Inessentials

Spoiler-free discussion of Lost, The X-Files, Fringe, and Dollhouse

The only reason I am looking forward to the final season of Lost, which begins tomorrow, is that it will finally be over.

Lost is a show with an expiration date printed on the label. Fortunately, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse understand that and have said for some time that the show should only go about 100 episodes. This season’s 16 episodes will put that total at about 121, roughly 50 more than was really necessary.

Lost works according to the Reverse X-Files Principle. The X-Files was a wonderful show about a skeptic and a believer (much like Jack and Locke on Lost) who were assigned cases that typical FBI agents couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. The show was very, very good at giving them a fascinating case to solve each week, and its loyal fans loved it to death on internet message boards by piecing together clues concerning long-running plots about aliens and government cover-ups (sounding familiar?). However, when the show tried to tackle long-arc topics, like the abduction of Fox Mulder’s abducted sister, the episodes were often duds. (Not always, but often.) The later seasons became too enamored with the mythology of the show and tried to make well over half of the late seasons’ episodes about dark forces moving against our beloved FBI agents. Thus begat The X-Files Principle: monster-of-the-week episodes that were light on the mythology are superior to the grind-it-out, mythology-heavy episodes.

Lost, though, acts according to The Reverse X-Files Principle. In the case of Lost, the most interesting episodes were those that advanced the mythology, and stand-alone, character-driven episodes were the least compelling. That is why the first season is so hit-or-miss. After a spectacular pilot, and spot-on blending of character, plotting, and mythology-building in episodes like “Walkabout,” too many of the episodes took us into the lives of characters that, frankly, weren’t all that interesting. Sun and Jin had an interesting dynamic on the island, and it was helpful to find out about their pasts, but episodes that simply follow them through their lives in Korea dragged on too long. The very worst were flashbacks involving Jack, easily the most one-dimensional character at the center of any critically adored drama. Terry O’Quinn as Locke was the only actor capable of turning any material into a work of art, while episodes focused on Kate, Hurley, Claire, Michael, and Charlie were at the whims of their episodes’ writing and mythologizing.

Since it has been five and one-half years since Lost began, we’ve had to suffer through lengthy stretches between seasons and sometimes just as interminable lapses in plot movement while Lost was on the air. And that was simply too long for a show so uneven as Lost. I know it has its devoted followers, and many critics consider it one of the golden jewels of television in the 2000s (on broadcast TV, no less!), I think it is so exasperating in its uneveness, that the density of the mythology makes it uninteresting to me (and, I’m sure, many others). I’d like to watch this final season of Lost as it airs to take part in this exciting moment in television history (which I do think it is), but I won’t be watching along. I’m still dreading my choice between watching the whole of the first five seasons again (ugh.) or trying to pick up in season four or five (huh?).

And that is why Lost is just too damned long. Too many non-mythology episodes to slough through. Too many episodes total for a show with such a dense mythology. Combine those two and you have television to dread, television as assignment rather than television as enjoyment. (I mean “enjoyment” in the full, critically aware sense, not in the watching Real Housewives sense.)

I could forgive Lost if I thought that it was better at correcting problems as it went on. But my viewing of later seasons (I made it half way into season five) never confirmed that those corrections were made. And that’s one of the reasons that I think both Fringe and Dollhouse were better television. Neither hit the highest highs of Lost, but both shows recognized problems with their first seasons (reining in William Gibson on Fringe, heavier mythology and less Eliza Dushku on Dollhouse). They found a smart balance of mythology, pushed the limits of dramatic storytelling’s adherence to the laws of physics, created memorable characters, and generally were smart and entertaining serials.

One question that this leaves us with is this: Is it better to love a show with higher highs and lower lows, or to love a show that is steadier but never reaches the same heights? Let us not confuse this with a show’s ambition. Fringe dares you accept things just as ludicrous as Lost does, and Dollhouse dares you to believe that its science is really possible and soon. And while neither invites inviting friends over for “event television” to the same level as Lost, I’m pretty sure I’ll find them more satisfying viewing on an episode-to-episode basis.

So I congratulate Abrams, Lindelof, and Cuse on their success on Lost, scattered though they are. They made a difference in television, changed its course in interesting ways. I hope those sitting down for the final season watch it with open minds for wherever (or whenever) they take it.

This is the latest Subway commercial featuring Olympic gold-medalist Michael Phelps, intended to tie in to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I’d like to take a moment now to say why this commercial is so very, very dumb.

1. Michael Phelps bursts through the pool wall. The first time I saw this commercial, all I could think was, “He’s going into that turn way too fast.” Then he bursts through the wall. Why would you want me to associate fear with your sandwich, Subway?
2. Not getting what makes Michael Phelps great. Michael Phelps is an amazing athlete who has broken all sorts of world records and won an astonishing number of Olympic medals. He did this by swimming. Through water. This commercial, though, assumes that is not amazing enough. No, Michael Phelps must swim through land. Now, Michael Phelps is no longer an amazing Olympic athlete, he is simply a below-average CGI figure, somewhere between Tremors and Bugs Bunny.
3. Jerod. Unlike every other spokesman in existence (except maybe Luke Wilson for AT&T), Jerod is in every single Subway commercial. This is to remind you that Jerod was once fat, but then he ate at Subway and became the huggable Jerod we feel indifferent toward today.
4. Vancouver. Jerod calls to Michael Phelps, who is wearing earplugs and swimming through concrete, “See you there!” Where? Apparently, Vancouver, which is where the Winter Olympics will be held in 2010. Why is Michael Phelps going to the Winter Olympics? I have no idea. But it is urgent that he must get there, urgent enough that he is swimming through the ground. Later we learn it is “so he can get to where the action is.” People, Michael Phelps doesn’t go to where the action is, the action comes to him.
5. Olympic athletes eating fast food. One of my favorite Olympics traditions is watching the McDonald’s commercials where smiling Olympic athletes eat massive piles of greasy cow meat. I always think, “They didn’t get to the Olympics by eating at McDonald’s.” But that’s not the thought I have watching Michael Phelps sell Subway subs. All I can think is, “Michael Phelps consumes 12000 calories a day. He could eat three Dominoes pizzas for dinner as part of his regular diet.” Just because “Michael Phelps fuels up with the mega-tasty Subway Turkey Melt” in no way reflects anything about whether you or I should eat one.

Stay tuned for analysis of future stupid commercials.

Some spoilers for Terminator Salvation, but it’s not like you were going to watch it anyways

Terminator Salvation fails for a number of reasons. It’s about 30 minutes too long, and all the dullest, most senseless, least compelling sequences come in the second half of the film, leaving the viewer with a sour taste. That’s a shame only because there are some pretty nice action set pieces in the first half. But what stands out about the film is its ham-fisted attempt to reflect on the classic science fiction question, “What makes us human?”

You see, in Terminator lore, machines are bad and humans are good. So when Salvation attempts to break new ground, it does so by introducing a character that is partly human and partly machine. This is then supposed to provide a philosophical quandary both for hybrid (“what am I?”) and for those who interact with it (“what is it?”). (Apparently this has become the standard fourth-film-in-a-franchise question, since Alien: Resurrection posed the same question, but with alien-human hybrids instead of machine-human hybrids.) Perhaps in more deft hands this could have been an interesting question for a film. Instead, it is in the hands of McG (Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), the pens of John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris (Surrogates, Catwoman), and the grunting of Christian Bale (Reign of Fire, Newsies).

Not having anything interesting to say about the interactions of humans and machines, the filmmakers decided to blow stuff up. Personally, I am in favor of blowing stuff up on screen. It’s fun to watch. Maybe not in the second hour, when the filmmakers have lost track of who we care about and why, so we have no reason to root for any of these characters to survive. We just hope our bladders survive the two hours it takes to finish the film. But not content to blow stuff up, McG, Brancato, and Ferris also decide that they should say something. This is a science-fiction film, after all, and therefore must have pretenses to philosophical navel-gazing.

So here is what they do. They create a character that is partly human and partly machine. Half the film’s heroes argue that the hybrid is fully human, and the other half argue that the character is fully machine. Apparently, the writers decided that there would be added emotional resonance if every person in the film was an idiot. This is called “screenwriting.”

As a philosopher (yes, I really do have a postgraduate philosophy degree), one thing I try to do in exploring difficult questions is start with the facts. Applied to this film, in wondering what we should think of a human-machine hybrid, and important fact to consider would be this is a human-machine hybrid. Apparently, this never occurred to anyone involved with the making of this film. They decided that it is much more interesting to ask “Is it fully human?” or “Is it fully machine?” In other words, they could never reach the part where they actually do some philosophical reflection, because they are too stupid to acknowledge the single most basic fact that the entire film is built around. Somewhere between deciding to make a film that introduces a human-machine hybrid and actually making that film, they lost track of that single basic idea.

Now, it would be wrong to say the movie fails because of some intellectual fault in the film. As an action spectacle, this film fails because it is boring. But sometimes boring science fiction films can be saved by the interesting questions they address. This is why we still watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. And it is also why you should watch Moon, the low-budget space flick that nobody saw last year. Better acting, a more compelling plot, and an interesting question at the center (albeit one that is raised to explore psychological and emotional elements rather than strictly philosophical implications). While I don’t think Moon is an excellent film, I can guarantee that you won’t leave it with that gross, McG-y taste in your mouth.

I have very little to say about music in the year 2009. I wasn’t even planning to do a recap or best-of, but then I realized that last.fm shows play counts by album. So here are my most-listened to albums that were released in 2009. And you can always see what’s in my ears at my last.fm page. (I should note that when songs are played back-to-back, it only counts as one play, which hurt albums that I usually listened to sequentially like Bitte Orca. It also is obviously biased toward albums released earlier in the year, like Noble Beast.)

• 154 plays: U2, No Line on the Horizon
• 140 plays: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
• 118 plays: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
• 117 plays: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
• 117 plays: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz!
• 106 plays: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, s/t
• 99 plays: Metric, Fantasies
• 92 plays: Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
• 88 plays: Sin Fang Bous, Clangour
• 85 plays: Mos Def, The Ecstatic
• 83 plays: Monsters of Folk, s/t
• 79 plays: Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
• 75 plays: Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound
• 69 plays: Passion Pit, Manners
• 69 plays: Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
• 61 plays: Ida Maria, Fortress ‘Round My Heart
• 59 plays: Bishop Allen, Grrr…
• 59 plays: The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
• 50 plays: God Help the Girl, s/t

Pretty big spoilers for Gone with the Wind

Rewatching Gone with the Wind yesterday at the local art house theater, I was struck by the dream imagery of the film. It begins with the film’s grandiose foreward:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…

“A dream remembered” gives the viewer a pretty fair handle on how to read the film. The film’s heightened emotions, narrow focus on Scarlett O’Hara, and whitewashing of the unpleasant aspects of slavery in the Old South fit the model of the retelling of a dream. Like a person giving a first-person narrative account of a dream, we are told a solipsistic account of a world that a cold-eyed viewer would recount much differently.

More than the narrative structure, there is another way that dreams figure into the story of Gone with the Wind. The first half of the film (the two hours leading up to the intermission) is the story of Scarlett O’Hara’s slow waking up from a dream. Scarlett, particularly in facing the death and stench of the make-shift military hospital in a church, wakes up from the dream life she has been living. In fact, Dr. Meade shakes Scarlett and tells her to “Wake up! Wake up!” And, unfortunately for Scarlett, she does wake up at the end of the first half, when she returns to Tara, her family’s plantation and vows to never be hungry or poor again. She is waking up from a dream and in doing so finds life to be a horror (much like the awakening in Mulholland Dr., come to think of it). And for Scarlett, awakening to the world around her leads her to lie, cheat, steal, and murder her way through life.

Interestingly, this is the same conclusion about life reached by the film’s other protagonist, Rhett Butler. For the first half of the film, he enters and leaves the story at well-spaced intervals. Like a bodhisattva who has awakened from dream-life yet still walks the earth, Rhett Butler is the only character in the first half of the film who is awakened to the dream-like state of the white characters in the Old South. Like the awakened Scarlett O’Hara, he has the very un-Budhhist attitude that the awakened life is one where anything goes – robbery, fornication, anything that benefits him. In his first speaking scene, Rhett even chastises the eager Southern gentlemen for their “dreams of victory” – a clear statement that he can see through the dream they are living in to the world that has already arrived without their knowing. And his decision is not to side with their gentlemanly honor, but to act as a smuggler out to line his pockets.

In an interesting reversal, Rhett attempts in the second half of the film to re-enter the dream life he accurately punctured in the first half. But his attempts to live in a dream are doomed, as his attachment to Scarlett is doomed. He cannot become a gentleman, and Scarlett cannot become a lady. And the one dream from which Scarlett never awoke was her dream of Ashley, which she realizes too late was only a dream. Rhett knew this all along, as he tells her in the films closing scene, “I’m leaving you, my dear. All you need now is a divorce and your dreams of Ashley can come true.” She has realized by now that it really was just a dream, but she has awoken too late to salvage her real marriage.

Like all dreams, the Old South was always illusory. The happy slaves, the code of gentlemanly honor, the concentration of wealth in the few landowners were all unstable at best and delusional at worst. The Old South is a remembered dream, a dream that never was as it is remembered.

Trailer-level spoilers for Up in the Air and medium spoilers for Drag Me to Hell

Manohla Dargis called Up in the Air “a well-timed snapshot of an economically flailing America.” A. O. Scott called it “a classic in the making. In 50 or 60 years when people want to know what life is like in this anxious, strange moment of recession at the end of this decade, they’re going to look at this movie the way we look at the movies of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra to find what life was like in the ’30s. … It captures something very deep and very sad about the way that we live now in a light-hearted and comic way, and I think that that’s brilliant.” And those descriptions are exactly right, but they’re about the wrong movie.

They are talking about Jason Reitman’s fine character study of a man who fires people for a living. It’s the one booming business these days, but even this job is unsettled as George Clooney’s character, who has trouble forming relationships with anybody, realizes his job is being replaced by an up-and-comer, played superbly by Anna Kendrick. The film is very aware of its prestigious ambitions and careful tone, and it is a moderately successful film that is a big-issue story masquerading as a small, intimate story. It’s pretty good. You should see it.

But, with all due deference to Mr. Scott and Ms. Dargis and the many others who have made similar claims, Up in the Air is not the 2009 film that best captures “this anxious, strange moment of recession at the end of this decade.” For that, we should turn to Sam Raimi’s throwback horror film Drag Me to Hell.

Drag Me to Hell is the story of Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), who in her role as insurance officer at a regional bank branch, decides to try for a promotion to assistant manager despite knowing that doing so requires her to make “tough decisions” that will impress her boss. The first such decision is to deny a third extension on a late mortgage payment; unfortunately, this is an old gypsy woman who begs Brown to reconsider, and in refusing to do so, shames the old woman. Being a gypsy, she curses Brown, who spends the next 60 minutes chased by a demon who claims her soul. Why is this the film that best captures the feeling of 2009?

“Actually, it was the bank that took the house. I just work there.”

Before entering a by-the-book horror-film third act, Drag Me to Hell is largely about the psychological consequences of working in a capitalist society. Brown is torn between doing what she knows is right and doing what she knows will help her get ahead in her workplace. She feels threatened by her boyfriend’s parents, who see her as a failure for not being born successful. She feels threatened by her male coworker who is gunning for the same job, and taking every opportunity to demean her. But she chooses to work within the cold machinations of capitalism, even when she knows it will hurt others. She will sacrifice an old woman’s future to keep her job secure and get just a little ahead. We see the devastation wrought by the financial sector on this old woman. The film doesn’t even attempt to cloak it as a case of capitalism-run-amok with greedy robber barons destroying the country; Brown is doing what makes sense for her job, since her bank will earn nice fees for foreclosing on the house. We watch the pitiable woman being beaten down by a system that doesn’t stop for her, and the subsequent shame. And we also see the shame to Brown as she participates in this. Early on, she attempts to deflect the guilt of her actions onto the company for which she works, but the film is a slow realization that she must face up to her guilt rather than hide behind her company.

“You deserve everything that is coming to you.”

After the gypsy woman attacks her, Brown suffers a mental break. (Notably, most of the film could be read as a psychotic break suffered by Brown; almost no one else experiences the terrors that she experiences, even when they are in the same room, unless they are already “believers.”) Like someone fired in a massive downsizing, Brown believes that she deserves what is happening to her. People who have been fired often feel like they are at fault rather than the company or person who fired them; if only they had worked harder, they would have been okay. They feel guilty, like they deserved what happened to them, even if that is not the truth. And certainly Brown goes through this as well. She, and the viewer, know that her actions led to this point, and that she must face the consequences herself. That feeling of deserving what is coming to you perfectly captures the feeling of the displaced worker, even though Brown deserves it and many downsized workers do not.

“It was my decision and it was wrong of me.” “You have such a good heart.”

The shame to those destroyed by the system, the guilt of those complicit in the system, the difficult choices faced by those still in the system. These are the feelings of 2009 that Drag Me to Hell captures and Up in the Air does not. After all, Anna Kendrick’s character got hired coming right out of college! And she had multiple job opportunities! Up in the Air may have some nice things to say about changing ideas of corporate loyalty and growing old, but nothing hits 2009 where it hurts like Drag Me to Hell. [BIG DRAG ME TO HELL SPOILER] When Christine Brown recognizes that what she did was wrong, it is too late for her. Having a good heart in the end wasn’t enough. She had to face the consequences of staying in her job. And the film’s final scenes are a working out of her survivor’s guilt.

2009 was hell. Sam Raimi captured it in a way worth remembering.

Here are my picks for the Top 10 films of the 2000s. These lists are always a little silly (will I still like my No. 1 pick in 10 years? how many times must I rewatch a film to be sure I love it? who cares what I think?), so you might be more interested in my list of 5 essential films of the decade that didn’t make my 1o-best list. Those five all reveal something above movies in the last 10 years. Enjoy.

1. Inglourious Basterds (2009) – Quentin Tarantino films generally leave me a little cold. I love the flair, the humor, the knowledge, but his plots are too often thin vengeance flicks that leave you feeling stupid for not catching all his arcane film references. But here, finally, QT has a plot worth loving, a revenge story that says something fascinating about the nature of revenge (forget what others say, this is not wish fulfillment), and a film that you can watch without feeling frustrated at your lack of movie trivia. Devastating, beautiful, terrifying, hilarious, tense, thoughtful. Bravo.
2. Moulin Rouge! (2001) - It takes a bold storyteller to tell you no less than three times how the film will end yet still have that ending leave you moved. Somehow Baz Luhrmann manages to do it, while reinventing the musical, the movie soundtrack, the star vehicle, and the smash cut. The most exhilarating and shamelessly romantic film of the last 10 years. Spectacular. Spectacular.
3. Zodiac (2007) – This is one of the few great films about research. It is simultaneously an obsessive portrayal of obsession and masterful twist on the tired serial killer genre. Subtle use of CGI, and a stellar cast. Like QT at No. 1, this is a film a head and shoulders above the director’s (David Fincher) other work. This film still haunts me.
4. In the Mood for Love (2000) – Perhaps the most beautiful film of the decade.
5. City of God (2002) – An epic that feels intimate.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007) – The best comedic filmmakers are also the best dramatic filmmakers.
7. I (Heart) Huckabees (2004) – I love comedies. I love films about ideas. This is a comedy about ideas.
8. Elephant (2003) – Devastating to watch.
9. Mulholland Dr. (2001) – What begins as a genre pastiche ends with a suggestion that reality is the true horror.
10. Ratatouille (2007) – Everyone has a favorite Pixar film; mine is an ode to creativity and creators.

5 Essential Films of the 2000s

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2002, 2003, 2004) – Redefined the blockbuster. The first film feels corny to me now, the second is still thrilling, and the third is still boring. But it brought attention to the possibility of a blockbuster entertainment that is also a smart film, and was one of the first to let fans in to the filmmaking process (and more than a little marketing) by using a thing called the Internet.
2. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2003) – This film defined the goal of distributors of independent films in the 2000s: through slow release and word of mouth, hope a film finds a huge audience. (Idea: why not buy good films, let them find their modest audience, and make a small profit rather than get into bidding wars for films you hope will make a huge profit?)
3. The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) – Along with Wedding Crashers, it showed there is an audience for R-rated comedy. It also launched the Judd Apatow phenomenon.
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2002) – Each time I’ve watched it, I’ve found this film trite, dull, needlessly formal, and on-the-nose. But, like Punch Drunk Love, it has a passionate following among people who watch only a few movies but like to feel like they are very smart movie watchers. It seems like every Sundance picture tries to recapture the alleged magic of this film.
5. Yi Yi (2000) – I have not seen this film. I’ve seen many lists with this as one of the great films of the decade. And since an essential part of film-going (at least for us amateurs who can’t run the festival circuit) is not seeing every great film, I’ll let this stand for all the great films I didn’t see this decade.

Significant spoilers for Avatar; medium-sized spoilers for Aliens

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Return of the Jedi. (Now known as Star Wars VI.) It’s not that I was especially fond of the Ewoks. Any kid knows that their treehouse homes are way cooler than the Ewoks themselves. It took me many years to realize it, but what fascinated me about Return of the Jedi is that the Star Wars universe suddenly was transplanted into a verdant forest. After the khakis and browns of A New Hope and the blacks, whites, and grays of The Empire Strikes Back, to suddenly see the speeder bikes racing through a lush forest of greens made the whole world more real. I grew up around forests, and seeing speeder bikes and light sabers in a forest was the coolest thing ever. Ever since, I’ve found science fiction stories set in wooded areas to be very compelling. (Similar for fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, or sci-fi set in that other great untamed area of Earth, the sea.)

So I was pre-disposed toward the world of Avatar, created by the man who made The Abyss (about strange life in the ocean depths) and Aliens (about the strange interaction of biological life and mechanical steel). Watching the film, I was struck by Cameron’s fussiness. Here is a man who never leaves an inch of frame unfilled. Showing off his command of technology and filmmaking, Cameron plugs every scintilla of his computer-generated world with some creepy-crawly, some background figure, something to fill the frame. When depicting the rich world of Pandora, this adds to the thrill that I felt watching Return of the Jedi as a kid. But over the course of 162 minutes, I did find myself occasionally yearning for the sparse landscapes of No Country for Old Men, a film content to let its characters drift through barren landscapes and barely decorated hotel rooms. Like the Coen Brothers used those repeated shops of nearly empty landscapes to engross the viewer in the moral emptiness of the universe they depicted, Cameron uses the lush greens and blues of Pandora to demonstrate the biological and spiritual connection the Na’vi have to their planet.

As a side note, Cameron also seems to forget about his camera. He’s so interested in filling the frame, that he forgets the cinematic possibilities of changing viewing angles. Of course, he expertly crafts the flying scenes, but it is not until a rush down the halls of a spaceship (strongly reminiscent of the Alien films) that we see the camera put in motion in a way that adds to the storytelling, rather than just showing off the admittedly wondrous world that Cameron and crew have created.

And of course, this world is supposed to be made even more life-like by Cameron’s embrace (and advancement) of 3-D technology. And I must say, at times I was really sold on the tech. Watching a spaceship glide through space, like we’ve seen a thousand times in Star Trek and Star Wars and a dozen other outer-space epics, I had never seen one quite as realistic as the ship at the beginning of Avatar. At other times, though, the 3-D effects were simply laughable. Any shot with multiple foci (for instance, a character walks across the foreground, a computer station sits a bit further back but still in focus, and more activity occurs at a distance in the background) comes across in the comical style of Captain EO. And fast moving characters were very choppy, at least in the theater where I watched. (I’ll be interested to see if that is still the case in 2-D.) Frankly, I’m glad I gave Avatar a chance in 3-D, but it will be a long time before I bother watching another film in 3-D. The pain and price just aren’t worth the payoff. It was barely worth it this time.

But back to the world of Pandora. Cameron presents the Na’vi as a mish-mash of indigenous peoples who have more to teach the “civilized” than the “civilized” have to teach them. As morality tales go, this one is a groaner. As a good liberal, I prefer it to a paean to the military or a we-can-do-no-wrong propaganda campaign. But the deadly serious New Age-y religion (captured in an unintentionally hilarious group hug-and-swing that recalls the Wachowski Brothers’ dance marathon in Matrix Reloaded) and the uber-intense way that Cameron enforces his point is, shall we say, less than subtle. And like many attempts to show how much we Westerners have to learn from indigenous peoples, the film slides into a subtle form of liberal racism. You see, these savages are noble savages. Look at how they commune with the animals they kill for their survival. Look at how connected they are to the world around them and each other. (Succinctly captured in those three oft-repeated words, “I see you.”) Clearly, the film pounds into our brains, we Westerners have much to learn about ourselves and our world from the National Geographic sort. As if to bring out a big yellow highlighter to make sure we don’t miss the point, the central characters among the barely clothed Na’vi are motion-captured and voiced from three African-American and one Native American actors. So the only time we see people of color in the film, that color is blue. (The lone exception is Michelle Rodriguez, whose Latino skin is two shades darker than her lilly-white pals.) I’m not claiming that James Cameron is a racist in any strong sense of that word. That word is too important. But his film does reveal a tendency to paint (blue?) a portrait of people of color as noble savages who could teach a thing or two to white Westerners who come after their resources. And that is a subtly racist message, at the very least in its racial essentialism, which is one short step from stereotyping, and in its praise of “noble savage” qualities in native people.

But the issue of race pales (ha! a pun!) in comparison to Cameron’s shockingly anti-military message. Watch movies for long enough, and you’ll see your fair share of anti-war films. But you’ll have to watch a long time to find a film that is not only so anti-war, but anti-military. What’s the difference? An anti-war film chronicles the terrible consequences (on soldiers, civilians, the land) of waging war. It may emphasize the futility of war. But it can also present soldiers positively in the face of these terrible evils. Even anti-war films can present soldiers as heroic, brave, virtuous, and wise. Cameron’s film bluntly opposes the very idea of a mechanized military. We consistently are presented with a contrast between Colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang), the film’s clear villian, and every other character in the film. He’s not a scientist who just wants to learn, like Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). He’s not a noble warrior like Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso). And when given the choice, he chooses evil (=Western =militaristic =colonial) when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) chooses good (=indigenous =communal). The film’s only other villain is Parker Selfridge (the always-welcome Giovanni Ribisi), who stands in for the cash-hungry mission leader who is here to rape and pillage the land for profit.

In case the trailer or the description so far hasn’t made it clear, the film is a thinly disguised allegory for the war in Iraq, with that thin disguise coming in the form of an allegory of colonization of North America, with just a splash of Vietnam for color. Like a said before, the film isn’t exactly aiming for subtle.

What strikes me about the message of the film is how it inverts many of the images of Aliens, which Cameron directed nearly 25 years ago. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley enters a giant walking robotic suit to battle the titular alien, who is a queen defending her progeny. In this story, the hero uses technology to defeat an alien biological life form that is following its biological imperative to defend its young. In Avatar, a similar suit is used by the evil Colonel Miles Quartich to defend himself against a tribal leaders defending their clan. The same images of a technological exoskeleton fighting an alien are used in both films, but to remarkably different effects. In one, a battle between mothers is made equal by human technology. In the other, military technology is the very evil that is being battled, since it is what enables the destruction of these people, their home, and their sacred places. It’s as though Ellen Ripley, at the end of Aliens decided to join the acid-for-blood alien and fight the Company because, after all, what business do we have on her world?

Avatar is an ambitious film that holds an interesting place in Cameron’s corpus. Its images suggest Aliens, but its message suggests The Abyss. For a big-time Hollywood director, Cameron has always been a critic of moneyed power, and he takes that further in Avatar then he ever has before. It’s visually rich (maybe too rich – I recommend a strong shot of espresso to ease digestion), and thematically blunt in a Steven Spielberg manner, but, like many of Spielberg’s films, a rather stunning filmmaking achievement.

Spoilers for Angel (Season 5) and House (Season 4)

My official Best Television of the 2000s list will feature only shows that aired at least three seasons in the 2000s. I am making this restriction because one of the marks of a great show is its ability to sustain its stories and characters over a long period, and three seasons seems as good a cut-off as any. Also, since the traditional television season runs from fall to spring, I’ve decided to include seasons that began in the fall of 1999 and I am ending with seasons that concluded before fall of 2009. That means that shows debuting in fall, 2009, are ineligible (Community, Modern Family), and it also means that on-going shows that debuted in spring, 2009, are ineligible unless they had the bad fortune to be cancelled immediately; that means no Glee, Dollhouse, Parks & Recreation, Castle, or Better Off Ted. Those shows got too late a start to be included in the best of this past decade, as I am arbitrarily determining it. Because of these restrictions on my count-down list, I thought it appropriate to say a little bit about a few shows that didn’t make the three season cut-off, but were spectacular nonetheless. I’m also including three shows that I think managed to pull off one truly great season amidst a number of less spectacular ones, and those are included at the end. Below are the highlights, in alphabetical order.

One Season

Andy Barker, P.I.

Andy Richter and Conan O’Brien teamed up for a Thursday night mystery-comedy hybrid that only aired four episodes before being yanked. (Six were filmed.) Featuring a stellar supporting cast around beat-down everyman Richter, the show exhibited remarkable comic timing over its first few episodes. When Andy Barker, CPA, moves into the office formerly held by a private detective, he finds people mistaking him for a P.I.; he may not know how to handle a gun, but he can handle your taxes when it’s over.

For fans of Chuck, Remington Steele, accounting

Firefly

Perhaps the greatest science fiction show to ever air on television, this series brought a legion of new fans to Joss Whedon. Its fans called themselves “Browncoats,” and turned Firefly into the most essential television show of geek culture in the 2000s. But is it any good? Beyond good, this show’s 13 episodes (shown, as jilted fanboys like to point out, out of order by the evil Fox Network) created a fully realized world from the first episode. The pilot is too slow and too long, but beginning in the second episode, this outer-space A-Team demonstrated that stories about vigilantes fighting against an evil centralized power could somehowstrike a chord with viewers during the Bush administration. Like many great shows, the most essential member of the cast was the location, in this case a creaky old spaceship with more smuggler’s holds than the Millenium Falcon. Wonderfully cast, with a sly sense of humor that combined Whedon’s subversive expressivism with Ben Edlund’s comic exaggeration.

For fans of Battlestar Galactica, The Tick, men in tight pants

Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is remembered today as the greatest dramedy, the greatest high school show, the show most like your own life, and the show that launched a thousand careers. This brainchild of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig told the story of high school from those least interested in remembering it. Surprisingly, those of us who had successfully blocked our own experiences found glorious catharsis in watching the failures and (very occasionally) successes of the two bands of outsiders (those intentionally existing outside the system and those too nerdy to fit in comfortably). Essential viewing for people who love television.

For fans of Glee, Friday Night Lights, awkwardness

The Middleman

An unrepentant throw-back to a sillier form of science fiction and fantasy shows, The Middleman proved that sharp writing and smart characters can make great television using the flimsiest of CGI. When a smart young artist (Natalie Morales) working a temp job gets nearly eaten by a mutant science experiment, her unflappability catches the eye of The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) who recruits her as his sidekick. There’s perhaps never been a show in the history of television that required so many repeat viewings with a pen and paper handy to unpack its jokes and references. Often times, an episode would pick a theme (Die Hard, sixties rock band The Zombies) and build as many references as it could into its 44 minutes. This show never achieved the critical mass of devotion it deserved.

For fans of Get Smart, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meta-humor

Chuck

Chuck has found unexpected life, being renewed for a third season that begins this January. This is the only show on this list still on the air, so catch this bandwagon while its still hot. (Wow, now that is a mixed metaphor.) Chuck Bartowski is a hard-working Buy More employee whose brain, due to unexpected help from his college roommate-turned-nemesis, becomes the living computer that stores all of the US government’s information. This is a fun, funny, sexy, silly blend of action and comedy that really found its stride in its second season. The best thing to happen to Mondays since Memorial Day.

For fans of Alias, Eureka, Adam Baldwin

Flight of the Conchords

Immigration. Unemployment. Bureaucracy. Topics for a gritty documentary somehow became occasions for the musical comedy duo to perform their songs. Each episode is a poorly constructed attempt to cram three pre-established songs into 30 minutes of story. Somehow, despite the obvious problems with this plan, the show managed to create moments of sublime comic awkwardness squeezed between occasionally brilliant, occasionally boring musical set pieces. In its way, it was one of the most ambitious television shows of the decade.

For fans of Dead Like Me, The Ben Stiller Show, Michel Gondry

Life

In its strike-addled first season, Life was a gritty cop drama, light-hearted character study, and on-going mystery in absolutely perfect balance. No procedural has ever managed to so perfectly blend those three elements as well as Life did in that first season. Its second season renewal came with strings attached: bigger (and subsequently less plausible) weekly hooks, less of the on-going story arcs, and Donal Logue as the new police captain. The second season fell to merely an above-average cop show, but was fortunately able to tie up many loose ends in its memorable series finale. The show drew out a nice parallel between generic Eastern religion’s emphasis that everything is connected and the basis of good detective work, which is following connections. Unlike most shows that attempt to make a character religious or philosophical, the writers were fully aware that the form of Zen being practiced by Charlie Crews is a watered-down, pop psychology version of Zen, which kept the show from ever falling into self-parody.

For fans of Castle, Burn Notice, staying out of prison

Pushing Daisies

Abandoned by film, television became the home of screwball dialogue in the 2000s, and not even Gilmore Girls or 30 Rock could manage Pushing Daisies‘ speed. More brilliant color and wacky quirkiness than any show should rightfully be able to manage, Barry Sonnenfeld somehow managed to create an engaging dream world in which a pie maker brings people back from the dead and solves crimes along with the love of his life whom he can’t touch, a crabby detective, and Kristin Chenoweth. Death has never been so funny.

For fans of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, color

UPDATE: Silly me. I left Kings off the list. Great modern fable.

Long-Running Series with One Great Season

Angel (Season 5)

Angel never discovered what it could do well until its final season, by which point fans’ whiplash was so great from its overhauls each season that no one knew what this show was any more. However, by having Angel go to work for the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart, Joss Whedon and Tim Minear wisely guided the show into complex thematic territory: at what point do you stop protesting the system and find a way to work within it? Mirroring Whedon’s own complex relationship with the Fox Network, Angel and his band of merry men try to be constructive from inside a destructive system. And by bringing Spike over from the now-finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shooting for darker, more gothic horror, and achieving more sublime humor, the fifth season became by far the series’s best. Watching Angel is worth it simply for the show’s finale, which is perhaps the finest final episode in the history of television.

The Closer (Season 1)

A weaker knock-off of England’s Prime Suspect, The Closer began its run on TNT as a law & order procedural with the added element of watching an unknown, and therefore untrusted, female cop head LAPD’s Major Crimes division. A breadth of capable acting by the supporting cast grounded Kyra Sedgwick’s head-flailing approach to characterization. In later seasons, the show became unbearable in its explorations of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson’s inexplicable relationship with her boyfriend Fritz, unnecessary relationship with her adopted cat, and unwatchable relationship with her family. But in that first season, The Closer was a smart woman-in-the-workplace drama with workable stories about how only she could wrangle a confession out of the bad guy.

House (Season 4)

Modeled on Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House, M.D., is a jackass to everyone, including his trusty confidant, his busty boss, and his team of diagnosticians. The writers always knew how to write for House (or Hugh Laurie’s indelible performance at least made it seem that way), but he was always surrounded by thin, unnecessary characters led by Cameron, the whiniest female lead this side of Felicity. So when House fired his staff at the end of Season 3 and began Season 4 by whittling down an auditorium full of candidates, new life was breathed into this occasionally stale medical drama. House was allowed to be his devastatingly truthful and hilariously cruel self and a better cast of supporting characters stepped in. The writer’s strike created some story-telling problems for the back half of the season, but it was still an audacious reinvention that amazingly worked, at least until Season 5 became too enamored with the Foreman-13 story.

Nearly spoiler-free discussion of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Lost

Critical consensus is that The Wire is the best television show of the decade, and probably the best show in the history of television. Perhaps despite being the best, though, the show is not particularly influential. Media scholar Jason Mittell recently wrote that The Wire, like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, is immediately recognized by informed viewers/listeners as a great work of art, but also recognized as completely inimitable. You admire it, you are in awe of it, but you don’t attempt to do what it does. Perhaps partly, you are intimidated, but more importantly it seems like something that it would be impossible to try and copy. So not only do you not try to examine why it is successful and then copy it, you don’t even try to draw any lessons from what makes that show great. Its greatness is unique and its uniqueness is inimitable.

In comparison, I’d like to add that despite being vastly inferior to The Wire, The Sopranos may be the most influential television show since Friends. (Possible exception for Survivor.) And while I felt the show was consistently over-rated and I lost interest in the show after two seasons, I do think The Sopranos had a much bigger impact on television than The Wire. The variety of its influences is as notable as the intensity of its influence.

1. It convinced Hollywood actors that there were great roles for them in television. Dennis Leary, Glenn Close, and more came to TV in large part because they watched The Sopranos and found the stories so powerful and the acting so superb that they thought they could do better there than in Hollywood. The standard for dramatic acting was upped.
2. In what would become one of the most annoying trends on television in the 2000s, The Sopranos used therapy as a contrivance to give actors an opportunity to go mono a mono in scenes that seemed designed for an actors’ workshop. You could determine a show’s pretensions by how often its characters went to therapy (except for Monk, which used the trope for comic effect). By the time Gregory House, M.D., got around to it, he had to be fully committed to an asylum for there to be any plausibility in what was by 2009 a hackneyed plot device.
3. Want to get arty? Try a dream episode! We’ll have nearly silent scenes played out on a boardwalk, and everyone will want to get in on the game. Sure, Buffy also did it with “Restless,” but it was David Chase who codified the idea that inner turmoil over a tough decision should be visually represented in a dream episode or dream sequence. Protege Matthew Weiner would add a twist by making Don Draper’s dreams into daydreams and memories, but the basic model still holds.
4. Great television happens on cable. Drama found its home on cable, with each channel that wanted to make a name for itself finding a flagship drama that would define its ambitions (AMC’s Mad Men, SciFi/SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, FX’s The Shield, Showtime’s Dexter). Each of these was an attempt to build a brand through HBO’s success with The Sopranos (and to a much lesser extent, Sex and The City and Six Feet Under).
5. Catholics get all the good stories. If you want religious characters on television, two rules apply: they’ve gotta be Christian, and they’ve gotta be nondescript or Catholic. Evangelical? Charismatic? Mennonite? And, God forbid, Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist? Good luck! The Sopranos reinforced the notion that guilt is what makes religion interesting, and Catholics hold the reigns on dramatic guilt. (The idea of Jewish guilt, with its siblings harping and nagging, get manifested in comedic roles, and we’re talking drama here.) Obviously, Big Love stands as an exception, but we all recognize how exceptional that sympathetic and unflinching portrayal of religion is. If you don’t want to play up the guilt, go the Reverend Lovejoy route and make the character nondescript and mainline, and then use that for a funny episode of how your sit-com family is conflicted over whether to take the kids to church.

I could go on and on about how The Sopranos either created or reinforced various ideas about television drama in its storytelling and in its prominence, but let’s get back to The Wire. What is The Wire’s legacy?

Its legacy is not the complex, long-developing storylines. Attempts at that style of storytelling wore their Lost comparisons openly, or were soapy WB/UPN/CW teeny-bopper shows. No episode of The Wire (including the pilot) makes sense by itself, any more than a chapter of a novel could stand on its own. Lost built its mythology as it went and used mysterious clues to keep the viewer guessing, but The Wire presumes that you would understand each character had a backstory in the way that a newspaper article about the Great Recession assumes you lived through the financial crisis of 2008. It simply picks up mid-way through a story and lets the viewer fill in the rest. It does it without the wink to the viewer that Lost is always giving (there’s a polar bear on a tropical island, but we’re not telling you why!). It is played with a completely straight face, with a seriousness appropriate to a newspaper story.

Its legacy is not the quality of the acting, which was uniformly superb. The acting on The Wire is not showy the way it is on The Sopranos or even Mad Men. Who would you give an Emmy to in any given year? Obviously The Wire had some of the most memorable characters in the history of television, but even when the actors were doing their best work, there was no guarantee that they would get an Emmy-ready episode written for them. Just as each character is beaten down by the system, each performance is subsumed to the story of the city of an American city. (Maybe Baltimore should have won an Emmy?) And while other television shows openly stole actors from the stable developed by the superb East Coast casting, no one is giving Michael K. Williams roles like James Gandolfini is offered.

If there is any legacy for The Wire, it will be the way it elevated the possibility of television as an art form. People who don’t care about TV can find that they care about The Wire, just as someone with no art background can find the joy in a Christo and Jeanne-Claude. You tell your friends about The Wire the way that Mittell tells his friends about Astral Weeks. Referring to a remarkable run of films in the ’50s and ’60s, Mike D’Angelo recently wrote that Jean-Luc Godard was a game-changer who didn’t change the game at all. And that may be exactly what happened with The Wire. It was so great, so special, so revered, that no one really knows how to do more than name-check it.