Into the Abyss

More than two years ago, I wrote a blogcat about the SyFy channel. You can read the original here. I gave that article the title the “uncanny valley,” after a well-known psychological phenomenon, describing the revulsion people tend to feel when they see something that almost-but-not-quite-perfectly mimics a human being (like creepy animatronics). I thought it was a fitting analogy for the puzzling feeling of watching SyFy original movies, which I described as follows:

The most puzzling thing about the SyFy channel is how inconsistent it seems to be: there is the overwhelming cynicism of the cheap exploitation, the tongue-in-cheek over-the-top ridiculousness, the unbelievable stupidity contrasted with the occasional flash of genuine creativity or originality, and the mixture of good actors on a vanity or irony kick, actors that never will succeed, and completely washed-up has-beens. Sometimes almost irritatingly self-aware, at times puzzlingly clueless. On the other hand, what else can you really expect from the intersection of business interests, creative bankruptcy, cult appeal of horror/sci-fi in general, ironic self-deprecation, desperate desire to climb the ratings charts, and a “fuck-it” approach to marketing?

I encourage you to read that piece in its entirety before reading this one, as it is an extension of those same thoughts (and I gotta get those page hits!). But in case you are too lazy and/or disinterested to read two unnecessarily long treatises concerning a fringe cable network, the basic premise of that first piece can probably be summed up in that quote above.

Now, some 2 years, 8 months, and 29 days since, the purpose and place of the SyFy channel in the public imagination has changed. Sharknado burst onto the scene in late 2013 and became (an admittedly short-lived) social media sensation. To borrow a phrase, with Sharknado, the SyFy channel turned things up to 11. I mean, how many of the items I listed in that previous article did that movie alone check off?

Cheap exploitation?

Check.

Tongue-in-cheek over-the-top ridiculousness?

Check.

Unbelievable stupidity?

You bet your sweet ass there was unbelievable stupidity.

The occasional flash of genuine creativity or originality? Um … well, okay, maybe not that one. But it satisfies the part about “the mixture of good actors on a vanity or irony kick, actors that never will succeed, and completely washed-up has-beens” with John Heard, whoever the hell played the obnoxious kid, and Tara Reid, respectively. Not to mention the absurd array of celebrity cameos, from Anne Coulter to Mark Cuban.

Now, in less than two years, SyFy has cranked out two Sharknado sequels (with a third on the way) and a knock-off called Lavalantula (which, for reasons that will make sense if you’ve seen it, could actually be considered a sequel to Sharknado as well).

Sharknado is the most commercially successful SyFy movie, with merchandise, a limited theatrical release, and an unbelievable 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, 82%. That’s higher than Forrest Gump, Gladiator, Braveheart and dozens of other movies that you may recognize as being, you know, good. All three of those movies won Best Picture, for fuck’s sake! On an anecdotal note, Sharknado is also the only movie that I know that will get bars to switch their TV sets to the SyFy channel.

It’s like they found the Heisenberg of SyFy original movies, who made the purest SyFy original movie there could be.

And it is hard to say that it isn’t working. While, as you might expect, the social media response to the sequels was less explosive than for the original, it gave the SyFy channel more cultural relevance than they have ever had. Add that to their quiet forays into reality TV (with the shockingly successful “Face Off”), a marginally successful “Walking Dead” knock-off, and the occasional niche geek and critical darling TV series (like “Battlestar Galactica”, “Defiance”, “12 Monkeys”, and “Dark Matter”), and it feels like they are beginning to carve out a space for themselves in the increasingly crowded broadcast marketplace.

While most of us would not say that our culture has changed dramatically over the course of only 2-3 years, I think that the SyFy channel represents one case where a change can really be observed. Another case, and one that might be more familiar to those of you who haven’t been watching the SyFy channel with borderline religious fervor for over a decade like I have, is the NBA. Specifically, the way social media (especially, but not exclusively, Twitter and Instagram) has shaped not only the way we consume the NBA, but also the way the players and teams actually conduct themselves.

Few NBA players epitomize the new generation of hyper-self-awareness more than LeBron James (maybe you’ve heard of him). In the words of Bill Simmons:

But even the most arrogant trader on the planet wouldn’t have aspired publicly to become a “global icon,” or obsessed over his brand as much as LeBron did these past few years, and really, I wonder if that’s the biggest reason he’s struggled in a few weighty moments over the years. You can’t build yourself as a worldwide brand without constantly evaluating how the outside world is digesting that brand. You have to be painfully self-aware, completely in tune with the public’s thoughts about YOU. (That’s what made “The Decision” such a horrendous misfire — he wasn’t in tune, even though he mistakenly thought he was. That’s the recipe for just about every career suicide attempt, by the way …). When you’re getting picked apart and you’re aware of the criticisms — and even worse, there’s truth in some of those criticisms — how can that not affect you?

In the modern environment of complete and total immersion, nothing gets past the crowd anymore. Every single second (both on and off the court) can be watched and rewatched by millions of fans, with a variety of agendas (many of them malicious). And the feedback, now, is instantaneous, too. You know that many of these players are immediately checking their phones as soon as they get back into the locker-room after a game, to see both their best and worst moments of the night being endlessly rebroadcast.

It reminds me a little of the “telephone game” that you play as a kid at summer camp. One person whispers a message to start things off, each person in line passing the message onto the next, until the message that comes out at the end is radically different, often transmuted into nonsensical gibberish. Now, though, instead of the message being distorted because only one person can hear it at a time, it is being distorted because everyone can hear everything at the same time. It’s like trying to whisper what you just heard into someone’s ear while at the same time three hundred thousand other people are shouting conflicting messages.

Don’t mistake this attitude for some form of Luddism on my part, mind you. I think that, on balance, the new media environment spawned by the internet produces far more good than it does bad. But it has inarguably changed the way we process information and by extension the way we CREATE information. Just as LeBron James has to spend every moment simultaneously considering the ramifications of every possible action, movies and television have to be able to react on much faster time frames than in the old, pre-internet paradigm.

That’s why the SyFy channel has already spawned so many sequels and to and derivatives of Sharknado. They can’t afford to let the conversation go silent, because there is so much other noise to fill the void. And what better way to demonstrate how in tune they are with the public’s opinion of their movies then by veering into this sort of grandiose self-parody? It’s like they are trying to anticipate the jokes people will make about the bad acting and small budgets by incorporating the jokes into the movie directly. And when people then make jokes about these jokes, the next movie adds another layer of self-reflection and awareness by incorporating THESE jokes into the movie. Lavalantula, for example, is in-and-of-itself less of a movie about giant fire-breathing spiders than it is a movie about Sharknado.

This brings me to why I gave this article the title I did. “Into the Abyss,” besides having a rather fitting sci-fi-ish ring to it, is a very loose translation of the phrase “mise en abyme.” Even if you haven’t heard this phrase before, you are familiar with what it describes. It refers to the endless recursive effect of standing between two mirrors, with each reflection containing within it an image of another reflection.

This is, in effect, what it feels like to watch movies like Sharknado, and what I imagine in some way it feels like to be a public figure like LeBron James, in the age of the internet and social media. There is no longer a clear disconnect between how and what information is produced and how and what information is processed; the line is even blurry about where and when a movie (or a basketball game, or whatever) ends and the next one begins.

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