There is, in my mind, another Joel, a Joel who is always almost possible, a Joel five minutes in the future, so to speak. This is the Joel who advertisers would like to own, to lure, to seduce. A Joel who might be 10-percent fitter, kinder, better rested, who self-help artists are always insisting lurks beneath the humdrum of obligations. He competes not only with the Joel who is, the real Joel, but the backlog of Joels who compose what is, and what likely will not be. The self as diagrammed by linear time is many selves, a flipbook of moments none of which can be called whole, but none of which can be dismissed either. In that past moment, at such a time, I was and I am no longer.
There are possible Joels I have killed throughout my life, by accident usually, though sometimes grimly, painfully, knowingly. There was a Joel who kept listening to all of his practical adults in college and tried to minor in business. One class into that decision, he became a Joel foreclosed. The most vivid possible Joel was an academic, a young man who moved his young wife across the country to Boston, to a PhD program that said yes to Actual Joel and all his muddled ideas of literature, and who was quartered, drawn, and displayed in my mind over the course of turning down the program’s offer. A Joel held back.
What I’m trying to talk about—obviously—is the late-aughts TV show, Fringe.
The Joel who first watched Fringe when it was on air was in college, in grad school, in his first professional position. I’ve recently completed the entire series for a second time, and the self-that-was kept occurring to me. Partly, this is because re-visiting any favorite cultural artifact places you in conversation with your own history. We’re all narcissists that way. But the selves that have been and that won’t be and that will never come to pass were also on my mind because the characters in Fringe meet their possible selves in various, literal iterations. Joel who finished his PhD, meet Joel who works (unhappily, miserably) in marketing
If it weren’t for Fringe in other words, I promise I would never speak about myself in the third person at such length. Even as a joke. Even for a beloved newsletter.
From season two of Fringe onwards, alternate realities and competing timelines force Olivia Dunham, Peter Bishop, and Walter Bishop, as well as their supporting cast, to be drawn in different lights, placed against different backgrounds, and sketched with different colors. It’s one of two ways the show contemplates our assumptions, and hopes, about the future in literal terms. That’s the beauty, and the clumsiness, of any fantastical writing, whether sci-fi, fantasy, or some supernatural third. The symbols are given flesh, which when done correctly, often gives the narrative a hardier pulse. (When done incorrectly, the narrative is more a less a cast of puppets clubbed to death by the undisguised fist of their operator. In front of children.)
In addition to meeting and fighting with their alternate selves, the star trio of Fringe faces off in the final season against time-traveling humans from the future, humans so changed by tech implants that they consider themselves a different species. In both cases, the philosophical stakes are basically humanities 101, or a kind of etiolated therapy session: what makes us, us? The question concerns one’s sense of “me,” this individual irreplaceable even across alternate realities, as well as the sense of our kind of being, these apparently singular animals reshaping the planet with collective whim.
In truth, Fringe isn’t all that interesting in terms of its philosophy. Love is very good, the human soul is irreducible to the human body, even as the self can be twisted, scarred, and redirected by unethical human experimentation. Okay, it’s a little interesting, but mostly it’s refreshing. The final season aired a little over 10 years ago, so its skepticism regarding tech isn’t exactly prophetic, given many of the problems we have now were already extant, or at least incipient. But the show’s depiction of future humanity is bracingly polemical for how plainly regressive their tech-centric world is depicted.
Dressed like mannequins from the 1950s, the Observers (future humans) are the secret heart of Silicon Valley unobstructed. Not progressive, not even optimistic, but primarily focused on control. This isn’t simply a narrative of decline. The future society is a landscape of tech-abetted wizards who can time-travel! The progress is real! What’s more, the cultural and political realities are intentionally shaped toward regression. We don’t decay into the heartless drones of tech overlords: that is Plan A, an accomplishment rather than an accident of decadence.
Again, Fringe paints with a broad brush in terms of “Science unbounded: bad!” But it dutifully, and winningly, balances its simplest theses with endless exceptions and foils. If you view the plot of Fringe as an analogy for climate change, for instance,1 then Fringe belongs squarely in the camp that believes ethical techno-scaping is the only way to defeat our energy sectors run amok. Walter Bishop, mad scientist and inventor extraordinaire, destroys the world. Walter Bishop, humbled and bound by the ethical immediacy of his relationships, also saves the world.
I’m not the through-and-through Butlerian jihadist I often sound like.2 But I found the hard-nosed tech-skepticism of Fringe a pleasant, convincing, gruesome, heartwarming rebuttal to the current AI campaign every tech company appears to be waging.3 I'm not worried about any kind of singularity, but I am worried about the men and women obsessed with its possibility, and with the binary-code idols they insist on making in their image.
I love you all.
This is an especially apt reading of the first season.
Unless it comes to smart phones in the hands of children. Don’t give into the convenience, parents! And outlaw them in schools. I mean “outlaw” quite literally.
FYI: The first season is not great. Very uneven. Fringe, really, is a perfect case study in how to create a cult show. Some episodes in season one are wonderful, and most of them are fun, but the recipe is all there: get together a bunch of great actors, a solid writer’s room, a world-class sci-fi idea, then muff it just badly enough you lose all your audience except the diehards. In subsequent seasons, simply start writing and executing a much, much better version of everything that came before. Also, let your stellar cast off the leash. I remembered John Noble giving a Patrick Stewart-level performance, but no one displays a more convincing range than the subtle, marvelous Anna Torv. A truly underrated actress.
words heavy with possibilities and mind pictures, like poetry