An open thread dedicated to discussing books, movies, and tv shows we love. And occasionally some politics.

Fringe is an X-Files-like science fiction series put out a few years ago by J J Abrams, complete with time-travel, parallel universes, and weird science.

I've been watching Fringe for a while, on the recommendation of a friend. The first season was really hard to get through. I kept thinking, "This is second-rate X-Files." But I trust my friend, and he said that it would get better, and it did. Since I reached the second season, I've been watching two or three episodes a night.

I recently came across a marvelous episode called "Brown Betty," which is what I want to write about today. "Brown Betty" combines elements of film noir with musical theater, meaning it had me at "hello," since I'm a sucker for both those genres. It also includes some fascinating discussion about the relationship between a Boomer father and his Gen-X son, which I note because very little, even now, is written or performed that has much to do with my generation (we're small, and stuck between two larger generations, so no one bothers.) It makes finding art or writing that relates to us something like finding a lovely truffle wrapped up in gilt paper in your fridge's vegetable drawer.

But the real reason I want to write about "Brown Betty" is its treatment of drugs.

I don't know if you've noticed (heh), but treatment of drugs in media, especially hallucinogenic drugs, especially marijuana, is almost universally abysmal. It starts, obviously, with Reefer Madness and movies like it in the 1930s:

There's an excellent article on the subject of anti-marijuana propaganda here:

http://flashbak.com/reefer-madness-mid-century-anti-marijuana-propaganda...

Reading that article almost made me decide not to write about drugs today, because reading anti-marijuana propaganda is the intellectual equivalent of taking a walk in the Fire Swamp:

There are certain topics that drag you down into the ugliest underbelly of United States culture, and this is one of them. It combines racism of multiple kinds (especially against Mexicans), xenophobia, Puritanism, and a remarkable amount of sexism, which is something that I think hasn't been written about enough, but which stood out a mile when I paged through the movie posters. They look like the covers of soft pornographic novels, and read like it too:

Weird orgies? Wild parties? Unleashed passions? Good girl turned bad? One puff was enough to set her on the road to ruin?

One shouldn't dig too far into the imaginations of the conventionally-minded. It's seriously ugly in there. Though I'm not sure I should blame establishment propaganda on ordinary people who happen to be conventional, puritanical, and square. Still, somebody had to write these things, and somebody had to choose to watch them. Those people should wipe their minds out with soap, and not because wild orgies are necessarily a bad thing.

Anti-marijuana propaganda has become more subtle since those rollicking days of puritanical excess. The establishment has to be a bit more careful these days, because Reefer Madness is now a widely-accepted joke. By the nineties, they were creating movies like Half-Baked
, which sells itself as a fun, pot-friendly romp yet ends up purveying a message of zero tolerance through (guess what?) a virtuous girl whose bed the protagonist isn't going to get into unless he admits the evils of weed. Or they sprinkle nasty little anti-marijuana gestures into otherwise reasonable detective fiction like Longmire. In the Longmire episode "Cancer," he confronts a Mexican drug cartel who came all the way up to Wyoming to plant great fields of the demon herb in the national parks (are there really members of the Tijuana Cartel growing weed outdoors in Wyoming? Why would you choose Wyoming? Seems like a pretty shitty growing season.) The story begins with a bit of background: when Longmire's wife was dying of cancer, he bought marijuana to ease her pain. Yet by the middle of the episode, Longmire defines marijuana itself as a cancer on his county, stentoriously announcing the fact while framed in a shot with a large marijuana plant in the foreground. So thanks for the analgesic effect that saved my darling some agony toward the end, but now that she's gone the drug is EVIL; in fact, it's the same as the disease that killed her!

Thank God for Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

Not the greatest movies, but, ideologically speaking, oases in a vast funless desert of pain.

Marijuana, in short, is one of the clearest examples of what I call the Warding Off. Marijuana is a warded concept, like police brutality or third parties. The concept itself might as well be fenced in and surrounded by guards. Most of the time, the messaging around a warded concept (in mainstream media, at least) will adhere strictly to a preordained pattern (in this case, condemnation: marijuana=moral turpitude and social decay). On the rare occasions when a writer pushes back against the preordained pattern, he or she generally needs to make some concessions to the establishment point of view.

This is what makes Fringe's treatment of drug culture interesting. The series explores the issue through the character of Walter Bishop, a genius PhD who also spent 17 years in an insane asylum (thankfully, J J Abrams did not ever imply that his psychotic break had anything to do with the drugs he took, an early indication that the show intended to push back against establishment drug messaging.) He has committed a dreadful wrong for a very human reason, with catastrophic results, a fact which haunts him throughout the show. He also does drugs. A lot of drugs, pretty much daily.

I believe Walter's backstory of wrongdoing and his "I'm a scientist who tampered in God's domain" plotline are what allowed the Fringe writers to present his drug use in the matter-of-fact way they did, without the customary pearl-clutching and genuflections to anti-drug propaganda. Walter already has irresponsibility and selfishness associated with him via his early decision to endanger two universes because he couldn't deal with a terrible personal loss. Walter also has a history of going insane. It's as if J J Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci decided to take some of the characteristics of Reefer Madness and associate them with their drug-using character--but disassociate them from the drugs themselves. If it was a deliberate decision, it was smart as hell, as it seems to have placated the censors, or the propagandists, or the producers, or the CIA, or whoever the hell makes the decisions about TV scripts.

In "Brown Betty," Walter has alienated his son, who has disappeared. Agent Olivia Dunham wants to go after him, and has some leads, but she's got childcare responsibilities for her niece, Ella, that day. She needs to leave Ella at the lab with Walter and his endlessly patient caretaker and lab assistant, FBI Agent Astrid Farnsworth (who I don't think gets sufficient credit for her awesome acting in this show).

The extremely stoned Walter's shortcomings as a playmate--"All you've done is eat all my snacks and talk about weird stuff. And everything makes you laugh," states Ella, in a line that probably cracked stoners up from coast to coast--leads to Ella demanding that Walter tell her a story. Walter fictionalizes what's happening between the main Fringe characters in a story that borrows equally from film noir and Broadway musicals, with Walter's favorite music from the 70s and 80s thrown in (start at 1:20)

He makes Agent Dunham the PI of his story, his son, Peter, into a runaway thief, and her boss, Agent Broyles, into her police officer contact. This allows Lance Reddick to dress up in 1940s clothes and sing Steve Winwood tunes, in a scene that I am genuinely grateful exists. The implication is that he too is stoned ("Detective Dunham knew some high people in low places")

I don't want to spoil the entire episode, in case there's people here who haven't watched it (I highly recommend it, and seasons 2-4 of Fringe--I haven't seen season 5 yet). But in addition to its refreshingly unWarded attitude toward drugs, it contains some very interesting thoughts on the relationship between the Boomer and Gen X generations, fatherhood, wrongdoing and forgiveness. It also contains an interesting critique of the Great White Man Inventing Stuff, a cultural complex of beliefs my boyfriend and I like to describe as "Big men putting screwdrivers into things."

I hope I've convinced you to give, if not the whole series, at least this particular episode, a whirl.

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on representations of drugs in the media, the history of marijuana propaganda, science fiction in general or Fringe in particular.

Also, good morning.