First of all, by all accounts McDonald’s has never sold onion rings.
My favorite works by popular creators are the ones that are frequently what the multitudes rarely put on a greatest hits list. Like Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory or Stephen King’s Joyland. Now we have Donald E. Westlake′s last novel Call Me a Cab (available now here at Amazon) a heretofore unpublished novel from 1977 (unpublished except in a briefer version in a serialized magazine edition ages ago). It’s a novel ahead of its time full of 1970s attitude, with realistic, thoughtful characters, without cliché or canned, artificial controversy, and, although it’s from Hard Case Crime, there’s not a single crime in sight for 3,000 miles. And it’s as riveting as any of his previous brilliant works.
So what about the onion rings? Back to that in a moment.
It’s the latest in what has become a packed 12 months of studios releasing animated movies. And it carries a common theme for a venue families once could prop their kids up in front of for easy content to enjoy. The subject again is death and dying, and more to the point, what happens to you after you die, It’s the Disney-Pixar movie Soul, a big-budget movie that at first blush is about a musician and his love for jazz. Starring the voices of Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx and the versatile Tina Fey, the animation is the best of merging digital animation with stunning real-world imagery. The musician theme is great, and directors Pete Docter and Kent Powers do their best to juggle humor and humanity’s most age-old questions: Who am I? Why am I here? And what’s next? This Disney+ offers some impressive visuals and ideas, but it also might be more for the older tier of kids and audiences ready for the thoughtful themes.
It’s a blend of Altered Carbon and Defending Your Life except it doesn’t look anything like that at all. In Amazon Prime’s new series Upload, the afterlife is hell, or close to it, because it’s gone digital. And if you want to have a good afterlife you better be rich, because otherwise you risk weeks a month without service. Like Altered Carbon, your memory becomes uploaded after your body dies and like Defending Your Life you get some help, not via heaven’s legal counsel as revealed in that film, but by customer service agents standing by to help via virtual reality. But it’s the chemistry of the story’s two lead characters that is touted as the reason viewers will come back after the first episode.
“Dying young, a brilliant Mathematician discovers a way to cheat the terrifying Divine Calculator. He schemes to be endlessly reincarnated in the life of the woman he loves, no matter how often the violent bailiffs of the Karmic Accountancy cut short each life.”
Yet the delivery of this quirky story is delivered through the voice of a foul-mouthed British thug in such a way that it… actually works. Numbercruncher asks questions involving the biggest topics of life and death yet balances humor and despair in a pretty stunning and imaginative way.
Bastard Zane is a thug. A dead thug. He speaks in the local accents of the street kids in Attack the Block or Daniel Craig in Layer Cake, and could easily fit into the crime noir world of Road to Perdition. And he’s experiencing the real afterlife, not one of angels and pearly gates, but of accountants running the grand show—it’s like the worst case scenario for those afraid of tax men and accountants: heaven is run by numbercrunchers. Writer Si Spurrier quickly gives us his set up in a way that puts this story alongside the afterlife treatments of Steven Spielberg’s Always, Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life or even the Philip K. Dick-inspired The Adjustment Bureau–and far better than Jerry Zucker’s Ghost. And then he proceeds to let his characters chase each other down.
Nick Spencer, the writer of Morning Glories describes the story as “Runaways meets Lost.” I think you could get better comparisons. How about “Runaways meets Planetary” (Brian K. Vaughn and Warren Ellis!) or “Veronica Mars meets Lost” (Rob Thomas and Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse!)? All four have a strong fan base, the comparisons stay in the same medium and one side is based in the adventures of teens and the other side is based on mysteries in physics.
I’m picking nits as all four of those stories have compelled me to read more or see more at any given time. (I just finished the entire run of Veronica Mars in a little under two weeks before Netflix could take it off the instant queue and I would have had to wait for DVDs in the mail. I get obsessive sometimes). I definitely think that Morning Glories could compel me in much the same way.
On each side of those comparisons though, there is a question that might not have crossed your mind. I think it boils down to the simple question: how do you like your mysteries?
For example, take the final season of Lost and the “sideways” reality. (LOST ***SPOILER ALERT*** – which shouldn’t really be necessary as it has been a year since the finale). The season finale reveals that the sideways universe is the afterlife. Desmond is there to help them realize what is happening and to bring them all together to see each other again.
Let me say that again, and just think about it for a while. The season finale reveals that the sideways universe is the afterlife.
I’m not sure about you, but the number of stories I can recall that deal with life in the afterlife is not that great. For comedy purposes, there is the wonderful Defending Your Life. In myths there is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that has been forever tainted by The Killing. (I shudder to even mention that series in the company of actual good stories). Death appears in The Seventh Seal and later Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Off the top of my head, that’s about it. (I’m sure there are more examples and feel free to enlighten me about them).
Lost did it differently though. The adventures on the island took up less than three months for some characters. (I’m looking at you Boone and Shannon). For others, it was several years of their lives as they went back in time and lived in the Dharma community.
So, what does the island mean in comparison to the rest of your life?
For Ana Lucia, it didn’t mean much as she didn’t join the rest of the survivors in waking up in the afterlife. For others, it meant the world. Waking up brought in a flood of emotion for the characters (and this member of the audience) as these people that meant so much to them for just a part of their life reappeared.
So, what is the afterlife? How do you use your time? Do you use it to become the father that you wish you were, that you wish you had? Do you use it to come to grips with your own physical failings that resulted in your own emotional failings? Do you beat yourself up over all the evil that you did?
In Defending Your Life the battle was against fear. For Albert Brooks, as the writer, I’m sure that is a very personal battle. For the characters of Lost they had different battles to face. Finding justice, finding love, finding friendship, finding forgiveness or whatever they needed to find so that they could move forward.
(Thinking about that personally, I’m not sure what I would need to face in order to move along. It’s a mystery of myself that I will have to explore).
In those personal battles, what is more important, the previous 20, 30 or 40 years, or the time spent on the island? How would you ever be able to work in the experiences of the island in comparison to the building blocks of your personality, your life that happened so many more times?
That is the question I have of the afterlife. I’ve never met my grandfathers. I know they played an important part of my parent’s lives, but they both died before I was born.
What happens in their afterlife? I assume they link to the lives of their children who then link to their children and then we meet. Or maybe they have directory assistance in the afterlife and instead of reaching a phone, you physically transport to that person. No matter what is the way of the afterlife, the next question becomes how long do we see each other? What about all the people we’ve met over the course of our lives? What if a friend from elementary school that we remember as the person who first exposed me to video games doesn’t remember us? With whom do we spend time in the afterlife? What do we need to do to improve ourselves?
I don’t know the answers, but I do know that Lost helped to create the questions. Sometimes a good mystery doesn’t have an answer. Yet. Sometimes we don’t want answers as we don’t want to infect the hopes, dreams and prayers of our imaginations. Whatever answer we get will pale in comparison to what we had created in our minds or it may be so big that we would have never thought to dream it.
The thing is mysteries are everywhere, we just may not see them. In Veronica Mars only two people believed something different about the Lily Kane murder, everyone else just went on with their business. In Lost different people discovered different things about the island that they decided to share or not share. (By comparison, Rose and Bernard chose to ignore all the hoopla and just live in the moment that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. The mystery they got to solve was how they would grow old together). In Planetary we find that the world doesn’t work the way we think and three “heroes” lead us to examples that wander into the fantastic. In Morning Glories we see six kids that start at a boarding school. We don’t know why they are there. We don’t know the purpose of the school.
So, what kind of mystery do you want? Do you want ones that are concrete and you can solve and figure out within a set amount of time, like a murder, or the existence of a polar bear, or why someone can talk to machines in some sort of origin story or why people born on January 1st, 1900 or May 4th are special? (May the 4th be with you significance aside). Or do you want what friendships mean, or how friendships start, or what the afterlife is like, or what relationships do we have with our parents, or how we need to fool ourselves to actually find our more about ourselves? In other words, should mysteries reveal more about the soul of the person or the plot of the story?
Ideally, a great story gives you both as you explore characters and their environments. I think Morning Glories is well along that path after only six issues.
