I was watching Alias last night and thinking to myself how silly many of the most recent TV series are. I guess TV series have always been silly, but I've been particularly aware of this phenomenon lately. The same applies to movies.
Last night's silliness resided in two elements: impersonation and misdirection.
I haven't been following the series closely, so I can't be sure what all has happened between the episodes I've watched, but it appears that Lauren, an apparently exposed Covenant mole, has managed to get back onto the "Rotunda" wearing a rubber mask in the likeness of Sydney, the show's heroine. Now, forgive my lack of credulity, but it seems to me that properly trained field agents and desk officers of a crack intelligence agency would see through or around a mask in less time than it takes to bat an eye. Besides the cosmetic anomalies, there would be the little matter of what carries the head around, to wit, the rest of the impersonator's body. Surely physique/figure, posture, gait, tread and a dozen other characteristics would give the impersonation away. As it happens in this episode of Alias, only a change in perfume is apparent.
Masks as paraphernalia of impersonation have been around for a while on the stage and screen. John Woo was into them for a bit (Face Off, Mission Impossible 2). They featured prominently in Darkman. Granted, the Face Off and Darkman masks were somewhat more sophisticated than the MI2 and Alias ones, but there are so many problems with the whole conceit of fooling everybody, including spouses and lovers in bed, with a simple change of face and voice that it's a wonder the idea gets used at all. I guess it's effective, though. People watch the shows–and sometimes pay money to do so.
Incidentally, the Japanese historical drama Kagemusha explores quite effectively the complexities of impersonation. A thief is very secretly recruited to impersonate an assassinated warlord. He succeeds brilliantly, even managing, though with initial difficulty, to fool, or at least win over, the warlord's grandson, but is ultimately exposed by the warlord's horse, who is not fooled at all and throws him off like a sack of rice. The warlord's favourite concubine, who has been kept away, like all the warlord's wives and concubines, from the impersonator, rushes to her supposed lover's side only to discover that his shoulder lacks an identifying scar.
More annoying than the business with masks is this tendency to stuff a show with misdirection. It's become so common that I've grown to expect it. You'd think the characters in the stories would expect it, too, especially the ones in TV series, who encounter it weekly or daily or whatever. The problem with it as a plot device, from my perspective, is that you stop trusting the characters. For me, at any rate, this creates a hesitation to care, a tiresome uncertainty that what I'm seeing is actually happening (in the context of the story) or that it means what I think it means. It's gotten to the point that I sometimes don't bother forming conclusions about the reality or significance of events in these shows. Well, all right, that's impossible, but I've adopted a sort of limp inquisitiveness, a ginger, half-hearted, detached curiosity focused more on how silly it's going to get than on what's actually apparently happening.
Another example of the device occurred in a recently aired and re-aired episode of 24. I haven't followed that series closely, either, but I get the gist of the events and relationships. In the episode in question, Jack Bauer, exposed as a CTU mole in the Salazar organization, moves to re-infiltrate the Salazar organization. Whatever happened to once bitten, twice shy? Don't the people in these shows have any sense? Why on earth would the supposedly sagacious head of a heavy-handed family criminal organization with terrorist connections allow an exposed anti-terrorist triple agent back into the bosom of his gang, especially when by discrediting himself with the government that agent has undermined his own usefulness to the underworld? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
The only explanation I can think of is that all this is somehow symptomatic of the currently empowered generation, the late-twenties through mid- to late thirties generation, I guess, that writes, directs and markets these productions. They must feel uncertain of the people and events in their lives, that anyone could be an imposter, that it's impossible to tell who is really behind or with you, what's really going on, or what anything really means. Perhaps it's the lack of a code, of a set of beliefs and morals they would rather die than betray. Perhaps everything has become so relative that people expect and forgive betrayal, trusting when trust has been abused, and overlook patent uselessness, anticipating benefits when no benefit can logically be expected.
