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Snuck in just as 2016 was closing its tumultuous loop, Netflix’s The OA has been the year’s biggest Rorschach test. A drama that blends science-fiction, fantasy, crime drama, neo-spiritualism, radical sincerity, apocalypse imagery, and one more Riz Ahmed appearance to savor, The OA has elicited reactions as widespread and varied as the show’s themes. For many people, it was a premise that was too silly to go on watching with a straight face; for others it was a frustrating series with moments of brilliance; for a few, and I’ll count myself among their number, it was something uncommon and beautiful in a TV landscape littered with sloggy sameness.
Writer/director Zal Batmanglij and writer/star Brit Marling begin their tale with Prairie Johnson (Marling), a young woman who’d been missing for seven years, only to turn up on a YouTube video of a woman jumping off a bridge; when her parents (Alice Krige and Scott Wilson) come to retrieve her, they find that their formerly blind daughter can now see. This of course is just the beginning. Prairie won’t talk about her ordeal; she scours the internet for an elusive “Homer” (Emory Cohen); she goes wandering and eventually gathers to her a quintet of lost souls (four high school boys and one teacher) to whom she begins to tell her story. The rest of The OA is told on those two parallel tracks: Prairie, who calls herself “The OA” now, and her friends/followers (Marling and Batmanglij do love their cult imagery) in the present; Prairie’s story, which immediately takes on the parameters of a tall tale, in the past. She was born in the Soviet Union in 1987, she says, where she survived a near-death experience as a schoolgirl. This story winds past her father’s death, her adoption by the Johnsons, her estrangement as she sought her birth father, and her eventual abduction by a scientist (Jason Isaacs) whose research into near-death experiences is more sinister and frightening than anyone could have imagined.
All that is merely the setup to the story. It is by no means the whole of it. The OA follows this abduction down a seven-year rabbit hole and acts essentially as a thriller, while in the present-day, The OA’s charismatic hold on her followers becomes … something different. More humane. More transformative.
Much of the reaction to The OA will make more sense if we just put cards on the table with regard to what that acronym means. “The OA” means “the original angel.” (This doesn’t spoil anything; the reveal of those words happens so gradually that you never quite notice when it was officially verbalized.) Your reaction to this will probably determine whether or not you’d be into the show. As will the fact that the season-long plot of The OA hinges on the weaponization of a piece of contemporary dance choreography. This is the secret that Isaacs’ near-death research leads to, what Prairie and her fellow captives have to discover to earn their liberation, and it’s what The Original Angel and her (mostly) high-school confederates have to achieve in order to …
That ellipsis is where most TV shows of this type would leave off. Many cited the pseudo-spiritual namby-pamby-ness of the Lost finale as a reason to drop out of The OA before it followed the same path. But while Lost (a good show with moments of greatness whose finale gets too much crap) was content to let that ellipsis remain and for audiences to interpret the spiritualism as they saw fit, The OA makes it specific. Prairie is an angel. She and her fellow angels were given choreographed movements during near-death experiences, movements that border on the ecstatic, such that, when combined, they could repel disaster.
In his recap of the fifth episode, Vulture’s Andrew Lapin writes:
There will be the temptation to laugh at the show’s open embrace of interpretive dance as a crucial plot element, especially as a tool that will open interdimensional gates. Interpretive dance is, after all, a favorite punching bag for those who like to exploit the spacey-artist stereotype, of which Brit Marling fits a bit too snugly. But there’s an aesthetic bravery to the way The OA employs outsized body movement as something truly transformative…
This strikes me as exactly right. There is an audacity to The OA‘s embrace of this turn of plot, and that audacity has been borne out by the polarization of the reactions to the series. Uproxx’s Alan Sepinwall was so galled by the way the series turned out — the dancing in particular — that he dedicated an entire post to simply re-posting gifs of the dance movements, over and over again, like a pet owner rubbing their dog’s nose in feces in order to train it not to make such a mess again.
It’s interesting, though not surprising, that The OA has elicited these reactions. Angels and modern dance are not the stuff of respectability; certainly not within the realms of sci-fi or fantasy or, actually, serialized television. We have a much easier time with devils made flesh and demons walking among us. Bloodletting rituals? Sure. Interpretive dance? Get right the hell out of here. It makes sense. It’s easier when we’re supposed to be horrified by something that unusual. But The OA is such a powerful and moving piece of entertainment not despite its interpretive-dance climax but because of it.
Acts of heroism on film always require some kind of sacrifice of self. Usually, this takes the form of one character dying so that others can live. The OA knows this and embraces it, but it also takes it a step further. There is something radical about using the human body for beauty as a response to violence or terror. There is something more radical still about using the feminized milieu of modern dance as a battle tactic. I don’t think it’s an accident that four of The OA’s acolytes in the present-day story are high-school boys – specifically boys. I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the boys, Buck, is transgender. There are subtleties at play here that I would hope aren’t lost amid the fact of The OA‘s choice of battle tactics.
Something that’s always moved me about So You Think You Can Dance (I was never making it out of this review without mentioning So You Think You Can Dance) is the way that these people with such preternatural control over their perfect bodies choose to use those bodies to tell a story. Of all the things they could do with that gift … they tell stories. The very first that we see of high-school bully Steve (Patrick Gibson), his body is on display, naked, having just had sex with a girl. She even comments on it. His body is how he’s introduced to the story. By the end, seeing how Steve’s chosen to use his body to channel these movements … it’s incredibly moving and deliberately so.
Netflix saw a huge summer success with Stranger Things, a series that took on a supernatural/sci-fi premise through the lens of ’80s nostalgia and a quintet of kids whose quest, while harrowing, still felt safely ensconced in the webs of the books and movies we all loved as kids. The OA is working with no such net, but instead telling a highly sincere and emotional story that is ultimately about bridging the vast gaps between us. It’s not for everyone, it’s hokey as hell if you press on it too hard, but that final 15 minutes of the season was more affecting than any TV drama all year.
