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The Variants and the Mirror Mirror Universe

anthonyletizia — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Science fiction aficionados love alternative universes. In many ways, the affair started with the “Mirror Mirror” episode of the original Star Trek, in which Captain James T. Kirk, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott and Lieutenant Uhura find themselves on a USS Enterprise that is darker, edgier and sexier than their own while also containing a First Officer Spock with a goatee. Comic book writer Grant Morrison, meanwhile, took the DC Justice League of America’s Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and transformed them into a darker, edgier and sexier version of themselves in the graphic novel JLA: Earth 2. Then there’s the FOX drama Fringe, which centers on a parallel universe at war with our own that is darker, edgier and sexier—thanks in no small part to a redheaded, ass-kicking variation of FBI Agent Olivia Dunham.

The comedy webseries The Variants created a “love letter” of sorts to such alternative storylines with its season two episode “Reboot.” For the uninitiated, The Variants follows the antics of the actual employees of real-life Dallas comic book store Zeus Comics as they deal with both fictional personal issues and the occasionally crazed customer. The webseries is thus filled with various comic book and pop culture references that are spun with an offbeat yet effective form of humor. The non-comic storylines are crafted in the same style, making The Variants an original and entertaining hybrid of all things geek.

“Reboot” combines the dual personal and professional subject matters that are often depicted on the show into a singular installment that exemplifies all of the inherent qualities that make The Variants so enjoyable to watch. Keli (Keli Wolf), the lone female employee of Zeus Comics, has been set up on a blind date by store manager Richard (Richard Neal). “I just want to check Facebook to make sure he’s not really blind,” she explains to fellow cohort Barry (Barry Furhman) before adding, “Richard says he’s into girls… this time.”

The first half of “Reboot” thus follows Keli on her so called date, which turns out to be with a gym instructor who leads Keli through a rigorous assortment of exercises while asking such get-to-know-you questions as, “Did you grow up around here?” “Are you a cat person or a dog person?” and, “How do you feel about children?” The basketball that Keli has been inaccurately tossing in the air lands on her head during that last inquiry, serving as the potential catalyst for what comes next.

“It’s a whole new universe,” a regular male customer of Zeus Comics tells a disoriented Keli when she arrives at work the next morning and finds herself in The Variant’s version of the Mirror Mirror Universe. “Everything’s different but kind of the same,” he adds. “Just faster, fresher, younger. Edgier. And I’m a lesbian now.” The customer is not the only one with a rearranged sexuality as the gay Richard has been transformed into an ass-slapping, womanizing heterosexual while silent backroom stocker Vlad (Ken Lowery) is a cheerful, overly-friendly cashier. Then there’s Barry, whose usual snarky, anti-customer attitude has mutated into the same snarky, anti-customer attitude—only now he is dressed as a Starfleet officer, wears an eye patch and displays the same goatee as Spock in the aforementioned classic Star Trek episode. To add to the mayhem, he is also brandishing an axe.

“I would love to get to the floor and look that up for you but I can’t because Spock has an axe—can you call 911?” a confused Keli asks a random caller on the phone before launching into a verbal tirade at her suddenly darker, edgier and sexier colleagues. Instead of an ion storm interfering with the transporter of the Enterprise, however—the scientific justification for Captain Kirk and his landing team being beamed aboard the wrong starship in “Mirror Mirror”—the alternative universe of The Variants has a more non-sci-fi explanation. “It’s Multiverse Mondays,” Barry clarifies in regards to everyone’s sudden change in appearance. “Sure, it’s a marketing stunt but the publishers do it all the time.”

The Variants is a comic book fans delight of a webseries, filled with subtle observations on the medium and an offbeat sense of humor that ranges from witty one-liners to absurdist situations. The “Mirror Mirror” installment of Star Trek, meanwhile, is not only a fan favorite but a critical darling as well, ranking number three on Entertainment Weekly’s listing of the ten best episodes of the series. By combining the two into a singular narrative, “Reboot” scriptwriters Ken Lowery and Richard Neal have crafted an effective “love letter” to the likes of Star Trek, Grant Morrison and Fringe while likewise demonstrating that The Variants itself is a worthy standard bearer of geek entertainment in the process.

“What’s not to get?” Barry asks at the end of the “Reboot” episode. “The characters reboot, the issues renumber. But nerds? Nerds are eternal.” If there is any doubt as to the verity of the statement, just ask the customers of the “fictitious” Zeus Comics of The Variants.

Anthony Letizia (May 21, 2012)

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Fringe and Mind Control

anthonyletizia — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Although the FOX drama Fringe follows a centralized storyline about a parallel universe that is at war with our own, the original roots of the series reside in an X-Files-like exploration of “fringe science.” Just as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated weekly occurrences of the supernatural, FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and cohorts Dr. Walter Bishop and his son Peter embark on “mystery of the week” assignments that border the fine line between the possible and impossible from a modern technological standpoint. Genetic mutation, teleportation and psychokinesis thus all find their way into the narrative alongside the overarching mythology of an alternative universe. One subject matter, however, seeped into the storyline on at least three occasions and directly relates to real world experimentation by the United States government—mind control.

“Mind control?” Walter Bishop replies when faced with the possibility during the second season of Fringe. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s attempted it. I told you about my work with the MK-Ultra Project. Of course at that time we supposed that we could do it with LSD and hypnotic suggestion.” Dr. Bishop’s background as a trendsetting genius in the field of fringe science allowed him to perform cutting-edge research in the 1970s—a large percentage of which was at the bequest of the US military and intelligence agencies—and his reference to MK-Ultra correlates to an actual clandestine program of the CIA that goes as far back as the early 1950s.

The heightened state of the Cold War during that era led to the United States “thinking outside the box” in regards to potential weapons and espionage techniques, especially since it was believed that the Soviet Union was conducting similar experiments. Mind control was one such area of interest. In the 1940s, various liberation leaders in communist countries were televised confessing to manufactured crimes against the state. Exhibiting no visible signs of torture or duress, speculation focused on the prospect that the Soviets had succeeded in developing a form of mind control in order to keep their disruptive citizens in line. Fearing a “mind control gap,” the CIA launched project Bluebird in 1950, which morphed into MK-Ultra in 1953.

As Walter Bishop mentioned, LSD indeed played a key role within MK-Ultra. In his book Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), British documentarian Dominic Streatfeild traces both the CIA and Great Britain’s interest in manipulating the minds of its Cold War adversaries, examining the many techniques studied by the clandestine organizations. The use of drugs was of a specific interest from the very beginning and only became greater when Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally stumbled upon a synthetic hallucinogenic in the early 1940s. Hoffman named his discovery “lysergic acid diethylamide,” or LSD for short, and the CIA began testing the effects of the drug a few years later.

“In July 1954 an officer was given a series of ‘secrets,’ told not to reveal them and dosed with LSD,” Dominic Streatfeild reveals. “In no time at all ‘he gave all the details.’ The Agency concluded that the drug had real potential in the field of ‘eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during interrogation.’ Such was the CIA’s zeal for experimentation that a security memo in December 1954 specifically warned that ‘Testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties’ was not to be encouraged.” While Dr. Bishop would no doubt have found that last comment discouraging, the CIA still continued to use LSD on not only its own agents but unsuspecting civilians throughout the United States as well.

Although the CIA was initially optimistic that it had found a means of controlling the mind and eliciting truths from foreign spies, further investigation demonstrated that LSD was far less reliable as a truth serum than originally believed when various test subjects began reacting differently to the drug. Rather than become discouraged, however, the MK-Ultra masterminds formulated an alternative use for the chemical. “In the mid-1950s, the CIA did a swift about-turn and decided that, rather than a truth drug, LSD might be an anti-truth drug: people on it were incoherent and completely out of control,” Streatfeild explains in Brainwash. “Mightn’t it be a good idea to give agents a small supply of the drug in case they were captured? Soviet interrogators wouldn’t know what to make of that!”

Drugs likewise play a key role in the mind control narratives of the FOX drama Fringe. In the episode “The Dreamscape,” for instance, scientific research conglomerate Massive Dynamic discovers a hallucinogenic even more powerful than LSD that finds its way onto the black market. “The drug can easily be mass produced as a cheap street drug or worse, in its potent form, used as a chemical weapon,” FBI Agent Olivia Dunham explains. “Apparently it can literally scare you to death.”

During another installment, meanwhile, a Seattle sleep disorder physician constructs a biochip that is capable of inducing a deeper sleep state in patients suffering from chronic insomnia. The Fringe Division initially believes that the chip is also capable of sending commands to those who have had the device installed in their brain and thus control their actions. In reality, however, the opposite is true—instead of sending signals to the brain, the biochip siphons off dreams and transmits them to another location. “What’s more, I believe the chips have the ability to turn on a dreaming state while the patient is awake,” Dr. Bishop clarifies. “Which would lead to paranoia, hallucinations and a complete inability to differentiate between reality and dreams.” Given the real-world CIA’s fascination with wreaking havoc on unsuspecting minds, the end-results of both Fringe episodes would no doubt have been of great interest to MK-Ultra.

While there is no documented proof that the CIA ever discovered an effective means of mind control, the same cannot be said of Massive Dynamic on Fringe. “This is our flight simulation deck,” chief operating officer Nina Sharp explains to Olivia Dunham and Walter Bishop. “What you’re watching is a live test of our prototype hands-free guidance system. Electrodes in the pilot’s helmet are picking up on his thought patterns, which send commands to an onboard computer. The pilot has been given a pharmaceutical enhancement, a drug to amplify his brainwaves, which makes it easier for the electrodes in the helmet to read them.”

In the episode “Of Human Action,” the son of the experiment’s main scientist takes the drug in question, giving him the ability to control another person’s actions. Although the father insists that such a side effect is impossible, Walter Bishop believes otherwise. “The brain is a computer,” he unhesitatingly states. “It’s an organic computer. It can be hijacked like any other.”

According to Dominic Streatfeild in Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, the CIA created a number of charitable organizations in the 1950s in order to secretly fund pharmaceutical research within civilian hospitals and universities. At the height of its LSD experimentation, MK-Ultra had “deals with eighty separate institutions including forty-four colleges or universities, fifteen research facilities or private companies, twelve hospitals or clinics and three penal institutions.” Although Fringe is a fictitious television series, its delving into the scientific potential of mind control coincides with the factual CIA’s own investigation into such possibilities. It is therefore not a stretch to believe that MK-Ultra would have indeed recruited Walter Bishop into its ranks, or even funded the research of Massive Dynamic, if the two worlds had somehow intersected.

Fringe is science fiction at its best in that not only does it entertain but the series likewise acts as a warning in regards to the dangers of real-world scientific experimentation. That was ultimately the moralistic message of the earliest entry to the genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and has remained a primary driving force within the field ever since. Although Fringe explores many aspects of science fiction, its narratives border on the “fringes” of modern exploration nonetheless—an observation that becomes even more apparent during the FOX drama’s brief entries into the realm of mind control and the actual secret investigations conducted by the CIA for well over two decades.

Anthony Letizia (May 14, 2012)

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Grimm and the Origin of Fairy Tales

anthonyletizia — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The NBC drama Grimm imagines a world in which the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are real, a world where a menacing evil lurks in the personification of wolves, ogres and other supernatural beings deep within the darkened forests of Portland, Oregon. Police detective Nick Burkhardt, meanwhile, is the modern day descendent of Jacob and Wilhelm whose mission is to defeat the forces of evil that were immortalized by the original Brothers Grimm. “The stories are real,” Burkhardt is told in the pilot episode. “What they wrote about really happened.” The reality referred to, however, is quite different than the “happily ever after” narratives of childhood as it is instead filled with sinister ambitions, violent deaths, primordial fears and ancient customs.

Society has become inoculated by the Disney adaptations of classic fairy tales to the point where we’ve forgotten that the earlier versions are filled with the same violent tendencies that run through the television series Grimm. “For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimm’s collection of tales can be an eye-opening experience,” Maria Tatar remarks in the introduction to The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Princeton University Press, 2003). “Even those who know that Snow White’s stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, that Briar Rose’s suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castles, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children.”

In actuality, fairy tales were never intended for children but instead served as an oral form of entertainment geared towards adults. According to Maria Tatar, these stories were primarily recited while the men and women of a village were dispensing their daily chores in the rural atmosphere of the middle ages. “But as industrialization gradually curtailed the need for the kinds of activities that had created a forum for oral narration, folktales as a form of public entertainment for adults died out,” Tatar explains. It was therefore the intention of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to transcribe these oral narratives into written words as a means of historically preserving the tradition before the stories themselves completely vanished from civilization. The title of their first edition was named Children’s and Household Tales, however, and a different patron arose for the volume than the Brothers Grimm originally envisioned for the project. The stories in future editions were thus altered, polished and even editorialized by the Grimms in order to make them more appropriate for a new audience—children.

The need for such sanitization was apparently great. “In Eighteenth Century French versions of Little Red Riding Hood, the heroine unwittingly eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother, is called a slut by her grandmother’s cat, and performs a slow striptease for the wolf,” Maria Tatar writes. “An Italian version has the wolf kill the mother, make a latch cord of her tendons, a meat pie of her flesh, and wine from her blood. The heroine pulls the latch, eats the meat pie, and drinks the blood. Even this folktale, which in its later-day version appears to be the most explicitly didactic of all, evidently started out as a bawdy tale for adults hardly suitable for children. As much as readers may be shocked by the cruelty and violence of the Grimms’ tales, they would find many of the stories tame by comparison with their corresponding peasant versions.”

The original meanings of many fairy tales were ultimately obscured by the Brothers Grimm when they reworked the various storylines that encompass Children’s and Household Tales. To further complicate the ability to correctly interpret these tales, slight alterations to the narratives can be found within different cultures, regions and nations from around the world. Both Cinderella and Snow White are males instead of females in Turkish versions, for instance, while Sleeping Beauty is likewise a male in Russia. Despite such nuanced differences, however, each of the stories still contains the same basic structure no matter where a specific variation may have derived. The fact that these fairy tales all share the same universal traits, meanwhile, raises the question of how so many different cultures developed the same fundamental narratives in the first place.

One theory suggests that these stories originated in India, migrated to both Europe and Asia via foot-bound travelers, and were then polished with the various traits of the specific cultures that they reached during their journey. This explanation, however, fails to consider the vast geographical distances that the tales appear to have travelled. “How is one to explain the similarity of the tale about the frog queen in Russia, Germany, France, India, in America among the Indians, and in New Zealand, when the contact of peoples cannot be proven historically?” Maria Tatar quotes former Soviet scholar Vladimir Propp as asking. An alternative theory thus contends that the narratives are instead part of a universal psyche or collective consciousness that is shared by all human beings no matter where they are located.

“On a more sophisticated level, critics have argued that fairy tales translate the eternal truths of mental life into concrete actions and images,” Maria Tatar contends. “They may incarnate the highest hopes and the deepest fears of every childhood, or they may preserve the fantasies and phobias of an earlier age, of the childhood of mankind. In the savage practices and violent events depicted in fairy tales, those critics have found an expression of regressive models of thought or of primitive ways of life. Both of these views—one emphasizing the uniformity of life in general, the other stressing continuities in the life of the mind—suggest that fairy tales traffic in truths so fundamental to life and so universal in their application that they are necessarily alike everywhere.”

These aforementioned themes include issues of abandonment, parental disapproval, low social status and a correlation between sexuality and bestiality. As Maria Tatar likewise makes clear, meanwhile, the heroes of fairy tales are initially the victim within any given narrative. This goes for the male version, which is often “underprivileged and taken for a fool,” as well as the female variety, who are “subjected to all manner of abuse and humiliation.” These traits stand in stark contrast to the depiction of the villains of the tales, who are no doubt metaphors for the seeming injustice of the world-at-large that all human beings inherently experience. It should be no surprise then that the hero eventually defeats his or her enemy in a violent, horrific form of retaliation—an outcome born from the frustration of every day existence and the desire for retribution against the obstacles that make life an ostensibly difficult proposition.

“The sufferings inflicted on the victim or intended for him are ultimately visited on the adversary,” Maria Tatar observes. “A woman who throws her daughter-in-law into a river ends by drowning. The stepmother who proposes to abandon her stepdaughter in the woods is torn to pieces by wild animals. There is no casual capriciousness in the selection of appropriate punishments or in the means of establishing justice. This is the Old Testament logic of an eye for an eye. In fairy tales, getting even is the best revenge.”

The NBC drama Grimm is an extension of this fairy tale legacy in that the series returns the narratives to their original dark and sinister nature while erasing the sanitization that the likes of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm added in an effort to make them more suitable for children. While the original fairy tales relied on vengeance to alleviate the unfortunate situations in which the protagonists find themselves, however, Grimm has Nick Burkhardt, a “hero” who brings a modern day sensibility to the proceedings. Fairy tales may have begun as universal stories derived from a shared collective consciousness before developing into bedtime stories for children, but in the hands of Grimm they take on new life while likewise retaining their primary intent.

“Few people look to fairy tales for models of humane, civilized behavior,” Maria Tatar concludes in The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “The stories have taken hold for a far more important reason: the hard facts of fair-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult.” With a narrative filled with its own depictions of violent deaths, primordial fears and ancient customs, it is a tradition that Grimm itself ultimately upholds.

Anthony Letizia (May 7, 2012)

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