|
|
|
|
EPISODE 5.05 Life of the Party Written by: Ben Edlund Directed by: Bill Norton
A Distinguished Ancestry Science fiction movies of the 1950’s were generally either morality tales dealing with the concerns of the day (nuclear annihilation or communist infiltration) or straightforward exploitation films with beautiful young women threatened by (improbable looking) monsters. One, however, stood out from the rest. Not only did it boast a strong plot, an excellent cast and (for the time) first-class special effects; more importantly it dealt with a truly timeless theme. I am, of course, speaking about “Forbidden Planet”. This was no accident for the film was directly inspired by one of Shakespeare’s most universal plays – "The Tempest". This was a play whose twin themes were the difference between illusion and reality on the one hand and what it is to be human on the other. How do we tell what is real and what is not? Can we really judge someone or something by their outward appearances? Certainly some people can try to deceive us by the way they look and behave on the surface but more insidiously do we not deceive ourselves by judging others on the same basis? The central character is Prospero, an observer and experimenter with human behaviour. He saw human nature at its worst when his brother, Antonio, usurped his dukedom and sent himself and his daughter Miranda off to almost certain death. The question he struggles with is whether behavior like this is human nature or can that nature be changed? But Prospero is not alone. He finds and takes control of an island which, together with Miranda, he shares with two creatures – Caliban and Ariel. Ariel is reason and intelligence. He is, however, enslaved to Prospero and does his bidding in creating the tempest to shipwreck Antonio and his companions. But he ensures that no-one is brought to serious harm thereby and is therefore a reflection of Prospero's own intelligence and reason, albeit an intelligence and reason put to immoral purposes. Caliban on the other hand was the offspring of a witch and an incubus, a mis-shapen creature that seems the very epitome of ignorance, bestiality, and treachery. Propsero tried to educate and civilize Caliban but felt himself betrayed a second time so he concludes that the creature is a born devil and quite lost. Prospero is, therefore, cast as the God-like ruler of all he surveys. He is the governor of the island; he is the one who controls Ariel and uses him to bring about the storm that gives the play its title and precipitates the action with which it deals. And he seeks to teach lessons to those deserving them, principally Antonio, and even to manipulate his own daughter. Inherent in all this is not just Prospero’s power to control others, but his right to do so - his moral and not just his physical superiority. But ultimately “The Tempest” is about Prospero’s own internal journey. He discovers what it really means to be human not by observing others and teaching them but by understanding himself. We learn that, as Duke of Milan, he was in large measure the author of his own downfall. We learn how Caliban had a right to feel hard done by on account of Prospero’s treatment of him and that the allegation of attempted rape against him may not be justified. We, and ultimately Prospero himself, begin to understand the destructiveness of Prospero’s sense of moral and intellectual superiority and how it led to his misplaced feeling of being unjustly treated and thus to his unhealthy obsession with revenge. The parallel between on the one hand the desire for revenge of Prospero, the intellectual and moral prince, and on the other of Caliban, the stupid, lazy, savage, untrustworthy, immoral, deceptive and thieving creature, is obvious. Caliban represents the ugly side of human nature, something that we all possess, even the seemingly most moral and upright of us. And Ariel represents the harm that intellect and reason driven by this dark side of Prospero’s human nature can inflict. Prospero, at the epilogue, realizes this. He sees through the illusion of himself as the moral superior of others and understands the reality about himself. As a result he is a very different man from the one he was at the beginning of the play and makes at least a brave attempt at forgiveness and reconciliation. In this sense the “Tempest” of the title is the agent of transformation. The Prospero character in “Forbidden Planet” is called Morbius. And he makes a similar realization about himself. Morbius and his daughter were the sole survivors of an expedition to a planet called Altair IV. There he had discovered the remains of a “mighty and noble” race, the Krell. He was a man who, partly by nature and partly because of his experimentation with machines left behind by the Krell, considered himself alone morally and intellectually capable of dealing with the legacy of this race. He also thought of himself as a loving father. He was wrong on all counts. A rescue mission arrives and, as the crew begins to die as mysteriously as before them had the crew of the original expedition, we learn the truth. Morbius’s feeling of being intellectually and morally superior to everyone else was an illusion. With his new found knowledge he had created Robbie, a robot enslaved to Morbius. It was capable of great destructive force but was restrained from doing harm by a device Morbius created for the purpose. Morbius of course congratulates himself on this evidence of his moral as well as intellectual superiority. But deep inside him were feelings of resentment, arrogance and ambition that had manifested themselves in the form of a monster from his own id and was attacking those who threatened him. Indeed behind his own paternal love lay an anger and a jealousy that would have killed his daughter too. The Krell’s own greatest intellectual achievement had inflicted the same fate on themselves and far from learning from them, as Morbius thought he was, he was repeating their mistakes. In Morbius and in his creations - the creature from the id and the robot - we see Prospero, Caliban and Ariel representing intelligence and reason and the ugly passion. But unlike Prospero the realization for Morbius came too late and he could only buy safety for his daughter at the cost of his own life. So, just what has this all got to do with “Life of the Party”? Well, we could start with the fact that this episode was a shameless rip-off…err “homage” to “Forbidden Planet” complete with the manifestation of a subconscious as a murdering monster.
Party Animal When we first see Lorne, he is his usual bubbly and bouncy personality handling ten different things at once with his familiar mixture of charm and humor. It is only in the privacy of his own office – or should that be dressing room – that we see there is something wrong. Before the mirror he reveals that the cheerful breeziness we saw earlier was all for show. In reality he has a headache and is depressed. It is his reflection that tries to cheer him up – playing the role for him that Lorne usually plays for others, especially Angel. As he had observed earlier, “I've pulled the big boy out of many a brood-fest.” At first the encouragement doesn’t seem to be working and Lorne still seems stressed. But as he walks out of his office the slow ballad the reflection sings suddenly turns into an upbeat pop song. The implication is that what we see in the Office is the real Lorne hidden behind the mask that he puts on each time he is in public. Thus we are introduced to the idea that there is an illusion here and a reality. The nature of the difference between them is gradually revealed in the course of the succeeding hour. In the course of this hour we do, I think, learn to see Lorne in a rather different light. When we were first introduced to Lorne – back in the days when he was simply called “the Host” - he was a demon with a limited ability to see the future and an understanding of what goes on inside a person. Moreover his gifts are not just offered to those with souls or those who are “good” (whatever that term means). As Angel once pointed out to him, they were also offered to “murderous demons”. So, he was there to help the forces of good and evil find the paths intended for them in the great design that Wesley referred to in “To Shanshu in LA”. As such it seems to me that he played a central role in the overarching mythology of the series. His precognitive abilities and the way he used them reinforced the idea that there is some pre-ordained plan and that Angel and all the others somehow fitted into it. That is not to say the writers had adopted a determinist view of the universe. Rather they have set up a tension between the free will of the participants in the drama and the idea that each had a pre-ordained role to play. But, to function as some sort of spiritual guide Lorne had to be able positively to influence a subject as well as understand. This alone implies a quick-witted intelligence, persistence and more than a little steel. These are all characteristics Lorne has shown. He never picks a fight. He is never openly confrontational. Bust as we have seen he never gives his subject an easy ride either. His approach is gently but relentlessly and remorselessly to wear Angel and others down until finally he gets what he wants. And it is here that the wry, camp humor becomes such a wonderful weapon. His whole manner suggests that he is simply indulging in trivial gossip for no real purpose at all. But this impression helps defuse any anger and annoyance caused by his probing and testing and thus skillfully prevents a confrontation developing and can easily lull potential subjects into a false sense of security and lead them to open up about themselves even when they did not mean to. Ironically though, as Lorne became a regular in the series, this emphasis on his role as a guide became less and less pronounced. The extent to which it has now been emasculated is shown by the way in which he has been used in the present season. When Angel was straying “off his path” in the Darla arc in season 2 the Host, as he then was, was there to tell him so and to try to put him back on that path. Here too the single most important issue is the extent to which the Wolfram and Hart’s Senior partners’ offer has led our heroes off their path again. This is an issue that has been debated on a number of occasions between the former members of AI. But the voice that has been most noticeably absent is that of Lorne. Indeed, his principal concern throughout this season seems to be more with his role as a mover and shaker in the entertainment world, as witnessed by the teaser. There is astonishingly nothing to indicate that Lorne had any views at all, one way or the other, about whether accepting the Wolfram and Hart deal was on or off Angel’s path. And, while he seemed to act as “morale officer” for the team, there is again no evidence of him trying to use his talents and skills to influence the path that they are on. Instead by the beginning of season 5 he is reduced to the status of a mystical lie detector (and an imperfect one at that) when his abilities are clearly far more important than that. His obsession with the Halloween party at first seems to be very consistent with this. His concerns seem entirely superficial. Angel has just killed a Thraxis beast and one of the devices he tried to use for the purpose failed. In the middle of this serious issue all Lorne wants to talk about is the party and he predictably gets the brush off:
And even then the only thing that seems to penetrate Lorne’s skull is the fact that the Thraxis isn’t now going to be coming to the party. When he does get a chance to talk to Angel about it we see that they have very different perspectives: Lorne: “Yeah, listen. Here's the snafu in a nutshell, top cat. Uh, nobody's comin'. Well, some people are coming, but the right people, the A-list people, they seem to be giving it a miss, and if they don't show up, this shindig is gonna be a bust.” But when he hears this Angel is glad: Angel: “I wasn't too crazy about this thing to begin with. I mean, we are talking about our clients, right? Our evil clients. Not the sort of folks I really like to show a good time. I'd be a lot happier if the whole thing just kind of fell through. Then we could get back to… Lorne: "Ha ha ha! OK! OK! You're killin' me. Can't you just feel up the big picture, Mr. Magoo? It's not about good and evil. It's about party. Party! Capital "P"! Rhymes with "me"?" So this is all about Lorne’s ego? Except it isn’t. There are very good reasons to be concerned with the party and, as if to emphasize this, Gunn rows in on Lorne’s side: Lorne: “So, uh, Angel, we just wanted to take a moment and emphasize how important this party really is to us.” Gunn: “I gotta say Lorne is right. We gotta show all the big bads that the new regime is here to stay, which, for the most part, boils down to image. And image-wise, if this party doesn't kick ass, we lose face.” Further weight is given to this new perspective by Lorne’s admission of just why the party is so important: "You know, Angel, I— I don't have superhuman strength, and I'm not a fighter. Quantum physics makes me nauseous, and I barely made a passing grade at mystical studies, but I'm on your team. This is something I can do. I believe it has a purpose that can help you, even if you don't." This is the second and more important way in which we see a different reality underlying an illusion. The strength about this is that it goes some way to redressing the marginalization of Lorne as a character that has been evident at least since the end of season 3. Of course it still leaves very real problems with him. For a start it does nothing to address the key problem of having someone who was originally conceived of as a sort of Greek Chorus commenting on the path that others took, now having no greater foresight than they and someone who has the ability to influence and guide others showing no inclination to do so. Why does Lorne feel reduced to acting as PR man when he has been so much more, especially in season 2? But at least it shows Lorne’s concerns as being integral to Angel’s mission. What he wants to do is important for Angel and he wants to do it because it is important to him and not just because he is a “party animal”. And in the context of this episode that is important because “Life of the Party” is really about the way that this sense of mission can be undermined by the distractions provided by their new working environment. So committed to his work for Angel was Lorne that he took a drastic step: “I'll let you in on a little secret. I had my sleep removed. Little procedure they have here at the company. Yeah, well, you know, I haven't slept a wink in, oh, about a month.” But, just as the “plastic educator” on Altair IV had unfortunate side-effects on Morbius, this little procedure had very similar effects on Lorne: Wesley: "The effects of long-term sleeplessness on the subconscious mind of an empath can be catastrophic." These effects are twofold. The first stage is bad enough: “Under normal conditions, Lorne has the ability to read people's destinies. But now I think he's writing them.” The second stage is worse: “If you sever the empath from his subconscious for too long, that subconscious can… it can manifest.” I will return to the second stage in due course but let’s stay with the first stage for the time being. Writing people’s destinies is, in fact, going a bit too far. What seems to happen is more in the nature of hypnosis. Those affected by Lorne seem aware of what they are doing but act in accordance with his will rather than their own. And Lorne influences them to serve his purposes.
Life of the Party Indeed, as we have seen he starts with himself. His own tiredness and depression are the first obstacle to the successful organization of a party, so his sub-conscious wills that away. The he moves on to the others. He wants Gunn to become more territorial, meaning more assertive in his dealings with Angel. Gunn takes him rather too literally. Angel’s instinct is to treat Sebassis as an “evil evil thing”. But Lorne wants Angel to be nice to him so that he will stay at the party. So, Angel acts as some sort of sycophant. Later he wants Spike to be more positive, so he becomes the life and soul of the party. He wants Fred and Wesley to be gregarious or, as he puts it: “Well, here's one problem. You're totally sober! It's Halloween. You should be 3 sheets to the wind already. Now, try and get into the spirit of things, OK?” So, Wesley and Fred start to act as if they were intoxicated. And finally Angel and Eve – for really no good reason at all - “get a room”. At one level what happens here is straightforward enough. Lorne finds himself blocked at every turn because, as he sees it, people are unwilling to trust or understand his perspective of the needs of the team (the public relations angle Gunn advocated). So, his sub-consciousness by taking control of their actions and bending them to his will does further that agenda. Unlike Morbius in “Forbidden Planet”, this is not in itself destructive because it’s not the manifestation of arrogance or jealousy. It is in fact a level of sophistication further than anything seen in “Forbidden Planet” because it shows the way that a genuine desire to accomplish something worthwhile can be perverted. And what Lorne does here is to amplify some of the tendencies already in the former members of AI and which may lead to their destruction. We can see this pretty clearly by placing their actions in a slightly wider context, thus showing that behavior in a more sinister light. Take Angel. As we saw from “Hell Bound” he is now riddled with self-doubt. This is demonstrated by the scene in which he tells Eve: "Look, I spent years doing everything I could to bring this company down. Now I'm the CEO, and I have to question every move I make because any one of them could be exactly what the senior partners want, so, no, I have no idea how it's going." He still regards people like Sebassis as the enemy but Lorne persuades him to invite Sebassis to the party and to be restrained with him. Then, as we have seen, under the influence of Lorne’s sub-consciousness Angel goes ever further and is not only totally sycophantic to Sebassis, he actually ends up sleeping with the enemy – Eve. Gunn has become more self-assured this season since his “brain upgrade”. There has always been potential in this for Gunn and Angel to square off against one another especially since they seem to be on opposite sides of so many arguments over Wolfram and Hart and how to deal with the firm. Now Lorne’s sub-consciousness influences Gunn to “mark out his territory”. The personal relationship between Wesley and Fred is another potential source of weakness. Fred is clearly warming to Knox and equally clearly this is annoying Wesley. The professional dispute that breaks out between Fred and Knox on the one hand and Wesley on the other has echoes of the way that Wesley reacted to Fred and Gunn’s professional behavior when they first started seeing each other romantically. Knox praises the technological part of the mechanism as “beautiful work” but that only leads to the following exchange: Wesley: “I agree, as a sculptural piece, but the device's trigger may not have been fine enough to actually trigger the effect.” Knox: “And how do you know your spell-casters didn't screw up the payload?” Wesley: “Because I went over the work and I got that knowing feeling you get when you know something.” Then, under Lorne’s influence, the two of them become drunk and start cozying up to one another. We have already seen the dangers of this sort of personal complication in Wesley’s life. So, in moulding everyone to serve his agenda, Lorne literally does become the life of the party. In all of this there is more of a hint of “Ariel” from “The Tempest”. This is a part of Lorne that brings about a particular end willed by intelligence. This is without thought to moral consequences but equally is without intent to harm. And here too we have another level at which we see the difference between illusion and reality. Lorne thought he was doing the right thing, but in reality what he was doing could have had catastrophic consequences. But this surely where one of the episode’s most basic problem’s lie. These potential consequences are merely hinted at. Worse still they are played for comic effects. Gunn’s very literal interpretation of marking out his territory, naked and embarrassed Angel and drunk Fred and Wesley all produced more than their fair share of amusement. But in “Forbidden Planet”, and even in “the Tempest”, there was a heart of darkness, a hint of menace. This was what the story was about. The questions those stories asked about human nature made no sense without this because they were designed to examine the extent to which darkness was fundamental to all humans, even the most noble. And I thought that there was another problem here too. Inherent in “the Tempest” and “Forbidden Planet” was the idea that the darkness came purely from within. Neither Prospero nor Morbius are manipulated. Rather they are the ones who shape events and it is the way they shape them that reveals the truth about them. The fact that Lorne has his sleep removed by Wolfram and Hart hints at the fact that the Senior Partners manipulated him into it, perhaps in the same way that they manipulated Gunn. Indeed the parallels between Lorne’s procedure and Gunn’s were made pretty explicit here. And as if to emphasize this Angel says at the end: “We're not OK. We've been so focused on the dangers outside that we didn't see the ones within. This place is trying to change us, Gunn. We can't ever forget that." That people are manipulated by outside evil into acting in a way that they would not do of their own accord is incompatible with any attempt to ask questions about the capacity of humans for evil. If this episode was simply about flagging up the fact that the Senior Partners were attempting to destroy Angel and the others by changing them rather than suggesting that what might destroy them was what already lay inside them, then the comparison between the events of “Life of the Party” and “Forbidden Planet” is entirely misconceived and the episode is reduced to a statement of the obvious.
The Incredible Hulk As we have seen the so-called first stage of the manifestation of Lorne’s sub-consciousness may be compared to Ariel. The second is clearly intended to call to our mind Caliban. The Incredible Hulk-like character that appears near the end is explained as “a manifestation of Lorne's subconscious. It peeled away from his mind, using Lorne's supernatural powers to punch its way into our world.” Its actions are explained in the following terms “It may have just been processing the conflicts that Lorne normally deals with in his sleep, acting out on the emotional responses he has to the people around him.” This is borne out by those it attacks. Lorne has a very personal grudge against Artode because of the way he flaunts his killing of a Pylean. That is why HulkLorne kills him. He goes after Sebassis because the latter’s arrogance forced him into drinking the blood of the slave demon or risk losing Sebassis as a part guest. And as for Angel, well he is just a pain in the neck to everyone. It is here we see the most obvious similarity between the subconscious manifestation of Lorne and the monsters from the id summoned by Morbius. It is also where we see the most obvious difficulty. In “Forbidden Planet” Morbius’ target were innocent crewmen just doing their job and his own daughter. It was this fact that gave meaning to the idea that there was evil in his sub-conscious. And although there is more subtlety in Shakespeare’s treatment of Prospero, the later's actions in "The Tempest" leave equally little doubt about the shaky moral ground on which he stands. As I have already said the comparison between his seeking revenge and Caliban’s own actions are important in conveying the idea that there were parallels between him and the monstrous creature. But we cannot say the same about the attacks on Artode and Sebassis. As Angel himself stressed at the start they were the sort of creatures they should be destroying and it was only because of their involvement with Wolfram and Hart that led them to have any other form of dealing with them. From that point of view Lorne’s sub-consciousness was acting in the way that Angel should have been. And as for its attack on Angel, well that was almost as justified. This is a very strange type of Caliban and one that subverts the whole theme of the episode. Indeed I find it very odd that the strongest the writers put it was that HulkLorne was “acting out emotional responses”. This is not the way to describe a cold-blooded killing. This was almost deliberately downplaying the importance of those responses. This is something that defeats the purpose of any episode intended to parallel themes from “Forbidden Planet”.
|
