The OA: producing stories using stories
Although only three years have passed since the release of the first season of The OA — one of the pioneering Netflix Originals launched in Italy — it feels like just brief flashes, like memories of a distant dream, linger in our minds. In those initial eight episodes, Prairie Johnson makes a mysterious return home after being missing for seven years, and astonishingly, she regains the sight she lost as a child due to an incident.
Prairie concocts a strange and enigmatic tale, asserting that she is the O.A. (Original Angel). She brings together a group of high school students and their teacher, sharing her experiences with them, particularly a ritual dance that purportedly allows travel between dimensions. The finale, beautifully balanced between the fantastical and the poignantly relevant, left doors open for a sequel while still standing as a complete narrative on its own.
The OA blends thrillers, science fiction and teen-drama in a cleverly dosed mix. When we believe we have understood the direction of the story, everything turns upside down again, leaving the viewer and the protagonists themselves at the mercy of a maze-like narrative process, full of twists and turns and blind alleys. The OA is a tale of tales, a story of stories (Franzoni, 2016)
Brit Marling teams up again with her writing and directing partner Zal Batmanglij; the two have worked together in the feature films The Sound Of My Voice (2012) and The East (2013). The series is characterized by their peculiar touch, reaching the peak of their creative maturity. While the first season showed a lot of assonances with The Sound Of My Voice, the second season aims higher. The OA is ambitious and philosophical and highlights the exciting talent of the two filmmakers.
In the first season, the main antagonist — or perhaps one of the protagonists in this intricate ensemble of characters — Dr. Hap Aloysius Percy, posits that death is nothing more than a garden of forking paths. This botanical metaphor carries through to the second season, making explicit reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which echoes the quantum “many-worlds” interpretation. This theory suggests that each measurement of a quantum state results in the universe’s history splitting into distinct, non-intersecting worlds, engaging yet again with the fascinating narrative mechanism of the multiverse.
To weave such an extensive and complex tale, the authors have undoubtedly drawn upon a wide spectrum of paranormal knowledge. They have likely delved into books on angels and near-death experiences, which is no coincidence given the presence of such books under Prairie’s bed in the first series. They have also studied the work of John Mack, a psychologist who dedicated his life to understanding the nature of alien abductions.
The character of Dr. Percy is explicitly inspired — both in terms of personality and appearance — by the American psychologist John Mack, to whom he bears a striking resemblance. From Mack’s studies emerged a renewed worldview in his patients, marked by heightened spirituality and environmental sensitivity. Mack’s writings highlight the rich history of socially accepted visionary experiences in pre-industrial societies — such as those of Native Americans — that were not seen as aberrations or mental illnesses.
In their quest for references and narrative inspiration, the authors likely encountered the urban legend of “the man of dreams.” This legend revolves around a portrait of an unknown man who supposedly appears in the dreams of thousands of people. Some believe that this man’s face is a manifestation of a collective subconscious, much like the shared visions experienced by the selected dreamers in the second season.
As in “Twin Peaks: The Return” by David Lynch and Mark Frost (2017), The OA reflects a profound affinity towards the concept of eternal return, drawing inspiration from the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as Buddhist and Hindu thought. In La gaia scienza (1882), Nietzsche writes:
This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live it again and again countless times, and there will never be anything new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh, and every unspeakably small and great thing in your life will have to return to you, and all in the same sequence and succession — and so too will this spider and this moonlight in the branches and so will this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is always turned upside down again and again and you, the grain of dust, are always with it (Nietzsche, 1991).
This concept is echoed in the explanation Hap gives to the character played by Brit Marling, who begins to recognize within herself all the personalities she has inhabited: Prairie, Nina Azarova, The O.A. Their lives are interconnected, and, as much as she might detest it, there is no plane of reality in which they are not somehow spiritually entangled. It’s no surprise, then, that The OA: Part II ends with a new beginning. What disrupts the balance is its self-referential twist, acknowledging its existence as a piece of fiction. This meta-narrative turning point forces the characters to confront their nature as fictional constructs and seems to impose a pivot on their otherwise circular journey.
If one dimension gives rise to another, and then to another, in a manner reminiscent of the floral fractal patterns found in a rose window, this suggests that the multiverse of The OA will continue to expand. The fourth wall begins to waver until it encompasses our sphere of reality. If this is how it ends, the meta-narrative device leads us to a gratifying conclusion: Karim, one of the new protagonists introduced this season, reaches the rose window by solving the enigmas of a villa reminiscent of the Resident Evil video game series. There, he attains a vantage point (“the vision of the Earth from the Moon”) over the entire multiverse: a film set where each actor can assume a new role depending on the project’s demands.
From this perspective, we can understand how some characters do not accept their fate and strive to breach the wall confining them to the realm of the imaginary in an attempt to reach “reality.” But what is reality itself if not simply one of the many facets of the imaginary pressing to be realized? The ritualistic and liberating dance of the characters in The OA seems to enact theories proposed during the seminars of the Collège de Sociologie in late 1930s Paris.
The social imaginary […] not only according to this theory is “real”, but demands to be realized, with more energy than comes from science, politics and also from art. And the “realization” happens above all through cultural productions that simulate with technologies the appearance of things, incorporating in their structure mythologies and collective emotional dispositions: the cinema, the photography, the media of the image, that determine a relationship with the time founded on constellations of “memories” and on “figures” endowed with an aura, on an allegorical power, fed by a “phantasmagoria”, that emanates of the things and the environments”. (Ragone, 2015).
This desire for contamination between art and life is expressed in Woody Allen’s movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), which illustrates the culmination of mass consumption of the medium cinema in the 1930s, with the introduction of sound and therefore the realization of maximum proximity between the individual and the screen reality.
Allen tells of a character who, at a certain point in his film, comes out of it to enter real life to be able to bind himself to a spectator with whom he fell in love to the point of becoming a flesh-and-blooded body from a simulacrum. […] The line “the real people want to live in fantasy and the invented one wants to live in reality” is eloquent. (Abruzzese, Borelli, 2000).
The meta-filming direction of the finale seems to push towards a narratively interactive future, similar to what we saw in Bandersnatch from Black Mirror, another Netflix series. Interestingly, one of the most complex and elusive endings of Bandersnatch leads us to a television set.
Interaction appears to be embedded in the very DNA of The OA: you can’t alter reality without a communal effort that both conceals and reveals the mechanics of audiovisual storytelling. Dialogue within the series alludes to the idea that “a story, if it is powerful, influences other stories,” much like the algorithmic recommendations Netflix provides to its viewers based on their viewing history.
For the first time, streaming platforms have an enormous amount of data at their disposal regarding their users. This allows them to draw their audience into a participatory game, prompting viewers to ponder how to continue the story. This creates an intertextual web that ties together all series within a single narrative meta-verse.
The OA navigates a television landscape that increasingly embraces diversity. The groups formed around the protagonist evoke the “losers” from Stephen King’s It or the concept of ka-tet from The Dark Tower saga — a group of seemingly disparate individuals brought together by fate to pursue a specific purpose (see Mazzoni, 2017). This reference extends to Lost (2006), a series that heralded the golden age of television.
The cyclical structure of The OA’s narrative also brings to mind David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which was cinematically adapted by the Wachowski sisters. Through skillful use of imagery and dialogue, Batmanglij and Marling manage to strike a balance between entertainment, wonder, and storytelling. They never leave the viewer entirely adrift, ensuring even the most surreal situations are obscurely decipherable.
For instance, consider the dialogue, mediated by Nina, between the giant octopus “Big Night” — a nod to Lovecraftian fantasies — and the audience at the nightclub “Syzygy” (a term denoting alignment in astronomy, symbolizing the union of planets). This careful mediation makes the complex layers of the narrative accessible and engaging.
Behind the enormous narrative and visual effort, Marling & Batmanglij may have subtly embedded the description of the creative process undertaken to write a modern series.
after decades of cultural subalternity to other audiovisual languages, […] has won the attention of viewers, professionals and scholars of communication by proposing imaginary universes extremely innovative in content and form. Working in depth on the time of consumption and on the very structure of the processes of affabulation, the new tv-series […] surpass movies in their ability to adhere to the identity profiles of the public, restoring their expectations and concerns”. (Brancato, 2011).
Let’s attempt a metaphorical interpretation: in this sense, the first season represents the past, the breaking point, the beginning of change. Dr. Hap is the analyst, the one who scrutinizes the spectators, trying to observe their habits to decode their behavior. But O.A. is the first angel, the first spectator to understand that to access a different narrative, you must embrace another mode of engagement.
O.A., both a character and actress, migrates into another story — similar but different — that belongs to a new generation. The need for the old group to connect with this new state of reality is, therefore, increasingly evident: it is an old television set, during broadcasting, that acts as a medium.
In that spiritual session, Betty discovers and reveals herself as a medium; the older generation feels the need to guide the new generation towards new types of narration that definitively escape the constraints of genre (detective, drama, comedy, horror, teen) to become a stream of collective subconsciousness. In season 2, the new audience is drawn to a house (the Netflix home page?) that alters consciousness by creating dependence. How many times have we heard these unfounded accusations leveled at every new form of media? Karim observes what appears to be the beginning of a new narrative — an ascent that ultimately reveals itself to be fake, illusory.
Played by actors aware of their roles, filmed by one crew being filmed by another. The fracture between the two worlds seems untouchable and perhaps irreparable: the creators have unveiled the secret of the creativity necessary for this new form of audiovisual production — an engaging, continuous, and exhausting struggle that requires perpetual transmigration to other narratives to exist. They suggest to new viewers not to forget that everything is storytelling.
Emiliano Chirchiano, PhD.
Nicola Guarino
References
- Alberto Abruzzese, Davide Borrelli, L’industria culturale: tracce e immagini di un privilegio. Carocci, Milano, 2000.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Il giardino dei sentieri che si biforcano, in Finzioni, Adelphi, Milano, 2015.
- Sergio Brancato, Le narrazioni post-seriali: il mondo nuovo della fiction-tv, in Post-serialità, Liguori, Napoli, 2011.
- Andrea Franzoni, The OA. L’angelo necessario, Settimana News, 30 dicembre 2016.
- Sara Mazzoni, The OA, Osservatorio Tv, 2017.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, La gaia scienza, Edizioni Studio Tesi, Roma, 1991.
- Giovanni Ragone, Radici delle sociologie dell’immaginario, Mediascapes journal (4), 2015.
This article first appeared in “Quaderni d’altri tempi” on July, 2nd 2019
