Tag Archives: Orphan Black

Narrative captivity: Losing Orphan Black for want of a half-fan

18706-orphan-black-s2-dvd-new_mediumI am a long standing fan of Orphan Black but this season they lost me.  I tuned in for the opening episode of the new season, and it wasn’t long before my eyes had crossed.

In the new season, it feels as if Orphan Black is being made to labor under the weight of its own complexities.  And with all the clones in motion, these complexities are formidable. And with two seasons in place, there are many additional plot points and precedents to honor.

Tedium, thy name is consistency.

Showrunners Graeme Manson, Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier must of course honor the story.  Fans, especially, are ferocious in their defense of its integrity.  But the rest of us really are not engaged in narrative book-keeping in any kind.  We love the actress, her clones, and the broad story lines that give her an opportunity to dazzle us with her virtuosity, lend some urgency to the story at hand, identify the goodies and the baddies, and that’s enough for us.

We want some sense of narrative development.  We want our heroine to mature or at least change (or at least clone) as pluckily she survives.  But give us the big picture, not what feel like pages of gawky exposition in which good actors are brought low by the need to belabor plot points.  These moments almost feel like writers and directors clarifying story complexities for their own sake, and when this happens we know that undue complexity has hijacked the show. Narrative captivity, it’s a terrible thing.

We see why this happens.  After a couple of seasons, the people who make the show have mastered the finest plot points better than the best Yeshiva student.  And fans!  Fans live and breathe the show and they often appoint themselves the guardians of the story line.  (“You want me on the wall. You need me on that wall.”)  And in a sense this is like any corporate culture, where the incumbents fall into a gravitational field and eventually can’t believe that everyone doesn’t live there too.

There are a couple of ways of fixing this.  One is to have an ethnographic panel of half-fans.  These are people who love the show but live in distant orbit around it. They know the characters and the major plot points, but they don’t know or care about the very fine details. Writers, directors and show runners can call them up from time to time and say, “So tell me about the show” and they can use this as a chance to recalibrate. It’s a question of optics.  We can hold up the half-fan’s view of the story and change the way we see the show. Or think of it as a time machine.  We can use the half fans knowledge of the show to recover the way we understood it in the first season.

Naturally, half fans, some of them anyhow, will evolve into full fans.  And it will be up to the person running the panel to replace them with more half fans.  In fact we should think of the panel as a bend in the river, a place where half fans slow for long enough for us to quiz them…before they run downstream to full fan status.

I don’t know who want to take this on.  And it would be presumptuous to suggest a name.  So I will.  Dee Dee Gordon could do this brilliantly.  What we need, Dee Dee, is a panel of half fans. As someone starts a new show, they will ask you to empanel this panel, and from time to time they will use it to see their shows (as many, most) others do.  In effect, the half fan panel (now, HFP, because that sounds way more official) is a rope that the showrunner wears around his/her waist while descending into the narrative mine shaft.  A couple of sharp tugs and they can return to the surface.

 

Orphan Black and cultural style

Readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of the show Orphan Black on BBC America (Saturdays at 9:00). It resonates with the transformational and multiplicity themes so active in our culture now.  See my post here.

I finally got to see Episode 1 of the new season (2) this morning and I was captivated by this scene.

Apologies for the quality of this clip.  I shot it with my phone.  Perhaps the show runners Graeme Manson and John Fawcett would consent to put the original up on YouTube.  (In fact, the last moment of this clip shows Manson and Fawcell in a Hitchcockian turn.  Manson is the camera man.  Fawcett is the the man in the glasses.)  (See the whole of this episode on the BBC website here.)

I think this clip touches on a couple of recent posts, especially the one on Second Look TV and the one on “magic moments.”  You decide.

But the real opportunity here is to comment on a truth in anthropology.  My field is, among other things, a study of choice.  There are so many ways of being human, of acting in the world, that people must choose.  (There is a famous story about a Russian actor proving his virtuosity by delivering the word “mother” in 25 distinct ways.)  How will we say a word, make a greeting, or carry ourselves?  We have to choose.  There are, for instance, lots of ways to do a “high 5.”

We have to choose from all the choices and once we choose we are inclined to stabilize the choice and use it over and over again.  It may shift with the trend, and we alert to these shifts, but for the moment, an invisible consensus says, this is how we do the high 5.

But this is not only a personal choice.  We make these stable choices as the defining choice of a nationality, ethnicity, gender, region, class, status, and so on.  Eventually, this choice becomes a style, a signature way we express ourselves.  It is a way we are identified by others.

Hey, presto.  Imagine an actress’ delight.  With styles, she has a  device with which to tell us who her character is and what her character is doing in any given part of the narrative.

Tatiana Maslany, the Canadian actress who plays the clones, has the exceptional task of delivering the “truth” of each clone even as she must make them identifiably different.  But of course she is going to use style.

In this scene, she is giving us Alison, the suburban clone.  The minivan, pony tail and jump suit label that identity, but then comes the hard part.  To show Alison in all her Alisonness.  And still more demandingly to show Alison under duress.  (Sarah, the street toughened con-artist clone, can handle herself in a fight.  The trick is to show Alison making her response up as she goes along.)

There is lots to like in this scene and, reader, please exercise your “second look” privileges to go back and scout around.

I love the moment when we see Alison spraying and blowing.  She is after all a multitasking mom.

I love the ineffectual last tweet that comes when she gets pitched into the waiting van, expiration meets exasperation meets astonishment. Who is this man?

I love the small gesture with which Maslany gathers her composure before leaving the van, squaring the shoulders and fixing her pony tail.

And then the wonderful look of dismissal she gives her captor as she closes the door of the van.  Alison is back in possession of her suburban self possession.  What’s nice about this among other things is that it shows the Alison beneath the Alison.  Yes, her self possession has been shaken by this event but where most of us would be wordless and traumatized, Alison is back.

That last moment of the clip, the one in which we see a brief, Hitchcocking appearance from the show runners, I like as well.  There was a time when it would be ridiculous to talk about these showrunners and the movie making master in the same breath.  But TV is getting so good these days, the comparison is not far off, and closing all the time.

It’s usual to talk about this Golden Age of TV, but that suggests the TV is now completing its glorious ascendancy.  And this just seems wrong.  With performances like Maslany’s and shows like Orphan Black, I think it’s more likely that TV is just getting started.

Thanks to the anonymous reader who discovered a naming error.  (Now corrected.)

 

The Real Mystery of Bates Motel

I am watching Bates Motel (Monday nights, A&E).  It’s engaging and scary.  Tune in if only for the performance by Vera Farmiga which really is astoundingly good.

I came away from last night’s episode thinking there are two kinds of drama on TV right now.  (Yes, there are more than two but indulge me.)  

ONE:

There’s the police procedural, that work horse of network TV. Law and Order, if you count all 6 versions, now has over 1000 episodes to its credit.  Then there’s CSI, NCIS and Criminal Minds. 

In all of these, we open with a crime and we close with some kind of resolution.  Chaos breaks into the world and then gets routed out of it. 

TWO:

Then there’s the another category that forgoes that this narrative and moral clarity.  I am thinking of Bates Motel which is shot through with menace and a mystery never goes away. 

You will say this is the nature of horror.  But this “dreadful indeterminacy” can be seen also in shows like Fringe, Lost, Orphan Black and Dolls. Something is out of kilter, the world no longer spins on its axis, the forces of disorder are building, and we are done for.  

SOME QUESTIONS

1. Is this a fair contrast?

2. Is the police procedural category diminishing?

3. Is there a second category of the kind proposed here?  (I am perfectly happy to hear everyone say “no.”  This is an open question.)  

4. If there is a second category, what should we call it?

5. Is it growing?

6. Why is it growing?

This is a question for those masters of popular culture, Sarah Zupko, Matthew Belinki, Tara Ariano or Sarah Bunting, and anyone else who wants to prove they are in their league.   

Orphan Black and involuntary improv

Orphan Black, the new show on BBC America (Saturday at 9:00 Eastern) is a pleasure. The theme is multiplicity, the writing is good, the acting is strong.

Seven women discover themselves to be clones. They are genetically identical.  But that’s where their similarities end.

Raised in different circumstances, countries and cultures, the “orphans” manage to represent some of the great diversity of the contemporary world. 

These differences are enough to force them apart.  But someone is trying to kill the clones so they are now obliged to work together.

Saturday, the “soccer mom” clone must stand in for the “Punk” clone.  She must persuade everyone that she is the mother of the Punk’s daughter.  (The daughter spots her immediately.  ”You’re not my mother.”)  

The soccer mom has an hour to get ready for her big performance, an hour to throw off suburban nicities and take on a brawling, street-smart cynicism.  She is aided by the Punk’s brother who says something like “Oh, God, this calls for a complete reverse Pygmalion.”  

It’s one of those lovely moments, where an actress playing one person must now play that person playing a second person.   Hats off to Tatiana Maslany, the very gifted actress who plays the clones.  

The theme here is forced transformation, aka involuntary improv.  As Orphan Black assumes the identity of another clone, the challenges come fast and furious.  In rapid succession, she discovers that she has an American accent, a stylish condo, a dolt for a boyfriend, $75,000 sitting in the bank, a career as a police detective, and that she is under investigation for a crime she can only guess at.  

In the title of the best book on improv, Orphan Black must deliver “something wonderful right away.”  This is improv in real time, under unforgiving pressure, with dire consequences attending failure.  

I believe we are seeing this theme more and more in contemporary culture because it is more and more a theme in contemporary life.  Increasingly, it’s what life is like.   

For more on this argument, see my book Transformations, on Amazon, by clicking here.