Life on Mars: Watch it!
Apr. 11th, 2006 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSo, Life on Mars thoughts, uncut, because there are no spoilers beyond the basic premise of the show, which I want anyone reading this and unfamiliar with it to watch. (Once again, thanks, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hmpf!) Firstly, naturally the title had me assuming it would be sci fi and was referring to the red planet; blame my lack of David Bowie knowledge. Eight episodes, i.e. a first season later, I find its use, the way this show uses 70s tunes in general, and the concept brilliant. Because what looks at first glance like a gimmick to make a tv show set in the 70s is more than that. Sure, you could do the tried and true idealist/cynic buddy cops concept without having the idealist imported from 2006. But then the idealist in question would be firmly grounded, he wouldn’t literary be out of step with the present, and the whole intricacies of memories and the way the past truly has become a different country would be missing. Not to mention the ongoing question of our protagonist’s true status.
Moreover, for all its 70s setting and all the lovingly created early 70s atmosphere, this is a very 2006 show because it plays so consciously with tv conventions and the audience’s expectations. Take the inevitable first physical fight between Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt, i.e. the idealistic copper and the cynical copper, which comes in episode 2. It’s a cliché of the genre, and it’s also a cliché that they bond afterwards. But instead of taking us through the brawl (which btw would just highlight that the BBC just isn’t good with physical fight scenes – it wasn’t in the 70s – and I’m a Blake’s 7 fan, I know! – and it isn’t now), our duo just keeps dodging out of frame for the fighting and doesn’t get back on camera until the bonding. The audience isn’t talked down to, it’s winked at. Sam Tyler isn’t John Crichton, that other stranger in a strange world, he doesn’t constantly refer pop culture, but when one of his colleagues says something like “We’re the force”, he can’t resist the obvious “and may the Force be with you” (in the last episode of the season). Then there are the Sergio Leone posters which Gene Hunt keeps hanging up in his office. It stands to reason that Gene would be a fan of Leone’s, but you could also make a case for at least a part of the audience being expected to know that the Italo Western of the 70s (which among other things gave Clint Eastwood his shot at stardom) were considered a break and new look at the genre, a European cynical look as opposed to the American John Wayne/John Ford traditional one. The birth of the anti hero, and all that. When Sam, in the last episode, calls Gene "an overweight, over the hill, nicotine stained, borderline alcoholic, homophobe, with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding", he’s of course describing the very archetype we know from lots of tv shows (not just in the 70s), and for that matter, films (Sam and Gene also echo Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night at times), and he knows he does; Gene’s reply is something no scriptwriter of the 70s would have come up with but lots of scriptwriters in the late 90s and the first decade of the new millennium would: “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.” And of course it’s the tv people from 2006 use to talk to Sam (he thinks).
Having seen the season in its entirety, I love the way the crucial 1973 memories of child Sam are indeed introduced in flashes in the very first ep, with the implications slowly more and more hinted at but the final reveal kept until the last episode. I think it filters into Sam’s relationship with Gene throughout which, wink at the audience about what Cordelia in Spin the Bottle memorably called “homoerotic buddy cop act” notwithstanding, I don’t see as slashy; Gene is among other things the unidealized father figure as opposed to the lost idealized father.
Mind you, at times I feel somewhat manipulated because Sam’s 2006 filter allows the producers to go for unabashed 70s sexism, racism, police brutality and what not without laying themselves open to the charge of approving, because it’s clear Sam doesn’t; but then again, it’s not just Sam. Annie and Phyllis are clearly presented as more intelligent and able than the guys at the station who patronize them, and as opposed to say, Jack Bauer of 24 “interrogating” (read: torturing) suspects which the narrative of his show supports by showing him always getting the right, life saving results with this, Gene Hunt’s constant bending of suspect’s rights and endorsement of brutal interrogation methods comes to bitchslap him and everyone else in a major way when a man dies in his cell because Gene’s subordinates are so keen on imitating and impressing him.
You have 70s tv referenced with the car chases, the constant smoking and indeed the credits, but, this being a British show, also very much not just 70s reality but the future decades. One of the cases to solve brings Sam to a factory he knows will be closed down in only a few years time, with all the people he and we meet losing their jobs, but he’s not in a position to judge anyone here; in 2006, he lives in the nice well to do living area this produces, and comfortably so. When our heroes solve the murder of a football fan (soccer to you Americans), the show in a rare example of foregoing subtlety even gives Sam a little speech on how the violence of fans (and the reaction of the police) will horribly escalate. It’s impossible not to flash to Hillsborough (either the incident or the tv drama) and/or the tv show Cracker with the relevant episode, written by Jimmy McGovern. And being German, I recognized the Brecht quote (and the missing half) in the episode with the hostage taker. It’s from Galileo Galilei, the play Brecht wrote and rewrote during WWII in his American exile for Charles Laughton: “Unhappy is the land without heroes” is the part of the quote Sam finds, but, as Reg reminds him later, it’s the reply to this which completes the quote and is crucial: “No, unhappy the land which needs heroes.”
Life on Mars presents a country which needs heroes, but this being the 70s, they’re lost heroes on the edge of breaking and teaming up with the antiheroes because they have to, because they’re not complete without them. It’s an unhappy country, but a fascinating one.
hmpf!) Firstly, naturally the title had me assuming it would be sci fi and was referring to the red planet; blame my lack of David Bowie knowledge. Eight episodes, i.e. a first season later, I find its use, the way this show uses 70s tunes in general, and the concept brilliant. Because what looks at first glance like a gimmick to make a tv show set in the 70s is more than that. Sure, you could do the tried and true idealist/cynic buddy cops concept without having the idealist imported from 2006. But then the idealist in question would be firmly grounded, he wouldn’t literary be out of step with the present, and the whole intricacies of memories and the way the past truly has become a different country would be missing. Not to mention the ongoing question of our protagonist’s true status. Moreover, for all its 70s setting and all the lovingly created early 70s atmosphere, this is a very 2006 show because it plays so consciously with tv conventions and the audience’s expectations. Take the inevitable first physical fight between Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt, i.e. the idealistic copper and the cynical copper, which comes in episode 2. It’s a cliché of the genre, and it’s also a cliché that they bond afterwards. But instead of taking us through the brawl (which btw would just highlight that the BBC just isn’t good with physical fight scenes – it wasn’t in the 70s – and I’m a Blake’s 7 fan, I know! – and it isn’t now), our duo just keeps dodging out of frame for the fighting and doesn’t get back on camera until the bonding. The audience isn’t talked down to, it’s winked at. Sam Tyler isn’t John Crichton, that other stranger in a strange world, he doesn’t constantly refer pop culture, but when one of his colleagues says something like “We’re the force”, he can’t resist the obvious “and may the Force be with you” (in the last episode of the season). Then there are the Sergio Leone posters which Gene Hunt keeps hanging up in his office. It stands to reason that Gene would be a fan of Leone’s, but you could also make a case for at least a part of the audience being expected to know that the Italo Western of the 70s (which among other things gave Clint Eastwood his shot at stardom) were considered a break and new look at the genre, a European cynical look as opposed to the American John Wayne/John Ford traditional one. The birth of the anti hero, and all that. When Sam, in the last episode, calls Gene "an overweight, over the hill, nicotine stained, borderline alcoholic, homophobe, with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding", he’s of course describing the very archetype we know from lots of tv shows (not just in the 70s), and for that matter, films (Sam and Gene also echo Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night at times), and he knows he does; Gene’s reply is something no scriptwriter of the 70s would have come up with but lots of scriptwriters in the late 90s and the first decade of the new millennium would: “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.” And of course it’s the tv people from 2006 use to talk to Sam (he thinks).
Having seen the season in its entirety, I love the way the crucial 1973 memories of child Sam are indeed introduced in flashes in the very first ep, with the implications slowly more and more hinted at but the final reveal kept until the last episode. I think it filters into Sam’s relationship with Gene throughout which, wink at the audience about what Cordelia in Spin the Bottle memorably called “homoerotic buddy cop act” notwithstanding, I don’t see as slashy; Gene is among other things the unidealized father figure as opposed to the lost idealized father.
Mind you, at times I feel somewhat manipulated because Sam’s 2006 filter allows the producers to go for unabashed 70s sexism, racism, police brutality and what not without laying themselves open to the charge of approving, because it’s clear Sam doesn’t; but then again, it’s not just Sam. Annie and Phyllis are clearly presented as more intelligent and able than the guys at the station who patronize them, and as opposed to say, Jack Bauer of 24 “interrogating” (read: torturing) suspects which the narrative of his show supports by showing him always getting the right, life saving results with this, Gene Hunt’s constant bending of suspect’s rights and endorsement of brutal interrogation methods comes to bitchslap him and everyone else in a major way when a man dies in his cell because Gene’s subordinates are so keen on imitating and impressing him.
You have 70s tv referenced with the car chases, the constant smoking and indeed the credits, but, this being a British show, also very much not just 70s reality but the future decades. One of the cases to solve brings Sam to a factory he knows will be closed down in only a few years time, with all the people he and we meet losing their jobs, but he’s not in a position to judge anyone here; in 2006, he lives in the nice well to do living area this produces, and comfortably so. When our heroes solve the murder of a football fan (soccer to you Americans), the show in a rare example of foregoing subtlety even gives Sam a little speech on how the violence of fans (and the reaction of the police) will horribly escalate. It’s impossible not to flash to Hillsborough (either the incident or the tv drama) and/or the tv show Cracker with the relevant episode, written by Jimmy McGovern. And being German, I recognized the Brecht quote (and the missing half) in the episode with the hostage taker. It’s from Galileo Galilei, the play Brecht wrote and rewrote during WWII in his American exile for Charles Laughton: “Unhappy is the land without heroes” is the part of the quote Sam finds, but, as Reg reminds him later, it’s the reply to this which completes the quote and is crucial: “No, unhappy the land which needs heroes.”
Life on Mars presents a country which needs heroes, but this being the 70s, they’re lost heroes on the edge of breaking and teaming up with the antiheroes because they have to, because they’re not complete without them. It’s an unhappy country, but a fascinating one.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 05:00 pm (UTC)I very much agree. Also, love your writing style.
May I friend you?
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 05:37 pm (UTC)This is the best description of the show I've come across so far; I wasn't quite able to explain why I liked it so much, but you've summed up my reasons perfectly.
*loves*
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 06:11 pm (UTC)That's pretty much how it went for me, too. ;-)
Date: 2006-04-14 02:25 am (UTC)You may want to check out the communities I recommended recently.