While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs, a Hollywood comedy about killing a dictator vs. that dictator, whose constructed his own fantasy, and kept his country in such a super-sheltered isolation they're practically a movie in themselves, or at least a TV mini-series about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION! The latest retrofuturist astro-swinger pad fantasia, deftly commingling MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist swagger with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, post-modern indoor beaches, nice space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers ala SNOWPIERCER and so forth. Because this is no ordinary space ark. It took off in 1963 years ago and while we're all post-post everything down here, they're like a space version of the Amish, stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue instead of the WITNESS barn raising. It's a ginchier bigger-budgeted better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year as well, 2014, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming, So it really is retro-futurism's time, if that wasn't an anachronism (see part 1, and part 2) . It's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.
I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be an American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit but it's just as much Goldblum's movie--both are in tippy top form and bring out new depths in each other--and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft --the president's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom (Vivica A. Fox), Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - never better). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed up general. And most of all, it's Reagan's dream come true, at last, the nations of the world putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.
I was going to change the channel after but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before the credits of could even start rolling, it's own blast from the past we're all one planet now, a speeding locomotive or space ship crucible --and I was crying too hard by then, 'fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes, to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint, But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing, how could I switch up a few clicks on the old time machine? I like how they explore the idea of how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never have to go outside and play, or learn to drive a stick. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, AIDS, and racism apparently. But otherwise it's TWIN PEAKS-MAD MEN-GALACTICA, with a rigid class system keeping things 'in order' of the sort white people only get to generally experience walking angrily past first class to our miserable G27 aisle seat.
Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband. Helfer is amazing. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe. But she's not the overall focus. It's Laura Pal--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers his mom works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! He was in DEAR WHITE PEOPLE also this year, coincidence?
The fantasy in both ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER, NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY with some TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish via a God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un. The idea common to dreams and fiction, of being able to scale back the sheer overpopulated, polluted, fucked in the head society we live in--to go back into the past, make it all locally sourced and small business and somehow recapture the essence of what we lost -- especially heterosexual white dudes old enough to remember all the shit their father got away with, and so feel resentful they don't get away with jack, but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. So to have the social order openly privileging us again, and to live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside -- it's like Windows on the World or that Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered"skidoo and--and a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?
It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THE THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like a Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never land.
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I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in that Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. More than even MAD MEN or BATTLESTAR, the vibe of ASCENSION recalls this show. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my overly acute imagination and super-sensitive nerves, I perceive way too vividly and so can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life, but even so... If you're the type who can handle that though, and love the retrofuturism as I do, then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's: a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a magician who holds ayahuasca parties, has a sexy narcoleptic daughter and a power animal voiced by H. Jon Benjamin who lives in his closet / alternate reality; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes as his only non-automotive possession, and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy, the list is endless.
So savor the rich attention to retro-futurist space race Questian detail, the weird streak of semi-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation, and let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.