I recently watched
some episodes of the television series Northern Exposure with a group of friends, a couple of whom had never seen the show. We watched four
episodes: the first two as introductions to the characters, and then
two of my top picks from the series, Burning Down the House
and Cicely. I
was a huge fan of this show when it was on, and in my memory it still
ranks very high on my list of all-time favorite television. I’m
happy to say that, for me at least, it holds up. The newbies became
instant fans as well. I believe that it was a seminal and
transformative show, one of many that helped shape what serial
television has become.
Northern
Exposure was always thought provoking. Watching it now, twenty-five
years since it premiered, it’s still provoking me to think. What
follows here are just some random ideas that popped up while
ruminating on the show, these episodes, and my love of it.
Burning Down the
House is arguably the most
famous and well-known episode. In it the character of Chris Stevens
(portrayed by John Corbett), the town DJ, philosopher and artist,
wants to create a work of art, a performance piece, what he refers to
as a pure moment. He builds a trebuchet (a type of catapult), with
which he plans to fling a cow. When he discovers that this had
already been done in the movie Monty Python and the Holy
Grail he was despondent. His
idea had already been done. The cow had been flung. Ironically it was
Maurice (portrayed by Barry Corbin), the town millionaire and the
person there with the least interest in or understanding of art, who
talked Chris into pursuing his vision.
As
Chris famously says, ‟It’s not what you fling... It’s the fling
itself.”
Here’s
the clip...
While watching this
my friend Ziggy (one of the newbies to the show), leaned over to me
and said, ‟It’s Beanish!”
Without context that
doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but she was completely right.
What’s more, Maurice is totally Mr. Spook in the this scene.
The context I’m
speaking of is the wonderful comic book series Tales of the
Beanworld by Larry Marder. I’ve
written about it at length HERE, so I’m not going to go into all of
the details again, but here’s the context.
Beanish
is the artist of his community. He creates pieces of art that he
calls ‟The Fabulous Look See Show!” He builds art installations
and then shares them with everyone. The scene in the above clip could
have been taken straight from the comic.
To
further the analogy, Maurice takes on the role of Mr. Spook. In the
Beanworld Mr. Spook is the protector of the community. He is not very
imaginative and he alone of all the Beans, simply cannot see
Beanish’s art. Though he never discourages Beanish from doing it,
Mr. Spook cannot comprehend what art is for or about. Watch Maurice’s
reaction at the 0:44 mark in the video and compare it to this scene.
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| ©2015 Larry Marder |
 |
| ©2015 Larry Marder |
I
don’t really have any grand insights into this, I was just struck
by the similarity between two pretty disparate things I love. I do
think both capture the feelings of artists everywhere. Here’s this
fabulous thing I did! Look! See! I’m trying to say something
profound about the world we live in, and I don’t know if I’ve
been successful or not but I want to share it!” I think it also,
gently, captures the experience of those who ‟don’t get it.”
Maurice and Mr. Spook stand outside the artistic experience, but in
these fictional communities they do not hinder the artist, nor are
they ostracized by the artistic community. There is acceptance of
both points of view.
Which
leads to another similarity between Cicely, Alaska and the Beanworld;
they are, in many ways, idyllic communities. I won’t go so far as
to say Utopian because that implies perfection and a lack of
conflict. There are conflicts galore in both Northern Exposure and
Beanworld, but they typically do not include the same type of story
engines that most of our genre fictions employ. But they are places
you would like to live.
Cicely,
specifically. I think part of the success of the show (and there are
many factors), is that it was a story of a community, one we would
all like to be a part of. For me it reflects the ideas of diversity,
of people and ideas, of ways of living. It’s about finding your
place and needing to be accepted in your chosen community for who you
are. That’s something I believe everyone craves for themselves,
even those who are opposed to the same idea for others. Even those
who can’t accept other points of view want to be accepted. We all
want to find our home. There’s no place like it, or so I hear.
But
strangely, our fictions don’t often address this. We seem geared to
narratives based on conflict between competing points of view. The
most popular entertainment these days seems to be the dystopian.
A
friend of mine recently shared the following quote on Tumblr, within
a day or so of my first musings about the semi-Utopian nature of
Cicely.
‟You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible. Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia, you know. My young people’s vocabulary… their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse. Well, do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?” — Junot
Díaz, Art, Race and Capitalism
This really struck
me. I don’t know that there is any type of conspiracy in media to
make this so, but I do think it’s an accurate depiction. What does
it say about us that we can’t imagine a future that is positive?
I’m certainly guilty of this in my media consumption. I’m a fan
of The Walking Dead, both the comic and the TV show. I loved Stephen
King’s The Stand. Mad Max: Fury Road was the surprise hit of the
summer for me. I’m not alone in any of these. None of these
represent a future I want to live through. I don’t think anyone
really does.
The point can be
made that these, and other post-apocalyptic fictions, are about the
triumph of the human spirit in the midst of terrible catastrophe.
Still, they seem to say that we can only expect terrible catastrophe
in our future. Referring to Maslow’s famous Hierarchy, there’s
not a lot of room for art and self actualization when mere survival
is at stake, a situation far too many people in the real world find
themselves in daily without the threat of Zombies or irradiated
mutants.
Odd then that our
fictions often present a world where there would be no opportunity
for fictions to exist (though maybe visions of a Utopian future would
thrive in a wasteland).
The early days of
Science Fiction, and I’m speaking in general terms here because
there are always exceptions, regularly portrayed the future as a
positive thing. Technology was going to save us from drudgery. Flying
cars and teleportation and the elimination of death and disease were
recurring themes. But somewhere our relationship with technology
changed. It brought us cars and TV and medical advances but it also
brought us the Atomic Bomb. Suddenly the possibility of mass
destruction was a reality instead of a fiction.
So our fictions
changed to make our fears manifest, and fear is always more palpable
than hope (which explains a lot of our politics, but that’s a
separate blog I’ll probably never write).
Star Trek is one of
the hopeful SciFi futures that has endured. It predicts a world where
science has solved the world’s problems and people live in a
diverse, multicultural society where actual progress thrives. The
original Enterprise, and to varying extents the all of the subsequent
settings, was a community where you wanted to live. There was the
same sense of belonging and acceptance there that we see in Northern
Exposure. They are communities where you are valued for who
you are, not discriminated against because of who you are.
It’s not just
Science Fiction and visions of the future. To come back to television
a lot of the most popular shows carry an element of the Dystopian
Present. Looking at examples of things I watched and thoroughly
enjoyed I can see the pattern. The motorcycle club of Sons of
Anarchy was a community, but certainly not one I would want to
belong to. For all of their ideals of the freedom of the road and
freedom from societal norms, the rules of belonging to their
community were incredibly limiting and stepping outside of those
rules could have fatal consequences.
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| The cast of Northern Exposure, all alive at the end of the series. |
 |
| The cast of Sons of Anarchy. 8 of these 10 characters died. |
There was a patina
of brotherhood that covered them, and as a viewer I could respond to
these bonds on a visceral level. But time and again one of these
‟brothers” would have to be eliminated ‟for the good” of the
club. There was no real acceptance of differences or diversity. There
was a pretty strict party line that had to be followed. There was no
room for true individuality.
Which holds true for
a lot of subcultures that claim to be about individuality.
So what am I saying
with this rambling set of connections? I’m not exactly sure. The
image of the artist and those who don’t understand him can be seen
as metaphor for anyone who simply wants to be seen and heard by his
community. It’s something everyone can relate to, whether they are
an ‟artist” or not. Maurice and Mr. Spook want their places in
their community to be respected as much as Chris and Beanish do.
To quote Chis from
the Burning Down the House
episode:
‟Look
at this – This is beautiful! We are standing at the center of the
primordial ooze. It’s like the world at the dawn of creation...
‟This
is the answer, right here. Destruction and creation. The scarred
battlefield of life. From the ashes rises the Phoenix! From the skin
rises a new snake!
‟You
look and you look and it’s dark and you don’t even know what
you’re looking for, or if you’ll even see it, or if it even
exists. And then, all of a sudden...”
Just
thought I’d fling this out there.
