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michelles-garden-of-evil · 3 years

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Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise, Part II: The Top 5 Worst Things

Last week, I listed my top five favorite things about the first 44 episodes of Strange Paradise, when Ian Martin was headwriter and when the show had a very different feel to it than in the final four weeks of the Maljardin arc. But no creative work is perfect, and, despite my fondness for this show, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that the writing for early Maljardin had several glaring flaws. Unlike Danny Horn, I don’t think that Ron Sproat was a better writer than Martin (actually, I consider Sproat the worst writer on SP), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel that his writing needed some improvement. Note that this entry is specifically about the writing during this period, so things outside his creative control (e.g. the Conjure Man’s questionable casting) will be excluded from the list.

That said, here are my top five least favorite things about the writing in the first nine weeks of Strange Paradise:

5. Cheesy dialogue

More specifically, (1) bad jokes and (2) slang that was already outdated when these episodes originally aired in 1969. This one is #5 because, while these lines are cheesy, I can’t hate them because most of them make me laugh. Even my personal least favorite of Jacques’ jokes, the “pose” line from Episode 18, is kind of funny in an ironic, anti-humor sort of way, like the dad jokes that have become fashionable in recent years. While there are some jokes in this show that I find genuinely funny--Elizabeth’s Song of Solomon joke, for instance, or “the lady doth detest too much”--most others are the epitome of cornball. Sometimes you hear both in the same episode: Episode 21 is loaded with Devil jokes/puns that would be unforgivably corny if Colin Fox didn’t possess enough charisma to sell them, and yet the same episode also features a genuinely hilarious double entendre. The good jokes sneak up on you, sometimes amidst a hurricane of bad ones.

As for the slang, some comments that I’ve read mention that it was largely out of date even in the late sixties. My good friend Steve (with whom I often discuss SP) has told me that “you might not be aware of how campy that slang sounded in 1969 since you obviously did not live through the Sixties--this happened with a lot of TV shows during that period, the most egregious examples being the various ‘evil druggie Hippie’ episodes of DRAGNET.” Apparently Martin became infamous for using outdated slang later on when he wrote for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, putting lines like “I dig a man who’s far-out!” and “I think bein’ around here’s gonna be kicks!” in the mouths of some of his younger characters. Even if he had used up-to-date slang, it most likely would have still aged poorly (as slang typically does), especially for generations born after phrases like “the most” and “making the ___ scene” fell out of use.

4. Slow pace and excessive repetition

This one is also low on the list, because slow pace and repetition weren’t flaws when the show originally aired, but instead have aged poorly because of advances in technology that made them unnecessary. Before the advent of the programmable VCR, you had to be able to catch the program you wanted to watch on time or have someone you knew catch it on time and record it--which, in 1969, would have meant an audio-only tape recording. This meant that only the most fortunate and/or most loyal viewers would have been able to watch Strange Paradise every day, making it necessary to recap all the major events in subsequent episodes for those who missed out. This is also likely the reason why early SP (like most soaps of the time) has a relatively slow pace: if too much happens in one episode, you have to recap more and the people who missed the big episode are more disappointed.

Nowadays, with DVRs, video streaming, and DVD sets--not to mention certain legally-questionable means--it’s nearly impossible to miss an episode of your favorite show (with few exceptions), making extensive recap largely obsolete. Screenwriters can cram as many plot points as they want into one episode and no longer have to write five episodes of the other characters reacting to the news if they don’t want to.

Even so, just because the constant recap served a function at the time doesn’t mean I have to like it. It gets annoying hearing the same plot points reiterated episode after episode. Like I said while reviewing Episode 21, “if someone were to remake this show for Netflix or another streaming service, they could safely ignore about 75 percent of the original scripts and condense the remaining 25 percent quite a bit without omitting anything important.”

And don’t even get me started on the lampshading of absent cast members, like in Episode 9 when Jean Paul and Quito wasted two minutes searching for Raxl just to slow the plot down. It’s nothing compared to Ron Sproat’s “we must search for Quito” filler episode in Desmond Hall (Episode 78), but still, those scenes were pointless.

3. Extreme artistic license with certain historical/cultural details

Although Ian Martin did a surprising amount of research on certain subjects for Strange Paradise, there are some subjects where he either didn’t do enough research, or (more likely) made extensive use of artistic license. The first one is his portrayal of Jacques’ wife Huaco as an Inca princess despite their marriage occurring over a century after the fall of the Inca Empire. I discussed this all the way back in Part II of my review of the pilot, where I invented the theory of Jacques traveling back in time to marry her, but other possible explanations include Huaco being a 17th-century descendant of Inca royalty (as the Quechua people are still alive today), extreme artistic license, and/or critical research failure. I don’t know if we would have eventually gotten a good explanation if Martin had continued writing the series, but we would need a damn good one for the approximate equivalent of having a 21st-century character marry the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and accept it considering that this is a fantasy series, but it still creates a lot of plot holes that need to be filled.[1]

Another example of artistic license about which I feel more ambivalent is the conflation of voodoo with the Aztec-inspired indigenous religion of Maljardin, which I’ve discussed before both in my Episode 23 review and Part I of this post series. I’m not sure if this is genius--religious syncretism is a real phenomenon throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, and some people today do syncretize the vodou Serpent God with Quetzalcoatl--or just an instance of Martin playing fast and loose with facts. I would like to think it’s the former, but it could just as easily be the latter (hence why I referenced it on both lists--I have mixed feelings about it).

2. Annoying inconsistencies

Does Raxl know that Jean Paul is possessed by Jacques Eloi des Mondes? Does Vangie? Why does Jacques’ portrait disappear in some episodes after he possesses Jean Paul, but not in others? All three of these things vary from episode to episode, and change annoyingly often as the plot demands. Steve and I have also discussed this subject in the past, and he believes that Martin used this device to make the story easier to follow; if that’s the case, it appears that he used Raxl and Vangie as audience surrogates, especially for new viewers or people who didn’t tune in every day. But surely there were other ways to do that without creating continuity errors? It may have served a function, but that doesn’t make it good writing. What Martin is essentially doing is filling and reopening the same plothole, episode after episode.

Regarding the portrait, I don’t know how much to blame Martin’s scripts for this inconsistency and how much to blame the directors, as I don’t have access to any SP scripts beyond the pilot script and the Vignettes. However, I’m going to assume that he’s at least partially to blame, because at least the pilot script mentions the disappearing portrait (which literally disappears in all three of the Paperback Library novels), Also, while none of the characters ever mention the portrait vanishing (unlike in the tie-in novels), some of his episodes have characters looking at it while Jacques is controlling Jean Paul and commenting on the uncanny resemblance. See also the diegesis tag for more discussion and analysis of the disappearing portrait.

1. Tim’s subplot

It should surprise none of my regular readers that Tim’s subplot is my #1 least favorite thing about the first nine weeks of Maljardin. I’ve already written an entire post about why I dislike this subplot, so I’ll keep my discussion of it here brief. Jean Paul saves the life of artist Tim Stanton when he hires him to paint Erica’s portrait, but then does nothing to make the commission easy for him--which is not a bad set-up for a plot in and of itself, but the execution is terrible. Tim chooses to use Holly as his model despite her barely resembling Erica, and Martin mostly uses their subsequent interactions to drive the old, tired, clichéd plot where two people who bicker and hate each other at first eventually fall in love (or at least he appears to be setting that up[2]). The payoff for the Holly portrait subplot finally occurs in Episode 33, but it’s underwhelming (not to mention barely recapped) and the already bland Tim quickly becomes a background character. In short, his subplot is a boring waste of time and should have either had more payoff or--preferably--been scrapped altogether.

That concludes my list of the worst things about Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise. Stay tuned for my review of Episode 45 within the next two weeks.

{<- Previous: The Top 5 Best Things }

Note

[1] Interestingly, there is a possible (if unlikely) historical explanation for Huaco’s sister Rahua having “skin as white as goat’s milk” and “hair like ripened wheat.” An early Spanish account of the Chachapoya people (aka Cloud People) of the Northern Andes describe them as “the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.” Assuming the Spanish account isn’t made up, this proves that reality is sometimes unrealistic.

[2] Thankfully, given the soap opera genre, it’s unlikely that Tim and Holly would have stayed together forever, even if they had eventually fallen in love during their painting-and-bickering sessions. Even so, that doesn’t make it a good subplot.

#strange paradise #ian martin #maljardin arc #review #analysis #arc review #list #bruce gray was a good actor but tim stanton is zzzzzzzzz #even jean paul agrees ;)

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lastsonlost · 5 years

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So I was half-right.

Instead of misogyny it's Nazis because of course it is.

If you spend a lot of time in certain Extremely Online corners of the internet ecosystem, you’ve likely stumbled onto #NoNutNovember, or just #NNN for short. An annual challenge encouraging men to refrain from masturbating (or even, for many, having any sex) for the month, No Nut November was initially created as a parody of internet-borne phenomena such as the Ice Bucket Challenge or Movember, skewering the silliness of viral internet challenges along with the more extreme claims made by proponents of NoFap, an anti-porn subreddit with half a million members. (According to one of the moderators of the NoNutNovember subreddit, /u/yeeval, the subreddit has no connection to NoFap, though the two are often conflated.)

For most participants, the challenge is essentially an excuse to shitpost, as well as tweet memes skewering some of the more exaggerated purported benefits of abstaining from masturbation. But there are many who take it seriously, with at least 52,000 people as of this writing diligently documenting their day-by-day progress (and setbacks) on the subreddit r/NoNutNovember. Per /u/yeeval, “I’d say 90% of the posts are from people actively participating and also there’s the occasional fallen member who stays on the subreddit for the community and laughs.”

On its surface, No Nut November is a fairly innocuous challenge: while it may seem silly to abstain from masturbation for virtually no reason, some of the memes are pretty funny, and a month of abstinence (whether it be from sex or masturbation) certainly isn’t going to kill anyone. u/yeeval says the goal isn’t to demonize porn or masturbation per se, but to prompt men to examine their own masturbation habits and whether or not they’re healthy. “In my opinion, most originally participate in NNN for the meme aspect of the challenge but as the days go on people begin to see how big their porn or masturbation dependency is,” he says.

"Neither of those things are bad or immoral in themselves but just like any outlet can become excessive in times of depression and loneliness.” Yet it would be naive to ignore that there’s significant overlap between the general anti-porn ideology behind NoFap — and, to a degree, No Nut November — and that of the far right, which has increasingly coopted the movement. (NoFap’s website states that, with the exception of a small number of users who may abstain for religious or moral reasons, they do not have an anti-masturbation stance.)

Because the challenge is associated with abstaining from porn, some people associated with the movement have taken the extra step of harassing adult performers on social media, giving it an additional layer of troubling implications. “In the past [No Nut November] has always been like, ‘Oh, look at this ridiculous thing some people are participating in,'” says adult performer and director Casey Calvert. “This year, people [in the industry] are talking about, ‘Oh, actually this is connected to the far right and maybe we shouldn’t just be saying hahaha, No Nut November.'”

A new meme brings these implications into sharp relief. Coomer is a reference to a meme of an unkempt, skeezy-looking bearded man in a white tank top with vaguely Semitic features, accompanied by descriptive text like “doesn’t even know anything about politics,” “extremely aesthetic right arm (huge muscle),” and “has never heard of NoFap"

It’s been circulating on 4chan for the past year, but Alex Hawkins, the vice president of the porn tube site xHamster, says he started seeing it in the replies on his company’s Twitter feed back in September, when presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted about limiting access to pornography. At first, “we didn’t really know what it meant and thought it was funny,” he tells Rolling Stone. Then, in late October, the coomer resurfaced thanks to a Twitter campaign led by a user named TeapotLad, in which users vowed to change their avatars to the coomer should they fail No Nut November. PewDiePie shouted out the campaign in a recent YouTube video, as did far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, who is perhaps best known for being one of the many extremist figures, including Milo Yiannopolous and Alex Jones, to be banned from Facebook. “No Nut November and the Coomer meme represent a deeper meaning,” he said in a tweet. “Porn is evil. It literally re-wires your brain and causes erectile dysfunction. Take the pledge. Don’t be a Coomer.”

The term has also been used in the context of “OK coomer,” a play on the “OK boomer” meme, in response to tweets critical of No Nut November or masturbation abstinence in general. “It’s positioned as this epic battle between the weak beta masturbators and the strong, alpha NoFappers,” says Hawkins.

Like most memes, “coomer” carries with it more than a tinge of irony, and it’s not always easy to determine whether it’s being used flippantly or to actually deride men who masturbate. But the implication is clear: masturbating is an urge that should be resisted at all costs. David Ley, PhD, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist who studies pornography and mental health, saw the meme after he tweeted his criticism of No Nut November, referring to it as “a creepy little smorgasbord of insecurity-driven hate with anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia all rolled up in one,” he tells Rolling Stone. (Ley has partnered with the cam website Stripchat to do AMAs about sexual health, and plans to appear in one debunking some of the myths associated with No Nut November.)

The idea that there are significant health benefits from abstaining from masturbation is partially based on the (primarily internet-propagated) theory that semen retention is linked to an increase in testosterone and male virility, an idea that has been widely debunked. For the most part, however, the idea that masturbation is somehow feminizing is “rooted in extremely antiquated ideas of masculinity,” many of which are also promoted by far-right groups, says Ley. The Proud Boys, for instance, a far-right extremist group known for its propensity toward violence, has long advocated for its members to abstain from masturbation on the grounds that it boosts testosterone and makes them more appealing to women; indeed, founder Gavin McInnes gave a shoutout to NoFap in a 2015 article for the far-right publication Taki’s Magazine. (The organizers of NoFap have strongly refuted any connection to the Proud Boys.)

An even more extremist version of this far-right anti-masturbation philosophy has been promoted by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, who has propagated the conspiracy theory that Jews dominate the porn industry and use pornography as a way to control white men. On far-right threads on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, this sentiment is fairly widespread. “Jews not only control most of the pornography industry, they also rely on the goyim to maintain a routine of ejaculation in order to stay docile and non-violent,” one comment reads. Another shared a viral Pornhub tweet poking fun at viewers who’d failed No Nut November, writing, “the Jew mocks you as they poison the minds of millions.” (Pornhub is owned by the Canadian company MindGeek, the CEO of which, Feras Antoon, does not appear to be Jewish, even though there are numerous 4chan /pol/ threads speculating as such.)

This anti -Semitism is also often accompanied by healthy doses of homophobia and racism as well: on these threads, you’ll frequently see users deriding men who masturbate to heterosexual porn, on the grounds that being aroused by another man’s penis makes you gay (even if said penis is depicted going into a vagina). And because mainstream porn often features white women paired with black men, there’s also a virulently racist element to much of this discourse, such as the suggestion that interracial porn is intended to steer white women away from procreating with white men and toward men of color.

The irony of this strain of the anti-masturbation movement is that, while it’s ostensibly intended to fight the larger porn industry’s attempts to brainwash and emasculate white men, anti-masturbation ideology has historically been used as a tool by fascist figures to gain social control. Cultural stigma associated with masturbation, combined with the fact that pretty much everyone masturbates, invariably leads to a lot of men “developing a lot of internal shame,” says Ley. “And that makes them open to manipulation and social control.” As an example, he cited the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany, which strongly discouraged Hitler Youth members from engaging in masturbation. Because anti-porn and anti-masturbation movements tend to be comprised of young heterosexual males, they could potentially be viewed by some on the far right as ideal recruitment grounds. The fact that something like No Nut November appears to be a joke on its face “appears to serve as this interesting front door recruiting kind of strategy to bring folks into this deeper, much more insidious and shaming movement,” says Ley.

Of course, it goes without saying that not everyone who participates in No Nut November or NoFap is a white supremacist or religious fundamentalist, and that the founders of these groups explicitly reject any suggestions of overlap between the two communities. u/yeeval says he has seen no hint of any anti-Semitic or misogynistic commentary on the subreddit, chalking any suggestions of Jewish porn conspiracy theories to “someone trying to make a bad / overtly offensive joke.” “NoNutNovember isn’t a political movement. We are not anti-porn. We are not anti-woman. We are not anti-masturbation or anti-sex,” he says. “In its most simple form NoNutNovember just a fun internet challenge that has grown in popularity due to many memes that circulate the internet…However, I also think that the reason that it has become so widespread is that it has given many the opportunity to look within themselves and realize that they might be relying on masturbation and porn for comfort.”

The coomer meme is also, at least inherently, apolitical, says Alice Vaughn, host of Two Girls One Mic, a podcast about porn tropes. “The concept surrounding ‘Coomer’ is neither right nor left politically. The urge to shame those with higher sex drives is nothing new, and is a subject many are uncomfortable with, especially adolescents (which is predominately 4Chan’s user base),” she says. But the rise of “coomer,” with its distinctly conservative implications about male sexuality, would seem to refute that the anti-masturbation movement is totally innocent or entirely intended in jest. The fact that it’s often used in the context of “OK coomer,” a play on a meme intended to skewer boomers’ criticism of Gen Z, also indicates that this is primarily a youth-driven phenomenon. When you consider how younger generations have typically adopted a more healthy, progressive view of sexuality than previous ones, this doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense — but it actually tracks with current data, which indicates that younger generations are having less sex, Ley says.

Usually, this phenomenon is attributed to male millennials and zoomers (members of Gen Z) spending more time watching porn, and to an extent this may be true; when it comes to determining the effects of pornography viewing on male sex lives, research is somewhat mixed. But it’s also just as likely that sociocultural factors like economic unrest and fear-mongering abstinence-only education have also played a role in these declining sexual activity rates. “We’ve spent decades telling these young kids be afraid of sex, and that only hereto monogamous sex is OK and moral,” says Ley. “Now all of a sudden they are really conflicted about sex and their own sexuality.”

That said, there’s also an awful lot of men who are not participating in No Nut November in earnest, and many more who aren’t participating at all. In an email to Rolling Stone, Pornhub vice president Corey Price said that traffic is virtually unaffected by No Nut November, and few of the adult performers Rolling Stone spoke with said that they hadn’t seen their engagement go down considerably during the month either. Considering that annual Pornhub traffic numbers are in the tens of billions, if there is indeed a wider porn conspiracy to sap men of their virility, that conspiracy appears to be working pretty well. But for those who are participating in the challenge, and may have stumbled along the way, Calvert has a comforting message: “I personally think No Nut November is very silly,” she says. “Not masturbating for a month does not make you a better man or a stronger man.”

............

Let me see if I got this straight.

Porn is evil

And not fapping makes you a racist homophobic Nazi

Did I... Did I fucking miss something?

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jiwoneelee-blog · 6 years

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Final

Over the past two or more decades, television has changed into a new model of storytelling, which is different from the conventional serial forms and episodic that were previously televised. Complex TV is the new model, which infuses multifaceted narratives as the norm television shows that air throughout the developed world. Essentially, it has redefined episodes under the guidance of serial chronicling with a shift in balance. It includes dismissing the requirement for the plot of television show to close inside the scene in way that foregrounds continuing stories in a scope of genres. A plethora of serial practices exist that can be employed based on the supposition that the narrative in the series builds over time. Being unconventional is the most defining feature of complex television. However, there are other features that characterize narrative complexity in modern TV. They focus on the serial as opposed to the episodic. They have an extended depth in the way characters are portrayed. Typically, the script is that of narration and storytelling coupled with an ongoing and constant plot. Characters also shift in perspective with each varying episode. It is also common to come across a commentary in television shows that explore their narrative stunts. Suspense is also a major feature that seems to be part of complex television, and the most active audience speculates about what might become of lead characters or a major twist in the plot (Mittell 20). Collective intelligence between the fans and the film is ubiquitous, and they participate quite intensively from the first to the last episode. This case study focuses on a series of TV shows that are ideal examples in demonstrating the Complex TV phenomenon, and they include Westworld, American Gods, Walking Dead, and Legion.

A lot of people conflate the description of the film as, “Highly Serialized Drama” with long-form episodic examples such as the X-Files and Twin Peaks. For a show to live up to its concept, it should not be predicated on a central narrative enigma not attached to future events triggered by narrative statements (Mittell 19). A show such as Revenge typically embodies complex television because its narrative thrust is simply forward moving, but with a keenness on insights and flashbacks that pop up in episodically so that the viewer understands key aspects about characters. Viewers do not have to grapple with deep mysteries in which they have to piece together hints to understand a character. Therefore, the common feature is that viewers are aware of narrative statements that are accumulated over time so that they have a clear understanding of possible future events that shape subsequent episodes. It is against the same backdrop that viewers and fans of Westworld, American Gods, Walking Dead, and Legion should understand them in terms of complex television. Character portrayal, the plot, the narrating, and storytelling style is in such a way as to dissuade viewers while maintaining a concrete storyline characteristic of complex television.

Westworld disorients viewers through its robotic characters portrayed as having their lives hanging on a loop. Thus, it means that the show’s storyline takes place over a long time, but it could also appear in a sequence, which further confuses the viewer. Westworld is reminiscent of the Marvel series Legion in which the characters’ bodies are swapped, and the audience is just not sure if the characters are really themselves or their swapped personalities. The common shifts between characters in complex television are thematically triggered by contemporary phenomenon among people whereby they have to constantly interrogate the realities around them. For instance, one might view their perception of an unusual scene as magical, artificial intelligence, psychosis, or just the side effects of trauma. The fact that they are not sure is reflected in complex television through character shifts. With the information age at its peak, it is quite difficult for one to differentiate between what is real and fake. The notions of reality are increasingly being distorted by a bombardment of news from different online platforms. Therefore, the idea that characters in Legion can swap bodies reflects the experiences of a typical contemporary television viewer. Perhaps the confusion created in complex television is the real source of fascination that the audience has with contemporary television shows.

The character swaps in a single storyline of a show and the use of robots show that the two shows mirror the transcending feature of complex television that projects a future that seems quite far but increasingly plausible. Traditionally, television has often been a way to escape reality, but complex television exposes certain ways through which realism gets constructed. It makes the audience to think whereby it is common to come across fans reading online recaps of shows just to understand certain things such as the real character, an actor’s alter ego or a twisted aspect of the plot. Towards the end of Westworld’s first season, for instance, there were already murmurs in its fan base that it had failed to exhaust the themes of humanity and consciousness. Some pundits went as far as challenging the notion that the series portrayed complexity as being equal to ingenuity. Complex television such as Westworld creates another significant platform in entertainment, including dynamic entertainment blogs keen to delve into the complexities of plot, character portrayal, and other nuanced issues.

Complex television is also about an extended depth of characters, and episodes vary from each in ways not contemplated by the viewer. The opening scene of American God, for instance, demonstrates the complexity characteristic. The series is based on an adaptation from one of Neil Geiman’s novels. The show is, indeed, human fantasy, but it is the depth of characters that makes it stand out from the rest of the shows aired around the same period of cable news networks. The audience for American Gods has to be really captivated, and it has to watch quite actively to understand even the first episode. There are soliloquies that are quite overdone. For example, “Technical Boy” in the film, who is the god of technology, soliloquizes, describing language as “a virus”, religion as “an operating system”, and prayers as “spam”. The gods undergo some temporal shifts and change their body shapes.

In one lewd scene, a goddess sucks people inside her by repeatedly having sex with them. Until that point, “Technology boy’s” point about language is evident. There is no difference with Westworld, which portrays a futuristic theme park in which humans have sex with lifelike robots before murdering them. Boston Dynamics and Jurassic Park are quite a phenomenon in the series. There is an enviable depth in character portrayal and the roles they play to advance the plot and set the stage for the next episodes. Interestingly, character complexity may sometimes turn off fans instead of intriguing them. The raping and murder scenes in Westworld might be quite unlikable, but they emphasize the typical feature of complex television.

The opening and closing brackets of each episode in most shows is debatably the most vital feature of the role screen time in establishing a balance between the serial and episodic form. Screen time often defines a specific episode as a distinct part of storytelling and it also entails the break between episodes (Mittell 27). A scene in many shows starts with a critical marker(s), for example, a short recap of scenes in the past episode, an opening title sequence of variable length. Similarly, a scene ends with closing credits that preview future accounts.. The show, Walking Dead illustrates the feature of opening and closing credits quite well. The storytelling in the show’s season finale evokes the events that shaped scenes in previous episodes. At the same time, it makes major and minor references to characters throughout the series. The devices employed to bring up the major theme of zombie survival, which also follows the current trend of narration in complex television. All of the screen-time elements as illustrated in Walking Dead exist outside the story-world and even its narrative. Like in series, the plots are stringed and arced across one full season. Nonetheless, the producers of the show always understand and try to make it such that each episode is a separate narrative that follows the pattern of screen time already set in the previous episodes. However, the first ten minutes of each episode is actually a recap of the final act in the previous scene. The compelling bridge between episodes is manifested in the way fans religiously look forward to the next episode.

Characters in complex television shows have intricate histories, which further convey the same inherent feature. Character complexity tends to compliment character depth. In Legion, for instance, David, the main character, has a complex history that only requires several visits to blog sites to be able to fathom. He is born of Charles Xavier and a survivor of the catatonic Holocaust. The latter was the former’s patient during his earlier visit to Israel. Up to that point, it just seems complicated that David exists in the first place. The viewer immediately becomes curious about his peculiarities. The audience soon realizes that David has telekinetic powers that enable him to make kitchen explosions. Further probes, of course, using online explainers, reveal that his experience is about the process of psychotherapy and treatment, which as the show indicates, is engaging and vigorous.

Complex TV is unique for its cinematic and novelistic features, which are compliments accorded to it by media pundits. However, the medium has significant aesthetic accomplishments that are worth noting. The first one, which is also an artistic breakthrough, is that it has created an active and engaged community of viewership that has an equally ubiquitous online presence. Although other modes exist to be used in television storytelling, complex television functions majorly within the several choices of locating story-worlds, characters, time, and events in continuing serial and episodes. The goal is to reflect a world where the imagined and the real are not so far apart.

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rolandfontana · 5 years

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The Man Who Murdered the Sixties

It’s been a half-century since Charles Manson and his loopy minions conspired to commit a series of murders that still fascinate and flabbergast the world.

Manson, who died in prison in 2017, would savor the attention he continues to attract, including in this summer’s Quentin Tarantino film (“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) and several new books, including my own.

In March 1967, at age 32, Manson was a fresh federal parolee who stumbled into San Francisco as American ingenues in peasant dresses and bellbottoms—runaways, hitchhikers, and lost souls—were streaming in for the Summer of Love. His timing was impeccable. The patchouli-scented sexual revolution created a perfect petri dish for his predation.

Using prison-honed talents as a con man and middling skills as a guitarist and singer-songwriter, Manson soon began building a cult of as many as 35 young hippies, three-quarters of them women.

He would spin campfire lectures for his stoner clan featuring Psych 101 dogma about projection and reflection. He basted their brains in a mix of Jesus Freakiness, Dale Carnegie hucksterisms, Norman Vincent Peale’s sunny-sided platitudes (“You are perfect!”), and the buggy self-help triangulations and “dynamics” of his prison-library Scientology.

Charles Manson. courtesy Oxygen

They believed he was a godly mystic.

The writer David Dalton nailed Manson in eight words: “if Christ came back as a con man.” Joe Mozingo of The Los Angeles Times said, “He was a scab mite who bit at the perfect time and place.”

Using the playbook of pimps and cult patriarchs, he isolated troubled young women from their past lives and controlled their bodies and minds. He was the Wizard of Oz for libertines, and he as much as told them so.

Susan Atkins, who became one of Manson’s most prolific killers, said Manson often mocked his own followers’ blind faith.’

“He said, ‘I have tricked you into doing what I want you to…It’s like I’ve got a bunch of slaves around me,” she told a grand jury in December 1969, after her arrest.

The Enigma of Charles Manson

Manson was an enigma on many levels.

The “Manson Women” Photo courtesy Oxygen

He was a racist and sexist imbued with the old-timey sensibilities of an Appalachian upbringing. He preached female subservience and racial segregation, and his young followers lapped it up in the midst of a flowering civil rights movement and on the cusp of modern women’s liberation.

Many were willing to kill for nothing more than Manson’s validation.

“You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time,” Manson once said, “…especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from.”

Just 29 months after Manson began assembling his naifs into a communal Family, these “heartless, bloodthirsty robots…sent out from the fires of hell,” as a prosecutor would describe them, carried out a series of proving-ground murders in Los Angeles over four weeks in the summer of ‘69 that still has a place of prominence in America’s storied pantheon of crime spectacles.

The primary motive was money to allow the Family to finance a retreat to California’s Death Valley to ride out the race war that Manson predicted was coming.

The first victim, the Family’s good friend Gary Hinman, was Killed on July 27. Two weeks later, on Aug. 9 and 10, Manson followers killed the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and five others in acts of casual savagery that remain a peerless mashup of celebrity, sex, cult groupthink, and bloodlust.

Police outside 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where the blood-splattered bodies of Sharon Tate and her four friends were found. Photo by George via Flickr

“It had to be done,” one of the killers, Leslie Van Houten, explained after her arrest. “For the whole world’s karma to be completed, we had to do this.”

Writer Dalton, who covered Manson for Rolling Stone, called him “the perfect storm” for 1969.

“It was the conflation of mystical thinking, radical politics, drugs, and all these runaway kids fused together,” Dalton told me.

“The world seemed to be in death spiral of violence, and we thought the whole hippie riot was about to begin to save use all. We were going to take over and everything would be cool. In fact, the opposite was happening, embodied by Charlie Manson.”

The implausible Manson story cannot be separated from the context of its era, as some Americans were asking essential questions about what their country ought to be.

The half-decade of 1965 to 1970 saw ghetto riots, the emergence of a vibrant new psychedelic culture, shocking political murders, riveting space exploration, escalation of the war in Vietnam, and burgeoning protests of the same.

Two months alone in the summer of 1969 brought an extraordinary series of events. On June 28, a police morals-squad raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, touched off three days of rioting—and ignited the gay rights movement. On July 18, Ted Kennedy, surviving male heir to the American political tragi-dynasty, fled the scene of a fatal car wreck on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass. On July 20, the world watched on TV as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their stiff, bouncing strolls through moondust.

Among the viewers was a small group of friends and kin gathered at the home of Sharon Tate. Twenty days later, on Aug. 9—50 years ago today—four members of the same group would be savagely murdered by Manson’s second kill team. A week after that, more than 400,000 peopled endured organizational bedlam to attend the Woodstock Festival, 100 miles north of New York City. That same weekend, Hurricane Camille pounded ashore on the Gulf Coast, east of New Orleans at Pass Christian, Miss., killing 256 people.

The Sixties created Manson, and his crimes were an exclamation point to a turbulent decade.

A ‘Child of the ‘30s’

But as he liked to say, “I am a child of the ’30s, not the ’60s.”

He was born to a prostitute mother and drive-by father in 1934 and raised by relatives in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia coal country. He became a chronic juvenile delinquent who flailed his way through a Dickensian childhood. A tiny boy who grew into an elfin but sinewy man, he was locked up in reform school, jail or prison for all but a few years of his life from age 13 to the grave.

He spoke or wrote a million words about his life and crimes—in court, in letters, in media interviews. He bleated many excuses for his wasted life, almost always beginning with a lack of parenting and proper education.

Manson often played crazy, but that was a studied tactic. As Vincent Bugliosi, his prosecutor and biographer, told Time magazine before he died in 2015.

“His moral values were completely twisted and warped, but let’s not confuse that with insanity. He was crazy in the way that Hitler was crazy…So he’s not crazy. He’s an evil, sophisticated con man.”

Manson preached a homespun version of liberation theology—the freedom to be you. But a switch was flipped in the fall of 1968, when the Beatles released their White Album.

Manson convinced his followers that the world’s most famous band was sending him direct messages in the lyrics, including those of “Helter Skelter.” He imagined that Paul McCartney’s song presaged a race war that would induce the Family to retreat to a desert hideout, then emerge heroically and install Manson as a world leader and master breeder.

Manson recast his horny young stoners into a classic apocalyptic cult, prepping for end times. Growing impatient for the race war, Manson decided to “show blackie how to do it” by committing a series of murders and leaving clues meant to implicate the Black Panthers, that era’s subject of America’s ever-changing moral panic.

The starry-eyed plan was a failure on every level.

Before Manson “got on his “Helter Skelter” trip,” according to Paul Watkins, another follower, “it was all about fucking.”

Five former members of the Family, all senior citizens now, are still imprisoned, 50 years along: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles Watson, Bobby Beausoleil and Bruce Davis.

Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was imprisoned for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. Photo via YouTube

Many others have died, including Watkins and Susan Atkins.

Most renounced Manson long ago, although Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, an early acolyte who served 34 years in prison for a 1975 assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford, self-published an autobiography last year that was largely dedicated to minimizing Manson’s culpability.

Atkins, who once seemed to enjoy her public profile as an illustrious sexpot murderess, had a personal reckoning before her death from brain cancer in 2009.

“In hindsight,” Atkins wrote in her memoir, “I’ve come to believe the most prominent character trait Charles Manson displays is that of a manipulator. Not a guru, not a metaphysic, not a philosopher, not an environmentalist, not a sociologist or social activist, and not even a murderer.

David Krajicek

“His long-term behavior is one predominantly of a practiced manipulator.”

She called him “a liar, a con artist, a physical abuser of women and children, a psychological and emotional abuser of human beings, a thief, a dope pusher, a kidnaper, a child stealer, a pimp, a rapist, and a child molester. I can attest to all of these things with my own eyes.

“And he was all of these things before he was a murderer.”

This essay is adapted from David J. Krajicek’s new book, Charles Manson: The Man Behind the Murders that Shook Hollywood (Arcturus).

The Man Who Murdered the Sixties syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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