I'm sure others have titled just as I have this post, but clearly David Milch has called us to do so, with his mystical, magical, spiritual, complex, multi-layered, multi-media, captivating, coolest thing written for television in a long time (ever?), puzzle. I find myself watching these six episodes over and over again on demand and I suppose I'll continue until I no longer notice new things each time. HBO's offering comes complete with a hint site johnmonad.com, named for the title character (Austin Nichols), in which cryptic story line hints are given to the visitor who types key words into a search field. Monad itself means The One, The Unifying Force, God, and John from Cincinnati starts with the title character appearing out of nowhere, uttering his first words to a surf promoter and marketer, Linc Stark (Luke Perry), "The end is near." In a re-watch, the most remarkable aspect of our introduction to John was that Linc, having driven up and parked before walking up a long and completely deserted dune to overlook the beach and see Mitch Yost, the reclusive self-obsessed patriarch of the very colorful and deeply troubled Yost clan of famous surfers as he exits the water with his board after his self-imposed solitary surf, didn't even seem slightly surprised when John suddenly appeared behind him out of nowhere, turning when John spoke his first words, as if he'd been expecting him, smiling slightly before casually replying, "Amen, my brother." Then John walks past Linc towards the emerging surfer, Mitch, who has by now reached the dune and the two men waiting there, when John utters his next original words and the first emerging theme of the series, "Mitch Yost should get back in the game." All of this before Linc tells John in so many words to keep his hands off of the youngest Yost, Mitch's grandson Shaun, and both disappear before Mitch levitates, suddenly finding himself standing behind his surfer's woody station wagon, dripping from having poured a gallon of water over himself to wash off the sea's salt, a half a foot up in the air.
Those words, "The end is near," and "...get back in the game," are the only original words our John utters until his surreal soliloquy in Episode 6, quoted in full in my previous post. The next five shows are spent with John meeting, interacting with and parroting the words (with his own interesting, sometimes ironic inflections) of the gnarly cast of characters: the surf shop Yosts including their loyal and wise employee and conscience, Kai; and the inhabitants and hangers around of a closed, down on its luck beachside motel, the Snug Harbor; including Mitch's son / Shaun's derelect father, former surfing great, Butchie Yost, perfecly portrayed by Brian Van Holt, now a heroin addict living for free in the slum dump motel; all of them residents of a dusty little California surf town just north of Tijuana, Imperial Beach (IB). We have a former cop who carries a resurrected bird around in his pocket while talking to his dead wife (Ed O'Neill), a drug trafficker flown in from Hawaii for the occasion and his muttering side kick / local distributor, a wanna-be surfer Jewish lawyer ("Abogado Dickstein"), the motel's caretaker Ramone, it's new owner (a sexually abused homosexual winner of the Mega Millions lottery), and a doctor who has walked away from his practice, drawn by Episode 2's "miracle". It's something to watch. Central and infuriating is Mitch's wife (Butchie's mother and Shaun's Gram), Cissy Yost, played and then overplayed but then we understand why and it all makes sense, infuriatingly, just like Cissy would be in real life, by Rebecca De Mornay.
In addition to the hint site, there's a "real" site for fans of the Yost's multi-generation sufing dynasty (with a small d), called YostClan.com, run in the series by a webmaster working out of a coffee shop with unreliable wireless for which he's paying by the hour, an online destination containing puzzles in which the visitor moves the pictures around to match the caption and find their proper order, an action that is easier said than done, but which leads to a level of interactivity called the pipeline. There are also, as always with HBO's series, message boards, online community for those who have been stricken as I've been stricken, by Monad mania, and since last Sunday's Episode 6, there have been, at this writing, 2,321 posts in one thread about Episode 6 and all that came before it, and what it all means or doesn't mean or might mean or what might happen next. This thread has been viewed 137,818 times, since Sunday. I hope this means we'll get more of this delightful show after these ten episodes HBO has in the can.
It all rings a bell for me, as John adopts those words as a way of saying he understands or does not undersand, whether something "rings a bell" or does not. In the Catholic Mass, the alter server rings a bell as the priest offers the Host and the bread and wine become Christ in transubstantiation. I don't know whether or not it goes all the way to Capra's classic in which "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings," or whether there's any connection between the fact that as the Yost's surf shop door opens a bell rings just like the bell that tinkled as Meadow opened the coffee shop door offscreen at the moment it all went black, just as we expected the Man in the Member's Only Jacket to walk out of the bathroom (blasting, a la Michael Corleone?) and we were left with the vision of Tony and Carmela and AJ eating onion rings and the sound of Journey's, "Don't Stop Believing" wafting excruciatingly through our heads. The Sopranos series ended just before John wanders into the lives of the drug abusing, dirty cussing miscreants of IB, and into the same Sunday night time slot.
Milch and his staff's writing is brilliant, ripe with toss off one-liners that remain in the mind and find their way into the vernacular, and without much regard for the limitations of the physical world. There's a spiral staircase, a helix mysteriously bathed in light from above, both promising and ominous with it's sharp edges covered by makeshift protective padding, that moves, at least metaphysically, from it's regular location to the courtyard of the Snug Harbor. By the end of Episode 6, as our title character is interacting with and gathering other characters from many different places at one time before his speech tells them straightforwardly in a muddy sort of way who's in charge here, something he predicts they'll know whether or not they can quite remember how, and the thickest among us have figured out that human frailty and redemption are among the show's central themes and that the laws of physics don't apply to John from Cincinnati, just as it was evidenced in the show's first moment as John appeared out of nowhere, magical realism set in So Cal, Gabriel Garcia Marquez channeled into new media. I hope John doesn't disappear any time soon.
"Some things I know and some things I don't." - John from Cincinnati
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