Post by petrolino on Aug 28, 2020 22:57:12 GMT
| # i%PUNK TV : 'Orphan Black' ~ A Punk Odyssey |
There's several reasons I enjoy writing extensively on a particular subject like punk, which means so many different things to so many different people. I think the main reason is that I feel I learn a lot more this way. It pushes me to look deeper into peoples' creative work than I might otherwise. If others contribute to the topic being addressed, that's terrific, as I can learn a great deal more.
I enjoy a good number of punk films, or movies with punk characters. I also see a pronounced punk influence upon American films of the 1980s. Despite this, I'm finding it difficult to recall anything punk-related that's affected me in any significant way when it comes to television. I don't recall any great punk tv show from my youth outisde of 'Marmalade Atkins' which was aimed squarely at children.
Apparently, there's a popular Canadian show called 'Young Drunk Punk' which was produced this decade, but I'd not heard of it until I searched for "punk tv" online today. I found the main articles I looked at were voicing much the same thing; that there's plenty of punk movies, but little in the way of punk television. Perhaps the freedoms offered by film were simply too great for anybody to try and mould a punk show on television, I don't know. I'm sure there are some I've not seen or heard of.
Tatiana Maslany in 'Orphan Black'
'Identity' - X-Ray Spex
Fortunately, I bought a television blu-ray box-set some time back that I'd heard touched upon punk subculture and I've recently begun watching it. It's the cyberpunk thriller 'Orphan Black'. From the very first episode, in which small-time grifter Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) is seen wearing a Clash t-shirt ('London Calling'), it's clear there's a strong punk undercurrent to the writing. Sarah's brother Felix Dawkins (Jordan Gavaris) is an artist who makes money as a rent boy and a drug dealer to pay for his loft space, fuelling imagery that's deeply evocative of the 1970s when punks could afford those kinds of living workspaces, pre-gentrification.
Their friends are punks, goths, metalheads and psychobillies and their local haunt evokes the punk bars of old. Of course, everything looks a hell of a lot cleaner as this is a cyberpunk thriller that's been produced for mainstream television, but it's easy to see between the lines. There's also subtle musical and cultural references to enjoy (these arise largely through different clones inhabited by Tatiana Maslany throughout the story).
"I auditioned for it about six months before I booked it, and just fell in love with the character of Sarah immediately. As soon as I read the breakdown for her I was like “Oh wow, who is this girl?” and reading through the script I was like, “I want, I need so badly to play this!” The excitement of playing multiple characters, that challenge made me salivate, I was so hungry for it. You don’t ever get that kind of challenge as an actor. To play six to 10 different characters is just a fantasy. I dreamt about it, panicked, pestered my agent. I did four auditions altogether, the last was a network test and chemistry read with Jordan (Felix), and got to play five different characters with little pieces of costume to help me navigate through them, and it was the most fun and the most terrifying audition I’ve ever done."
- Tatiana Maslany, BBC America
Tatiana Maslany
British Punk Rock Retrospective : The Thatcher Years
A word for Tatiana Maslany. Her work in 'Orphan Black' constitutes one of the greatest pieces of acting I've ever seen on television. She enters the frame as a streetwise career criminal but is soon revealed to be a complex being. Maslany then has the task of charting different individual's evolutions from series to series and I think she does this brilliantly.
Ostensibly, this biological horror is about doppelgangers, clones and shapeshifters, but it avoids the sermonising and hamfisted satire of recent horror films like 'Ma' (2019) and 'Us' (2019). Instead, it remains a resolute character piece that's essentially about the human condition and the role it plays in scientific advancement. Maslany establishes herself here as the ultimate new wave chameleon.
"The grand adventure of a set visit is entering a universe where everyone — absolutely everyone — is a pro at playing pretend. They’re admirably adult about it. They drink coffee and sit in chairs and operate machines, as if there weren’t lights so hot that they banish the winter outside, as if it’s perfectly normal for a sweltering interior to look like a dusty, sunbaked facade. Insides become outsides here, as gravel underfoot transforms a soundstage floor into a sandy desert.
But the illusions are particularly vertiginous on the set of “Orphan Black,” the BBC America television show that has the same star many times over. “Orphan Black,” you see, is about a group of persecuted clones, and all of them are played by Tatiana Maslany, a 29-year-old actress who has ridden her multiple roles to cult stardom and critical acclaim. On a recent morning in Toronto, Maslany was wearing a frizzy blond wig and was made up as Helena, the dangerously mercurial Ukrainian clone. Her face was covered in blood and filth. She was not — as far as I could tell — thinking about the Screen Actors Guild Award nomination she received that morning, or (as I was) the circumstances that landed her in the peculiar fishbowl of fame. She was focused instead on butter.
The crew was getting ready to shoot the other half of a two-clone scene they had started the day before, when Maslany was playing Sarah Manning, a street-smart con woman and the protagonist of the show. Helena, by contrast, is a cult escapee with homicidal tendencies and a ravenous, animalistic relationship with food. The director of this episode, David Frazee, and Maslany were working through how Helena’s insatiable appetite would affect her behavior in this scene. There was butter present in the shot, but it was not there to be eaten. Would Helena be able to resist? Even a tiny taste?
“Are you going to lick the butter?” Frazee asked.
The cast and crew of “Orphan Black” labor painstakingly over minutiae like this, in the service of a much grander contemplation (or, perhaps, demolition) of female televisual archetypes. The show’s premise allows Maslany to portray a bewilderingly diverse set of stock characters — the punk-rock con artist, Sarah; the shrewish suburban housewife, Alison Hendrix; the geeky stoner, Cosima Niehaus; the Ukrainian psychopath, Helena; the icily aloof career woman, Rachel Duncan; the pill-popping cop, Elizabeth Childs; and many others — encompassing almost every trope women get to play in Hollywood and on TV. (Maslany’s legions of adoring fans call themselves #CloneClub on Twitter and contend that the credits on “Orphan Black” should say “Tatiana Maslany” nine or more times, once per clone.)
In its subject matter, “Orphan Black” broods on the nature-nurture debate in human biology, but in its execution, the show cleverly extends the same question to matters of genre. What does the exact same woman look like if you grow her in the petri dish of “Desperate Housewives” or on a horror-film set in Eastern Europe? What about a police procedural? The result is a revelation: Instead of each archetype existing as the lone female character in her respective universe, these normally isolated tropes find one another, band together and seek to liberate themselves from the evil system that created them.
By structuring the story around the clones’ differences, “Orphan Black” seems to suggest that the dull sameness enforced by existing female archetypes needs to die."
But the illusions are particularly vertiginous on the set of “Orphan Black,” the BBC America television show that has the same star many times over. “Orphan Black,” you see, is about a group of persecuted clones, and all of them are played by Tatiana Maslany, a 29-year-old actress who has ridden her multiple roles to cult stardom and critical acclaim. On a recent morning in Toronto, Maslany was wearing a frizzy blond wig and was made up as Helena, the dangerously mercurial Ukrainian clone. Her face was covered in blood and filth. She was not — as far as I could tell — thinking about the Screen Actors Guild Award nomination she received that morning, or (as I was) the circumstances that landed her in the peculiar fishbowl of fame. She was focused instead on butter.
The crew was getting ready to shoot the other half of a two-clone scene they had started the day before, when Maslany was playing Sarah Manning, a street-smart con woman and the protagonist of the show. Helena, by contrast, is a cult escapee with homicidal tendencies and a ravenous, animalistic relationship with food. The director of this episode, David Frazee, and Maslany were working through how Helena’s insatiable appetite would affect her behavior in this scene. There was butter present in the shot, but it was not there to be eaten. Would Helena be able to resist? Even a tiny taste?
“Are you going to lick the butter?” Frazee asked.
The cast and crew of “Orphan Black” labor painstakingly over minutiae like this, in the service of a much grander contemplation (or, perhaps, demolition) of female televisual archetypes. The show’s premise allows Maslany to portray a bewilderingly diverse set of stock characters — the punk-rock con artist, Sarah; the shrewish suburban housewife, Alison Hendrix; the geeky stoner, Cosima Niehaus; the Ukrainian psychopath, Helena; the icily aloof career woman, Rachel Duncan; the pill-popping cop, Elizabeth Childs; and many others — encompassing almost every trope women get to play in Hollywood and on TV. (Maslany’s legions of adoring fans call themselves #CloneClub on Twitter and contend that the credits on “Orphan Black” should say “Tatiana Maslany” nine or more times, once per clone.)
In its subject matter, “Orphan Black” broods on the nature-nurture debate in human biology, but in its execution, the show cleverly extends the same question to matters of genre. What does the exact same woman look like if you grow her in the petri dish of “Desperate Housewives” or on a horror-film set in Eastern Europe? What about a police procedural? The result is a revelation: Instead of each archetype existing as the lone female character in her respective universe, these normally isolated tropes find one another, band together and seek to liberate themselves from the evil system that created them.
By structuring the story around the clones’ differences, “Orphan Black” seems to suggest that the dull sameness enforced by existing female archetypes needs to die."
- Lili Loofbourow, 'The Many Faces Of Tatiana Maslany' (articled published at The New York Times, April 2, 2015)
Tatiana Maslany & Jake Gyllenhaal
Tatiana Maslany speaks with Seth Meyers
I still have a couple of series of 'Orphan Black' left to watch which I'm excited about, but assuming it doesn't fall off a cliff towards the end (a la 'Game Of Thrones'), this show will easily join my other 2 favourites seen from the past decade, 'Banshee' and 'Magic City'. The scientific narrative is cleverly spun from an imaginative, open-ended premise that roots the unravelling of its kaleidoscopic web of intrigue in themes that are universal. The story doesn't always cut to where you expect it to go, nor does it cut to the characters expected. It has to be technically assured to pull off its premise and I feel it's better than that, it's pretty dazzling.
"I started out as a dancer as a kid; I’ve been dancing since I was 4. So performing was always part of what I was. I don’t know if it I enjoyed the response I got from people or if I liked having an audience, but there’s something in me that wanted to perform. I transitioned into theater and acting when I was about 9, community theater and musicals, being, like chorus-kid-number-78 or whatever. But I just loved it. As a kid you just crave attention, and early on I just felt it was so cool and fun to play around and have people clap for me. But eventually I grew up and fell deeper into it. About 7 years ago I moved to Toronto and kind of took control of it, and realized there’s a depth to this art form, and a reach, and a chance for expression and creation and telling story about human nature and all the contradictions that we are as people. Now I’m really obsessed with characters, I’m really interested in people and I love playing different kinds of people, learning about them and defending them or understanding them better. There’s something in it that’s much better than the attention."
- Tatiana Maslany, BBC America
Identical "Sestras"
'Abstract Nympho' - Chrome