Tribaligenesis
All Star
It still has potential, it needs to delve more in the mythology of their beliefs. But the ending of the first season has been disappointing.
The OA Official [Discusion Thread]
- Thread starter CEITEDMOFO
- Start date
DoubleClutch
Superstar
the 100 is definitely a better series than this.
I did too overall. I just didn't like the junkie character and still not sure about the bully
The show was cool.
As someone already stated, the dance movements were cringe worthy.
The directors did a poor job of interweaving the FBI scenes. I also thought some of the character builds up were a bit forced as well.
I had the most sympathy for OA's parents. She was wild disrespectful when she said they weren't her parents or that she needed to run away to NY to find her father. bytch you're blind. Wtf are you talking about? They weren't drugging you because they wanted you to be a fukkn vegetable. They were giving you meds to stop YOUR nightmares and YOUR nosebleeds. What solutions did you bring to the table?
As someone already stated, the dance movements were cringe worthy.
The directors did a poor job of interweaving the FBI scenes. I also thought some of the character builds up were a bit forced as well.
I had the most sympathy for OA's parents. She was wild disrespectful when she said they weren't her parents or that she needed to run away to NY to find her father. bytch you're blind. Wtf are you talking about? They weren't drugging you because they wanted you to be a fukkn vegetable. They were giving you meds to stop YOUR nightmares and YOUR nosebleeds. What solutions did you bring to the table?
However that ending is fukkn inexcusable. I'm wondering if they didn't want to go overboard with the school shooting scene because of the optics it would've brought. Filming a mass school shooting brings the worst type of publicity for the show and would completely overshadow every plot. Without a doubt I can foresee copy cat crimes.
Which brings up a pertinent question, "Then why film a mass school shooting?" There is nothing about that plot that requires a scene like that to be filmed. It's a fake and forced plot device in my opinion. I'm also 100% sure the writers were making a social remark about mass school shootings as well. Unfortunately it falls flat with piss poor execution.
Which brings up a pertinent question, "Then why film a mass school shooting?" There is nothing about that plot that requires a scene like that to be filmed. It's a fake and forced plot device in my opinion. I'm also 100% sure the writers were making a social remark about mass school shootings as well. Unfortunately it falls flat with piss poor execution.
CEITEDMOFO
Banned
In the month since it premiered on Netflix, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s series The OA has inspired close analysis from viewers intrigued by the scientific, philosophical, and religious implications of the show’s trippy sci-fi exploration of near-death experiences and faith. On Reddit and elsewhere, you can read dissections of The OA as a Christ tale, as biocentric, or as descended from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
On Thursday, I spoke with Marling, the show’s co-creator and star, to ask about the research and abstract thought that went into the show. This conversation has been edited.
Spencer Kornhaber: Were you reading any religious or philosophical texts when creating The OA?
Brit Marling: Not necessarily any religious texts. I think we were reading a lot about near-death experiences themselves, like Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life and Sam Parnia’s research. It’s fascinating as storytellers to find this area where the science is largely being conducted through storytelling. Near-death experiences are difficult to measure, record, or find definitive scientific proof of, and yet there’s a convergence across so many cultures, so many different religious backgrounds, of similar types of sensation.
Pop Culture Is Having a Metaphysical Moment
If people are having these out-of-body experiences—they can remember the details of hospital rooms and spaces that they couldn’t possibly have seen—is something leaving the body? Where does it go? How does it return? That area felt really like an interesting place to set a science fiction landscape in.
In terms of philosophy, later as we were editing the show [we read] Martha Nussbaum’s work. She has this book calledUpheavals of Thought talking about how emotion has been disregarded in philosophy as a feminine afterthought, the important thing is more masculine, linear logic and reasoning. She’s coming in and being like, “No, emotions are incredibly valuable. They determine what is important to us and what direction you should go in as a being in order to flourish.”
I think that dovetails with a lot of the ideas of the show in terms of a return to movement and instinct and feeling. These things are all very important, and we maybe have let go of them as technology takes us further and further into living just from the neck up.
Kornhaber: A lot of people have watched The OA and seen Christ allegories or seen echoes of Russian folktales. Is any of that in your head as you’re writing the show?
Marling: Certainly the Russian fairytales, we were reading those at the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, for instance, the Russian fairytale Vasilisa. It’s basically Cinderella, but it’s the version of Cinderella before it was processed through a more Judeo-Christian interpretation. There’s no glass slipper, for instance. It’s about this young woman who has to go into the woods and encounter this character Baba Yaga, who isn’t a fairy godmother and isn’t a witch either. Through the girl’s cleverness and goodness she manages to get what she needs from Baba Yaga. And eventually she goes and wins the heart of the prince, all through her own effort and agency.
When that story gets retold and packaged further down the line in time, it becomes a very different story about the mythology of makeovers—your fairy godmother descending and giving you the most amazing dress, and then you win the prince. I think in general we have to go back and find the most ancient seed of a story because there’s usually a greater wisdom there. Those early Russian fairytales certainly entered the mythology of the story, which was more about a young woman’s agency than passivity in response to trauma.
Kornhaber: Why have Prairie be from Russia in the first place?
Marling: We both had seen the documentary on p*ssy Riot, and that was really illuminating, hearing those young women speak so clearly and passionately. Also [Russia] is a landscape that feels easy to set this in because—at least from the outsider perspective—it has these extremes: the extreme of colds and the extreme of the oligarch families. When the OA begins telling her story it has the kind of heightened quality, the way kids daydream. It just felt right.
Kornhaber: Obviously the characters have some very allusive names—how much thought went into names like Abel and Homer?
Marling: Oh, interesting. Zal is particularly brilliant at coming up with names and titles. The OA as a title is from his mind. Sometimes [characters] have names right away that just appear. I remember when we were first talking, he was telling me this idea of a parent-teacher conference. And [the teacher’s] name just appeared: Betty Broderick-Allen. And then other times things don’t appear. Like Stephen Winchell had maybe four or five different names before we landed on that particular one.
I think Nina Azarov was slightly inspired by [Anton Chekov’s] The Seagull. Homer came of course because of the idea of the Odyssey. I guess it’s just part of the weird unconscious well—stuff just comes out.
Kornhaber: Were you looking to any particular spiritual traditions about the afterlife, reincarnation, or resurrection?
The Dark Science and Folklore That Went Into 'The OA'
On Thursday, I spoke with Marling, the show’s co-creator and star, to ask about the research and abstract thought that went into the show. This conversation has been edited.
Spencer Kornhaber: Were you reading any religious or philosophical texts when creating The OA?
Brit Marling: Not necessarily any religious texts. I think we were reading a lot about near-death experiences themselves, like Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life and Sam Parnia’s research. It’s fascinating as storytellers to find this area where the science is largely being conducted through storytelling. Near-death experiences are difficult to measure, record, or find definitive scientific proof of, and yet there’s a convergence across so many cultures, so many different religious backgrounds, of similar types of sensation.
Pop Culture Is Having a Metaphysical Moment
If people are having these out-of-body experiences—they can remember the details of hospital rooms and spaces that they couldn’t possibly have seen—is something leaving the body? Where does it go? How does it return? That area felt really like an interesting place to set a science fiction landscape in.
In terms of philosophy, later as we were editing the show [we read] Martha Nussbaum’s work. She has this book calledUpheavals of Thought talking about how emotion has been disregarded in philosophy as a feminine afterthought, the important thing is more masculine, linear logic and reasoning. She’s coming in and being like, “No, emotions are incredibly valuable. They determine what is important to us and what direction you should go in as a being in order to flourish.”
I think that dovetails with a lot of the ideas of the show in terms of a return to movement and instinct and feeling. These things are all very important, and we maybe have let go of them as technology takes us further and further into living just from the neck up.
Kornhaber: A lot of people have watched The OA and seen Christ allegories or seen echoes of Russian folktales. Is any of that in your head as you’re writing the show?
Marling: Certainly the Russian fairytales, we were reading those at the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, for instance, the Russian fairytale Vasilisa. It’s basically Cinderella, but it’s the version of Cinderella before it was processed through a more Judeo-Christian interpretation. There’s no glass slipper, for instance. It’s about this young woman who has to go into the woods and encounter this character Baba Yaga, who isn’t a fairy godmother and isn’t a witch either. Through the girl’s cleverness and goodness she manages to get what she needs from Baba Yaga. And eventually she goes and wins the heart of the prince, all through her own effort and agency.
When that story gets retold and packaged further down the line in time, it becomes a very different story about the mythology of makeovers—your fairy godmother descending and giving you the most amazing dress, and then you win the prince. I think in general we have to go back and find the most ancient seed of a story because there’s usually a greater wisdom there. Those early Russian fairytales certainly entered the mythology of the story, which was more about a young woman’s agency than passivity in response to trauma.
Kornhaber: Why have Prairie be from Russia in the first place?
Marling: We both had seen the documentary on p*ssy Riot, and that was really illuminating, hearing those young women speak so clearly and passionately. Also [Russia] is a landscape that feels easy to set this in because—at least from the outsider perspective—it has these extremes: the extreme of colds and the extreme of the oligarch families. When the OA begins telling her story it has the kind of heightened quality, the way kids daydream. It just felt right.
Kornhaber: Obviously the characters have some very allusive names—how much thought went into names like Abel and Homer?
Marling: Oh, interesting. Zal is particularly brilliant at coming up with names and titles. The OA as a title is from his mind. Sometimes [characters] have names right away that just appear. I remember when we were first talking, he was telling me this idea of a parent-teacher conference. And [the teacher’s] name just appeared: Betty Broderick-Allen. And then other times things don’t appear. Like Stephen Winchell had maybe four or five different names before we landed on that particular one.
I think Nina Azarov was slightly inspired by [Anton Chekov’s] The Seagull. Homer came of course because of the idea of the Odyssey. I guess it’s just part of the weird unconscious well—stuff just comes out.
Kornhaber: Were you looking to any particular spiritual traditions about the afterlife, reincarnation, or resurrection?
The Dark Science and Folklore That Went Into 'The OA'
CEITEDMOFO
Banned
some thoughts i shared elsewhere:
The OA is like quantum leap. She jumps from dimension to dimension saving groups of five or more people who are alone, bringing them together to become family made of strange materials, as she and Steve discussed in the bathroom. The statue of liberty quote defines her - A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
She has spent her life imprisoned. As Nina she and her father lived in a hidden gated house on a hill, when her aunt took her she felt her blindness was a prison. Her adopting parents drugged her for over a decade, hap traps her and even when released her parents imprison her within her bedroom, with no door. This is forever her loop in all dimensions. When she appears in the new dimension it appears to me a hospital. Possibly she is in a dimension where Nancy and able institutionalized her, and is Homer the dr we hear about in his NDE, Dr Roberts. Thus she say his name as question.
Meanwhile, her role in each dimension is to gather those loners in need, to bring them together with the purpose to help them fix their lives. And in return they learn the movements so she can pass on. Ultimately, she will reunite with the fishbowl group as khatun said that this group has to work together to avert a great evil.
She has spent her life imprisoned. As Nina she and her father lived in a hidden gated house on a hill, when her aunt took her she felt her blindness was a prison. Her adopting parents drugged her for over a decade, hap traps her and even when released her parents imprison her within her bedroom, with no door. This is forever her loop in all dimensions. When she appears in the new dimension it appears to me a hospital. Possibly she is in a dimension where Nancy and able institutionalized her, and is Homer the dr we hear about in his NDE, Dr Roberts. Thus she say his name as question.
Meanwhile, her role in each dimension is to gather those loners in need, to bring them together with the purpose to help them fix their lives. And in return they learn the movements so she can pass on. Ultimately, she will reunite with the fishbowl group as khatun said that this group has to work together to avert a great evil.
DoubleClutch
Superstar
STAN JONES
Fire John Harbaugh
CEITEDMOFO
Banned
aw man thanks
Jesus that finale and those stupid ass hand movementsComplete waste of time
I am just watching now this. I know I'm late as hell.
Fillerguy
Veteran
Pls dont. Its an absolute of time. You'd be more satisfied watching asian car crash vids and Im being serious. Theres zero pay off
Way too much good shyt on for you to be watching this right now
Peter Popoff
Baba Yega in black uptowns
This shyt was basura, not looking forward to season 2.