C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

Thankfully I live in world half ignorant of media. I miss a lot of things, occasionally I follow a thread to some discovery only to realize that only three million people watched this. Ah, so. and So it goes.

This was my experience with JFC (John From Cincinnati.) Wikipedia could fill in some of the blanks, but after my experience of “discovering” the show I didn’t want to read what other people had said about it. I had been looking for a new series to watch on DVD. I am in the middle of the (5th?) season of THE WIRE, which I love, but THE WIRE is tough for me to sustain an interest in. Why? It’s so realistic, it’s depressing. I’ve heard the authors are liberal guys, but where is the hope? Damn. It paints a picture of corruption and human frailty that makes every character an anti-hero. Bare bones comic relief. Mostly just hardcore living in a world of greed, betrayal and failure. It’s just something I’m always prepared to watch and call it fun.

I’m waiting for the next season of BREAKING BAD to come out on DVD, as it hasn’t reached the addictive stage where I have to download it from iTunes, like I do for MAD MEN and LOST. Yes, I confess. I love BREAKING BAD, but again, it’s pretty damn dark. A guy with terminal cancer, with a pregnant wife and no money decides to supplement his high school chemistry teacher salary by becoming an (excellent) meth cooker. I can’t even make that sound light by telling saying there are tons of fun, quirky characters. Dark, dark, dark.

I looked around Netflix and IMDB.com to see if I had missed anything and I saw JOHN FROM CINCINNATI pop up. Old or new I didn’t know, but I remember being surprised that I liked the surf history film RIDING GIANTS. I grew up in Detroit during the 60’s and the surfer scene had already been diluted and popularized by the Beach Boys and their blond upbeat whiteness reminded me of the Christie Minstrels who I had long grown out of. (I had a brief involvement with all forms of folk music when it felt indie and rebellious.) No big waves in Michigan, so surferism seemed a distant, irrelevant phenomenon. One of the interesting aspects of RIDING GIANTS was the cultural connection between the beatniks, the surfers and the next incarnation, the Flower Children who I was definitely interested in. The Flower Children, or hippies, offered a complete lifestyle overhaul, not the frat boy hijinks of a small beach culture of even the urban coffeehouse angst of the beats. Once the hippies came on the scene, my radar fixated upon them. The rest were merely wanabes.

Sidebar. I was never a big fan either of surfer music, even the more raw pre-Beach Boys guitar stuff. I noted Quentin Tarantino’s wider appreciation of music history on the soundtracks for Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies, but it never got farther for me that that, what quirky people in Hollywood dredge up to play with. Then one day, I was sitting in a (yes) coffeehouse (yes a Starbucks) in Manhattan talking with a fellow writer and they were playing a compendium of surfer guitar music that, well, struck me as odd and compelling. I shrugged and bought the CD from them with my latte.

NOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE SHOW

If I had never watched a David Lynch film (or series: Twin Peaks) there wouldn’t be much context for what I think they were trying to do in JOHN FROM CINCINNATI. At this point I am nearly at the end of the nine episodes and have tried not to read anything anyone else has written about the series. I have to say the first disc (three episodes?) fascinated me more than the rest of the series sustained my fascination. Still, there is something I like very much about the show. After watching it, I walk away in a sort of dream state that is oddly accurate to the way (I at least) experience the world. We “know” that magic doesn’t exist in a literal sense (at least most of us) but the way our minds work it FEELS very much like we live in a magical world. One example would be coincidences or as the surrealists (and Jungians) say synchronicity. I think about something odd and obscure (say, Popeye) and the next moment I see a reference to it on television or somewhere else, even a “Popeye revival.” Was the reference always there and I hadn’t noticed it or was it “activated” in my perception by my first thought? In any case what it feels like is that there is a magical correspondence between one’s inner life and the “real” world, like there is another reality just under the surface that plays by totally different rules than our “real” non-magical world.

In JOHN (JFC) this magical reality is coming through, not only for individual characters who find themselves levitating, healing knife wounds, and coming back to life from kissing a telepathic parrot, but the community is beginning to realize that they are all experiencing an altered reality, en masse. Ostensibly that’s because “John” the idiot-savant surfer who has strange powers like astral projection, healing, and communicating with his unknown “Father” has arrived in this downwardly mobile surfer community. The show focuses on the Yost family: Mitch the expert surfer who suffered a knee injury and slumped into a selfish mysticism; Cissy, his wife and mother of Butchie who is an attractive slightly over the hill woman with a spitting-nails rage that is directed to nearly anyone in her path; Butchie, another world class surfer who hit the wall of fame and bounced back into drug addiction, even “signing over” guardianship of his son to Mitch and Cissy. Shaun, Butchie’s fourteen year old son, is feeling the power of the Yost line in his expert surfing and becomes the person the show revolves around, more in the sense of what happens to him than what he does himself.

Mitch is the first one to experience magic, he’s the main levitator, which he originally mistakes for a perceptual sign that he’s dying of a brain tumor until Butchie (for the moment not high on heroin) witnesses. Butchie experiences a drying out from drugs without cold turkey though his hair plugs (?) smoke for a while. Sean experiences the biggest juju when he is revived from a broken spine and vegetative existence from a surfing accident by a magical parrot brought into the hospital by Bill, an ex-cop adopted “uncle” who talks to his dead wife and breeds, well, some pretty exceptional birds. Other characters experience magic, too: spontaneous mystic trances, healing powers, prescient dreams of winning lottery numbers, and talking to ghosts. In fact, the whole town of Huntington Beah seems caught in a viral mysticism probably attributable to the mysterious “John” from Cincinnati. Of course, we don’t know anything about John. Butchie decides he’s from a town “like Cincinnati” because he seems unfamiliar with walking in traffic. Like they have no traffic in Cincinnati, I guess Californians don’t get to the hinterlands much. John agrees with Butchie because he agrees with nearly everyone in an autistic “little boy” style. Cincinnati doesn’t explain why John can surf at the expert level, pull wads of cash and a credit card with no limit from an empty pocket and instantly heal from self-inflicted knife wounds.

The language of the show in remarkable in its own way. People talk and muse in Shakespearean monologues like they do in DEADWOOD, apparently by the same production team. The language is rich, hard to follow, fun, but also distances us from reality aspect to the show. In real life how many people talk like this? Even the swearing is expert, arcane, and over the top.

One of the only people not to avoid the direct experience of magic is Cissy. In some ways this makes her the “main character” though her constant rage is difficult to be around. Maybe she’s rageful because she’s not getting any magic and all the undeserving around her, Butchie her ‘moron’ son, Mitch her unfaithful solipsistic husband, and now the mysterious John who talks her out of killing herself when he’s astral traveling (and talking normal for a change).

There are, needless to say, too many characters. I haven’t even mentioned (though now I will) the millionaire promoter who is repenting how he destroyed Butchie, Shaun’s porn star mom who comes back to make him a tuna sandwich while Cissy barely holds herself back from shooting her; Ramon, the “wise” Mexican who hopes one of these mystics would only cough up one more winning lottery number; “the Hawaiians” an odd couple, vaguely homoerotic in a brutal homophobic sort of way, who come to live in the haunted motel for vague reasons of drugs debts owed by Butchie and some strange interest in becoming more guardians (like he needs more) of Shaun the golden boy. There’s also Kai, the tough surfer girl sometimes employed in Sissie’s (and Mitch’s?) surf shop who also is compelled to watch over Shaun.

There are Christ themes here and Stephen King themes and they overlap. The last name on John’s magical credit card is Monad, a term used the Gnostics for the first aspect of God. Curiously, Gnostics also believed that “this reality” was not the real reality, but the real reality lurked underneath the perceptual reality, accessible only via signs. Gnostic Hollywood writers would explain a lot. At times, John appears to be a Christ figure, though being obviously “challenged” affects our perception that his “Father” is really God. And Shaun is some kind of hero figure that the community is invested in, though he’s too young to have done much other than outshine his peers. The Stephen King aspect (which is more overt in a show like Carnivale) would be if a cosmic Evil vs. Good fight to the finish erupted spontaneously in a little surf town. It could, couldn’t it? Why not? Still, we’re not clear who, other than possibly the sweet John, might truly represent a Manichean dark side. A more likely scenario is the “mystic virus” that may do as much damage as good. The fact that many of the characters have used drugs in the near or distant past makes them more amenable to hallucination, though many are “clean” when the new magic kicks in.

Before I decided to read anything more about the show, I saw that it came on HBO after the Sopranos and got cancelled fairly quickly. Clearly its makers had hoped to cast a wide net of characters to prepare us and them for a long, multi-season development of subplots. Will Shaun’s mom who abandoned him for world class porn stardom become a “loving” mother? Will Cissy allow her? What will happen to Cissy and Mitch who clearly love each other in a Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton brutality? Will Butchie rise from the squalor of his druggy life to compete again? What will happen to the crazy gay man, Mr. Cunningham, who walks around talking Shakespearean therapy jargon to his teddy bear and various ghosts? What about the neurologist who quit his job to hunker close to the Yost clan because he couldn’t explain the miracle of the parrot’s kiss? And what about those Hawaiians? And Butchie’s webmaster, Dwayne the harelip? (They call him “the harelip.”) Surely exploring these questions could take many seasons.

It’s a noble effort which now we know has “failed” in the sense that it was cancelled. The difficult part is that none of these questions can now be answered and we have to live with that. It did make me want to go back and give Deadwood another try, though. The first time I tried to watch it, I just couldn’t get into it. But now I get it. Listen to the language. Think Shakespeare is some weird unexpected venue. We’ll see. Stay tuned.