really create a new world for people, they want to live in it—especially if it’s filled with really pretty people who say funny things.”

Foremost among those really pretty Firefly people who say funny things is Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a vet of the losing side of a civil war fought 500 years from the present between the self-explanatory Independents and an interplanetary corporate empire, The Alliance. Mal now captains Serenity, a Firefly-class junker spaceship, a sort of interplanetary U-Haul for-hire. Serenity’s crew: Mal’s ex-lieutenant Zoe (Gina Torres), pro courtesan Inara (Morena Baccarin), preacher Book (Ron Glass), strong-arm Jayne (played by Adam Baldwin like a comedic riff on Warren Oates ), mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite), physician Simon (Sean Maher), and Simon’s possibly telepathic sister, River (Summer Glau). Together, this oft-squabbling crew pulls odd jobs both legal and not-so on assorted planets that look like leftover sets from The Wild Bunch.

Serenity goes beyond the simple train robberies, snatch-and-grabs, and willy-nilly Robin Hood plots of the TV show to encompass a galactic conspiracy tale involving the attempts of the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an Alliance assassin, to capture River. Or rather, capture the memories implanted in her head that not only threaten to turn the girl into a literal human weapon but also pose a threat to the Alliance itself.

All of which is good and well, but really doesn’t tell you why both the show and movie work so damn well. The lived-in, multi-culti frontier planets made for good sci-fi, but what was truly precious was the intimately observed interactions of the crew: the way Inara, all cool sex-worker professionalism, and Mal, diffident or sometimes downright petulant, negotiated their personal codes with a growing, grudging affection; how Book irritated lapsed-believer Mal into reconsidering his notions of faith; how Jayne learned to not be a jerk (well, learned to be less of one); and the inevitable, spirited dinners in Serenity’s homey galley, with all assembled telling tall tales.

While glad to take “as much credit as I can” for this superb ensemble, Whedon more seriously adds, “Part of the reason Serenity exists is I was just so blown away by how these people loved each other, and gave off an energy of being a real crew.”

And as was the case with the core groups supporting Buffy and Angel, Firefly offered another of Whedon’s quietly radical redefinitions of the non-biological family. “My family was very ’70s, very scattered,” says Whedon, a third-generation TV writer (his father wrote for Captain Kangaroo, his grandfather for Leave it to Beaver) whose mother helped found the women’s rights group Equality Now.

“I didn’t really feel that kind of particular romance that you might get from something like Little Women or The Incredibles. For me, the created family . . . it’s like the clubhouse . . . a little nest you can hide in. It’s sacred, the most exciting kind of family.”

As family leader, Mal is a complex mixed bag, as capable of thrilling heroics as laughable pettiness. Most importantly, “Mal will lay down his life for the people around him,” Whedon says, adding that Mal both meets and falls short of the effective leader’s need to be “a little bit distant, a little bit uncompromising, and sometimes absolutely arrogant.” The result is the tragic-comic pickle of being stuck between “accepting that a) there’s something wrong with himself or b) there’s anything right with himself.”

Serenity’s villain suffers no such inner conflicts. The Operative is an ideologue, an Alliance assassin whose belief that evil—and River’s dangerous implanted memories of Alliance dirty secrets—can be extinguished, but only via violence. “He’s a creation of the monster that is good intentions,” Whedon says. “I believe in what the Operative wants as strongly as the Operative does, and I want to slap Mal around half the time, but at the end of the day, Mal’s the person who’s going to save us from the notion that we can be perfect.”

The Operative is also the human face of Serenity’s crackling political undercurrents—which, without spoiling a great plot twist, have everything to do with empire expansionism. “It’s about how everybody else’s politics—which don’t take us into account—inevitably affect our lives,” Whedon says. “And about the idea of individualism and dissent—how conflict is a natural outcome of that in the same way that what we consider to be sin is a natural outcropping of human behavior.”

Whedon is building a head of steam. “No matter how enlightened you are doesn’t make you the boss of the universe or . . . able to govern places that are very faraway and have very different customs and ideals,” he says. “You can’t just sort of say, ‘OK, we’ve got it right, our dance moves work so everybody dance like us.’ It’s just not going to happen.”

To fans who’ve suffered through the sudden death of Buffy’s mom or the demise of Angel’s entire supporting cast in its final episode, it won’t be surprising that Serenity’s battle between political opposites exacts a human toll that includes some fan favorites.

“People who know my work, know: I like to kill,” Whedon kids. “But it’s something I’ve dealt with my whole career—if a character is likable, you can’t kill him. So what we’re saying is God only kills bad people?” Noting the upgrading to superhero status of Hannibal Lecter in 2001’s Hannibal, he continues, “Or God saves cannibals? When you just sort of blithely say, ‘Bad guys die, good guys don’t,’ you’re robbing people of a bit of their humanity.”

And as much as Serenity is shot through with loss, it’s also, ultimately, about faith—something stated outright by Book and mirrored in the movie’s “Can’t stop the signal” tagline, which is both “a shout-out to the fans’” and mnemonic of the movie’s belief that the truth cannot be quashed.

So what does faith mean to an atheist like Whedon? “It means, ultimately, a little bit of cock-eyed optimism,” he says. “Not that there’s a higher purpose, necessarily, but that there is something worth doing, worth believing in. That what is good in us, the invention of altruism, will eventually outweigh what is bad in us, the invention of evil.”

Weekly inspirational: BREAKFAST ON PLUTO!

NO MATTER WHAT YOU HEAR, Neil Jordan’s wonderful movie isn’t about a 1970s glitter rock-era transsexual’s coming to terms with who he/she is. Rather, it’s about how that transsexual, one Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), copes with a world not at all happy that he knows full well, from boyhood to adult girlhood, exactly who she is.

And however much Jordan protests too much in the press, Breakfast on Pluto is very much connected to his very similar, but maddeningly flawed The Crying Game and its Irish Troubles history companion, Michael Collins, while paying more serious mind to the ambisexual concerns of his very silly Interview With the Vampire. In short, the director has finally found material—Patrick McCabe’s impressionistic 1998 novel, which Jordan adapted—that unifies his obsessions with politics, the Troubles, and the dangerous fragility of machismo.

A swooping-camera fanfare introduces a pair of thickly accented, subtitled, talking CG birds who set the scene. That’s right—talking birds. Anyway, it’s the 1960s, a small Irish village, and foster child Patrick is already taking to wearing his disapproving mum’s frocks, idolizing glamour queen Mitzi Gaynor, paling around with a black girl named Charlie (Ruth Negga) and a lad with Down syndrome (Seamus Reilly), and finding his only real adult support from kindly Father Bernard (Liam Neeson).

Once he becomes a lithe, becurled glam-drag teen, Patrick/Kitten moves to London to 1) avoid getting pummeled by local unfriendlies, 2) search for his biological mother, and 3) find true love.

Life doesn’t cut Kitten a break. Desperate for cash, she starts turning tricks, and is almost killed by a psychotic gay hater (played, with winking irony, by Bryan Ferry). Politics hound her, whether via her first boyfriend (played with smoldering intensity by ex-Virgin Prunes singer Gavin Friday), the lead singer for a hilarious glitter-cowboy band who turns out to also be running guns for the IRA, or a deliriously fun night out at a club that turns into a nightmare courtesy an IRA bombing. (The latter’s abrupt, intimate randomness makes it the most viscerally matter-of-fact vision of terrorism yet committed to film.) What follows is a seamless mesh of loss, camp, hard-boiled epiphany, and earned delights.

More than any movie in memory, Jordan uses source music to underscore his scenario and as a brilliant substitute for McCabe’s exclamation point-heavy prose. He understands the way a critically indefensible tune becomes something transcendental simply by how one hears it. And so, Bobby Goldsboro’s saccharine “Honey” becomes Kitten’s theme song, while Harry Nilsson’s nearly forgotten “You’re Breaking My Heart” (“you’re tearin’ it apart, so fuck you!”) becomes a daft revolutionary fist-pumper.

Jordan really gets the mission statement of ’70s glitter rock—the reinvention of self via rock raw power and camp theatrics—represented here by choice cuts from the Glitter Band, Slade, and T. Rex. Meanwhile, the director is so confident in his material that he hilariously indulges in metatextual larks not present in McCabe’s, um, text. A personal favorite is a hilarious scene done in the style of 1960s spy semi-spoofs such as Danger: Diabolik in which Kitten—dressed, of course, in a black vinyl cat suit—destroys a terrorist cell by spraying its members viciously with “a bottle of Chanel’s favorite number.”

And Cillian Murphy? After out-Lorre-ing Peter with his squirm-inducing turn as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, he magnificently re-purposes his weirdly delicate beauty to create a Kitten who may sometimes purr but otherwise avoids all the traps of drag approximation. When in the grips of her latest dilemmas Kitten hisses, “Serious, serious, serious,” Murphy makes it sound like a valid unified field theory for every problem on Earth. You don’t just accept his soiled innocence; you root for her.

Through all her Candide-like indignities—worst is a horrifically violent British police interrogation—we get the sweet sound of Neil Jordan’s most romantic conceit: that the unassailable integrity of Kitten’s true self, clung to from childhood on, cannot help but enhance the humanity of everyone she meets. Even the most thuggishly violent cop ends up a new, better man after realizing the incredible courage it takes to be a girl like Kitten.

Tee-Construction: A brief history of the T-shirt

It all started with sailors. A century before Calvin Klein, the idea that underwear was an essential part of one's wardrobe didn't exist. In 1880, one Dr. Gustav Jaeger convinced what must have been a rather fragrant nation that regularly washed underwear might be a good thing. Still, most late 19th century folks got by with the "Spiral Bustle", not much more than an extended shirt.

In 1901, P.H. Hanes Knitting Company (now just Hanes) introduced two-piece men's underwear for catalogue sale. But it was the Navy, 12 years later, that inadvertently accelerated the evolution of underwear by issuing a revolutionary new item to its sailors. Seeking to avoid sexually scandalous sights exposed by its V-necked uniforms the Navy issued a garment that featured short sleeves, a "crew" neckline (hence "crew neck") and a vaguely "T"-shaped silhouette (hence "T-shirt").

A few years later, the influx of sailors on leave during World War I brought about the truncating of the popular civilian "union suit" into a "singlet" or "jersey." The price: 24 cents. The trend soon spread, and by World War II 12 million men were wearing the Navy's newer, less expensive tee, which quickly became known as "skivvies."

The nation grew accustomed (and secretly thrilled) to newsreel images of wartime patriots barely dressed in, what writer Valerie Steele described as, the "most significant and pervasive example of underwear as outerwear. Not only [did] it flaunt rules about hidden clothing, but it also [violated] taboos ... against male sexual display." Even at this early point in its existence the T-shirt became an empty canvas upon which anyone might project his or her sexual fantasies. In the words of Guggenheim magazine's Deborah Drier, it allowed individuals to indulge in "showing gender" and the "erotic presentation of the self."

By war's end, the phenomenon of the T-shirt — the one garment capable of displaying class, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation and the advertising of same — was born. Though 180 million were sold in 1951, the T-shirt's meteoric ascendance can be traced to, like many things American, the movies.

The seminal T-shirt film is Elia late 19th A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Marlon Brando's brutish portrayal of the lovelorn Stanley Kowalski riveted a nation as Brando's buff pecs and abs were revealed in graphic relief by a thin, stretched tee. According to Drier, the overall image created "a sexualized brutality ... a dangerous ... incoherent sort of manhood."

Four years later, the tee sewed its rebellious rock 'n ' roll roots with James Dean as he mumbled his anti-authoritarian way through Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In the '60s, toasted tee-wearing hippies took on the Establishment in Easy Rider (1969), while the Sexual Revolution of the '70s was given form (and visibly erect nipples) via Jacqueline Bisset's wet tee in The Deep (1977).

Even the '80s received its own chintzy signifier with Don Johnson's designer-tee and Armani suit get-up in Miami Vice. Considering the techno-fetishistic and corporation-friendly nature of the '90s, it is apt that the most memorable recent tee-film is Mission: Impossible (1996), with an androgynously pretty, synthetic-tee-clad Tom Cruise hanging from a wire in order to do some serious downloading.

However prescient Hollywood might have been regarding the tee, the advertising world took a while to notice the shirt's human billboard potential. Ever the innovator, the military caught on first. As if jar-head haircuts weren't humiliating enough, the armed services began stenciling rank and company on T-shirts. About the same time, Ivy League schools clarified the student body pecking order by way of the imprimatur of school fraternities on tees. The first corporate-advertising tee didn't appear until the '60s, when Budweiser featured a can of Bud on the company's T-shirts. Since then, however, advertisers have grown more savvy in terms of their demographics — especially the captive market of college students.

One example of how brazen companies have become with their T-shirt promotions can be seen at Northwestern University. Recent Northwestern grad Maura Johnston notes, "They'd give you free stuff, and the free stuff of choice was a T-shirt [with credit card logo]. Brilliant marketing! If there's one thing people in college hate to do, it's laundry. You give students T-shirts and they become a billboard for whatever product is being sold."

The on-campus tee, corporate or not, continues to define class and cultural orientation. "Phish shirts and frats are synonymous," says Johnston. "Then there's people who want to show they're 'ironic' by wearing Miss Piggy or some other childhood icon."

Today, rock T-shirt sales are an over $500 million business. Whether you're a stoner wearing the new Spiritualized tee, or a self-anointed outcast draped in the latest Marilyn Manson misery-wear, the tee continues to be the transmitter of instant cultural/psychological affiliation. The T-shirt is ubiquitous — from corporate sports gatherings to seedy leather bars to the runways of high-fashion, the tee continues to spell it all out. With the advent of inexpensive printers and appropriate software, the T-shirt has become an even more egalitarian mode of expression. And since anything can be printed on a T-shirt by most anyone, it hasn't lost its ability to shock. Or at least annoy.

Greatness of the day: MYSTERIOUS SKIN

Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin does many things magnificently. It's a one-film curative for indie pederast apologia pathogen like L.I.E. and The Woodsman. It's American magical realism with poetry and bite. And in layer after layer of greyscale suffering and possibly not so happenstance balm, it negates Spielberg's pornography of false optimism. As in Scott Heim’s brilliant source novel, it argues that memory scars everything; only a truthful, ongoing engagement with the original wound does any good at all.

Skin is all about the victims of abuse and the life-long mangling of self and reality. In this case two, two small-town Kansas boys who were seduced, fucked, and abandoned by their baseball coach (Bill Sage).

Ten years later, teen Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) deals with his repeated rape by leaving the site of the crime for New York where his cauterized heart can, for a while, be an occupational plus.

The asexual Brian (Brady Corbet) blacks out the horror, believing instead that he was abducted by UFOs. In Brian, Araki locates the horror of nothingness, as Brian narrates, "The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. Five hours. Lost. Gone without a trace."

Selective forgetfulness eats away at Brian even as it shields him from whatever horrors lies in those five hours. It also positions the audience in a constant, low-grade-anxiety situation.

Brought up on Oprah culture, we think Brian might be better is he just remembers and processes his troubles and ta-da!, recovery. But we see what the perpetrator coach did, and we see how Neil destroys himself, and we see how helpless Brian is, and we can't help but wonder if Brian can ever weather such monstrosity. At the same time, we can sense the consuming evil parting the curtains of forgetfulness to eat Brian alive and we can't bear to watch that either.

Araki allows us no way out. Not because he's the hipster nihilist critics have accused him of being, but because his respect for these boys is so absolute, he refuses to sell them short.

As the film floats through its daylit-dark, the boys’ lives intertwine, leading to a single, unforgettably heart-wrecking closing image that doesn’t exclude a whiff of hope. Whatever you think of Araki’s past queer-splotation movies (The Doom Generation, Nowhere) is rendered moot by an entirely new, pensive, luminous realism supported by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd’s gauzy, gorgeous score. At one point, one of the boys says, "I wished with all my heart we could just leave this world behind. Rise like two angels in the night and magically disappear."

The wonderful, brave thing about Araki's film is that in a cinema dedicated to selected amnesia on certain topics, Mysterious Skin makes two boys magically appear, luminous, beautiful and no longer alone.

Hipster lesbian twins vs. Christian teen-pop sisters!

Talk about weird cultural doppelgängers: The last couple of months [this was 11/8/2007] have seen the release of CDs by two sibling acts in an accidental double-niche-genre face-off: The Con by fashionista hipster lesbian twins Tegan and Sara and Insomniatic by Christian teen-pop queens Aly & AJ, 18-year-old Alyson Michalka and her two-year-younger sis, Amanda Joy.

Both are transitional recordings hitting the racks at a crucial moment in both genres. Indie has ossified into a clutch of subgenres stagnant in their inherent stylistic conservatism: the strip-mining of exhausted references (the Velvets, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Gang of Four, assorted ’80s new wavers), studied amateurism and reliance on retro sonic signifiers. (Or in the case of the latest by the Arcade Fire and the Killers, it’s a matter of simulating Springsteen in the hope of broadening market share.) Teen pop, meanwhile, keeps benefiting from its post–Brill Building creative process by committee as it gleefully rummages through pop history to loot and reconfigure source elements to create a deliriously entertaining production line of Pro-Tooled Frankenstein monster pop. While indie sells “authenticity” and the presumed superiority of creative birthing in the garage, what we usually get in a duel of the genres is a choice between self-penned mediocrity and a great record.

Which brings us to both sister acts’ newest Mylar, which finds Tegan and Sara trying to do something more user-friendly with their creepy perfect stretched-elastic soprano harmonies, sing-along-averse melodies and hip detachment, and Aly & AJ giddily building on past brilliance. Without getting too deep into the opposing artists’ lyrics, it’s sufficient to say that Tegan and Sara tend toward the gloomy and introspective (the easy way to dubious legitimacy) and Aly & AJ toward witty relationship chronicles that are cathartic and anthemic.

Floridly produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Christopher Walla, Tegan and Sara’s title track on The Con throws down a prevaricating gauntlet. A spastic acoustic guitar strum IDs this as the twins’ song, but there’s a new openness, a definite Hounds of Love–era Kate Bush airiness to the verse and a yummy pop chorus that the girls unfortunately feel compelled to ruin with an extraneous sprig of mood-demolishing angular guitar.

Similarly, the song “Nineteen” possesses a disarming prettiness that would be a tasty step forward were it not mucked up with rote New Order-y guitar noodles to nowhere, along with huge, gated reverb drums that suggest that Phil Collins is now part of the ironic indie quotation canon. Elsewhere on the release, we get the usual ’70s monophonic synths, unadorned Roland 808 beats and self-consciously fuzzy, sorta-’60s, sorta Frippy guitars, presumably because it just wouldn’t be indie without self-consciously fuzzy, sorta-’60s, sorta Frippy guitars.

Before we get to The Con’s true triumph, “Burn Your Life Down,” a word about the Tegan/Sara vocal technique: There’s a certain intensity to their land-speed-record melodies and bizarre harmonizing, but there’s no cadence and release in the technique. And there’s none of the satisfying separation and eventual merging of sibling tones that one gets in, say, the Everly Brothers. In a sense, it’s actually anti-musical, except on the mid-tempo “Burn Your Life Down,” which is just frickin’ great. That simple, lovely melody is supported by a no-bull four-piece; the harmonies circle in smart intervals around one another, allowing us to enjoy one sister’s slightly more raspy timbre and the other’s more flute-like qualities that on the super catchy chorus blend into something lovely. An entire CD of “Burn” – that would be something.

Insomniatic, Aly & AJ’s latest, is produced by Tim James and co-writer Antonina Armato, and as befits the genre that lives and dies by the single, is always enjoyable, but a few tracks flitter near filler. Indie kids are still in thrall to the notion and cult of authorship, which tends to result in teen pop’s dismissal by the hipster cognoscenti. But teen pop’s use of the finest producers/songwriters – aware of but not ruled by the same influences indie mimics – provide Radio Disney friendly acts with terrific material.

The first single is the brilliantly architectured “Potential Breakup Song,” whose title and conceit is postmodern. Stripped to component parts, it’s a superior Sparks song, complete with arch vocal delivery, and a diamond of Eurotrashy electronica with a minor-key melody that’s perversely cheery. Super-smart and crazy-catchy, it’s three-plus minutes of pop bliss. Tied for second-best are the tracks “Closure,” which uses those three “Hey Jude” outro chords to build a moving-on anthem, and “Like Whoa,” which opens as a bit of “Toxic”-like glitchy pop and explodes into speaker-bursting electronic-pop operetta delirium.

Aside from several ill-advised attempts to be “soulful,” Aly & AJ’s voices are unassumingly pretty and perfect for multitracking into shimmery pop choirs. Aly & AJ are less about their expression than your pleasure. Under no pressure to be cool, they’re free to be honest. The very talented but hipness-hamstrung Tegan and Sara would benefit greatly by following their lead.

THE FAMILY GUY: Takashi Miike

THE FAMILY GUY
Takashi Miike's extensive filmography is as sweet as it is strange



BY IAN GREY

Singing and dancing zombies. Insane lactating mothers. Incestuous killer sisters. A son rebuilt by mad science from pieces of a father figure. A minotaur-licking loser. Two daughters literally joined at the hip. Images that mix literal, metaphoric and just plain bizarre Oedipal nightmares. Others that gush over-the-top gore and sentimentality in equal parts. In the course of films that shift from abject horror to slapstick comedy, one can easily miss the fact that Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike really is a family guy.

Best known in the U.S. as director of the relentlessly controlled patriarchal nightmare turnaround horror Audition, Japan’s ridiculously fecund auteur is as obsessed with family as Steven Spielberg, but with none of the obsessive kneejerk-normative impulses that mark the US master as an American filmmaker.

Sometimes a Miike family is a “normal” construct under siege by outside forces (The Happiness of the Katakuris). Sometimes, the nuclear family fragments on contact with spiritually void consumer culture (Visitor Q). More often, that “family” is a substitute unit — the Japanese yakuza crime families that fill many of his films. (If this seems a stretch, note that Miike has a yakuza franchise film called Family.)

In the most extreme instances — and when talking Miike, “extreme” takes on new meaning — you get something like Gozu, in which a lonely yakuza separated from his crime family gives birth to himself via a lover’s birth canal, which makes her his default Mom. Or something.

Miike’s family thing is a prime reason why, despite the cultural details lost in translation, his films sink deep claws into a Westerner’s back brain. Viewers can depend on nothing but knowing that the unexpected is the rule. Like an early Brian de Palma on amphetamines, even his most horrid nightmares exist cheek by jowl with tenderness.

Or as Eye Weekly’s Jason Anderson smartly summarized, “Takashi Miike is not just some sick bastard — he’s a sick bastard with heart.”

He’s also insanely prolific. Miike has finished two movies this year and is filming his third, while this month will see the DVD release of 2005’s The Great Yokai War. So, rather than attempt to be comprehensive, the following is a list of representative titles that might help you get a grip on a sizable filmography.

Miike masterpieces

The Bird People in China (1998) — Magical realism, tragedy and comedy blend as a salaryman and a yakuza travel on a Herzog-like upriver search for a mystery tribe. An amazing underwater CGI shot of a flock of turtles powering a boat and a strobe-lit gangster gunfight nightmare are early indications of Miike’s febrile invention, while a character sums up the director’s career-long modus operandi, “It’s a metaphor, dummy!”

Three Extremes (2004) — After two feh shorts by Chan-wook Park and Fruit Chan, this anthology becomes essential because of Miike’s Box, the tale of a woman novelist whose increasingly surreal/frightening memories of patriarchal incest are causing her reality to break into sad, conflicting bits. Elegiac and visually gorgeous in a way suggestive of an Asian Bergman, it’s a meditative, mature look at identity.

The Great Yokai War (2005) — Miike shocks by doing a Jim Henson-y, super-cute kid’s movie involving a boy from a broken family ending up in a supernatural battle between some supernatural creatures of Japanese mythology.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) — The aforementioned zombie musical. What else can be said? OK — it’s a deeply spiritual, family zombie musical. With jokes.

Audition(1999) — Widowed patriarch systematically seeks new wife, finds sexually traumatized girl his daughter’s age. Multileveled hallucinations, mangled desire, acupuncture needles and knives meet body parts in less-than-conventional ways.

Visitor Q (2001) — An emasculated TV reporter tries to reconnect with his family via the creation of a documentary on family; incest, interfamilial lactation, necrophilia and worse follows. In the end, it’s actually an affirmation of familial happiness. Really.

Flawed but freakishly fab

Ichi the Killer (2001) — Thought Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive was the last word in operatic gore? Think again. With one main character into lacerating S&M (when not blowing away roomfuls of yakuzas) and a meek programmed “assassin” who slices people sideways with his knife-enhanced Reeboks, Ichi is a reprehensible piece of manga slaughter that also manages to be, well, quite funny.

Gozu (2003) — A mystery woman indulges Miike’s lactation fetish, a character gives slimy birth to himself through his girlfriend’s birth canal and a minotaur haunts the director’s incomprehensible but hilarious idea of a road movie.

MPD Psycho (2000) — So there’s this detective suffering from multiple personality disorder. He goes after a cult with bar codes on their eyes and a killer who cuts off the tops of people’s skulls and plants sculptures in their exposed brains. Then Miike’s TV series gets weird.

Zebraman (2004) — This film is Miike in full-on adorable mode: A failed dad gets to “be” his favorite superhero. Despite or because of the loopy premise, it’s a sappy delight.

Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) — In his efforts to avenge the killing of his brother by his yakuza dad, a boy enlists the help of other teen malcontents, including a herm-aphrodite whose vagina shoots poison darts. While boasting unique set pieces and feverish, inventive style, Miike hadn’t yet perfected the mashing of melancholy, gore and comedy.

Other nonessential but fascinating offerings include 1999’s N-Girls vs. Vampire (virgin models become vampires), 2000’s The City of Lost Souls (a moody interracial gangster love story highlighted by a Matrix-style CGI cockfight) and Shangri-La (2002) a comedy that deals with, um, homelessness.

Miike misses

Look, the guy makes a lot of movies; some duffers are inevitable. These are titles you might want to skip. A good deal of these lesser efforts are yakuza films aimed to fill Japan’s ravenous direct-to-video appetite. The best (i.e., most perverse) of the lot is Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002), a gang turf–war/inter–crime family soap opera that is alternately dull and almost unbearably hyperviolent.

The most genre-recombinant is Full Metal Yakuza (1997). Equal parts gangster revenge film, RoboCop rip and Frankenstein, it’s a flawed jaw-dropper about an oafish yakuza who is killed trying to protect his father figure, a crime-family boss; a mad scientist “rebuilds” him with spare cyber-stuff and parts from the aforementioned boss.

Graveyard of Honor (2002), Dead or Alive (1999) and Kikoku (2003) prove that even Miike can be generic, and nobody will dis your Miike cred if you skip his competent but inessential J-horror entry One Missed Call and the extended J-pop video Andromeda.

But as career downsides go, and considering his astonishing production speed, these few off entries are small beer indeed. Especially in light of the fact that Miike is only 46 and just now hitting a new aesthetic peak as his ongoing family “project” is gaining a tighter focus. God only knows what images and ideas we’ll be gasping over when this article is hopelessly obsolete in, say, three months.

[NOTE: I wrote this in 2006. As of now, Miike has directed eighty-three (83) films.]

Oh! You Pretty Things: More thoughts on THE COCKETTES

In the late 1960s a young actor named George Harris moved to San Francisco. Harris was soon haunting thrift shops, donning gowns, furs, and jewelry, growing lots of hair and slathering on the cheap-tart makeup. After dragging up and knocking back a lot of acid, he reinvented himself as a queer hippie Christ figure named "Hibiscus."

Hibiscus and some other like-minded young nuts soon moved into a 10-room Haight Street apartment rented for the lordly sum of $30 a month. Like deranged Little Rascals, they started putting on shows at a North Beach bijou called the Palace, largely off-the-cuff messes of drag, deranged trash-deco costumes, and oft-nude chorus lines pumping it up to '30s standards and Stones songs. The shows bore names such as Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma and Hot Greeks. The troupe called itself the Cockettes.

Bill Weber and David Weissman's deft, happy/sad chronicle of the Cockettes' beyond-camp positive perversity offers the rare exhilaration of watching an entire subculture create itself from scratch. And, as the credits close, to linger with true dismay on the unlikelihood of anything so raw, crazed, so un-self-consciously contentious, rising in our relentlessly self-reflexive time.

Along with John Waters--who found one of his (and Divine's) first appreciative audiences at the Palace--The Cockettes is narrated by group survivors who charm with their continuing amazement at what havoc they once wrought. Total hams to a man (and a few women), they had the born drama queen's sense of extreme self import to document their every moment on cheap film.

In amusing vignettes, we find that they were predisposed against earning money, for reasons both mistily "political" (although Andy Warhol earns more reverence than Karl Marx in the Cockette view) and practical (even in the '60s, pretty things with shaved eyebrows and bare johnsons hanging from holes in their panties were a bit much for most potential employers, or paying audiences). Naturally, they were doomed.

Before their fall in '72, their shows grew ever more elaborate. They even found time to make the occasional sort-of narrative film, including a hilarious queer skewering of Tricia Nixon's wedding.

As local fame grew, the Cockettes received coverage in Rolling Stone, and future disco diva Sylvester joined the group. But their status as nouvelle-chic darlings led to a disastrous run in New York attended by the starry likes of Sylvia Miles (also one of the film's narrators), Anthony Perkins, Diana Vreeland, and John Lennon. In the end, it wasn't beauty that killed this beast (swollen to almost 50 members by the early '70s); it was drugs, other people's notions of success, and the inevitable internal bickering.

Thanks to their articulate subjects and fleet editing, Weber and Weissman never have to hammer points home. It soon becomes obvious that being a Cockette wasn't just a pose--it was a way for the intrinsically tweaked to survive outside an already ossified hippie milieu.

At one juncture, the filmmakers display cutting contempt for those who'd have their subjects tarred and feathered by cutting to a film clip of then-newly elected California Gov. Ronald Reagan sneering, "Grow up!" at people like the Cockettes. As the film shows, many of the Cockettes were unable to do that, as they died in the '80s from the "gay cancer" President Reagan would so vigorously ignore.

Of the survivors (one of whom died of AIDS during filming), we see middle-aged Cockettes adjusting to a more gray reality with varying degrees of oddness. Jilala, the Aleister Crowley figure of the group, appears in (relatively) conservative makeup only to later reappear as a Day-Glo Carmen Miranda. "Goldie" is a queen bitch to the end, while Peter Mintun (the Cockettes' favored piano accompanist) and "Fayette" (a female) look like normal folks, although a maniacal Cockette-ish grin blows their cover every few minutes.

After viewing The Cockettes, I wondered if every so often the culture currents simply carry a glittery gender-shifting corrective wind which, during the Cockette phase, carried with it the inspiration-stuff for David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, the New York Dolls and Bette Midler.

I felt a sadness and even a muted anger that low cost, freewheeling Cockette culture had ultimately been sucked dry of identity power politics by Burning Man's Club Med style of desert alt.whatever, and deeply pleased that Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Lady Gaga's monsters get everything that mattered so very right.

As for that dismay I mentioned earlier--fuck me and my easy bitters. There's nourishment in this tale and the glitter of an aging Cockette's eye: the mainstream always loses to the good, brave and crazy and Weber and Weissman's document is that delightful, needed reminder.

SHOCKING METAL OF THE DAY: Korn

The other day I was feeling perverse. When the new Korn CD showed up, I didn’t just hurl it, I got kinky. I played the damned thing.

And now I’m stuck, like the drowned sailer, waving my hands in a critical ocean of no-fucking-way. As in no fucking way this or any Kornrecord could be good, and even if it was, any self respecting metal-fan couldn’t find the time of day for it — or admit it was good. Really, there's so much awesome coming out every day from everywhere, who could give a fuck about some millionaire nü metal burn-outs?

Except…except…except if the tin didn’t read ‘Korn,’ I bet this would make many a critic’s Band to Watch lists. There are songs here that suggest a grittier, weirder Alice in Chains. Songs here that sound like percussion  done by unholy Roman chain gangs. There are songs here that even make you forget how lead yelper Jonathan Davis sounded in the bad old 90s.

Part of Remember Who You Are‘s spasmodic excellence is pure Kismet. At this moment, Korn in is the situation of being trapped between their fanbase’s slavering desire for more shit that sounds like oldKorn, a mass market-driven need to update the sound and an audible urge by the band to be artistically relevant. (Just saying, but when nü metal was Faith No More’s “Epic,” people had no problem with it, probably because Mike Patton presented a super cool version of how listeners felt they were.)

Don’t get me wrong — sometimes Davis still sounds like old Davis, with that crushed-balls, stuck-pig, tenor Trent Reznor thing. But about fifty percent of the time of  Remember Who You Are, his voice is the most unpredictable thing going and enhanced by the appealingly raw, four-dudes-in-a-room production style.

On the startlingly inventive “Are You Ready to Live,” we hear a war between musical modes, a battle between being a really good Slipknot song and a really good song by Low, as in the indie slowcore Mormons, complete with Davis sounding like a ringer for Low’s Alan Sparhawk. And you thought we lived in a time devoid of miracles.

Atop pit-ready, rattling track of “Oildale (Leave Me Alone),” which sounds more like a less Greek version of the most recent Rotting Christ CD than anything else I could think of, we get a Davis who’s successfully morphed into the Devin Townsend of Strapping Young Lad. No, for real.

But all is not well. “Pop a Pill” is pleasingly raw and weird with its cool Arabic-scaled riffs.  Unfortunately, it also has the most Korn-y ‘funk’ bass and a return to that vocal style that so troubled us in the 90s. And “Holding All These Lies” is just fucking god awful, not because it’s nü metal, but because it’s crap.

But then you get “Fear is a Place to Live,” which in one song reconciles old and nu Korn. Deep groove disco beat? Check. Indie-pop-ish chorus? Check. Self-loathing monologue (but not a rap)? You betcha. 

And so it goes, back and forth, from inspired to lousy and back.

That noted, successive listens had me thinking: if Korn are working so hard to move on, why are we so deadset on dismissing them, sound unheard?

Even in this edgy incarnation, the better songs here face-slap us with the reason Korn sold multibillions: the inglorius basterds can write a song, a for-real tune, not a mess of riffs crazy-glued together.Agoraphobic Nosebleed rules, Anaal Nathrakh rips, but it’s downright useful to have something that’s fairly brutal that you can hum along to while you’re being totally teenage and alienated.

And so, listening to the updated Davis machine, I got to thinking that instead of loathing Korn, we should really be grateful.

People seldom start their metal journey with Behemoth, Meshuggah or Napalm Death.  In the 90s, there was easy-to-digest Korn, just like with have  Crack the Skye‘s Mastodon with their ELO choruses, both working as catchy gateway drugs to the harder stuff.

Meanwhile, I think there’s another good reason why Korn makes the metal cognoscenti turn up their noses while similar but more arty, less emotionally naked bands like Deftones are accepted. And please, do feel free to say I’m full of something.

At about the same time the first Korn records came out, the literary world was exploding with its own form of nü metal. It was an abrupt gush of seriously fucked up dark young adult fiction (DYA) that was totally narrowcast at teens, really fucked up teens, or teens who saw themselves as really fucked up. Whatever.

DYA heroes and heroines, usually big music fans, wee often latchkey kids from wrecked families. Incredibly despairing and often literally goth, the books were rife with child abuse, violent incest, vampires who did not glitter but did rape your soul, mothers who either over-medicated their kids of sold them for quick cash and, incredibly, worse.

And so a generation before Twilight, authors like Charles de Lint  and Francesca Lia Block created full-blown publishing empires off this new generation’s seemingly bottomless need for tales of truly fucked up tweens and teens (why they were so fucked up is up to the sociologists).

Cut to: me, trying to cross 7th Avenue  at 8th Street in New York City in the mid-late 90s.

Fuhgeddaboudit.

The street was clotted with hundreds of kids outside a Barnes & Noble packed with Charles de Lint books where one of the Korn dudes was doing an autograph session. All  with a copies of Follow the Leader andLife is Peachy cradled, gently, in their hands. Most of them wearing worn Slayer,  Metallica and Megadeth tee shirts, their  older sibling’ metal. Kids who needed to hear their angst mirrored/validated in Davis’ vocal middlebrow but still effective operatics.

And so I think another reason we might dismiss Korn is because they’re fucking embarrassing; neediness and desperation are not pretty. They’re the opposite of the cool swagger of a Devildriver or Five Finger Death Punch, the blustery maniac shrieks and barks of black metal, the cookie monsters of death metal.

So we have Korn as gateway to more awesome metal and  as accidental metal therapists (along with Remember’s “Are You Ready to Live” and “The Past,” Remember  features the therapeutic “Let the Guilt Go”).

But there’s more.

No matter how good they get—and on Remember Who You Are, they’re often pretty damned good—Kornwill always be the musical equivalent of a metaphorical photo of us at 14, 15 or maybe 16, faces sprayed with spots, hormones raging uselessly, porn sites memorized so Mom, whose probably been drinking again, won’t find them when on your crappy Acer computer. Look at it this way and the title Remember Who You Are almost feels like a threat.

But strip the new CD of all that incredible baggage, and what we have is a band trying and half the time succeeding in not sucking in a pretty unique way, a 2010 band and not a relic, and hitting an easy 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

You can hate ‘em. You can point out that they’re metal Peter Pans, eternally stuck in angsty adolescence. You can accurately point out that Davis still sounds like a miserable stuck pig here and there and there would be no arguing it. But given all the positive roles Korn have played in the real and greater metal world,  and despite how irritating as they can be, and now as good as they can be, its time to finally accept them as one of us. Remember Who You Are indeed.

Lohan before the fall: the wonderful GEORGIA RULES

Just when it looked like voracious indie product had sucked the juice and truth out of the dysfunctional family subspecies, along came the odd couple of director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman) and Lindsay Lohan to provide not only the best movie in the genre in ages, but one that could easily fill a Twilight Zone double bill withMysterious Skin. 


Lohan plays a hypersexualized teenage wreck whose alcoholic mom (Felicity Huffman) sends her off to Idaho for a stay with her own mother (Jane Fonda), an emotionally remote, amorphous Christian. (The image of Lohan passed out in virginal white under a sign reading "Welcome to the Land of the Famous Potato" is an early indicator of Marshall's gentle, weird humor.) 


After the basic setup, and a plot that has much to do with the repressed returning in spades, Georgia does things indies are too hiply full of the latest misunderstanding of the ironic gesture to countenance: Christians and Mormons are ribbed and respected; rural life is an amusing and viable option.


Most uncool in this embrace-the-abuse Rihanna moment, sexualized and just plain sexual violence has lasting un-pretty consequences and a mere movie, despite Little Miss Sunshine's delusional insistence otherwise, can only suggest the beginning of a solution to big trouble. While everyone is understated and ace in their roles, it's Lohan's exposed nerve of a performance that pays the bills here with interest. Soon we'd be treated to the spectacle of a 60s party girl like Fonda tut-tutting Lohan's entirely average nightlife as the overture to the onetime ginger-girl becoming celebrity bloodsport as the nation's latest sacrificial blond. 

Hateful Film of the Day: WORLD TRADE CENTER

Oliver Stone’s insidiously godawful, 9-11 exploitation picture, World Trade Center, requires its audience to forget how neo-conservatives repurposed Sept. 11 as a plummy excuse for Strausian mass slaughter all while urging viewers to indulge a sick, misty-eyed wallow in necro-nostalgia. It willfully ignores the fact that glossing over the political significance of this most horridly political event amounts to nothing more than simple artistic cowardice, while also using the real-world bravery and suffering of its real-life protagonists as a sort of critical extortion.

Nominally about the undeniable courage and endurance of two New York Port Authority cops — John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) — the film’s inchoate core of all-American righteousness, relentless Christian imagery and impotent fist-shaking is actually personified by Marine Sgt. Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon). Lantern-jawed, blue-eyed and a fanatically patriotic Connecticut Baptist, Karnes gets a calling from God himself to go to New York, save people and afterwards proclaim that “Somebody’s gonna pay for this!”

By film’s end, and after an “uplifting” epilogue, an entirely unnecessary title card informs us that the real Karnes served two tours in Iraq. The inclusion of that detail, whether the filmmaker wants to admit it or not, is commentary. Which suggests that either the once left-leaning Stone is pulling a Christopher Hitchens (thus the film’s gushing endorsement by far-right wags), or that the director views Karnes — inexplicably filmed through distorted lenses and at low angles usually reserved for movie psycho killers — as a well-meaning dupe of his superiors’ empire dreams. The first possibility is simply annoying, the other has elements of high tragedy, but Stone and company seem to entertain both, perhaps in the cynical name of hedging their bets.

Otherwise, World Trade Center accomplishes one amazing thing: It makes Sept. 11 boring. It’s not the fault of Andrea Berloff’s script, which in surer hands might have provided a decent armature. Nor is it the fault of Cage, who plays McLoughlin with a subtly self-doubting brand of taciturn that negates the actor’s tendency toward freakshow displays. Nor is it Peña’s Jimeno — also a heartfelt sketch — although one wonders why his white counterpart is granted film-long backstory flashbacks while the Latino Jimeno only warrants one quickie bit of exposition.

No, what’s wrong is 100 percent Stone. Center opens at dawn, with a montage of Manhattan street scenes — cops going through their routines and so on. It’s effectively nerve-wracking stuff in light of what’s to come. Then again,anything would be nerve-wracking in light of what’s to come.

Glad for small mercies, we only see the Center’s collapse from the limited POV of McLoughlin and Jimeno, who, after rushing to the Trade Center’s lobby, end up buried and immobile under tons of rubble and waiting for rescue.

After its money shots — including a single person jumping from the Towers in tasteful long shot and the urban abattoir of Ground Zero rendered as pleasingly free of bloodied dead bodies — the movie downshifts into a flattened style that’s meant to pass for seriousness with a big “S,” but instead calls attention to itself by way of its very dullness.

Between scenes of McLoughlin and Jimeno trying to stay awake in the darkness and rubble, their remarkably stoic wives — played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, respectively — fret about their spouses from inside their bucolic New Jersey and New York State homes. (Bello’s character is only able to understand the fear and pain of possibly losing someone after being helped in doing so by an African-American woman. The Black Savant lives.)

Meanwhile, it’s really hard to listen to McLoughlin pointedly list all the disasters (both natural and terrorist-based) that the Port Authority was prepared to deal with — but “not this” — without also thinking of that “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” memo the Bush administration ignored. It’s hard for anyone but the filmmakers, apparently. Or maybe this is another, slyer bit of that political commentary the filmmakers claim not to be making.

In the end, all Stone really seems to be up to is using Sept. 11 to again mourn the loss of mythical white American innocence for what one assumes will be a predominantly white Boomer audience. And no doubt turning a pretty penny doing it.

NUCLEAR FAMILY WAR and Veronica Mars And Battlestar Galactica

[This was first written for City Paper in 2006 but I stil stand by the basic ideas]

TV needs to reflect viewer desire and perceived reality. Conservatives can make as much noise as they like about reanimating the traditional family to the point of obliterating alternatives; what matters to television is the reality on the ground. And it looks like this: According to Divorce Magazine, the percentage of folks married was, as of 2002, 59 percent of the population, down from 62 percent in 1990. The 2000 U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 13.5 million single parents had custody of 21.7 million children. Single-mother families increased from 7 million in 1990 to 10 million in 2000. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, in a 2006 study, found that children raised in families "without fathers, both by lesbian mothers and by single heterosexual mothers," experienced a generally superior parenting experience.

Television depends on either a literal or instinctive grasp of such facts, which in turn helps explain why huge corporations have banked on such wide-ranging single-parent shows as Everwood, Gilmore Girls, Reba, andSupernatural. The success of these shows, assorted queer-themed programs, and HBO’s ironic inverse Big Love--about a polygamist with too much family--underlines the reality: The American family is radically redefining itself in ways immune to traditionalist scolding and wishful thinking.

In another very obvious way, TV’s reflecting nature pops up in the way it deals with post-Sept. 11 fear, helplessness, and government indifference. The CSI variations, Bones, Cold Case, House, Numb3rs, and NCISserve up an endless array of implacable, invisible enemies that can only be dealt with by experts who buck The System--which is almost always assumed to be incompetent, corrupt, or both.

The finest television combines the problems of increasingly fractured social groupings and external threats and brings them to a fine boil in the cauldron of family. And nothing boils more than Denis Leary and Peter Tolan’s singularly seething Rescue Me. Leary plays Tommy Gavin, an underpaid New York Irish-American firefighter haunted by the ghosts of people he didn’t save at the World Trade Center. An epic drunk, Tommy screws his dead cousin’s wife, kidnaps his own kids, and tries to pummel red-staters out for a grief fix at ground zero. But he’s still a lifesaver, flaws and all.

While arguably an exaggeration--at least to those not raised in Irish-American families--Rescue Me creates an otherwise accurate, enraged, and aching look at the class and cultural stressors fragmenting blue-collar families. So much so that it’s the object of a jihad by the Parents Television Council, led by right-wing scold L. Brent Bozell, the idea apparently being that if you don’t show the truth it’ll go away. But like other shows about fragged families, such as those in Six Feet Under and the monumentally popular Desperate Housewives,Rescue Me reaffirms its audience’s sense of who they are, while offering the solace that their situation may be better in comparison.

Rescue Me’s firefighters constantly rib each other about being queer. While a defensive reaction to the reality of these mainly male firefighters spending most of their time together, it also helps them cope with the fact that they’re each other’s real family, united in mission and values and loyal to the core. And this idea is one only television, with its recurring characters and season-long tales, can do justice to: the metaphorical family unit.

Not just any group of biologically unrelated folks smooshed together constitutes a metaphorical family. While the doctors in House care about one another, they’re too self-immersed to cohere, and anyway, the show mainly exists to watch Hugh Laurie rip patients a new one. Metaphorical TV families, like the real item, are not about one person--or if they appear to be, that person is just an entry point to explore other family issues.

The defining figure of the new metaphorical family may just be Joss Whedon. His Buffy the Vampire Slayer,Angel, and Firefly were often about nothing but the struggles of metaphorical families to define and defend themselves. Look no further than the 2000 episode "Family," in which Buffy’s metaphorical family--blue-collar Xander, father figure Giles, and supernatural sister Dawn--band together to support Tara, the girlfriend of newly out Willow. Tara’s biological father shows up claiming she’ll become a demon if she doesn’t return home. Buffy and the gang reject his craven power play. Infuriated, he says, "We’re her blood kin. Who the hellare you?" Buffy: "We’re family."

"Blood kin" and metaphorical family fuse on Alias, in which double agent Sydney Bristow’s biological father is assimilated into her core family of loyal, beloved co-workers. More subtly, the cops on the wire in The Wire are more intractably connected to each other than their official families, and more overtly, the unrelated hotties ofSex and the City form a family to support their Gotham adventures, as do the queer families of The L Word,Will and Grace, and Queer as Folk. Dead Like Me, meanwhile, took the metaphorical family thing to delightfully ridiculous analogous extremes, with a clan of the deceased--a girl named George, Jewish father figure, slacker brother, and cranky older meter maid often reluctantly pressed into mother duty--easing folks’ passage to the afterlife.

Right now, the two shows that most elegantly fuse external and internal threats to the family--traditional and metaphorical--are unsurprisingly two of the best shows on the small screen: Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars and Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. Amateur sleuth Veronica (Kristen Bell) and dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni)--the most realistically positive daughter-father relationship limned in any medium for some time--live in a sunny Southern California town infested with moral rot, racism, and elitist cruelty, a microcosm of Bush America. For all Veronica’s plucky wit and the bedrock relationship between she and Keith, the show is incredibly despairing. The powerful and rotten often get away with their crimes--including Veronica’s rape. Veronica’s efforts to locate the truth are rewarded with smirks from the law and corrupt alike. The show’s most scary element, though, is Veronica’s inability to form an extended family.

Once upper but now barely middle class, she doesn’t fit in with the rich kids, while her dalliances with the few elite teens who aren’t outright bastards earn her the distrust of possible ally Weevil (Francis Capra), a poor Latino biker. And slippery race politics threaten her friendship with her African-American best friend, Wallace (Percy Daggs III). At one almost intolerably painful juncture, you’re led to think that Keith has died--this long after Veronica’s alcoholic mother has abandoned her--and Veronica’s primal weeping against a backdrop of city lights and black sky makes you realize, My God, he’s all she has. Aside from etching a raw line around the limits of the biological family, it makes you realize how much she bears beneath her quips, how alone she is, how brave.

Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, is the show future media scholars will reference when trying to figure out what the hell was up with America after Sept. 11. It starts with the decimation of humankind courtesy a surprise attack by the man-made slave class of robots and human clones called Cylons. The titular battleship and a small fleet of human survivors spend the show trying to escape the superior Cylon forces.

What creator Moore does with this standard sci-fi armature is brilliant. Most everyone in the Galactica fleet has lost their biological families in the attack, and the show posits the survivors as the ultimate extended metaphorical family. This reading is boldfaced by episodes that play out like the Hatfields and McCoys in space, with the idealistic Galactica "family" up against the cold pragmatists of another surviving ship, the Pegasus. The defining difference between the two: The Pegasus crew tortures their female Cylon prisoner, while the Galactica folks try to figure out why she is what she is. Other contemporary concerns appear in SF drag--mainly, the place of democracy, surveillance, and open debate in times of war. But Battlestar Galactica is most acute in its observations on family and its kissing cousin, identity.

While there’s much to be gleaned about the fluid nature of family in extreme situations from the relationships between Galactica’s Cmdr. Adama (Edward James Olmos) and his surviving son and his dead son’s lover, the location of the show’s central theme is in the body and soul of Sharon (Grace Park)--or rather, the Cylon clone of Sharon.

As a Cylon, the Sharon clone hates humanity for its self-destructive cruelty, but she’s also in love with one of the ship’s pilots, is carrying his child, and constantly sees her belief of humanity as scumbags countered by Adama and company’s decency--and increasingly takes to helping that crew. Will she cave in to the wishes of her Cylon forebears or bond with the Galactica family? More importantly, can she rise above being "born bad" and craft her own viable, independent identity?