BSG Vidlet: Televangelism

[beccatoria]

Here is my tenth and final response to thearchive2's challenges! The project is over! Soon I will upload a playlist on my imeem page and direct links to all the vidlets have been added to my dirt simple website.

Title: Televangelism
Video: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Audio: One Love - The Flobots
Summary: God is in the TV the wireless your brain.
Editor's Notes: My thanks to both cyborganize and heyiya for all their help on this one. It was kind of a war with the footage, but I'm pretty happy with the end result. This is in response to thearchive2's tenth challenge: broadcast. And yes, the audio distortions are deliberate!

Direct download available here. 21 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs!

Password: vidses

Watch on Vimeo

Cross-posted to thearchive2, galactica_vids and vidding.

Other vids available here.

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm so pleased you like it! Don't worry about commenting regularly - I'm bad at that myself and it means I know when people do comment they do it because they want to not because they feel obligated. :)

I'm glad that you picked up not only on the broadcastey effects but also the tvs and radios, etc. in the vid. I really wanted it to be about the way religion is broadcast through the fleet - the way religion and technology intertwine - hence the title.

I have to confess I'd never thought of it as the contrast between internal and external, I think you got something a litlte different to what I was intending. But then again maybe not.

As I said I was going for broadcasting and technology and religion, so I knew I wanted not only literal technological broadcasts (like Baltar's pirate broadcasts) but also the visions - God broadcasting directly into your brain - and the hybrid - perhaps the ultimate merging of technology and the Word of God. (Ha! The hybrid is the ultimate televangelist!)

So, like, the proliferation of religious broadcasts in the Fleet is only a parallel to the proliferation and expansion of these crazy mystical visions; whether you turn on the radio, or sit next to the hybrid, or get high on chamalla, or fly out in your viper and see your dead best friend magically returned from the dead - the signal is transmitting. So ultimately it becomes very personal for each character.

So it's fascinating that you focus on that personal relationship with the, err, "divine broadcast" which I hadn't really focused on so much as, "OMG the divine broadcast is just another kind of broadcasting!"

...does that makes sense? *hopes*

[chaila.livejournal.com]

I totally got the technology/religion theme but ooohh I hadn't necessarily made the visions = broadcasting to your brain connection though I love it. This is rather fascinating because I think you were intending to focus more on the means of communication, technology and the divine broadcast, which is totally awesome and kind of mind-blowing, while my brain must search for Personal Meaning. Because I think the further connections I was sort of making was the way people take the televangelism, the broadcast, the visions, and sort of, live it, personally. The signal in say, Baltar's pirate broadcast leading to Laura making a connection with Emily (and the possible recognition that her beliefs are perhaps not in competition with Baltar's preaching, which OMG I'm still flailing over the "competition" line/clips), or the broadcast!visions leading Laura not to let Baltar die. So the idea I was sort of taking away from it was that the broadcasts, the signals, the visions, don't mean anything until somebody sort of adopts them, believes them, acts them out. Receives them, as it were, in a more active, personal way. So then is the meaning in the external broadcast or in the actions of the person who received it and digested it internally, believed it, put their own spin on it and acted according to it? Which I don't think is actually adverse to what you were saying, but just a bit of a different focus? Something like that anyway. :)

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you've got that exactly right. Though the fact that you picked up on something else is really awesome. I would also note that I was trying to focus on the broadcast and technological ideas because that was the prompt not because I find your ideas less interesting. Which I totally don't, and in fact I think that Faith is my least-favourite S4 BSG episode (even though it has my favourite S4 scene: the Hybrid's prophecy to Kara) because the Laura and Emily storyline was just so...stupidly lacking in any real exploration of Faith and whether Emily was finding hidden messages in Baltar's static the way Leoben finds messages in the Hybrid's static, or whether she was just a dying woman falling for a common dream among the terminally ill. It was a totally weird mishmash of messages that left me utterly confused as to what I was supposed to think Laura was saying when she told Adama Baltar might be on to something.

So like...I'm very, awesomely interested in the idea that personal interpretation of your faith really changes up what that faith is and what it means. Which ties in to the fact that human oracles seem to be in touch with the same mystic source as the hybrid and make prophecies about cylons and stuff, and isn't that the most extreme example of source-interpretations leading to opposite sides?

I suppose if I wanted to tie these two threads together in the context of the vid, I'd suggest decaying purity of broadcast as it gets older, more warped, more repeated. God transmits into your brain, or God has to reach you through his insane metatron the Hybrid, or God has to reach you through someone fumbling through the dark in a desperate attempt to feed his own ego, and Gaius, in turn, is distributing illegal pirate broadcasts one low-quality, static-filled bandwidth to dying, impressionable women. Who in turn have dreams directly from God.

The word of God might be infallible but just because the TV's telling you the truth doesn't mean you're going to hear it right?

And now I've talked myself in circles and really have no idea what I'm saying aside from: I love it when people comment in my journal and make me do that so yay you!

Finally: I'm so glad that you liked the "competition" line! I was so stuck on that one until it snapped into place. I'm still not entirely sure what it means myself, but yes, I also get a sense of rich, complex, confusion about the nature of the competition between Laura and Gaius and which one of them has access to the source of the broadcast and what it means if it's both.

[chaila.livejournal.com]

left me utterly confused as to what I was supposed to think Laura was saying when she told Adama Baltar might be on to something

I KNOW! I still have no idea. I choose to view it as Laura recognizing exactly what you say about the "competition" line, not buying into Baltar's spiel, just recognizing that maybe not everything is going to turn out exactly like she planned, maybe she doesn't know all the answers. Just accepting of her own uncertainty, of the rich layers and the confusion. Maybe she doesn't have a direct line to the gods, maybe there are conflicting signals, and maybe that's okay?

The word of God might be infallible but just because the TV's telling you the truth doesn't mean you're going to hear it right?

EXACTLY! I shall fall back on a West Wing quote here, as I am apt to do. Someone asks one of the characters if he believes the Bible to be literally true, and he says something along the lines of, "Yes, but I don't think either one of us is smart enough to understand it." And that line PWNS ME. I sort of think that's the idea. No matter where you're receiving the signal from, you're interpreting it. Especially when god speaks through crazy hybrids and weird visions. Not so straightforward is god, especially when the signals being relayed and retranslated through all these channels. And yet everyone thinks they have a Direct Line to the Truth. And just, no. You have a direct line to what you believe to be the truth. And that? Is not the same thing. And now I'm talking in circles. :)