‘Wild Palms’: Mind-Melting Techno-Babble

“Wild Palms” is bound to attract a cult following. How large depends on the number of acidheads ABC can persuade to watch it.

Heaven help us from zealous, revved-to-the-max, futurist wanna-bes who seek to refract their high-tech Orwellian crystal-ball gazing through television. Film director Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner are executive producers of this punishing six hours of gibberish spread across four nights. It begins Sunday at 9 p.m. and continues Monday at 9 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 p.m., on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.

“Wild Palms” parallels a favorite Stone theme: Nearly all of its gnarled characters are conspiratorial and guilty of something. But although Stone’s recognizable name looms above the title as a bug light to lure the unsuspecting (as in “Oliver Stone presents”), it’s Wagner who conceived and wrote this cosmically pretentious, self-important, imitative goulash about technology incestuously screwing over the very humanity that created it.

Based on Wagner’s own comic strip in Details magazine, “Wild Palms” is directed variously by Peter Hewitt, Keith Gordon, Kathryn Bigelow and Phil Joanou and spews cultural and musical references galore, from the Beach Boys to Marvin Gaye.

The year is 2007, the setting Los Angeles, where a war between two mysterious sects, the Fathers and the Friends, is decimating the locals. People are savagely clobbered in public, with only earnest young patent attorney Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi) seeming to notice or care.

Square-palooka Harry naively takes an executive job with the Channel 3 television network owned by white-haired Sen. Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), a ruthless, homicidal, raving-mad politician who has merged his own leadership ambitions with technology. Kreutzer is planning to introduce virtual reality--the transmission of computer-generated 3-D holographic images--into America’s homes. His dream: For starters, sitcoms and other programs will now make house calls. Putting that in a horrifying 1990s context, instead of watching Bob Saget on the screen, you could punch a button and have him drop by holographically. Even worse, it could be Ross Perot.

Just how this “age of virtual telepresence” fits Kreutzer’s presidential scenario is a little dicey. Suffice to say that he can’t achieve his personal vision of technological nirvana--a sort of holographic eternal life for himself--without something called the “go” chip. And he’ll stop at nothing--do you hear, nothing --to get it.

The ensuing carnage finds people getting maimed or murdered in exotic ways, from having eyes gouged out to having an arm shoved down a throat, to say nothing of being victimized by such conventional means of extermination as drowning, throttling, butchering and shooting.

Unknown to Harry, meanwhile, his seemingly innocent mother-in-law, Josie Ito (Angie Dickinson), is really Kreutzer’s conniving sister, an evil witch who travels with an entourage of stormtroopers and feels nothing for her daughter, Grace (Dana Delany). Grace suspects that Coty (Ben Savage), the little snot that she and Harry have raised as their son, may not be their son. Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall), a flirtatious old flame of Harry’s, may be in cahoots with Kreutzer.

Meanwhile, just what the heck is going on with warped, tormented painter Tully Woiwode (Nick Mancuso), crazed “go” chip creator Chickie Levitt (Brad Dourif) and off-tune saloon crooner Chap Starfall (Robert Morse)? Why is there no water in Harry’s swimming pool? And finally, what is this mind-altering drug mimezine that victimizes Harry’s pal, Tommy (Ernie Hudson), and this Church of Synthiotics religion preached by the ranting senator? “We are the cardinals of this cathedral,” declares Kreutzer. Yes, sure.

If this bizarre, symbol-slogged piffle seems familiar to devotees of “Twin Peaks”--ABC’s 1990-91 cult weirdness from David Lynch and Mark Frost--they should beware.

There are surface similarities. But rather than a “Twin Peaks” homage, “Wild Palms” reads rip-off: A “Wild Palms Reader” is being sold to coincide with the arrival of “Wild Palms,” just as publication of Laura Palmer’s diary accompanied “Twin Peaks.” Palm trees rustle in the breeze here as did the evergreens in “Twin Peaks.” The Peaksian somberness of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s synthesizer score is also no coincidence, wafting ominously across the languid opening of “Wild Palms,” as Harry awakens at night, walks outside to find a rhino in his waterless pool and then hears a child’s voice crying: “Daddy, Daddy, help me!”

When it comes to obscure, dysfunctional storytelling on a massive scale, however, it’s Lynch’s epically ostentatious sci-fi flop “Dune” that “Wild Palms” brings to mind rather than “Twin Peaks.” Like “Dune,” “Wild Palms” is largely hokey and incomprehensible.

Although Frost and Lynch employed a myriad of confusing artistic and literary feints to tease and have fun with “Twin Peaks” viewers, even at its most obtuse that series dribbled out a seductive whodunit--tied to Laura Palmer’s murder--that kept you hooked.

“Wild Palms” offers nothing comparable to compensate for its suspenseless, unfathomably fragmented, laboriously eked-out plot. Nothing beyond some diverting holograms and occasional darts of sharp humor aimed at television: Channel 3’s prime offering--starring Coty and famed actress Tabby Schwartzkopf (Bebe Neuwirth) as his mom--is “Church Windows,” a futuristic sitcom repeating the vacuous jokes of its predecessors. And when Kreutzer’s arch foe and Josie’s ex-husband, Eli Levitt (David Warner), is asked what he hopes to accomplish by blowing Channel 3 “all the way to hell,” he replies drolly: “Put a serious crimp in sweeps week.”

By this time, however, it’s apparent that even much of the cast has been mind-melted by “Wild Palms,” with Belushi, for example, sluggishly moving about in what appears to be a stuporous state of bafflement and the wooden Dickinson just not up to being Wagner’s neo Mommie Dearest. Her eye-gouging sequences with Mancuso are museum pieces of unintentional camp.

Some credit is due “Wild Palms” for at least daring to dream. In essence, though, it creates its own hologram, an eyeful of image with nothing to touch, feel or hold on to. Buy the reader, skip the show.