1993-05-20 "Hello, I Must Be Going"

Our Cyberpunk Future According to ‘Wild Palms’ -- California is where East meets West. Where West is East. Where the future begins. Where realities are created, where for almost a hundred years Hollywood has been the magic dream machine, the crown of creation, the unmoved mover, the void at the center of the Great Media Wheel: The New Jerusalem arising amidst the wild palms and shimmering mirages of the desert, the New Cathedral of our twenty-first century self-made reality.

—Anton Kreutzer, “New Cathedrals” speech, 1994, as imagined by Norman Spinrad in The Wild Palms Reader

Wild Palms the television series is ultimately less of a comment on the moral void at the center of the entertainment industry and more of a televisual comment on television-as-medium itself. The plot is more linear than the comic, more driven by Wyckoff’s investigation into the conspiracies that surround him and his long-buried family secrets. Wyckoff is eventually revealed to be Kreutzer’s biological son, as is Wyckoff’s own putative son Coti (Ben Savage). Coti’s role as television star and Kreutzer’s chosen scion comes into play with Kreutzer’s messianic plans to live forever and control the American people through the mind-altering chemical mimezine and holographic virtual reality television programs. The glimpses we catch of Coti and the other actors in “Church Windows” reveal a program with broad punch lines, silly plotlines, and wooden acting: a perfect Platonic evocation of television’s banality. But unlike the traditional TV sitcom, the figures appear in the mimezine-dosed TV viewers’ own living room, the drug allowing them a synesthetic full-sensory experience. This recalls Philip K. Dick’s 1965 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where dirt-poor off-world colonists are kept sedated using hallucinogens that allow them to project into diorama-like “Perky Pat layouts” that mimic a heteronormative 1950s-style suburban home: an ur-sitcom of sorts. The miniseries’s Macguffin is the “Go chip,” which will allow Kreutzer to use Mimecom’s virtual reality technology to live forever. The fact that this wondrous biotechnology is being used to provide a single man with holographic immortality while simultaneously issued as cheap, hollow entertainment for the masses is yet another classic Dickian trope.
https://wearethemutants.com/2019/01/24/california-dreams-our-cyberpunk-future-according-to-wild-palms/
https://grantland.com/features/rediscovering-oliver-stone-wild-palms/
https://www.timboucher.ca/2023/02/wild-palms-synthetic-realities/