In Which I Attempt to Sound All Intellectual By Tossing Around Words Like "Postmodern," But Am Really Still Talking About TV Shows

In my semi-random surfing around the web tonight, I happened to come across a page of pictures featuring Paul Goddard's Agent character from The Matrix. Which led me off into a rambling train of thought that I'm going to blog here because, hey, I don't have anything else to do. (Well, OK, not strictly true, but like I said, I'm busy procrastinating.)

Anyway, I didn't realize this until somebody on one of the BBoards pointed it out (at which point I went "D'oh!" and smacked my head, 'cause it was obvious), but in many ways the week-before-last's Farscape ("John Quixote") really was one great big in-joke based on this particular coincidence of actors (Goddard, of course, playing both The Matrix's Agent Brown and Farscape's Stark). I think at one point they even did use the word "matrix," and I doubt it was an accident. I think there's just something ineffably cool about that. Actually, not only was the whole episode sort of an in-joke in that respect, but it also consisted of an almost uninterrupted series of in-jokes and pop-culture references to everything from Monty Python to Max Headroom to fairy tales to Shakespeare to some stuff I couldn't even properly identify. It's all very... postmodern. Or is that too much of a buzzword?

Of course, it's not like that show doesn't spout forth pop culture references in the normal course of things, because the human character, Crichton, is an endless font of the things, from the obvious to the obscure. I don't remember whether I've mentioned this here before or not, but one of the things I noticed when I started watching Buffy recently is that it, too, was very heavy on the pop culture stuff (only pretty much everybody in Buffy gets to play, because they're all of them familiar with Earth culture). Which led me to think of something else that the two shows have in common, and which I think is really very interesting. In each case, the character(s) know the rules of the genre they're in. John Crichton's seen Star Trek, he's seen Star Wars, he's seen all the sci-fi movies, and he endlessly uses them as a basis for comparison to his life on the far side of the galaxy. Similarly, the kids on Buffy have all seen horror movies, they're all familiar with Count Dracula and Anne Rice and the Wolfman and the Mummy.

So there's a real sense of self-awareness there, in both cases. The writers are aware of the show's antecedents and roots and shaping influences. The viewer is aware of them. And the characters are aware of them, too. And it seems to me that you get two very cool things out of this situation. One is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. When John Crichton encounters a psychic-vampire energy being that lives off the negative emotions of others, he doesn't need a lot of exposition about what that involves, he doesn't waste time freaking out about it, it doesn't take him half the episode to figure out that that's what he's facing. It's a familiar concept to him, as it is to us. We've all seen this on Star Trek. It's ground we don't need to re-cover. So we can spend thirty seconds on it and move on to the stuff the show is doing with the concept that actually is original.

The other thing is that it gives you a starting point from which to take all those all genre cliches and completely subvert them. Buffy's monsters frequently don't act like their cliched horror movie counterparts, often to humorous effect. Crichton discovers that life in outer space really ain't like the movies ("Boy, did Spielberg ever get it wrong. Close encounters, my ass!"). The thing is, the audience for these shows is, if I do immodestly say so myself, pretty sophisticated. We've been around the science-fictional (or horror-movie) block a few times. We know these cliches well enough to get the joke when the writers play off of them. And when the characters are sophisticated enough to get it, too, well, how can you avoid identifying with them? They are us. I mean, how cool is that?

And you're probably wishing I'd shut up and go back to the online quizzes by now...