I’m trying to remember how and from where I procured a boxset of Wild Palms, but can only recall the words of a screenwriter friend who implored me with some urgency, “If you ever see it somewhere, buy it,” and that when I saw it someplace or other, I did.
The tragedy of Wild Palms is that it is only just over five hours long.
The tragedy of Wild Palms is that it was too beautiful for this world.
The tragedy of Wild Palms is that is does not, by even the most generous reading, make any sense whatsoever in any way at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J1taQAsHJg
Wild Palms came somehow into the world in the post-Twin Peaks days of 1993. It was based on a cyberpunk comic strip serial by Bruce Wagner previously published in Details magazine. It told of a dystopic near-future in Los Angeles where corporate interests have seized power in America and threaten to further control the population via the medium of living hologram, able to invade people’s homes through their televisions. There are guerrillas opposing the Government (the Friends vs the Fathers), an influential television series of dubious repute (‘Church Windows’), a murder, a child star, substances with made-up names, a very transparent stab at Scientology in the ‘Church of Synthiotics’, a terrorist plot and a great deal of recurring dream imagery featuring a pool, a rhino and a woman covered in tattoos of palm trees.
Obviously, this will all be great.
Wild Palms featured a cavalcade of Hollywood names of the time. We recognise this now as a given on many big ticket television series (David Fincher, House of Cards; Martin Scorsese, Boardwalk Empire; Jane Campion, Top of the Lake; the busloads of film actors now cast in TV roles), but in 1993 Wild Palms endeavoured to set itself apart as an Television Event Miniseries™. Michael Mann had directed Miami Vice in the mid-80s and David Lynch had recently mesmerised/traumatized TV audiences with Bob, but Wild Palms was on another level. It had its own book.
“It is a paper trail, a Hungry Ghost story, a psychadelic dossier filled with borrowed moonlight from a floating world…This is not a book about the world of WILD PALMS, it’s a book from that world. It doesn’t know it’s fiction.”
Oliver Stone had acquired the comic strip rights and served as executive producer. Each episode was directed by a different film director, one of whom was Kathryn Bigelow (for the others, well, search that.) William Gibson played himself in a cameo. Jim Belushi played the lead. Robert Loggia, Angie Dickenson, Kim Cattrall, Ernie Hudson and Bebe Neuwirth were in supporting roles. Wagner was the series creator and wrote the screenplay in eleven days. The budget was $11 million ($17 million today.)
Wild Palms was quite nakedly trying to make itself in Twin Peaks’ image (and to capture the huge ratings of that show at its most popular), in the way that Ray Donovan thinks of itself as heir to The Sopranos. But not too much! “It’s nothing like Twin Peaks,” Wagner told Entertainment Weekly (their words: “moaned”). “This is its own thing. This is very different.”
Certainly, ABC’s executives wanted none of the drawn-out ambiguity of Twin Peaks, just plot, plot, plot! A clear beginning, middle and end, thank you, then you can have your rhinos-and-empty-pools vignettes. The reason for the Wild Palms Reader was to guide viewers through the series’ incomprehensibly dense backstory plot, though for what purpose seems unclear. This amazingly strange object sows more confusion than it dispels. It is also somewhat of a curio among William Gibson fans for the contributions that he made to it. It contains Wild Palms character bios, diagrams, pseudo documents, TV listings from the future, ads for drug manufacturers, and a chapter titled, ‘AIEEEEEE!!!!’. Other contributors include Mary Gaitskill, Lemmy, Malcolm McLaren, Jane Pratt and an ex-CIA operative. It was designed by Yasushi Fujimoto. Gibson called it “a secret masterpiece of esoterrorism.”
Oliver Stone said of the series, tellingly, that the atmosphere was more important than the storyline. Jim Belushi described it this way:
“It’s like Dynasty on peyote. It’s thirtysomething gone to hell. It’s Donna Reed getting stabbed. It’s got everything in it. The Singing Detective. The Prisoner. You name it, it’s in there.”
That is probably about right.
Other than 2007 looking almost exactly like 1993, and that Kim Cattrall is ageless, one of the main things to take away from Wild Palms is that people in the early ‘90s were seemingly scared out of their minds by the idea of virtual reality technology. Between 1992 and 1995, on film there was The Lawnmower Man, Strange Days (directed after Wild Palms by Kathryn Bigelow), that one scene in Disclosure, Savage, Brainscan, Johnny Pneumonic, Arcade, Future Shock, and Virtuosity, which were each laden with colour-saturated images extolling the terrifying mind-control powers of unwieldy VR gloves and headsets that people were just about to start wearing at every moment of their lives in a mass abandonment of the real. (Perhaps their fears were founded?) Wild Palms hopped on this panic bandwagon in the hope of stirring just the right amount of contemporary unease.
In several of these films, as well as in Wild Palms, the escape into this virtual void is coupled with hallucinatory drugs. People journey of their own volition or are made to against their will by nefarious, powerful forces. These forces often seek total control over the population, through faceless corporations, or public figureheads hidden in plain sight. The media operates as an organ of state control. There are often dopplegangers, doubles, blurred identities of all kinds, a conspiracy at work that only the protagonist knows the truth about but can’t convince anyone else of as they are labelled insane despite these walking holograms being completely real.
Anxieties about surveillance and control – whether a dissolution of personal agency, or control enacted by outside forces – are powerfully stoked by these tropes of speculative fiction (idk, perhaps those fears are also well-founded.) On paper Wild Palms has the makings of a particularly great take on these elements, which is why it was best suited to remaining a comic strip that would have made for a really good graphic novel. Or today, from the right studio, a perfect slate for a video game (which I would totally play!)
But from the vantage point of now, Wild Palms only works brilliantly as parody, though it’s deadly serious. It is brought low by astoundingly inept acting, direction and writing. Nothing makes sense, though we know this is a world built of deliberate confusion. Scenes brim with hubristic performances from actors certain that they are each living parts of a masterpiece.
The conviction of everyone involved cannot be faulted. Its tone-deaf take on every genre it tries on, can. It is such a mess–of intent, ideas, tone, logic–that its unintentional viewing pleasures are many. It is so spectacularly misguided that it’s tempting to think of it as an elaborate inside joke, a big public canvas of esoterrorism: “Let’s take the most money we can get for this, make it as pretentious and dense as possible, stir in some moral panics, hype it beyond measure and then hope that critics see it as deep and interesting and important, even though we have nothing lasting to say.”
Wait, that was the last season of Mad Men. But yes, Wild Palms producers, ha ha ha, what a good trick you played!
Is Wild Palms unfairly overlooked in the canon of Important and Influential Television™? No. Though what it attempted in its wanton ambition must have surely remained a touchstone for future producers trying to get money out of studios and networks. Some of things it attempted were successfully done later elsewhere, in shows like Carnivale (never forget), and Fringe. It was so deliriously self-satisfied that in its way maybe it did help set the scene for the contemporary television showrunner/auteur. Perhaps it is more realistically a cautionary tale. In any case, it is somehow a thing that was made, thankfully! It is so fun and nutty.
William Gibson wrote of the series on his blog in 2006, “It fell drastically short of the serial.” But of the Reader, he remains proud. “It managed to pre-figure some of the most eldritch vibes of Bush-era neoconservatism. And indeed the series can be imagined as making a very different kind of sense, at the time, if only Clinton hadn’t been elected.”

America, is this correct? You will have to sit through the 5.5 hours of Wild Palms and report back. This is important! Please enjoy this trailer for the series (but first an advertisement for a fitness program, which I think enhances the experience, and I’m certain now on second viewing is not part of Wild Palms.)
Wild Palms is available to watch in full on YouTube. Or if you ever see it somewhere, buy it.
