NCIS, My Love

It started while I was looking around for distraction.  I didn't mean to fall in love.  Just a little fling, a little dalliance to pass the time after work, after my neurons were stretched out like dry rubber bands, having seen clients all day.  Just poking around the recent postings on On Demand, not even the casual encounters, just the television series.  It was all innocuous. I'd gotten tired with my off and on affair with CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York;  it had gone on for years, and I'm not happy to admit it.  But I just couldn't do it anymore, with the same old crimes, the same old cities, night after night.  I just couldn't take it anymore, all right?  Alright!?

It was probably the international flavor, the tres exotique quality that finally drew me away from CSI.  It felt like a bigger world with NCIS, and then her friend, NCIS: LA, was like a Moroccan fashion model.  It just kind of happened, and now six seasons later...well, we haven't made it official, but it's definitely not a one-nighter.

I'm not feeling like I have to defend myself, but I do want to explain.  I need to explain.  I need you to understand me.  And not judge.

I love the international thriller.  It's one of my favorite categories.  I love the Bourne movies, the James Bond movies.  I even liked "The International," although surely Clive Owen is the J. Edgar Hoover of Hollywood.  How else do you explain his success except for having bugged many producer's bedrooms?

And I also love stories of functional ad hoc families.  I watched all of "Buffy the Vampire Story," and all of Joss Whedon is pretty much centered on these kind of groupings, which is more or less the story of my generation.  Adrift from conventional moorings, coming together in alleys and desert towns, forming societies out of the wreckage of the old, not yet coalescing into a new, integrated structure.  That's me and mine.

So!  NCIS, with less fan boy vibe, revolves around similar families but in particular work settings.  But the tension and rough love is still there, the backing-each-other-when-the-chips-are-down, the humor and the functional dysfunction.  Then add the involvement-with-world-affairs-and-important-stuff, and how could I refuse that third drink?

The attraction of these shows, maybe all procedural shows, is a ritualistic one.  A procedure is followed in each episode;  the same arc with inflections, riffs, and different textures...but always the same arc.  Sometimes there's a larger arc that helps hold the smaller stories, and those, like the meta arc of the X Files, are really what I love.  They are like the huge science fiction novels I used to get as a kid, thick like a massive sandwich, taking forever to get through, holding one's mind in a warm, directional embrace that bridges the childhood cultural ice fields of crevices and brittle surfaces.  With the broken suburban narrative of youth, these big, multi-faceted, and ultimately integrated stories, that moved from chaos to order, from confusion and disorientation to resolution and transformation (or at least clarification), can't you see why I was primed for this affair?

My life has a lot of inelegant and geometrically lumpy arcs, clients moving forward generally, but with many curly cues and wavy lines.  Not to mention my own, more faith-based arc.  So exposing myself to these matmatically luscious designs, episode after episode, and then savoring the different paint schemes while my social network of add ons and ad hocs is reflected without ridicule--it has a saluatory effect on the general background anxiety of modern life.  You know?

We have to surrender to our loves.  To try to stuff our love into prescribed forms, only cavorting with Masterpiece Theater, or on the other end, teenage slasher films, it distorts you, it twists you like a metal bar propping up a tank.  So I declare it:  I'm in love with NCIS (and her slutty NCIS: LA friend--don't tell her).  It's a modern love.  It's maybe a post-modern love.  It cuts against across my idealized identity.  It exposes shame, blame, rage...well, not rage, actually, a slight blush maybe.  Ok, that came from my dream last night.  Sorry.

So don't judge me.  Love me.  And my darling NCIS(s).