The Enjoyable Trouble with Time Travel

I've been thinking more about time trave than usual - I always think about it at least a little - because I've been enjoying Heroes on NBC, and the main reason is one of the most appealing characters, Hiro, can bend space and time. In other words, he can teleport and time travel.

Now teleportation, though extraordinary, is really just an extension of what we already do, all the time - move across distances, or space. As in walking across the street or taking a plane. Time travel, on the other hand, is something we never do. That is, we live forward in time, but never go backward, and never go forward any faster, certainly not instantly.

Which is what makes time travel such an immensely enjoyable vehicle for fiction. You can travel a day or a year into the future and see what you're doing then, and what's happening in the world. You can travel to the past and have a drink or a cup of tea with your great-great grandmother. (You can go back in the past and try to save Socrates...)

Except ... you'd need to make sure that if you did meet your great-great-grandmother, it wasn't before she met your great-great-grandfather. Because what if your meeting somehow distracted the two from ever meeting... Where you would be then?

Paradoxes like this are what make time-travel stories so much fun - and I think they're also what makes time travel impossible. Sure, you could come up with scientific possibilities, such as the creation of an alternative universe every time you travel into the past, which would allow you to change past A (your great-great-grandparents met and had children) into past B (they did not, because of your trip to the past), which would allow you (a product of A) to travel to the past and avoid the paradox of doing away with circumstances that allowed you to travel to the past (because the A that created you would still exist - all that would happen is a new B would be created) ... but, whew, creation of such alternative universes every time you travel seems even more farfetched than time travel!

And travel to the future has its own devastating problems. If I travelled even just a day into the future, and saw what you were wearing, would that mean you had no choice about what clothes you put on tomorrow? I don't know about you, but I'm rather sure that I have free will - at least, about what kind of shirt I wear. (Whether I exercise that will well or not is, of course, another story.)

So, in the end, I'm afraid that we'll never be able to travel in time, except in our minds and our fiction...

On the other hand, I just could be an agent from the future, doing my best to disguise my tracks...

Useful links:

Deja Well Worth Vu blog post review of 2006 Deja Vu movie

see elsewhere on Infinite Regress for reviews of Heroes and Lost episodes...

Time Travel in Fact and Fiction free 20-minute podcast

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

my other blog & podcast

Brief initial post to welcome you to this blog - which I expect will be mostly about television and movies. I love responding to comments, so by all means jump in.

You also might find my other blog of interest - twice upon a rhyme - more or less weekly commentary on new techs, popular culture, tv, movies, Wikipedia, outer space, politics, the works, that I've been writing since March 2006. Come over any time and jump into those discussions.

And, if you enjoy podcasts, give my Light On Light Through a try - also free on iTunes - pretty much the same as my two blogs, but with a little music, phone-ins, and the occasional sound effect...

You can also subscribe at http://lightonlightthrough.com/rss

Of Asterisks, Black Swans, Thom Yorke, and D*ck

So, Thom Yorke has a haunting new song - "Black Swan" - to be released on his Eraser CD in July. You won't hear it on any radio station - at least, not the non-satellite kind.

Radiohead never did too well in airplay, anyway. But there's a more explicit, illicit reason you won't hear Yorke's plaintively beautiful song. "This is f*cked up, f*cked up," the refrain says, over and sadly sweetly over again.

The FCC was just empowered to increase fines for allegedly "indecent" broadcasting by 10 times their previous amounts. Even with the original amounts, no radio station would want to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars for repeated offenses.

But it's not just radio and TV. Our society is so provincial that you can't just come out and write "f*ck" in most publications - that is, you can write "f*ck" but not the actual word.

Which is interesting. Because, in addition to writing "f*ck," you can further write that the asterisk stands for a "u". You can say that on the air, too. You can also go the "freakin'," "f'ing," and "f-word" routes - in print or in speech - but you can't write or say the actual word. Even though "f*ck" and the other substitutions are all saying exactly that same thing.

Just who would be hurt by seeing or hearing the actual word? Kids? I bet it's a rare 9-year old in America these days who hasn't heard the word at least as often as your average man or woman in Congress. (Or maybe not - VP D*ck Cheney did tell Senator Patrick Leahy to "go f*ck" himself just outside the floor of the Senate a few years ago.)

Well, we can all hear "Black Swan" on the Web, and soon on the new Thom Yorke CD. We'll no doubt be able to hear it on Sirius Satellite Radio, too, where Howard Stern had to go to continue his show in the way he and his fans wanted. Except Sirius costs money. So, thank you, FCC, Congress, and President B*sh, for this new sin tax.

We'll also be able to hear "Black Swan" over the closing credits of A Scanner Darkly in July - Richard Linklater's rendition of the Philip K. Dick story. Thank goodness the F*ds haven't gotten to the movie theaters yet.

But the FCC is ushering in a new Dark Ages for non-satellite radio and non-cable television - programming them, in effect, out of cutting-edge artistic relevance. And they're sharpening their talons for cable and satellite radio, too. After all, it's unconstitutional - in violation of the First Amendment - for the government to go after broadcasters, so why stop there? Why let an artist paint the human condition with a full palette of options, when you can go in an outlaw the most vivid colors?

It's fucking ridiculous.

How Star Trek Liberated Television

This essay was first published in Boarding the Enterprise, edited by David Gerrold and Robert J. Sawyer, BenBella Books, 2006.

How Star Trek Liberated Television

“Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dust…”
-- G.W.F. Hegel, 1770-1831

by Paul Levinson


Hegel was talking about how the greatest writings of the classical world –- those that would have the most lasting impact on our popular culture –- took shape as the civilizations around them started to decline. He was thinking about Socrates and Plato in Athens, Cicero and the Roman Republic, Augustine and the end of the Empire.

Let’s think about Star Trek and the decline of network television.

The twenty-first century has not been kind to traditional network television in America. Overall viewership has been falling for more than a decade. The premiere of The Sopranos several seasons ago drew more viewers than any program on the networks. A mere handful of millions separates Fox News on cable from network news on free TV. Although the Nielsen ratings in the Fall of 2005 show more people watching television than ever before, it’s often not the networks they are watching.

It wasn’t always so. Television entered the 1970s at the height of the networks’ oligarchic power. CBS, NBC, and ABC accounted for 90 percent of the prime-time audience back then, which watched television on some 36 million TV sets. This translated into more than 100 million people. In contrast, the four networks today (the original three plus Fox) often have trouble attracting more than half that number of viewers in total.

The competition back then was as fierce as it is now. In order to attract the top advertising dollar, networks had to field a reliable 30-percent share -- a consistent third of all network viewers. Programs that achieved less lived on short leashes, regardless of their quality and the passion of the their audiences. The original Star Trek on NBC was such a program. It was one of the best series I had ever seen on TV. And it was cancelled in 1969, after just a three-year run. The reason: its ratings were slipping. Even worse: the majority of its viewers were children and teenagers, not the kind of audience that advertisers were looking for the 1960s. In those days, kids didn't have much purchasing power. And they spent what they had on products not advertised on prime-time TV.

I was one of those kids (well, I was 19 when Star Trek debuted on NBC TV in 1966). I was furious and heart-broken when it was cancelled.

We all know what happened afterwards to Star Trek. How it first returned in the afterlife of syndication, on local, unimportant stations throughout the country, at midnights on Sunday on Channel 11 in New York City, at after-school hours and other decidedly non-prime time showings in other cities. How it inspired a following that generated four subsequent television series and ten motion pictures, and propelled Star Trek into the popular culture zenith inhabited by the creations of Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.

This is the story of how that syndication not only launched Star Trek into mythic levels in our popular culture, but signaled the beginning of the end for the network domination of television. From The Sopranos to Rome, also on HBO, from MTV to CNN and Fox News to the Discovery and the Sci-Fi Channels, all that we see on cable today is the result of Star Trek’s amazing off-network voyages.


Syndication and Star Trek

Syndication before Star Trek was an afterthought for viewers. The pleasures it afforded were akin to those you got when you drove a friend’s jalopy, or enjoyed food you took home from a fine restaurant the night before.

Other enormously successful reruns had only a fraction of Star Trek's impact. "To the moon, Alice, to the Moon!" is no doubt recognizable to countless viewers around the world who have seen The Honeymooners in reruns since its CBS prime-time debut on a Saturday evening in 1955. So is the theme music from Bonanza. But only one movie has been made of The Honeymooners -- with Cedric the Entertainer in 2005 -- and no movies have been made of Bonanza. No further series carried forth the story of The Honeymooners, and Bonanza had one failed "prequel," The Ponderosa, on cable TV in 2001. Lost in Space, on CBS from 1965 through 1968, did manage a movie adaptation, but it and the original series have had little to no effect on our popular culture.

I Love Lucy is the high watermark of this kind of syndication. The show began filming for CBS in 1951, continued for 23 years in one or another version, and soon was syndicated all over America and the world. By 1974, Viacom had 179 syndicated episodes of Lucy in the field. In New York City alone, you could see reruns of Lucy on three different local TV networks -- in fact, twice a day on one of them. Lucy is as hilarious today as she was in the 50s, and you can see her in a fair number of old movies, too. But of course there can be no new Lucy series, and nor are there any sections in bookstores stocked with paperbacks that tell the story of her further or alternate adventures.

What did Star Trek have that all these other shows did not? It was not only the story line. It was the specific way in which Star Trek broke into syndication. It fit none of the patterns. It broke all of the molds. Unlike Lucy and Bonanza, which were huge successes throughout much of their prime-time original runs, Star Trek was a ratings disappointment. Indeed, Lucy and Bonanza were still riding high in prime-time network television during their syndications -- which of course far outlived their original lives -- but Star Trek was dead and all-but-buried when its syndication began in 1970. Its success in syndication was thus a slap in the face of network television and its ratings logic from the very beginning.

But Star Trek’s syndication also came along at just the right time in the history of television.


Diversification of Media

The history of media shows a very interesting pattern that has repeated itself many times. When new mass media start out, they attempt to please everyone. They create entertainment, report news, in a way that is designed to appeal to as many people as possible. They are the most “mass” of mass media at these outsets.

But sooner or later, this changes. The first American magazines that rolled off the printing presses in the 1840s were intended for all readers. Harper’s had something for men, women, children, outdoors types, bookworms, everyone. A hundred years later, a hundred different magazines on newsstands beckoned to fisherman, gardeners, coin collectors, doll collectors, businessmen, housewives and almost every conceivable taste and interest. Radio underwent a similar, if faster, development. Stations in the 1920s and 30s broadcast news, talk, sports, all kinds of music, and soap operas and mystery shows, to boot. By the 1960s, we had stations devoted entirely to rock ‘n’ roll, country and western, classical music, or talk.

Television from its inception did everything faster than every other medium. It was in ninety percent of American homes by the end of the 1950s -- a decade after its commercial introduction –- a record for adoption still not exceeded by personal computers and cell phones.

Although few people realized it, television’s sped-up evolution made it ready for diversification by the early 1970s. Certainly the network executives had no idea what was coming. Having pulled the rug out from under Hollywood and the neighborhood movie theater in the 1950s – Hollywood moguls hugely underestimated the appeal of staying at home and watching TV – the network execs made the same kind of mistake about cable. They overlooked the public’s appetite for specialized choices in TV viewing, and how cable could feed it.

Star Trek in syndication provided the first example. In retrospect, a science fiction show was an ideal vehicle for this maiden voyage.

Although the 1950s is known as the “golden age” of science fiction, the sales of its leading authors, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, were far from golden back then. On television, Captain Video and His Video Rangers ran on the third-rate Dumont TV network from 1949 through 1955. Actually, Dumont was fourth-rate - always struggling, limping far behind the big three networks. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh kindly describe it as "perpetually impoverished" in their 1979 Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows. Captain Video's budget was so pinched that it provided the grand total of $25 per week for props! (That's right - twenty-five dollars - I didn't leave off any zeros.) The Twilight Zone had considerably more success in its original 30-minute format on CBS from 1959-1962, but failed to make the transition to an hour-long show.

Given this ambiguous status of science fiction – the mixed signals it gave to the popular culture – it is entirely understandable that NBC first took a chance with Star Trek, and then was quick to cancel it. What happened afterward to the networks is also understandable, but only now with the wisdom of hindsight.


The Time and the Place: Guerrilla Television

How can TV – how does any medium – cater to a specialized taste? How can it satisfy that appetite in a way that invites the rest of the public to join the party? What is the best time and place for such presentations?

The thing about syndication is that it had no time and place - nothing appointed for everyone at the same time, at least not nationally. It was off or under the radar. It went totally contrary to the mainstream miracle of network television, in which everyone in the country, or at least 30 or so million viewers, watched the same show at the same time. In its heyday, network television reveled in everyone arranging calendars, making a point of staying home at a particular time, to watch a hit show.

But even locally here in New York City, Star Trek's schedule in syndication was sketchy. It was on midnight on Sunday, but sometimes it was also there on Saturday.

I remember calling my girlfriend Tina, long since my wife. "Did you see 'City on the Edge of Forever' last night? I tuned in in the middle, and didn't want to wake you."

"When will be it on again?"

Who knew? Maybe a year, maybe next week, if you took into account the Saturday schedule, but who knew what that was or how long it would be in effect?

The people at Channel 11 presumably knew, though come to think of it, maybe not. I'm sure I saw "The Trouble with Tribbles" at least three times in syndication in one year, and "Spock's Brain" twice ("You'll get nothing more from her, Jim -- hers is the mind of a child!"). Where was the sense in that?

It didn't make much sense but that was its charm – and its power. Marshall McLuhan's celebrated 1960s distinction between "hot" and "cool" media explains part of it. Hot media put everything out clearly and precisely. But once we get it, hear it, read it -- like a newspaper -- we have little further interest in it. We already know its stories. We know what to expect. Cool media are more low-profile, ambiguous, imprecise. We therefore can never get enough of them. We can't get our fill because we can never imbibe them completely. Star Trek's banishment from the networks immersed it in a dark, cool pool of our memories. The vagaries of syndication brought it a lot closer -- yet still somehow always just a bit beyond our calendar and reach. You couldn’t really make a plan or precise appointment with yourself to see it. But you also knew that it was somehow always there, anyway. Like some ubiquitous, invisible being, it was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Many people worship such beings. Star Trek's fans felt that way
about Star Trek in syndication.

And cable television was just about ready to pick up on that.


Dumont Avenged!

Ironically, cable was introduced in State College, Pennsylvania in the 1950s as a way of providing TV network programming to people beyond broadcast range. The town of State College is located right smack dab in the middle of that wide state, too far from Philadelphia in the east and Pittsburgh in the west to receive their signals via air. But it is a big college community, and the television networks and their advertisers wanted to reach it. The answer was cable. Like FM radio when it was first introduced in the 1940s, cable was thought of as an adjunct, an extra channel, for mainstream broadcasting.

This did not change until the early 1980s, when CNN, MTV, and HBO began offering programs not available at all on the networks. This was less than a decade after Star Trek in syndication had shown the good sense of providing a program no longer available on network TV. Cable was the brain-child of many people, all of whom were aware of the success of Star Trek in syndication. Only a TV-exec confined to a planetoid around Alpha Centauri could not have been. But at least one of the great pioneers of cable in the 1980s had a more explicit connection: Star Trek reruns had been a big hit on Ted Turner’s WTBS television station in Atlanta in the 1970s. He had seen first hand, in his profit-and-loss columns, that there was not only life but spectacular impact beyond network TV. You need only to hear Darth Vader as the voice of CNN to appreciate how deeply Ted Turner was tuned into science fiction and its power in the real world.

When a medium begins to falter, it has no shortage of would-be successors nipping at its heels. Videotaping technology was also invented in the mid-1950s, and soon replaced the feeble kinescope, which at first was the only way of making copies of television shows. Among the early successes of video was the taping of the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev "Kitchen" debate for broadcast on NBC. But these Ampex videotape devices were used by the networks to enhance their programming – like cable TV in those days, videotaping was an adjunct of network TV, not a stand-alone medium – and the taping devices were in any case not available to the general public. An Ampex recorder had a price tag of $45,000 in 1958.

Sony came to the rescue of videotape and television viewers starved for diversity and more control over their television in the mid-1970s – just as Star Trek was beginning to make a big name for itself in the backwaters of syndicated television. VCRs introduced by Sony were intended for the viewing public, and cost less than one-tenth of the 1958 Ampex. As demand quickened, prices dropped to below $2000 per device. Still no bargain, but affordable to the upper middle classes. Soon VCRs would be in reach of everyone, and become standard gear for television.

When the television networks finally realized what was happening, they were horrified at the prospect. People were watching rented movies rather than prime-time shows on their TV screens. Even worse, viewers could tape a program, play it back, and speed past the commercials. So upset were the networks about this possibility that they went all the way to the Supreme Court – in 1984, as cable was first beginning to flex its muscles as an independent medium - in an attempt to make it illegal for viewers to videotape television shows. (So much for corporate network support of the First Amendment, when it can hurt their pocketbooks.) The Supreme Court, in a rare display of good judgment about the media in the twentieth-century, wisely decided not to give the networks what they wanted.

Today, TiVo and similar technologies, as well as “on demand” cable, are making the VCR obsolete, and the networks along with it. V-casts and mobisodes are debuting on cell phones. How much longer commercial television can endure with viewers effortlessly able to delete commercials, or watch programs by subscription on cable and cell phone with no commercials to begin with, is anyone's guess. But the successful assault on network hegemony began in 1970, on the date that Star Trek went into syndication.

The feature shared by all of these developments -- Star Trek in syndication, the rise of cable TV and VCRs, and now TiVo and its siblings -- is the assertive viewer, the basic human desire to see and hear our entertainment when we want it, rather than wait passively for a network to dole it out.

The Internet probably has been the least injurious of new media to the traditional television networks. We can look on the Web for additional information about our favorite network shows. We can discuss them in online communities and message boards. And we can "stream" or download a missed episode of a current network series -- or simply see one we want to view again. But these very benefits of the Web cater, again, to our hunger for entertainment on our schedule rather than someone else's, and in the long run only expose the rigidity and unresponsiveness of traditional network TV to our needs.

The Internet as a medium for first military and then scholarly work goes back to the 1960s. The personal computer as a device at hand for everyday people was introduced in the 1980s, and its connection to the Web took wings about a decade later. Once again, the transformation from corporate and administrative to personal satisfaction took place just a few years after Star Trek debuted in syndication on Channel 11 in New York City, Ted Turner’s WTBS in Atlanta, and local stations across America. Coincidence? Well, one could argue that the impulse to satisfy our entertainment needs on our own schedule was so strong, and the networks so inept in fulfilling it, that the revolution would have happened anyway, with or without Star Trek. Certainly the technology of cable and the Web, and the daring of innovators like Ted Turner, would have been there, anyway. But revolutions need a first shot, a Paul Revere, to signal their onset. And Star Trek in syndication provided that.

It is probably also worth noting that David Gerrold, author of the acclaimed "Tribble" episodes and one of the editors of this book, also contributed to the digital revolution with a column about personal computing in Profiles, a magazine devoted to the Kaypro "CP/M" computer in the 1980s. In fact, so did my friend Rob Sawyer, the other editor of this book. The roots of the revolution fomented by Star Trek run wide and deep.


Human-Fashioned Futures

The evolution of television towards greater satisfaction of viewer tastes and choices is no coincidence. Along with the diversification and specialization of mass media, the empowerment of the viewer points to a crucial truth about the human relationship to technology: in the long run and the last analysis, we control our technology and media, not vice versa.

You wouldn’t know this given what most critics of media say. Those who pass judgment on our popular culture often depict us as creatures of our media, which increasingly dictate our tastes, schedules, and lives. In fact, the liberation of television begun by Star Trek shows just the opposite.

It is entirely appropriate that science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular led this charge. At its best, science fiction shows human rationality struggling with and triumphing over a chaotic, hostile, dangerous universe. Until 2006, The New York Times confined most reviews of science fiction to columns on page 38 or the equivalent in which three or four novels are accorded a paragraph or two each of review -- almost literally on the margins. That may in fact have helped science fiction, by keeping it suppressed and edgy, but it missed how science fiction is the quintessential story-telling of our time, uniquely capturing the human connection to the cosmos: our capacity to first know it and then reshape it to our own specifications. (Not only science fiction got short shrift in The New York Times. Mystery and detective fiction still do. And romance novels are not reviewed there at all. The genres are apparently too popular to merit the Times' attention. If it's not about a dysfunctional Southern family, the "newspaper of record" has little interest in reviewing it. But that's a story for another essay.)

More than any program in the history of television, Star Trek exemplified these highest ideals of science fiction. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu and the rest were standard-bearers for our human encounter with the cosmos, for the unique mixtures of passion and logic that we bring to our encounters with everything.

Back here on Earth, in the 1960s, the program failed. But its lessons and thrills were far more profound than could be contained in any decade or network. It was and is a story for the centuries and the millennia, and its appropriate medium could therefore never be just network television, or indeed any single means. Its proper vehicle is, instead, every possible kind of communication at hand, which today includes books, television, motion pictures, and the Web.

Who back in the 1960s could have predicted such pollination, which broke through network TV like an explosion of dandelion seeds, invigorating half a dozen media and transforming television in the process? Not even Harlan Ellison, author of "City on the Edge of Forever" (in my and many other people's estimation the best script and episode in the original Star Trek series), who told the Washington Post in 1972 that in his opinion Star Trek was "dead." (Thanks to David Alexander's 1994 biography of Gene Roddenberry -- Star Trek Creator --for salvaging Ellison's classic of poor prediction from the historical dustbin.)

In those days, after all, gone was pretty well gone on television. Like an enemy of the state who had been declared a non-person in Orwell's 1984, with all images expunged from the public record, a television show once cancelled was invisible, unattainable. It wasn't like an old book that stayed on the same shelf, in the same library, for years and years. Its exile was far worse than yesterday's newspaper, which you at least could keep to wrap fish in. For that matter, last year's and earlier newspapers were available on microfiche in the library, for anyone who wanted to peruse them.

It was into the pit of such programmed, televised amnesia that NBC and just about everyone assumed Star Trek was headed after its cancellation. Instead, when NBC cancelled the series, it actually was taking the first big step in canceling itself and the two other networks as the mighty triumvirate that once dictated everything new that we saw on television.

The twenty-first century revolution in media had begun.

See also: Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent and Star Trek Into Darkness: Echoes, Resonances, Great

                                        

---

The Night That Alias Reinvented Itself

Note to readers of my blog: This essay was originally published 2005, in slightly different form, in Alias Assumed: Sex, Lies, and SD-6, edited by Kevin Weisman aka Marshall Flinkman, with Glenn Yeffeth (Plano, TX; BenBella Books, 2005). I added a few new paragraphs - at the end of the essay - just before the conclusion of the series in April-May 2006. The conclusion of the series was enjoyable - but it didn't change the conclusions of this essay.




The Night That Alias Reinvented Itself
by Paul Levinson

September 30, 2002 was not that night. But it was a nice Monday night in New York City. I was walking with several colleagues to McNally Auditorium at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus, where we were to appear on a panel about The Sopranos that I had organized. The fourth season of the HBO series had premiered two weeks earlier, and had attracted a record-breaking audience for television: for the first time in the history of the medium, a cable TV show had scored better in the Nielsen ratings than any of its competitors on free, network TV.

The only thing bad about The Sopranos, I said to one of my colleagues -- Lance Strate, who was to present a paper on The Sopranos and the state of New Jersey (cultural as well as physical) -- was what to watch on TV on Sunday evenings when The Sopranos was not on. Lance looked at me and nodded sagely. "Watch Alias," was all he said.

I had vaguely heard of Alias then, which had just started its second season the night before. As it turned out, I didn't get to watch any of Alias until well into its third season, when my daughter (then 17) talked me into getting DVDs of the first two seasons (I'm sometimes a little slow to take a hint). Once I did, I was soon believing not only what Lance and my daughter had told me, but was coming up with reasons that Alias was in one way even better than The Sopranos, which might have made it the best show in the history of television.

Which brings me to the subject of this essay....

The Common Denominator of Network TV

The prime commandment of network television has always been: Thou shalt not offend! The networks make their money from selling air time to advertisers, who are happy to hand over big amounts of money for big numbers of viewers. The advertisers don't much care if the viewers are thrilled with the programs they are watching or merely interested -- in fact, all the advertisers care about is whether the viewer is watching their commercials, preferably with at least one eye open.

The result is that television has long appealed to the lowest common denominator of public interest: show what keeps the largest number of people interested, without turning anyone off and away. If a program keeps viewers on the coasts riveted, but sends middle-Americans running from the screen, the inexorable arithmetic of advertising works against it. Better to have a show that is at least mildly interesting to the coasts, and retains the heartland. The furor over Janet Jackson's breast on CBS during the Superbowl half-time in 2004 shows just what can happen when this principle is violated even for a split-second.

Now, a powerful corollary of thou shalt not offend on television has always been thou shalt not confuse! After all, a confused viewer can easily become an irritated viewer, a short distance from being no viewer at all. This is why daytime soap operas move at a glacially slow pace: you can miss at least a few weeks of programming, and not lose much of the story. But all television drama steers clear of sudden, disrupting turns in events and characters. Miss Ellie was deemed so important to viewers of Dallas, for example, that Donna Reed was drafted to play her after Barbara Bel Geddes was sidelined with heart problems -- even though the two looked and sounded nothing alike.

Which makes the surprise reinvention of Alias right in the middle of its second season on ABC all the more remarkable and rewarding.

The Rug That was Pulled Out from Under

The original setup of Alias, which carried it from pilot through a season and a half, was an elegant box within boxes. First, Sydney Bristow, a grad student, is working for the CIA. On this level, we in effect had a slightly older Felicity as secret agent. (J. J. Abrams conceived both Felicity and Alias. Jennifer Garner also played a friend of Felicity.) But we soon learn that Sydney only thinks she is working for the CIA. In reality, her SD-6 unit is a rogue operation, which uses the CIA as a cover. Most of SD-6, including Sydney at this point, thinks it is an entirely legal if black-ops unit, working for the good guys -- which the CIA will deny all knowledge of, and which will kill anyone who reveals anything at all about its work. By the end of the pilot, Sydney's fiance is killed by SD-6 because she tells him that she works for them. This leads to her resigning, which puts her own life in danger. The crisis is resolved when Sydney decides to stay on at SD-6 as a double CIA/SD-6 agent (that is, a good guy who works for the true CIA under cover as a bad guy who works for SD-6); this gives her the best opportunity to avenge her fiance's killers. Meanwhile, her mysterious father Jack reveals himself as also a double CIA/SD-6 agent. Sydney is not happy about any of this, but working under cover at SD-6 nonetheless affords her the best chance of bringing down this cruel organization and its allies -- in contrast to her work at SD-6 up until this point, which she thought was for the good CIA but was really for evil SD-6.

That a plot of such complexity -- look how long it just took me to summarize -- was ever established on network TV indicates how far the medium had come since Dallas. The success of HBO on cable -- which, as a premium subscription service, was free of the numbing yoke of advertising -- was at least part of the reason that ABC-TV was willing to be so daring. Indeed, Alias and The Sopranos were often in face-to-face competition at nine oclock on Sunday nights.

The two shows have little else in common. The Sopranos, unlacerated by commercial interruption, tells its story in hour-long film-like episodes; Alias decorates its commercial breaks with roller-coaster cliff-hangers. Not burdened by the FCCs childish (and unconstitutional) provisions, The Sopranos gives us realistic nudity and language; the most we get from Alias in this regard are tight outfits and a few sons-of-bitches. Although characters die with regularity on The Sopranos, the plot remains unrelentingly constant, and the persistent, singular complexity we experience is how such violent people can command something akin to admiration and even affection from us.

Although Alias had its emotional moments, especially in Sydney's relationship to her father, its supreme complexity was intellectual, and was especially so in the first season and a half. How could Sydney Bristow function as a good guy in an environment of bad guys who almost all thought they were good guys, and not give herself away to the head of SD-6, who in fact was a bad guy? She often went on missions with her partner, Dixon, an earnest good guy who did not know he was working in the service of bad guys. Sydney's job was often to confound the mission, or give the fruits of the mission to the good guys (the real CIA) right under the nose of Dixon -- who, if he had any inkling of what Sydney was doing, would have assumed that Sydney was a traitor to her country. (In fact, he eventually began to get just such an inkling.)

In the first year and a half, Sydney and her colleagues on both sides of the divide were able to walk this tightrope, in the face of ever more desperately complex situations. And then J. J. Abrams did something even more radical. He cut the tightrope. Right in the middle of the season. Right after the Superbowl on ABC in January 2003, which meant right in front of a huge audience.

He didnt stop the series. He did something far more unprecedented: he changed its very premise.

The Night of Reinvention

The Superbowl on television has long been about the closest the world regularly comes to being a global village. It vies with the Academy Awards for drawing the largest number of simultaneous viewers worldwide, and here in America, it regularly doubles the number of Academy Award viewers (Superbowl audiences are over 100 million in the U.S.; Academy Award TV audiences have been as low as 50 million). Coverage of American Presidential election returns, to give another comparison, attract well under 100 million viewers on all stations combined, and of course far less on any single broadcast or cable network. When the Superbowl is on TV, we are all seated in the same stadium, multi-millions of us, watching the exact same action on the screen. Alias could not have found a better spot and time to reinvent itself.

January 26, 2003: That was the night. The broadcast of the Superbowl on ABC-TV had drawn a record-breaking audience of 138.9 million viewers in the United States, according to National Football League statistics. More conservative Nielsen ratings estimated the audience at 88.6 million -- still a record for a Nielsen-measured audience. Alias fans have been abuzz about the new episode that will air right after the game. Victor Garber, who masterfully portrays Jack Bristow on the show, has promised that this episode will change things, and help the ratings. (Viewers have averaged about 9.3 million per show for the second season of Alias, until this night.) ABC had decided to postpone an episode guest-starring Ethan Hawke until the February sweep month, in favor of this special Alias chapter. "It was a very conscious choice on the producers' part, and I think it will help," Garber is quoted as saying by Rick Porter (on tv.zap2it.com), eleven days before the broadcast.

There are certain unwritten rules on TV -- certain specific principles in support of "thou shalt not confuse". Lead characters can be brought to the point of death as often as needed, but rarely killed (this used to be never, unless the series was ending or the actor or actress decided to leave). Institutions were even more robust and resistant to change. Southfork (the Ewing ranch on Dallas) could be set on fire, but never burned to the ground or out of existence; Ewing Oil could be sold, but sooner or later it would wind up back in J. R.'s or at least Bobby's hands. Even The Sopranos could never survive Tony's truly leaving the mob. If he did, that would mean we would be watching the series finale.

According to the Nielsens, some 17.4 million Superbowl viewers stay tuned for Alias -- twice the usual number of Alias watchers. Phase One -- the aptly numbered Episode 13 of the Second Season -- starts out conventionally, if provocatively, enough. Sydney's alias is a scantily-clad call girl on a private jetliner, tempting an ugly, powerful man in possession of some crucial data onboard the plane. Sydney bests the bad-guy, gets the data -- but then apparently gets shot. A delightful opener. But none of this has much to do with the real plot and purpose of this episode.

That pivotal story begins with the revelation that Arvin Sloan, bad-guy head of SD-6 played by Ron Rifkin, has gone missing, and has been replaced by a new eloquent monster, one Anthony Geiger, portrayed by Rutger Hauer. (One of the great strengths of Alias had always been the high octane star power attracted to the series for guest appearances. These included not only Hauer but Quentin Tarantino, Amy Irving, Lena Olin, Angela Bassett, and the aforementioned Ethan Hawke. See my comments below for more about Lena Olin's impact on the show.) Jack and Sydney have had a complicated relationship with Sloan -- everything is complicated in Alias, one of its joys -- and there is even a possibility that Sloan may know that Jack and Sydney are double agents, but for his own reasons is allowing their deception to run its course and unfold. Sydney, Jack, and viewers who have followed the series know they cannot expect such forbearance from Geiger. He presents something of a life-threatening problem.

And, in fact, Jack is soon unmasked by Geiger, who commences to torture Jack for the truth. Sydney -- who we learn has actually made good her escape from the sky (no real surprise, even Alias cannot afford to kill off its lead character) -- focuses on rescuing her father. But only the real CIA can pry him loose from Geiger. Indeed, the CIA would need to field an all-out attack on SD-6 headquarters -- but this would forever blow the CIA's game (also Jack's and Sydney's) of letting SD-6 think it was putting one over on the CIA. In other words, such an attack would blow the very premise of the series.

Well ... television series have been no strangers to episodes and plots that put central characters in dire jeopardy, and threaten to undermine the fundamental logic and set-up of the series. But prior to this episode of Alias, the TV way of handling this would be to bring the disruption this close to completion, razor thin to inflicting mortal damage on the plot, and then at the last moment ingeniously veer back and resolve the disruption to maintain the status quo. (The very way that Alias has just resolved the opening tease with Sydney.) But the problem with this approach, of course, is that the ingenious twists were always predictable since viewers knew there would be some kind of unexpected saving grace -- and therefore the twist was not unexpected at all.

Alias tried a different tack this time. The real CIA indeed attacks SD-6. A fierce fight ensues. We expect SD-6 to somehow pull its survival, and the continuance of the complex terrain of the series, out of the fire. But the blaze is too strong. Geiger and SD-6 are destroyed. Sloan, the SD-6 mastermind, does survive. And in the last scene we learn that the destruction of SD-6 was exactly as he had planned. He -- and the series -- are moving on from Phase One.

The Dividends of Mutation?

Alias gained about a million viewers for the episodes that followed "Phase One". This was a limited improvement -- Alias had reached that number (10 million viewers) at times during its first season. And in the third season, viewers often dropped below 8 million per show. It never really recovered from this fall.

Alias's daring reinvention of itself was thus less than an unmitigated boon. What went wrong?

Part of the answer had to do with specific developments in the series, especially the availability of a particular actress, which had nothing to with the reinvention on the night of the Superbowl. But part of Alias's problem after the reinvention flowed from the direction of the reinvention, or where it pointed the series. Let's look at that part first.

Unfortunately for Alias, the very purpose of its reinvention was apparently to make itself less complex, simpler, presumably easier for the common denominator of television viewers to understand. In the interview with Rick Porter mentioned above, Victor Garber gives an indication of why the show reinvented itself: "I think it's a difficult show. It's not an easy show for people to follow." The difficulty he was talking about is SD-6 -- the complexity of two good double agents, Jack and Sydney, working undercover for a bad organization pretending to be good, and consisting mostly of agents who are good who do not know they are working for someone bad. In other words, the very heart and soul and deepest intellectual jolt of the first season and a half. And the very heart and soul that "Phase One" blasted out of existence. Garber continues in his interview, "the Superbowl episode is like starting over. Its almost like a pilot episode."

Unhappily, the pilot was for a series which was less challenging and riveting of the mind.

Interestingly, all of the continuing characters, and most of their delicious conflicts and ambiguity, survived the revolution of "Phase One". But this ambiguity was personal, not structural or organizational, and therefore it was more commonplace than what had been before. Sloan, for example, not only survived but was still calling the shots. Since we already suspected prior to "Phase One" that he knew something close to the truth about Jack and Sydney's loyalties, the tantalizing question kept arising: why, then, did he allow them to continue to work for SD-6? Was Sloan perhaps in some way not just a villain, but a hero too? This ambiguity continued and was further developed and exploited after the re-invention. But without the almost insanely complex infrastructure of SD-6 to support it, Sloan became just another inscrutable, enigmatic character -- almost a dime a dozen in spy stories.

Other characters were similarly deprived of their best conflicts. Dixon, Sydney's partner, was a good man who thought he was patriotically working for the CIA in his work for SD-6. He was in fact no conscious double-agent, but a decent person unwittingly doing bad work. Sydney knew this, and had to constantly struggle with it. Dixon, for his part, started to suspect Sydney was not loyal to SD-6 (which, in Dixon's mind, meant Sydney could be a traitor to the U.S.A.), and was beginning to agonize about whether to bring this to Sloan's attention.

Indeed, this counterpoint came to the boil and played a central role in "Phase One": "You had your suspicions about me!" Sydney says to Dixon, in one of the best moments of the episode and the entire series. "You were right! I know this is insane but you have to trust me now! ... You have been working for the enemy you thought you were fighting." Thus Sydney convinced Dixon -- just barely -- to help her bring in the real CIA to bring down SD-6. But once SD-6 was gone, what was left for Dixon? In place of a good man in an almost impossible situation, he became an embittered man, who rightly felt he had been made a fool of for years. He was given other reasons in the series to loathe Sloan. But the upshot was we had a Hamlet of a character replaced by a conventional, by-the-book hater.

Marshall McLuhan not only coined the term "global village" but noted that "the medium is the message". We might say that in fiction of this sort, the complex structure of the plot is the message. When that underlying structure was removed without warning from Alias, that was the most complex -- and brilliantly satisfying -- move of all. But without that undergirding, the characters of Alias struggled to maintain their balance and even their reasons for being. With that fundamental rule of television -- you can burn Southfork, but it has to be repaired or rebuilt -- so courageously busted, the complex heroes and villains of Alias were left without a logical home.

Other Plusses and Minuses in the Aftermath

Other factors helped and hurt Alias in the aftermath of its reinvention on Superbowl 2003 night. One factor in particular both dramatically helped and hurt Alias, and in the end shows the damage that another kind of transformation can wreak on a show -- the unintentional loss of a character because the actress who plays her is no longer available.

Laura Bristow/Irina Derevko -- Sydney's mother and Jacks wife -- first appeared, in shadowy profile, at the end of the final episode of Season One. Throughout most of the first season, everyone -- including Sydney and presumably Jack-- thinks Derevko is dead. But Sydney and Jack were beginning to suspect otherwise, and at the end of the last episode of that season we meet Derevko: her people have captured Sydney, and she has shot her daughter (not fatally) in an attempt to get her to talk.

In the first episode of the second season, Derevko turns herself in to the CIA -- to be close to their planning, to be close to her daughter, who knows? Lena Olin gave an incandescent, sterling performance as Derevko in that episode, and indeed in every episode in which she appeared that season.

She is beautiful, powerful, poised. Sparks fly every time she and Victor Garber are in the same room. Scenes between her and Jennifer Garner are superb. A two-part episode -- "The Passage" -- takes the happy family on a trip to India to prevent a war between that country and Pakistan over nuclear weapons. "The Passage" is generally regarded as one of the high points of the series, and I completely agree. The acting between Olin and Garber has seldom if ever been equalled on television.

Irina Derevko easily survived "Phase One" -- she was not in that episode at all. In the stories that followed that evening of transformation, Derevko's complex character and Olin's exquisite acting buoyed the show. Viewers had every reason to expect the same for the third season, whatever the twists and turns in the new, watered-down plot.

But this was not to be. For whatever reason, Lena Olin was not willing to play Irina Derevko in the third season of Alias. At first, Jack was obliged to resort to instant messaging to keep Irina in the story. This worked best, once. Alias had few options. The Dallas solution of getting another actress to play the part had not worked well even in Dallas back in the 1980s. It would have been flatly ludicrous for Alias. A contrivance such as plastic surgery to change Irina's face would not have done it -- a significant part of Lena Olin's power and presence is her voice. Alias eventually decided to bring Irina's sister Katya into the story, played by Isabella Rossellini. She is a fine actress, with more cinematic successes to her credit than Lena Olin. But she is not as scintillating at her present age as Olin is at hers. The volatile chemistry between Olin and Garber that literally lit up the second season was missing.

The moral of this part of the story of Alias is that not all transformations are equal. The loss of an electrifying character is very difficult to sustain. Perhaps if Alias had killed Lena off in a satisfying way her absence would have been easier to take in the third season. But, even so, the shift from Irina to Katya -- from Lena to Isabella -- was a jump cut that left the viewer unsettled and dissatisfied. Her return in later seasons was not enough to reverse this.

The Perils of Reinvention

Genius is hard to maintain. Plots that flourish by reinventing themselves may be even more difficult. Live by the sword, die by the sword: once the cat of reinvention is out of the bag, viewers can come to expect it, and it can thus become boring. The weekly television series V tried a radical approach in the 1980s, after two successful mini-series which introduced the show and its characters. How about killing off a central, seemingly crucial character every few weeks? It seemed like a good idea at first. But pretty soon the series killed off not only many of its original characters, but itself.

Alias, alas, did just that. The fatigue it exhibited in its third season was due not to too many unexpected plot changes, but probably too few. Rather than building on the golden opportunity of Sydney's two-year amnesia that set the third season in motion, Alias essentially went in circles. With the exception of Sydney's sister, the third season ended up pretty much on the same terrain, with the same set of characters and conflicts, that we saw at the end of the second season.

The fourth and so far the fifth season of Alias have been pretty much the same. And now, like everyone else, I'm waiting for the finale J. J. Abrams has promised, which will start with a 2-hour special April 19, and continue in weekly installments through May. I'm betting we'll be in for at least a couple of great surprises.

But whatever happens, nothing can ever erase the magic of those first 22 plus 12 episodes, and the brazen verve, nerve, of what happened in Episode 13 of Season Two. Win, lose, or draw in the finale, that Episode 13 and everything that led up to it will remain one of the highest points of serialized fiction. It made Alias the greatest show in the history of television at that moment. Perhaps its subsequent failure was the price the series had to pay for that accomplishment.

And what will we watch now that Alias will soon no longer be with us, for good? I'm sure Lance Strate would say Lost -- as well as 24, Battlestar Galactica, and The Wire. And The Sopranos are back, too, at least for this year and next...

Helpful links:

Alias - The Complete First Season

Alias - The Complete Second Season

Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium - by Paul Levinson

Why the Man of Steel Did So Little to Stop Hitler and Tojo?

Superman, Patriotism, and Doing the Ultimate Good:
Why the Man of Steel Did So Little to Stop Hitler and Tojo

by Paul Levinson

[originally published in The Man from Krypton, edited by Glenn Yeffeth, Ben Bella Books, 2006]


“It is that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.”
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817


The nice thing about Coleridge’s explanation of what makes poetry work is that it applies to much more than poetry. Nearly two centuries later, we know that we cry at sad movies, get angry at villains in novels, are thrilled by special effects because we voluntarily suspend our disbelief in all of these encounters, and pretend that what we know to be fiction is real. Unlike a rollercoaster ride in which there is a chance, however slim, that we can really lose our lives, our gasps at a horror or science fiction movie come completely from the success of temporarily believing that we can lose our lives, when we know full well that we cannot. The more effective the presentation in eliciting this grand pretense, the more highly we prize it.

Comic books in general and Superman in particular are no strangers to this wonderful wheeling and dealing with our emotions. A human-like alien from another planet with super powers is easy for fans to believe. All right, as a kid I always wondered why Superman didn’t use his x-ray vision to look though women’s clothing, but this super morality was a minor part of an otherwise convincing catalog of super strength, super speed, long-distance seeing and hearing, flying and leaping, and weakness to Kryptonite. With one glaring exception.

Why didn’t Superman use his powers to stop the German Blitzkrieg and the Japanese fleets during the Second World War?



The Size and Dates of Miracles


Wallace Harrington put the matter aptly in his 1999 Superman and the War essay: “most every Superman fan has asked at one point or another over the last 61 years: If Superman is so powerful, why does he not simply put an end to all wars and suffering?” Debuting in 1938, on the eve of World War II, Superman certainly blew his first big chance. It took D-Day and Hiroshima, and the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives, to put an end to the Axis powers.

Instead of applying himself to this worthy task – a task he could easily have accomplished – the Man of Steel for the most part used his powers during the war years to take out common criminals and petty dictators, and vie with fascinating fictional villains such as Lex Luthor who were not as evil as Hitler. There were a few exceptions.

First and foremost was the two-page “What If Superman Ended the War?” which appeared in the February 17, 1940 issue of Look Magazine. In this story scripted by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, Superman flies to Berlin to pick up Hitler by the scruff of his neck (the classic Superman grip on a villain), does the same with Stalin in Moscow, and hauls the two to the League of Nation’s World Court in Geneva, where they stand trial for crimes against their own peoples. (In our reality, this court was dissolved by the final League of Nations assembly in 1946, and succeeded by the U.N. World Court in the Hague.) The Look story is noteworthy, even controversial, for a variety of reasons:

• It appeared before the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941. It thus was a safe fantasy story, in that it was not presented to the American public at a time in which the nation was actually at war. The story in this way avoided such questions as why didn’t the Man of Steel first destroy every weapon that was firing at American troops.

• The story has been incorrectly identified by many comic-book historians – including Harrington – as having been published not in 1940 but 1943. This may well reflect our yearning for Superman to have made an attempt to stop World War II after it had become a fully global war with massive American participation. Of course, the 1940 story is somewhat anachronistic in 1943 -- why would Superman in 1943 bypass Tojo and Hirohito in favor of Stalin, who while certainly no angel was then an ally of the United States and England?

• More recent anti-war advocates have correctly noted that Superman sought to put an end to the beginning of World War II by bringing its chief villains (Hitler and Stalin had both invaded Poland in 1939, which started the war) literally to justice, without firing a shot. The little story was thus a powerful brief for settling disputes among nations in a world court of law, and for holding the leaders of criminally aggressive nations, not their citizens, to task. These ideals have by and large yet to be adopted by the world, some 65 years out from the Look Superman story.

• The story was published as a special feature in Look Magazine -- not as part of the continuing DC comic-book series, or newspaper strips -- and thus was outside of the normal canon of Superman narratives. This meant that the comic books and strips could continue their accounts of Superman without making reference to the Look fantastic tale. Which was a good thing, since the U.S. was soon to enter World War II, and the comic books would have been utterly beyond anyone’s suspension of disbelief had they depicted a world in which Hitler (and Stalin!) were in prison.

How, then, did the Superman comic books handle the reality of World War II?

With scant use of the war as a central theme, and certainly no knock-out punches to the Axis. “Japanazis” were mentioned in Superman #18 (September-October, 1942), Superman helped train troops in issue #23 (June-July, 1943), and he saves a fictional comic-book writer from the German Bund (Nazi sympathizers in the U.S.) in issue #25 (November-December, 1943). That “King of the Comic Books” tale is a spectacularly inventive “meta”-story – the comic-book writer has angered the Nazis because he portrays Hitler unfavorably – but it is hardly a piece with any major or significant relevance to the actual war effort. Meanwhile, Clark Kent, who has been declared “4-F” because of his poor vision (nice touch – he accidentally sees through the eye-chart, courtesy of his x-ray revision, and reports the letters he sees on a chart in the next room!), helps with Air Force technical training in another memorable story in that same issue. But, again, the Man of Steel, this time in disguise, only helps in training, foregoing the front-line role one might expect of Superman, and which would have been much more inspiring to America.

Harrington accurately notes that, although the stories in the Superman and Action Comics had little relevance to the main battles and issues of World War II, the covers were often brightly patriotic. (Superman stories appeared in both of these publications.) Wartime covers showed Superman attacking battleships, tanks, and enemy positions. He sped to protect our fighting men, and (of course) delivered supplies (a valuable but behind-the-scenes activity). The cover of Superman #17 (July-August, 1942) does have him holding Hitler and Hirohito (no longer Stalin) by their necks and trying to shake some sense into them. And Superman #29 (July-August, 1944) depicted Lois Lane walking arm-in-arm with a soldier, a sailor, and a Marine, saying “You’re my Supermen!” But you couldn’t judge what was inside those comic-books by their covers: as Harrington remarks, “it was actually rare that the action went further than the cover.” In comic-book land, as in our reality, the war raged on, and took its course, with no significant impact from Superman.

The war fared about the same in Superman’s radio and cartoon exploits, 1941-1945. A Nazi spy appeared as a villain in Superman’s adventures on the Mutual Radio Network. Two cartoons produced by the Fleischer studios have Superman engaging the Japanese. Another has the Man of Steel against the Nazis. Although fans held and hold these episodes in high regard, none dealt with decisive events in the war.


Why Didn’t Superman End the War:
Of Superheroes and the Deity


We have already touched upon the very practical reason why Superman could not have put Hitler and Tojo out of their misery in 1941: the war in fact would rage on for another four years, and the comic books and radio broadcasts and cartoons would have been totally out of touch with reality had they allowed Superman to play such a conclusive role in the war. In terms of Coleridge’s analysis of poetry, we could say that, although Superman’s failure to fully confront the evils of Germany and Japan strained the willing suspension of disbelief of his fans, that suspension of disbelief would have been utterly shattered had the comics and broadcasts and cartoons brought us a world in which the war had been ended by Superman.

But there is a deeper, more profound, reason for Superman’s inaction. It has to do with the god-like powers that were ascribed to him. A more mortal superhero such as Batman would not have been in the same predicament. Had Batman and Robin devoted all of their energies to stopping Germany and Japan, they at best would and could have played only a minor role. The Dynamic Duo could have worked day and night in high profile to end the war, and the war could have plausibly continued, just as it did in reality, with no jeopardy to our willing suspension of disbelief. But Superman and the suspension of disbelief required to believe in him enjoyed no such luxury. His super powers were such that if he had applied them to the task of ending the war, it would have been over. We expected more of Superman precisely because he is able to fly at incredible speeds, lift extraordinarily heavy weights, see and hear what no mere mortal can, and is invulnerable to bullets, fire, water, and all manner of catastrophes except those packaged in Kryptonite.

Indeed, from the vantage point of 2005, we can look back and wonder why Superman did not lend a hand that made a difference in all kinds of disasters, natural as well as of human creation. Why didn’t the Man of Steel hold at least one of the levees together in New Orleans with his bare hands after Hurricane Katrina? Why didn’t he rescue at least some number of people when the World Trade Center towers were blazing and crumbling on September 11, 2001? His absence that day cuts especially deep, because he is so closely associated with tall buildings. (A poignant September 11th thread on the web which began just an hour after the attacks -- http://www.geocities.com/womenofgotham/sept11.htm -- is entitled “Where Is Superman When We Really Need Him?”) Questions such as these may seem unfair to pose about a comic-book character, but Katrina and 9/11 were if anything a lot less destructive than the Second World War, in which Superman did so little to prevent millions upon millions of deaths.

Perhaps we are inclined to ask such questions of Superman because we hold him, and his judgment as well as his powers, in such high, nearly god-like esteem. Similar questions have been asked for millennia, after all, of the Supreme Being. The Book of Job, thought to have been written some time between 700 and 300 BC, asks why, if God is good and all-powerful, would He allow such bad things to happen in the world? On an individual level, many who have lost loved ones have had similar concerns. Sometimes entire peoples have been haunted by this question. In the aftermath of the Holocaust in World War II, devout Jews had their faith severely tested: why would -- how could -- God allow such a thing to happen?

The answer provided in the Book of Job is that God sends these monstrous things our way to test us. Other religious teachings suggest that God might not be omnipotent – that God contends with powerfully evil forces, and is sometimes less than completely successful in stopping them. Several religious leaders made this point on the Larry King Show, after September 11: It was their view that the Supreme Being sought to sway the hijackers against their terrible acts, but did not prevail. Or perhaps He/She did, and this intervention prevented that tragedy from being worse than it was.

But Superman can be saved by neither of these answers. Surely the Man of Steel did not refrain from helping more in World War Two, and from intervening in recent disasters, to test us. And though we can understand that he might not be totally successful in vanquishing evil, surely he could make more of an attempt. While unshakeable belief in the Deity may survive the most unspeakable of evils on this earth, can a willing suspension of disbelief in Superman survive his general failure to even confront such evils?



The Real Limits of Fiction and Comic Books



Superman fans can at least have the comfort of knowing that all fictional characters who seek to fight evil suffer from this same exquisite problem, in direct proportion to the size and scope of their powers. Where were the wizards in Harry Potter’s world during World War II? Or were they checked by evil wizards on the Axis side? The annals of science fiction are chocked full of time travelers bent on killing Hitler before he does his damage. The travelers almost always run into some unforeseen complication – sometimes their intervention even ironically enables Hitler. This must happen if the story is to remain consistent with our reality.

Of course, a novel or a movie can posit a new reality, made different from ours by the action of the hero, in which Hitler is never more than a failed painter. But a comic-book series and character would have a very difficult time taking that route. The proximity of comic books to the real world, the pace with which they move, means their characters and stories must toe a fine, demanding line to real events. When I discovered Superman in comic books in the 1950s, they were sold on newsstands and in candy stores, right alongside of copies of The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The Journal-American, The Daily News, The Daily Mirror, and The New York Post. The fiction in the comics had to be in just the right doses to thrive next to the black-and-white reality in the papers.

Further, the more horrendous the real disaster, the more careful the fictitious hero needs to tread, lest the real victims of the tragedy take offense at their pain being trivialized or exploited. Television and movie docu-dramas about September 11, announced in 2005, were subjected to criticism that the theme was inappropriate for Hollywood treatment. (I disagreed, and argued in a Reuters article “Third Hollywood Studio Sets Sights on 9/11” by Steve Gorman, August 16, 2005, that such presentations are “part of the process by which we come to understand our own feelings about this.”) But any comic book treatment of September 11th would bear a much bigger burden.

So what’s a Superman fan to do? Well, there’s always the approach of not pushing such questions of Superman’s non-intervention too far, and letting him off the Book of Job hook. After all, he is not a Deity, he is a just a comic-book action-hero, and if his life next to newspapers and chewing gum means he has to be more in touch with reality than does a character in a novel, well, maybe we should also give him the benefit of such casual company, and not hold him to impossibly exacting standards.

No ... I don’t think so. That’s not really very satisfying either. Part of the fun of all fiction, comic books included, is teasing ourselves and the stories against how well they relate to our reality.

Maybe a better answer is this: Comic books are inextricably part of the matrix of everyday life – in the case of Superman, our everyday urban life. These little story books work on the premise that, if you happen to look up at the sky for no particular reason, you may see a superhero flying by. Or, if you see a thief snatch a lady’s purse, Superman may well streak down to retrieve it, and haul the thief – by the scruff of his neck – off to jail. We can expand this thieving villain to the level of a corrupt politician, or even to a mad scientist, also living and working in the city, maybe just around the corner, right under our noses. But the key to all of these characters may be that something about them is intrinsically and irrevocably city-sized. Not bigger than or beyond the city, not world-sized or even nation-sized. City-sized. And that includes Superman, who came of age in the heyday of Fiorello LaGuardia, the bigger-than-life, beloved New York City Mayor who read comics to the kids over the radio on Sundays. And this may be as good as any an explanation for why Superman is singularly and frustratingly incapable of responding with real effectiveness to larger-sized threats and more pervasive evils. We can gauge him best in terms of intra-city issues and realities. When we get beyond that, we are in uncharitable territory for this kind of superhero.

But we can still draw inspiration from Superman’s successful urban-sized exploits. We can be awed by his powers. We can bemoan that he has been unable to use them to stop or end the debacles of our day since his first appearance back in 1938. And we can retrieve that noble, lost, impossible potential and do all in our limited, non-super power to help.

King Kong at Large in the 1950s Bronx

The Big Ape on the Small Screen:
King Kong at Large in the 1950s
in the Bronx

by Paul Levinson

[first published in King Kong is Back,
ed. David Brin, BenBella Books, 2005]


It was an age before DVDs and VCRs. There was
no cable to speak of, except in a few rural areas,
where cable piped in the networks. Sitcoms, Westerns,
soaps, news programs, and variety shows were all the
rage on the air. Few if any movies made it to the little
black-and-white screens.

Hollywood moguls had earlier scoffed at television
and its power. Who would sit home and watch a
flicker on the screen when you could walk a couple
of blocks to a local theater, and see a big double-feature
for a quarter? Sometimes these movie houses even
brought back great old movies from earlier decades.
That was the only way a kid in the 1950s could
enjoy the media past.

But we heard tales. From friends with
older siblings. From hipper parents. For some
reason, a film about a huge ape riven with love
and bullets on the Empire State Building caught my
attention.

Meanwhile, things were afoot in the corporate
media world of that day. General Tire had acquired
RKO Radio pictures and its movie library in 1955.
This meant that WOR-TV in New York City -- the
local Channel 9 -- had access to lots of movies
from bygone years.

Channel 9 had little else going for it. It was
not affiliated with any of the major networks.
But soon it had the Million Dollar Movie.
The station was so starved for programming that it played
the same movie every night during the week, plus
three times on each day of the weekend.

On Thanksgiving and the surrounding week, it played
King Kong.


The View from the Grand Concourse


You can see the Empire State Building
from some parts of the Bronx. A tower of Oz
at the end of the yellow brick road of Broadway --
which in fact runs from the Bronx all the way
downtown through Manhattan.

I used to wonder, when I was watching that
fabulous heart-rending end of King Kong, if I would have
been able to actually see the ape on a clear
day if he had been on top of the Empire State Building --
clutching on to Fay Wray, swatting those damned
strafing bi-planes -- and I on the Grand Concourse
or University Avenue up in the Bronx.

I settled for seeing him in my living room,
on the small, blurry, black-and-white Motorola
that my father had picked up "for a bargain"
some place in the early 1950s. It gave
us plenty of aggravation -- my father hated
to pay the repairman, who was needed at
least several times a year -- but it also gave
us miracles every night, and some nights
more than others.

Television was the second medium to bring
entertainment electronically into the home.
Radio was the first, and therefore had
to invent lots of programming -- news and entertainment
-- as it went along. Television was able to
swoop down on radio, and pick up some of
its stars and a lot of its programs. Jack
Benny and Gunsmoke both made the jump into vision.
And then TV turned to Hollywood and scooped up some of
its movies, too.

There was and is a world of difference between
seeing a movie on a big screen in a public
theater and a small screen in the bosom of
your home. It was more than not being hit
by a Goober candy or Ju-Ju Fruit thrown by
some kid in the back row. It was more than
not having to pay a quarter for the ticket.
It had to do with intimacy and convenience.

Somehow, watching King Kong in my underclothes
made me more vulnerable, more engaged, more
agape at his power than if I had seen him
on the screen in the Allerton Movie Theater
near my apartment building. He and Fay Wray
and Bruce Cabot were just a few feet
away from me, for God's sake. Sometimes,
when I stretched out on the scuffed parquet
floor, my nose up to the screen, they were
just inches from me. Skull Island and the
Empire State Building both were in easy
reach, as close as the pennies under the couch.
When Carl Denham (played by Robert Armstrong)
intoned "It was Beauty killed the Beast," he was
imparting that weighty lesson only to me.


Multiple Visions


And then there was the repetition. When it's
something you love, or are on your way to loving,
repeat performances are a good thing. Movie
theaters of course allowed people to come back
and pay as often as they liked. But even if
the money was no problem -- and, in the 1950s,
quarters added up, especially to kids on
a quarter-a-week allowance -- who had the time
to walk the three blocks to the theater every
day and/or evening? Some theaters allowed you to
stay as long as you wanted, and see a second or
even a third showing, at no extra charge. For
those that did not, you could try hiding out in
the bathroom. But even in those cases, no seat
in a movie theater was as comfortable as the
floor of your home.

Few media in the 1950s offered satisfyingly multiple
renditions, at home or at large. Rock 'n' roll radio
played the same songs over and over again, but not
so that you could count on hearing the specific
song that you wanted. Books could be renewed from
the library, but lugging them back and forth was no
pleasure. No one I knew could afford to buy too
many books for enjoyment -- well, at least we had
comic books. Most of television was as fleeting as
lightning, but there was the Million Dollar Movie.
When Kong was on that show, it was a comic book come
to life. Kong and comic books ... but Kong was more.

Repeated viewing allows attention to detail.
King Kong on television rewarded it. I was struck,
even as a kid, that this was not just an ape-gone-wild
or a horror movie, but a show about show
business. The expedition to Skull Island is
led by show-man Carl Denham. Kong is brought back to
New York to make money. It's not just beauty that killed
the beast, but the exploitation of venal stardom and
untamed nature.

Denham's schemes may have gone awry, but the 1933 movie
that told his fantastic story grossed almost two
million at the box office, I found out later. And
Channel 9 did ok with the ad revenue it generated from
the movie. A cash register rang every time Denham
spoke Kong's epitaph.

There were other provocative aspects of the story which
struck me later, in retrospect. King Kong is a big,
black ape. His attraction to Ann Darrow (Fay Wray)
plays right into Southern racist stereotypes about
the lust of black men for white women -- and
a knock-out blonde, at that. The ever-pithy Denham
observes on Skull Island, as a native chief takes
notice of Ann: "blondes are scarce around here".
And later, when Jack Driscoll (played by Bruce Cabot)
objects that getting Kong off the island won't be easy,
Denham regards Ann and replies, "but we've got something
he wants."

How many children or even adults got all of this
in a single viewing of King Kong in a movie theater
back in the 1930s? Television, often criticized for diluting
profundity and reducing complexity in story-telling --
for going for the lowest common-denominator in its programs
-- turned out to be the best friend the creators of
King Kong ever had. Writers Merian C. Cooper and
Edgar Wallace (and James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth
Rose) couldn't have asked for more. The subtleties and
depth and overtones of the plot -- as well as the nuances of
the direction and cinematography -- all rose to the gleaming
surface on the small screen's multiple showings in the
living room.

The Million Dollar Movie thus presaged some of the
advantages of videotapes and DVDs. In fact, I watched
King Kong more frequently during most Thanksgiving
weeks than I see a movie I rent from Blockbuster or
cable-TV's Movies-on-Demand today. The main advantage
of watching movies on current TV screens -- other than
the size and color -- is that you can pause and re-wind.
Kong could neither be stopped nor reversed once he
began his gloriously ill-fated journey on the
Million Dollar Movie. But you could count on him
coming back for a series of return engagements every
single year.


Vertical vs. Horizontal Myths


The nature of the Million Dollar Movie audience was
also different from movie-theater audiences before and
after the 1950s, and DVD audiences today, and worked
to the advantage of King Kong. People usually see
movies in theaters with just one or two or a few more
friends and relations. They might talk about the movie
for a few minutes or maybe a few hours on and off after
leaving the theater, but the next day they are not likely
to discuss the movie with any one else, unless they too
have very recently seen the movie, or the subject
comes up for another reason (such as the Academy Awards
night on television is near). DVD rentals engender
even more fragmented audiences -- the likelihood
that someone outside of your immediate family
will want to talk about a DVD you just saw is slim.

In contrast, King Kong was a hot subject of
discussion for me and my pals for a good week
or more. Thanksgiving helped us out. We
were off from school for a few days, and
had less than usual homework (not that it would
have mattered if we had had a ton of homework).
We could not only watch the movie repeatedly, but
talk about it in between, go over particular
scenes and dialog and details, and be primed
to look out for them in the next viewing. We each
had favorite scenes. Jordie loved the jungle.
Ray and Phil went for the scene in which Kong
broke free of his chains. We all hissed the
bi-planes. (What was my favorite part? Well,
I liked Fay in Kong's arms -- I'm a hopeless
romantic, what can I tell you....) Our
group mind was brought to bear in appreciation and
analysis of the movie -- before such a phrase even
was common in sociological parlance. Our
hyper-scrutiny left no stone unturned.

The application of many minds to an idea, theme, or
story is an engine of myth-making. In the old days --
in classic times, or, actually, all times up until
the electronic age -- the only way a story could be
embroidered by many minds was over time. An oral
account, a handwritten manuscript, even a printed book
other than an immediate best-seller just took too
long to disseminate and percolate to become a myth any
time soon. In order for the critical mass of mind
power to be reached, the theme or story had to be
passed down and commented upon by generations of
people. I call this process "vertical" myth-making.

With the arrival of the electronic age -- actually,
not telegraph or telephone in the 19th century but
radio in the 20th -- a new way of generating myths
was at hand. Huge numbers of minds could imbibe a
radio show at the same time. Radio was the first
instantaneous simultaneous mass medium. With the
advent of national networks in the 1920s, radio
could reach the mass of minds needed to make a story
into a myth in a heartbeat. I call this "horizontal"
myth-making.

Motion pictures in movie theaters never quite had this
capacity. The theater offers pockets of simultaneity,
not a single wave that pulls in everyone listening
at that moment. Although the requisite number of minds
to make a myth could be reached in motion picture houses
a lot faster than in bookstores and libraries, it was
still hit or miss in comparison to first radio and
then television broadcasts. Indeed, anything less than a
huge hit movie with a very long run at the box office was
unlikely to have any long range impact upon our popular
culture.

King Kong was of course a pretty big hit movie in
1933. Had it not made a strong and continuing impression,
it would not have been picked up by the Million Dollar
Movie in the 1950s in the first place.

But once on television, King Kong played to a very
different audience. A world of kids unencumbered by
jobs, free to stoke their imagination and cultivate
their craving to watch and talk about the big ape
fighting for love atop the Empire State Building, again
and again.

The "kids" part of this equation is crucial. Only children
(of all ages, but usually not yet fully adult) have that
unquenchable desire, the intensity, to want what they
enjoy over and over. Only local, low-budget television
was in a position to satisfy that need back in the 1950s.

King Kong was there for us on the Million Dollar Movie
in New York City year after year, as we grew up. The
brave, doomed ape and his enduring lessons remained
the same on the screen, as we got older. Just like a
Passover seder, in which the ancient story of how
the Jews broke out of their bondage is re-told around
the table once a year. Except ... well, Kong's
story had no happy ending, and yet was much more fun
Even a sad movie beats an upbeat religious tradition.


Repeat Performances


In the movie, King Kong moves both horizontally and
vertically -- across the expanse of the globe, as Kong
is brought from Skull Island to New York City, and up
(and down) the Empire State Building, as the ape makes
his last stand for love.

The pattern was also played out in the way Kong built
his myth in America. Horizontally, as people first saw
the movie in theaters across the country in 1933.
Vertically, as word of the movie and occasional return
engagements simmered in ensuing years. Horizontally
again, in a big way, when kids in New York City saw
it over and over again at the same time on the Million
Dollar Movie. And topped off with a vertical thrust, as
kids saw the movie year after year on the Million Dollar
Movie at Thanksgiving time.

The broadcasting of the exact same program on a yearly
basis was something unique for media in general and
television in particular. Movie theaters of course had
return engagements, but not a guaranteed yearly schedule.
Specific television programs were rebroadcast as reruns,
series and sitcoms continued for years, but none with the
metronomic rhythm of the Million Dollar Movie and its
holiday presentations, which you could count on like
clockwork.

This wasn't limited to just King Kong on Thanksgiving.
Yankee Doodle Dandy was shown every year for a week around
July 4. March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and
Hardy was shown on a rival NYC TV station -- WPIX (Channel 11)
-- as great counter-programming to King Kong every
Thanksgiving Day. But King Kong made the longest lasting
impression. There are no re-makes that I know of scheduled
for Yankee Doodle or Wooden Soldiers.

Patriotic musicals and Christmas comedies no doubt strike
chords in our popular culture very different from the
spine-tingling chimes of horror-adventure movies.
Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman have enjoyed sequels and remakes almost every decade.

But King Kong did it the hard way -- the same movie, the
same ape, the same nearly forgotten actors on little screens
in living rooms. The more you consider King Kong on the
Million Dollar Movie in New York City, the more it all fits
into place. Kong goes down fighting from the top of the
Empire State Building -- which, by the 1950s, was not just
the tallest building in the world, but the very tower from
which television transmitters were broadcasting their
programs to the city. Kong came from a prehistoric island
-- not only was the 1933 movie prehistoric by filmmaking
standards in the 1950s, it was black-and-white at a time
when film and TV were both set to make the leap into
living color. This synchrony between the story of King
Kong and the circumstances of its presentation on the
Million Dollar Movie helped make it unforgettable.

Indeed, I doubt that Peter Jackson would even have remade
King Kong in 2005 had it not been for the ape's
extraordinary sojourn on television in the 1950s. That
small screen was a time capsule with a window that
carried Kong first into our living rooms in
the dawn of television, and then into our psyches and
permanent popular culture the half-century after. Kong
stayed reassuringly the same on the small screen for
a few years, and then grew into mythic proportions in our
recollections and imaginations.

So enduring was King Kong's impression on the small
screen, that when the 1933 movie was released in
black-and-white VHS in 1998, a typical review on
Amazon.com began: "As a young child in the nineteen-fifties,
I used to watch this film whenever it appeared
on TV on 'Million Dollar Movie'. I loved it
then. I love it now. Time has not diminished
the capacity of this film to mesmerize and
hold the viewer in its thrall." The review was
signed by "Lawyeraau". It could have been written
by me, but it was not. (I don't believe in
pseudonyms. Denham taught me the value of fame.)


Postage Stamp Resurgent


Television has grown enormously since the 1950s.
Where once there were three or four national
networks and a smattering of small local stations,
today there are hundreds of stations on cable
and satellite. Where once what you saw on TV
was gone the instant after you saw it, and repeat
performances of something you loved were a gift
from on high, today we have TiVo and movies-on-demand
and VCRs and DVD players and any number of ways
to see something as often as we please. Where
once the screen was small and black-and-white and
blurry, today our screens are clear and colorful
walls.

But the small has survived and has even mounted
something of an amazing comeback. Cellphones
have come in on little cat's feet -- or
people's little fingers -- and they're not just
for phone calls anymore. "Mobisodes" and "V-casts"
are offering new kinds of television for cellphonic
viewing, with episodes just a few minutes long.
Beyond that, pretty much anything available on
the Web is becoming accessible on the cellphone.

So I'm looking forward to Peter Jackson's King Kong.
But in an ideal world, I'd hop into my Mini Cooper
after the movie and drive to a nice, quiet spot on
the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. I'd make sure
I could see the Empire State Building. Then I'd
call up the 1933 movie on my little cellphone screen....

I know I'd watch that last scene a few times -- hey,
I'm not so enamored of the past that I don't take
advantage of modern perks. And as I drove down to the
highway afterwards to get back to wherever I was going,
I'd put the phone to my ear, so I could hear Denham say,
"It was Beauty killed the beast," one more time, right
in my ear.

Then I'd call up some of my friends from the 1950s --
Ray, Jordie, yeah, I'm still in touch with a few
of them -- and we'd talk about it...

What part of that is more fantasy than reality for
me these days? Only the Mini Cooper -- but, hey, you
never know....