A Sequel To The Power of Myth

 

Dr Robert Ballard

“Every day someone stops me on the street and says that The Power of Myth changed their lives,” Bill Moyers told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006. “It happened when I was in San Francisco in February. I was having lunch at a restaurant on California Street, and the waiter politely interrupted the conversation and said, I just want you to know that The Power of Myth changed my life. Why? I asked. And he said, Because I began to understand there are truths universal to all of us. What it did for me was to awaken me fully to the power of metaphors. Change the metaphors, Campbell told me, and you can change the world.”

He was promoting a a new television series, Faith and Reason, that he’d created around a conference staged by Salman Rushdie who is President of PEN’s American Centre. “He thought that religion was such a hot button issue that he had asked over 100 writers to meet in New York to discuss faith and reason, “That’s it, I told myself. That’s my organising principle. I’m a journalist. I’ll cover the event.”

The writers discussed the enduring power of myth: “Stories that we call myths aren’t just any old stories,” said Margaret Atwood. “For instance, there’s lots of other kinds of stories. There’s jokes, and there’s animal fables and things. And there’s what happened to Bill when his tractor went into the pond. Those kind of anecdotal stories. Myths are usually more important to a culture. They are stories around which the culture revolves. And on which it builds all sorts of other beliefs and activities.”

The Power of Myth

The Power of Myth was a monster hit on public television in America in 1988. It was six hours of conversations between the journalist Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, who’d devoted his life to studying myths across cultures and through time. “He helped me see the connections, how the pieces fit,” Bill Moyers said. Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell recorded their conversations at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch Studios and the American Museum of Natural History in 1985 and 1986. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. The two men sat in chairs, talking. There were no special effects. It was “stone age television” The New York Times television reviewer John J O’Connor wrote, but he found the programs oddly compelling. They were “something special” he conceded. “Both men grapple with the very essence of life and living,” he wrote of the final program in the series. “There may be seeming chaos, but Mr. Campbell quotes Schopenhauer who, in his later years, concluded that life seemed to have had an order, a consistent plot. Affable and generally cheerful, Mr. Campbell becomes momentarily dark toward the end of the hour, saying that “none of us has lived the life he intended.” But then, he adds, it’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.” This is something often quoted by the ocean explorer, Dr Robert Ballard.

Joseph Campbell said that the photographs taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts looking back at the earth on Christmas Eve in 1968 had expanded the horizon for mythology. “The last time I saw him I asked him if he still believed – as he had once written – ‘that we are participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own inward mystery’.” Bill Moyers said. “He thought for a minute and answered, ‘The greatest ever’.”

A Teevography for Boxee

I want a new kind of TV Guide, a teevography, that keeps a record of the season and episode numbers of the series I watch on DVD as well as the dates they were first broadcast. I want it to list the generic tags (genre, actors, writers, directors) and I want to be able to add tags of my own and see them as clouds I can sort and re-configure according to fields I specify. I want my playlists archived and linked to these episode guides and essays I’m writing. And I want to be able to link to the web and refer to wikipedia and other sites and save my searches as bookmarks. I want to be able to keep a wish list of shows that I want to watch, when they’re shown on broadcast television or become available on DVD in Australia. And I want the teevography to prompt me when writers, creators and production companies make create new shows I might conceivably enjoy.

I don’t have a television I can hook up to my computer and I have poor reception so I don’t watch regular broadcast television. I don’t subscribe to cable. I don’t use the Boxee system, although I’m intrigued by the idea of it and think it could be the answer to many of my prayers. Mostly I want to tap into a new kind of television criticism, focusing on the writers and creators of television shows and a thoughtful examination of the themes and stories underpinning shows, something to read after I’ve seen the series, that discusses the entire series.

I can imagine a new kind of professional critic, the teevographer, having a “channel” available through Boxee, putting together strings of episodes from different shows and series around a theme. A Financial Espionage stream, beginning with an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot where Hercule solves a bank fraud case with a piece of sleight of hand, worthy of Penn and Teller, with the rule card from the game of Monopoly he’s been playing with Hastings. Danny going undercover at a private British bank that’s involved in a sting operation on the Russian Mafia which is trying to launder money through it, in Spooks Season 2. A chief of bank security who used to be a policeman and has a dazzling track record in outsmarting grifters, tries to outsmart Mickey’s gang, using blackmail to get them to help him apprehend a bank robber who is about to hit his bank in the first season of Hu$tle.

And in the first season of Numb3rs, Charlie Eppes tries to help his brother Don, an FBI agent, recover the kidnapped daughter of a mathematician the robbers think has cracked the code for encrypting financial transactions. “When Don is able to determine the identity of one of the kidnappers, and learns that the plan is to “unlock the world’s biggest financial secret” it becomes clear why Ethan’s daughter was kidnapped,” writes Gary Lorden, the mathematics consultant to Numb3rs. “The captors want to use Ethan’s method to break into a bank’s computer and steal millions of dollars. Don’s obvious strategy is for Ethan to provide the gang with the key to get into the bank’s computer and trace the activity electronically in order to catch the thieves. But when Charlie finds a major error in Ethan’s argument, the only hope Don has to rescue Ethan’s daughter is to come up with a way to fool the kidnappers into believing that he really can provide the Internet encryption key they are demanding, and use that to trace their location to rescue the daughter.”

The professional critics could earn revenues when readers clicked through to commerce sites to rent or buy DVD’s or through iTunes, and receive royalties from streaming services. There would be editorial freedom and independence for the critics: they wouldn’t be under obligation to review certain shows and may not really know who their readers are. Their writing would be protected under a creative commons agreement. Bloggers could link to it but commerce sites couldn’t appropriate the reviews. The professional critic’s credentials come from immersion in their field of interest and continuity, it’s something they do well and for a long time: the best examples I can think of are from music, Gary Giddins who writes mostly on Jazz and Alex Ross who writes mostly on classical music.

Frost / Nixon

The special features added to the DVD of the 2008 movie Frost /Nixon are a ‘making of’ feature, a profile of the Nixon Presidential Museum, and short excerpts from the 1977 television interviews David Frost had conducted with Richard Nixon that Peter Morgan’s stage play and movie adaptation were based on. The New York Times review of the movie recalls that the reviews of the original television interviews were “decidedly mixed — from prison his former aide John D. Ehrlichman gave Nixon’s performance the big thumbs down, calling it ‘a smarmy, maudlin rationalization’. But the audience share was huge, blockbuster-size: the first program, on Watergate, which played against a John Wayne flick and reruns of Good Times and The Bionic Woman attracted as many viewers as the year’s reigning ratings champ, Happy Days, the Eisenhower-era sitcom in which Frost / Nixon director, Ron Howard, played the Everyboy Richie Cunningham”.

Frost / Nixon was first staged in London in 2006 and moved to New York in 2007. In the ‘making of’ special Ron Howard talks about being inspired to make the play into a movie because he’d found parallels between Richard Nixon’s dishonesty and the secrecy and misleading information given to the public by President George W Bush’s administration. The movie dramatises “the citizen’s breakdown of trust in its president,” Ron Howard said.

CSI Series 5

“What drew me to create CSI was a very simple statement: ‘The body is the perfect specimen’,” said series creator Anthony E Zuiker. “I began to think about the notion that blood, hair, saliva, skin, etcetera are forensically designed to tell an investigator what has happened without having any witness to a crime. I found this particularly fascinating, and I’m glad our viewers do, too. It takes countless numbers of people to bring this combination of drama and science to the screen. The attention to detail that is paid by our writing staff, technical advisors, and researchers is second to none. I go down to the stages knowing that all of the laboratory equipment decorating the set is authentic and operable. In actuality, we have better instrumentation on our set than most of the crime labs in America. This is an unfortunate fact that needs to change.”

“A brown hair with a follicular tag. A person’s whole identity balled up in a few nanograms of matter,” Gus Grissim says to Sofia.

“Assuming one’s identity can be wholly quantified by our DNA,” she replies.

“Well genetically it can. We’re completely programmed as soon as the sperm hits the egg.

“So we’re defined at a cellular level?”

“More or less.”

“No. Identity is the totality of our life experiences. How our brain neurons process our relationship to the world and each other.”

“I stand corrected. DNA is what we are not who we are.”

“What we are never changes. Who we are never stops changing.”

“Whether we like it or not.”

CSI describes itself as a ‘procedural drama’ where the story emerges from the science and the science is the star. The characters have the deductive reasoning of criminologists fused with the experimental ingenuity of scientists. The science talk sparkles: “The software digitises the diluted ink pattern and the algorithm extrapolates a reversal probability estimating an image of the original writing,” Tim Speedie says in CSI Miami.

In Series 5 of CSI Las Vegas several of the episodes feature perverted medical operations. Unqualified doctors doing gender reassignment and cosmetic surgery. A couple purposely conceive a daughter who’s a genetic match for their son and harvest her bone marrow and organs to keep him alive. Superstitions are turned against animals. A bear taken from a local zoo is used for a hunting expedition that goes wrong and its gall bladder is taken to sell to people who believe they’re an aphrodisiac. An investigative journalist undercover in the Latino community is killed in the manner of a classic ‘narco corrido’ – songs glorifying a particular crime – with a Mexican snake stuffed in the mouth of her severed head.

Doctor Who Planet Of The Dead

When Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who in 2005 after the series had been dormant for fifteen years he said: ”It deserves the status of being like Robin Hood or Merlin or James Bond – those rare British cultural figures who just run and run.” The original series, which ran for twenty six years from 1963 was low budget. The Time Lord known only as the Doctor was outwitting metal humanoid Cybermen who could have been wrapped in tin foil and the evil pyramid shaped machines called the Daleks who could have been exterminating humans with elements from bar heaters. But the story and the characters were rich and the theme, by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, broke new ground in electronic music. The new Doctor Who has the luxurious appearance of a feature film. The monsters are diabolically detailed, the action happens on dense computer enhanced worlds and the special effects are sensational. The regenerations of the Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have acquired a wide extended family: the parents, siblings and friends of his companions, parliamentary figures, the British Royal Family and the intergalactic equivalents of MI5 and the United Nations in the Torchwood Institute and UNIT. But “If you strip the show down to its essentials, it’s one man, and one woman,” said Russell T Davies.

The Doctor is more than a great humanitarian, he’s a great speciesarian, with a deep regard for all forms of life anywhere in the universe. He uses ingenuity to outwit his enemies and escape danger and tries to cause no mortal harm. But in the final of the last series, Davros, the creator of the Daleks, showed the Doctor a version of himself he found unbearable. He’s a saviour but his presence wreaks havoc and people and creatures die and suffering and destruction follow in his wake too. He is unarmed but the humans who become his companions are frequently armed and as the human race takes tentative steps into space it acquires weapons from alien civilisations and its leaders are prepared to use devastating force. And all of his companions are lost to him after a while. They’re generally ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. “The bigger picture is why the Doctor’s travelling alone – because he’s heartbroken, because he loses too much in the end (each time),” said Russell T Davies. “This is an arc over these last few specials, gradually, especially in Waters of Mars, which comes up in November, we discover that he travels with a human because he needs a human. He’s too powerful , and without that (human with him), he can become a dangerous man. Donna pointed that out to him in her very first story, The Runaway Bride.”

The series is on hiatus until 2010 and David Tennant’s regeneration is edging towards his demise in a series of television specials. The 2009 Easter special is a romantic comedy with references to jewel heist movies. Lady Christina de Souza breaks into the International Museum in London and in an aerial grab, suspended from a wire, takes an ancient golden goblet and leaves a waving gilt Chinese good luck cat in its place. She tries to escape from a the scene of the crime in a red double decker bus. The Doctor boards the bus, eating an Easter egg. The bus is sucked through a wormhole onto a planet that has been reduced to sand by a swarm of orbital termites that extrude metal carapaces and the mass of the swarm and velocity of its movements rips new holes in the fabric of space and time so that they can find new planets to denude. The Doctor and Lady Christina encounter a couple of giant fly creatures, the tritovores, who trade in waste and use anti-gravity components of their crashed ship’s engine to fly the red bus back through the wormhole, to London. The Doctor has been communicating with an exuberantly nerdy UNIT scientist to measure and monitor the wormhole. He defies the UNIT leader to closes it once the red bus and its passengers return.

Get Smart

The Get Smart pilot, Mr Big, was one of the last television pilots made in black and white in 1965. It’s compositionally cool, filmed on site in modern buildings and urban settings. Maxwell Smart is a suave spy in a tuxedo. 99 is an intelligent, beautiful, wry and deadly female spy. There are sleek, diabolical tools and weapons. Max drives a Sunbeam convertible. The American spy agency, CONTROL, is the force of good battling KAOS, the international organisation of evil. And the music is sexy, cerebral jazz. It was a time when Miles Davis was as popular as a rock star. Get Smart’s composer Irving Szathmary had been an arranger for the big bands of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden and Paul Whiteman.

At the time spy dramas were everywhere. Sean Connery was making the first James Bond movies. And I SPY, The Man from UNCLE and The Avengers were on television. In a voice over for the pilot Mel Brooks said that with Get Smart he’d do what these other spy dramas did but “stretch it half an inch and we’d have comedy.”

“Well, it was very good for its time,” said Bernie Kopell who played the KAOS leader Siegfried and was quoted in the Get Smart handbook. “Without James Bond, it couldn’t have happened, because that was the frame of reference: the daring, always winning, indomitable hero who had great success with the ladies and never got killed. There’s this impossible, unrealistic hero who was out there saving the world. And the comedy was brilliant.”

Mel Brooks and Buck Henry wrote hilarious dialogue and director Leonard Stern shot memorable slapstick and sight gags. Mel Brooks dropped out after a few episodes – he was writing The Producers – and Buck Henry stayed with the series.”I always thought the formula was: the visuals are for the kids, and the dialogue is for the adults,” said Buck Henry. “So I would try – sometimes by way of the other writers – to inject a note of more contemporaneous sort of semipolitical, sociopolitical satire into it. I usually wrote teases and tags, and I put stuff in various places, trying to kind of tie in little events and things that were going on in the world and make fun of them. That was my theory … And it was a time in the 1960s when our ideas of our beloved institutions were being deconstructed, the FBI and the CIA in particular.”

Lost In Austen

The classics scholar Robert Fagles, who made popular translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad for our time, died in 2008. A colleague compared the epic swagger of his style to the films of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. “He was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to interpret the classics in a contemporary idiom,” said the New York Times in an obituary. “He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-braille it.” The Odyssey has been re-brailled a couple of times since Robert Fagles published his translation in 1996. In the 2000 George Clooney movie O Brother Where Art Thou and “More News From Nowhere”, a song from the 2008 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!

The classics endure because they tell timeless truths. I can imagine Jane Austen’s novels being read for all eternity. But since the dawn of film and television there have also been adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels but since 1995 they take their cue equally from the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. The great romantic image of our age is Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging from a lake with his breeches and billowing white shirt clinging to him. It’s six pretty hours of a straight telling of the story. The wit and poetry of Jane Austen’s writing is intact but the savageries of the era are glossed over. Maybe the romantic appeal of this miniseries is that it’s possible to imagine Darcy’s estate as a forerunner to a Beverly Hills mansion. We don’t stop to think that there’s no electric lights, central heating, or modern plumbing.

Assessing Threats on Spooks and The West Wing

As Series 5 of Spooks was going to air Executive Producer Simon Crawford Collins said: “The irony of it all is that we still find ourselves rejecting well-researched storylines, based entirely on fact, because we feel viewers would find them simply too far fetched.” Spooks and The West Wing take us below the surface of the American political system and the British security services. Much of what they’re dealing with doesn’t reach the public, and when it does the accounts may be slanted to protect individuals or hide what’s been happening. The media is often used to promote disinformation, either tacitly or because they’ve believed a false account. Both shows are dealing with situations that are literally incredible. “Spooks depicts the Bush administration as shadowy and manipulative, but is just as hard on the British government, too,” said The New York Times when the series screened in America. “The show is chilling in its awareness that imagery and spin are the ultimate rulers. Tom is a patriotic idealist, which doesn’t prevent him from spreading disinformation to the press … His boss, Harry, is just as dedicated but more of a realist. ‘Politicians are conniving, wheeling-dealing scum,’ he says, even as he prepares to give in to their expediency for the sake of the country’s long term security … Spooks like The West Wing has a shrewd sense of political horse-trading.”

And the governments and security services may be misleading one another. The Associated Press reported that President Obama’s CIA Director Leon Panetta “… told politicians in closed-door testimony last month that the intelligence agency had ‘concealed significant actions’ and repeatedly misled the US Congress since 2001, according to a letter released yesterday from seven Democratic politicians. Exactly what actions Mr Panetta disclosed to the house intelligence committee on June 24 is unclear, but committee chairman Silvestre Reyes said the CIA blatantly lied in one case.”

When we rent or buy episodes of Spooks and The West Wing through iTunes perhaps they could be linked to free podcasts of University courses that could help us at least comprehend the science behind the threats the characters are dealing with. Richard Muller teaches a course at Berkeley called Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines that you can download. “The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics.”

The Writing of Spooks

Spooks Series 1 was broadcast in 2002. The DVD’s for just this series have a quaint interactive interface that’s a piece of spy ‘tradecraft’. A man in a black hood, wearing black leather gloves, breaks into an office building and disables the alarm. We have to rifle through papers on the desk, the rolodex and a stack of data CD’s to locate and play the episodes, interviews with the cast, series creator and writers and producers, and dossiers on the characters.

Series creator Stephen Garrett said he wanted to find a twist on a ‘precinct’ drama, something with the life or death situations that teams in hospitals and police stations face. He was in a bookshop and and was drawn to espionage novels, particularly John Le Carre’s. In the ‘special features’ interviews hidden in the rolodex and top secret reports, the producers and writers talk about finding a middle ground between the English public school-bred spy of Le Carre and the wild sophistication of James Bond. These are old models: the early twentieth century English public schoolboy and the mid twentieth century international playboy. There’s a twenty first century edge to Spooks, keeping pace with clouded state and religious affiliations and the tools of terror being mobile phones in the hands of unaligned terrorists who can turn office supplies into weapons.

In a newspaper interview Spooks writer David Wolstencroft said, “We realised the spy genre is a great lens for the world in general. In all walks of life there are lies, betrayal and traitors, and you can see so much through those issues. I wanted to humanise the process, to look at how you decide whether to take an IRA tip-off about someone blowing up a nuclear power station, if it means turning a blind eye to their own bomb on a train. Spooks was in development before the 9/11 attacks in New York. “We all met on 12 September and realised we had suddenly become the world’s most pertinent show,” said David Wolstencroft. “We weren’t happy about that, far from it, but knew we had a responsibility to digest it and work it through. All of a sudden everything had to be contextualised within the world of 9/12.”