The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

From “Of Mere Being” By Wallace Stevens

You have to give Oliver Stone’s 1993 mini-series Wild Palms more than a little credit: trying to merge cyberpunk with the lightning-in-a-bottle of Twin Peaks is no small feat … if not flat-out impossible. Not that Wild Palms isn’t enjoyable, but compared to what it had tried to be, it just falls short.

Actually, that’s not quite fair. While Wild Palms doesn’t succeed in being a Lynchian copycat it really does manage to be its own, unique experience … if you put it and yourself in the right frame of mind.

Written by Bruce Wagner–based on his comic strip of the same name that ran in Details magazine–with its five episodes directed by the likes of Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt, Phil Joanou and even future Academy-award winner Kathryn Bigelow, Wild Palms ran on the ABC Network beginning in May of 1993. Unlike Twin Peaks, the show had always been planned to be a singular experience, with no plans for a sequel or a second season: the network not wanting to reproduce the unpopular chaos that was the second season of Twin Peaks. Because of this, Wild Palms is much more stylistically focused, without any ups or downs in tone or structure: a five-hour film rather than a TV series.

In the then-future Los Angeles of 2007 a totalitarian right-wing organization called the Fathers (with a decidedly Scientology-esque religious flavor) have held total control for many years and are resisted by the more libertarian-leaning Friends–though their activities are purely underground and feel more like they are hiding in the shadows than really engaging in actual conflict with the powers-that-be. Our main protagonist is Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi), a successful patent attorney, who is married to Dana (Dana Delany) and with who he has two children: Coty (Ben Savage) and Deirdre (Monica Mikala).

The plot gets moving when Harry is visited by an old flame, Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall) who wants Harry to play detective to try and locate her missing son, Peter (Aaron Michael Metchik). This brings Harry into contact with Senator Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), Page’s boss at Channel 3. Kreutzer, the main antagonist, is both the leader of the Fathers as well as head of the Synthiotics cult–and has the ultimate goal of achieving a form of digital godhood through the implantation of a “Go Chip.” Right off the bat, Harry is caught between the two groups: pushed and pulled back and forth between them as his previously safe-appearing little life is turned upside down and inside out.

To call Wild Palms confusing would be an understatement: the characters, their backstories, their relationships, their goals and even the history behind this future Los Angeles are all experiential: it’s up to the audience to try, somehow, to put it all together as the show unwinds. Because of this, Wild Palms a show that really needs to be watched multiple times, with each viewing adding another piece to “what’s going on here?” puzzle.

This confusion was actually a goal: Stone saying that he saw the production as a “a sort of surreal diary … a tone poem” than a clearly linear, plot-driven story. In this way, Wild Palms actually works, and works quite well: it’s not a show but a sensation. Scenes drift in and out of episodes, with dreamlike dialogue and outlandishly surreal moments. Characters recite poetry, never answer questions directly, revelations and plot moments come fast and hard leaving behind a kind of dizzying amazement–with equal parts bafflement.

Delightfully odd details float through each episode: Wyckoff dreaming of a rhinoceros, the Friends having a secret hideout at the bottom of a pool, “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens recited by the Synthiotics as their mantra, “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman conversely intoned by the Friends, a brutal murder committed by a child wearing a sailor suit, Shakespearean moments of eye-gouging … all the while set in an elegantly sterile Los Angeles of blue skies, cream-colored buildings, and empty neighborhoods.

Adding to this is staggeringly vast cast–making each character feel like we are just seeing a sliver of what could be a vast and interesting backstory–performed by just about every possible mainstay character actor from the 1990s: Angie Dickinson, David Warner, Ernie Hudson, Bebe Neuwirth, Brad Dourif, Charles Rocket, Ben Savage, Nick Mancuso, and others.

This “feeling” of the show is further enhanced by the show’s already-mentioned cool visual tone. Nothing in Wild Palms screams THE FUTURE: the cars are classically styled, clothing is clean and clearly inspired by a Japanese aesthetic, and when technology appears it is unobtrusively simple.

For example, when virtual reality makes an appearance its shown not as heavy goggles but as a simple pair of eyeglasses: the digital world depicted not with clumsy, garish CGI but as a Dutch-angled ballroom with real people dancing in it.

Same goes with the depictions of holograms, a key plot point as The Fathers are planning the next stage of their total control via that technology coupled with a hallucinogenic drug. Rather than showing heavy, dark equipment, the projector looks like something that could sit on top of any 90s-era television set, with the images it creates exactly as crisp and clear as real life.

While Wild Palms falls straight into cyberpunk–and even has a extremely clumsy cameo by William Gibson–it would be much more accurate to call it Southland Sci-Fi, joining other films like Kathryn Bigelow’s own Strange Days, A Scanner Darkly, and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales: a production where Los Angeles is a major character in the story and not just a generic backdrop.

Being even more accurate, it would be better to say that Wild Palms has more in common with proto-cyberpunk Philip K Dick than Gibson: the characters are oddly remote from one another, their emotions — for the most part — are diluted. The plot is both labyrinthian and paranoiac, with characters sliding in and out of trustworthiness and likeability with several completely falling apart.

As cyberpunk, it works less than a view of the street than the boardroom: save for a few characters/moments we see nothing but the well-off movers in the upper-echelons.

Still, like with everything else about it, Wild Palms still manages to work–both as a show and as cyberpunk. It’s a cold and sterile future filled by double-dealings and strategic and Machiavellian betrayals but it still holds onto the idea of technology being both a tool of the oppressed and the oppressor.

The final verdict is that while Wild Palms is not Twin Peaks, and has become unfortunately overshadowed by what it tried to emulate, it actually works quite well as pure entertainment as well as cyberpunk fiction in its own … unique, and wonderfully bizarre way.

Wild Palms- 6/10

You can get a copy of Wild Palms here.

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