An eight episode Netflix mini-series, Archive 81 (2022) is sufficiently entertaining to recommend. The show is scary but not excesssively unpleasant and it poses enough interesting riddles to maintain audience interest for its eight hour run-time. The show belongs to a genre that seems increasingly prevalent on cable and streaming services: the occult mystery series built to engender endlessly replicating narratives, a labyrinth of branching pathways that tease a solution to various enigmas but won't (or can't) definitively solve the puzzles that it poses. In a way, this form parodies or, perhaps, embodies the structure of internet inquiries -- one mystery links to another and, pretty soon, the objective of the original search is forgotten, buried under a palimpsest of competing facts and narratives. This is an old and, somewhat, disreputable form, prefigured by the curiously organic, perpetually regenerating narratives in ancient serial movies -- for instance, serials like Judex and Fantomas by Louis Feuillade (among the first popular narrative films ever produced). The X-Files developed this technique for holding a plot in a sort of perpetual suspension with regard to its"myth" episodes -- that is, shows that explored the dire consequences of the nightmare conspiracy promoted by the "smoking man" and his alien cohorts. Twin Peaks, in both its first and second series, is a noteworthy example of this type of show. Lost, the Tv show about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island, brought this kind of maze-like narrative to prime-time network TV. More recent examples of this genre are Yellowjacket, a variant on the plane-crash plot in Lost and Green Frontier (Frontera Verde) by the Columbian director Ciro Guerra, Roberto Bolano's longer novels have some of this flavor, particularly 2666. In these works, protagonists from a realistically portrayed milieu find themselves entrapped in a series of events that become increasingly uncanny and threatening. The protagonists, although initially presented as competent and down-to-earth, are generally vulnerable and have back-stories that emerge during the series involving trauma and madness. Often, it is unclear whether the weird events portrayed in the show are actually happening or merely fictions spawned by the hero's overactive imagination. Economic necessity, the drive to produce a series that has eight or more episodes, requires that solution to mysteries encountered by the protagonist be deferred or that each plot that is resolved spawns additional narratives. A paranoid aura frequently envelopes these shows -- no one is what he or she seems to be; all characters harbor dark secrets. Time is fluid -- the protagonist is "unstuck" in time to use Vonnegut's formulation from Slaughterhouse Five. Flashbacks are necessary to develop the previous history of trauma and these increasingly invade the primary action, destabilizing it. Green Frontier is a particularly characteristic example of this kind of program -- a plucky female detective investigating the deaths of several women in the Amazon basin finds that her detective work ultimately uncovers her own past; the film shifts in a bewildering way back and forth across three generations and has as its theme the exploitation and genocide of native Indian people inhabiting the rain forest. Nothing is ever resolved and the show features long hallucinations, some of them triggered by psycho-active drugs used by the characters, others arising from eerie nightmares. For some reason, death by fire is a prevailing theme in these sorts of shows, I think, for the reason that it is helpful for the scenarist to have bodies destroyed by flame so that people thought to be dead can be resurrected from time-to-time -- the corpses were mistakenly identified. (This motif leaks into other forms of cable TV -- for instance, there's a conflagration in The Righteous Gemstones, a raucous comedy about mega-church evangelists, and Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley features repeated shots of a blazing fire, filmed in reverse action, that have no real importance in the plot but merely figure as a symbol of the "infernal" qualities of the protagonist.)
I'll call Archive 81, therefore, an example of the paranoid occult thriller (or POT). The show's premise is that an expert in the restoration of damaged film and video tape is engaged by an avuncular, if mysterious, oligarch to work on a series of fire-ravaged video cassettes. For unexplained reasons, the hero a handsome lanky African-American named Dan Turner is engaged to do this work at an isolated Brutalist bunker hidden in the mountainous woods somewhere north of New York City. The mysterious estate features several complexes of concrete structures with apparently limitless cellars and subcellars, including tunnels leading to an abandoned church sanctuary. Most of this sinister complex is off-limits to the hero, although much of the show involves him exploring precisely those parts of this maze that he is not supposed to enter. (The labyrinth depicted in the show is a mirror for the complicated and involuted plot.) The damaged tapes were shot in 1993 by a young woman named Melody Pendras. Melody investigated the residents of an apartment building in lower Manhattan, the Visser Apartments and shot interviews with her subjects on the tape that Dan Turner is attempting to restore. Melody's project is initially described as a documentary produced for her anthropology class. Bur, as we discover, she is attempting to locate her birth-mother whose last known address was the Visser Apartments apparently in the late seventies. (Melody is the archetypal protagonist of this sort of narrative -- as an infant, she was left in a Church, has a conflicted relationship with Catholicism, and seems to have been the victim of some obscure, unnamed trauma.) Melody is supposed to have died in a fire in the Visser Apartments that claimed 13 lives (maybe -- the bodies were never found). The damage to the video tapes is due to this fire. It's worth noticing how this set-up ingeniously supports the complex plot -- first, information can be provided to the viewers through Melody's video tapes but when it is necessary for the narrative to conceal something, the tape just becomes illegible. In this way, mysteries can be suggested but left interminably unresolved. Dan Turner's situation mirrors Melody's story. Turner's father, a psycho-therapist died in a mysterious fire with everyone in our protagonist's family. Turner has never really understood how this fire occurred and suspects his father may have set the deadly blaze. Turner is trapped in an eerie maze of concrete corridors full of off-limits zones. The Visser Apartments, except for one or two shots, is one of the those horror film staples -- a place with no exterior that seems to have limitless corridors with locked doors and an inverted Empire State Building of descending cellars and catacombs. Like Turner's bunker, the Visser Hotel is full of places said to be off-limits -- Melody is told to avoid at all costs the apartments on the sixth floor -- guess where she spends most of her time? Thus, Archive 8 gives the viewers two spectacularly haunted houses for the cost of one. And, as you might expect, it turns out that Melody was a patient of Dan Turner's father and, of course, the destinies of the two protagonists are inextricably entangled. (It's odd for a viewer who was already in his forties in the nineties to see that era portrayed as part of the remote, inaccessible past.)
Archive 81 crams as much weird and uncanny stuff as possible into its brisk 60 minute x 8 episodes. There is a coven of witches, human sacrifice, psychotropic black mold, a monster that looks like the skeleton of a pterodactyl or stork, a blurry "snuff" film, suicide, drug addiction, baffling post-modern art, epileptic seizures and a spectacular seance that concludes the sixth episode in the show. Along the way, there are hip references to Andrei Tarkovsky and The Twilight Zone as well as pitch-perfect parodies of TV news and advertisements. (The show has a "cold open" that is always a fragment of a TV show or commercial.) The sinister billionaire who has hired Tucker keeps warning him to stay out of the scary sub-basements in his bunker but, of course, he makes a bee-line for those places. Cell-phones are a problem for shows of this sort -- the protagonists are always woefully ill-informed, have no internet access, and no signal. (That's why Tucker is restoring the video tape in the remote mountains far from NYC -- he can't reliably get a signal; this is a device parallel to the video that he so effortlessly restores but which always is destroyed beyond recognition just when things start to get interesting.) Series Tv works on the basis of the charisma of the principal actors. If the stars are appealing and interest the viewer than you are inclined to stick around and see what happens to them. Dan Tucker is wonderfully played by a very magnetic actor, Mamoudou Athie -- he's handsome, with great teeth and huge eyes, very important for a role that requires him mostly to react to scary things that he's seeing either on video tape or haunting the interminable basements in his bunker. (He speaks with the distinctive phrasing that Adam Driver uses -- and I predict that this guy will be the next Adam Driver in terms of Hollywood exposure.) Martin Donovan, Hal Hartley's muse in that director's indie films, is great as the oligarch -- he uses the slight southern drawl that Tom Wolfe famous attributed to the pilots of commercial passenger planes in his book The Right Stuff. Poor Melody Pendras is played by Dina Shihabi, also an appealing actor with a curiously flat face -- sometimes, she's gorgeous, other times her prognathous profile looks squished and unappealing. The Visser Apartments is full of eccentric-looking witches and warlocks, most notably an extremely pale red-headed sorceress named Cassandra -- the actress debuted decades ago in Woody Allen's Interiors. The film is full of odd wall paper, comets, strange patterns in mold, scurrying cockroaches, and, of course, ghosts and the ghosts of ghosts. As the program progresses, Dan Turner starts to haunt Melody Pendras, somehow appearing in 1993, when her story takes place. Vice-versa, Melody starts to haunt Turner in his 2022 bunker.
This series is carefully manufactured for mass audiences but intelligent enough to keep more sophisticated audiences engaged. For better or worse, it exemplifies the best sort of product built for Cable TV.
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