Opiniatrety

Who Dreamed It?

Brian blogs (TAR, CT) on the "Westphall hypothesis":

The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to St. Elsewhere in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.

Brian objects to this six different ways. Five and six, he claims, are the really decisive ones. And while I think five and six establish that it is possible to have the following be true:

The entire action of TV series X was a dream, but series Y and Z that share characters with X are not part of X's dream

I really doubt that they establish that this is possible in Tommy Westphall's case. (Though since I've never seen St. Elsewhere, I haven't read the CT comments, I haven't clicked the link to check out the character-sharing network, and I probably haven't seen most of the shows involved in that network, I'm probably not the best person to judge.)

Here's Brian's objection six:

This is related to the previous objection. From the fact that a character appears in two different TV shows, it doesn’t follow automatically that those shows take place in the same fictional world.

We can see the logical point here by simply noting that the fact that a city appears in two different fictions doesn’t mean those fictions take place in the same world. For instance, recently I saw two romantic comedies set in London, one with tennis (Wimbledon) and one with zombies (Shaun of the Dead). The presence of London in both movies doesn’t mean they take place in the same fictional world. And if cities can be cross-fictional so, logically, can people....

The point about London is taken. But the thing is that London is in the real world, and Wimbledon and Shaun are fictions that take off from that real world. Arguably, Shaun London inherits most of the properties of Real London as a sort of default--Shaun London is on the Thames in virtue of the fact that Real London is on the Thames even if this doesn't come up in the movie at all, unless there's something about the movie that makes it false. But Real London doesn't inherit any properties of Shaun London--the fact that Shaun London contains an apartment with such-and-such mess doesn't make it true that real London does.

(This is put hypothetically because I haven't seen SotD. Nor, for those counting implicatures, have I seen Wimbledon, so stop saying that! You know who you are.)

The same relation can hold true between fictions. Kenneth Koch's The Duplications contains a lot of quite surprising stuff about Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck. Duplication Donald inherits many characteristics from Disney Donald, although the defaults are probably overridden quite a lot here--still, I'd say that Duplication Donald is white with a yellow beak, even if it doesn't come up explicitly in the poem. But Disney Donald doesn't inherit anything from Duplication Donald. It is not even default true in the world of Disney that Donald is eventually beaten to death by Mickey in a jealous rage and then resurrected by Mickey, using his newly acquired Olympian powers, only to be turned into a piece of text art shortly thereafter. I mean, that wouldn't even be true as a default, even if it weren't overridden by other things in the Disney world.

What Brian needs is that the St. Elsewhere characters that are shared with other series don't inherit their properties from St. E. But I doubt he can have that, at least not for many of the characters. The asymmetry here is between works that are somehow derivative of others; that play off their popular perceptions, that exist within the worlds of the other series, that for sure come later. That won't be true of any St. E spinoffs--though if St. E is in fact spun off from other series, those may be off the hook.

(There's an interesting question lurking in the area about the status of multi-authored sprawling works like the land of TV. I'd say, for instance, that it is not true in Love American Style that there is humanoid life on other planets, even though Mork is a character in Happy Days which was a spinoff--I think I've got that right. And I don't think that's because Happy Days is asymmetric in the way SotD and Real London are. But that's for another time.)

(There's also another interesting question--what if two rival authors start incorporating the others' characters into their works, making them do things that obviously aren't meant to be true in the original work? Like, P.G. Wodehouse starts having Bertie make an ass of Sherlock Holmes, whereas Conan Doyle has Holmes send Bertie to prison several times--my chronology's off here, but I'm in a hurry. That would be a somewhat cool premise for a story kinda like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, but it would be much, much cooler if it happened in real life. By my standards of cool.)

Well, I'm in a hurry, but Brian's objection 5 is basically that you can dream about real people. And that is true, but is that likely to be what Tommy's doing? It sounds as though, for this to be true, Tommy would have to be dreaming about the characters doing exactly the things they do in real life, and that's quite lacking in what PD Magnus (in Brian's TAR comments) calls "interpretive coolness."

Posted by Matt Weiner at October 5, 2004 03:28 PM