PREY: "HUNGRY FOR SURVIVAL" (1998) by Tobe Hooper, William Schmidt

So a few days ago I had the chance to view a VHS of the unaired, Tobe Hooper-directed pilot of the TV show Prey (1997-98), which would eventually be brought to series as a completely retooled and renovated show for a short-lived season.  While the vision of the series first conceived by show creator William Schmidt (TV writer and future executive producer on shows like Carnivàle and Charmed) and Hooper never came to pass, ascribable to nigh unassailable reasons connected to Hooper's airless style and Schmidt's occasionally high-toned creative decisions, reasons made even more succinct placed beside the show that was soon created from its picked-apart bones, it was an illuminating and poignant testament to the collision of popular templates and almost-imperceptible - naive and psychologically middling, but worldly searching; allegorically crisscrossed and incongruous, yet petrified and untouched - dramatic and exploratory structures that have come to characterize Hooper's work.  Prey seems to activate for Hooper an archetypal romanticism in an hour time that his feature-length pilot work for Nowhere Man and Taken do not in their vaunting of regular plot mechanics.  Prey offers the least realistic and most skeletal drama for Hooper to emphasize only what he deems worthy to emphasize, embodying his inclination for stories that may have no connection to reality yet reveal the world a la carte through a breadth found in dramatically bridging seemingly unconnected things and structuralist concepts.  For instance, Hooper's libertarianism is not his communism, yet presented beside each other, they create paranoid neoliberal tragedies.  This is somewhat applicable to Prey: "Hungry for Survival."

Firmly in the realm of a minor work, being a forty-and-some minute pilot meant to launch an ABC drama, with all its necessary overtures toward show-duration, will-they-won't-they romance and stop-loss soap opera narrative threadbare, this falls in a purer, more rarefied place than the butch actioneer masculinity sprinkled over warmed-over Spontaneous Combustion leftovers that is Nowhere Man (1995) and the impersonality of Taken (2000), Hooper's other series launching efforts.  The set-up, that is, the barely-congealed melodrama, allows Prey, for all its trappings, to present a beginning that is also an end, a suggestion of things to come that seems to performatively lay out the idealized solutions within its at-once romanticism and fatalism, sensibilities that are at once self-fulfilling and answer at once they question, for melodrama and tragedy's teleology has gone far from unstudied.  For instance, the protagonist of Prey's sometimes-disembodied passion is much more suited to Hooper's work, and the undisclosed but bleak fate of certain characters, subsumed in death-signifying genre tropes, is more than finalizing by the end of the episode, leading to no open threads with the enactment of some minor projection.  (Hooper's feature-length pilot to Dark Skies also more successfully figures itself on passionate main characters, although the specter of Kennedy's assassination in that leads to an opening of the road ahead for its protagonists rather than the constricting of an artificial, contrived genre-world, significant of the elongation of a contrived, controlling reality.)  Prey is modest, but it seems to be the least closely-monitored of Hooper's TV pilots, working off a creator and writer who also seemed to have been running off the fumes of a rare freedom to begin in science fiction invention and end in the most cozy convention, of the "starcross'd lovers."

Plot (penned by yours truly): Prey concerns a projected global collapse to humanity threatened or at least harbingered by the resurgence of a demonized other, an unevolved, "splintered" genetic strain of human that is discovered to coexist among the Homo sapien.  A junior geneticist (Sherilyn Fenn) in an academic setting, working amongst a team for a lead researcher who has gotten closer and closer to uncovering the existence of the mutant strain (Lindsay Crouse), falls in with a sensitive FBI agent (Adam Storke) after the mentor is murdered, but he turns out to be a member of this mutant species attempting to cover up the trail of this new discovery.

Unconvincing in more ways than one, this volleys valiantly between ripe set-pieces and unbelievable renderings of milieu, and even less realistically shaded quasi-satire of academic pettiness and global calamity as seen through less-than-visceral channels (such as the media and academia).  The FBI agent appears randomly, along with local law played by Frankie Faison (filling in the R. Lee Ermey role from I'm Dangerous Tonight with even worse gnomic banter), within academic halls and seat-of-bourgeois eateries in or near the college hamlet, looking out of place and derelict of his more serious duties.  A rival researcher steals the team's discovery and he names the species right on national TV without a peer-reviewed public release in sight.  A federally convicted mutant has a gaggle of fawning Mansonesque groupies.

A Beauty and the Beast fricassee of inter-species romance featuring a shrill, performative Sherilyn Fenn and Hooper's own, most artificial theatrics, with a mercifully brief and incidental stopover in inconsolable Silence of the Lambs knock-off territory, this is nevertheless about Fenn's grappling with the world around her and its seeming moral collapse, and never have outsized, stilted displays of emotion been so at one with a director's dialectical, anti-good-television conception of building a serial narrative made of ideas.  What better outlet for acute unreality and the melodrama of cultural tutelage than a series that is about a global sci-fi invasion but takes place almost entirely on a college campus (a la I'm Dangerous Tonight) and is once again in Hooper's filmography about a female protagonist who is never at one with the greater morality she represents - albeit that she holds inside her (wittingly or in sublimated state) - due to the oppression of societies and cultures?  She is berated, gently, by ideas and perspectives on all sides that never seem to add up but to bolster her own undivided principles.  Salama in Djinn asks, why must I suffer for progress?  Amy in The Funhouse, why is my kindness and cruelty so embattled within me?  Genie in Night Terrors,  my purity and my pleasure?  Sloan, here, asks only one pivotal question: Why kill, why divide, even as shadowy noir tropes come to both validate me and erase my love?   Third quarter in, a young Michael Stuhlbarg appears affecting a "Balkian-Bosnian-type accent"[1], playing a possible love-interest rival against the strapping mutant FBI agent but as a slender-spoken foreigner.  He advises Sloan in tentative terms befitting both the first proper introduction of a Muslim character and Hooper's willingness to work in mysterious ways, like with a cross-cultural love triangle between a hunk and a dweeb.  He simply asks her, against an illuminating fire (paraphrasing), "Do you believe in God?  Among my people suffering great adversity, one thing one can simply do is pray."  The episode ends in a full romantic modality between the two lovers, the scientist and the now-rogue mutant, and surely Hooper and Schmidt have more "Romeo and Juliet" in mind than the aforementioned "Beauty and the Beast," as the underlying genocidal and global warming concerns are meant to evoke a world at war with love, although the proto-Twilight bells alarm loudly... as they do in Hooper's Dance of the Dead.

I do want to someday track down a copy of this and make it available, as it has a lasting impact in its being the least competent of Hooper's television work.  Sherilyn Fenn rides around on a helmeted bike like the least badass star of a sci-fi action show.  It is certainly a statement.  A more conventional but hobbled version of the show soon came to fruition starring Debra Messing in a much more tomboyish, elan-filled version of the main role.  The most unfiltered and undutiful of Hooper's television work.