THE CONDEMNED OF EXTOXIA
Max once said to me: `Repetition is what counts. The more often you hear the same thing, the more plausible it becomes.’ I came to realise how true that was the other night when I caught myself staring distractedly at a live broadcast of Killer Ball. I wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening on the screen, but that’s no excuse. The truth of the matter is that I wasn’t really shocked anymore. It just seemed normal, part of my everyday existence. No matter how barbarous and bloodthirsty the images might be, over time you get used to seeing them. They become part of the `new normal’ and you adjust your life accordingly. This `normalisation’ process has become increasingly clear to me over the past month ever since I started watching a banned TV series entitled The Condemned of Extoxia.
As always, it was Max who put me on to it. He happened to mention it to me one day when he called by for a chat and a smoke at Infinity Gateway. I take particular note of what Max says to me when he lowers his voice as if he’s being monitored by the authorities. There’s something strangely conspiratorial about it especially since these conversations are inevitably shrouded in the grey hue and smoky aroma of illicit Cuban cigars. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Max himself had produced the TV series for his own amusement…
The Condemned of Extoxia was broadcast by the Contrario Multimedia Channel MMC3. The Anticlocks had proscribed MMC3 for alleged subversive activities soon after they seized power. They weren’t keen on publicising deviations from the norm. Deviations tend to give people ideas.
The TV series focuses on the arrest and imprisonment of a man called Sonderlyne and his doomed efforts to escape from a maximum security jail on the distant planet of Extoxia. Throughout the series Sonderlyne remains a mystery. Nobody is sure where he is really from and he appears not to have any family ties. His lone wolf status marks him out as a threat to the established ordered, someone who needs to be kept in check or eliminated.
The inevitable confrontation that occurs between Sonderlyne and the prison authorities constitutes the driving force of the TV series. The action scenes, centred on numerous abortive escape attempts, kept me on the edge of my seat most of the time. I particularly liked the claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison setting which reflected my own predicament in Anticlockwise.
But it wasn’t the struggle between an unarmed prisoner and the overwhelming forces of authority that captured my imagination. It was something else, something more disturbing. My attention was drawn to the process of dehumanisation that Sonderlyne undergoes as the story progresses.
At the beginning, even though we don’t know too much about him, Sonderlyne is clearly part of a human species that we recognise. Gradually, however, as the prison conditions deteriorate, he is forced to adapt to stay alive. `Either I change or I will be crushed,’ he notes poignantly in an early episode. The more barbarously he is treated, the less human he becomes, the less human he is able to remain. At the end of this diabolical process Sonderlyne has been turned into someone else. Whoever he might have been at the outset has been eradicated. The creature that is left at the end of the series embodies the corruption of his persecutors in its own soul. The depravity of the situation has paradoxically transformed Sonderlyne into a mirror-image of the very people he opposes.
That’s the problem of living in an autocratic society. Slowly, however much you resist and try to cling to the values you had in the past, the oppressiveness and brutality of the situation that you now find yourself in seeps into your pores like poison and you’re transformed into someone different. It’s easy to be a saint in Paradise. Hell is quite another proposition. And Sonderlyne was in Hell.
The Condemned of Extoxia helped me re-establish in my own mind who I was before the Anticlocks took over. It was a useful lesson that I won’t forget. I made a firm resolution to ensure that at all times I listened carefully to what Max had to say to me.
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