[conspire] OT: The double-feature from hell

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 19:28:38 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at linuxmafia.com
Subject: [skeptic] The double-feature from hell
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

I've recently watched two extraordinary television miniseries, nearly
back-to-back, the composite effect of that juxtaposition being truly
weird on one's psyche.  I highly recommend both in very different ways,
so I figure I ought to review them here.

One was HBO's 'Chernobyl' (five-part historical drama, written/directed
by Craig Mazin, best known for several fluffy comedies, and for having
suffered through freshman year at Princeton with Ted Cruz as a roommate).
One of Mazin's main sources was Svetlana Alexeivitch's set of first-hand
accounts, _Voices From Chernobyl_.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)

The other was BBC & Amazon Prime's 'Good Omens' (six-part comic fantasy,
written by Neil Gaiman based on the inspired comedy novel he co-wrote
with the now-late Sir Terry Pratchett.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens_(miniseries)

If you _really_ want to mess up your brain, interleave episodes of those
two miniseries.  I disclaim responsibility for any psychiatric
complications, though:  You're on your own, there.


'Chernobyl' is meticulous, serious, and totally gripping.  The first
four episodes work chronologically forward from the moment of the April
26, 1988, 1:23am disaster through the immediate aftermath and cleanup, 
covering accurately the technical and politically-driven screwups and
needless deaths.  The fifth is an equally meticulous if much less tense 
recap/exposė using as its framing the (intended) show trial of the three
plant staff chosen to be fall-guys, where our main viewpoint character,
Dr. Valery Legasov, subverts the show trial in a tour-de-force
reconstruction for an audience of Soviet nuclear engineers and others,
showing that, yes, the three defendants contributed to the disaster, but
that it wouldn't have happened without a concealed defect in the
RBMK-series reactors known to the Powers That Be but classified secret
to hide it, plus pervasively shoddy and unsafe practices (such as
graphite-tipped control rods and no containment vessel, because those
made it cheaper) dictated by the Soviet party line.

Mazin's recreation of the look and feel of the 1986 Soviet Union is uncanny.
I know because I was there a couple of times, in the 70s and the 80s,
and Mazin's production team nailed it.  Ex-Soviet commentators, who would
know better than my Western-running-dog-imperialist self, have said the
same thing.  (Mazin avoided trying to do East-Slavic accents to avoid
the Boris & Natasha effect, and so apparently being Soviet is best
emulated by speaking English with vaguely or wholly British accents.  No
American accents were permitted, as Yankdom would have thrown viewers
out of the narrative.  No kidding; Mazin decided that.)

Some factual details were harmlessly flubbed like the absurd notion of
taking a flight by military helicopter from Moscow to Pripyat, 700 km
away -- forgiveable under dramatic licence.  And everyone calling each
other 'comrade' (tovarich)?  What, because it was 1925?

Where the series totally fails, however, is politics. the details of the
Soviet system, and the workings of power.  (This feeds back into factual
accuracy, e.g., Legasov's big moment during the show trial never
happened and could never have, for lots of reasons including him not
having been there.)  This was covered a week ago in _The New Yorker_ by
ex-Soviet journalist Masha Gessen, who was formerly and natively a
Muscovite but managed to find a trifecta of ways to alienate the Putin
regime:  She's (a) Jewish, (b) lesbian with adopted Russian children,
and (c) personally pissed off Putin in 2012 when she was editor of
popular-science journal _Vokrug Sveta_ ('Around the World') at which she
refused to send a reporter to cover a frivolous and blatantly political
Putin photo op over at the Russian Geographical Society.  

Not long after being summarily dismissed from the magazine, Gessen did
the manoeuvre we Americans call 'getting the hell out of Dodge', and
became a dual American/Russian citizen with emphasis on American.  And 
thus, as a science-heavy journalist with deep experience with the Soviet
and post-Soviet system, she's nearly the perfect critic for the series's 
myopias:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong

A couple of snippets:

  In Episode 3, for example, Legasov asks, rhetorically, "Forgive
  me -- maybe I've just spent too much time in my lab, or maybe I'm just
  stupid.  Is this really the way it all works?  An uninformed, arbitrary
  decision that will cost who knows how many lives that is made by some
  apparatchik, some career Party man?"  Yes, of course this is the way it
  works, and, no, he hasn't been in his lab so long that he didn't realize
  that this is how it works.  The fact of the matter is, if he didn't know
  how it worked, he would never have had a lab.

Gessen zeroes in, in particular, on one of the main protagonists, a
Belarussian nuclear scientist named Ulyana Khomyuk, whom Mazin created
as a 'composite' intended to stand for many real Soviet scientists who
helped get the truth out.  Problem:  Khomyuk is, in short, a fantasy
plot-resolution device:

  Khomyuk appears to embody every possible Hollywood fantasy.  She is a
  truth-knower: the first time we see her, she is already figuring out
  that something has gone terribly wrong, and she is grasping it terribly
  fast, unlike the dense men at the actual scene of the disaster, who seem
  to need hours to take it in.  She is also a truth-seeker: she interviews
  dozens of people (some of them as they are dying of radiation exposure),
  digs up a scientific paper that has been censored, and figures out
  exactly what happened, minute by minute.  She also gets herself arrested
  and then immediately seated at a meeting on the disaster, led by
  Gorbachev.  None of this is possible, and all of it is hackneyed.  The
  problem is not just that Khomyuk is a fiction; it's that the kind of
  expert knowledge she represents is a fiction.  The Soviet system of
  propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of
  spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning
  impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a
  monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

As Gessen points out, Mazin thereby leaned on a Hollywood variant of the
Great Man Theory, where Khomyuk is practically a scientific Harry
Potter.

Totalitarian states do not have that kind of vulnerability to plucky
scientists and to 'A Few Good Men' staged court testimony.  Pretending
it were so makes for great drama but poor historical accuracy about the
mechanisms of power.

Nonetheless, this was _extremely_ worth sitting through all five
episodes, and, if many of its scenes don't give you nightmares, you
should get your imagination checked.  And the eerie background music by
Hildur Guðnadóttir (of Iceland - where else?) makes what would already
be gripping, instead be edge-of-seat gripping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDnT_ORAnVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R21xLNqNNLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM_HhU_CV44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6K3_7J3fwI




I somehow accidentally stumbled across the novel _Good Omens: The Nice
and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch_ soon after it was
published in 1990.  Accidentally is the perfect way to discover that
great delight of a book, because nothing blows away your expectations
quite like having none.  It's an example of that rare triumph that
sometimes happens when two extremely gifted writers set out to amuse
each other and magic results.  The writers in this case were Neil
Gaiman and the (now tragically deceased) Sir Terry Pratchett.  I wasn't
yet a devoted Pratchett fan, but was about to become one.

The magic in this case stemmed from Pratchett and Gaiman's idea to stew
together a parody of several things:  (a) The junk American supernatural
thriller flick _The Omen_, (b) Richmal Crompton's mostly-1920s series of
adventure novels about an 11-year-old ne'er-do-well schoolboy and his 
gang of friends (his 'Just William' series), and (c) the Biblical
Apocalypse and End Times.

I actually didn't fully 'get' the authors taking the piss out of 
_The Omen_ the first read through, but the affectionate 'Just William'
parody was unmistakeable.  _But_, here's the thing:  It  wasn't just
that, but much more than the sum of the parts, because Pratchett by
himself could lure you along on a charming-seeming narrative where you
suddenly realise _much_ more is being said than you would expect, and
adding Gaiman turned out to be nearly Pratchett^2.  There are peerless
bits where one of our two main characters, the angel Arizaphale,
formerly the Angel of the Eastern Gate at Eden, and now owner of a
rare-book store in London Soho, muses about his collection of Wicked
Bibles, every one of which is taken straight from reality.  The Four
Horsemen play a role, and also the Lesser Four Horsemen (the latter
sadly dropped from Gaiman's BBC adaptation because Auntie Beeb's budget
didn't stretch that far).  The music of Queen is frequently featured
because of a running gag that cassette tapes left in a car glovebox
inevitably transmogrify into 'The Best of Queen'. 

The through-line is that Arizaphale and his frenemy Crowley the demon 
(and sometime Edenic serpent) really would rather the world not come to
an end, just because the Son of Satan has been born and accidentally 
raised by the wrong family in an idyllic Oxfordshire town (Tadfield),
and conspire to prevent it.

Gaiman and pterry (as Pratchett was known to online fans) always hoped
to get together for a sequel, to be called _668: The Neighbour of the Beast_,
but that sadly never happened, and Pratchett fell victim to, and died in
2015 at age 66 from, what he referred to as 'The Embuggerance', a rare
early-onset form of Alzheimer's, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), that
subtly but gradually was destroying his ability to express himself
following his 2007 diagnosis, though he kept up producing highly
creative output including many solo and jointly-written books right up
to the end.

WHich brings me to the six-part adaptation.  It's lovely.  In places,
it's screamingly funny.  It's sharp-eyed and urbane and, like Pratchett
and Gaiman, is imbued with the hope that despite being terribly
disappointing, humanity will muddle through by being human.  And, more
than the novel, it's a rather beautiful love story, that of the two
conspirators against both Heaven and Hell.

The authors had a point, by the way:  The M25 orbital road around London
really _is_ Exhibit A as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the
affairs of Man.  I've seen those tailbacks.

When this pending BBC production was announced, and it was disclosed that
not only would Gaiman be main writer and executive producer, but that
David Tennant would play Crowley, all of us fans said 'Brilliant!
Nobody could be better.'  And he was indeed perfect -- as was Michael
Sheen as Arizaphale, Sheen being unfamiliar to me.  There was a surprise
show-stealer in the form of Jon Hamm as Archangel Gabriel, the very
model of the bad boss.  Miranda Richardson played the formerly minor
roll of Madame Tracey and made it count.  And the Voice of God (for
voiceover in a few places) was Frances McDormand, which somehow really
worked.

A number of new scenes were spliced in by Gaiman, particularly the
ending.  Again, it worked.  There are a number of subtle Pratchett
'Easter eggs' throughout, plus an end-time screen in the credits saying
'For Terry'.

Adaptation and new scenes were necessary because it's a different medium,
after all, and Gaiman knew this -- even though I slightly missed the
book's famous concluding lines (parodying Orwell):

  If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his
  friends. And a summer that never ends. 

  And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot ... no, imagine a
  trainer [RM: 'sneaker' in the American edition], laces trailing, 
  kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, 
  and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; 
  imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular
  song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, 
  all human ... 

  Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield ... 
  ... forever.

And, as with _Chernobyl_, but very differently, ah, the music, this time
by one David Arnold -- was just bloody perfect, especially combined with
the production's story-referencing animated sequence in the opening
credits, that was something like a cross between Douglas Adams's HHGTTG
and Terry Gilliam's cartoon panels.

Opening title:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_q57nJwt4A

Better still, same with the animated sequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsrPO8qslBE

I think this is the end-credits music from episode 1.  Note the 
Queen- riffing in the middle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_6wJU27pA4


See it.  You'll have a delightful time, and maybe want to ring up a
friend to have $BEVERAGE_OF_CHOICE together.



Or see both _Chernobyl_ and _Good Omens_, and have a really weird weekend.



_______________________________________________
skeptic mailing list
skeptic at linuxmafia.com
http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/skeptic
To reach the listadmin, mail rick at linuxmafia.com 

----- End forwarded message -----