Twin Peaks will forever be my favorite show of all time. It’s weirdness is unprecedented. It sits both at the peak of David Lynch’s career and at this perfect point in history when television was still just trash and when you consumed it, you did with the same relish that you consumed Bagel Bites or Oreo O’s. It was a time when FOX was just getting started with shows like 90210 and Married With Children, when trashiness and disgustingness were hilarious, when Jerry Springer was both a genius and a charlatan, a world of satire and deadpan comedy that will never come again.
But in the sea change that came with the coming decades, new kinds of serialized video content began being produced. There are those shows everyone talks about: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones… The first two seasons of both True Detective and Westworld were a revelation. But these were all masterful works of genre, whereas with Dark something new came into the world that for once could rival Twin Peaks with its weirdness.
Dark raises questions of causality and plays with dichotomies like good and evil, but it also manipulates our expectations in an almost mathematical way. What is so mind-meltingly good about it isn’t the dialogue or the characters, but the puzzle of its narratological universe and the way in which this puzzle has been realized. In a streaming universe dominated by sequels and spin-offs, Dark is something of a miracle. It exists in a genre all its own, a genre that is distinct from science fiction, a kind of postmodern realism.
But what do I mean by this?
Lyotard, who coined the term postmodernism, defined it as “incredulity toward metanarratives”. The postmodernist would play the part of the ultimate skeptic, and in literature this would mean the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflixibity, and intertextuality. In other words, texts that stand outside themselves or comment on and are related to other texts, that are both unreliable and self-aware, none of which would I claim Dark is attempting to accomplish. When speaking of postmodern realism, I am merely suggesting that the realism of Dark contains techniques and elements that grew out of the postmodern period.
The essay, The Literature of Exhaustion, by quintessential post-modern author John Barth begins with a quote: “Every man is not only himself. Men are lived over again.” A quote that is attributed to Sir Thomas Browne and could just as easily be the tag line for Dark, which is itself a story of characters reliving the same nightmare for an eternity of iterations, a nightmare that they perpetrate upon themselves in their very efforts to unwind the Gordian knot of its narrative construction. Baran bo Odar, one of the creators of Dark (the professed “heart” in the story-telling, whereas Jantje Friese is the “head”) has used Christopher Nolan as an example of what to do and what not to do in storytelling, as in Inception (what to do) and Tenet (what not to do), the difference between these two lying in the strength of the characters or lack thereof, and it is this (genuine characters that genuinely motivate us) from which the realism in the title postmodern realism derives. It is not simply a stylistic game but a character-driven puzzle.
Okay. Fair enough, you say. But postmodernism…?
Perhaps the best contemporary take on postmodern film would be Wes Anderson’s both ironic and self-referential films, full of references that make them intertextual, and presenting a very unreliable visual universe—as in far removed from what anyone in their right mind would describe as realism—although also very twee, but the most common trend in contemporary cinema is Metamodernism, which incorporates all the postmodern techniques but without the irony, existing both as straightforward storytelling and meta critique, self-referential intertextual but also straightforward and grounded.
It’s true that this kind of film-making is everpresent these days, most noticeably in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the wildly inventive film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, but what Metamodernism presents us with is not a new trick, but an old trick that won’t die inside a larger industry dealing with the insecurities inherent in last generations, the uncertainty and shoe-gazing of a people going over the cliff. Metamodernism is just an expression of continued postmodern influence inside a straightforward commercial industry, an industry in which characters are treated once again as living things sculpted to life by a skilled artisan.
True Detective writer and creator Nic Pizzolatto will hypothesize and psychologize endlessly about the nature of his iconic characters, Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, like a car salesman waxing poetic about his SUVs. To him, they have authentic reality because he, like most scriptwriters of today, is neck deep in a sort of low-rent modernist ideology which is one part sales pitch and two parts mystical and absolutely essential if you are ever going to create something that feels real. The first rule of authorship is the embarrassing levels of belief necessary to create anything anyone will care about, and postmodern literature, with its radical doubt, was so caught up in its own circle jerk of artifice, its characters came out tasting like cardboard.
Yes, I am saying that the characters of Wes Anderson taste like cardboard.
Of course postmodernism has also had its fair share of the charismatic wonders, its bad boys and punks, Jean Baudrillard and Foucault, but the revolutions it was stoking always were limited to the academy and its discontents. The greatest authors of the postmodern age were those who utilized its techniques without falling too hard for its rhetoric, popularizers—like Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut—and outliers like David Foster Wallace—whose Infinite Jest presents itself as a monument to sincerity in the ironic 90’s while at the same time evolving to become the poster boy of the post-modern novel in the 21st century—but perhaps its most far-reaching and noteworthy name was also its most artless and least ironic, PKD.
What made PKD such a remarkable storyteller of the outlandish may have been his own paranoid convictions and alternative views of time and where we are in it, but his particular populist take on the postmodern standards of the meta and pulp would make him the perfect midwife for that aforementioned sea change the 21st century would bring to this postmodern ubiquity. His well-oiled imagination and philosophical audacity became the new benchmark for madcap authors like George Saunders and Jeff VanderMeer as they explored classic PKD dichotomy of the fake, the real and the many gradations in between, with works like Pastoralia and Annihilation ushering in a world where genre was becoming literary and straightforward storytelling was cool again.
And now, even as the storytelling market has come to be dominated by the hollow moralizing of Disney and the MCU, narrative, serialized video content also provides room for the more nuanced story arcs traditionally only found in literary works, made all the more engaging when merged with the fully realized worlds filmed content can provide. This is where the storytelling traditions of 21st century are blossoming. Dark just took it to the next level.
*
Living in New York in the late 90’s, I became fascinated by what I saw then as a trend in film, a kind of mini-movement typified by Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, both of which were works of symbology more than narrative, in which pieces of symbol structure were presented with an obviousness inside a larger context of fakery, but this is a moment that came and went, that both typified the underlying “end of history” thinking as the century turned, and the weariness of the creators trapped inside it. It was a kind of cinema of exhaustion, a cinema where the auteur has torn the product down to the barest scaffolding of symbol, to pull back the veil, but like a magician who’s invited us backstage of his trickery, the effect is underwhelming.
As the century turned, the world embraced works like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and reeled from 9/11, but found comfort in the incessant flag-waving and the endless sincerity which ensued, but the atmosphere of the early 21st century was not just very distinct from the irony of the 1990’s—it was also distinct from the kinds of revolutions that marked the beginnings of the last couple centuries. There is no new Modernist movement, or new Romantic movement, or new Enlightenment, because each of these movements were inspired by new ways of seeing ourselves in the world, and these days, the only new way of seeing is that we’re not much longer for this world.
Things like experimental fiction and social programs for the needy start to seem quaint and instead everone’s hunting for a healthy dose of “realism” by which they mean a kind of sanctified nastiness. The “realists” of our time are throwing their lot in with fascists and strongmen, and the “idealists” are barrelling on with their progressive rhetoric even as each report out of the climate scientist community is more dire than the last.
From the fragmented narratives of modernism and the fragmented canvasses of Cubism sprouted a creative culture striving to go ever further by the 1960’s, but this creative boldness occurred in a world of relative stability. Which is to say, the very unrest of the 1960’s was only possible because the youth culture believed in the ideology of progress and the ultimate stability of society—the uptick of history was treated like an extra law of physics at that time. Compare 1960’s America to 1930’s Germany: on the one hand, instability framed by the overall stable society (1960’s America) in which it takes place, on the other a society struggling to remain stable as it comes apart (1930’s Germany). Our current century is more like the latter, where everyone gives up on everything because they’re watching their world come down around them, and the stories we tell are tied up with that.
As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote eighty years ago: “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm… All mass culture under monopoly is identical. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth is that they are no longer anything but business used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce,” (Dialectic of Enlightenment; Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 94).
So, how does America in the 2020’s compare to America in the 1940’s? Or 1920’s for that matter? As much as things change, they always remain the same. Them that’s got shall get and them that’s not shall lose.
We have a culture of sameness that exists in an underlying state of radical uncertainty—the uncertainty of the oppressor facing the artifacts of his oppression and the uncertainty of the viewer who is watching the world go over the cliff from the isolation of their subdivisions, highrises, and slums. The sameness exists because it is safe; its success is guaranteed. And this same mentality is behind the larger failure of the political and business class to address a situation that requires more than just “business as usual” and the MAGA movement is just one response to this business as usual, because fascism always looks like the answer when our society seems broken, but we the people exist nowhere along this spectrum—and neither does real meaning-making exist within the framework of this sameness—for these “unanimous” products cannot step outside the consumption model of the capitalist system which created them. From Loki to the Mandalorian, we are given only surface and never substance. All of which, does not mean that great art cannot thrive here. It just goes to show what a rare and wonderful thing it is.
Dark is given to us as sci fi, but even when Baran bo Odar says the word sci fi about his own creation, he does so with an ironic tinge to the voice. Why? Because it doesn’t fit this limited understanding. It’s not genre fiction. It’s something else. Because it is more like an allegory adorned in the skimpiest of sci fi frameworks. Which is not to say that it fails as sci fi, but rather that it is more than what sci fi has been traditionally.
At one point in Dark, Adam says, “Man is a strange creature. All his actions are motivated by desire, his character forged by pain. As much as he may try to suppress that pain, to repress the desire, he cannot free himself from the eternal servitude to his feelings. For as long as the storm rages within him, he cannot find peace. Not in life, not in death. And so he will do what he must, day in, day out. The pain is his vessel, desire his compass. It is all that man is capable of.”
This is true for each character in Dark. Each one is a vessel of pain guided by desires and hopes. The question of Dark is how to find a way out of this maze—that in their story universe is a kind of literal narratological time crystal, a 4D object, and in so being has the extra dimensionality that postmodern works can sometimes take on. Think of Cloud Atlas, and its ‘Russian doll’ structure with its books bookended by other books; in this case the “bookness” of it becomes supercharged. The characters themselves are reading the books that we are reading as we are reading them. Clever.
In Dark, a similar sense of hyperreality is created by taking characters that have an essential realism to them and then having those characters meet other iterations of themselves—when Claudia meets herself for example—or interact with characters out of context with themselves—like when Katharina Nielsen meets her mother 33 years in the past. The viewer experiences these situations as both realistic and metaphorical, experiencing the work both as an example of modernistic realism and with a postmodern disconnect. Postmodern realism.
*
Twin Peaks characters have a deep love of cherry pie and coffee. They transform from seedy drug smuggling wife abuser to vegetables that can somehow make the most innocent babblings turn ominous. They are upstanding sheriffs and exotic sawmill-owning Hong Kong widows, but these are characters drawn in the bolder lines of a caricature often verging on satire, that we both enjoy with an ironic detachment even when we find ourselves caught up in the recognizable storylines they traverse, in part because the mystery that contains it all is itself so unknowable and absurd.
But today’s viewers have grown tired of ironically detached viewing and instead want to dive into a messier—and more authentic—realism. Perhaps they want to have their cake and eat it too, in the case of metamodernism, and its postmodern techniques and moralizing a la Disney, or perhaps they like their realism neat—as in the case of shows like Breaking Bad, True Detective, and so on—but they want to suspend their disbelief. They want to be drawn in rather than viewing from the comfort of an externalizing irony.
And Dark draws us in with this kind of potboiler realism. It doesn’t intentionally lay the sentiment on so thick you want to puke that first episode, as in Twin Peaks—just the first of Twin Peaks’ many charms and delights—but opens with a more traditional simmer of the subtle realist. However, as we are drawn on, the hyperreality contingent in its premise, which was unknown to the viewer at first, is revealed in stages and continues to grow and increasingly be a factor in the storytelling of the series, increasingly creating a kind of self-reflective disconnect and a kind of intertextuality of paradox. In this way, the structure of Dark creates its own commentary upon the characters of Dark, but because it takes some time to get there, we are tricked into believing that we are emotionally engaged in a realist story even as we also more and more experience it in a kind of parallax view, such that it is simultaneously allegorical and realist.
In Twin Peaks we see both the heights of what postmodernism could produce and its limits. Postmodernism exists as the “cannibalization of all the styles of the past”. A postmodern work is often likened to a collage, and Twin Peaks feels like a collage of different worlds, from parody, to whodunnit, to a kind of simultaneously goofy and convincingly weird paranormal ultra reality that is like the reality of the viewer reaching into the show from the outside, both living on the more superficial postmodern level, but also something ineffably more.
When Lars Van Trier wrote his also iconic The Kingdom, he said he tried to copy the writing style of David Lynch on Twin Peaks, a style he described as “writing with the left hand” and it is specifically this style of composition, of the unconscious that makes Twin Peaks so unique, a style of writing that was only possible because back then TV was trash, and making high art TV was the ultimate ironic gesture, which of course is no longer true. Perhaps the worst thing about Dark is that it takes itself so seriously.
That having been said, although Dark has a very German and heavy-handed quality to it, the puzzles of character it sets up—that are themselves contingent upon the larger entwined timeline contain a deeper “left hand” level of meaning—these puzzles are only effective because we are approaching this work from the emotional perspective of a potboiler realism, which is wholehearted, as opposed to the more hybrid ironic/realist works produced by auteurs like Charlie Kaufman and Yorgos Lanthimos, which also play with a fusion of allegory and realism. Rather than the realistic allegory of Kaufman and Lanthimos, Odar and Friese create a story that is framed as realism—the missing child whodunnit—and then introduces allegorical elements, but these elements never overwhelm the sense of realism that was set up at the outset.
Or to put it another way, Dark is couched in the highbrow realism of shows like Westworld and Breaking Bad where the absurdity bends but never breaks. As Rust Cohle says in True Detective, “In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and secret fate of all life. You’re trapped, by that nightmare you keep waking up into.”
There have been many genre series that caused a big splash, often for the heightened realism these genre pieces have attained—titles like The Wire and Game of Thrones, Westworld and True Detective—but the best among them are creating a new culture, a new kind of realism, a realism that is not constrained by reality or the meaningless theatrics of simplistic story arcs found in the MCU and Disney, of the “good v. evil” and “just be yourself” variety. Even at the very moment when AI is beginning to threaten their livelihoods, some screenwriters are venturing out and into truly new territory, and Dark creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese epitomize what can be accomplished when they do.
I am reminded of Hakim Bey’s TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone. Not only are there literal places where freedom reigns for a brief moment, there are also imaginal and storytelling spaces that create that sense of freedom and urge us onward into the darker waters of introspection, and Dark is one such antithesis, a series that contains hidden inside it actual meaning. How we access that meaning is by the aforementioned hyperreality. Each instance of this is like a code—Pay attention now. This is important—when Katharine Nielsen’s mother murders her grown daughter because she doesn’t recognize her—when Ulrich Nielsen unintentionally perpetuates his own family’s tragedy when he tries to kill a small boy he believes will grow up into a serial killer of small boys. Each of these is like a koan that can be unraveled, both about the character, but also about the nature of causality. This hyperdimensional aspect is like a living metaphoricality—a conspiracy of a higher order—in which the characters are constrained by a cabal of themselves to continue the endless cycle of their suffering.
Conspiracies always end up looking cheap by the time we make it to the closing page of our precious political thriller, whereas the greatest conspiracies remain aloof and impossible up until the end and Dark is able to accomplish this through its dual nature—a dual nature it is always putting the question to with its endless dichotomies that increasingly come to be experienced as a kind of cosmic joke. There is no good and evil, but only two sides of the same cursed coin, and by living along this razor edge of the real and metaphorical, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, can have their cake and eat it too, like the scientist at the heart of Dark and his Schroedinger cat and the macrocosmic quantum state he creates in his efforts to undo the past. Oops. Spoilers.
And just as the characters in Dark have this dual status as real and also imagined, we also live our our version of realism even as we are also hyperdimensional metaphors acting in a larger metaphorical array. Like the characters in Dark, we are looking for our way out, and like these characters also we are too easily lulled into simple answers of good and evil, of imagined conspiracies and blind to the world beyond our simplistic narrative of us and them, the world that creates the rest, the underpinning assumption that manifested this false dichotomy. For the characters, this question of which parts of the story are tied up in the knot of self-reflexive causality and which parts have an existence outside the story becomes central to their own questing. (Where does their reality originate from? How can it be undone?) For the viewer, this same questing translates to the age-old clichés of the Wheel of Samsara and the Allegory of the Cave.
If only we could leave the Society of the Spectacle behind and embrace the world in all its awkward intensity, profundity, and general unpleasantness. Oh, wait. We can. We just don’t.
Dark is still entertaining us into a kind of slumber even when it presents story and character in a more meaningful and challenging way. But Dark stands in direct contrast to a show like Westworld, which is similar in that it also asks questions of artifice versus “the real” as framed in its larger sci-fi package, but distinct from Dark in that its remarkable first season (the only season worth watching) ends in a comfortable cynicism whereas Dark is a genuine exploration of in between or liminal spaces—between the imagined and the lived, the story and the real. Does it do anything other than entertain?
*
That first season of Westworld was perfect sci fi. The conceit of the living automaton and the meta level wherein the theme park is a stand-in for creation and the engineer who built it an elusive God figure, all of it was so… perfect. It created a framework where larger theological and teleological questions could be given their due, where the interplay between character and person could be explored, and this ambiance of artificiality acted like MSG to heighten the sense of realism. But as soon as its trappings (the wild west theme park and its automatons waking up) expanded outside their frame—into limitless other artificial environments and then out into the surrounding world itself—the charm of the show vanished and it began to weigh itself down. The loss of the charismatic God figure didn’t help it.
Dark on the other hand is as much epistemological as ontological. It’s playing with the laws of storytelling like Westworld but instead of having a fiction inside a fiction, Dark gives us a timeline that forever loops back upon itself in a chorus of bootstrap paradoxes, a story of times that are interconnected in an impossible architecture of causality such that the arc of narrative is threaded through past, present and future—through its conveniently arranged various ‘nows’ and through the hidden times between—through times outside its own boundaries of time travel—and this winding of the narrative itself evolves into a kind of structural component that the characters are both aware of and are trying to unwind (or have come to accept). Increasingly, the characters cease to work and act as themselves but instead to subvert their actions and being in service of an imagined timeline they are forced to live through.
In other words, if Westworld is the story of characters breaking free of the constraints of their narrative arc then Dark is the story of characters who believed themselves free becoming enslaved by their narrative arc.
Both of these shows present the framing of the story as part of the story, but in that first season of Westworld, the story was an extra step removed from us, and what was thrilling was watching the artifice wake up and invade the frame. The guests get their comeuppance, and the fiction turns self-aware and factual. But what is in Westworld a clever conceit inside a larger universe that remains entirely inside its own purview, the theme park come to life, is in Dark, an endless theologizing that we can not entirely grasp even at its close. Is God time like Adam postulates, and if so, what sort of twisted God inhabits the twisted up timeline of Dark? The basic premise: “What if quantum mechanics was true on a macro level” is beyond clever. It breaks our brains, which is exactly what makes Dark so effective.
But in the end, who cares? Why do we need another show? Why are shows made? Are any of these shows going to save the world? Does the world need saving? What is the purpose of a show like Dark?
In essence, the purpose of the show is to find a way to write itself out of existence. It is working towards an enlightenment moment wherein it will cease to be, while all the while also able to maintain the suspension of disbelief and keep all its various story components in line (characters aren’t breaking the 4th wall or commenting on the nature of storytelling) as utilizes these meta techniques that have been retrofitted to its more realist environment—such as a character’s awareness of themselves as trapped in a story not of their making and deceived by literal manifestations of themselves.
Just as the time crystal of narrative is eternally recurring, the characters are always both the real character and the hyperreal metaphor come to life in the triumvirate universe of timelines they create, with its fallacious dichotomies only annihilated when reality is finally encountered and the created apparitions of the two parallel universes we have been living in this whole time willingly sacrifice themselves to end the suffering of their worlds by allowing them to be annihilated. This is Dark.
We watch Dark for the same reasons we always watch shows, because it’s cathartic, but the point is that Dark is cathartic in a different way. It’s taking us on a roller coaster, just like Breaking Bad did, and The Boys did, and The Man In The High Castle did, but the puzzle at the center of Dark has a life of its own. It is a new kind of idea, and there is nothing more precious than a new kind of idea, especially now and here at the end of the world as we know it.
Because authors who write with the future in mind have a special problem these days. That is, the future isn’t such a sure thing anymore, and as a result, those of us who are always rubbernecking for up-and-coming disasters are developing new habits of mind, and Dark stems from one of these habits. Maybe it’s a recently resuscitated tradition of afterlife fiction, or maybe it’s just an impossible hope hidden in the general malaise of play-pretend despair.
Whatever Dark is, it’s also a story of possible worlds and peopled by ghosts.
*
Among the culture watchers, there are those who treat these audiovisual and other such texts as a kind of holy text that must be deciphered and are only interested in the ones that can stand up to that description. And Twin Peaks has always presented itself as a kind of divining of the television gods. It’s true that with its more recent iteration seems lessened in this regard, in part because the irony is gone. TV is no longer trash.
Dark does not have the same level of inscrutability as Twin Peaks at its best, but Dark is more a way forward for the original Twin Peaks series than its own final season so many years later. When Twin Peaks returned in 2017, it also seemed to be a story about ghosts. Halfway between Dark and Ionesco, its characters were trapped inside a story they would never escape, ending up trapped in a kind of storytelling afterlife where they’re half real and half imagined and doomed to remain that way forever.
What universe was David Lynch exploring in this last supreme effort of his? It seems more Inland Empire than Twin Peaks in its construction. These mythical lands, of cherry pie and coffee, the mystical FBI and the Black Lodge, are truly an expression of the American underbelly wound back in upon itself, and Dark sprouts from this same geography of the unhinged underbelly of a place, just different place and different underbelly, all endless rain like an endless punch in the face in small town Germany just before the nuclear power plant’s shut down, and its high school intrigue turned middle-aged and the missing child turned middle-aged suicide. The compounding paradoxes and their unwinding dichotomies. Dark.
But Dark is not some mystical text. Its possible interpretations are finite. This is part of its realism.
And although Twin Peaks is more wide open to interpretation, this is only because it is empty, and its emptiness is only more apparent in the efforts of its creator to bring it back round to some sort of closure twenty-some years later.
And we who inhabit the world and want to make meaning of it reach out for stories such as these, but history is like memory, forever shifting to fit with our evolving understanding of things, and as the paranoid fantasies and absurd impossibilities of science fiction increasingly becomes everyday reality, it makes sense to place PKD as one of the high priests of postmodernism in an after-the-fact re-imagining of what it was and what purpose it served and is serving. In this latter-day postmodernism of our times where the dogma of postmodernism has evolved into a bag of tricks that our more commercial blockbuster-oriented creators have taken on to make it more engaging—think Deadpool—it makes perfect sense to put PKD on his pedestal. He is the ultimate freak in the larger pantheon of postmodernist’s Freaks and Geeks.
Because postmodernism itself was ultimately a very trashy pursuit. It embraced trash and was trashy itself. It wallowed in our trashes ironically, while postmodern realism takes that same trash and turns it on its head and makes sculptures of it, turns it sublime and graspable, makes it both a commodity and opens the door to something better, opens the door to the possibility of artworks of real meaning for the children of the post-apocalypse.
I’m not saying that Philip K Dick doesn’t deserve the reverence. His outlandish understanding of things, as exemplified in VALIS, is one of the high points of 20th century letters, but his appropriation by the establishment hacks seems a tragic twist in his larger fate. The obscurantist is appropriated by the orthodoxy to maintain their ongoing hegemony in the face of an ever-disjointed world sort of thing.
For whether we speak of science fiction realism, genre realism, or postmodern realism, what we are really saying is the imagined and speculative and allegorical has become much closer to home in the last couple decades, because our world is ratcheting up its weirdness factor to unpleasant levels while all the while the end of days is staring us in the face. The dark dreams of our predecessors have become the everyday reality of the next generation. Are chatbots sentient? Will the world really allow itself to go trundling into climate apocalypse so the economy can continue to appear functional for a few more years? Is it actually true that we’re filling our oceans up with plastic because we can’t do away with plastic straws and plastic bags?
Ultimately, what Dark’s postmodern realism is just the sign of the times. Both we and it live in a PKD universe. Our politicians and entrepreneurs read like PKD villains (Trump and Musk) because generally speaking the absurdity and idiocy of reality mirrors the very fake realities that PKD concocted a good fifty years or more ago.
When we are saturated with meaninglessness, meaning can become less effective. In a pile of glittering trash, do we notice the genuine thing? When staring at items on the rack, can we discern the true poetry from the Hallmark card? 1899, the follow-up to Dark by creators Odar and Friese was cancelled after its first season despite positive reviews and impressive ratings maybe because of “completion rates” or how expensive it was or just a gut feeling, but the larger issue is saturation. Things can be new and unique, but only so long as they are so in a consumable package, in bright, sparkly colors that capture your attention whether you like it or not. The slow burn will burn out before it’s finished in the media market of today.
Sure the pace of 1899 was slow, and there are those who claimed it was just a tad predictable, and there are also those fatalists among you who say the genuine demands to be seen and will—that a great show will find a way—but what if the people aren’t looking for greatness? What if great shows are created by accident because for the most part no one wants to see anything anymore? Because the catastrophes are lining up upon the horizon and our bills are adding up as well and so on?
I remember watching a documentary about Graham Greene and in the course of an interview he said something like, “But there are so many other things more important than books.” Trying to be a great storyteller is like trying to be a great juggler. When the ground is beginning to give, we don’t care about jugglers. We only care where to put our feet, and maybe the occasional light entertainment.
But in Dark something genuine has indeed slipped through. We should all be watching.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
