"Mystery loves company"

After a decade-long streak of love-hate letters drawing on his embattled relationship with the US (eg. Salvador, Wall Street, JFK), Oliver Stone took a shine to Bruce Wagner’s graphic novel Wild Palms, seeing in it the potential for another frenetic, paranoiac vision. Of all the unlikely formats for this material, he chose to launch it as a TV mini-series, which alienated many conservative viewers, and remains little known to this day. Considering Olly subsequently made no bones about his less-than-favourable opinion of television in his lurid satirical masterpiece Natural Born Killers, it’s fairly self-evident he was smuggling cautionary didactics on the worrying nexus between corporatism, technocracy and media monopoly into the prime-time arena. As a creative decision, the 4:3 televisual packaging may be its Achilles Heel or its subliminal genius, depending on how you look at it.

Wagner’s screenplay wears its many, many influences on its sleeve, the interactive opioid television matrix of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the psychopolitical futurism and drug experimentation of Philip K Dick, and the cyberpunk aesthetics of William Gibson, to name just three. The setting is Los Angeles in 2007 although it looks and feels more like a depiction of garish 90s Hollywood façade as “The Future”, where the streets and public places are hectored by martial law. Harry Wyckoff, Jim Belushi’s unassuming lug, is a patent attorney and family man who is losing a game of mind-chess with a symbolic rhinoceros. Enter old flame Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall) as the sultry spirit of jezebel equipped with an irresistible sob-story about her missing child. This soon entwines Harry with messianic, entrepreneurial gruffalo Senator Anton Kreutzer, a tanned-up, snow-coned Robert Loggia in a full-throttle, choleric turn that surely anticipates Mr Eddie in David Lynch’s Lost Highway a few years later. The Senator is the Promethean godhead of a movement called Synthiotics, proponent of a nebulous, quack philosophy called New Realism, whose chief drawcard is a virtual multimedia soapy called Church Windows that beams its stars right into the viewer’s living room. No sooner is our quintessential, short-tempered nemesis ensconced than the narrative spirals drastically into a thematic cornucopia charged with headache-inducing plot twists, a glut of classical and pop-cultural references and a familial Gordian Knot complex enough to keep the Neo-Freudians in business for another century. Many a well-worn face are cast in type to maintain comfort zones; Angie Dickinson as the duplicitous, botoxed mother-in-law, David Warner as the cool-hand ideologue leading the resistance, Brad Dourif as yet another sickly “nobody understands me” outcast, and Ernie Hudson apparently reprising his role as the marginalized 4th ghostbuster. The occasional Easter egg is lobbed over the fourth wall too, such as William Gibson appearing as himself to downplay his contributions, Oliver Stone in an interview that reveals his JFK speculations have since turned out to be true, and the arguably self-aware irony of the uniformly hammy performances. One scene in particular features children staring straight out of the screen at us as they sit in front of mesmeric cartoons. This is merely a tip-of-the-iceberg precis, as trying to contain this hot mess in a traditional synopsis is just not possible.

What is it really about? There’s more than enough food for thought to keep everyone guessing from their own idiosyncratic point of view. What begins as an exposé on the psychology of jealousy and marital disharmony speedily enfleshes one tropic limb after another - animism, totemism, atavism, techno-shamanism, Samurai code, anti-trust, child celebrity, child recruitment, child harvesting, child brainwashing (plenty of bad child stuff). Belushi’s protagonist is admittedly so pedestrian that the story’s heart, albeit a very crooked one, seems more like the Senator’s dysfunctional, paternalistic family, around which every other element is a centrifugal body politic. This perspective readily suggests a colourful psychoanalytic model of the all-enveloping meta-family of Hollywood itself. It’s generally understood that Synthiotics is a wholly unveiled representation of the modernized pseudo-religion Scientology, the irascible, grail-chasing Senator its Hubbard and his occulted dealings the clandestine iniquities of The Sea Org. Both he and Dickinson’s enabling lioness surround themselves with faux zen installations and powerful objet d’art (more nods to mesmerism), constantly spuming with offhand poetics to the point of irritation, such as in the egoic projections we’ve come to attribute to eccentric elites in their effort to immunize against ordinariness. Analysis buffs can also bask in Dickinson’s interruption of both Oedipus and Electra with her criminal excesses, all the way from Kyoto to California. And perhaps all those swimming pools sans water are there to vivify the recurring theme of the hazing of the maternal, not to mention the sly nod to Rod Steiger’s mother-obsessed killer in No Way to Treat a Lady. Note also the carefully placed references to interstitial feminist icons like Zelda Fitzgerald, which points to the film’s women as prima materia for the vampiric agency and designs of its men.

Ultimately, Wild Palms is so nauseatingly awash with meaning and event, so snowed under by a constellation of concepts, that it illustrates Synthiotics’ very own notion of post-symbolism – there are no more metaphors. The self-reflexive flamboyance of couching a TV horror on TV, crammed with the wrap-around reality/unreality of soap-opera mimicry and fictive selves, has all the unnerving symptoms of a psychotic break, as in the jarring infinity of the phenomenon of mirror-mirroring. Unlike the comparatively understated pulp of fellow early 90s VR nightmare The Lawnmower Man, Wild Palms is forced, contrived, obvious, overexpensive, overstylized, overscored with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s era-specific mood-synth, plagued with musical cues (how many times can you hear Gimme Shelter in one sitting?), hyperaware hypertrash, like the cluttered paella of the real Hollywood, a town poltergeisted by a DeltaFosB overload of too many ideas. And maybe that’s the point.

Most noteworthy of all, however, is its disturbingly prophetic quality. It’s feasible that Stone could float a Disney-safe “fantasy” and bait a cult minority of impressionable nocturnals in sedative 1993, but there’s no place for this kind of whistleblowing today (compare with 2014’s poker-faced Maps to the Stars). It’s no longer a secret that the neurosis engendered by competitive, segregated urban living is being capitalized on by a shrewd, industrialist kakistocracy who implement elaborate platforms offering alternative realities. Now the information horse has bolted and the kids know, or one can only hope, all about our misadventures in perception management, rank pharmaceuticalization and designer drug novelty (forget Soma, try Mimizine!), the CIA’s nefarious MK Ultra project and our gradual, spiritual hologrammatization within globalized, machinic vortices of the virtual. It’s enough to make you want to have the key alumni of science fiction over to dinner and, come that solemn part of the evening when the cheese platter and cognac is laid out, lean over and sternly say “please stop giving them ideas”.