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July 31, 2006

what time machines are for

So the new season of Battlestar Galactica isn't coming until October, but there are some trailers you watch over and over, breathless and squirmy.

It really is like waiting for Christmas. I forgot what that was like.

At the risk of overstatement, Battlestar Galactica is the great pop-cult gloss on the post-9/11 world, that and 24. 24 is, of course, the classic liberal guilty pleasure, the show aesthetically compelling (but functionally conservative) junk food that progressive dudes like to consume the way we ironically chow down on the Howard Stern Show (maybe Rush if the stomach is stronger.) Like Howard Stern, Jack Bauer is a kind of encoded cop whose beat is masculinity and male excess. Only instead of policing the boundaries of dudeness by contemplating the "manginas" of pre-op female-to-male trannies (Stern's schtick; so, so NSFW), Jack Bauer meditates on holy violence, our hero/pilgrim engaging in ritual (purifying?) cycles of sadism and masochism while brooding darkly on the simultaneous need for / impossibility of duty and honor and patriotism. (It's all Daddy eulogies in 24; Jack as dad, Jack as prodigal son. Jack betrayed by all father figures and mentors except, of course, for poor, sainted David Palmer, the only man Jack ever loved!)

In so much as it takes Nixon to go China, 24 proposes that only an honor-bound, haunted liberal can effectively wield the sword of ultra-violence. (And Jack is a liberal, only of the pro-war New Republic/Slate variety.)The horrorshow of guilt and pain that is Jack's increasingly insane, orgiastic day-in-the-life sums up to a powerful, unconscious consensus that unites male assholes of every political stripe. Instead of Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty" line, though, the Jack Bauer consensus is more exhausted, slack and adolescent. Mere doggerel, really: "Not only am I in no way any kind of bitch and/or pussy, but under the proper circumstances I am capable of taking this shit so much farther than any you ever imagined was possible."

Battlestar Galactica mines the same psychic territory, except that instead of playing the psychodrama out from the POV of a strangely sensitive and (that word again) tortured all-American, black-ops hand, BSG plays it out from within the collective point of view of a downtrodden, beleaguered technologically over-matched minority. The shift in location affords what the grad students like to call a radical re-alignment, one that makes BSG infinitely more likely to blow someone's mind that 24, which at best threatens to make straight men unexpectedly sad or aroused.

The previous two BSG seasons flirted with a whole bunch of heretical notions (heretical to the FOX), most of them related to the possibility that some or another "we" (it's just a tv show, right? nothing to do with "us") might be on the wrong side of history. Next season, though, when the human resistance depicted in the clip above puts on their ski masks and goes around (I imagine) planting bombs, BSG is going to quit with the coy stuff and go flying straight down the maw of the question of terrorism and freedom fighting and "asymmetrical" warfare. This going to be something to behold if for no other reason than that for most American audiences terrorism poses no question at all except how many Arabs will have to die in order to "stop it." The experience for those fans is going to be nervewracking, a ride akin to, say, Kirk flying the USS Constellation into the mouth of the planet killer in The Doomsday Machine. The up-tempo scoring charts a rising arc of anxieties: Are we the cylons or the humans? Am I Baltar or Roslyn? Was the show always about the war? Is it against the law to root for terrorists on TV?

When ex-President Roslyn says, "Our children need to know that some people fought back while others collaborated," half the audience will hear some kind of founding fathers bullshit, and half will hear a Hamas or Hizzbollah leader rallying the proverbial irregular troops. I'm waiting for the moment that second sound turns BSG into an official poster child for the media's support of terrorism (just like the New York Times!) And why not? If doing your job as a journalist can make you a terrorist sympathizer, why doing your job as a passive consumer of mass media? The beauty of thought crime is that you don't have do anything in order in order to have Anne Coulter or Alan Dershowitz condemn you to death, you just have to be.

Posted by ebogjonson in battlestar galactica, on July 31, 2006 10:07 PM

Comments

Posted by: Lester Spence at August 2, 2006 11:54 PM

Posted by: ebog at August 3, 2006 4:09 PM