Kathryn Bigelow is finally getting her due (Steady Diet of Film, Slate, Salon, etc.) This month Harvard Film Archive has a retrospective of her work (see her in person July 2nd, introducing Hurt Locker.) In addition to Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days, among others, Bigeow also directed part of the prescient Scientology critique Wild Palms.
Oliver Stone’s Prescient SFnal Scientology Critique
“Why should this reality be public domain? What’s so great about it?” asks a Clara Bow-bobbed Kim Cattrall in the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms.” “Tony wants a new and improved reality: controlled by Mimecon and sold straight at 7-11… A world where we don’t have to be afraid to leave our dreams open at night.”
“Wild Palms” isn’t dark enough to be “Twin Peaks” and it isn’t campy enough to be “V,” but the show holds up as a odd document of early 90s speculative fiction (the film is set in 2007.) Producer Oliver Stone might not be known for his futuristic vision, but he certainly is paranoid, and that’s what every dystopic fiction needs. Said EW at the time:
“It was dreamlike and hallucinatory. I put my friends in it. I put famous people in it. I didn’t care about the story. It was a tone poem.” [Writer Bruce Wagner] hangs a right onto La Brea. “Then Oliver saw it.” Oliver Stone knew Wagner from purchasing the film rights to Force Majeure (a movie Stone still hasn’t made), and the Palms cartoon struck a special conspiratorial chord with the JFK director. ”It was so syncretic,” Stone says. (Syncretic? ”Look it up,” he says.) ”It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn’t your wife, maybe your kids aren’t your kids. It really appealed to me.”
Like much of early-90s science fiction, the focus is on televised holograms. A corporate body, with some zen-relgious pretensions and Hollywood ties — not unlike L. Ron Hubbard’s sect — is experimenting with bringing TV to life. These “New Realists” — insisting they are just Buddhists in practice, freeing the mind from the body — work with a narcotic drink “Mimezine.” Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s idea of corporately-distributed hallucinogens in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” and William Gibson’s virtual worlds (Gibson even makes a sheepish cameo as himself in the first episode,) the most surprising thing about Wild Palms is it is actually pretty good.
It was originally a Bruce Wagner-penned comic in Details magazine that eventually spawned a book, “The Wild Palms Reader,” containing timelines, secret letters, and bios of all the characters, as well as contributions from scientists, sci-fi writers (Gibson, Thomas Disch, Bruce Sterling,) musicians (Genesis P. Orridge, Malcolm McLaren, Lemmy from Moterhead) and others like Mary Gaitskill, Jane Pratt, and ex-CIA Operative E. Howard Hunt. To hype the program, ABC offered 900-773-WILD (75 cents per minute,) offering tips and storyline cues. It was ultimately a flop, and still is, unfairly. Maybe it’s just to early for cult-classic status? Or maybe the miniseries format is just too awkward in length, which is why only PBS still airs them (”V,” for that matter, isn’t as cult-y in popularity as it seems it should be.)
Kathryn Bigelow (”Strange Days”) directed some of the episodes, and Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the creepy minimalist soundtrack. James Belushi plays Harry Wuckoff, a patent attorney, offered a job with the “Wild Palms Newtork” — Channel 3 — run by Senator Anton Kreutzer. Sen. Kreutzer used to be a sci-fi writer, his motto is “everything must go.” In addition to virtual programming, the “Fathers” have been kidnapping children since the 1960s. Wagner doesn’t even try to conceal the resemblance of “Synthiotics” to “Dianetics,” but Scientology was more benign in those days (Tom Cruise had only just begun his studies.) One doesn’t have to be Theresa Duncan to doubt this script could ever be filmed now.
In addition to the virtual worlds and Scientology send-up, the joy in watching “Wild Palms” is its naive perception of what the world of today would look like. Oliver Stone appears as himself, talking about “recently released” documents that prove his film JFK was correct and alluding to the “late” Jack Valenti (who did in fact die last year.) There are no cell phones and nothing like the Internet or email, and people smoke freely indoors, but the looks and feel of people’s homes is what seems most “off.” The utilitarian office tables and chairs, beige walls, and Times New Roman fonts show just how far we’ve come with design, in that future-speculating set designers couldn’t even imagine a world where college students decorate with IKEA and Trader Joe’s enables gourmet-enough hors d’oeuvre for the most casual get-togethers.
Ironically, the wardrobe stylings are what give the series a modern look—mostly because early 90s looks have yet see a revival on the runways. Those boxy silhouettes and monochrome jewel-tones are exaggerated with a Jetsons-spin. In an early scene, Cattrall wears a beautiful burgundy satin dress with an unusual Grecian-inspired satin draping, but just about everything she wears could easily be in Proenza Schouler’s next collection. That being said, I can’t really see a future in menswear for the Edwardian collars and neckties Belushi wears.
Related links:
- Wild Palms and the “Wild Palms Reader”
- “Neuromancer” by William Gibson
- Erik Davis’ review in the Village Voice
- David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
- Coilhouse, “Inside Scientology’s ‘Psychiatry Kills’ Exhibit”
- The New Yorker, “Chateau Scientology”
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