Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

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  But why, then, that yearning? No one lies awake at night longing to be transported to a convincing imaginative extrapolation of early-nineties social themes, or if they do I have yet to find their chat rooms. It’s obviously the case that the great obsession of American television—family—was also in play on the bridge of the Enterprise. It’s in play on almost all TV shows, of course; there are exceptions, but even most shows that don’t revolve around actual families revolve around impromptu families centered on work or sitting around in a coffee shop or whatever. I suspect that this has equal amounts to do with the centrality of family in American life and with the mechanics of staging a television show: When you have a regular cast whose interactions form the bulk of any plot, there’s always going to be a tendency to portray their relationships as overridingly important and to indulge the little bit of wish fulfillment that says they can satisfy all their emotional needs in one another.

  Like The West Wing, say, The Next Generation offers a fantasy of smart friends working together and supporting each other; it’s designed to make you want to join them. When you’re a skinny thirteen-year-old who’s nervous a third of the time and bored another third, the idea of roaming the constellations with Captain Picard, whom adventure follows like a shadow and who always knows what to do, is bound to have a powerful appeal. And as the show advanced through its run, The Next Generation became very good at fusing its thematic concerns with the kind of intense fan service a long-running SF series probably can’t do without. Loneliness barely exists in it; characters on-screen by themselves are usually about to be attacked by glowing balls of light or semitransparent children. By the third or fourth season, the show runners had realized that TNG’s two major themes, the android Data’s ongoing inquiry into what it means to be human and Picard’s personification of enlightened humanism, could just as easily be explored around a poker table, or while feeding Data’s cat, as they could during computer meltdowns and alien standoffs. Data’s little visor and Troi’s relationship with her mother and Picard and Crusher’s wistful breakfasts and Geordi’s dating woes and Picard’s discomfort around children—all of this stuff seemed peripheral, but assuming you wanted to hang out with these people in the first place, it was a delight.

  But The Next Generation’s appeal went beyond the image of your brilliant best friends saving you a seat in Ten Forward. As a preface here, think about the Harry Potter series. One of the reasons J. K. Rowling’s books exerted magnetic power over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you’re a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series. It’s the Slytherins and Death Eaters who have it in for Mudbloods, not Harry and his friends, Hogwarts’ true heirs. What results is an absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration of basically the entire cultural heritage of England—and thus the backstory of much of the modern world. It’s as if Rowling remakes a thousand-year-old national tradition into something that’s (a) totally unearned but (b) also way better than the original. Of course it electrified people.

  Star Trek does something similar, though with an American contradiction that’s arguably even more fundamental. It was already possible, by the early 1990s, to trace the terms of the current partisan divide in America. Conservatives—think in Jonathan Haidt–ish terms here—value tradition, authority, and group identity; liberals value tolerance, fairness, and care. Or whatever; you can draw the distinctions however you’d like. The point is, The Next Generation depicts a strict military hierarchy acting with great moral clarity in the name of civilization, all anti-postmodern, “conservative” stuff—but the values they’re so conservatively clear about are things like peace and open-mindedness and concern for the perspectives of different cultures. “Liberal” values, in other words. You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of objective. They sail through the universe with colonialist confidence sticking up for postcolonial principles. Starfleet has a Prime Directive … but it’s explicitly noninterventionist! This is so weird that it’s almost hard to notice; your mind slides over it. But it’s fascinating in numberless ways. Picard is both indisputably the most patriarchal Star Trek captain and indisputably the least likely to punch anyone in the face. No one is more individualist than the individuals of the Enterprise (“If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe”—Dr. Beverly Crusher, “Remember Me,” 1990), but their individualism has led them to reject most forms of private property (because it actually holds them back, they’re so boldly individualistic) and embrace ultracentralized health care. It’s nuts, but it’s also a vision of the American psyche that, if you can get into it, makes a lot of fine things suddenly seem possible, and makes some debilitating anxieties simply fall away.

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  The thing I can’t shake, having taken in all 133 hours of the series, is that Data’s positronic brain doesn’t have a wireless connection. When The Next Generation wants to impress you with the superhuman information-retrieval capabilities of a twenty-fourth-century android, it shows him, uh, reading really fast. Not that you expect a 1980s TV show to be accurate with respect to near-future technology, but there’s something about TNG’s enormous pass on networking, its total failure to see interconnectedness as part of the Federation’s eventual culture, that seems more revealing than any of the predictions—warp fields, the iPad—it did get right. There are episodes, kind of a lot of them, in which Data has to be shut down for one reason or another, and one of the other crew members pushes the hidden catch on his head that opens his cranial access panel, and a little square of hair swings up off his scalp and you see his metallic skull. And there are tiny banks of Christmas-type LED lights blinking on it in an arrhythmic sequence. The main impression you get is of the enclosedness of Data’s head, its armored separateness. The model for a thinking computer is not a cloud of decentralized cognition but a hard shell containing a single distinct self.

  By contrast, when Picard is kidnapped and assimilated by the Borg, the species of hive-mind albino cyborgs that poses the major existential threat to the Federation, what’s emphasized is the physical violation this entails, how Picard’s body is ripped open to receive the Borg implants that erase his individual consciousness. The Next Generation is surprisingly anxious about the idea of sharing thoughts in general. With the exception of the telepathic Betazoids, who are mostly represented positively, creatures who communicate through mind reading or centralized consciousness are seen either as villainous or as so remotely alien that they can’t be comprehended. Networking, either organic or technological, transgresses Star Trek’s ideal of individualism, in which the thrust of personal development is always toward independence, uniqueness, and competence. Technology is meant to be a tool you can use or not; it’s not supposed to change the way you think. No one is ever alone on the Enterprise, but there are depths to which togetherness can’t penetrate.

  Star Trek: The Next Generation aired its final episode in 1994, the year before I got my first e-mail address. Watching it again over the last couple of months, I’ve had moments when I wasn’t sure whose future I was supposed to be projecting myself into. Series lore suggests that we, the current denizens of Federation Sector 001, Sol system, are going to grow up to become the self-reliant, fencing-class-taking, light-to-casual computer-employers of the twenty-fourth century. On the other hand, I’ve seen a race of electronically linked humanoids who share information in a vast decentralized net to which they all have access; who see data as a neutral atmosphere, like air; who use technology to share thoughts and impressions at all times; who are never out of contact with one another; and who react
to the briefest removal from their shared consciousness with an itchy, frantic eagerness to get back. Remind you of anyone? They fly around in giant cubes and occasionally erase whole civilizations, like Apple Maps.

  I have no idea whether the heroic (but responsible!) individualism of the Enterprise crew is a relic, a quaint throwback that was already being assimilated by the Internet while Star Trek was busy articulating it, or whether the type of humanism Captain Picard represents can survive the transition to online culture more intact than TNG wants us to think. Part of me desperately wants to believe the latter. What I’m certain of, though, is this: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. And—another part of me wants to add—oh, God, make it so.

  3. IN THE DARK (1993)

  What I remember first about that year is the darkness of the nights. We would pile into a car and if we all had late enough curfews we would drive out of town, past the last light, on some country road we didn’t know the name of, fields and stars as far as we could see. When there was a lightning storm on the plains we’d drive toward it, watching slashing omens craze across the sky; otherwise light was what instinct led us to avoid. My friend had an ancient and indestructible Oldsmobile, the color of a polluted lake, and we drove it down alleys as fast as we could, we crashed it into other people’s trash cans. We bought grape slushes at Sonic and snuck into the park off Canterbury Avenue, across from the golf course, where we’d sit under the trees and tell each other stupid and wonderful things. We had been there as children hardly any time ago; now, in the dark, it was transformed. If you’ve ever been seventeen, and especially if you’ve ever been seventeen in a small town, you’ve had your own year of dark nights. But when you are seventeen, and especially when you are seventeen in a small town, you believe that there is opening before you a mysterious and uncharted realm that exists for you alone. You and your friends are conspirators in a shadow country.

  I didn’t watch The X-Files, which premiered that fall, on September 10, 1993. I was wasting time at an advanced enough level not to need help from television. But The X-Files was there, in the background, for that year and for several years after it. In my memory of that time it seems to be running, muted, on every TV in every room I enter after dark. We are huddled around a phone trying to figure out whether there are such things as girls we might call, and in the other room we see the back of my friend’s mother’s head and Mulder’s and Scully’s faces staring out at us. Years later, when I watched the show in sequence, I never minded the incoherence of the main storyline, which infuriated longtime fans, because I was already used to imagining the series as a montage of empty atmosphere, and in fact had fallen half in love with it as such. The show’s cinematography, lush by today’s standards and astonishing in 1993, looked shadowed and moody, and because Scully’s expression was a striking combination of horror and numbness and bravery and trauma, none of which we had experienced and all of which we wanted to pretend we had experienced, it seemed only natural that the show would slide along the margins of our secret world.

  The names alone were thrilling. Mulder and Scully: Somehow the words were both left field and all-American, weird and out of time and stylish. They could have been in Bringing Up Baby or they could have been rock stars or they could have been murder victims in a film noir. (That year, I went to every old movie that played at the Poncan, our town’s converted vaudeville theater.) And they were deep; they were haunted with overtones. “Mulder” with its echoes of “mull” (to ponder) and “molder” (to decay, to turn to dust); “Scully” with its baseball reference wrapped around the obvious “skull.” Not watching the show, I still knew its basic program, that the heroes were FBI agents investigating the paranormal, that Mulder was the intuitive one who believed in telepathy and aliens and Scully was the skeptical one who didn’t, and it resonated because something like that conflict was at work in our lives, too. If we made fun of The X-Files for the simplicity of its contrast between “belief” and “science,” it was because our own experience was just that simple, and because unlike Mulder and Scully we had no language in which to discuss it.

  I took pride in being furiously rational. At the same time I often felt that my sanity was a mirage and that with one second’s concentration I could dispel it forever, like smoke. Mulder and Scully argued about whether the craft that went down in the woods of Wisconsin was a UFO, while we drove at midnight to the old Robin Hood Flour plant by the train tracks, a looming tower of rusted cylinders deserted before we were born, and argued about whether to break in. Mulder and Scully uncovered monsters in the timberlands of Oregon and Virginia and Maine, while in Ponca City we told stories about the murderous spirit who haunted the Indian reservation in the form of a beautiful woman. Known as Deer Woman, she could run alongside cars on the highway and if you looked over into the next lane and made eye contact, she would steal your soul. Which sounds ludicrous, right until the moment when you are seventeen and driving at night down an empty country road.

  We had been lied to so often that we spent half our time seeing through lies, but inexplicable things still happened. We had been told not to understand things we understood, and at the same time we knew there was more to the world than anyone was willing to tell us. The truth was somewhere, and perhaps it was mundane and perhaps it was magical, but then when you are seventeen in a small town, the felt distance between those terms is perhaps less than is commonly supposed.

  And then there was the big thing, the one that was omnipresent in our town, the one The X-Files groped toward but never quite knew what to do with. When our life sciences class arrived at the unit on evolution, our teacher, who was also the wrestling coach, made it clear that he was continuing under protest. He held a piece of chalk as he said this, and stabbed mildly at the air with it. We were all free, he said, “to not necessarily buy into what’s in the book.” Half the class nodded and looked grim.

  One weekend I followed my girlfriend to a raft retreat organized by her church, in some hills three hours from town. My friend and I lost our way looking for the cabin. We got there in the middle of the night. There had already been a bonfire and a sing-along with the youth leader’s guitar and now the teenagers were spread out in the dark summer air, under humid masses of trees, communing with the Spirit. They each held an arm up, like unsteady radios. There was excitement when we appeared because an angel had come down to dance with my girlfriend (she was the pastor’s daughter, the angel always danced with her) and we were the first audience for the story. No, you couldn’t see the angel, but you could tell it was there, she wasn’t just reaching her arms out, she was holding on to something. You could see where its fingers were pressing her skin. I went rigid with contempt, at which point the youth leader, whose name was R.J., got out his guitar again and tried to win me over by sing-talking. “It’s like what Bono said,” he hummed. “Fuck the mainstream.” I spent the night in a rough wooden bunk in a room with five or six earnest boys from farm towns, and if this had been an X-Files episode, if the roof had split open and the floodlights of a UFO pounded down on us, I’m not sure which of us would have felt vindicated.

  * * *

  Of course what I didn’t know then was that The X-Files rigged its own central question, that the dichotomy of science versus belief never resolved in favor of science. Scully was always wrong, always, and most episodes let you know she was wrong before she even appeared on-screen, before she had a chance to speak. The liver-eating immortal bile-mutant would slither through the air-conditioner shaft toward its victim in a shot whose objectivity was not tainted by the presence of a perspective character, and then we’d cut to FBI headquarters, where Mulder, in his Ambien-furred morning voice, was saying, “Hey, Scully, what if the killer’s some kind of bile-mutant,” and Scully would look stricken and respond with a theory about swamp gas or atmospheric contaminants, a theory so self-evidently lame that the viewer was not even expected to remember it. Scully’s wrongness and the show’s determination to see the paranormal everyw
here unwittingly reversed the whole polarity of the series: It became clear before long that what Scully meant by “science” was not “the scientific method” or “testing hypotheses based on observable evidence”—an approach that might lead you to believe in ghosts around the thirtieth time you saw one—but simply “the canon of currently accepted scientific knowledge,” which bizarrely became the show’s most irrational article of faith.

  You could argue, and I would almost agree with you, that beneath all the obvious post-Watergate, post-JFK government-conspiracy machinery, the real subject of The X-Files’ stylized paranoia was the American city’s anxiety toward small towns. The show out-noired noir by recognizing that the most extreme context for modern alienation was not the mean streets of the detective story but a white-collar bureaucracy that extended infinitely above the protagonists—literally into space—and that could control them without their knowing how or why. But in practice, Mulder and Scully spent most of their working hours, especially in the stand-alone “monster of the week” episodes that made up the bulk of the series, pursuing mysteries in Lake Okobogee, Iowa (where Ruby Morris was abducted by aliens in “Conduit”), or Delta Glen, Wisconsin (where the agents investigated a cult in “Red Museum”), or Miller’s Grove, Massachusetts (where cockroaches attacked humans in “War of the Coprophages”). The strangeness and isolation of small towns was a theme the series returned to again and again. One of the show’s most beloved episodes, “Home,” takes place in a small Pennsylvania town where a hideously deformed, inbred family molders in a disintegrating house, a nightmarish vision of the freakish underside of Capraesque normalcy. Darin Morgan, the show’s cleverest writer, had approached the same subject from the opposite side in the second season, when, in “Humbug,” he sent Mulder and Scully to a town populated by circus freaks whose behavior is surprisingly pleasantly normal.