The OA
(2016)
(SPOILERS) Unreliable narrators can be
tiresome, particularly when some bright spark(s) decide to stretch the device over
eight episodes of a TV show. With a Shutter
Island or Life of Pi (or Usual Suspects) there’s an end in sight,
and your mileage for their content may vary based on how satisfying/over-familiar/tiresome
the “It was all a dream, possibly/definitely” conceit is. Too often, they come
across as a cop-out on the part of the writer, sucking the audience into a
shaggy dog story that professes to have a commanding subtext but is actually
led by its “twist”; rote writing and structuring are disguised as revelation,
and it becomes all about that. The
ambiguity becomes the point, whereas before the story at least (may have) had a
number of different ideas to boast; it wags the shaggy dog and is symptomatic of
the writer, having put away childish things, being unable to embrace metaphor
without calling it metaphor outright. So it is with The OA.
For its devisers, Brit Marling and Zal
Batmanglij, this approach may border on an obsession, not dissimilar to M Night
Shyamalan’s fixation on third act plot twists, one that comes across as
simultaneously superficial and patronising, as if there are lessons to be
imparted that they – the ones who see – can convey, regarding susceptibility to
others impressing their paradigms upon us, or simply our own inability, on a
daily basis, to be sure of what we know to be true. Which makes it ironic that
Marling, as one of those seemingly with a mission to instruct, casts herself as
one with a mission to instruct, the cult leader with a fistful of devoted
adherents.
I’m suspect my problems with The OA would be less pronounced had I
not previously experinced their 2011 film Sound
of My Voice; indeed, I initially resisted giving the series a look for that
reason, as the premise gave me an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I quite liked Sound of My Voice, but its desire to
withhold was only intriguing up to a point. As such, I felt like I knew what The OA was going to be going in, on the
basis that they had a track record in being wilfully elusive and ambiguous (in Sound of My Voice, Marling plays a cult
leader professing to hail from the future); essentially, they’re doing exactly the
same thing here, with just enough uncertainty that you can get 40+ pages of IMDB
comments running the gamut from adoration, to indignation, to trying to pin
down just what it’s all about (which is only worthwhile if you leave the show
actually invested in what you’ve just watched, and which anyway is a hiding to
nothing; this is not Lost,
although some of its aspects are indebted to that show).
One of those comments reference “deepism”
as a malady suffered by Marling and Batmanglij, a phrase I hadn’t come across
before, but which does feel like it has some bearing on The OA. There’s an essential banality to their repeated “message”,
regarding the fallacy of faith in an intangible force, of the portrait of those
who are caught up in such beliefs as people with holes in lives; something
missing, damaged, leading to a need to believe in something more than
themselves (the rationalisation for anyone who embraces anything outré, that
excludes them from being ascribed “normal” behaviour). This is less-than-profound-but-struts-that-way
posturing is why the show has been garlanded with the kind of empty-headed
applause The Slate gives – “The OA is
less a story about a myth than it is a story of how myth is made, and our
collective, almost primordial need to tell stories that bring us together, bind
us, and give us meaning. The OA
suggests the sublime exists not in some ethereal realm, but rather in the
people around us”: now, that’s
deepism.
Of course, Marling and Batmangli have succeeded
in igniting exactly the impulse they attempt to critique in “followers” of the
show. On one level, The OA feels like
a rebuke of the Damon Lindelof school of storytelling, where exactly the type
of mysteries he shows to be “real” through deliciously gripping twists and
turns of plotting (the conclusions are something else, but you can’t have everything)
are shown to be anything but. On another, the show is utilising exactly
Lindelof’s approach to inflate nothing (or something very slim) into something
– focussing on a different member of the Five each episode is the very
technique that kept Lost moving
through limited plot progression, and which hampered its first few seasons (but
it’s worth emphasising that the series had a far more impressive grasp on
character; most of those in The OA
get short shrift).
So yes, The
OA leaves it to you the viewer to decide if Prairie is telling the truth or
spinning a yarn (one that she may believe), and as such the takeaway may be
contrasting stimulation or ambivalence (or enragement). Marling actually went
there and said “our interpretation is
less important than the audience’s”. Yes, she said that. Ten out of ten for
unbridled pseudishness. For me, it leads to a boy who cried wolf scenario. I’m
unmoved by the prospect of a second season; they don’t need to bait that hook
because I’m not swallowing (I’ll gladly eat humble pie if they turn the show
into something tangibly gripping beyond its most evident theme, but I’d suggest
that ship has sailed and, indeed, had no cargo in the first place).
Because, more than the manner in which it resolves
itself (or doesn’t), I’m not hugely
sold on the storytelling. There’s some very good acting in the show – Phyllis
Smith, Alice Krige, Patrick Gibson, Emory Cohen – but Marling’s drippy moonbeam
performance wears thin quickly. It’s a leap I never really made to believe the
Five would willingly choose to go and listen to Prairie tell a tall story every
night, most likely because of this, but maybe also because its insufficiently
motivated, smacking of the kind of thing that only happens in a story, along with where it all leads, to the unwittingly
hilarious conceit of foiling a high school gunman (a cheap device if ever there
was one) through the power of interpretive dance. In fact, it’s all so
unlikely, maybe this too is a tale told by an unreliable narrator.
Ah yes, the interpretative dance. A term
I’m using principally because it’s instantly what I recognised it as, but also
because Batmanglij objects to it so much, believing it rude to the art form;
I’m a proud vulgarian, in that case. He expects more from “serious people”. Really? You need to get a grip, Zal. Such a
response certainly explains why his creative projects are so earnestly po-faced.
I know the climax is supposed to be powerfully stirring (again, the execution,
right down to the surging, euphoric music, is very Lindelof), but if falls on
its face, plunging headlong into the realm of farcical.
And that’s not mentioning other unlikely
turns of plot, such as Hap leaving Prairie at the side of the road when he has
no real idea what effect her loss will have on the experiment (of course, the
answer, if it’s in her head, is that the narrative demands it, just like the
answer, if it is in some respect true, is that the contrived convenience of the
box full of books derives from Riz Ahmed planting them there for someone who
goes looking under beds to find). And then there’s the fact that the show is
desperately lacking a sense of humour that might soften the blow of its concerted
self-importance.
The idea of researching NDEs as Hap does is
so extravagantly Frankensteinian, it would likely have benefited from a less naturalistic
telling, but as it is, the only part that really held sway was Jason Isaacs’
confrontation with a similarly mad professor-ish associate; Marling’s reductive
analysis of the NDE experience (“They
draw something that often exists in our unconscious mind and brings it to the
surface”) suggests she isn’t really fascinated with the phenomenon per se,
particularly since the whole thing is but a conceit (to enable “a reflection on trauma and recovery”, as
Vulture puts it, and to which she readily agrees), meaning the aspects of the
premise with the most potential become the most disappointing in execution.
Give me Flatliners any day (well,
probably not the forthcoming remake).
Oh, and I have no idea why The OA keeps getting compared to Stranger Things, other than that people
had no frame of reference and both were made by Netflix. It may as well be
compared to The Crown. After all, both
are either made by people or feature characters with an unassailable sense of self-importance.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.