Signs of Life

Late to the party, but I recently caught up with The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, a show with which I have a love/hate relationship. To be honest, the first season felt somewhat interesting and original. By season two I was starting to entertain this niggle, an idea that perhaps this bit of media that looked from the outside, from the sides, from before and after, like an unmissable feminist triumph was doing something weird. Like, for instance, who was the target demographic audience for a show about how religious (Christian) fundamentalism takes political power and immediately uses it to create a state that is predicated on corporal punishment and sanctioned sexual violence? It seems to me that the religious fundamentalists of the US would be, at best, disinterested, and at worst they might find a way to warp the narrative into an allegory of the too-permissive liberal democratic order – logic that might equate, say, state sanctioned violence with the right-wing paranoia around sexual liberation. I know, it seems like an enormous stretch, but I spend enough time on twitter to have an understanding of the mental gymnastics involved in reading the Empire in Star Wars as an allegory of the American left or whatever…

Anyhow, this is all to say that I was having my misgivings already. If the only people who were watching the show were those who understood the value of a liberal secularism to begin with then what was the point of this highly didactic, preachy-ass show? Was it the violence itself, a sort of trauma porn? Was is merely a sense of smug self-righteousness that middle-class Americans could experience, knowing that Gilead would never some to fruition on their watch, and for good reason, after all, just look at… And then something happened on the show that crystalized these nebulous ideas for me (spoilers begin now, in case that matters at this point in time): June names her daughter, the offspring of a relationship that had been liberatory in its clandestine origins, discovered by Serena, and turned into another coercive sexual duty, “Nicole.” This was the name that Serena had chosen for June’s child before the child’s birth, before June’s dramatic escape, before sending the newborn to Canada. In an action of defiance, June chooses her own name for the unborn daughter, and to say that I was shocked at this turn of events during the season two finale, this moment of reversal, capitulation – betrayal – would be an understatement. After all, the relationship between Serena and June was that between jailor and inmate, between assailant and victim. We (I) had just sat through eight episodes of misery meant to convey the banality of evil, returned to American soil. This was nazi shit. Slavery. The use and abuse of humans as things. And so here we are, having been convinced that Serena is irredeemably evil, and June pays her tribute by naming her daughter the name she would have had if Serena and Fred had succeeded in stealing her from her rightful mother. I still don’t understand this move, really, in terms of character or plot. Perhaps it is meant as an acknowledgment on the part of June, either of Serena’s desire for a child of her own (why should we care at this point given that she is comfortable with horrendous means to obtain this child, or any child), or perhaps – and even more horrifyingly – as a nod of solidarity between two women who have fallen into the trap of Gilead. Except it’s clear that Serena is an architect of her own prison. It may have proven more restrictive to her own ambitions than she imagined possible, but the fact remains that this is not only her doing, it is a system that she has continued (and will continue, for at least a few more seasons) to defend.

The real answer to this question, which is every bit as unsatisfying as the above answers and which betrays the vacuous politics at the center of the show, is elsewhere, and it has everything to do with the intended audience of the series. June is demonstrating her moral superiority by naming her child in accordance with Serena’s wishes. And let me digress here: she is certainly morally superior and deserves this reading. In fact, if anything, later seasons of the show will spend far too much time depicting an inner turmoil that begins to tear apart June’s emotional stability and the very fabric of her family. But the truth is, she is unequivocally a freedom fighter, an ally to the others in her position, and a force for good. That’s why this token seems wildly out of place, and it transforms June from a gritty survivor into an apologist, a parody of an American center-left that meets the rise of right-wing populism with the smug knowledge that they are safely tucked away in their own blue-hued enclave.

It gets better in this latest season, though, and by better I mean infinitely more problematic, vexing, bizarre. June is in exile, with several other Gilead expats and escapees, in Toronto. Over time, the American ethnic enclave (huh?) in Toronto has started to rub our neighbors to the north the wrong way, resulting in xenophobic protest. This imagery reaches its pinnacle in a scene where June has come out to pray for an American pilot who lost his life flying a mission to save her older daughter, Hannah. She kneels before an American flag before diving to save a child from a disgruntled Canadian who fires a gun into the crowd, through the slowly billowing American flag. It’s a veritable clash of fascisms – the populist (bad) versus the American militaristic (good), and it’s carried off without a whiff of irony, without a single nod to the thought that, perhaps this sort of macho nationalistic ideology was implicated in the rise of Gilead and its successes in conquering so much of North America to begin with.

Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Moss have contributed immensely to feminist discourse in the previous decades. I do not fault them for the premise of this show, its stylization, and much of its political content is valid, if essentially benign – after all, women all over the world find themselves trapped in their own Gilead, just not typically in the US and not typically professional-class white women. But when liberalism and civility disintegrate into fascist apologia then I really have to wonder what I’m watching and why, what they’re making and why.

As of this writing, season 4 of HBO’s Westworld is over, and we await word as to whether season 5, reputed to be the show’s last, will be green-lit.

Spoilers ahead:

Given that the season ends with the deaths of (nearly) all main characters, not to mention the entire human/augmented human race(s), the idea that we would continue on is a bit absurd. Presumably the show will happen within “The Sublime,” the show’s version of robot heaven. Dolores, made to suffer, is our only survivor that we know of for sure, and it seems that she has resolved to relive her experiences, perhaps to try and understand how she can possibly rectify the destructive natures of human and host alike. Conveniently, the Hoover Dam, which in season 4 is a short drive from Manhattan, has been turned into a server farm with unlimited hydroelectric power to support the open-ended adventures of Dolores in The Sublime, creating her world as she sees fit, or finding Teddy, “her cornerstone,” (a rough analogue for the Freudian concept of a founding trauma, a memory so profound that it becomes an anchor for all other features of subjectivity or subjecthood or subjection…. whatever is handy, as we will see).

The first season of the series was remarkable. It was visually stunning – often shocking – even apart from the typical HBO penchant for gratuitous nudity and buckets of fake blood. It brought up some really mind-bending ideas around AI, agency, and the self, all pertinent questions for my research and which I attempt to address in my dissertation. The plot twists were complex and sophisticated, but didn’t feel like obfuscation or cheap shots, nor did they feel stilted the way that, for instance, Christopher Nolan and M. Night Shamalan’s films always do to me; films like Inception and The Village often seem like slight-of-hand but with the magician explaining the trick as he does it, on the one hand a cheap gimmick, but on the other one that justifies itself and makes viewers feel self-congratulatory over their ability to understand something so complex. Anyhow, the parallel time trick was well-executed and meaningful, something which season 2 tried to recreate and multiply. For me, it reached just a bit too far, and what had been a welcome twist in season 1 simply became a chore in season 2 as the various narrative threads wove together to create a bizarre tapestry.

The third season felt like a hard reset. We leave the park and deal instead with Delos’s real, insidious, hidden agenda: the prediction of individual behavior. What is free will if a computer knows what you are likely to do, and the powers that be do their best to corral potential free-thinkers before they become a threat to business as usual? Here, the alliances start to get way, way, too complicated, and the seeds of season 4’s myriad shortcomings are sown. With all of these shifts in allegiances between guest and host alike come deep shifts in character and perspective. These changes sometimes left me, at least, feeling confused and perhaps a little cheated. The season had plenty of redeeming qualities, however: Vincent Cassel as the villain, a reframing of the existential stakes, beautiful scifi environments, and fulfilling action sequences to name but a few of these things.

So for season 4, the natural move would be to combine every single philosophical, ethical, or existential issue of the preceding 24 episodes, add in a secret time shift or two, plus multiple realities that interact (when convenient, but not when it’s dramatically useful for them to remain apart), and make the characters even more malleable and prone to massive, massive reversals. Well, for me this became an issue. Again, the season actually has plenty of redeeming elements: music is used in a more sophisticated way to gird, rather than simply accentuate, the plot, the Frankie storyline was nice, and there were other subtleties that made the show feel more well executed in general. What I take issue with was what, precisely, was being executed.

The title of this post refers to how the season constructs itself in a metafictional way. It refuses to take a side, even provisionally, on how it will treat the multiple existential questions it raises. Instead, it loses its internal self-consistency, the cardinal sin of plot since before Aristotle, to keep its narrative hurtling toward armageddon. Are the hosts’ personalities predetermined and immutable as a result of their programming? Yes. But also no, if it means that Caleb, as a digital copy of himself, can shed light on human nature for Charlotte, or if suspending this qualification will allow drama between William and his synthetic double, who himself has a crisis of identity. The reversals continue on the level of character. Bernard does a lot of work making the sympathetic Maeve seem likely to abandon the cause (she doesn’t), and in the end Charlotte does abandon hers to become an eleventh-hour ally of Bernard and company. So why did she spend two seasons becoming increasingly power-hungry and villainous? What a waste…

As a counter-example, take the contradiction-rich territory of time travel narratives. The best time travel movies do one of two things: they either provide the audience with an explanation of what will happen when a contradiction occurs – branching timelines, holes in space/time, if you touch your past self you both explode, or even embracing nonlinear notions of time as in Arrival – or they acknowledge how dicy the territory is in the first place. For this last, see Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which both break the fourth wall to ask audiences to simply suspend their disbelief. I’ll take that over trying to simply have it both ways within the same storyworld, and it would be one thing if it were “both” ways, as in “all of two ways,” but Westworld season 4 wants to have multiple shades of ways, mutually contradictory at times, and completely inconsistent. Honestly, it leaves me questioning whether the writers didn’t care or whether they reveled a bit in the sheer insanity of it all, and this has left me ultimately questioning myself. Am I being unfair, analyzing the show to an obnoxious degree and nit-picking? If the reviews for the final episode are any indication, these issues might be more than just a world of my own creation.

Have you heard of this book, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism? As I start putting pen to paper on the dissertation, I find myself needing a deep reading of this iconic text. It grounds my notion of “futurity,” and since the diss is about character and time/place in sci-fi, I suppose I should be an adept on the Jamesonian views regarding the virtual distance sci-fi puts between reader and text, how the future is (and isn’t) imagined in the context of neoliberalism, and so on.

So I’m reading the introduction, the one he added in 1990, or rather I read it yesterday (slow and steady). Super valuable, of course, but I’m bothered by this preoccupation with modernism as such. Let me explain:

I understand that, especially in the west, modernism was all-consuming in terms of cultural production. Sure, there were some hold-out creators that were preoccupied with the 19th century and couldn’t move on in the spirit of a Miró or a Woolf, and sure there were also stirrings from the very beginning to push beyond the horizons of nascent modernist sensibilities in the form of both high art (one could argue that Dada was somewhat postmodern) and pop culture (film noir, proto-beatnik lit a la Nelson Algren supposing that counts..). Okay. Fine. I also get that this movement went on to colonize the non-west in myriad ways, for example, Cèsaire’s surrealism via his discovery of the movement and friendship with Andre Breton in Paris.

But I have two main categories of question which might be anachronistic, or at least contingent on the contemporary notion of the modernist past. The first regards modernism in its relationship to capital. Jameson points out that postmodernity works hand-in-hand with late capitalism, or in one way of putting it, post-industrial capitalism, with its emphasis on the service industry, entertainment, and financial products as drivers of value. over production of actual stuff, is a natural corollary to a cultural movement that is also, in some way, recursive rather than observant. What I mean is, postmodernism conflates the infrastructure with the superstructure, to use Althusserian terms, which I like because they make me feel comfortable and seen. The generation of value is, if not decoupled, at least further alienated from productive labor in the traditional sense. This is a gross oversimplification, but I think you see what I mean. Does this imply that modernism proper worked as a corollary to industrial capitalism, or even more bizarrely, that nascent capitalism and the Industrial Revolution interfaced in a similar manner with romanticism, naturalism, or impressionism? Obviously, I don’t have enough knowledge of pre-war culture to answer this or even meaningfully pose the question – still less am I prepared to articulate the question in 18th or 19th century terms, but it’s there.

The other set of questions has to do with what happens when one ventures out of the west, especially between the turn of the 20th century and WWII. I would argue that modernism finds itself imposed upon native forms of artistic expression in numerous and complex ways, supplanting popular forms of the short story, drama/performance, music, and representational arts over the course of the century. If we now find ourselves post-modern, then what does that say about the forms that creative production took outside of the west but concurrently with western modernism? In other words, does postmodernism deal with global neoliberal capitalism in its relation with cultural production and the logic of being-in-this-world on a global scale, or is it only meaningful for a certain hegemonic perspective, one where western modernism seems perfectly salient as shorthand for “creative production 1900-1941?”

But why, you might ask, is this relevant at all? In many ways it isn’t. I don’t know that any answer to the above would shake the foundations or even rattle the windows of Jameson’s astute analysis, which is indispensable in our current era for understanding the shift from the liberal paradigm of the US and Europe from WWII until 1973 to the reigns of Reagan and Thatcher which traded material advances for the working and middle class for the chimera of production for its own sake. I ask because, as an academic just starting to realize my own context, professionally speaking, I want to know how long I have to deal with modernism as neoliberalism becomes more and more a caricature of itself, as the ecological catastrophe and economic contradictions conspire to undo this era of postmodern logic that licenses post-industrial capitalism. What comes after postmodern, and does it need to tarry with the modern, or can we, can I, reframe the logic of the current epoch in other terms, like the anthropocene, in terms of genre, in geopolitical or identitarian terms?