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It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
It is comforting...
I was going to post this last week but never got around to it. So I decided to put it up now, just minutes before the season ender so that my incorrect predictions and blatherings about the show can be as ill-timed as possible. You are welcome.
I love this show. I realize this puts me in the minority of humanity. But leaving aside the spectacular performances being turned in by Rebecca DeMornay (like she's been shot out of a cannon right outside the frame every time she appears), Ed O'Neill (heartbreaking), and Brian Van Holt (his array of physical ticks -- like a seemingly unremarkable shoulder clap -- make the grunting, immature, heroin addict former surf legend somehow articulate), I think the show is really smart, really refreshing, exciting and not nearly as impenetrable as people are making it out to be.
Pause.
Okay, so, aspects of the show are pretty impenetrable, like, for example, the dialogue, setting, and character motivation. Heh. But I think it is a really tremendous example of storytelling, because it is a story about storytelling -- in the way Lost used to (or tried to) be but abandoned (for whatever reason). In JFC, a message/story needs delivering. But it won't get delivered in words. It'll get delivered via "ones and zeros" -- a mass of data that will get some sort of meaning ceded to it. The meaning will be meaningful but it will also remain, well, a mass of ones and zeros.
Here I go, getting all impenetrable trying to explain how the show isn't actually impenetrable. But to me, the most interesting narratives are the ones that hold in balance both an utter virtuality -- their existence as random (if pleasing) patterns of data -- and a humanistic faith in the organizing power of a story.
The show is a classic bait and switch, and it uses the obfuscation of meaning to drive narrative desire. Contemporary television audiences might have limited tolerance for such an approach, but it should be familiar to anyone who has read "The Minister's Black Veil" or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which use the technique in different ways). The titular character of JFC is perhaps the most impenetrable aspect of the show, an American drifter with James Dean hair, who mainly just parrots what people say right back to them, and seems to be, well, Jesus Christ. The revelation of his identity appears to be the end goal of the show. But I'm not sure John's identity, once or if revealed, will really reveal much of anything. As in "The Minister's Black Veil," it is in the desire to lift the veil that narrative survives; once it gets lifted, narrative dies.
If the storytelling technique seems somewhat overly cerebral, the character patterns -- I wouldn't call them motivations exactly -- are more of the heartstring variety.
The Yosts are no mere dysfunctional family, they are a family founded on the tail end of the sixties, when the Manson family rose, and the promises started to crack: the sexism of Free Love, the racism of white children named Che, the violence of whatever-whenever exposed.
But the slapdash community that circles around the Yosts has all the markings of the intentional communities the sixties rehabilitated (from the 19th century, natch), and that slapdash community -- the worshipful lawyer, the two thugs sent from B-movie central casting, the change-of-heart neurosurgeon, the grill-master Luis Guzman, the pedophile-haunted lottery winner, the hare-lipped webmaster and the Irish barrista who wraps the Harelip's head inside her shirt when it's closing time-- (seriously, how could you NOT love this show?)-- that community is the heart of the story and cancels out whatever horrible thing Cissy Yost did to her son while dropping acid back in the day. They remain a promiscuous community, ready to seize on anything or anyone that will make them feel at home in the world, ready to make up stories to make themselves make sense to themselves, but where Cissy did what she felt and that was truly truly bad, the non-nuclear community is able to both rage and sputter in a purely instinctual manner while always keeping their inner compass true.
In the end, though, if the show is about anything it's about how to make good television, it's about acting talent (some of the best you'll see anywhere gathered quite conveniently into one package), it's about the throwaway line becoming central (Ed O'Neill to the Harelip about a laptop: "You're gonna turn that thing on? Outdoors?!?"); it's about the beauty of the thing -- the center of it all is the adolescent Shaun Yost, a physical savant, always juggling, skating, or surfing, completely inarticulate, but somehow more beautiful because his instrument is something other than the mind, a remarkable non-Kevin Williamson way of making adolescence beautiful on its own inarticulate terms.
Also, did I mention? The show is fucking funny as shit.
UPDATE: Just watched. What the fuck?!?
Patton Oswalt apparently crawled into my brain and dug out a paragraph about loving Friday Night Lights.
So I first watched this video for Chromeo's Tenderoni a few weeks ago and finally just realized what bothers me about it. Don't you think that when the delivery guy goes through the car wash, the Chromeo guys painted on the side of the van should get all smear-y and blurry or at least there should be some sort of flash-sideways to the alternate side-of-the-van world where we see them really struggling with the carwash?
The way it stands, they barely get wet! On the side of the van! Going through a carwash!
Or am I the only person in the world who thought that would be, like, the climax of the video's narrative?
(Correlatively, why do I feel that Kriston is the only person in the world who is going to get what I'm talking about here?)
