Director Kevin Smith Talks Galactica

Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob (among others) wrote about his love for Battlestar Galactica. He says one of the reasons they got it so right was that it was a reflection of our current culture.

How did the new “B-Star G” peeps spin straw into gold? How did they
make the human beings as interesting (if not more so) than the fucking Cylons?
Like all great art, they simply held a mirror up to our culture. “Galactica” V.2
is an allegory for 9/11 and the War on Terror viewed from both sides. It offers
a far more complex view of two opposite ideologies in juxtaposition to one
another, presenting neither side as particularly evil – just terrifying.
Extremely well done Science Fiction has always been most powerfully effective
when it lays out humanity naked and shows us ourselves, warts and all. Whether
it’s “Planet of the Apes”, “Star Trek”, or almost anything by Phillip K. Dick,
the best sci-fi isn’t simply laser-beam driven shoot-‘em-ups between good guys
and bad guys; it’s the abyss we look into and see someone awfully, sometimes
painfully familiar looking back from.What Sci-Fi does best is allow the author
to comment on what it’s like to be a human being – the shame, the miracle, the
sacrifice, the desire, the grand heights, and the abject lows. And if an author
can accomplish this in stealth mode – be entertaining while not calling
attention to his or her loftier goals – so much the better.

This gives an insight into how representation can be shown on screen. Kevin Smith clearly thinks that the reason it has succeeded is by showing us a part of ourselves that goes unnoticed, or is often ignored to give a vision of perfection. He says sci-fi succeeds (but this can be worked to most dramas) when we watch it and we see something scarily familiar to our real lives being shown to us. Battlestar Galactica especially is full of 'imperfect' people, strangely it is somewhat a rarity on TV (and even more so in TV sci-fi) to have the characters as gritty and realistic with flaws and all.

Big Scary Disasters and Battlestar Galactica Blogs

On the official Battlestar Galactica blog creator Ronald D. Moore talks about the relationship betwen 'Big Scary Disasters' and Battlestar Galactica.

I work on a show that's premised on the idea of an apocalyptic event actually
happening to group of people and their struggle to survive in its aftermath, and
so the idea of being ready for the unexpected does actually occur to me on
occasion.
I won't make this a rant or a sermon, but I will ask anyone reading
this blog to take at least a moment to think about the idea that maybe, just
maybe, something really bad can happen to you and the people in your life that
you care about. Your life can be upended by any one of a litany of disasters.

(Link to article)

Whilst this is written in reference to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the idea that a television show is so based on the fear stemming from a situation is telling, and in fact can easily be applied to Galactica itself.
9/11 created a climate of fear that directly influenced many shows, the fear is most prevalent in Battlestar Galactica, yet it also seen in The West Wing or Sex and the City. People felt they could empathize with characters who had experienced pain and suffering, as most Americans felt they went through some degree of pain and suffering after September 11 no matter how distant from the events they were.

-harry

Fears of Viewer Desertion

After September 11 TV networks worried that audiences may not be in the mood for the new season of television that was due to be starting (or in some cases had just started). In the immediate time afterwards manufactured entertainment seemed suddenly so irrelevant and unnecessary.
They feared that the public wouldn't accept the shows they had created, that these shows were for a different climate.
However, looking at Google search patterns tells a different story.
It shows enormous gains on 9/11 related issues in the week following it.

Top 10 Gaining QueriesWeek of September 10, 2001
1. nostradamus
2. cnn
3. world trade center
4. osama bin laden
5. pentagon
6. fbi
7. american red cross
8. american airlines
9. afghanistan
10. american flag

These hold throughout September, and only start to decrease in October.
By Novemeber 9/11 related searches had all but dissapeared.

Top 10 Gaining QueriesNovember 2001
1. harry potter
2. xbox
3. gamecube
4. daisy cutter
5. lord of the rings
6. shakira
7. toys r us
8. melbourne cup
9. melanie thornton
10. leonid meteor shower

By November the only part of 9/11 that Americans seemed to care about was the kind of bomb being dropped on Afghanistan.

(inspired by editorial in Dec. 2001 Television Business International by Les Brown)

Confronting Death and Real Violence

Besides a brief period on film in the 1970's Hollywood has never really confronted true violence, and particularly not on television.
Television has almost always followed the path of 'hyper violent PG rated' content. It still gives the exhilarating rush of violence but removes any kind of pain or suffering that real violence, or realistic screen violence would bring with it. It is through this that hundreds and hundreds of Cuban drug barons could be killed in a show like Miami Vice, or faceless officers could be zapped by aliens in Star Trek without the audience having to feel unsettled.
9/11 posed viewers a new set of problems however. People were suddenly aware of pain and anguish, and that removing these images from popular culture could not possibly work in creating saccharine sweet violence this time around. Drama that acknowledges the pain caused by violence are more popular than ever, and people now expect death to be accompanied by suffering. This is seen prominently in 24 Season 6, where Jack Bauer, a man previously seen as being in the vein of John Rambo or John McClane , is now feeling remorse for his actions and now doubts himself, showing the human side of war (this could also reflect the American public's waning appetite for the Iraq war).


(inspired by Larry Gross' 'Letter From Hollywood' in 'Film Comment')