“NOVA: The Bible’s Buried Secrets”: It might’ve been appropriate to open the Sunday sessions with a Bible story, but it was pretty heady stuff for us to absorb so early in the morning. Paula Apsell, producer of “NOVA,” introduced “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” thusly: “Shot in Israel, Egypt, Syria, and the U.S., the film challenges viewers to think about the Bible in an entirely new way, one that exams the message and the meaning even as it looks for a historical core. What emerges is provocative new evidence surrounding the origins of monotheism and the ethical code that accompanies it, ideas that change the world and resonate for us today as it did then.” Fascinating stuff, sure, but way too much to take in at 9:00 AM. But there was at least one portion of the discussion that captured my attention: the question about whether God had a wife.
Professor William G. Dever responds: “The reason why God is so bad-tempered in the Old Testament is mostly he was lonely. And if he had listened to his wife, he wouldn’t have done those bad things. We know that in the minds of many ordinary Israelites, there was a pair of deities. Why shouldn’t there be? There was everywhere else in the ancient world. You have to remember monotheism is a difficult consideration. The development of monotheism is late, in some cases arbitrary and even artificial. A much more natural system is to have a plethora of gods, one for each need. And that’s what most peoples in the ancient world thought, and so did they in Israel. The very fact that the prophets and reformers condemned the worship of other gods means it was going on all over the place. Otherwise, why talk about it? So it’s clear that while those who wrote the Bible and edited it and passed it down were rigid monotheists, so to speak, all men, in the minds of many, God, of course, had a consort. And why not? If women had written the Bible, the portrait of God would be different.”
How would it have been different? Too…many…jokes. Must…move…on…to…next…panel…
“NOVA: Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives”: This one was actually even more headspinning than its predecessor, since it was about the late physicist Hugh Everett and his Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which predicts that every time we make a decision, a parallel universe splits off from our everyday reality (ow, my head just exploded!), but what made it stand out was the fact that it views Everett’s work through the eyes of his decidedly non-mathematical son, Mark…who you may know better as E, the heavily-bearded frontman for The Eels.
The key to the show is the relationship between E and his father…or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Hugh Everett died in 1982, so he never saw his son become a famous musician (at least from a cult standpoint), but…you’ll pardon the unintentional pun…they really were living in two different worlds. “I think it is a common thread with a lot of families that fathers and sons have their issues and maybe don’t always connect,” said E, “but we didn’t connect at all. I mean, it was sort of shocking the degree of how isolated he seemed to me, growing up in the same house with him all those years. But how do you relate to the rest of the world when that’s what’s going on in your mind, you know?”
E did have some fond memories of his father, despite their lack of a connection. “I remember him delighting in things like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘The Twilight Zone’ and science fiction books. We’d have neighbors come running over and…they’d be sitting in a hammock one summer day, reading a science fiction book, and it would have a reference to my father, and they’d come running over and knock on the door, all excited.”
There’s a scene in the film when the producers find some tapes of E with his dad, and for all his enthusiasm about working on this project (he calls it “an extraordinary process” and “probably the single-most life-changing thing I’ve been through”), there was clearly still a certain amount of annoyance about the way he found his way to hearing these tapes. “I didn’t want to listen to the tapes,” he admitted. “It was a really awkward moment for me when I walked into the room. The filmmakers had already listened to some of the tapes, and they were all kind of looking at me like…it was like they set a trap for me. I was scared. It was just the weirdest thing was hearing his voice for the first time in, whatever, 25 years or something. I couldn’t even remember his voice, but then as soon as I heard it, I remembered it really well.”
E’s comments make it pretty clear that the gene for physics skipped a gene, but he’s resigned to it. “I’m not bitter about not being a mathematics genius at all,” he assured us. “I’d much rather be a rock star. The groupies are a lot better.
“Masterpiece Contemporary: The Last Enemy”: I guess it’s an unfortunate testament to how little public television I watch that I wasn’t even aware of the transition of “Masterpiece Theater” into a more modern production, but as Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of the series, said, “It would have been a crime not to spruce up (the series) because, as you know, in this town, every 35-year-old icon needs a little work done sooner or later.” The most recent stage of the program’s revitalization is to create a brand called “Masterpiece Contemporary,” which provides…well, the title speaks for itself to a certain extent, and it’s speaking to the current public television audience, one which doesn’t necessarily require their PBS to provide non-stop Jane Austen and William Shakespeare adaptations.
Eaton described the series as being set in England in the very near future, but that the thrust is that governments all over the world will be assembling a single database called TIA (Total Information Awareness) which knows everything about everyone and can, as a result, keep track of both the good guys and the bad guys, thereby protecting the former from the latter. The problem occurs when TIA falls into the wrong hands…and only one man knows it. That man is a reclusive mathematician played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was not, alas, in attendance for the panel. On the up side, however, someone who was in attendance was Robert Carlyle, a.k.a. Begbie in “Trainspotting” and Gaz in “The Full Monty.” Carlyle plays a rogue agent in the series, which is only fair, given that he’s spent the bulk of his career playing guys who you never quite felt you could trust.
“I’m a maniac,” he assured us. “That’s why I get cast in those roles continuously, you know.”
Carlyle’s reason for accepting a television role…something he’s doing soon on “24” but that he hadn’t really done in awhile prior to this…was that he liked the ambiguity of the character. “You don’t really, really know up until the fifth hour who this guy actually is,” he said, “and I like that, because I think that’s one of the great problems in television, is constantly telling you exactly what’s happening. A character will tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’ll go and do it, tell while they’re doing it exactly what they’re doing, and, once they’ve done it, tell you what they’ve just done. And all the while, they’ll talk to a guy called John, and you know that because he’s called him his name 25 times on two pages. And in this, Peter (Berry’s) script, we had very, very little of that. We trimmed a few lines here and there, and we – Iain MacDonald, the director, and I – kind of decided that really this guy should only speak when it’s absolutely necessary. And if you look through the full five hours, he really only talks when he needs to find something out. Other than that, he won’t say anything at all. I like that.”
As ever, I haven’t seen this yet (although our readers in the UK have, as it was aired there earlier this year), but the clips looked action-packed. Given that Carlyle’s a proven commodity, this may well prove to be the first episode of “Masterpiece Theater” I’ve ever watched in its entirety.
“Masterpiece Contemporary: God on Trial”: I suck. I was totally outside when this panel was going on, talking to Robert Carlyle, and I didn’t even see so much as the opening clip. My bad. But per Ms. Eaton, the plot of the production is as follows: “It is the story of a group of Jews in Auschwitz on the night before they are supposed to die who ask the questions that many of us ask when things are horribly bad: How could this happen? How could God allow this to happen? And in extremis these group of people, intelligent men, some of them scholars, some of them lawyers, some of them just regular people, decide the only recourse they have in this last night is to put God on trial.” Heavy, man. The cast includes Stellan Skarsgard, Dominic Cooper, Antony Sher, Rupert Graves, and Stephen Dillane. I’ll keep you posted on more details as a I receive a screener.
“Great Performances: Cyrano de Bergerac”: Kevin Kline is Cyrano de Bergerac! Jennifer Garner is Roxanne! And the critics are skeptical…well, about Garner playing Roxanne, anyway. Not me, you understand. But one of my peers suggested that it seemed like “a kind of funny casting trick. Maybe let’s get a big audience. We will put on the star from “Alias” from TV, who, you know, is a spy that runs around in tight clothing.” I thought that was a bit cynical, personally, but it turned out that Kline had the same concerns.
Fortunately, he got over them quickly.
“Ron Rifkin, a friend of mine who was on ‘Alias’ with her and who comes from the theater, had told me that she was an understudy in ‘A Month in the Country,’ the Turgenev play that he was in, many years ago with Helen Mirren,” explained Kline. “She was a theater person, had trained in the theater. That was her first love. I did my research because I had the same concern. Is she of the theater, how long has it been, and has she been trained? And so all of these fears were allayed. And more to the point, when we did the first read-through, I was knocked out. She was a natural comedian, didn’t shy away from the language, didn’t overnaturalize it or do anything that one fears that someone steeped in film acting with no theater experience would do. On the contrary, she was very theatrical and energetic. She’s got a tremendous sort of graceful athleticism or athletic grace and energy. I didn’t watch her bloom; she came in full bloom.”
