All posts by Matthew Callan

Boob Tubery

Amerika the P.U.-tiful

Once upon a time, great lumbering beasts roamed the media landscape, crushing everything in their path and scoring great returns during sweeps week. These beasts were known as miniseries, and in the 1980s they ruled television’s earth. Following the success of Roots in 1977, every network strove to catch lightning in a bottle again by spending a tremendous amount of money and programming time on televisual epics. These productions were typically aired on successive nights so that it was necessary for viewers to tune in to the same station for an entire week (or longer). Many miniseries were based on popular novels, or dramatized historical epochs (or both), and they were often touted as not only entertaining but Very Important.

In 1987, ABC took a gamble and broke from this formula, banking on a miniseries that was neither adapted nor historical, but instead set in a dystopian future. This had been successfully done before—V, a miniseries depicting an alien invasion of Earth, had been a huge hit for NBC years earlier—but ABC’s production opted for a nightmarish future that seemed a little more plausible. The miniseries was called Amerika. Its premise: What if the Soviet Union took over the USA?

This fear-mongering concept might seem a McCarthyite relic to the modern reader, but while US-Soviet relations had warmed somewhat by the time Amerika was in production (glasnost and perestroika had already entered the lexicon), a fear of communist subversion on our side of the Atlantic remained. In the wake of the leftist Sandinistas’ victory in Nicaragua in 1979, many right wingers insisted that nation could be used as HQ for fomenting communist revolutions throughout the hemisphere, or maybe even act as a beachhead for a future Russian invasion. Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised address in 1986 to warn his fellow Americans that Nicaragua was “only two hours’ flying time from our own borders” and that the Sandinistas would allow the Soviets to “become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America”, which is why the US needed to give the CIA-backed anti-communist Contra forces whatever aid they wanted. (And also why the US needed to fudge the question of who was the real threat to human rights in the region.)

Amerika generated immense controversy even before it aired. Liberal journals warned it would damage US-Soviet relations, and that appeared to be quite likely when Moscow threatened to retaliate by shutting down ABC’s Russian news bureau. The network aired a Nightline-style program addressing the uproar, hosted by Ted Koppel and featuring a live town hall forum. (The miniseries became so “serious” that of course David Letterman had to take multiple shots at its self importance.)

I was recently reminded of the existence of Amerika, and the memory brought back the fear young-me felt when it first aired. I did not watch the miniseries back then, but I did see commercials for it and was vaguely aware of the hubbub around it . The idea of Amerika scared me as a sub-10 year old because frightening the public was clearly the intent of its creators, as exemplified by this promo.

Having now watched Amerika, I can say there was nothing to fear from the miniseries apart from death by boredom—even minus commercials it runs an agonizing 12+ hours yet somehow feels twice as long. However, Amerika has certain perspectives on, for lack of a better word, Americans’ ideas of American-ness that may seem eerily familiar to the modern viewer.

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Fiction

Marina

Originally published in Sycamore Review Summer/Fall 2019

It was easy for Marina to spot the future people who came to kill her baby. Most were so disoriented by their trip across time they would dart their heads like lost dogs, looking for anything familiar and finding nothing. Some were overtaken by coughing fits brought on by air that did not agree with their future lungs. Some just cried, great wails of fright and want not unlike her baby’s but so much more disturbing for possessing the depth of adulthood. These cues gave Marina more than enough time to identify the future people and lose herself in a crowd, for she was in the city now and there was always a crowd nearby. She adored crowds. The future people were large of face and frame, so even the more disciplined ones who resisted the impulse to cough or cry were betrayed by their size. 

That is why Marina did not worry all that much when she ventured out in the morning to drop off her piecework from the night before and pick up the day’s load from the dress factory, with her baby clasped close to her breast in a sling, babbling and pointing with rapturous wonder at the streetcars as they clanged up and down the high street. She was sure any danger from the future people would make itself known to her with ample time to react and escape. Marina often wondered why they bothered to hide themselves at all. She wondered this much more often than she wondered how the future people came to her from the future, or why they were so intent on murdering her baby yet so helpless at the task. These realities of her new life had been established long ago and were not, in her opinion, worth pondering.

Marina was not surprised the morning she returned from the factory, her satchel full of piecework and her baby working a sore spot into her clavicle with the top of his head, when she heard a clamor coming from the other side of the front door of her tiny fourth-floor flat. She paused with her key inserted in the lock and waited for the the noise to play itself out. It sounded like a person who’d been shoved down a flight of stairs, the din of a clumsy flailing of limbs trying in vain to break a fall, oofs and ows and other exclamations of shock and pain. Then a low moan. They’ve come here now, Marina thought. Before this moment the future people had only come after her in the street, or in her father’s barn before she fled the countryside a few months ago, but never directly in her home. A new thing, she thought. What a marvel new things were! 

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Politics Schmolitics, Uncategorized

Aaron on the Side of Caution

The problem with The Trial of the Chicago 7 begins with the title. The eponym of the court case that charged several antiwar activists with causing a riot during the 1968 Democratic convention implies seven coequal protagonists, an obvious impediment to the tidy storytelling expected of a 130 minute movie. By necessity, such an adaptation will leave a lot on the cutting room floor. If the viewer accepts this artistic license, however, they must still reckon with what writer/director Aaron Sorkin added and what he omitted, and why. Overwhelmingly, his narrative decisions were made to tamp down partisan conflict, and to declaw a group of people whose radicalism would both offend and shame the film’s target audience of modern liberals. 

Many wings of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s, especially the Yippie strand led by Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman, forwarded an explicit goal of “heightening the contradictions” between activists and the violent repression exacted against them by the government. At every conceivable turn of The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin does the opposite, jumping through hoops to reduce the distance between radicals like Hoffman and the prosecutors who sought to put him in prison for a decade. It appears Sorkin’s main objective was to make all the defendants acceptable to viewers whose ideal mode of activism is a BLM mural sponsored by Shell Oil. 

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the larger Sorkin-verse and its smothering brand of centrism (or to anyone who knows Sorkin took on the job of chronicling the Chicago Seven before he’d even heard of them). There is, however, an important distinction between forwarding a worldview through the vehicle of fictional characters and forwarding that worldview through history. If one could argue the bipartisan utopia of Sorkin’s presidential drama The West Wing rendered liberals completely unprepared for the blunt savagery of the GOP in the twenty-first century, the inciting media was still a fantasy, one that proclaimed This is how politics should be. Whereas The Trial of the Chicago 7 purports to tell us how politics were, and are. This is why a corrective is desperately needed. 

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