Last week, Laurel and I viewed the
final episode of the final season of the television series JAG. It took us about a year to work through the set. Laurel is a
voracious reader, primarily of murder mysteries and computer documentation. As
a writer and reader of non-fiction, I am informed by Ayn Rand’s theory of
aesthetics expressed in The Romantic
Manifesto. For being television, written, shot, and edited on a grinding
production schedule by a large, changing staff of writers and directors, with
the attendant holes in plot, character development, and theme, JAG held up
well.
Ayn Rand based her
theory of art on Aristotle’s maxim that fiction portrays people as they can and
should be. Every work of art is “a selective recreation of reality according to
an artist’s metaphysical value judgments.” (The
Romantic Manifesto, Signet 1971, p. 19) An artist cannot
present all of reality, so some aspect of it stands for the whole. Is the world
hospitable or hostile or indifferent? Rand called this one's "sense of life."
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| Complicated pasts leave them internally conflicted. Their moral lodestars are on the far horizon. They eventually find home port. |
“Art is a
concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts into the perceptual
level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly as if they
were percepts.” (RM p. 20)
"Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values--a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals." (RM p. 38)
A biography of Abraham Lincoln’s life could run six volumes, chronicling every detail, but the characterization of President Lincoln in a Civil War drama will subsume and encapsulate all of that and deliver it to the audience, according to the intent of the artists--the actor, writer, director, and the others in the team. Ultimately, someone has artistic control of the final product and it is that person’s vision of life that we receive.
"Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values--a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals." (RM p. 38)
A biography of Abraham Lincoln’s life could run six volumes, chronicling every detail, but the characterization of President Lincoln in a Civil War drama will subsume and encapsulate all of that and deliver it to the audience, according to the intent of the artists--the actor, writer, director, and the others in the team. Ultimately, someone has artistic control of the final product and it is that person’s vision of life that we receive.
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| Petty Thief to Petty Officer Zoe McLellan played PO1 Jennifer Coates |
(I perceived a
hidden undercurrent from Quantum Leap
in the re-enactment episodes. The story is carried forward by the same actors,
though in costume. Season 5 Number 11 “Ghosts of Christmas Past,” take place in
the Viet Nam war. Season 6 Episode 23 “Mutiny” is a re-creation of the Somers Mutiny. Season 9 Episode 14 “Each
of Us Angels” is set in World War II. Season 9 Episode 18, “What if?” offered
alternate stories launched when they read fortune cookies at a restaurant. In the world of Donald P. Bellisario, you always have a choice. Tangentially, I followed the historical clues offered in Mutiny. Read here. )
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| Our viewpoint characters, the normal couple. Beset by life's hard losses, they never lose their moral compass, and so they persevere and thrive. |
Of course, the show suffered from errors of fact and the fan base responded. You can read other foible finding on the TVtropes.org wiki. Nonetheless, I benefited from keeping a handbook
of military justice at the couch, just to help with the details. It is not the
purpose of fiction to be didactic, but it is important not to make up
everything, otherwise you are not even creating science fiction but are selling
fantasy.
We bought most of
the DVDs, borrowing a couple of seasons from the local library. We have not
watched broadcast (cable) television since 2010 and we were never big consumers
before that. But people recommend shows and we read about them. In this case, JAG was a back-filling of our NCIS collection. (NCIS was piloted in
Season 8 of JAG.) We discovered NCIS sometime after 2006. We picked up
Season 1 of The West Wing at a neighborhood Blockbuster just as that series was concluding. We eventually viewed Mark Harmon's portrayal of Secret Service Agent Simon Donovan and found it positive and realistic. That led us to NCIS.
Just for contrast
here, we did once watch most of an episode of CSI but could not tolerate more. In fact, we withstood two seasons
of torture with 24, so we think we’re
tough. As for politics, I did view half an episode of The Veep (reviewed here ) but I would rather clean the latrines after drill.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
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