The World of "Being Human"

Like all geeks, I have my share of obsessions, things I fangirl about. "Fangirling"has emerged as a recent slang term to describe the outsize, overemotional reaction to people or things that are the object of the fangirl's obsession; the term is also used to describe gatherings (real or online) of like-minded females to discuss said obsessions at great length, or the incessant writing or gushing about them in any forum she can find. While the term fanboy exists as well, it doesn't seem to be as pejorative, or, at least, doesn't seem to imply the sheer sentimentality and swooniness that fangirling does.

So if you, Unknown Reader, will grant me the latitude, I will devote this post to fangirling about the British television show, "Being Human." This show has just completed its fifth and final season on BBC3, much to my and its fanbase's sorrow. Even The Guardian waxed indignant over the cancellation of the show in its March 8, 2013 blog posting. No, this is not just defensive citing of critical authority to justify my own crazed passion. Well, yes, actually, it is.

Here is the premise of the show: a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost rent a flat together in Bristol. Sounds like the setup for a really dreadful joke, doesn't it? Which is precisely what I thought when I first heard of this program (or, since it's BBC, should I say, "programme"?) several years ago. I dismissed it as riding the wave of the Twilight- and "True Blood"-inspired madness, a cheap televisual knock-off of the lucrative teenage girl-focussed vampire/werewolf craze. But I kept hearing critical acclaim for the series, and I finally decided to give it a try so that I could mock it with a clear conscience.

I watched the first episode in the spirit of derision and was instantly completely hooked. Within a month or so I had watched all five seasons, the most recent ones in grainy, jumpy cuts on illegal YouTube posts uploaded in Great Britain. Thus, I became part of the national pandemic of binge-watching (the back-to-back watching of multiple episodes or entire television series in a short period of time), as decried by a July 2012 article in Slate. Would it have been better if I had waited a decent interval, say, a week, between consuming each episode? Undoubtedly. But I was in the grip of an addiction. In my defense, I did limit myself to one episode a day. Mostly.

Toby Whithouse

So, what exactly is the appeal of this quirky show? The writing, mainly, by the brainy, inspired, and mad Toby Whithouse. Each episode focuses on one of the main characters in turn, at the same time weaving in continuing plotlines for the other two, and each season has its own story arc. Rules get changed along the way (for example, in Season 1 a vampire threatens to bite the werewolf when he's in human form, whereas in Season 3 it's given out that werewolf blood is deadly poison to vampires), and there are minor inconsistencies here and there (for example, the inscription on Annie's gravestone changes), but for the most part the whole structure coheres beautifully. The show is by turns poignant, terrifying, hilarious, gory, creepy, uplifting, and tragic. And Whithouse leaves little room for transition: the shifting tones pile one on top of the other like waves on a beach. While I have seen it described in one place as a drama, and in another as comedy, the show evades all efforts to categorize it as one genre or another. In Season 1, episode 5, "Where the Wild Things Are," the final 10 minutes are a roller coaster of slapstick, white-knuckle chase scenes, tragedy, mysticism, low humor, surprise, and violence, ending in a cliffhanger that must have given the original viewers a week of agonizing suspense (sorry to be so enigmatic here, but I don't want to give anything away) before the ultimate resolution in episode 6.

Aidan Turner, Lenora Crichlow, Russell Tovey

Then there are the amazing actors. In the first three seasons, these consisted of: Lenora Crichlow playing Annie, the sweet, relentlessly upbeat ghost whose generosity of spirit manifests itself in the brewing of copious mugs of tea (none of which she can drink, as she's a ghost); Russell Tovey playing George, the jumpy, histrionic, fastidious werewolf who is in denial over his "condition" as he delicately calls it; and Aidan Turner playing Mitchell, the brooding, sexy Irish vampire with a dark and violent past who has sworn off blood and is making an effort to join the human race. Hence the title, "Being Human." The entire series is a reflection on what it means to be human, what it means to be a "monster," how we rationalize our actions, how much we can help what we do when it is part of our nature. Mitchell is constantly being criticized by his fellow vampires as acting counter to nature in his renunciation of blood; in "Being Human," this questioning of what is "natural" is the whole point of what it means to be a moral being. These monsters are social misfits, outsiders looking enviously in at the rest of society.

According to an interview by U.K. blogger Jason Arnopp, Whithouse claimed that he was originally asked to make a show about a group of friends who buy a house together. He wasn't terribly thrilled with the idea, but he started work on it, making the three characters a shy agoraphobe, a fastidious prig who loves order, and a recovering sex addict. After several months of frustrated tinkering with the script, he decided to give it a supernatural twist. Thus, the shy person became a ghost, the fastidious one a werewolf who is trying to distance himself to the thing that happens to him when the moon is full, and the sex addict a vampire who has abjured blood.

Original cast of "Being Human" in pilot

The pilot was one of six commissioned by BBC3, and it was rejected in favor of another show, "Phoo Attack" (I have no idea, either). Quick note here: since the Beeb is governmentally owned and is a public service entity, it can't just make pilots that are shopped around privately as the networks in the U.S. do. These six pilots were all publicly aired, and one was selected to be serialized. This show that "won" ended up not being very popular and was dropped early on. In the meantime, there had been growing enthusiasm for the "Being Human" pilot, with people writing in to the BBC and signing petitions, so BBC3 replaced "Phoo Attack" with "Being Human." Two of the original actors, Guy Flanagan as the vampire Mitchell and Andrea Riseborough as the ghost Annie, were either dropped or unavailable, and, thankfully, Turner and Crichlow replaced them. Tovey as George remained, for which I am grateful: George is the stable, decent center around which the troubled Mitchell and the flighty Annie revolve. The pilot seems to be completely unavailable for viewing, except for snippets that fans have uploaded to YouTube.

Season 5 cast: Tom, Alex, and Hal

In Season 2, Nina, a nurse turned werewolf, evolved from minor role to principal character, but then she, George, and Mitchell all vanished by the second episode of Season 4, and a new werewolf and vampire were added. Finally, Annie left at the end of Season 4, and a new ghost who entered the series near the end of Season 4 completed the (unholy) Trinity in Season 5. So the fifth and final season contained none of the original cast. Such overwhelming changes are usually indicators of the imminent death of a popular series; in this case, there was a sort of refreshing renewal. None of the new characters were pale imitations of the earlier ones; they were originals in their own right. The new cast comprised Damien Molony as Hal, the "posh," handsome, courtly vampire with OCD tendencies whose youthful appearance belies his 500-year-old medieval origins; Michael Socha as Tom, the caterpillar-browed, moody teenage werewolf with a nearly impenetrable Derby accent (at one point Hal even comments: "Are there subtitles for this conversation?"); and Kate Bracken as Alex, the cheeky Scottish tomboy, stuck forever in the girly clothes she died in, trying to make sense of her brutally shortened life.

Michael Socha, Damien Molony, Kate Bracken

So why do I love this show so much? Because it's mind-blowingly awesome! the fangirl in me wants to scream. But I'll try to give a more dignified and reasoned response. I love it because of the care that went into every line of dialogue, because of the show's schizophrenic nature–it can't decide whether it wants to be horror, sitcom, thriller, or morality play–because of how much the actors embrace their roles, especially Tovey, whose tortured screams and contorted, naked body signify both the physical torment and vulnerability he undergoes in his transformations to werewolf, as well as the mental anguish that leaving his humanity behind entails. Molony, too, with his endless obsessive rituals and twitching facial muscles to show the sheer effort it takes to keep the bloodlust in check, completely inhabits the character of Hal. When he finally does give in to his dark side, it's both terrifying and comic. Whithouse gives him a macabre, funny scene singing an Irving Berlin song as he converts a pub full of people he has just killed to vampires:

Hal sings "Puttin' on the Ritz" (mild spoiler)

Andrew Gower as Cutler

Even the villains are masterpieces of complexity: by turns charming, oily, pedantic, sadistic, pathetic, creepy, or just plain violent, but never one-dimensional or predictable. My personal favorite is Nick Cutler, the slimy solicitor vampire with a tragic back-story who tries to stage a PR coup for the vampires. He even sets up a focus group to bounce his ideas off of–genius! Unfortunately, the other vampires, lacking his vision, eat his focus group before he can collect enough data. One doesn't know whether to laugh uproariously as he tries to decipher the responses on the blood-spattered clipboards or to turn away in horror from the savaged corpses lying near their overturned plastic folding chairs. Both, I guess.

The final season is currently running on BBC America, but I don't have cable, so I'm waiting for the preordered discs that are supposed to ship some time in mid-August. It's bittersweet anticipation, because I know the series has been cancelled. Nonetheless, I'm readying my fangirl squeals of delight for the final showdown between good and evil. Or is it between the ordinary evil we can understand and ultimate, unfathomable evil? Is the condition of being human inevitably and inextricably bound up in causing harm to others, or can we emulate the monsters in this show and try to evade our own worser natures? The virtue lies in the trying, rather than in the succeeding.

[One final note: do not watch the American version of this show (SyFy channel), except for purposes of mockery. Although Toby Whithouse is named as one of the co-producers of that program, it's terrible in the writing and only adequate in the acting. After four episodes I couldn't bear to watch any further. Feel free to disagree with me, but you're wrong.]

The Nature of Desire

Archetype of Desire

Okay, not a terribly geeky subject, but even geeks have longings, right? Actually, what inspired this post is a book I just read by young adult writer and gay novelist David Levithan. Or perhaps I should say, novelist David Levithan, who writes mainly for young adults and happens to be gay. Thus his book combines two realms of the geek world I inhabit: young adult fiction and science fiction. So where does desire come into the picture? Well, I suppose there is always the perennial geek question: Why does no one desire me? But that risks sounding whiny and self-pitying, so we move on to the more interesting and universal questions:  Whence comes desire? And how is desire related to love?

David Levithan

 Levithan's first novel, Boy Meets Boy (2003), took the standard teen love story and gave it a gay twist. Perhaps his most well-known book, a collaboration with Rachel Cohn, was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006), which was made into a mildly popular indie movie of the same name in 2008, starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as the eponymous leads. The book I just read, every day (2012), is science fiction, of a sort.

In every day, the protagonist, A, is a being who inhabits a different person's body every day, for exactly 24 hours, then moves on to another body without any control of where he/she/it will end up (this problem with pronouns is a major crux of the book, but more on that later). No explanation is given for A's condition, and A her/himself is ignorant of her/his parentage and origins.

The only rules governing A's condition seem to be:

1. A will end up within a certain geographical radius–no more than a four-hour drive–of the last body.

2. A will land in a body that approximates A's actual age; so, for instance, when A was an infant, (s)he ended up in infant bodies; now that (s)he's a teen, in teenage bodies.

3. The body inhabited by A will only vaguely remember the events of the missing day, and A can control what those memories will be to some extent.

4. A can access memories of the current body (s)he is inhabiting, as well as her/his own memories, and A possesses to a limited extent all the skills and knowledge of the body (s)he is inhabiting.

5. A is helpless to prevent the change of bodies, or to direct where (s)he'll next end up.

So, interesting premise, right? It's actually quite bewildering for the reader; A helps us out by titling each chapter with the number of the day in her/his life, and by introducing us to the body for the day, complete with physical description and personality traits.

Still, that's not what's interesting about the book. The trouble starts when A falls in love, and has to convince the object of her/his love, a teenage girl named Rhiannon, that (s)he is the same person with each new encounter. Now, I don't want to give too much away, so I'll break away from the plot of every day and talk about the problem in the abstract.

When we fall in love, we fall in love with both a personality and a body, with both soul and physicality. It is generally accepted that the shallower among us fall in love with appearance only, the deeper with their beloved's essence. Yet can we separate those so readily? Many tales recount the story of how a young woman has to look beyond her lover's hideous exterior to discover the beautiful soul within: Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," the Grimms' "The Frog Prince," or the Greek myth of Psyche, where she believes herself to be visited at night by a hideous serpent to whom she's been given as wife, when in reality it is the god of love himself, Eros.

There are also the stories of the monstrous or ugly men who cannot find love, despite their kind and virtuous natures: Quasimodo of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady

There are some stories with the roles reversed, though fewer: Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," with the knight of King Arthur's court promising to marry the hag, the "loathly lady" who helps him solve the riddle that will save his life; the closely related 15th-century poem,  "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," with a similar story; and a modern version, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion," with its sickly, homely heroine Fosca who with the force of her relentless love finally convinces the handsome soldier Giorgio to fall in love with her before literally dying of her passion.

What is the point of these stories? That the protagonists learn to see the inner beauty of their mate and thus learn to appreciate true love? No. In a few cases, they do indeed come to love their hideous partner; in others, they merely go through the motions of devotion (sharing food, a kiss, lying in the same bed together, going through with a marriage ceremony), but then the spell is broken (or, in the case of Eros, the truth revealed), and they are rewarded with the transformation of their partner into a beautiful form. In the less fantastical stories, the ugly guy doesn't get the girl (poor Quasimodo only gets to clasp Esmeralda in his arms after she's been hanged; Cyrano hears Roxane's avowal of love just before dying of blunt force trauma).The point seems to be that, while we shouldn't be quick to judge by outer appearance, the true reward for such selflessness is what we all secretly desire: beauty.

Innate desire or choice?

When we add sexuality into the mix, it gets far more complicated. Why do some of us gravitate toward one gender and not the other? The complicated answer seems to be that it's not completely genetic, and it's not completely choice. I won't go into the reams of research that have been done in the field of human sexuality, but reliable experts agree that homosexuality is not aberrant, as originally thought, but part of a natural spectrum of human desire, with approximately ten percent of the population at one end defining themselves as completely homosexual, the rest either as completely heterosexual or bisexual, though this last term is often what conflicted homosexuals use to describe themselves in order to avoid categorizing themselves as gay. Dr. Loren Olson, a blogger for Psychology Today, gives a much more nuanced picture of bisexuality than I can within this post. But there do seem to be people who can fall in love with a person's essence, regardless of gender or physical form.

So A's problem–or, actually, Rhiannon's problem–is how to keep love constant when the object of one's desire keeps changing bodies, from average to gorgeous to gangly to homely, from petite to huge, from Caucasian to African to Asian, from male to female to transgender. Rhiannon's primary struggle seems to be trying to figure out a gender for A, and she frustrates A by spending so much time fretting about it. For A, who has no body and thus no gender, it seems like a trivial concern; for Rhiannon, it's huge. She can bring herself to kiss or hold hands when A is an attractive or even average-looking teenage boy, but she has trouble when A is a sexy African-American girl. She loves A, but she can't always bring herself to desire the body that A is currently inhabiting.

If A has no body, can A even exist as the object of desire (okay, within the bounds of this novel, clearly, yes)? Doesn't the noun "object" imply physicality? Can one be physically attracted to an essence? If so, is this attraction to essence what we call romantic love? Or is love just the high-sounding name we give to desire, not possible without a physical entity to attach it to?

This novel made me ponder how much what I personally am attracted to depends on the body that houses it, and how much doesn't. So far, I haven't reached any profound conclusions, but the answer seems to be that it's far more tied to the physical package than the ideal me would like to admit. Can I transcend my human, evolutionary instinct to be drawn to physical beauty? Can I transcend my preference for the opposite sex? If I were to meet my own version of A, how would I react? Would I be able to feel romantic love independent of physical desire? It's a fascinating thought experiment, one that Levithan encourages us to perform.

Reunions

I went to my college reunion a month ago. Not a milestone reunion, but a general one for those who graduated in the '80s. I was hoping to see a lot of my friends from the years above and below me, but turnout was low, except for the Class of '88, which was having its 25th reunion. Only 6 from my year (from a class of under 300, but still....), but it was wonderful fun nonetheless. I hung out in the dorm, walked around campus, chatted with old friends and old classmates, found out who had a wonderful career, who had a wonderful marriage, who had started over in a totally different profession, who was getting divorced. I don't know why I get such a kick out of all this. It's not like I dwell fondly on most of these people during the course of my normal day. Or week. Or at all, come to think of it.

I know there are people who never go to reunions, some of my friends among them, and I don't understand it, not really. I've gone to all of my college reunions and most of my high school ones. The people who don't go explain that they see their real friends all the time, and aren't interested in the others. Or they're ashamed that they aren't successful. Or that they don't have a career. Or that they don't have a spouse. Or children. Or a new book coming out. I find that they are laboring under the delusion that reunions are for showing off.

Sure, there must be some people who come to reunions to show off, especially if they felt underappreciated in their undergraduate/high school years. But that is not my experience in general. My former classmates are happy to see me, sympathetic to my life struggles, my lack of accomplishments, and supportive about my small triumphs and my plans for turning my life around. I think many people go to reunions to recapture their youth: the cameraderie, the intensity, the seriousness of purpose, the sense of seeing the future opening wide before us. It's bittersweet, of course, because that vista has been steadily narrowing over the years. Still, there are the shreds of shared hopes and dreams waving raggedly in an amber light...

Not my classmates, but I did attend an all-female college.

I guess what I'm talking about is nostalgia, a dangerous emotion. Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, "to return home" and algos, "pain" or "ache," so nostalgia could be defined as the pain of homecoming. Originally, it was a medical term, coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries longing for their homeland. These men were literally dying to return home. When we think of nostalgia today, however, we think of getting a bit weepy, a bit maudlin about fondly remembered events in the past, but I don't believe most of us think of pain or sickness. Yet pain is the source of those tears–the pain that that time can never be visited again. Hell, Proust wrote an entire epic eight novels on this theme! So, why do I call nostalgia dangerous? Because it refers back to a hazy past that might not actually exist. Unlike those Swiss soldiers who were missing their very real homeland, when we experience nostalgia, we are pining for an imagined past that seems better than our cold and harsh present. It may well have been better, but nostalgia implies a sort of over-emotional idealization of that time, as seen in its definition as "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster). So the modern definition of nostalgia involves a displacement in time, rather than in space. And what are college days if not an irrecoverable condition of the past?

Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychology, puts it a different way. He writes about the "paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia–for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.... All of us, finally, are exiles from the past" ("The Landscape of His Dreams" in An Anthropologist on Mars,  (Vintage Books, 1995). It is the fantasy of those college days that holds me in thrall, not the reality.

I know that my time in college had its rough patches, and that there were times when I was quite miserable. Especially when it was 2 a.m., I was jittery from unaccustomed amounts of coffee, out of Wite-Out, and I had two papers to write by 9 a.m., plus a calculus test to study for. There were times I became filled with dread at the formless mass that was my future, and there were times that I thought I would never, ever have a boyfriend (attending a women's college might have had more than a little to do with that), and that I would die old and alone in some book-crammed, dusty apartment with no one to notice I had gone until the stench wafted into the hallway. Still, even as I record these more somber memories, nostalgia creeps in, and draws a gauzy curtain over all that angst.

But why shouldn't we give in to nostalgia once in a while? It's better than smoking opium, right? I loved being at reunion and giving in to the onrush of feelings evoked by those familiar stone buildings, those well-trod paths, that computer center–wait a minute! Computer center? Where did that come from? That wasn't there in my day! And we segue immediately into curmudgeonry.

Well, my real reunion (30th!) comes up in two years, and I fully intend to go and wallow in all that nostalgia. By then, I hope I'll have a little more direction to my life. It will be fun to compare notes with my classmates, not in a competitive way, but to see what odd and quirky directions our lives have taken. You can go home again; you just can't stay.

Okay, back to being more reliable: I promise to post once a week from now on. End of the school year and its concomitant madness put me off my stride. Also, I like to procrastinate.... Hey, that could be a topic for a future blog!