The OA is a term used in the screenwriting biz as an abbreviation for Original Author, and in the popular Netflix show, the OA stands for the Original Angel. In the beginning, there was the word connects the two definitions. The existence of an OA posits an absolute unlike Derrida’s if enough people believe it, it is real concept and it is the relationship of the original to the absolute that makes things real. When we dream, we are the OA and that is why our dreams can seem so real.
That is the Christian undertone of the story, but there is also an undertone from a more ancient European religion involving the world tree and the rainbow bridge to the underworld. Every time Hap’s prisoners died and came back, they traveled along this bridge and sometimes, when they came back, they landed on another branch of the tree.
Watching the OA was very strange for me because of all of the thematic overlaps with the story I wrote in 2016. You have “the Echo”, the scientist enslaving young people, and the one who discovers a method of travel to different timelines. Instead of a house, my story centers around a machine. It is almost as though ideas float on the wind sometimes.
The plot of the OA is structurally distinct from that of my novel and there are only a handful of thematic parallels, so there is clearly no direct cross-influence, but I distinctly remember thinking about how odd the overlap was and that the overlap signified some cultural movement which was about to emerge related to the enslavement of young people by mad scientists and the power of art to avert catastrophe and pain.
One can usually identify if one work influenced another by the number of overlapping details. In a case where I suspect that a person plagiarized the plot of my novel by using a ghostwriter to accelerate his adaptation, there are 30 plot elements that occur in the same order in both stories, and his story is only 40k words long, a novelette. When many of the plot elements are very unique, that level of structural overlap doesn’t happen by chance synchronicity.
This experience has led me to question why an original author seems more special than a copycat. Each expression of an idea can have the same amount of power to influence, yet the moment that an idea emerges from our collective blind spot does seem sacred because of its relationship to the absolute and because of the effort taken to delve into the darkness and lay hands on those slippery, ephemeral things for which we don’t yet have words. The person who wanders in the dark and sacrifices their energy to give birth to those ideas should benefit from what they produced, but in my experience, this rarely happens. Some copycat like Hap always comes along.
The OA said things that are hard to say yet which many of us already believe, thereby expanding our ability to communicate. When our language grows, we grow and that is why whenever a person uses unfamiliar words to say something that we already believe, their words are given significance and respect.
The story in the OA is significant to me because of all of the times in my life that I might’ve died. I sometimes wonder if my life forked at those instants and placed me in a different world. It is fun to imagine that I might carry information from one world to another through such a journey because books that were written in one world might not have been written in another. These are crazy thoughts, though – the sorts of thoughts behind works like the OA.
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I love how Minnesotans imply that someone is crazy by saying that they are “touched” – as in, touched by God. Are all original authors ‘touched’ in some way? Are copycats equally ‘touched’ – just in a different way? Missourians will say, “bless your heart,” if they think you are crazy. This suggests that to be touched by God is to be cursed to wander in the shadows of what we think we know —with only the blessing of blind faith to numb the pain. Despite their differences, Hap and the OA both share this journey through the shadows.
I started my writing journey because I was painfully detaching myself from a scientific career that seemed morally wrong. Like the dancers in the OA, I distracted myself from pain with art. I wanted to find out if fictional voices were cynically constructed, magically channeled, or produced through an organic process. It is clearly a mix, but the mystery hasn’t died for me yet. That is a blessing.
This was first posted on quora.com.
Kirsten Hacker 