Spoiler Alert / Joe Dunphy's Movie Reviews

(First published on Blog.com, around 9:16 am Chicago time, today) 

Miscellanious ramblings … If you’re looking for an essay that holds together, you’re going to be in the wrong place, today, because I’m in no mood to write one. I’ve just gotten done banging my head into the proverbial wall trying to set up a mirror to this blog on the not always so very well documented Tumblr system, and am frustrated, stressed, tired and hungry. But blog.com is determined to keep its servers clean of blogs that haven’t been updated often enough, because at 1/4 of a cent per meg, diskspace is far too expensive to waste.

A meg, for those who don’t know, works out to be about 66 pages of printed text, meaning that if you have written 660 pages of blog posts - the equivalent of a thick, university sized tome’s worth of posting - the service will free up 2.5 cents worth of diskspace by wiping out your work. Think of it. If they did this to a mere 60 users, each of whom would lose a few hundred pages of work, before they knew it, they’d have saved up enough to buy themselves a snicker’s bar. Not just any snicker’s bar, either, but one of those large ones, the kind that can take one back to many happy hours spent in train stations across this great land of ours, waiting for connecting rides. Sure, they’d have to go to Walgreens to get it - in a movie theatre, we’d be looking at something more like 60 or 90 users who’d have to lose a decade or two of posting before the staff could reap the collective fruits of their disk clearing labors, in all of its nougaty goodness - but if you’ve ever been in a computer lab, you know how much those snack foods mean to the programmers. So I’d better get going, whether I’m up to it or not, and if the quality of my writing should suffer as a result?

Dude, we’re talking nougat and peanuts. It’s nothing to be trifled with.

If the reports I’ve heard about Caprica’s ratings are accurate, then this show probably won’t be on for much longer. Does it deserve to be? Should one catch it before it is cancelled, knowing that short running shows don’t tend to find their way into syndication? Maybe. I will say that I find it greatly superior to the vast bulk of what Syfy produces, but then that isn’t very high praise. We are talking about the same channel that brought us “Mansquito” and “Termination Shock”, that movie about the girl who shoots starship destroying fireballs out of her chest. Have they done better, this time? Something that a grown up can watch without hoping that nobody will catch him watching it?

Again … maybe. It’s deeply flawed. At times, the dialog has made no sense. Consider Joseph Adams / Yussef Adama’s ramble about there being no flowers on Tauron - “not a one” - and how he burst into tears the first time he saw them growing on Caprica, when asked if he would bring his wife and daughter back from the grave, if he could.  Is that the kind of tangent a grieving widower would go off on, leaving the listener to wonder what on earth was its relevance? Yes, yes, they’ve emigrated from the horrible place, and just as their lives are finally sweet, mother and daughter are no longer to be found living them? That’s the reason for the otherwise mystifying speech?

But then think about what he tells his son, as he confronts him about his having skipped class in “Tauron school”, explaining that showing up is about being proud of who he was, of being Tauron. Then think of the immigrants in your own family. Yes, the lives they left behind were hard, that’s why they were immigrants, but were they as bleak and gray as the one people were living on Tauron, if we accept the above explanation of Adama’s otherwise pointless speech? If so, then what was there to be proud of? In the real world, there was real beauty mixed in with the hardship that our forebearers left behind, some collective creation that the people could point to and say, this is what we did. Life was hard, but it wasn’t joyless. That joy is what we see altogether absent in the fictional Tauron culture, aside from that moment of dark humor when the grandmother says that  the Tauron children play jacks with the bones of the children who lost at jacks, deadpanning the joke until she gets the desired level of terror in Joseph Adama.

What do Taurons eat? They seem to be a vaguely defined combination of every Mediterranean, Latin and Middle Eastern culture known, a fair number of these cultures having cuisines so developed that one can fill libraries with books about any given one, yet as the young William Adama shows up with lunch for an abusive friend of his uncle’s, what we see is a sandwich, something called “fritos”. Really? That’s it? They couldn’t spend a few dollars, and hire one of North America’s thousands of financially strapped and desperate chefs to do some kind of fusion thing, just to give a little color to the setting? No, they couldn’t. What music do Taurons listen to? Again, starving musicians are in plentiful supply, the real world source cultures have rich traditions - just think of the words “Latin Music” or Verdi or Vivaldi or … surely we’ll at least hear a few folk songs coming?  No, we never hear a note. What stories do they tell? None are ever told. In every way, those creating this culture fail to create it, and don’t even seem to try, or even to farm out the effort to those who’d be happy to try, and do so for a pittance.

These may seem like little things, trivia not worth commenting on, but the absence of those little things are one of the reasons why science fiction doesn’t tend to really be literature. Those little things that a writer shares … the snatch of song, the scent of beignets sizzling in the oil, the reddened shadows cast by the setting sun across the columns of a synagogue - it’s those little, “unimportant” things, the things we hardly think to notice, that make a place seem real, like more than a cartoon, and that becomes doubly important when the place we’re looking at isn’t real. If one says “Sicilian” and one’s audience has grown up in New York or Chicago, life gives the writer a boost up as he reaches his listeners, because we all have associations with that word that it will conjure up - but not if one says “Tauron”, because there are no Taurons. That feeling is something that the writers and their coworkers on the set have to create from scratch, and what kind of feeling do they create?

We see the Tauron people being treated like dirt, stereotyped, robbed and scorned, and some of us will start out liking that, because in a fictional setting, in which the viewer will habitually let down his guard, it puts on display something that the population of an Anglo-Saxon dominated country has been very good at not letting itself see. As many have observed, in the America of today, it’s OK to be very, very white, and OK to be very, very not white (ie. Black), but not so OK to be anywhere in between. One can watch the same people who would fawn over a member of the Gangster Disciples, just to prove how “sensitive” they were, think nothing of talking about Mexicans, or Arabs, or Italians in a manner not at all unlike that we see Taurons being spoken of, on the show. Doesn’t look so pretty when it’s fictionalised, does it?

Or does it? Even as we watch the Tauron characters simmering in a stew of resentment and humilation all too familiar to all too many of those of Mediterranean descent in this country, we don’t see them doing anything to earn better for themselves. The “hero”, Joseph Adama, is a crooked lawyer who forgets to talk to the judge before having a bribe sent to him, and asks his brother to kill his new found friend’s wife, to “even things out”, after watching his thug brother beat up the friend, who seems to be the Bill Gates of 150,000BC - and yet never seems to think of resenting this, and maybe pulling a few strings to get the matter taken care of, using the influence his wealth would offer him, even at a politically awkward moment. The hostility to be found in racism isn’t a hellish thing for those it oppresses, merely because it is hostility, but because it in unearned hostility, something that the one to whom it attaches can do nothing to escape. It is a tragic thing for those around them, because those it drives off into the shadows have something to offer, their companionship at the very least, and often far more than that. Caprica fails to get that, and in doing so, having passed on any opportunity to make the Taurons seem like flesh and blood, declines to even make them into even slightly lovable cartoons. We don’t know them, and hope that we never do.

Which, as far as that part of plot goes, leaves us with no story to tell. Real stories are about characters, these constructs with whom something resonates in our subconsciouses, letting us connect with those who aren’t really there. Even the villains have to have a few virtues, some reason for us to feel what they are feeling, or for us, they won’t be there at all. The Taurons just aren’t, at least not at the moment. But, perhaps, if the show should linger, they will be.

The show seems to do better with its more white bread characters, especially Zoe, who is played by Alessandra Torresani, who is playing a piece of software in this world in which Italians (Taurons) can only be played by Mexicans, and a pair of light featured yuppies can have a dark featured daughter without anybody asking awkward questions about the mailman’s love life. The character has seemed to be the target of a significant amount of mockery in the blogosphere, judging from my recent skimming, much of it undeserved, I would think.

Zoe does seem to take herself with lethal seriousness, but as we are talking about a 16 year old - who seems to have slipped down to being 15, now - that would be what we would expect of her, were she real. Can we believe in a 15 year old suicide bomber (her boyfriend) being driven by religious fanaticism? Picture a chorus of voices echoing out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem yelling “yes”. Children younger than that have done worse, in real life. The scene I’m thinking of, most of all,  is the dancing scene, which I’ve seen some describe as a puppy dog flirtation between a young technician and his hardware, the authors finding this most strange, calling it a “ratings killer”. I think that they’re misreading the scene.

The robot contains the reconstructed personality of a young girl, whose consciousness lives on through the ill conceived magic of artificial intelligence. She is trapped inside, her internal self-image (which we see in the shorts in which Ms. Torresani appears) having not caught up to her external reality (that of a one ton piece of equipment). The scene she’s living and the scene the technician are living aren’t one and the same, and the disconnect between the two has the potential to drive her even crazier than she probably is about to become.

The technician has cause to suspect that somebody is present inside that robot body, not in the sense of an actual human consciousness being present, but that of there being some sort of self-awareness. Consider the scene in which the robot, having been bound in place. One doesn’t really see a steam shovel panicking because it’s been bound to a flatbed on a train; this is the behavior we’d associate with a living being who had been left bound and immobile, panicking at her own helplessness. “Her?”, one might ask, much as the technician’s soon to be defingered friend did, as he asked why the hardware was being feminised, but men have been feminising inanimate objects for centuries in real life. Consider the pronoun we use for ships. It’s an expression of affection for that which is created by its creator, and such affection seems instinctual, a part of the drive that pushes us to create, even when we know that that which is created can’t possibly return the affection. But an actually conscious entity? Those who created that would move from merely being artists to adopting a more parental role.

I’ve read comments that while Zoebot would resent the crudeness of the technician looking at her chest and praising it, Zoebot seemed to “eat it up”, but again, let us consider the circumstances: Zoebot isn’t letting the technician know that there is any literal femininity about her at all. As far as the technician knows, all that he is looking at is a metal plate, one that he is responsible for maintaining and will be needed by this machine that he is seeing pass the Turing test. We might see Ms. Torresani’s look of dismay as he utters those words, but he doesn’t. As for the dancing that follows … from Zoe’s point of view, she’s a young woman, trapped where she doesn’t wish to be, and the technician is a boy about her own age, who is giving her what she hasn’t had for a while and hasn’t had enough of, ever - attention, as they dance. To the technician, what is happening is that he is bringing the robot to life, because he has no idea just how alive it already is.

So, again, the problem is the same as before - a failure of the imagination - but the failure is on the part of the reviewers and some in the audience, not on the part of the writers. They’re succeeding admirably in exploring the natural consequences of an unnatural situation, and we need only be open to noticing that. If one if to watch this show, while it last, I think that this is what one would watch it for. But few viewers probably will, insisting on watching that sort of scene with a literalness it doesn’t call for, and so if you want to do your viewing, I’d recommend that you do so, soon. I give this one a season before it is cancelled, and look forward to being proved wrong.