The Eerily Prescient, Wildly Ambitious 1993 Science Fiction Mini-Series Wild Palms is Like Megalopolis, But Good!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I both do, and do not, know why it has taken me thirty-two years to finally experience Wild Palms, but I’m glad that a patron chose it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 because it could not fit my sensibility more snugly.
It’s a wildly ambitious, deeply strange magnum opus inspired equally by David Lynch and Phillip K. Dick that also anticipates Southland Tales.
If I might engage in some reductive math, David Lynch+Phillip K. Dick=Wild Palms. On a related note, David Lynch+Philip K. Dick=Southland Tales as well.
William Gibson has a stiff cameo as himself, during which he’s identified as the man who coined the phrase “cyberspace.” That’s no “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” but it’s not bad. That feels like the mini-series's extremely subtle way of conveying that it’s inspired by the cyber-punk oeuvre of William Gibson.
Incidentally, if you’d like to ask me to film a cameo in a movie where I’m introduced as the man who coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” I will happily accept in exchange for any amount of money.
Wild Palms is so utterly bizarre and non-commercial that it’s a miracle that it aired on a major network. Wild Palms is bonkers by the standard of art films. It’s nutty on an almost unprecedented level in the safe world of network television, with its laugh tracks, laundry detergent commercials, and manimals.
The eerily prescient science-fiction provocation would not exist without Twin Peaks. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s beloved brainchild radically expanded the parameters of network television.
Twin Peaks illustrated that something surreal, arty, and purposefully perplexing could win audiences' attention if done artfully enough. Wild Palms similarly owes its unlikely existence to the Rodney King riots.
It’s hard to overstate the cultural and creative importance of the upheaval that followed the innocent verdict of the police officers who beat Rodney King while he was on the ground, pleading for mercy.
The corruption and brutality would have gone unnoticed if it had not been recorded for posterity by an onlooker with a video camera that would change the course of American history. The Rodney King riots felt like a glitch in the matrix, a look at what Los Angeles life would look and feel like if civilization broke down and all of the ugliness and conflict rose to the surface.
It felt a little like the world ending with a bang rather than a whimper. It was violent. It was dramatic. It was boffo television.
Iconic images of King being viciously abused by exemplars of corrupt authority were disseminated throughout the world. In between, there were commercials for cat litter and deodorant.
The revolution was televised and monetized. If it didn’t involve money or television, did it even matter?
Wild Palms appeals powerfully to my aesthetic, but I never watched it in its entirety until I was professionally obligated to do so because it is a mini-series. I am not a regular consumer of fictional mini-series. That is not true of true crime mini-series. I watch those with regularity, but I’ve never been a fan of hour-long dramas. I see mini-series as hour-long dramas on steroids.
Novelist/screenwriter/cartoonist/Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors co-writer Bruce Wagner’s adaptation of a comic strip he wrote for Details casts a solid James Belushi as Harry Wyckoff, a patent attorney in 2007 Los Angeles. He’s married to the beautiful and melancholy Grace (Dana Delaney), who owns a boutique, and has two children: mute four-year-old Deirdre and 11-year-old Coty (Ben Savage).
This is a good-ass shot
Coty is a child actor who has just been cast in Church Windows, a smarmy sitcom that is projected, in hologram form, into audiences’ homes. Church Windows perfectly nails the awful banality of conventional sitcoms.
Our hero’s son is a successful child actor, so we know something is deeply wrong with him. He’s gratingly precocious as a miniature adult with a wisecrack for every situation in Church Windows and an absolute monster offscreen.
Savage plays Coty as a dead-eyed sociopath concerned only with money and power. He’s hate-worthy in his villainy. He hasn’t reached his teens, yet he possesses a level of calculating evil that would be remarkable for someone twice his age.
Coty is part of a Scientology-like cult called the Church of Synthiotics run by Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia, who would go on to play a similar role as the embodiment of the sinister patriarchy in 1996’s Lost Highway), a science-fiction novelist turned cult leader, television and technology mogul, and Senator.
Kreutzer was modeled on L. Ron Hubbard, but he comes off as a Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure because he combines showmanship, ruthlessness, business, religion, and entertainment.
Kreutzer is a cult leader. So are Trump and Musk. It’s not enough to have everything this world has to offer. No, Kreutzer demands a power beyond that. He wants immortality. He wants to, in Scientology terminology, drop the body so that he can leave his withered frame and live forever as a hologram. To achieve this, Kreutzer seeks the “Go Chip,” the MacGuffin at the center of all the secrets and lies.
Grace is convinced that her son is not her son, that he was switched at birth with her actual biological child. This would generally be an expression of madness. Grace is suffering through a powerful depression, but she’s not wrong.
The pint-sized sociopath with the insatiable hunger for power switched places long ago with Harry and Grace’s real child, who sells maps to the stars and serves as Coty’s double.
Coty’s involvement in the Church of Synthiotics made me think about how a young Neil Gaiman was pressed into service defending Scientology on BBC when he was seven years old. The choice was not random; Neil’s dad was the media spokesman for Scientology in the UK.
Neil learned to lie on behalf of the fragile ego of a fantasy writer convinced that laws did not apply to him at a young age.
That is as creepy as anything in Wild Palms.
When Paige Katz, a long-ago lover played by Kim Cattrall, seeks help from Harry in locating her lost son, he finds himself immersed in a shadowy world of power and deceit.
More specifically, Harry finds himself in the middle of a furtive conflict between Fathers, a far-right wing organization deeply entrenched in politics and the media, and a warring organization known as Friends.
Wild Palms would be worth seeing for its preposterously stacked cast alone. Brad Dourif plays Chickie Levitt, a technological genius and father of virtual reality. He’s also the illegitimate son of Eli Levitt (David Warner).
Eli Levitt is also Grace’s father and the founder of the Friends. Ernie Hudson plays Tommy Laszlo, Harry’s longtime friend and a gay man whose sexuality is entirely irrelevant. That is rare now. It was practically unheard of in 1993.
The bad guys in Wild Palms, like the bad guys in the work of David Lynch, aren’t just villains; they represent evil in its purest form. They include Angie Dickinson as Josie Ito, Grace’s mother. Dickinson gives the character major Dianne Ladd energy. She’s a maternal monster with a killer instinct, both literal and figurative. Then there’s Dr. Tobias Schenkl (Bob Gunton), Harry’s psychiatrist.
The malevolent shrink has been giving notes on his sessions to his enemies. Wild Palms occupies a world of secrets, subterfuge, and lies where power is the ultimate goal.
Wild Palms feels almost suspiciously timely in its depiction of a quasi-fascist movement that combines the most nefarious elements of entertainment, technology, populism, celebrity worship, and politics.
Charles Rocket has a small but memorable role as Stitch Walken, a stand-up comedian in the Marc Maron mold and a secret member of the Friends. There is a particularly timely moment when Stitch mocks the right wing with a mock Hitler salute.
A pre-Mad Men Robert Morse plays Chap Starfall, a former superstar reduced to being a lounge singer before another ominous organization called the Wild Palms Group boosts his flailing career.
At a certain point, I had no idea what was going on. I was bewildered but not in a bad way. Not understanding what was going on didn’t diminish my enjoyment.
I gave myself over to the madness, to the sunny West Coast insanity.
In its dizzying, kaleidoscopic depiction of a future dystopia teetering on the precipice of collapse, Wild Palms suggests what Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis if it were good and not two and a half hours of torture.
Wild Palms closes with a reference to the line, “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper” from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” Southland Tales opens with Justin Timberlake’s cracked soldier inverting T.S. Elliot’s words by saying, “This is the way the world ends, Not with a whimper but a bang.”
I’m not sure if this was intentional. T.S. Eliot isn’t exactly unknown; those words rank among the best-known in poetry. It would be an awful big coincidence if Kelly weren’t paying homage to Wagner's magnum opus.
This takes place in 2007. Southland Tales takes place in 2008. That contributes to the sense that Southland Tales is, on an existential level at least, a continuation of Wild Palms, if not a spiritual successor.
I love Southland Tales because it is so gloriously insane. I love Wild Palms for the same reason.
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