The Culture Beat

The popular cable show (Friday’s and other times on the National Geographic Channel) featuring Cesar Millan has become one of my wife and my favorite shows.  We have two cats and no dogs but we find the show fascinating.  For those who haven’t yet heard of Millan, he came to fame in Los Angeles when he became known for being able to handle practically any “problem dog,” who was driving its owners to distraction with biting, barking and other distracting and neurotic behavior.  Raised in the Mexican countryside, Cesar grew up watching packs of dogs on his grandfather’s ranch interact with each other and humans and the boy made a deep study of dog psychology.  He realized that dogs have an innate need to be led by a pack leader and lacking that, will act out aggressively.  

When he began working as a dog groomer in L.A., he was dismayed to see how Americans treated their dogs like humans, often child surrogates, and the dogs suffered under such anthropomorphizing.  They were unable to feel the security of a pack leader so they took on the role themselves and their owners paid for it.  Cesar applied the intuitive skills he had grown up knowing, applying, in this order, “exercise, discipline and affection,” which freed the dogs from their desperately self-imposed dominance in a household to be happily calm and submissive when their owners became calm and assertive.

One media spotlight that put Millan’s methods into the national consciousness was Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “What the Dog Saw,” that linked Cesar’s way, with studies by movement specialists.  After centuries of breeding, dogs naturally focus on human movement and body language–they sense the mood of a person through the nonverbals of posture, eye contact and other factors.  They sense when their owners are in charge–or not–and respond accordingly.

The Dog Whisperer features segments of Millan making calls on households that have contacted his production crew with their doggie problems and he interviews the owners without prior knowledge of their situation. Usually a dog is aggressively acting out his insecurity issues or phobias and within minutes, typically, Cesar has instructed the owners how to address the problem, which of course makes for dramatic television as we watch the dogs transformed into calm, submissive pooches by the segment’s end. The owners often need to continue applying the proper discipline and leadership and in these cases, success follows. After three seasons, the show continues to fascinate as new cases of strange behavior are confronted and solved.

I like the show because I believe that Millan has discovered something true about the natural order–the marvelous relationship between man and his best friend took thousands of years to develop and Cesar recognizes that modern households are dysfunctional when they seek to humanize these amazing canines–dogs are happiest when owners treat them like dogs. Furthermore, humans who learn the lessons of being a calm, yet assertive individual, prosper in a variety of ways in other areas of their lives as they cease from striving and become their best self.

Those who watched Friday’s grand finale might be interested in several links sent to me by our man in Hollywood, Thom Parham. Here’s a Chicago Tribune blog entry that features numerous elements including an interview with show creator Ron Moore, and several of the stars. It addresses several of the religious aspects of the show now that it’s revealed to have played a key part in the series. This is an another interview that adds more juicy background. For those interested in what I thought about it and who don’t mind spoilers, I’ll say that it was a very satisfactory ending to probably the most ambitious dramatic television series in history. Where else would you see the running themes of examining questions of human nature, war, technology and freedom versus destiny and the unseen but traceable hand of the divine? Battlestar Galactica was intended by Moore to be the antithesis of Star Trek, a franchise he had worked on for years and that he knew needed to be transcended in order to renew the potential of the science fiction genre. Thus, humanity is seen as both blessed with nobility and cursed with venality, often in the same characters. Never was a show able to have such high stakes and try its characters each week in a unending series of thankless choices that dissected their souls. Yes, it was fraught with darkness, but that made the ending that much better, as the name, “Daybreak,” indicates, the show was ultimately about hope and a much better world if we would choose wisely. And though no traditional theist, Moore cannot help but display a central belief that there is some kind of overseeing agency in the cosmos working for our ultimate good, weaving itself into our lives, our decisions, and opening doors we didn’t deserve to go through. He doesn’t want to give us answers he doesn’t have but he served his audience well by treating it like adults and raising a great many good questions few programs have the will to pursue so relentlessly. For that, the show achieved a level of greatness that is singular and indicative of the potential for a medium once commonly derided as mindless entertainment. Television is growing up, thanks to the few shows like Battlestar Galactica.

I’m starting a new occasional series of posts on television programs I watch that might interest you. The first is on a show I’ve followed closely since it’s mini-series debut and which now how three more episodes before it’s finale. Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel was a reboot of the late seventies’ Star Wars wannabe. As I discussed early on in a 2005 Breakpoint piece, it’s story of a ragtag fleet of humanity’s remnants fleeing the robotic Cylon forces that had destroyed it’s 12 home worlds could be read as a study in clashing culture in the post 9/11 age. Humans must retain their values in their war of survival against their enemy Other to justify their right to exist. Never has a television program consistently given me a sense of disquiet when I sat down to watch it–anything could happen to almost any character and often did as they are pressed much further towards doubt, despair and few good choices as they searched for the mythical destination of Earth. This last season promises answers to the many questions as to what agency has been behind events and interventions into both the human and Cylon races–increasingly we have seen evidence of a invisible hand–whether natural or supernatural–overseeing revelations and changes of fortune.

It would take way too long to catch newcomers up on where we are so near to the end so, with the recommendation that you start catching up on back season via rented or bought DVDs, or online episodes and come back and read this later, I’ll issue a SPOILER ALERT to those who wish to do so. The rest of you get to hear my current theory of What’s Behind All This. Based on this week’s episode, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” I’m wondering if I glimpse the ultimate theme of the series. Here goes:

In the episode we saw Starbuck, shaken to her core since learning that she had crashed on Earth, and, after finding her wrecked Viper and a decayed corpse with her dogtags, was wondering WHAT she was. Cylons could be “resurrected” into new bodies with intact memories. Did that happen to her? But she knows that she isn’t one of the 12 models of Cylons–so, who is she?

Three weeks ago we learned that there was a seventh Cylon model that was killed earlier in the race’s history. Called Daniel, the only artistic model was destroyed by the Cylon Cavil, in a Cain/Abel analog. Last night’s story had Kara Thrace (Starbuck) in the bar trying to remember a song her father had taught her on the piano. She is helped by the bar’s piano player who becomes a sort of proxy for her father/teacher. Using the drawing human/Cylon child Hera gave her, she finds her “muse-ic” and together the two play the song. This is a breakthrough moment for Kara, recapturing long-suppressed memories of her father’s love and approval. Several of the Final Five Cylons hear the tune and recognize it is the music each of them heard right before they discovered they were sleeper Cylons in the human community.

When they ask Starbuck where she learned the tune, we see that the piano player is gone. It seems that the unseen element guiding both Cylon and human destinies has appeared to Kara to nudge her to the next point in her self-discovery.

That’s when my wife got a flash of insight–she thinks that the Piano Man was a psychic expression of the long lost Daniel, the artistic Cylon, who is orchestrating events and characters. If this is so, and if indeed the culmination of the story is at hand, I think we may be seeing that the guiding hand behind events is somehow the power of art, the cultural phenomenon that tells our stories and gives our lives meanings. If so, and it’s too early to be sure of course, then this would seem to exclude a purely supernatural explanation for the providential interventions in the saga. (See now why this wooly theorizing would be confusing to almost anyone not steeped in the series’ lore?)

There are other elements pointing to this as well. The visions of Baltar, and others include an opera house where “the shape of things to come” is revealed. So, music, or in a larger sense, art, is a trigger into identity and possibly dramatic resolution, may be the overriding theme of Battlestar Galactica. Just my guess. It won’t be long before we know what the frac is going on.

I have now become re-engaged with the complicated series to a degree I haven’t known since sometime in the second season. How do I know I’m more engaged? Well, this season I’ve had two dreams about the show, same as I did the first season, so I know the show has gotten back deep into my psyche again.

This week’s episode, “The Constant,” was one of the closest things to a stand-alone episode we’ve seen in years. Poor Desmond, who got a blast of electromagnetic radiation at the end of the second season, finds that his helicopter trip from the island out to the ostensible rescuers ship, causes him to become “unstuck in time,” his consciousness bouncing back to 1996 and his army days. He has no memory of the island and so bounces from 2004 “present” and the past. He learns he must contact rescuer Michael Faraday in the past at his Oxford University office in order to get, yes, back to the future without going crazy or dying of a brain aneurism. Faraday tells him he needs an anchor across time, a “constant,” to stabilize his consciousness and save his life. The only person he knows who could fulfill that role is Penelope, the woman he left behind when he joined the army. Desmond had set sail for a race around the world to win her respect and love again when he landed on the mysterious island. Now that he is adrift in time, can he find her and convince her to remain true to him?

The well-written episode pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five a time-tripping sci-fi classic, as well as, of course, the Marty McFly/Doc Brown dynamic, but it’s the deeply romantic element and it’s resolution that gave the episode, in a a series long allergic to explanations or payoffs, some small sense of closure. The plot itself reminds me of The Outer Limits series from the 1960s which featured some nifty sci-fi themes with commentary on human nature at the center. We now know the island is apparently itself out of sync with the movement of time in the rest of the world–time moves more quickly there–just like in Narnia.

An allusion that others have already picked up on but which just occurred to me is based on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Ulysses, a soldier sailing home to his beloved wife, Penelope, is waylaid by sorcery, monsters and other hazards on strange islands. Desmond’s Penelope, like Ulysses’, is the homing beacon that keep the hero focused.

There is enough happening now that the series no longer seems to be spinning its wheels in the muddle of endless mysteries and some momentum has made it seem like time is indeed speeding up on Lost.

After writing the post below, I found some fascinating analysis at the Entertainment Weekly site. Jeff Jensen, a professing Christian and one of their busier writers, has been writing a weekly online episode analysis for some time. I’ve found it whimsical, insightful witty, cogently argued and sometimes completely over the top, a delirious flood of chatty scrutinizing of every plot point, real or muddied to try to explain what the heck’s happening on the island. This week’s analysis of “Confirmed Dead,” the episode to which I was responding below, is Jensen at his best with some undeniably compelling points about the four new characters that dropped down to join the castaways. One of them, Charlotte, who finds her parachute lines snagged by a tree limb leaving her hanging upside down over a pond. She frees herself and falls into the water and we see a look of happiness spread over her face, as if she’s happy to–what–be back again? Here’s Jensen’s interpretation:

But there was something more to her reaction — something that reminded me of another fantastical tale about an enchanted homecoming. The book is Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis, the sequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The story starts with a chapter called ”The Island,” in which the Pevensie kids return to Narnia via a mysterious island marked by ancient ruins and odd creatures. First thing they do: play in the water. Maybe I’m just fishing again. But if you think I’m wrong, then you owe me a better explanation why Charlotte Staples Lewis has been assigned a name so conspicuously similar to the author’s unfurled handle, Clive Staples Lewis.

Lost is full of all types of allusions, literary, scientific and otherwise, and the writers have said that characters’ names mean something significant (Jack Shepherd, John Locke, etc.) So now we have a character clearly meant to evoke another story of characters who move from the ordinary world to a fantasy one and are delighted. But Jensen has more–he makes a good case that the Freighter Four as he calls the ostensible rescuers, are actually based on a team of superheroes. Check it out.

=============================================
Original post:
I recently voiced my problems with the returning ABC drama, specifically it’s “mystery of the week” syndrome which averages one new unexplained conundrum an episode, accumulated over three seasons, with few real revelations about why the island of lost souls is so strange and deadly–and frustrating. Last week’s season premiere did nothing to alleviate my irritation with the producers’ lack of anything that would move the plot forward. We saw more “flashforwards” of the “Oceanic Six,” the survivors who apparently were rescued but now, in the future, lived in as much pain and confusion as they had on the island and now were contemplating getting back to the island. Besides the headache-inducing problem of whether this is the real future or a possible future if Jack, Kate, Hurley, and three others escape this season, there’s the exasperating rock-and-a-hard-place situation where no matter what they do, the survivors are doomed to various forms of risk and misery–with no answers until apparently the last episodes of the last season that, with the writers’ strike slowing down production, seems further away than ever.

Thus, this week’s episode, which introduces three new characters (the parking lot for the show’s featured players must have been expanded yet again over the summer ). While seeming to be rescuers they are in fact seeking to capture the Others’ leader Ben, now the prisoner of the faction of the survivors who believer the “rescuers” mean only harm. After Ben tries to kill one of the rescuers, and is beaten for maybe the sixth time, this time by Sawyer, John Locke decides it’s finally time to put the maliciously manipulative Ben out of their misery with a bullet. Under a direct mortal threat, Ben was finally forced (we think) to reveal something of what he knows. He gave them the name and a detailed background of the rescuer he’d just tried to kill. And he said he knew all this and more because he has a man on their ship.

Finally, I had a sense that the ratty little creep was being honest and forthcoming. Any such information seems like a fresh cool breeze on an island stifling with unresolved enigmas. Are producer/writers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof finally moving their stalled tanker off the rocks of overplotting and down the river of resolution? Ben has become for me sort of the avatar of the producer/writers; he knows all but isn’t telling while he moves the characters like chess pieces around the island —infinitely manipulative and coy—which is why we enjoy him getting beaten bloody—at least I do.