The competition among stories: the shifting attempt to understand origins as a vital tool for understanding the future. And no one on any side seems to have undiluted access to the nature of these origins. Like us they are limited: texts, snippets of archaeological evidence, the more-or-less trustworthy pronouncements of wise men and women. The narrative is the working out of what is against what came before, with the inversion of monotheism and polytheism, tinged with repetition, evolution, and a sort of submerged and fought-off fatalism. We consume BSG trying to find out what already happened, not what will happen next, though these are connected by the obvious – obvious because BSG has made it explicit – sense in which the echo of the past is the shape of what society will grow out of the catalcysm.
This is another theme for this blog: the appeal to the past as indicator of how to build a “natural” society. BSG is explicit on one hand: human versus machine, the oldest sci-fi trope, messy free-willed man versus cold metal. Shake, complexify. On the other, the fleet’s idea of the past is so obviously compromised and muddled, all appeals to nature are suspect yet attractive, as they should ever be. The fleet’s Gods apparently vacated in the cataclysm, making their comeback in the post-destruction breach.
How the narrative adapts, and how fast, the telling of the story as cultural marker. In the Lascaux cave paintings the narrative method stayed the same for thousands of years. A narrative where humans seems to exist not without a level of anxiety towards their place in nature, but rather with a constant level of anxiety – a normal level that came to seem…natural. (In our shorthand, the teleology of the salmon and the bird.) Suppose that. Now suppose it is because from where they were, they were so much closer to the echo of protoplasmic nature, one undifferentiated mass of cells, a pre-anxious proto-biology. (The past moves in tandem with the future in any good theory.) The teleology of bird and salmon maintained a memory of cohesion not just among people, but among biology itself: a resort to nature itself echoing forward, though we confuse culture and society for nature, man’s manifested ability to be selfish for the normal and unopposed.
So, BSG, with many of the characters visited by echoes of previous experience, both real in terms of diagesis (someone is dead in Starbuck’s viper) or flashed-back (our final five Cylons as the residents on a long-destroyed Earth). And it ties a certain sort of narrative fatalism into the past, a move also happening in “Lost” (here for now, more from us later), a product of the odd and dominant and by-no-means unwelcome comic-book ethos sweeping our narrative culture. It’s the Cylons’ refrain: “it’s all happening again”. It’s the what-appeared-secular society of the colonies getting the old time religion after the Gods abandoned them. Both what-we-knew-as-humans and Cylons are operating out of narratives – divine plans – of great compulsion and forgotten origins. The unraveling of the narrative is the slow revelation of the errors of their assumptions to nature, and the struggle to base a society on these shifting ideas.
We’re making the show seem tedious. You don’t need to read about cave paintings and biotech. But it helps! We don’t suppose this is for new fans…
More:
The original Starbuck is not impressed with the new narratives. Sounds vaguely familiar to comic book fans. Interesting enough, amid competing claims of naturalism, what people use for support to reassert the older ones. The one point I’ll accept – and be saddened by – is that kids stuff is in no way for kids anymore. But not exactly for adults either. More on that later.
