Imaginary Worlds - Multiverse Remix

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Marvel and DC are jumping into the multiverse with multiple movies and shows crossing over into parallels worlds with different versions of established characters while they’re merging IP from different franchises. It’s a win-win business strategy, but multiverses also bring up intriguing story possibilities of how we could’ve turned out differently if the circumstances of our lives were different, and what it would be like to meet your double. I covered those themes in my episode Doppelgängers 2.0, and I looked into one of the first cinematic multiverses, The Tommy Westphall universe, in my episode Inside the Snow Globe. Both episodes were from 2015, and since a lot of recent listeners probably never heard them, I’m presenting them again as a double feature. This episode is sponsored by Walker Books and BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, holiday edition. I'm Eric Malinsky. For the last several months, my favorite kind of procrastination has been going on Twitter to see any rumors about which characters

might be showing up in Spider-Man No Way Home. The new movie pits Tom Holland's Spider-Man against enemies that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield fought in their Spider-Man movies. They all die fighting Spider-Man against enemies that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield fought in their Spider-Man movies. The movie is part of a new phase for the Marvel Cinematic Universe,

which is all about the multiverse. DC is also doing the multiverse thing with their upcoming movie, The Flash, which will feature both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton playing their versions of Batman from different universes. Tell me something. You can go anywhere you want, right? Any timeline. Any universe.

Now, from a business point of view, the multiverse storyline makes a lot of sense. You're enhancing your IP, bringing back old actors that were really popular, blowing up social media, and making a lot of money. But there are also interesting story possibilities, especially the idea that in a multiverse, any one of us could have turned out differently if the circumstances of our lives had been different, or if we made different choices at crucial times in our lives. And these are topics I've covered before on the show. So I'm going to replay two early episodes of mine that dealt with those themes. Both episodes are from 2015, and I imagine a lot of listeners that are new to the podcast

probably haven't heard them before. And the second episode I'm going to play after the break has one of my favorite endings that I've ever done in this podcast. It just makes me so happy. But first, let's start with my episode from 2015, which was called Doppelgangers 2.0. It was 1994. I had just gotten out of college, and I moved to Los Angeles to pursue animation. I was doing that thing where you call people to do informational interviews in the career you want to go into. And my parents recommended that I call this friend of a friend of theirs,

who was doing computer animation in the San Francisco Bay Area. And the only computer animation I had seen at that time was really clunky and soulless. But my parents said I should really talk to this guy because his company just made a deal with Disney to produce a feature-length computer animated film about toys that come to life. I was like, okay. I mean, it sounds kind of weird, but okay. And I just called this guy to find out, you know, what his career path was, but apparently I made a good impression because at the end, he said that he had internships and, you know, why don't I come up for an interview? And I was surprised. I mean, I just moved to Los Angeles with my best friends from college.

I love to draw. I want to do hand-drawn animation. So I politely turned him down. We've all had moments like these, these sort of sliding door moments. And whenever I visit the Bay Area, I sometimes think about the other Eric Malinsky. The one who said, you know, I just got out of college. My future is just a blank slate right now. Sure, what the hell? Come up, I'll visit your studio. It's the only internship I've been offered. What's it called? Pixar? What's that Eric Malinsky like? How happy is he? Does he ever wonder about me and my life over here? You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. Today, I want to talk about one of my favorite genres, doppelgangers, and why they're getting

more popular. Alyssa Wilkinson is also fascinated by doppelgangers. And like me, she went through a career change. She was going to be a ballet dancer, and now she teaches film at King's College in New York. So her favorite doppelganger story is Black Swan. Natalie Portman played a ballet dancer who could only achieve greatness by imagining a dark, edgy version of herself.

Now move! What happened to my sweet girl, huh? She's gone! Oh! Oh! I think that for a lot of, well, girls in particular, but especially if you grew up dancing or being in kind of high performing music situations or something like that, the idea of having a self that could choose to not practice or go out late at night and do all the things you're not supposed to be doing or go behave

badly was very appealing. And it wasn't something that was available to a lot of sort of type A firstborn girls in particular. And I've watched it several times. And every time I watch it at the end, I just feel like I have a great intake of breath because I've been holding it the whole time. I mean, that's interesting. As a woman, this particular kind of doppelganger story is one that you find interesting

that a guy could never really quite get as much. You know, girls are kind of socialized to be cooperative and sit in the seats and do the thing at school and kind of be agreeable. And girls are no different than boys in that they would like to act out. And a lot of times they've just kind of been acquiescent. So it's kind of fun to see that happen on screen, even if it's terrifying and brutal. Doppelganger is German for double walker. And for most of history and folklore and literature, doppelgangers were supposed to be terrifying and brutal.

Shelley, for example, believed he saw his doppelganger several weeks before he died. That's Elaine Tobin. She's a cultural studies professor at NYU. Abe Lincoln believed he saw his own doppelganger in the mirror in back of him. And his wife was so upset by this because she was convinced that he was not going to make it through his second term of his presidency, which, in fact, of course, he did not. When I was growing up, I didn't know the serious history of doppelgangers. They were kind of a joke in pop culture. Playing your double was a rite of passage for actors in sitcoms or soap operas.

But the journalist Ryan Britt says we shouldn't write those shows off as silly. When he was a kid, he was obsessed with one particular doppelganger. This chemical compound will make me cool. The doppelganger that time forgot is stefan or kel from family matters who is steve urkel's doppelganger there is no steve here i'm stefan sweet thing but did you think it was cool like did you oh yeah yeah oh yeah well because it was because it's wish fulfillment because if you're a nerdy kid, you're Urkel. You know, and that's a way to be cool. And then the morality play there is it's not really you.

Maybe you're better off being awkward and strange, you know, the way he was. Ryan says the first creator of pop culture to take this idea seriously was Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek. What's so compelling about Star Trek is that in their first season, they had two doppelgangers. Which was Mirror Mirror, where they all had goatees? And that is in the second season. Star Trek is obsessed with acknowledging our dark side.

If there's one big difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Star Wars is you can't turn to the dark side. And Star Trek is you have to control the dark side where you say hey this is a part of me I have to reconcile this Shatner literally embraces his other self in the end you need me I need you I need you an obsession I think that Roddenberry and those guys that wrote on Star Trek had was, you know, are we good or bad inherently?

And so if we split that up, if we split those up into specific creatures that resemble us, I think that the idea of facing your shadowy self, you know, is more compelling than just finding out that, hey, if you grew up this way, you'd be a jerk. Elaine Tobin says this Star Wars versus Star Trek approach to dealing with your dark side actually plays into a larger debate that we're having in our culture now. On the one hand, we have a narrative that sort of originates in Freud

that the only way to kind of be your better self is to tap into repressed emotions. And then that moves us into a glowing position of wholeness. But then the other side of it is this kind of positive, like, get rid of, get away from the negative energy. Don't think negative thoughts. Positive thinking will make you successful no matter where you started out in life. That's the American dream. So the American dream starts to fall apart as it is now. Then you kind of have to figure out how you're going to come up with other psychological ways to handle that.

We're very torn as a culture on which of those is a better path. And that kind of thinking inspired the TV show Fringe, where FBI agents met their doubles in a parallel universe and discovered how different they'd be if history were different. It's her mom? Yeah. She's alive. Well, the last few years have been hard for her. My sister died during childbirth. You have a sister too.

And a niece. Ella. She's seven. Ella. You gotta trust me. I'm you. Modern doppelgangers are not just bad omens or dark versions of ourselves, and we might have scientists to thank for that. Physicists in Switzerland are using the Large Hadron Collider to look for evidence of a parallel universe which they say could exist

if you believe the mathematical models of string theory. And cloning humans is also a real possibility. So a show like Orphan Black can now jump to the main hurdles, which are now moral, legal, philosophical. Yeah? Sarah, you can't make a deal. Why not? Any freedom they promise is bullshit. They're liars.

That synthetic sequence, the barcode I told you about, it's a patent. A patent? We're property. Our bodies, our biology, everything we are, everything we become belongs to them. They're patented. One of the reasons why I love doppelganger stories is that I always fall for this trick. Like, there's really a part of my brain that believes Tatiana Maslany

is only playing Sarah Manning, the main character, and all the other clones are played by somebody else. And whenever I remind myself that she's actually playing all those characters, every time there's a part of my brain that goes, what? But that's another reason why we're seeing more doppelgangers. They're just easier to do with digital effects.

But there's another reason why doppelgangers are multiplying. Alyssa Wilkinson believes it's because they tap into a very modern concern, social media. I'm my own PR machine in that way. And everything that I put on the internet is a version of me. And, you know, back 20 years ago, we used to talk about how you could pretend to be someone else online. You know, you might really be, you know, a middle aged man in the middle of nowhere, and you're pretending to be a 12 year old girl. But today, it's more like, I use my own name, I have my own likeness, I might even have video of myself. So it'd be very complicated for me to be pretending to be someone else. But in a sense, I still am since I can't represent, I don't know,

the full, I'm stuck to whatever Mark Zuckerberg says I can be or whatever, you know, Twitter says constitutes me, which can't possibly be all of me. She knows everyone's playing the same game, but she still gets wrapped up in FOMO, fear of missing out. Yeah, well, so I have to create a double who appears to be having that much fun. So I might actually turn around and go to a party simply so I can be in the picture so nobody thinks I'm a loser. Yeah, I feel that way too in the summer where everybody's posting their amazing vacation photos. I'm like, we got to go somewhere. Totally agree. Everybody is definitely having a better summer than I am.

Except that nobody is, right than I am, except that nobody is, right? I mean, there's probably one guy. Yeah, I hate that guy. Actually, I don't really have a problem with all this. I mean, it's funny how often people my age go on the sort of kids these days rants, but I actually wish social media existed when I was growing up. I mean, you know, I was a very awkward, dorky teenage kid. I felt like I was always making faux pas. I was my own worst enemy. And yeah, I could have been cyberbullied instead of just bullied. But I also could have created an avatar that went out way beyond the confines of my school or my neighborhood and made friends out there in the world.

And if that didn't work, just try and find more people. I mean, there's an endless amount of people I could have found out there, you know, to make friends with and girls to flirt with. You know, there's people really love like authenticity and vulnerability, but I don't know. I've been there. I mean, it's got drawbacks. What you're saying I see is the idea that social media is allowing us to kind of invent our better selves in a certain way, which is really interesting to think about, except it's really anxiety inducing, too, because like how much time in a day do you have to try to keep up with all of this curating that you have to do to create another person? other person. I mean, sometimes I almost feel like I am the evil twin, you know, that my doppelganger on Facebook and Twitter is my is the good version of me. And I'm the one with all the ugly feelings and bad hair days. Right. You're the one who doesn't censor and you're the one who says stuff that probably won't get a like. Right. But the person on Facebook is the person who's like really

has good comic timing. They're the person who's super witty. I think that might be one of the reasons why so many people feel constant, constant anxiety, low-level, constant cultural anxiety. Elaine Tobin thinks that we're experiencing the kind of anxiety that people felt when the Industrial Revolution began. Until that point in history, a chair was something that could only be made by a single craftsperson. And suddenly a machine comes along that can make 100 identical versions of that chair. And that triggered an existential crisis in America. Elaine says we're kind of experiencing the same thing now. Yeah, we're infinitely reproducible. I mean, my students, for example, don't realize how weird it is to be able to Google yourself and suddenly see images come up of yourself that are global. There's like fragments of me everywhere, right, that have lives of their own in certain ways. And there's nothing to be done about that. And it's only going to increase. My fragmentation, my that and it's only going to increase my fragmentation

my reproduction it's only going to increase and i mean just think though what a strange development of mankind this didn't happen in the roman empire like you knew like 10 people right you know you didn't have this happen, right? Wasn't Caesar on a coin? Every so often, Caesar would go through the street and you'd go, hey, it's the guy on the coin. It's the guy on the coin. I think he's our leader. That's what I hear.

I asked Elaine if she had a favorite doppelganger story, and she picked one that I never would have expected. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Of course, in that story, Dorian Gray doesn't age, but his portrait does. And he feels free to do whatever he wants, to be completely amoral, because the portrait is experiencing all that guilt and shame. It doesn't just get older, it gets uglier, and he remains beautiful. But it plays with all the notions and all the fantasies that we can be living two lives at once,

right? And that's, I think, at the heart of what a doppelganger fantasy is, is that you can be living evil Eric and super good Eric at the same time, and you don't have to combine them into a unified person. Although at the end of the story, Dorian Gray stabs the picture in a fit of rage and breaks the spell. I guess one of the modern equivalents of it is when people sort of stop doing Facebook as this kind of weird social experiment

and they go on talk shows. Oh, I went on Facebook. The idea that we kill our electronic self, right, in order to live a more authentic life. I mean, part of the reason I love these stories is actually the moment when I'm done with them, the moment that I kind of unplug from the fantasy, turn off the TV, log out of social media, and then have this sort of stark moment of being reacquainted with the one version of me that

exists in the real world and all the choices I made to be that person. That's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Alyssa Wilkinson, Ryan Britt, and Elaine Tobin. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't.

Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and this is Tom Fontana. In the 1980s, he was a writer and a producer on a hospital drama called Saint Elsewhere. You know, the show was always on the brink of being canceled. Our first season, there were 100 TV shows on the air. There were only three networks.

And we were 99th in the ratings. But the show was critically acclaimed, and the top brass at NBC liked it. So they managed to eke out six seasons. Rather than do what a lot of people do, which is, oh my God, we're going to get canceled. Let's make it more palatable for the audience. We went out of our way to make it as unpalatable as we possibly could. And Tom was particularly fond of crossovers. I was a big, when I was young, I was a big Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, I was young. I was a big Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction fan. And I determined that the only one of the characters that had been on all three series was Irene Ryan, who played Granny.

I've come to take care of Betty Jo Jones. We've got a baby specialist coming from Beverly Hills. That is me. You're a Beverly Hills doctor? I'd appreciate it if you kept the Beverly Hills part to yourself. So a character from the Bob Newhart show would pop up as a patient at St. Allegius, the hospital in St. Elsewhere. Or he staged a crossover with Cheers, which is a sitcom, but they filmed their episode like a drama.

So when Carla talks trash with the doctors from St. Allegius, there's no laugh track, and it's totally weird. Hey, hey, everybody! These two butchers work at St. Elsewhere! Welcome to Cheers, Drs. Jekyll and Hyde. Who recommended this? I overheard Erlich talking about it. You'd figure. The writers also used to keep a list of every crazy scenario that they would love to do for the finale. So when the show was finally canceled, Tom Fontana grabbed that list off the wall and brought it into a meeting with executive producer Bruce Paltrow. And this was his first idea. Two of the doctors are having a deep conversation in their office, which they often do.

Suddenly. There was a flash, a mushroom cloud. And the two of them went, oh my God. And then the show ended. Very 1980s. Bruce Paltrow was not buying it. So here's Tom's next pitch. Two of the doctors are having a deep conversation in their office, as they often do. And one of them says, I have a secret that's been weighing on me, and I have to confess it right now. I was the second gunman in Dallas the day that Kennedy died. And he then opens the drawer, pulls out a gun, and he goes,

now that I've told you, I have to kill you. Bruce Paltrow was not amused. So Tom was like, okay, how about this? Two doctors are having a deep conversation in their office, as they often do. It's snowing outside. We pan back to reveal that the entire hospital is made of plaster, and it's inside a snow globe,

which is being held by Tommy, the mute autistic son of Dr. Westfall. It's one of the main characters. But we learn that in the real world, Westfall's not a doctor. He's a construction worker. And another doctor from St. Elsewhere is actually his father, who stays home taking care of Tommy. Hi, Pop. How are you doing? Good.

How was your day up on the building? Well, we finally topped off the 22nd story. How's he been? Did he give you any trouble? He's been sitting there ever since you left this morning, just like he does every day. World of his own. Careful with that, son. So this means that the entire series of St. Elsewhere

has just been a fantasy in the mind of this mysterious boy with a snow globe. And Bruce said, well, it's not the worst one. Go ahead and write it. I don't understand this autism thing, Pop. Here's my son. I talk to him. I don't even know if he can hear me.

He sits there all day long in his own world, staring at that toy. The response in the mail was about 50-50. Half of our audience hated, hated, like wanted to come to the MTM lot and burn us to the ground. And the other half thought it was a fitting part of the show. Either way, it was all supposed to end right there. Trick ending, nothing more. But Tom Fontana couldn't stop with the crossovers. He went on to produce Homicide Life on the Street, and he brought over two doctors from

St. Elsewhere, even after that show had been off the air for like 12 years. He even staged a crossover with Chicago Hope, which was on CBS. And he purposely didn't show those scenes to the executives at NBC. So the next Monday after the show aired, Warren Littlefield, who was head of NBC at the time, called me up and goes, you are a bad, bad boy. And he found a partner in crime, the actor Richard Belzer, who played Detective John Munch on Homicide. He was like, well, let's see. I could be on all the Law & Order shows, before he went over to Law & Order. And bit by bit, he just, he would get, they would say, you know, we want you to be in this,

and he'd go, well, I have to play Munch. So, Munch talks to the lone gunman on the X-Files. Detective Munch, Baltimore Homicide. Did they find her? And a good evening to you. He orders a drink at a bar on the wire. Rodney, you can't press a regular for a whole tab. It just isn't done. And he teaches a class in arrested development.

We supply the glitter, glue, the crepe paper, and the ready-made template pages for you to decorate and fill out with my favorite birthday, foreign bank statements, and of course, family secrets. This did not go unnoticed. Keith Gow is a playwright in Melbourne, Australia, and he and his friends were talking about this at a pub one night. And they started wondering, does this mean that Arrested Development and The Wire exist in the same universe? And if you can trace all these shows back to St. Elsewhere,

does that mean that all of these shows were dreamed up by Tommy Westfall, the autistic kid with a snow globe? And we started just sort of collating a list of shows. And the further we got into it, the more connections we seemed to find. So they made a grid of the Tommy Westphal universe, which spanned hundreds of shows and put it online. And people wrote in from around the world pointing out that Tom Fontana was not the only person fond of crossovers. A lot of TV writers love The X-Files. And as kind of an homage to that show, they like to incorporate the names of fake brands or companies that appeared on the X-Files.

And I think the big one that broke it open was the Morley cigarettes that the smoking man on X-Files smoked suddenly started popping up in other shows. So Spike on Buffy smoked Morley cigarettes as an homage to the X-Files. The Tommy Westfall theory didn't really go viral until 2002. The late comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie wrote a post complaining that his boss at DC was putting way too much pressure on him to link his characters to other comic books.

Which is funny because it's something that DC and Marvel are doing way, way, way more now. I mean, the hot buzzword in Hollywood is having a shared universe. But back in 2002, McDuffie was using Tommy Westfall as an example to prove that a shared universe was ridiculous. And it's fascinating the objections that I hear about it sometimes. I don't understand why people take it so seriously. I mean, you can object all you like, but it's just a bit of fun finding the connections. Like, I don't literally think it makes sense that the X-Files and Homicide exist in the same universe. No, but they could exist in a multiverse. And if you think this thing has gotten weird, it gets even weirder here.

The Tommy Westfall theory actually mirrors real scientific theories by physicists who think that our universe may be one of many. Now, scientists don't know if these parallel universes have nearly identical versions of us. I mean, maybe the laws of physics are so crazy over there that if we crossed over to another universe, we'd just burst into flames. But the latest mathematical models definitely indicate that parallel universes are probably real. And some scientists think that tiny particles might be able to break through the membranes that separate these universes. And the Tommy Westfall multiverse works in the same way, except those traveling particles are Detective John Munch or morally cigarettes. Oh, I was stunned. Tom Fontana was also proud of the fact that Tommy is at the center of this phenomenon. I think it sort of adds a whole other layer to the idea of what an autistic person can

or cannot do in a very bizarre kind of way. You know what I mean? Because it says people have imaginations regardless of what their conditions are. You know, the human mind is an extraordinary thing. And he thinks having these porous borders is good for creativity. He saw it firsthand when Homicide and Law and Order swapped cast and crew. What it ultimately does in my mind is enhances the storytelling because somehow it frees you to go to a place where you wouldn't normally have gone within the restrictions of your own genre or your own TV series. So like, say, Sleepy Hollow, which is a combination of all sorts of different things, which I don't think you could have had 20 years ago, because 20 years ago you either had your cop show or you had your family drama.

And now you can have something like Sleepy Hollow, which is a time travel procedural fantasy. And Sleepy Hollow staged a crossover with Bones, which is a very down-to-earth FBI show. I actually still have the snow globe upstairs. Really? Yeah. So at this point, Tom went up to the second floor of his office, and he came back with the snow globe, the one that Tommy held in that final scene.

It was so much bigger than I imagined, like the details and the little plaster hospital inside the glass were kind of amazing. That's an amazing memento. Yeah. Wow. That's so cool. And as I kept staring into the snow globe, I started thinking. So Tommy dreams up St. Elsewhere. Two doctors from St. Elsewhere appear at Homicide.

Munch crosses over from Homicide to the X-Files. The Laureate rental car company from the X-Files shows up on Veronica Mars. Veronica Mars has a boyfriend who works on This American Life, where she meets Ira Glass, who plays himself. Hi. Hi. You must be the girlfriend who we have heard so much about and never seen. I am. I was on This American Life years ago.

This guy named Eric Molenski told her about this strangely and unexpectedly fierce argument that he had gotten into. That means that half the shows and podcasts out there are actually all part of Tommy Westphal's imagination. Including me. Hey, Pop. How you doing? Good. How was your day up on the building? Well, we finally topped off the 452nd story. How's he been? Given you any trouble?

Tommy? He's been sitting there since you left this morning. Just like he does every day, staring at that snow globe. You know it changes what's inside. Yesterday it was a hospital. Today there's a skeleton key in the sky. It says imaginary worlds or something. I don't understand this autism thing, Pop.

He's my son. I talk to him. I don't even know if he can hear me. He sits there all day in his own world, staring at that toy. You got a text. Oh, it's that detective again, Munch. That's the third time this week. He keeps popping up, doesn't he?

That's it this week. Special thanks to Tom Fontana, Keith Gow, Rob Pruitt, and Bill Lobley. Ooh, you got a text. Oh, it's that detective again, Munch. F*** him. Maybe you should block his calls. What's that mean? I don't know. I think you take a building block and you throw it at the phone or something.

You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at E. Malinsky. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.