Tags
2016 election, amazon, cut the cord, Deja Vu, Dick, England, timelines
I feel like I’m a teenager again.
At least, I do insofar as I’ve had to shift my television expectations to something much more akin to the way we watched TV when I was a kid. If TV watching was in order for an evening, we could only select from a limited number of choices. Those options may not, any of them, be exactly what you’d want to watch but hopefully you’d have enough to choose from so that you could find something acceptable.
Missing, relative to yesteryear, is the TV section of the daily newspaper to explain exactly1 what those choices were.
Particularly when it comes to Amazon, I find myself scanning what’s available – which display with their IMDb ratings – and picking from the handful of shows that look interesting to me while also having been rated highly by the cloud. Rarely, by contrast, can I go into the evening with some shows in mind that I then attempt to find among my streaming options. I suspect a subscription to cable TV, which I cut loose years ago, can easily rival the choice availability for a single streaming channel these days.
It was a multi-step process by which I decided to watch The Devil’s Hour on Amazon. I first had to be drawn in by the moody splash graphic, the intriguing title, and the spooky aura of the description. Subsequent pass-throughs identified a 7.6 rating on IMDb; a pretty solid recommendation. This put it in my head that there was “something” on Amazon Prime that I wanted to watch, even if I couldn’t remember which specific show it was. Then, one night, I matched the “something” with The Devil’s Hour and began to watch. From there I was thoroughly hooked until I finished the full, 6-episode first-season run.
The Devil’s Hour focuses on a woman who suffers a sense of dislocation. She wakes every morning at 3:332 troubled by recurring dreams. She also has a frequent sense of déjà vu. Clearly, there is something behind this mystery – otherwise it wouldn’t have been made into a show.
The Devil’s Hour is another clever combination of police procedural and sci-fi/supernatural. As the series progresses, we learn that the main character’s difficulties can’t possibly be “all in her head,” – she knows too many things that she couldn’t possibly know. We are driven to the series finale, eager to learn what is really going on.
I don’t actually want to tell you what’s really going on, and risk ruining your watching experience, but I am going to draw a connection that could ruin part of it for you. Stop reading right now if you’d rather watch the show without any hint towards understanding the mystery. If you are into this genre of entertainment, and haven’t watched The Devil’s Hour yet, I’d highly recommend doing so.
Several weeks after finishing The Devil’s Hour I watched a movie on Netflix, a movie that I hadn’t known much of anything about except its name. That is, until Netflix added it to their shortlist for December.
As I say, the title of the movie The Adjustment Bureau rang a bell with me. It came out in 2011, starred Matt Damon, and currently sports a respectable 7.13 rating on IMDb. Reading as little as I could about it, I nonetheless managed to see that it was an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story from the 50s. Although Dick pics tend to run the gamut from iconic to the mundane (say 2001’s Imposter), that origin enticed me to risk an hour or two of my time on the film. I assumed that with Matt Damon in the lead, it would be some form of sci-fi thriller.
It wasn’t really. Saying that, I should probably tie back to The Devil’s Hour and my assertion that the mere mention of The Adjustment Bureau in the same post should be considered a spoiler.
You see, the conceit of The Adjustment Bureau is nearly4 the same as what drives The Devil’s Hour. Except, of course, how it isn’t. Whereas The Devil’s Hour plays it as a dark and creepy mystery, The Adjustment Bureau goes for the light-hearted, romantic adventure.
Sometimes I am in the mood for a light-hearted, romantic adventure but generally I am not. The Adjustment Bureau was not a bad movie but it was no Devils’ Hour. Apparently, there are enough viewers who prefer their sci-fi to be cast as light-hearted, romantic adventure rather than a dark, brooding mystery. The Adjustment Bureau did well enough at the box office.
Watching the film adaptation inspired me to dig up and read the original short story. It was published in a magazine (Orbit Science Fiction, Issue No. 4, September–October 1954) and, as with so many of Dick’s stories, is short and to the point. By whatever reasons, the copyright gods (pun intended, even if it is poorly formed) have the original article and its illustrations available on the internet. The original The Adjustment Team is quite obviously the foundation of The Adjustment Bureau but in perhaps the most important way (that romantic comedy angle), it is a very different work.
As with the last time I looked at one of Philip Dick’s short stories turned into multiple-modern movie presentations, I’ll stop to think what this says about our cultural shift over the seventy years5 since the story was first published. In The Devil’s Hour, the individual who attempts to change the future is just a man – despite his unique (?) ability to see the path of destiny. In The Adjustment Team, it is God Himself. In The Devil’s Hour the attempts to right the wrongs makes this man into a serial killer, a person whom we (the characters and the audience alike) continue to fear even once we know that his intentions are true. When it is The Almighty altering our destiny – it becomes that much harder to question. Indeed, The Adjustment Bureau operates with an assumption that “The Plan” is in fact a good of the highest order. The fact that the angels, themselves, become serial killers6 doesn’t seem so disturbing.
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- I may be getting a little starry-eyed here. As much as I denigrate the summaries provided by Amazon or Netflix, they are probably at least as useful as the synopses found in my local paper. A subscription to TV Guide might have provided some value-added, but we didn’t have one of those. ↩︎
- In therapy, she refers to the time of her waking as “the devil’s hour,” by which she means the hour from 3AM to 4AM. Some quick-and-dirty googling does not turn up the reference so I’ll just take the show at its word that this is a thing in England. ↩︎
- The rating actually fell overnight after I watched the movie, which leaves me speculating. Was someone else drawn in by Netflix’s removal and IMDb’s high rating and found themselves disappointed? One has to wonder. ↩︎
- While we’re at it, it is pretty close to the idea behind 11/22/63. ↩︎
- I am deliberately mixing what’s in the source material with what was added for the movie, without examining the cultural implications thereof. Whereas Dick’s original short story also implied a divine hand in the story’s proceedings, it was less direct than in the movie version. In fact, one might read into the original story that “The Old Man” is simply a rather impressive bureaucrat, “We are fully licensed to make such corrections,” the Old Man explains. Such ambiguity is cultural commentary in-and-of itself. ↩︎
- Just so you don’t have to dig through it, in the original work nobody gets killed. That plot line was introduced for the movie version, perhaps itself a sign of our loss of moral compass in the 21st century. ↩︎