The actual title, Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, was kinda long for a blog post title and “bee TV” has a nice ring to it.
So what is the probability I live in a world wherein a movie stuffed with reusable memes would already be famous as a “first movie streamed on the internet” and yet had stayed off my radar? Moreover: the web version, WaxWeb, is a proto-hypertoon (“hypertoon” being one of my pet concepts).
Me: very low, I’d’ve at least heard of it.
So imagine my surprise. A combination of Cascadian Entomology and the QuadCraft Project led me to it, circuitously.
Quoting Sean Benjamin in ScreenSlate:
Wax continued to flay the boundaries of its representation when an acquaintance of Blair’s at the Amiga computer store in the East Village "put Wax in a VHS machine connected to a Silicon Graphics machine connected to a T1 line connected to the mbone” at the Sun Microsystems headquarters, where it officially became the first movie streamed on the internet, seen at the time only by a few dozen nerds at literally two frames per second.
Indeed, in terms of style: it plods along at a steady pace, our main guy, Jacob, narrating in a rather deadpan voice, in contrast to the wild content.
Jacob tells us his story in the first person, such that we feel like we’re watching his memories but from a more omniscient point of view (a typical storybook angle). Sometimes we see what he sees as the bee TV, an icosahedron.
We learn about those special Mesopotamian bees, installed by his grandfather in England in the early 1900s. His grandad, a beekeeper, had the foresight to realize (a) a plague was coming among the bees and (b) a naturally immune strain might save his bacon (so to speak).
And he was right. The imported Mesopotamian bee colony thrived and multiplied. Also, the man who brought him the bees, from Basra (by our time in Iraq), remains in the storyline, which has multiple threads. In another subplot, a female character is working on her souls-of-the-dead detector, an electronic device she never really completes, but which gives fragmented results.
Our protagonist, Jacob, lives in the 1980s, as a worker bee in the military industrial complex in Almogordo, New Mexico.
He codes weapons simulators, the target acquisition part, where an X-looking icon will be juxtaposed on what to hit, say a tank. Actual (not simulated) weapons are being tested nearby, using our guy’s software (part of a vast effort no doubt i.e. our guy is one more maker). The X will become “the mark of Cain” (taking us back to Genesis) where Cain speaks the language of Babel (presumably pre its turning nonsensical).
The Mesopotamian bees were passed down to Jacob, where he keeps them more for entertainment (he supposes) than for their commercial value as honey makers. His income is from the military-industrial job after all, working among the flight simulators. He and his significant other are both worker bees, but in different areas.
The bees start communicating with our hero through some telepathic process, which again, is where the icosahedron comes in, as the “bee TV” in his mind’s eye.
The bee TV helps him regress to his grandfather’s house, an Eden, and then guides him on a mission of vengeance as that’s what the dead are into: restoring balance, exacting karma.
Our guy becomes their tool (he gets pulled off his regular job by bee energy, one might say).
So yeah, in the early 1900s i.e. hearkening back to Edison’s day, communicating with the dead was indeed posited by many as a possible use for electricity. Edison himself speculated in this regard, according to Paul Laffoley, that electronics could connect us to some world of whispers.
That belief system may seem retro and quaint today, but in a way it’s what’s happened: TV recordings now bring back the ghosts of our ancestors in ways pre-CRT civilizations never enjoyed.
From a Film Studies angle, this VHS-recorded movie forms a bridge to our digital media, starting from celluloid film technology, where the special effects evolved from theater’s, and then went through the CRT chapter of mostly analog electronics.
The movie showcases lots of light-bending TV tricks, taking those who lived through these times on a trip down memory lane. The space shuttle. President Reagan on TV.
And if you didn’t live through it? Their ghosts live on today in our shared videogrammatron. As will ours. On bee television.
