I dove into the DVD days of yore last week by way of Dark Angel, a dystopian action-thriller series from James Cameron that aired on Fox for a few seasons in the early 2000s. Jessica Alba, who’s since become a business mogul, stars as Max, a genetically modified girl who was bred by a secret government org seeking to create “X5” super soldiers. In her case, that means feline DNA was mixed with her own, giving her cat-like vision, strength, and stealthiness. At age 9, as is explained in the pilot episode, she and a handful of other GMO kids escaped from the remote military base where they were being trained.
The lab-rat experimentation had unintended side effects, of course. While a catnip jones would have been funny, the writers went for something dark: the X5 brain produces insufficient levels of serotonin, resulting in life-threatening seizures for the now 19-year-old Max. To overcome the deficiency, she gobbles tryptophan—an amino acid that, in the best of times, she could buy as a supplement in most grocery stores. Within the construct of Dark Angel, however, the best of times are a faded memory: an electromagnetic pulse has turned America into a Third World country where all but the wealthy scrounge to survive.
There’s far more to the show than all that, obviously, including an ample amount of action, but I bring it up in large part because of how quickly the established order of things was upended. Twenty years ago, when I first I had a hankering to watch Dark Angel, I hunted for it on cable channels and, when it failed to turn up, purchased the DVD sets for about $25 each. In today’s world, swap “cable channels” for streaming apps and, just as then, it’s nowhere to be found. The DVDs can still be purchased, though—if one prefers new to used—for a helluva lot more than what I spent.
Back in the day, even if one didn’t own a stand-alone DVD player, both desktop and laptop computers came with DVD/CD drives; consumers who bought DVDs and CDs could, if we wanted, rip them to our expansive internal hard drives (though it was always more tricky with DVDs). At a certain juncture, however, the computer companies removed DVD/CD drives and shrunk the size of the internal HDs. They nudged us, ever so slowly, toward the always-on world of streaming media.
There are pluses and minuses to the streaming world, of course, with the biggest negative being a licensing minefield that’s left many good and great movies and TV shows unavailable for decades. From the time I was young to now, just a few months before I turn 60, I’ve been fascinated by all that came before—history writ large and small, from the rise of the Roman Empire to the surprise 1977 pinfall of Bruno Sammartino. Yesterday is the building block for today, after all, just as today is for tomorrow. In theory, all that information is now a keystroke away—yet, because of the constraints applied by tech companies, much of it remains lost.
On my About page, I explain that I subscribe to the George Santayana aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and also say that I “believe that those who only look in the rearview mirror are sure to drift into the median strip.” It’s a balancing act. What makes me nervous: We, as a people, no longer look behind us. History is replete with lessons that are applicable to the present. One just needs to look back—and, too, watch Dark Angel. The tinpot despot is attempting to detonate a financial EMP that will harm America beyond our imaginations.
The Old Grey Cat 