X-Files Retrospective: How Vince Gilligan Came Up With The Right Way to End The X-Files - Twice

 

Any shortlist of the greatest showrunners of this century has to have Vince Gilligan on it. It is not just because he created two of the greatest series of all time – Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul -  but because in an era where the series finale matters more than it ever did, Gilligan and his writers managed to stick the landing not once, but twice.  Its not just that for many viewers the series’ finales for both shows are clearly among the best in history but because the entire final season for both shows led up to it perfectly every step of the way. With the exception of David Simon, who managed to perfectly close out not only The Wire but his follow-up HBO series Treme and The Deuce I don’t know of any showrunner who has that great a track record.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry Gilligan cut his teeth working for The X-Files writing his first script in 1995, becoming a staff writer in Season 4 and staying with the series until the final season. Only his colleague Frank Spotnitz, who also joined the series in Season 2, stayed with the show for nearly as long and anyone who looks at Gilligan’s writing over the course of the series knows that he was not only the superior but far more consistent writer. Gilligan wrote or collaborated on 30 different episodes and the majority of the episodes he wrote were among the greatest in series’ history.

 

Like Darin Morgan, Gilligan was the great comic genius of The X-Files but while both were brilliant satiric writers, Gilligan’s scripts had a different kind of humor than Morgan’s. Morgan’s satiric style was meta and had a much darker humor to it: as much as one laughs at Clyde Bruckman and Jose Chung, there’s a melancholy tone along with so many of the great jokes. Gilligan is essentially a more optimistic writer not only then Morgan but overall. And Gilligan didn’t have an outsiders look; he wanted to joke at it from within.

We see this in some of the greatest comic episodes he wrote over the years; not just Small Potatoes which looks at our great hero Mulder and shows that he himself is something of a loser, but other superb gems over the years. Among his crowning achievements were two masterpieces in Season 5: Bad Blood in which he radically reinvents the format of the show to see how Mulder and Scully see each other and Folie A Deux, which shows that Mulder and Scully are soulmates, because they have a common insanity.  Gilligan also had a gift of creating some of the most human monsters-of-the-week of the entire canon, some of which make you wonder about just so much of what Mulder and Scully doing. In Bad Blood, Mulder and Scully discover what seems to be an entire small town of vampires and learn through the wonderful sheriff (Luke Wilson) that the vampires are average citizens who don’t want to be spotted. “We pay our taxes,” Wilson’s character says at one point. Gilligan had a gift with so many of his monsters to make their superhuman abilities actually make them more ordinary. This led to the inevitable conclusion in Season 7’ masterpiece Hungry which took place entirely from the perspective of the monster and went out of its way to make Mulder looking like a man toying with his prey to the point he almost seemed a villain.

When the series began its decline in the seventh season Gilligan was the only writer on the show still capable of turning out masterpieces on a regular basis. During Season 7, he not only wrote the exceptional Hungry but the wonderful X-Cops which found Mulder and Scully interacting with the Fox hit series.  Filmed entirely on video and playing like an actual episode of the series it was one of the comic highpoints of the entire show: not only because it showed Mulder eager to have an X-File play out on live TV but because it showed the bold and fearless Scully understandably terrified that her eager partner was going to embarrass them on TV  - and seemed incredibly reluctant to ever appear on camera.

It remains unclear if Season 7 was going to be the last one when it was being filmed but Gilligan may have very well thought it would. Writing what many thought at the time would be the penultimate episode of the series Gilligan also got to realize his dream of making his directorial debut. And if it was going to be the final monster of the week, Gilligan pulled out the stops.

Je Souhaite deals with Mulder and Scully investigating a series of ‘crimes’ by the Stokes’s brothers, played by those brilliant comic geniuses Kevin Weisman and Will Sasso. (Weisman was a year out of becoming famous for his work on Alias; Sasso had become one of the breakout sensations of the late night comedy MAD TV.)

Gilligan usually treats most of the characters in his stories wit respect and love, even the monsters, but with the Stokes brothers he goes out of his way to show them as among the dumbest people possible. The gimmick of the episode is that Anson discovered a genie in a rug and has become its master. He is granted three wishes and its clear he is incapable of making good ones. His second wish is for a giant boat but because he didn’t specify it was in the ocean, it’s parked outside his house.  There’s also the fact his brother Leslie is in a wheelchair, thanks to an accident of stupidity years earlier. The genie suggested to Anson what the right thing to do is – but neither Anson nor Leslie seem able to see the logic.

Anson’s third wish involves something that should bring money. The genie (Paula Sorge) makes sardonic suggestions he might want to wish for intelligence or talent and Anson thinks he should wish for a money machine. Finally he asks to turn invisible at will. The genie rolls her eyes, tells him his wish is breathtaking in its unoriginality, but grants it. Anson walks out on to the street turns invisible – and is promptly flattened by a truck when he sets his eyes on a pretty girl.

The body turns up at the morgue – and Scully’s eyes practically bug out as she first realizes that its invisible and then seems genuinely in awe.  (When she puts the body back in the freezer, she says ‘Bye’ in a girlish fashion. By this point Mulder has come to realize the Stokes brothers have found a genie and this genie has a long history. Using the national archives he finds images of the genie with Mussolini and Richard Nixon. (That would explain a lot.) Mulder goes to see Leslie, who is still staggering – and has to hear the theme to I Dream of Jeannie to know what a genie is.

Leslie then gets the rug back and once again the genie suggests the obvious. Leslie considers this. “Oh, a solid gold wheelchair.” His first wish is to ask for his brother to come back from the dead. By this time Scully has called in a bunch of scientists to see her discovery – and her face falls flat when she finds the compartment empty.

It has now become very clear that bring Anson back from the dead was a horrible idea, and Anson makes it very clear. Leslie has just figured out to wish for ‘legs’ – just as Anson lights a match to explode the gas in the trailer, blowing both him and his brother up to kingdom come.

Mulder and Scully now find themselves with the genie, who seems remarkably non-plussed to see them. She’s been a genie for more than five hundred years and she is appropriately cynical, saying that mankind has not changed for five hundred years. “They always make the wrong wish,” she says. They are about to move on when the genie tells Mulder that since he unrolled the rug he gets three wishes.

Mulder wants to do the right thing – he wants to make a selfless, completely free-of-obligations wish. (Considering everything he’s gone through the past seven years; you might think he’d want the conspiracy explained to him but that’s never been Gilligan’s style anyway.) So he wishes for peace on earth. The genie grants it. Immediately after it happens, Mulder’s face falls. He runs outside – and finds that the streets are empty of people. “I should have known you’d do this!” he shouts, running to the Bureau. Naturally his next wish is to reverse the first wish and he begins to lecture the genie – right as Skinner reappears.

In the final minutes Mulder is in the middle of writing out the details for what he believes the perfect wish will be. Scully shows up in his office. “You don’t remember disappearing for about an hour earlier today?” Mulder asks Scully. Scully doesn’t.

Mulder tells Scully what’s he planning to do – make the kind of wish that will make the world a perfect place. Scully tells him if you do that, what is the point of our everyday existence? Now this seems to go against the nature of so much of the series message, particularly the mythology, but Gilligan has a bigger point that argues that at the end of the day The X-Files was never about solving the big problems but the relationship we’d found with the characters we love. Mulder listens turns off the computer and makes his final wish.

In the final scene Mulder and Scully are about to watch Caddyshack. (“I can’t believe you’ve never seen that,” he tells her.) He mentions to Scully that: “I don’t know if you noticed, but I never made the world a happier place,” he tells her. “Well, I’m happy,” Scully says. “That should count for something. What was your third wish?” she asked. Mulder smiles.

In the final scene we see the genie drinking a coffee and with the mark of the djinn gone. There’s a smile on her face we haven’t seen the entire episode. Someone finally made the right wish.

The episode is, as one reviewer called it, “a note of perfect bliss” and had it been the final monster of the week, it would have a great triumph for the series. Then of course came Requiem – and the decision was made to keep the show going.

Gilligan’s role in the final two seasons of the series was significantly smaller; during Season 8 The Lone Gunmen spinoff which had been a development hell for years was finally greenlit by Fox and he took on the role of showrunner. He only wrote one script for season 8 but it was a gem: ‘Roadrunners’, a brilliant piece of body horror where a cult in a small desert town worship a slug as God and have a habit of stoning people to death for the next host. Scully ends up discovering the town, becomes a prisoner and becomes a host.

The show is one of the great works of horror for the series and Gillian Anderson gives one of her best performances of the final two seasons in it, playing someone desperately lost and increasingly aware of how trapped she is.

When The Lone Gunmen died a quick death Gilligan returned for Season 9. Gilligan wrote two solo scripts and one shared credit. The shared credit ‘Jump The Shark’ revisited The Lone Gunmen after their series ended and is considered one of the worst episodes in the series. However John Doe, an episode where John Doggett (Robert Patrick) wakes up with amnesia in a town in Mexico is one of the classics of the final seasons, a brilliantly dark scripted series where Doggett has to realize his identity – by learning that his young son is dead. Patrick gives one of his best performances in the series.

By the time that episode aired it was known the series was cancelled. Gilligan was once again allowed to write and direct what was definitely going to be the last monster of the week episode. Sunshine Days was not quite at the level of Je Souhaite but it had a level of brilliant meta commentary, great humor and once again gave a clear message as to what The X-Files had really been about.

Doggett and Reyes are called into investigating a strange death of a young man who died in what the neighborhood called ‘The Brady Bunch house’. These two young men (one of them played by David Faustino) are flown through the air in telekinesis and killed.

The owner of the house is known as an Oliver Martin (Michael Emerson cast very against type from the kind of character he has played basically his entire career on TV.)Reyes does some research – on a Brady Bunch website – and finds out this is the name of ‘Cousin Oliver’, the character who was written on The Brady Bunch in the final season.

Gilligan has never done anything quite so meta in his career. This is the story of a man fixated on a popular TV show, so lonely he derives comfort from its presence around him.(He constantly recreates the family in the house.) He’s taken on the identity of a forgotten late edition to the cast when it was nearing cancellation. (Again Reyes is the one to figure it out, which is meta.) And the dilemma he faces is whether he can find a way to live without it, because a constant exposure to the fantasy is killing him.

Oliver as a child possessed a kind of psychokinesis that enables his thoughts to become reality. Scully learns about this and mentions that they need to find proof. “I’ve investigated 200 cases” she tells Doggett and Reyes – the exact number of episodes.

What’s particularly remarkable about Gilligan’s work on The X-Files – particularly for the man who created Walter White – is that at his core he was a humanist who sees there are always more important things to care about then government conspiracies. This stands in contrast to the series finale where Mulder chooses to sacrifice his happiness with Scully to uncover the same truth he’s been chasing all his life. By contrast Gilligan argues all of this is bunk.

Scully finally gets the proof she’s been searching for all her life. She’s planning to get a Nobel Prize. Witnessing it Skinner says joyously: “With this, The X-Files can go on forever!” And then as Oliver begins to decline physically because of his use of the power, they face a darker question.

Doggett realizes the truth. He talks to the doctor who first observed Oliver (John Aylward) who tells him that he spent weeks with him but the longer he stayed the more his power diminished. The doctor realizes why. “For the first time in his life, he was happy.” Doggett realizes that the way keep Martin alive is for the doctor to keep being his surrogate father. In the final scene he agrees to do so – on the condition he never uses his power again.

Scully walks away from this not dismayed but happy. One of the final scenes shows that Doggett is started to enjoy these cases and that Scully has finally learned her lesson

Gilligan also takes a shot at the mythology in this storyline. Oliver has the ability to make objects float, he’s the kid who can change the world – in other words, this is exactly everything we’ve been dealing with Baby William all season. Gilligan’s solution is to show that love matters to keep a child safe – William, by contrast, was injected with a bit of metal (that didn’t even work, according to the revival.)

Sunshine Days is nowhere near the level of Je Souhaite or indeed Gilligan’s best work (he did set the bar very high) But in both of those scripts Gilligan demonstrated that the best way to end a series like The X-Files was not with a huge information dump or revelations about a conspiracy but to remind us that it was about the journey you took and the people you met along the way. (This is close to the ending Gilligan would give us for Better Call Saul, if not Breaking Bad.)

When the series was revived in 2016 and again in 2018 Gilligan wasn’t among the former writers to return to The X-Files. (To be fair, he was very busy at the time.) But I honestly don’t think he needed to come back to the show, though it would have been nice if he had. Gilligan had made his point about what The X-Files was really about in what might have been the penultimate episode and the actual penultimate episode. And honestly given how the revival played out, there’s a good chance given the final episodes that Gilligan’s message, if not the execution, finally registered with Carter and his colleagues. What more did he need to say?

Myths And Realities of Peak TV, Emmys Edition: Part 1 The Age of The White Male Antihero Was Even Worse Than It Seems at first Glance

 

Watching the 1998 Emmys I enjoyed one of the most emotionally satisfying victories in what have been nearly three decades of watching the ceremony. Andre Braugher, after years of being ignored by the Emmys for his work as Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on The Street received Best Actor in a Drama for what was his final season on the show.

At the time I was overjoyed simply because I was a fan of both Braugher and Homicide. I had no idea how historic Braigher’s triumph was. Braugher’s victory in this category was the first for an African-American since Bill Cosby had won for I Spy in 1968. (Cosby was also the first actor of any race to win three consecutive Best Actor Emmy until Bryan Cranston managed to do so for Breaking Bad from 2008 to 2010. I think we can all be grateful for that.)

Less than four months later The Sopranos would debut on HBO and reshape the television landscape forever. During the next fifteen years of the first Golden Age – from the Sopranos debut until Breaking Bad’s final season, only one actor would even be nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Drama – Andre Braugher in 2001 for the already cancelled Gideon’s Crossing.

I remember reading on the internet by the time Ozark debuted in 2017 just how exhausted so many people  of dramas that were centered around ‘White Male Antiheroes’. It wasn’t even the first time I’d heard the subject discussed. In the fall of 2013, as both Breaking Bad and Dexter were coming to the ends of their runs Entertainment Weekly wrote an article on the subject, though in this case it was in relation to sexism rather than racism. I don’t know how aware of the controversy I was at the time – I was a huge fan of the two series discussed as well as Mad Men, House of Cards and the first season of True Detective. I was aware of the sexist tropes in play, which may have been one of the reason I was such a big fan of Damages when it was on the air and spent a fair amount of time pushing for series centered around ‘anti-heroines’. (By 2014, we were starting to get more female centric dramas of this note and I’ll get to that later on.)

But it wasn’t until fairly recently that I began to truly realize just how white the era of Peak TV was, at least in the period I discussed. To be fair there had been many times when it had been incredibly obvious  - The Sopranos dominating the Emmy nominations every year it was on the air, even in inferior seasons, while The Wire and OZ, two of the most racially diverse shows to that point in television history were essentially ignored during their runs. But while was a covering the Emmys for the first time – and slowly beginning to make predictions in the nominations and winners, though until the last decade I kept them to myself – that I realized that those people who wanted to use the hashtag EmmysSoWhite could have used it during almost the entirety of the 2000s and well into the 2010s and almost inevitably been more accurate then they were when it was finally used in the aftermath of the 2021 awards. What’s more this seems to have been going on in plain view during the era – and it was essentially ignored by almost ever major critic who covered the era and indeed in the immediate aftermath. (Both Difficult Men and The Revolution Was Televised ignore it all together.)

Since many have been arguing that the era of Peak TV is finally over, I think it’s time we realistic had a conversation about why, for some more than obvious reasons, that may not be the worst thing. So in the next couple of articles, I’m going to discuss how the Emmys saw Peak TV while it was happening, both in the extreme notes and the more subtle ones and why the last decade is giving us signs that as TV is transitioning into a new era, there might very well be signs the changes are for the better.

Now I’ll start with the obvious. I’m fully aware that using the Emmys as a benchmark of great television is as foolish as using the Oscars as a bench mark for the best movies. Indeed, in the next article in this series I’m going to point out that there was another awards show – less noted and now steeped in controversy – that was in hindsight far more in touch with the zeitgeist then the too-often behind the curve Emmys. But indeed it’s for that reason I think we have to use the Emmys, because they still are the standard – and also because there’s a good argument Peak TV actually set things backwards for diversity.

To restate the obvious, many of the most diverse series during the 2000s were essentially ignored by the Emmys. But the Emmys would demonstrate their bigotry in ways that were both subtle and in hindsight, blatantly bigoted, particularly when it came to drama. It’s The West Wing only nominated its one African-American lead Dule Hill a single time during the era of Aaron Sorkin while every other regular (including Stockard Channing who didn’t become one until 2001) was nominated multiple times. It’s Dennis Haysbert never being nominated for playing a black president during four seasons of 24, while Gregory Itzin, who played Charles Logan was nominated twice (once as a regular, once as a guest actor) and Cherry Jones winning the only season she was nominated for playing white ones. It’s about Katherine Heigl winning Best Supporting Actress in a Drama the one year she was nominated for Grey’s Anatomy and Sandra Oh and Chandra Wilson being nominated five and four times apiece and each time losing to a white woman. (Blythe Danner’s two wins for Huff during Grey’s Anatomy first two season look particularly like a thumb in the eye to them – and this is coming from someone who never liked the show.) It's about Lost, which had the most diverse cast of a network series only having a single non-white cast member ever nominated for an Emmy (though to be fair, the Emmys also ignored a lot of deserving white cast members too). And it’s about The Shield one of the most diverse shows as well as groundbreaking ones during the era, never being nominated for Best Drama and only once having a colored cast member nominated (CCH Pounder in 2005) despite having multiple deserving possibilities over the years (Forest Whitaker and Anthony Anderson are the most obvious examples)

And the few nominees of color were, except for Braugher, always in the supporting category. And  they were few and far between. Asides from the ones I’ve mentioned already, the only prominent ones in the drama category during the 200s were Freddy Rodriguez was only nominated once for Six Feet Under (in 2002), Masi Oka for the first season of Heroes and Naveen Andrews for the first season of Lost. It was not until 2010 when Archie Panjabi deservedly won Best Supporting Actress for her work as Kalinda on The Good Wife that a non-white actor had won an Emmy for acting since Braugher’s triumph in 2010.

Comedy was a slight improvement, though not much of one. America Ferrara became the first (and to date only)Latin-American to win an Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy for the first season of Ugly Betty. Tracy Morgan was nominated twice for 30 Rock, Vanessa Williams four consecutive years for Ugly Betty and at the end of the decade Sofia Vergara was nominated for Modern Family. But comedy was only marginally more diverse than drama during this period, as has been pointed out numerous times over the years by others. And even for the shows that had diverse casts again the discrimination was subtle but still there. Eva Longoria was the only one of the four leads of Desperate Housewives never nominated for an Emmy (though in fairness after its first season it pretty much dropped off the Emmys radar) and I don’t think Alfre Woodard would have gotten a nomination for the second season (she shouldn’t have anyway) had it not been for the actresses long history with the Emmys.

Now I realize that the staunch defenders of the Emmys (which I’m not for the record) would argue that this was just a metrics of ‘an earlier time’. To be clear, the 2000s was not the Jurassic Era. But it might blow your mind (it certainly did so for mine) that in the decade prior to The Sopranos debuting The Emmys had a superior track record with minorities than it did during the period after The Sopranos debuted.

Jimmy Smits was nominated six times during the decade, three times as best Supporting Actor for L.A. Law and four times for Best Actor in a Drama during the four seasons he was a regular. (He won for L.A. Law in 1990.)James McDaniel, who played Lt. Fancy on Blue was nominated for Best Supporting Actor twice. Eriq Lasalle and Gloria Reuben were each nominated for Supporting Actor and Actress the first four years they were on ER. Even C.C.H. Pounder, who was never a regular, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Dr. Hicks in 1997. Steve Harris was nominated for Best Supporting Actor twice in the decade for The Practice and Andre Braugher was nominated in 1996 in addition to his win in 1998. James Earl Jones actually won Best Actor in a Drama in 1991 (take back what I said about Braugher) for the mystery drama Gabriel’s Fire.

In 1992 and 1993 Regina Taylor was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama for her work in the 1960s I’ll Fly Away. Cicely Tyson would be nominated for Best Actress for her role in Sweet Justice the following year. (It would be another twenty years before another African-American was nominated in this category again).In 1993 Mary Alice would win Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for that same series. And speaking of diversity in 1995 Hector Elizondo was nominated for the first of four consecutive years for his work in Chicago Hope winning in 1997.

Comedy was much less rewarding (Must See-TV was incredibly white) but one should not discount the nominations – and win – that Ellen DeGeneres managed to achieve for writing ‘The Puppy Episode’ of Ellen in 1997. It’s hard to imagine such shows as Will & Grace existing without it as well as the slow trickle of TV shows with LGBTQ+ characters. I don’t think Willow Rosenberg’s coming out of the closet in 2000 on Buffy could have happened before Ellen DeGeneres’ win.

Now I’m not pretending that the Emmys during the 1990s was a rainbow coalition, particularly in the comedy category. But compared to the decade that was to come it was as ethnic as David Simon’s Baltimore – which I need not remind you was basically ignored during this period in the acting categories. Indeed Lucy Liu became the first actress of Asian origin nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Ally McBeal. It would be another eight years before a woman of color – Williams – was nominated in this same category.

This was for the record playing out on television’s biggest stage during the era where all eyes supposedly were on television in a way they never had been before. And yet the critics who worshipped every moment of this decade never even mentioned it while it was happening. I might not have liked the message in Maureen Ryan’s Burn in Down which covers TV during this  era (when it came to Lost I was probably to close to it) and to be clear the Emmys probably don’t enter into the discussion. But looking back on it, it’s obvious to anyone that the Emmys and the kinds of series and actors they nominated during this period were clearly a ‘Whites Only Club’.

Things would only marginally improve during the three years after the end of the decade as actors like Don Cheadle received multiple nominations for Showtime’s House of Lies and Giancarlo Esposito was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his incredible work on Breaking Bad. But as recently as ten years ago when Breaking Bad dominated the Emmys (deservedly) for its final season was being very clear as to who they were allowing in and who they weren’t. It speaks volumes that an actor who was diagnosed with dwarfism would win an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama during this period and an actor of color couldn’t get in the door. Not to take anything away from Peter Dinklage but it does kind of stand out.

What makes all of this all the more troubling was that during this same period a different awards, which is now hopelessly mired in controversy it may never escape from, had been given a greater variety of awards and to infinitely more qualified nominees during this entire period. In the next part of this essay, I intend to discuss the Golden Globes and how during the era they were clearly more on top of the current feel for what the public watched and loved than, with few exceptions, the Emmys was.

Constant Reader (Adult) July 2024: The Last By Hanna Jameson

 

 

There’s a part of me-  very cynical but also pragmatic – that makes me question the sincerity of the youthful protestors around the world who are protesting the evils of climate change. I don’t doubt the reality of the threat so much as the sincerity of their motivations, in part because I’m not sure even they have truly considered why they’re doing it.

I don’t doubt the reality of the horrors of global warming but the way it is shouted by  protestors  always makes me wonder whether the youngest among them have truly considered how their phrasing it. Even the most devoted scientists admit that it will be a gradual process rather than a switch being flipped: one day we will have the world we live in, the next day it will be an apocalyptic hellscape. Perhaps if that were the case we might be able to unite around the idea, though I seriously doubt that. What is talked about is a future that will slowly but gradually become unrecognizable.

I think it is the fear of the unknown that is driving the youngest among them for a selfish reason: for all the problems of the world today, many of them have it easier in most creature comforts than previous generations. They get their food delivered to them on Grubhub, Uber and Lyft take them anywhere they need to go, they can get all of the latest films and TV on their phones, all their shopping needs are done on Amazon and they don’t even have to leave the house to meet with their friends. What all of these young protestors shout when they say “their future has been destroyed’ is a euphemism for a fact that they don’t have the ability to last five minutes without their iphones. None of these teenagers are Katniss Everdeen and they wouldn’t survive in a world if they couldn’t ask Siri how to catch and skin a fish. And with social media making this generation increasingly isolated, the idea of having to form a new society by working together on anything is a scenario where the survivors would envy the dead. They don’t even want to have to talk with people with opposing political views on Twitter; the idea of bonding with them to building a new society is unthinkable to them.

On the other end of the spectrum, I don’t truly think the people who have wanted to destroy their government or longed for a zombie apocalypse have thought it through at all for pretty much the exact same reasons I listed for the other side. There has been an enormous amount written and playing out in movies and TV about the end of the world. (I started a series about it once; you might consider this book review an unofficial part of it.) Much of it involves outside threats or larger disasters, from The Walking Dead to A Quiet Place to Snowpiercer. Even the very best of these series and films rarely look at what happens after the world ends and when we try to rebuild. (The Mad Max series is a rare exception and there may be others I’m unaware of.)

I think there is a part of our society that yearns for this kind of post-apocalyptic world because today’s world is too complicated. Considering how difficult the world is, how messy every aspect of it seems and how uncertain the future is, it is understandable that some of us may think that some form of an apocalypse would make things easier, in a perverse way. The thing is, nice as that might seem we all know the end of the world will never be as simple as a switch being thrown. Survivors we’ll be left behind and we will have to rebuild.

This was made very clear in so much of the fiction that came out during the Cold War when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed around the corner. A lot of the best fiction of that era took place in dystopian worlds but most of the authors gave no illusion as to what it would look like. This was clear in such classic as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which to date has been remade three separate times into movies, A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter Miller’s dark satire set in a future hundreds of years after a nuclear war and Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. We got far grimmer perspectives throughout the 1980s, most notably in such TV movies as The Day After and the film Testament where we see what happens when nuclear war does occur. When the Cold War ended in 1991 and nuclear annihilation became far less a direct threat to the end of the world then before the idea of a nuclear apocalypse has somewhat diminished in so many end of the world scenarios in our films and TV.

In that sense Hanna Jameson’s 2019 novel The Last is both a throwback and a reimaging of these same scenarios. The novel unfolds from the perspective of an American historian named Jon Keller. He has gone to a conference in Switzerland which at the last moment was moved to a hotel called L’Hotel Sixieme. Keller is getting breakfast when he hears a woman scream: “They’ve bombed Washington!”

Keller and his colleagues then learn of nuclear war on their phones. Washington has been bombed and the President and his staff are dead. They see footage of it. A plane crashes on the outskirts of Berlin and it’s because someone uploads the video that they know Berlin is gone. Then the Internet goes down.

Jon expects the end to come immediately and as a historian he feels a duty to keep writing. His wife Nadia and his family are in California and we quickly learn from Jon that his marriage was in trouble before he went to the conference.

For the next few weeks, he writes brief journal entries, waiting for the end to come. No one dies of radiation poisoning but people start committing suicide. Dylan, the hotel’s head of security takes a role of leadership and starts a routine. He and some people go hunting, they start rationing food and they vote on the cutting of gas and electricity. There is a doctor in the hotel. After three weeks the people start talking to each other. At the end of the fourth, Jon hears guitar music. After six weeks he goes outside and they see the clouds are turning orange. The doctor, whose name is Tania, casually mentions the trees will start dying soon. At the end of the seventh week, Jon writes down: “I’m going to keep writing. I feel like if I don’t keep writing, I’ll lie down and die.”

The bulk of the novel follows and is labeled: “A Narrative Chronicle of the Initial Post-Nuclear Months by possibly the last living historian, Dr. Jon Keller.” The novel takes place over the course of three weeks, with Keller often dividing his daily entries into multiple parts to describe the action that follows. We later learn he is writing the entries in long-hand rather than using his laptop because he believes with electricity possibly disappearing, it is more important to have an analogue story being told.

We learn from Keller and other people that the possibility of this war had been hanging in the air for a while. There had been major conferences, news reports and Jon’s wife had constantly been marching against it. Such details of who struck first and why is never made clear because the people in the hotel don’t know. We also never learn the details of why the conflict started or why it is escalated, though at one point someone holds up a Swiss franc and says this is what it was all about. We don’t even know how far in the future we are. There is a suggestion in the middle of the novel when the survivors, most of whom are foreign born, ask Jon and the only other American in the hotel Toni who they voted for in the last election. The argument becomes loud very quickly and its only through a miracle that it doesn’t come to violence. There will be many other occasions where violence breaks out for far more ‘logical’ reasons.

Jon becomes close with most of the survivors. Among the more prominent ones is Toni, a libertarian and an agnostic who has one of the few guns, Nathan, a mixed race Australian who is one of the more optimistic people in the group, Adam, a former rock musician who has quite a lot of drugs and alcohol and numerous foreign couples from everywhere from Japan and Germany. Some know English, some don’t. Many of them are young; some are older, but all of them acknowledge how incompetent they are to survive. Nathan admits up front he has no idea how to start a fire without a lighter; Tania is overwhelmed by her work, most of which involves being asked for non-existent anti-depressants and everyone spends a lot of time at the bar. When Adam OD’s on heroin halfway through the novel Jon and Toni are frantic because ‘there is no 9-1-1’. It’s up to them to save him and they know when its done, he might not necessarily be grateful.

 However because the hotel was once a hunting lodge there are more than enough guns. (This is Switzerland.) Toni has a tremendous amount of ammunition, mainly because she is terrified of the possibility of sexual assault. This is a fear that turns out to be more than merited when one of the guests attempts to rape a female staff member. The group makes a decision that they intend to try him for this – and then execute him. It is done coldly because they know sending him into the forest might kill him and they don’t want to spend their dwindling supplies as well as time and energy keeping his prisoner.

Keller mentions all of this in his writing but his primary focus of his narrative deals with the discovery of a girl that’s found in the water tower on the roof. Jon realizes that she couldn’t have gotten up here on her own nor gotten into the tank. He suspects she has been murdered.

As much to distract himself from the threat of impending death as well as his only physical health (he is suffering from a pain in his tooth which he ignores throughout the novel) Jon decides that he has to find out both who the girl is and who killed her. The guests are willing to indulge him, though many think he is wasting his time from the start. But as the novel continues Jon becomes obsessed to the point of near-psychosis, thinking he needs to do this in order to stay human in the face of death. That this might not be the best use of his energy is something that no one suggests at first; everyone needs a reason to keep going at the end of the world. But as the tensions become greater as the supplies dwindle, Jon’s obsession turns into something close to paranoia.

As the novel continues and supplies begin to dwindle the guests now begin to realize their options are becoming limited. It also becomes clear that there are people residing in the forest who may be a threat to them. An initial excursion into the nearest town leads to a reunion with historians at the conference which quickly escalates into violence and death. Everyone knows winter is coming and is terrified of what that will mean when the electricity goes and they run out of water. None of them are talking about what will happen when the worst of it comes.

Jon doesn’t want to lead and spends much of the novel letting people he considers more qualified – Dylan and Nathan among them – do the hard work. Much of his writing takes on a detached tone but you can tell how shocked he is as the veneer of civilization continues to erode and how unsuited he is to what comes next. He holds desperately to trying to find justice for the murdered girl but he is a horrible detective, making false assumptions that lead him astray, making increasingly paranoid suggestions to the remaining hotel staff and eventually Tania thinks he’s had a psychotic breakdown.

In most novels that unfold in the aftermath of nuclear war (On The Beach is the most famous example) much of the story unfolds in a pattern of the survivors trying to maintain a routine while they wait for the inevitable. This doesn’t happen in The Last or at least not while the narrative is going on. It is worth noting however, the narrative ends abruptly when we learn Keller’s infection of his jaw has incapacitated him and it is unclear if he will recover.

What I will say is that the novel comes to a conclusion with a resolution to who killed the girl and why she died. It takes place in a world of madness but it’s worth noting by the time it does Keller is desperate to find a reason and it leads him to do something that would have been unthinkable for him even after the bombs dropped.

It’s also worth noting that there are suggestions throughout the book as to the issue of fate who are still in the hotel and as to why they were there.  Jameson doesn’t come up with a conclusion one way or the other, mainly because philosophical constructs are irrelevant in the aftermath of an apocalypse. However, the last lines of Keller’s narrative suggest – however faintly – that one major character might have had a sense of the divine. That individual is insane of course, but the two have always been related.

One of the last set of  paragraphs in the book is profound and because there are no spoilers I think I’ll quote it in its entirety:

“The end of the world is a fairly comforting concept, because – in theory – we wouldn’t have to survive it. Maybe what’s been f---ing us up, more than anything, hasn’t been finding a way to cope with the world ending but finding a way to cope with the fact that it didn’t.

An ending is easy. The terminal waking up, morning after morning, isn’t easy. I think that’s why I’ve been so angry… why I wanted to believe that the girl in the water tank had died for a more important reason than…continued violence..

Instead of a conclusion, we’ve been offered nothing but more life. I don’t know how to come to terms with that.”

 

Jameson gives the most realistic issue that we have to deal with when it comes when we discuss ‘the end of the world’. If it comes through the sea’s rising, a plague or nuclear war the fact remains it that it will not be as simple as all life on earth dying with a snap of a finger. There will be people left behind, they will have to carry on and society will have to adapt to confront the new realities that are left behind.

That’s what I believe terrifies the young who are screaming the loudest and we shouldn’t really be shocked at that. They are excellent at telling all of us what’s wrong with society but when it comes to how to fix it, they have nothing resembling a solution. They’re not so much terrified at the idea of the end of the world; they’re terrified of being left behind to cope with the fact that it didn’t.

The Last doesn’t end with resolution either, However there is just enough hope remaining behind to suggest that going on is possible. And the postscript of the novel, written by a different survivor, gives the barest ray of sunshine that some form of civilization will continue even after the end. It may be false hope, but it’s still hope.

 

 

How Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Stephen King and Greta Gerwig Explained One of the Biggest Problems With Society To Me

 

 

In November of 1999, not long before Thanksgiving Buffy The Vampire Slayer aired one of its many brilliant comic episodes: “Pangs”.

I’ll briefly set it up. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her best friend Willow (Alyson Hanigan) are in their freshman year at Sunnydale University. They’re trying to deal with the issues of going to school on a Hellmouth but they’re also teenagers and Thanksgiving break is coming up. Willow, who has a very liberal education (when she’s not studying to be a practicing Wiccan) has very clear perspectives of the reality of the Thanksgiving’s we celebrate and the reality of them. Buffy acknowledges it, but she also wants to have a nice family dinner because her mom is visiting her relatives. She spends much of this episode going into overdrive about preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for everybody while deal with the most recent ghoul of the week.

Now at the start of the episode Xander and his construction crew engaged in a groundbreaking ceremony for a new library at Sunnydale University. While they did, they unearthed what was essentially an old ritual site for the Chumash tribe (I don’t know if this is a real indigenous tribe or one that Joss Whedon and his colleagues invented for the series). By doing so they released the spirit of a warrior spirit who begins to slaughter the people he blames for his tribe’s genocide, starting with a priest and moving on. One of the best jokes in ‘Pangs’  - and there are many – is that Buffy Summers, who can beat the crap out of demons and vampires twice her sides on a weekly basis, is paralyzed by something far greater  - white guilt. She spends much of the episode facilitating about trying to find a way to defeat this horrible, murderous demon – who by this point has infected Xander with syphilis – without, you know, hurting its feelings.

This plays out hysterically throughout the episode on almost every level. Giles, who despite some of his modern impulses is somewhat of a product of Britania, is particularly dry in so many of his reference particularly when he refers to the Chumash as Indians:

Buffy: Giles. We refer to them as Native Americans.

Giles: Hard to be behind the times. Takes an effort not to refer to you lot as bloody colonials.

As things get noticeably worse he gets more snide: “Why don’t we give them some land? That should solve the problem.”

There are also, to be fair, a lot of other great jokes that don’t directly rely on the situation, particularly the fact that Buffy has chosen to have Thanksgiving at his place. Buffy is obsessed with his proper cooking implements until he asks dryly: “And having the dinner at my place is not to stick me with the cleanup?” Buffy can’t get back to discussing the ritualistic murders fast enough.

Anya, an ex-demon who is blessed with always saying the wrong thing whenever possible, has extraordinarily great lines. She memorably calls Thanksgiving “a ritual sacrifice…with pie.” She’s currently having sex with Xander (which she describes in detail despite no one asking) and is understandably upset when he might have syphilis. You know that she might have caught it. And when she goes to visit a potential victim of the murders where she starts out by asking: “Does everyone still have both ears?”, she shrugs it off. “Well, she gave us pie.”

And this is also the first time that Buffy crossed off with its spinoff Angel which means David Boreanaz has returned. He goes out of his way not to see Buffy throughout this and everyone keeps thinking that’s he turned evil. He finally explains exasperated: “I’m not evil. Why does everyone keep saying that?” He goes out of his way to show himself to everyone but Buffy to keep it secret – and at the end of the episode, Xander spills the beans setting up the crossover on Angel.

But the best joke – and the one that is the point of this article – comes when Spike, who has just been tagged by the Initiative (it doesn’t matter why, see the series it makes sense) ends up smack in the middle of the long debate about all of this. Finally exasperated, he shouts out:

“I can’t stand any more of this shouting about the namby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.”

Willow: “We refer to them as…

Spike: You won. All right. You came in and you killed them, and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s was Caesar did, and he’s not going around saying, “I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it.” The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons and you massacred them. End of story.”

 

Buffy clearly doesn’t want to hear this and says: “Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of…” Then she paused. “Not that I don’t like Spaniards.”

After this goes on for a while, Willow deflects again:

“Well, if we could just talk to him…”

Spike shuts that down.

“You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better?

 

It is telling that Spike – who by this point is one of the biggest villains in this series – has made a statement that is one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard about the reality of civilization and society I’ve ever heard on television and have rarely heard since in a quarter of a century. Even Xander, who isn’t in college and was a poor student acknowledges as much even though he undercuts it.

“Maybe it’s the syphilis talking but…some of that made sense.”

Giles then immediately rolls his eyes, metaphorically. “I made a lot of these points earlier, but fine.”

In the last twenty five years in America and across the globe there has been a huge hue and cry, by minority groups and among the left, about so much of the sins that the West have committed across the globe and how much of America is built in sin.  I know it will be taken the wrong way by using a TV series to make an argument that America has nothing to apologize for because we do obviously, particularly in regard to the Native Americans and the entire nation of Africa. And I genuinely do understand why all of the people who were displaced and who don’t have the benefits of white privilege not only are justifiably angry but have a right to be.

But where I differ with them is a question I’ve had for awhile and have in fact raised in this blog before in other context and which Joss Whedon, through one of the series great monsters, has put forth more eloquently then I did.

Let me ask all of these enlightened people and academics a question I have and I’m not being facetious. In the history of the world – not Western civilization but the entire breadth of human history – is there a civilization that was entirely and completely peaceful? And I don’t mean a town or a county, I mean a civilization. One that existed for a while: decades, a century, any period, that spent his entire existence on the globe completely content with everything it had. One that never thought to expand its territory even within a few miles. One that never invented a single weapon or wrote anything about warfare in its literature. One that when a rival tribe or marauding set of warlords either only fought of defense of itself or just surrendered and let itself being absorbed saying that violence is not a resolution and ‘our time is over’.

Just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean there isn’t one, of course, and I’m sure I will be burned in effigy and on-line by so many academics by saying I’m speaking in pure hypotheticals. They live in a world of pure hypotheticals, so I don’t know why they’d be offended. But the reason I doubt this fundamentally is because I remember reading something that Stephen King wrote that I think is directly on point.

If you are a fan of King you are familiar with his novel The Stand. (I was actually planning to write a separate article about it long ago but I’ll just stick to the bare minimum.) Early in the novel a plague wipes out 99 percent of America and possibly the rest of the world. Only a few survivors with an immunity to it that science can’t explain are left to explore the wreckage of America and try to figure out what to do next.

One of those left alive is Glen Bateman, a fifty-ish sociology professor who Stu Redman encounters early in his travels. Glen initially begs off joining him but before he does, he explains ‘sociology in a nutshell’ in one of the greatest passages King’s ever written:

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God but human society was made in the image of his opposite number and is always trying to get back home.”

Before that he utters another cynical phrase: “That is the curse of human race: sociability.”

This is one of the darkest things written even by the master of horror. But looking at not only our society today but the entire history of the world, it’s difficult to make an argument that King, speaking through Bateman, is entirely wrong.

I don’t deny that the West – by which I guess we call all of Europe and America, except for Russia – was incapable of doing such horrible things to itself on its own. The fact that there’s such a thing in European history known as ‘The Hundred Years War’ pretty much makes that clear. But I don’t believe for one moment that when the Europeans began circumnavigating the globe they had exported prejudice and warfare the same way they didn’t everything else. As Spike said the history of the world has never been about making friends. And as he would know  - having studied European history as a human and witness more of it then these children – civilizations don’t have to be a different color to want to kill each other. It may be the most bigoted reason but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s ever been the only reason.

I don’t deny that Europe owes a huge debt to all of the nations across the globe it made a mess of and then just left without a word of help. I don’t deny that America has spent four hundred years oppressing the natives of this country and looting and pillaging an entire continent to make it habitable for their owners. I don’t deny they then spent the next two centuries first wanting to own the people they’d uprooting from their homes and then denying them the same rights as everyone else. I deny none of that happened. What I do want to want to know is what we – as a nation - do now. And a completely different but more recent film gives me a metaphor – and not an optimistic one.

One of my favorite movies in recent years was Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. A superb comedy that focuses on the conflict between a seventeen-year old girl (Saoirse Ronan) and her working-class mother (Laurie Metcalf) it is a triumph on every level. And one of my favorite scenes in it comes halfway through the film.

Lady Bird and her mother are having an argument about college. It has gotten to a point where her mother makes it clear, like mothers often do, about how much she has sacrificed for her daughter. Lady Bird grabs a pencil and paper and tells her: “Give me a number.” Metcalf is puzzled. Lady Bird demands her mother tell her exactly how much she spent sacrificing for her. She tells her mother once she raises this much money, she will give it to her and she will have to speak to her mother again. Her mother looks at her and tells her: “Honestly, I doubt you’ll ever be qualified to get a job where you could earn enough money to do that.” Lady Bird throws down the pad and storms out of the room.

It's very hard not to see that scene and see the relationship that so many minority groups have with all of America. The entire film is a metaphor for it now that I think of. Ronan’s character resents her mother despite everything she has done for her and she and her mother are always fighting. Lady Bird has dreams for an expensive college that, for her working class family, are almost certainly unrealistic but she refuses to relinquish them and constantly considers her mother the villain. The argument I’ve just cited is one that I think is at the core of every discussion one tries to have with certain members of any minority group – African-Americans, LatinX, women, the LGBTQ+ community  - the tension is always there and no matter how unrealistic the dreams, there is a demand for them. Certain parts of the scene don’t fit the metaphor exactly, but I think the demand is basically the same particularly when it comes to elected officials and people on the left, most of whom are in these communities. We know how horrible our history is with them and trying to resolve these demands seems impossible. I often think if we were to ask for a ‘number’ – a metaphor for what it would take to bring about resolution – we would get from members from all of these groups the same response Lady Bird’s mother gives her daughter.

And that may be part of the biggest problem facing so many of our divides today. If we had a ‘number’ – something that could accommodate all these of groups, not so that we didn’t have to ever see them again but so that we could end the argument,  society would at least having something to try and work towards. It might be difficult and it might take a while, but at least we would know where to start.

But when it comes to some of the more extreme members of all minorities, and the left as a rule, they don’t want the number reached. For understandable reasons they are angry and enraged at the world. And it is an unfair place even if it weren’t for the structural blows that so many of them face. For many of them, the only thing keeping them going is their rage, their anger.

And if you suggest  if there’s something that we can do to make things better, some small thing, some large thing, ‘a number’, many of them are genuinely surprised by the question. Maybe they’ve been so focused on the horrible ways society is that they genuinely don’t know what it would take to make things better for them, either individually or as a people. Maybe they know there is no single thing or even a lot of things that can be done to fix it. Hell, maybe some of them even think that anyone who asks to fix the problem doesn’t understand it in the first place.

And maybe they like it so that the people they consider the problem – all white cis males – are always uneasy around them. Maybe they think that there is no real solution so all they can do is make everyone who isn’t one of them think twice before saying or doing anything to them. After all, the history of the world isn’t about making friends. But since they can’t use the methods that were used against them, they can make the lives of everyone around them uncomfortable, unpleasant and remind them every time that there’s a debt that they are owed that they need to repay. They will never tell you what the number is, or how to reduce it but they’ll always tell you that it’s getting bigger.

I don’t have a solution for this. I don’t. But in a way I do think that what Glen Bateman thought was the curse of the human race – sociability – is the only way to save it. If we don’t try to find bonds, ways to talk to each other, be willing to listen, then we might as well as is said in The Stand ‘leave the whole thing to the cockroaches.”

The Stand ends on an exchange between Stu and Fran that is one of the most haunting. “Do you think people ever learn anything?” Stu asks Fran. Fran pauses before she gives an honest answer: “I don’t know.” I need to believe in the opposite, that we are at least capable of learning from our mistakes, of acknowledging that there are commonalities even between the most divided among us. I need to think that number can be reached and a common ground can be found. It may be as fictional an idea as any of the scenarios I’ve listed here. But there are worse lies to believe.

 

Criticizing Criticism Series: Why I Do What I Do And Why I'm Happier at It Then Other More 'Popular' Writers

 

 

Last night I made the mistake of commenting on an individual’s blog about why I thought social media was the ruination of society and why I thought that many people on this site have their keyboards pointed in the wrong place. In this long comment of criticism, my biggest mistake was saying I was happy with the relatively few number of followers I had.

This individual sent me a note which perhaps they may have thought was helpful but like so many of these people was as self-centered as so much of the political criticism I’ve gotten at this site. (I won’t bother to give their name even though they made it clear they were unlikely to read my own column.)

They looked at the number of followers I had and told me they thought I was using this site incorrectly. Strike one.

They told me that they hadn’t read my article because they have no real interest in either film or television, still the meat of my columns. Strike two.

They told me that this was strictly a political and tech site and I was taking up time and energy sending my columns here, claiming it was like sending cultural articles to a finance magazine. Strike three.

Then they told me that I was writing my articles in an incorrect format, doing it poorly and not in the right matter. Considering I haven’t received a single complaint like that from anybody and that I’ve submitted many of them to my father, who knows more about journalism and critical writing then this person could ever remember, strikes four and five.

Now I considered writing this post on this individual comments section  because I was irked by their ignorance but I know from past experience that, like ninety percent of the people who are criticized, they will either ignore it or take it the wrong way. And I can do that basically for fun. So instead I’m going to explain to my own readers – who are out there and know my frustrations better, exactly why I think this person is wrong-headed and why I do what I do in the first place.

First, yes after eight years on Medium I have slightly less than five hundred followers. I said in my comments I was fine with that considering how I got them, but I don’t think this registered with a generation who believes that to be taken seriously in the world you have to at least have half a million followers on Instagram. (I spent most of my comments arguing against this and they clearly missed that point.)

Perhaps I should mention that it took me nearly five years just to get as many as a hundred readers for my columns. The fact that this number has grown exponentially in the last three years and continues to do so is a matter of triumph for me considering that anywhere from 90 to 95 percent of my columns are cultural criticism and I have avoided using clickbait and advancing my metrics with social media and algorithms at all costs because I refused to debase myself. I mentioned this in the comment I left this person and its clear that didn’t register.

I should also mentions that somewhere between three and four thousand people read my column a week according to Medium stats. I grant you that’s not a significant number to so many writers on this blog, but to me it’s staggering and in a sense, moving. Perhaps it’s the kind of feeling that can only be described to someone who spent so long writing and being unread that and as someone who is now astonished that people actually do read and listen to me. Maybe the use of profound is too strong a work, but I am kind of amazed when I look at my stats and every week and see the pieces that I wrote as long ago as three or four years ago that are now being read enormously. People care what I think about shows like Shogun and So Help Me Todd. They love to read my comments on Jeopardy going back the past two years. They think highly of my analysis of The West Wing and The Closer. Maybe I don’t get a huge amount of people who comment my blog or clap for it, but I don’t live or die by that. All that matters to me is that you read my stuff in the first place; more so if its about TV and film. It’s nice when someone comments on it, even if it is just  a ‘great article. My well-being has never lived or died based on the number of people who love and/or hate my articles. The fact that so many people seem to think otherwise – and that many of them do so on this site – depresses me.

Now on to the next part. As my readers know all too well, there is a healthy number of people on this site who do write about movies, television, books, music and things other than politics and tech, which as we all know are the only things that anyone in the world should not only write about but care about. (This is sarcasm. I know I shouldn’t have to point this out but given that so many of the people on this site only seem capable of expressing it and not recognizing it when it’s directed against them, I think I have to.)

I know this, of course, because many of you are my colleagues and peers, if not friends in the traditional sense of the words. I have written many comments on your columns over the years, expressing support or friendly disagreement and many of you have done the same, for which I am grateful. And I have noticed that it has been debate and friendly disagreement practically 100 percent of the time. We might have disputes over whether Game of Thrones deserved all the Emmys it got or whether Dead Poet’s Society deserved a Best Picture nomination but they are temporary arguments that we quickly let go of and then move on with the next article. I’ve never gotten into the kind of visceral disputes with those who deal with film, TV, books and all things cultural  that is the everyday life of every article that involves politics in any form. I’ve certainly never had to block or mute any of you the way I’ve had to with so many political articles where people very quickly become rabid vultures and conflict is expected. I have a theory as to that which I’ll get to, but not just yet.

Now I should mention that I’ve written somewhere between 1500 and 1600 articles over the last eight years on this site and close to a thousand in the past three years alone. And because I have an eclectic set of interests I rarely return to the same subject matter twice in a week and maybe not even in a month. Those of you who read my columns know that I have many continuing series I’ve written about over the years and that many of them dealing with similar themes but I think part of the reason I’ve had such a hard time getting a devoted following is because I don’t only write about the same subject and thing day after day. I write primarily about television and awards shows pertaining to it but as we all know there are countless numbers of those shows and my articles on awards show about them go into depth that many don’t.  For a long time I only wrote about television but eventually I realized I had more to say about such things a films, books, history, criticism, and once in a blue moon issues affecting the contemporary world. I contain multitudes and I don’t want to be confined to a single subject and I have a very specific reason for writing as little as I do about today’s political minefield and the world we live in. (I’ll get to that too.)

No one who reads my blog regularly can argue that I write the same kind of article every day. Having spent so much time on medium in the political world, I can say with all sincerity that dozens, if not hundreds of people on this site,  do exactly that day after day after day. I’m not being entirely sarcastic when I truly wonder if there is some kind of online form that all of these writers have in their computers or iPhones that they use as their model for every other article and merely edit to meet the current subject.

I don’t deny the fact that many of these articles are personal, have a truly great vocabulary and have historical footnotes and research. It doesn’t change the fact that for a sizable number of them they are, for all intents and purpose, just writing the same article in terms of theme if not subject. It may differ depending on the individual’s race, gender or sexual identity, maybe even by political affiliation. It doesn’t change the fact they’re still just writing the same article.

You know the type by now. We all do. These individuals take a subject from the past day, week, further back, maybe some personal event that happened to them. Sometimes it has to do with their identity, sometimes its general.  Then they use this article to play the same song. You know doubt know the catchphrases by now: “capitalist agenda”  “no difference between the two parties’,  “nation built on white supremacy’ “corrupt world order” “evils of civilization’, ‘cable news’,  ‘social media’. That last one comes up a fair amount, perhaps more than all the others, particularly as the greatest violator of everything that’s wrong with today’s society. You’d think that these so-called intelligent people might be aware, as I continuously have made clear, of the irony that they are using links to social media to promote their anti-social media agenda. But that is as clearly lost on them as sarcasm.

Then we go to the comments section, where the real fun begins. Seventy to eighty percent of it, as we all know, is written by fawning writers who do everything in their power to tell the author how brilliant they are with the ideas and how completely right they are with how utterly screwed the world is. Fifteen to twenty percent is comprised of trolls who are of the completely opposite political views who call this person an idiot. The writer or their acolytes then berate this individual to a longer argument that usually takes an entire thread. The remainder of the posters (and I was part of them) gently criticize them or point out that they wrote these articles and don’t have a solution. They are always ignored by the author and their allies no matter how many times they try to reason with them, and yes I speak from personal experience.

Now not all of these articles are of the so-called ‘doom-porn variety’ but they all have a similar negative tone as to the impending collapse of our society, mixed with the clear fact some seem to be rooting for it. There is no real optimism here, no kindness, no hope. Oh, and a reminder to read the next article they write and comment on this one.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past three years trying to figure out why so many at least seemingly intelligent people have spent so much time and energy – of which many say they don’t have much – writing all of these articles about how broken our society is then trying to do anything at all to try and fix it. Considering that there seem to be millions of them out there, you’d think if they spent the same amount of energy they do decrying the system into making an effort to change it, they could actually do something significant. And when you consider that they all seem to know, chapter and verse what is wrong with America and the world today they must know what would work to make things better.

But in all those hundreds of millions of words I’ve read, I’ve seen nothing approaching a solution. Not a realistic one, not an unrealistic one, not even a science fiction type one. All they seem interested in doing is writing and posting how broken the world is and how nothing can be done to fix it.

Some of my colleagues – who are psychiatrists – argue that this is a form of therapy. And while I grant you this is slightly less dangerous than shouting at random strangers, it’s not really more productive. And as someone who when he was younger did the former and could not let go of his rage, I acknowledge there is some therapeutic value in express your frustrations this way.

And I should mention I agree with ninety to ninety-eight percent of the frustrations and problems with our society today. I share them and they do bother me as much, if not more than so many of these writers. So why don’t I spend every waking moment doing exactly what they do?

Because I don’t have the answers either. I don’t think there’s a short-term solution to the issues raised and probably not long-term ones. I have slightly more faith in the system then most of these writers, albeit not much more.  But I believe – whole-heartedly -  that so much of the so-called discourse in our society is just noise that adds nothing to the conversation. I believe that unless you have something constructive to say about fixing the problem, then there is nothing to be added by just raging against the machine. It’s worth writing about occasionally, but to devote every moment of your spare time to it just seems a waste of it.

So I do what the vast majority of us have to. I move through life the best I can. I deal with the horrors in the world by talking to them with my friends, family and people I care about. I do my best to keep myself well-informed but not too well-informed – because I truly think if the world cared about everything the people who shout us do at the level they all think we should, the vast majority of us would not have the strength to get out of bed in the morning.

And I long came to the conclusion that while there are many problems in the world, the people who write these articles on this site and others are not the least bit interested in solving them. To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin they are interested in two things and two things only. Making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That’s all the lion’s share of these articles do and I will be damned if I do anything to contribute to being part of what they all agree is part of the problem.

All of this is why I have spent so much of my time at this site and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future writing about film, television, books, and very little about the world at large. Because here’s the larger thing. The reason I write so much about these things is not because I would like to be read by millions of people online. That would be nice, I grant you, but I’m not naïve enough to think its possible.  No the reason I do it is the same reason I watch television, read all these books, watch these movies and even write about history.

It makes me happy. And I can sense the happiness in the writing of so many of my fellow film and TV critics at medium. Even when they truly hate the film or show they see, I can tell that, like me, they enjoy what they do. They get pleasure out of sharing their point of view. They enjoy debating it with colleagues online and they’re grateful that people respect them.

I don’t sense any of that enjoyment or happiness or anything other than a kind of bitter contempt for the world in any of the political or media articles I’ve read at this site. Perhaps that’s the reason they have a bigger following then my own articles. It has nothing to do with an algorithm so much as the adage that misery loves company. Maybe they truly feel so defeated by life that the only thing they want to do with their time as the world collapses around it is spend with people who agree with how screwed they are.

And I just don’t understand that logic, not as a writer or as a human being. Maybe I would if this was my full time career, if I cared more about responses on social media, or if I wasn’t quite a bit older than I suspect many of the biggest doomcryers are. But maybe it’s my own philosophy, particularly as someone who has lived a difficult life and has dealt with his own share of demons over the years. Maybe it’s just the perspective of someone who needed a lot of actual therapy instead of whatever these articles are.

I agree that the world is, far too often, a dark place with a future that is increasingly uncertain. I agree there’s a lot to be miserable about. But unless you have a constructive solution to even one of these problems and are willing to spend the time and energy working to achieve it  - neither of which those who scream the loudest about it at this site seem remotely interesting in doing – then shouldn’t you spend at least some of your time and energy on something that makes you happy?

I grant you the things I and so many of my colleagues  write about movies and TV are small potatoes compared to everything else going on in the world. And it’s not like we don’t worry about the big stuff to. But at least I get the sense for those of us here on Medium in our little circle of film and TV we come here to escape our problems by talking about the smaller things in life. We can forget the struggles of the everyday world that so many people on this same site seem to want to relive, relitigate and regurgitate for the sole purpose of such insubstantial things as clicks and likes. Maybe its makes so many of these people feel better but since their natural state seems to be outrage and anger, it’s impossible to tell.

So to that person who tried to ‘help me’ today, thanks but no thanks. I’m perfectly fine writing about things you don’t care about to an online site that doesn’t seem to want them to relatively few people, compared to you and your colleagues. No I probably won’t have as many followers as you will when I discuss such things as the thematic concepts of Lost and The X-Files or what shows I thing deserve this year’s Astras (next few weeks readers) but unlike you and your colleagues with everything you write about in deathless prose, I’ve made peace with that. I don’t know if you’ll read this article or how you’ll take it, but I couldn’t care less. You’ve never been the type of reader I’ve tried to reach nor wanted to, truly. That was the point of my original comments which you did miss. If you want to unfollow me after this article, go ahead. You were never my audience anyway. I don’t know if you’ll be happy about that but I am.