So What If There Were Vampires?
Took a survey of what I watch on the television last night. My choices divide between crimes shows and supernatural or fantasy programs. The latter provides the bulk of my viewing please. This category break down into about four sub genres; people who don’t die (this includes vampires and people repreating the last day of their lives), people returning from the future trying to save us form what lays ahead, aliens among us and space travel. The one quirky outlier of this genre is The Good Place which focuses pretty much entirely on moral philosophy as opposed the characters being dead and awaiting judgments.
Note the first category, the cop shows are colder and filmed in grim grey tones. These tend to focus on logic, intuition and procedure. I have been watching mostly police shows from Europe, i.e., Spain, Britain, France and Finland. A murder is usually involved and the sorting out of the horrors takes an arc of six episodes. I think I am draw to these based on the training my mind has received, you know law school and stuff like that.
I really want to focus on the second genre. Here are a few of shows I have been watching, Humans, Roswell NM (the new one) and Travellers. I did binge watch most of True Blood. The popularity of these shows implies to me that we the television viewing audience, (well, maybe it is the television writing class), have trouble with the issues of potentially finite mortality. Also, we (they) are also struggling with what is moral and what is not. Most of the plot lines involve powers both wonderful and frightening and extended if not eternal life confronting what motivates and animates us of ordinary flesh and a short span of existence. Why do we do good is implied in almost every story line, sometimes it is express, but impliedly it is there every single episode.
True Blood had characters that were purportedly 2000 and 3000 years old. The. writers implied that living over that period stripped these beings of any sense of the burdens, fears and joys that most of us mortals live with day to day. Travellers had characters who were filled with purpose, they were hellbent trying to avoid a dystopian future. These beings once they came from the austere dark world of synthetic food and cowering in glorified huge yurts to be protected from the befouled environment. However, they become enchanted with the choices we humans currently have as to lifestyle, diet and philosophy.
Religion in our modern world is fading. Those in standard Protestant denominations refer to the current generation as the great unchurched mass. Pews are empty and coffers are drying up. I wonder if the prevalence of such programming is sort of bubbling up and out of our desires for more than a span of 70 odd years. In the past we had clerics to dazzle us we heaven or threaten to damn us all to hell; in either case we existed after our mortal bodies failed. I wonder if the tales of aliens and the undead are our creation of a new cannon of hope to stand against existential angst.
Me, I am not looking at these programs for that bulwark against the meaninglessness of life. I am watching the programs because they have attractive women with slim figures, taunt bellies and perky breasts all wearing beautiful clothing. But I think an argument can be made that people have always told stories of the supernatural to express fundamental concerns about the limitations of human life. From Grimm’s Tales to H.G. Wells to H.P. Lovecraft to indigenous peoples origin stories of fantastic eagles and other beasts from the sky, humans have looked for more than the existence that what is found between the forceps and the headstone.
Maybe I am wrong but I really do think the popularity of these programs is tied to so innate will toward life plus more hard wired into our psychological makeup. Time to go back to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment