Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Thoughts
on watching the last ten minutes of last week's Ally
McBeal, 4/27/98: I
suppose I owe an explanation as to why I wasn't
watching the first forty minutes of Ally
McBeal, and it is being the first new
episode that I haven't taken in glued to the tube
throughout (and I've been tube-glued for some of
the too-frequent reruns, saints alive). Right
then--Mary Doria Russell was in town, and if the
name means nothing to you I can only urge that
you proceed to bookstore or library and get two
novels, one called The Sparrow and one
called Children of God. They both have
her name at the bottom. Were she here she'd most
likely say they are about "Jesuits in
space." Actually they're about specific
Jesuits and the people who work with them and
love them and the horrible and wonderful things
that happen when some of them visit a planet
orbiting Alpha Centauri. For the author of two of
the most intricate, exciting and
imaginative intellectual books of this decade,
not to mention a woman who looks and acts my own
mother, I even skipped out on my yoga class. And
my yoga teacher can tell you what perfidy that
means I'm in for the rest of the week.
Ms. Russell
concedes freely that Alpha Centauri's a bad
candidate for a planet supporting life or a
planet, period--any body managing orbit around
the system's three stars would most likely get
incinerated by at least one of them, or in her
words, "Sorry, I lied to you." Ms.
Russell looks like a teacher and was an
anthropology professor for some time before she
got downsized, or in her words, "I'd
probably have brain cancer by now. Those
chemicals are not the healthiest things
to work with."
So Ms. Russell
signed some books for my friends R. and J. while
I took a picture of Ms. Russell standing next to
the woman standing in front of me in line, with
the woman's camera (she wanted a picture proving
to a friend of hers that Ms. Russell is
in fact as short as all that, and while
suspicious of this agenda I remembered to sweat
over whether my legendary at anything with moving
parts would cost this poor person her documentary
proof) and I had no books to be signed but I
asked Ms. Russell if she'd read Stephen Fry's Making
History, about a history student and a
physicist who decide to historically unmake
Hitler. She's writing a novel about the
persecution of the Jews in Italy during World War
II ("I'm Jewish by choice and Italian by
ancestry, so I like to think I can get some
handle on both sides of the story"). She
hadn't read Making History and was
afraid people would expect her to produce that
kind of book; her new one won't be science
fiction, won't be published until at least 2000,
and no, she won't be writing any more books in
the Sparrow/Children universe. "If
I did another book I'd have to actually put a
pronouncement from God in there, I do not
have that much chutzpa"
She'd mentioned
that Dune was the worst movie she'd ever
seen-- "That film had no movement,
it was just closeups of people thinking,
and you could hear them thinking. My
great-aunt understood movies better than that,
she'd cut people's heads off in the frame, but
she understood that there had to be
movement."
I invited her to
watch Manos, the Hands of Fate, which I
described to her as "closeups of people not
thinking."
Then J. and R. and
I found ourselves at a Thai restaurant in the
basement of a converted church, and whereas J.
and R. have between them a boyfriend, a gym bunny
agenda, and a not-yet-decorated condominium, I
don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd
like, and we spoke of Anabaptists and
evolutionary theory and shopping for old ladies
in the Midwest (buy them something Asian, since
you can't shop for that stuff in the Midwest),
and dead presidents--the kind that rot, not the
kind that people convert other people into stuff
that rots to acquire, in literature and film both
modern and antiquated. It reacquainted me, in a
refreshing optimistic sense and melancholy
nostalgic sense alike, with memories of the time
when dinners like that followed evenings like
that with a regularity of breath following fellow
breath.
And after waving
R. and J. off to their respective busses home I
went home myself, and it was ten minutes to ten
and the living room was empty, so I pulled on our
rabbit-eared Sharp Linytron-I-Plus, clicked the
selector to channel 13, and of course my first
question was "What's he doing on
this show?!?" he corresponding to Dylan
McDermott as Robert G. "Bobby" Donnell
of The Practice, David E. Kelley's other
show on that other network.
The respective
networks went through respective hissy fits when
asked to promo each other's product, I know that
much. No idea how Kelley got'em
together--incriminating photos acquired in
collusion with both Bo Diddley and Daddy Freddy,
I'll say--but the hell with it, there's Donnell
conferring with Ally during the obligatory
last-ten-minutes anticlimax.
I'd tried The
Practice a couple of times after TV
Guide called it "The Best Show You're
Not Watching," liked the jutt of McDermott's
unshaven chin, loved looking at Laura Flynn
Boyle, but felt on the whole laden with
metaphorical weight. If Kelley's obsessing to
make us feel life-as-the-law to the point where
he's built two shows on two networks around the
idea, Ally's innate zaniness at least
gives him a trampoline to temporarily escape his
own portension, and also enough extra-litigatory
ritual--the funeral of Richard's uncle climaxing
in a gospel choir singing "Short
People," the shot of Ally at the crosswalk
humming "Tell Him" that builds to a
choreographed pedestrian chorus line--to let you
hope that this too, could be part of the
metaphor, that we weren't fated to live inhaling
dust and dripping sweat and being occasionally
asked to show our teeth, seconds ticking towards
our sentence. When Ally McBeal works,
it's like the guitar solo in "Jessie's
Girl" exploding out of the breakdown, in
that second right after it actually turns into a
guitar solo--inchoate energy happy at first to
have no form, to simply sizzle in being, then
finding a shape, forming its own feet, and doing
a dance because that seems the best temporal
expression of its non-temporal consciousness.
The Practice
signifies merely as a lawyer show, which makes a
far less supple Bounty for supporting Kelley's
heavy brow, and against the starkness of which
his gross-out concerns (most every Ally
and Practice episode contains something
seemingly fermented from a secret writing team of
male third-graders transmitting live from behind
the monkey bars) seem merely childish.
But something
strange happened in those last ten minutes--and
granted, if I'd watched the first forty I might
have a different conception--Ally was
paced like The Practice. For a short
while I wasn't seeing a couple-four characters
batting set-ups and punchlines over a
vari-slotted net with that all-dismissive traffic
light, "bygones," popping up every
twelve seconds or so. (For those not familiar
with Ally, "bygones," a phrase
usually used by firm founder Richard Fish, is
code for "we need to forget this entire
train of thought and any unresolved feelings,
contradictions or consequences of said train
shall be forgotten with it." Richard may
have studied hypnotism at some point; the people
around him don't exactly forget what they've been
thinking, but they do shut up almost every time.)
Instead, Ally talked to Bobby, just the two of
them, in a quiet. conventionally dramatic
cadence.
And that was
especially good, because for the first time in a
long time on Ally, two people were
discussing serious matters without apparently
(maybe it was in that first forty) having to have
a nervous breakdown first. Ally told Bobby that
the ultimate purpose of life should be the
ability to look in your child's eyes and not be
frightened of what s/he might be seeing. That he
should try to preserve his innocence while he
still had some left.
The measured,
logical, and serious cadences of that transaction
carried over into the last eight minutes, into
Ally arguing Renee into a corner over whatever
that was about, even to the finishing shots of
Vonda Shepard onstage, the camera lingering over
the three black backing singers, catching not
three undulating interchangeable "pips"
of the kind Ally's therapist tells her to
mentally summon in times of stress, but three
different women each with her own blink rate, her
own ways of leaning into the microphone. All of
which leaves me thinking first, that they should
try this crossover business more often,
executives be hung, but secondly, more lastingly,
that perhaps Ally should try this more
often. Because it has strong, supple,
well-rounded characters who might be able to
breathe on their own if you took the
"bygones" hose away.
Here's mud in your
eye at next week's episode.
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Hamlin
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