The Holo-Men: Bruce Wagner’s “Wild Palms”

There’s a perverse glee to be found whenever the world catches up to science-fiction. Sometimes it comes in the form of mankind matching the imagined potential of what was once the most seemingly impossible of technological achievements—setting foot on the moon, exploring the ocean depths, or stringing the world on so many wires of electronic communication. At other moments, we see our human race fall prey to all the very worst nightmares rumbling about in our collective unconsciousness—so many new innovations in terrible weaponry, dystopian states and corporate greed reigning supreme on all the distant horizons of our tomorrows. Most of the time, however, all we ever really see is the march of history walk past the imaginary watershed moments without so much as a passing glance, pushing all those possible achievements yet-to-come even deeper into the distance as we struggle to understand even the most basic and rudimentary forms of positive and negative scientific advancement. At times like those, we may even observe all those one-time far-off dates on the calendar grow closer and pass us by like former friends at a school reunion that barely even take the time to recognize anyone at all. 1984 has come and gone, and Orwell’s world of Big Brother has not yet come to pass (or at least has done so in a much more subtle fashion); 2001 happened ten years ago and we’re certainly no closer to colonizing the moon or exploring Jupiter; when 2019 reaches our temporal shores, I doubt we’ll even have to worry about Replicants or whether or not they dream of electric sheep.

All of those were big picture, blue-sky gambits of science-fiction imagination, though, and occasionally it’s possible to look back at those stories that looked forward and wonder why we haven’t yet grabbed the fruit that they saw hanging within our grasp. After all, was 2007 really such a far off date to suppose we might begin to dabble in holographic entertainment or honest-to-goodness virtual reality? Isn’t it kind of disappointing that we’ve really never left the stage of telecommunications-technology that was prevalent in the days when the internet and e-mail were just catching on with the public at large? Oh sure, we’ve streamlined the process from the bad old minutes it took to sign on with dial-up modems thanks to broadband and wifi, and certainly we’ve all become more sophisticated with the ins-and-outs of online socialization—the masked-ball anonymity of usenet groups and AOL replaced by the glass-house politics of Facebook—but all we have are faster, fancier and cheaper versions of toys that came out well over two decades ago. We should be at the point where two people can shake hands with one another even while standing on different continents, and not merely stroking their iPads at the same time while on video-chat or Second Life. Though it’s often a maligned concept amongst game-designers grown weary with too much talk of immersion and blurred lines between the real and the virtual, it’s a shame that we’re no closer to the idea of the holodeck right now than when Gene Roddenberry first dreamed it up for Star Trek: The Next Generation, save for some pathetic attempts at CG imitations beamed up on live CNN telecasts during their coverage of the 2008 Presidential election.

All these years gone by, and we’re nowhere near the promised land of VR equality, offering everyone a beautiful new beginning in the paradise of limitless cyberspace, but then perhaps that’s only because we never found our own technological Moses to lead us through the desert. Had we found a guru of that sort (and not merely the type who stands on stage in a black turtleneck remembering his next big announcement at the last minute), perhaps we might have finally be living in the kind of world that writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson have imagined for decades, for better or worse. But then again, gurus like that often come with all their own price-tags of unhealthy philosophical demands, the kinds that make a rebirth on the net feel a bit too close for comfort to the old ideas of surrendering the livelihood of the flesh for the awakening of the spirit—enlightenment at the cost of suicidal blood sacrifice. Whether it’s drinking the Kool-Aid or waiting for that unidentified flying chariot to swing low and whisk you away from the confines of your earthly body, there’s no shortage of crazies and cults out there with religious doctrines that border on the clinical, instead of the mystical, and though their alleged casualties have never been as direct or numerous as those of Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, the Church of Scientology has probably stood at the forefront of the popular imagination when it comes to our collective fear of religious beliefs that sound more like Star Wars fan-fics than gospel truth. L. Ron Hubbard once made his living as a science-fiction author, after all, and it’s hard not to think of that background when considering the rise of a faith that’s become one of the most unusual fixtures on the Hollywood scene for the better part of fifty years.

Perhaps if power-brokers like them had a cyberpunk mythology to their faith instead of mere space-opera, we might’ve gotten closer to all tomorrow’s VR parties, after all. That’s one of the kernels of history-gone-another-way that provides the impetus for the technological advancements, subtle as they are, of Bruce Wagner’s Wild Palms comics and miniseries, broadcast on ABC back in 1993. As far as storytelling goes, its quality is debatable at best—the narrative is complicated beyond repair, the dialogue is hackneyed and hamfisted in its attempts to cram in whatever pop-cultural name droppings it can get away with (Robert Longo paintings, Bob Dylan songs, and even William Gibson himself all are featured), and the acting is perhaps the most diverse and eclectic assortment of scenery-chewing antics ever put forth by a major network in a forum other than a daytime soap. As far as science-fiction goes, it’s interesting, but by no means a definitive representative of any of its myriad sub-genres—its vision of a major-media conglomerate putting holographic entertainment out on the market as a means of subtly shaping mass perception of reality is interesting, though by no means unique, and often gets muddied in the increasingly complicated strands of its plot, as various rival factions wage a multi-generational war for the hearts and minds of Los Angeles. As a piece of baby-boomer nostalgia-thriller, it’s positively bizarre, and at times seemingly counterintuitive with its themes—yes, it’s all very well and good that James Belushi wakes up one morning to discover that his wife isn’t his wife and his children might actually be sinister pawns in an elaborate conspiracy to rule the world, but the correct needle-drop for that moment of domestic paranoia shouldn’t be just another lame cover of “All Along the Watchtower” (between its appearances in Watchmen and the Battlestar Galactica remake, it should be all but banned from any further use in sci-fi), but something by the Talking Heads.

So much of the rich potentials of the cyberpunk plot get lost in the way of so much Wonder Years-style longing for the past, just from the perspective of middle age. It feels somewhat like what you’d get if you mixed the existential avant-garde of THX 1138 with the dopey nostalgia of American Graffiti. That’s not to say that it’s entirely useless, however, because indeed the series does at least fly by as a piece of mildly intelligent entertainment, the sort of thing that would be perfect to watch as a marathon on a long international flight—the television equivalent of the paperbacks you purchase in the duty-free store of your departing airport and throw into the garbage bin in the city of your destination. ABC put out a lot of these strained, surreal headscratchers in the wake of their mishandling of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and though it may not be saying very much at all, Wild Palms at the very least outshines similar B-grade dramas like Stephen King’s The Stand, and works in the same satirical register as that program did at its best of moments, a show that embraces the camp that it’s mocking so much that you’d be hard pressed to tell at times exactly where its tongue is in regards to its cheek. Even the opening titles have a wonderfully so-lame-it’s-good quality to them, awfully plain in the same way that Tommy Wiseau’s infamous The Room is with its postcard shots of sunsets and palm-trees, its eye-rollingly romantic muzack score and its static text (any graphic designer worth their salt would cringe knowingly). At times, the series seems to vacillate between trying way too hard to shoehorn any kind of cultural relevance into its already potent script and a kind of slow, subtle apathy for any of the complications it creates along the way—though big things happen, people die and life-as-we-know-it is brought to some kind of irrevocable shift of consciousness, it’s awfully hard to keep track of precisely what has occurred by the end, not because the rug’s been pulled out from our feet to reveal an endless parade of turtles all the way down, but simply due to the fact that it’s hard to both follow the increasingly bizarre events while still keeping a strong emotional bond with its two-dimensional characters.

What saves the program (if anything truly does) is the investment that the eyebrow raisingly impressive cast pours into their roles (seriously, where else are you going to find Robert Loggia, David Warner, Brad Douriff and Angie Dickinson all onscreen at the same time?) and especially the eye-opening pop-art visuals provided by its roster of directors, which includes genre auteurs like Keith Gordon and Katheryn Bigelow. Thanks to their studied, yet playful use of color, frame and movement, all of the script’s nods to the likes of Longo, Dylan and Gibson find themselves articulated in more than mere dialogue asides, allowing them to be expressed directly in visual displays of off-the-wall holographics and surreal suburban landscapes that take full advantage of the medium of television—even without closed-captions, all those pop-culture references really can fall on deaf ears, thanks to how well they’re put on screen in a form we all can see. Perhaps most savvy of all is the way that Wagner and the various directors subtly turn some of the most familiar artifacts of the domestic landscape into something utterly alien and threatening. Sometimes it’s the way they create a network of underground dissidents who travel beneath the streets of L.A. through tunnels accessed through drained out swimming pools, raising the image of John Cheever’s The Swimmer, stubbornly making his way across the quaint suburban landscape through so many shallow ends. Others, it’s how they treat the artifacts of mass-media itself, whether with all the new holographic toys or merely the show’s increasingly outdated format of television itself. Though he is by no means the most distinguished director on the show’s line-up, Peter Hewitt managed to create some of the most compelling images of the series in his 90 minute pilot, especially in those moments where the camera swung back to look not at but through the television screen itself, targeting its unsuspecting audience with its omnipresent gaze. It was especially disturbing to see little Ben Savage, the younger sibling of Wonder Years star Fred Savage, gazing back at us through the abyss the cathode-ray tube and spouting off lines in a hammy holo-sitcom (not that different from what he eventually starred in on Boy Meets World) in between childlike assassinations performed for his cult-masters.

At times like that, it hardly matters that Wild Palms covers ground that was probably served better by the likes of Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic or even a Cliff’s Notes reading of Marshall McLuhan. For all its faults, Wagner and his directors do a fantastic job of distilling the matters of their medium for a key handful of perfectly expressed and chilling messages—Big Brother may have outgrown dystopia’s demographics, but Little Brother is always watching.