On the Road (2012)–1920, 1922, 1947, 1951, 1957, 1969, 1970, 1971, 2013

The new 2012 film version of On the Road, based on the classic 1957 novel gets only 44% positive rating with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.  Fans like it even less, with just 40% approval.  And I know why and understand their reasons, but it’s not the movie.

I loved the movie, but I’m haunted by the Beats.

I think director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera, did an excellent job capturing Jack Kerouac’s novel.  But see, that’s problematic, since the book itself is hard to like, even though it’s considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century by many literary historians, and yes, hated by just as many.  However, On the Road is more than a novel, it’s a legend.  The characters are based on real people.  These people were so fascinating they became characters in many other novels by various Beat writers.  Countless biographies have been written about their beat lives, and over the years films and documentaries have been made trying to capture this very tiny subculture.  We’re not reviewing a movie, we’re reviewing mythology.

The encounter of two men, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac generated a whole literary movement, the Beat Generation.

On the Road, came out in 1957, but was about Kerouac’s real life of 1947-1949.  It was essentially written by 1951, the year I was born, but tinkered with, and not published until 1957.  That’s a long time ago to most young movie goers today.  If Kerouac had lived he’d be over ninety.  So the 2012 film On the Road, is really a historical flick.  It’s about a bunch of unhappy crazy people who did a lot of drugs and rushed back and forth across the continent several times trying to find happiness, kicks, or just escape from their inner demons, obligations and boredom.

When I first read On the Road in 1969, it felt contemporary because the beats were a whole lot like the hippies, at least superficially.  It took me a while to realize that On the Road was about my father’s generation.  My dad was born in 1920, and Jack Kerouac was born in 1922.  Kerouac died at 47, in October of 1969, and my dad died at 49, in May of 1970.  They both died miserable drunks.  They both smoked a lot of unfiltered Camels.  They both travelled back and forth across America in a restless attempt to find themselves.  They both were failures at marriage and raising kids.  I use Kerouac to understand my uncommunicative father.

When you’re a kid and read On the Road for the first time it’s tremendously exciting.  It’s adventurous.  It’s about hitch-hiking.  It’s about sex and drugs.  It’s about jazz.  Yes, it’s that old, before rock and roll.  After doing a lot of drugs and hitch-hiking trips myself, I saw the book in a different light by 1971.  I reread On the Road every few years, and the older I get, the more I understand the suffering behind the story.

I wonder if the 60% of movie fans, and 56% of critics who watched On the Road are savvy enough to immediately realize that this story is about misery and not glamor?  To be on the road that much, to drink that much, to take that many drugs, to fuck that many people, requires a tortured soul driven by restless, existential pain.

Maybe I love this film because I read the pain in every character on the screen.  This is a great film when you realize it’s not a fun film.  Sure, they quote Kerouac’s famous lines twice in the film

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!”

Kerouac rewrote his life to make it better, to romanticize it, to make it more meaningful, more exciting, but if you read the many biographies about Jack, you know he failed to fool himself.  He knew they were all beat characters.  When he discovered Zen, he hoped to put a spiritual spin on things, and hoped he could find enlightenment in his life, or at least write an enlightened view of it.  He failed.  Alcoholism consumed Kerouac, just like my dad, my dad’s brothers, and their father.  I come from two beat generations.

Everyone is initially seduced by Kerouac romantic spin on his life.  Everyone loves Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty because he’s so wild and bangs all the chicks, but they forget that ole Dean will abandon you in a Mexico City flophouse when you’re out of your mind with dysentery and have no money, or run off and leave his wife and children to get his kicks making some other woman equally miserable.  Neal was a petty criminal, street hustler, con man and user of people, but all too often people loved him.  And Kerouac knew that.

Whether Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) or Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) are convincing in their roles depends on your image of Jack and Neal.  I loved that the movie didn’t romanticize these two.  I don’t think Kerouac did either in his book if you read it closely, but too many would-be beats and hippies have.  I am reminded of the contrast between the 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and their trip across 1964 American in an old bus named Further, and the recent documentary Magic Trip that used actual film the Pranksters took on the trip.  History and nonfiction don’t match up.   For On the Road, history and fiction don’t match either.  A good writer can make real life a whole lot more glamorous than it is.  I believe Kerouac wanted to chronicle his life without the glamor.

Which brings us back to modern American movie goers, they are incurable romantics.  They hate realism.  They embrace a comic book view of reality.  That’s why I think 60% of them turned their thumbs down for On the Road.  That’s why the film played only one week in my city, and why there was only one other person in the theater when I went.  That’s why they didn’t like a realistic story about a struggling young writer who loves a low-life hustler and makes him the center of his novel, his life, even though time and again, the bastard left him high and dry, and crushed his soul.  Kerouac wrote a lot of books, but only the ones that have Neal in them still matter.  Jack returned to Neal time and again, in life and in books, but without Neal, Jack never could get his life together.  Success didn’t help, and only made it worse.

Neal Cassady was the bus driver for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and Cassady brought the King of the Hippies to meet the King of the Beats.  It was a disaster for the old friends.   Jack and Neal are now legendary mythic characters.  Trying to understand the realism of their friendship requires reading book and after book, and now watching movie after movie.

I think if you’re among the people trying to understand the story of Jack and Neal, you must see this film.  Everyone else should be warned.  If you didn’t like it, then you’re lucky, you don’t have a beat soul.  If you love it, you’re among the haunted by the myths of the Beats.

4/4/13

The Visual Limitations of Novels

This week I read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles first published in 1949, and then I watched the 1990 film version by Bernardo Bertolucci with Debra Winger and John Malkovich.  I found the novel a stunning example of writing, and the movie a stunning example of cinematography, which only made it obvious that novels are severely limited in evoking the visual world.  Reading the novel, the world of Port and Kit Moresby felt claustrophobic and small,  but seeing the same couple on screen, showed them living in a vast panoramic vista.

In mind, I knew Kit and Port were traveling across Algeria in the late 1940s, after WWII, so the sky should have been getting bigger and brighter as they got closer to the Sahara, but instead it got darker.  That’s because the story was getting psychologically darker.  In fact, their world as I imagined it, was often dark, with few people and buildings.  The book so reminded me of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, that I thought Bowles must have used it as a model.  In the film version of The Sheltering Sky, the streets were crowded with people, and the cities and villages were sprawling with buildings with narrow maze like streets, and everything was bright, colorful and beautiful.  The gorgeous visuals overwhelmed the dark brooding characters.

It was jarring to watch the film right after reading the book because it looked nothing like what I imagined, but obviously the film looked like the world Bowles wrote about and lived in.

Reading The Sheltering Sky and then watching its film version made me see the difference in the two art forms.  And it’s not because Bowles didn’t give me the information to visualize.

When she was hungry, she rose, picked up her bag, and walked among the rocks along a path of sorts, probably made by goats, which ran parallel to the walls of the town. The sun had risen; already she felt its heat on the back of her neck. She raised the hood of her haïk. In the distance were the sounds of the town: voices crying out and dogs barking. Presently she passed beneath one of the flat-arched gates and was again in the city. No one noticed her. The market was full of black women in white robes. She went up to one of the women and took a jar of buttermilk out of her hand. When she had drunk it, the woman stood waiting to be paid. Kit frowned and stooped to open her bag. A few other women, some carrying babies at their backs, stopped to watch. She pulled a thousand-franc note out of the pile and offered it. But the woman stared at the paper and made a gesture of refusal. Kit still held it forth. Once the other had understood that no different money was to be given her, she set up a great cry and began to call for the police. The laughing women crowded in eagerly, and some of them took the proffered note, examining it with curiosity, and finally handing it back to Kit. Their language was soft and unfamiliar. A white horse trotted past; astride it sat a tall Negro in a khaki uniform, his face decorated with deep cicatrizations like a carved wooden mask. Kit broke away from the women and raised her arms toward him, expecting him to lift her up, but he looked at her askance and rode off. Several men joined the group of onlookers, and stood somewhat apart from the women, grinning. One of them, spotting the bill in her hand, stepped nearer and began to examine her and the valise with increasing interest. Like the others, he was tall, thin and very black, and he wore a ragged burnous slung across his shoulders, but his costume included a pair of dirty white European trousers instead of the long native undergarment. Approaching her, he tapped her on the arm and said something to her in Arabic; she did not understand. Then he said: “Toi parles français?” She did not move; she did not know what to do. “Oui,” she replied at length.

There is much visual detail in this passage, but I never saw it in my mind’s eye.  I never “saw” Algeria like I saw it in the film.  Now that I’m reading passages from the book after seeing the movie, I’m “reading” it differently, and seeing it differently in my mind.  This might be a clue to always see the movie first.  I find the Harry Potter movies fantastic illustrations of the books, but poor substitutes for them.

Just look at this film clip and then imagine how to describe in it words.  Does the words camel, caravan and desert even come close to evoking what we see?

While watching the movie I felt the soul of the novel had disappeared.  The experience of reading and viewing beautifully illustrated the difference between the visual medium of film, and the world of black and white letters that are decoded inside our head.  The novel is rich in details I can’t see, and can’t be filmed.  Or can they? 

Movies seldom have narrative commentary.  One example I can think of is the theatrical release of Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford provided a film noir detective voice over.  I’ve always preferred the theatrical release over Ridley Scott’s director’s cut.  I wish movie makers would experiment with unseen narrators to see if they could get closer to filming classic books.  There is an aspect to books that is neither dialog or description, that is always left out of movies.

I also read Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear this week and it begs for a movie treatment, or at least a graphic novel adaption.  Bear describes a world that is as visually bizarre as Oz, and a spaceship with three hulls.  I have no way of visualizing this story.  And the novel, Hull Zero Three is written like an action film, so it feels like the soul of a novel is left out.

I wonder what my reading experience of The Sheltering Sky would have been like if Paul Bowles had included National Geographic like photographs of all the locations Port and Kit visited on their trip?  I know of one book that did this, Time and Again by Jack Finney, a time travel novel about 19th century New York City.  The book included 19th century photographs of the city.  It made a huge difference to the story.  I wonder how I would have experienced Hull Zero Three differently if Bear had commissioned illustrations for his book?

I assume writers expect readers to do all the mental cinematography themselves, but I don’t think it would hurt if they provided a few seed images.  I’ve talked to many readers who claim to hate movies of their favorite stories because it ruins their own mental images they have created.  I think my problem is I don’t visualize books as I read them, and illustrations and photographs would be helpful crutches for people like me.

I recommend creating your own experiments to test the visual powers of novels.  Would the monster hit TV show Downton Abbey be as popular if it was just a novel, without all the beautiful visuals?  And think about all the many visual interpretations of Sherlock Holmes?  There are many film versions of classic books Little Women and Pride and Prejudice.  Try reading the books before or after seeing the movies and see for yourself the visual limitations of novels.

JWH – 3/23/13

The Big Trail (1930)

Yesterday I got in a Blu-ray copy of The Big Trail, an early widescreen movie from 1930.  The Big Trail has quite a fascinating history behind it.  Starting in the late 1920s Hollywood began experimenting with widescreen and Technicolor, but the depression killed off interest in these technologies, especially widescreen because it required special theaters, screens and projectors.   The Big Trail was filmed from April to August in 1930 in black and white using both 70mm and 35mm cameras, creating two unique versions from different camera angles.  The whole production was also shot in five languages using different lineup of actors for each language. 

Epic production doesn’t begin to describe the making of The Big Trail.  Seven different states were used for film locations, covering 4,300 miles, traveling in 123 baggage cars, with 93 principle actors, 2,000 extras at all the locations, 725 Indians from five tribes, 12 Indian guides, 22 cameramen, 1,800 cattle, 1,400 horses, 500 buffalo, 185 wagons and a production staff of 200.  And they had the wagon train do everything wagon trains did back in those pioneering days, cross rivers, get lowered down cliffs, blaze trails through timbered lands, cross deserts, climb mountains, survive snow storms.  All other wagon train movies since have been puny in scale.  The Big Trail was a very gigantic production, but it’s not as famous as Gone With the Wind from 1939.  That’s too bad, it should be better remembered.

I had to watch The Big Trail alone last night because none of my movie friends like old black and white films and I couldn’t convince them to give The Big Trail a try.  What a loss for them.  It’s a shame because as soon as I started up The Big Trail I was stunned by it’s beauty.  Old movies are in a square format and seeing this movie in widescreen format on my 56” HDTV made my heart ache.  If only this 70mm widescreen format had caught on in 1930.  All my favorite old films from the 1930s and 1940s would have been so much more grandeur looking.  And that’s what Fox called their experimental format, the “Fox Grandeur” process.  What if Grand Hotel had been widescreen, or The Maltese Falcon, or The Wizard of Oz, just imagine how more magnificent they would have been.

[This screenshot is from Blu-ray.com – click for full size version]

Modern movie goers are used to high tech visual productions and when they see old movies, especially silent films and films from the 1930s, they think of them as primitive and crude, and often assume people of those days saw what we see today.  Their technology was older and less sophisticated, but the prints we have are old and in bad shape compared to the original pristine prints audiences viewed in their day.  Silent movie film goers didn’t see jerky prints with faded splotches and lines running through them.  They were sharp and vivid with wonderful contrast and the motion was as natural as modern films.  Sure the acting style is strange to us, but the acting style was normal to them.  It was great acting by the way they judged acting.

Old movies are being restored all the time now, especially for the Turner Classic Movie crowd and Blu-ray movie fans.  The restoration of The Big Trail is far from perfect, but I found it impressive to watch visually.  I expect someday that digital processing will clean up even more of these film defects, and created a print closer to the 1930 original.  For the most part the defects weren’t distracting.  A couple of times I thought it was raining because of the tiny scratches.

The Big Trail was an experiment in many ways, not only for the widescreen filming.  It was an early epic western about settlers crossing the country in a huge wagon train.  The Big Trail was the first starring role for John Wayne, but many of the actors were from Broadway, because it was an early talky and they needed actors that could project their voices to outdoor microphones.  Much of the dialog is stagey, and the cinematography is reminiscent of great silent films.  Yet, the sets and costumes look very realistic.  It would take another 60 years before citizens of the pioneering west looked so realistically dirty and grungy.  Plus the Indians were real.  Often the wagons were drawn by oxen and cattle rather than horses.

[Click for full size versions.  From Blu-Ray.com]

Westerns weren’t this good for a long time, not until Stagecoach, ten years later.  Most westerns of that era were B movies, short full of action, produced from very small budgets.  As I watched The Big Trail, I wondered how many people living in 1930 had once traveled across the country in a wagon train.  The heyday of the wagon train was from the 1840 to the 1860s, when the continental railroad was built.  It was possible that some of these pioneers were still alive to verify the realism of the film.  I wonder if any of them wrote about it? 

Westerns today, 80 years later, often work hard to appear realistic and historical.  It seems like every decade has a different view on how the old west looked.  Just compare the two versions of True Grit.  There’s also a difference in how violence was portrayed.  In The Big Trail, John Wayne only kills one of the bad guys, and with a knife.  And the bad guys were on the hesitant and cowardly side, only willing to kill when no one was looking.  Nobody was a great shot either.  Today’s westerns have heroes that kill as many people as a mass murderer.

The Big Trail was an innocent portrayal of pioneers.  At one point the John Wayne character was telling a bunch of boys what all he learned from living with the Indians and one of the kids asked, “Did they teach you were papooses come from?”  That’s about as risqué as this movie got.  But it was realistic enough to show a woman nursing a baby.  And I thought the love conflict was reasonably sophisticated for a movie of its time.  The plot of The Big Trail was gentile and slow.  I’m not sure people only used to modern films would like it.  Modern audiences are addicted to fast action, fast dialog, and lots of plot twists.  I’ve seen The Big Trail three times now and I’m looking forward to seeing it again.  It’s a classic western, and a classic 1930s film, my two favorite genres.

JWH – 12/29/12

Django Unchained–Reviewing a Film I Wanted to See But Won’t

I grew up in the 1950s on a steady diet of western movies and TV shows.  The western is my favorite movie genre, and sadly few are made anymore, so I was really looking forward to Django Unchained.  That was before Sandy Hook.  And even before the mass child killings in Newtown, Connecticut, I worried that Django Unchained was going to be too violent and over the top.  I love realistic westerns, or at least westerns that feel historical.  Watching the trailer to Django Unchained didn’t remind me of any history I knew about.  It’s a strange revisionist fantasy of 19th century America.

True Grit and Open Range were good westerns in my book, but I have to admit there’s little real history in westerns.  Westerns are a genre that teaches us that guns are the answer to social conflict.  Westerns are Darwinian tales about the survival of the fittest, but in the 1950s, westerns were stories about the fittest bringing civilization to the west.  In modern westerns, civilization isn’t the focus, but gun play.  It’s still good versus evil, but the good guys are pretty much as vicious as the bad guys.

The trouble with modern westerns is they often are just gun porn, and from the previews and what I’ve read, it appears that Django Unchained is a killing fantasy like a sex fantasy.  Pornography is hard to define, but for me, porn films are those which merely press our brain buttons and set off our neural programming for sex, violence and fear, providing little else artistically and intellectually.  In the old days if films showed actual sex or violence they were deemed pornographic and illegal.  Over the years we’ve accepted more sex and violence in movies because the sex and deaths were artificial.  We called it art.  But art can push them same buttons as real sex and snuff films.

Movie makers want to make millions so they need big audiences, and action movies with massive body counts are among the top selling films.  Such films need a bad guy that filmmakers can manipulate the audience into hating.  And since our love for violence seems to have no bounds, movie makers need really evil bad guys to justify the extreme violence they wish to recreate on the screen.  Django Unchained selects slavers in the Old South.  These guys were plenty evil, so no one will feel bad if we watched them get killed in horrible ways.  And evidently Quentin Tarantino didn’t feel actual historical slavers were evil enough, so he made them even more repulsive in his film, so the audience could enjoy watching them be punished with an orgy of good clean gun killing fun.  What an emotional release it must be to see those slavers get their retribution.  But is enjoying that retribution divine or evil?

Now I’m not saying I wouldn’t have enjoyed Django Unchained, because I probably would, I’ve been conditioned by decades of violent movies.  I’m not going to see Django Unchained because part of me is telling myself that it’s sick and disturbing to be enjoying such gluttony of violence, in the same way part of me tells myself I can’t gorge on Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.  Too much of anything is bad.

I don’t plan on giving up all violent movies, or westerns.  However, I need violence to be presented realistically.  We should be shocked and horrified by violence, not getting off on it.  Gun porn is just giving the little angry guy inside of us a hand job.

I read three books this year that covered the subject of slavery and violence in America around the time of the Civil War.  Midnight Rising by Tony Horowitz, about John Brown the abolitionist terrorist, Reconstruction by Eric Foner about the horrors of the South after the Civil War, and Freeman by Leonard Pitts, Jr., a novel about a freed black slave returning to the South to find his wife after the Civil War ends.

Reading the lengthy plot summary of Django Unchained on Wikipedia and looking that the previews on YouTube convinces me that Tarantino’s history of this time period is some kind of strange fantasy created to justify the gun violence.  Movie goers will not learn any history about slavery or the Civil War South, just like they didn’t learn anything about WWII from Inglourious Bastards.  Where is the justifying art?

In fact, if you wanted to make an artistic anti-slavery film Mr. Tarantino, there’s actual slavery going on in the world today that needs our focus of attention.

The real issue is how we use fiction.  Fiction has always been about entertainment, and it’s always manipulated us by pushing our emotional buttons.  If fiction is high art we should learn something about reality, people and ourselves.  Fiction should not masturbate our base instincts, but isn’t that what much of fiction has become?  Low art.  Our most powerful instinct is to reproduce, so most films deal with sex and romance.  However, instead of dealing with them as a topic for enlightenment, all too often films just stimulate our urge for intense romance and hot sex.

We are all animals with a strong fight or flight instincts.  Most violent and horror movies stimulate that deep biological programming.  Fiction is based on conflict, and the plot must go through several stages before bringing its audience to a release of tension, which for gun porn usually involves the hero killing more and more people – a mass killer.  On screen body counts have gotten ridiculous.  Action violence is choreographed like live action cartoons, so unreal they are on the level of Roadrunner cartoons and Three Stooges films.   Can anyone really watch The Expendables 2 without feeling insulted?

Our world is full of real violence, so why do we need pseudo violence to thrill us?  Even if television news wasn’t presenting us weekly stories on mass murders, isn’t it time to wonder about why gun porn is so entertaining?  Have we seen so many fictional killings that only visions of extreme slaughters can thrill us?  Haven’t we become so jaded to violence if it takes the Sandy Hook killings to make us question violence in our society?

Maybe I’m just getting old and my testosterone is petering out, but gun porn has gotten too absurd.  I just can’t ethically rationalize enjoying the big screen killings to myself anymore.  I’m not immune to the thrill of violence.  I can still rationalize Breaking Bad because the show is not about violence, but about a good man becoming evil, and there are many episodes where people don’t get killed, and when they do it’s horrifying.  To me, films like Django Unchained are only about the thrill of violence, and other aspects to the story are just straight men setting us up for the high caliber penetrating punch line.

I’m tired of pretending it’s all in good fun.  I’m not even suggesting that these films escalate violence in our society.  I’m asking:  Isn’t it weird we get so much fun out of watching people being killed?

JWH – 12/27/12

I Can’t Watch Movie Violence Without Thinking About Sandy Hook

Last night I was going through my DVDs looking for something to watch and popped in The Matrix.  The opening scene is of the police trying to arrest Trinity.  It had some pistol shots, and I immediately thought of Sandy Hook.  I felt guilty watching the movie.  I watched a little longer because the shooting was over, but as I watched I remembered the scene where Neo rescues Morpheus in an orgy of semi-automatic and automatic weapons violence.  I had to turn off the movie.  I knew as soon as the assault rifles showed up I’d imagine their bullets impacting little bodies of six and seven year old girls and boys.

Sandy Hook is my turning point for rejecting violence in our society, like Hurricane Sandy is the turning point for many about climate change.

We’re all asking ourselves how can anyone become a mass murderer of children?    That’s too monstrous to comprehend much less accept.  But this is after decades of accepting other kinds of violence as part of our ordinary life.  Haven’t we long taken serial killers, terrorists, gangs, drug cartels for granted?  There have always been terrorists, serial killers and even mass murderers, but the horror of their crimes keeps growing bigger and bigger.  When will this escalation of violence end?  How much can we accept before it drives us all into a terminal depression?  If we don’t do something, then we will accept mass murder of children as part of life too.

And I’m afraid watching violent movies, television shows and video games is a form of acceptance.  If we could plot the rise of violence in our society with the rise of violence in the movies I bet the lines would parallel each other on the chart.  And if we also plotted the number of weapons and kinds of fire power civilians now own, that graph would match the others.

When I was growing up policemen carried revolvers and  automatic weapons were carefully controlled.  The average citizen couldn’t own machine guns.  If people owned a gun for protection it was usually a simple .38 Smith & Wesson or a small .410 shotgun.  Now families have whole military arsenals including assault rifles with extended clips.  In the 1950s movie action heroes were cowboys that carried a single pistol on his hip.  Now action heroes blaze away with assault rifles cradled in each arm, and when their ammunition runs out, whip out two large semi-automatic handguns from concealed holsters.  Both in real life and screen life, we can’t seem to get enough firepower.  What are we afraid of?

I was looking forward to the new western by Quentin Tarantino that comes out Christmas, but after Sandy Hook I can’t handle any more violence, real or fun.  And isn’t it weird we accept so much violence as fun?  Something is wrong with us.

Are all those assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols in movies just product placement for arms dealers?  Have the arms industry just shifted it sales from warring countries to American consumers?  When average Americans feels the need for night vision goggles and laser scopes, I have to wonder who is promoting those sales and what emotions are they playing upon.

I used to believe that there was no correlation between violent video games and movies and real life violence, but I’ve changed my mind.  Hurricane Sandy and Sandy Hook are warnings about the future.  Our environment is overheating in both weather and violence.

Sometimes we vote in a polling station, but most of the times we vote with our dollars.  Sorry Mr. Tarantino, but you and other action film makers have taken violence for escapist fun too far.  I think some of our gun fantasies have become porn and we need to classify them XXX and keep them away from people under 21.

But  what level of gun violence is obscene?  Back in ancient Greece, they believed violence should occur off stage.  Sometime between 400 BC and now we’ve crossed a line.  I think it’s time to think about where that line should be and return to an earlier standard of violence in art.  We’ve gone too far.

JWH – 12/18/12

Life of Pi–Is God the Better Story?

Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee have done an excellent job of adapting Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi to film.  When I read the book back in 2004 I thought at the time it would never be made into a film because the novel was too cerebral, too narrative heavy, plus, how could anyone get a tiger to do all that acting?

Life of Pi the film covered a surprising amount of the content of Life of Pi the book.  So far I can think of just three scenes I missed.  First, story of Pi’s family running into Pi’s three religious leaders.  Second, showing how Pi used turtles to survive, and finally, the scene where Pi is blind and hears people in another life raft.

Still, Lee and Magee beautifully succeeded with capturing the philosophical heart of the novel.  If you loved the book, go see the film, you’ll be surprised by how well it was filmed.

Is God the Better Story?

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, don’t read beyond this point if you plan do either, because I’m going to analyze the philosophical statement of the book and it will spoil the story.

In the main story, a boy from India, Piscine Molitor Patel,  who wants to be called Pi, is shipwreck in a lifeboat with a zebra, orangutan, hyena and a tiger named Richard Parker.  Martel tells us this story very realistically and we are expected to believe it happened. But along the way, Martel takes us through scenes that are very hard to believe, like the carnivorous island with the meerkats.

Yann Martel has crafted a Zen kōan into a novel.  Most kōans are short, “What is the sound of one hand clapping.”   Yann Martel essentially asks, “Is God the better story?”

At the beginning of the novel and movie, in a pseudo introduction, the author is told by an older Pi, that he can tell the author a story that will make him believe in God.  Yann Martel creates two stories, one very long, elaborate, fantastic, awe inspiring – and brutal, and a second that is short and brutal.  We are asked which one we prefer.  Martel is right, everyone, including realists like me, will pick the story with Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger.

So where does God come in?  How can this story make us believe in God?  Analyzing fiction for symbolism is tricky, but for me, Richard Parker represents God though analogy.  At the end of the film and novel, when Pi has told his long fabulist story to two Japanese insurance investigators they refuse to believe him.  So Pi tells a shorter, ugly version that we know is true, but hate to believe.  Then Pi asks the investigators which story they prefer.

We all want to believe in the story where Richard Parker existed because it’s a better story than the one of madness, murder and cannibalism.

So what about the prediction at the beginning, that the story will make us believe in God?  I believe Yann Martel uses the desire to believe in Richard Parker as a stand in for God, creating an analogy, that the readers and audience must make on their own.  Pi desperately wants to believe in God.  Pi asks us to believe in Richard Parker because the story of surviving in a lifeboat with a tiger is a better story than going mad and surviving alone.

The whole point of the novel is to trick the reader into the question:  Which story do you prefer.  Of course everyone prefers Richard Parker to be real.  By transference, we’re ask to accept that belief in God is the better story, just like how we want to believe that Richard Parker existed.  We’re never explicitly told that wanting to believe in Richard Parker is the same as wanting to believe in God, but I feel it’s obvious.

Yann Martel tells us people prefer religion over reality because the story of God is a better story than reality.  And I ask:  “Is this why people refuse to accept the fact of evolution because they prefer the story with Richard Parker – oh, I mean God?”

The novel is an elaborate metaphor to explain why people believe in God.  It doesn’t say that God exists.  Nor do we know what Yann Martel believes.  It just says people prefers belief in God because it’s a better story than how we see reality directly.

What the novel is tricking us into confessing is that the belief in God, no matter how unbelievable that story might be, that it’s a better story than reality.  That when we’re pushed to the ends of our physical and mental limits, we want God even if he’s cruel, vicious and indifferent.  That the belief in God is what gets us through this life.

Has Yann Martel stacked the deck?  Is God the better story?  Yes, reality does sometime involve madness, murder and cannibalism.  And even in the God story, people die, animals are cruelly killed and eaten, people suffer.  If the audience was given the Richard Parker story, and a documentary about the evolution of the universe with cosmology and the evolution of life on Earth with evolutionary biology, is God still the better story.  I don’t think so.  Richard Parker is like a magician’s diversion.  If you could watch this movie and blot out the tiger, the reality of Earth is magnificent!  Richard Parker and God divert our attention to our fantastic reality.

God is only the better story when you don’t understand reality.  Richard Parker is ferocious, terrifying, cruel, indifferent and doesn’t answer prayers.  No matter how much Pi loves Richard Parker and wants his recognition, Richard Parker ultimately refuses to acknowledge Pi’s existence.

So why is God the better story if Richard Parker just walks away from us?  I know many people who have long given up religion but haven’t given up on God.  They say that God must have created us but walked away from the universe and is no longer involved.  Personally, I’m confident there is no God and the size, age and origin of reality is beyond our understanding.  I find it far more comforting to know the rules of our local universe and not feel the need to blame a superior being for bad things or beg for good things.  If a bacteria, shark, drunk driver hurts me badly, I just accept it was the luck of the draw and not a judgmental deity deciding I had done something wrong.

Where the metaphor of Richard Parker breaks down is Pi can see Richard Parker, and we never see God.  It’s actually easier to believe in Richard Parker than it is to believe on God.  Life of Pi is a wonderful novel.  I’ve read I twice now.  And each time I want to believe the Richard Parker story, even though I know the truth is the story about cannibalism.  How many times will I have to read this book before the realistic story is the better story?

What if the novel and movie had been about a boy that survived 227 days on the ocean and had endured the incident with cannibalism and madness and survived.  No tiger, no zebra, no hyena, no orangutan, just Pi, his mom, the Frenchman and the Buddhist sailor?  It would have been brutal, but the success of Pi surviving the ordeal would have been just as magnificent. 

Why do we want a better story?  Santa Claus is a better story than parents buying kids Christmas gifts from Target.  The Easter Bunny is a better story than throwing milk teeth in the garbage.  Heaven is a better story than dying.  But why is God a better story than reality?  Is God a better story than evolution?  If you understood evolution and cosmology, God isn’t the better story.  God is a simpler story, and God’s story is endlessly confusing and contradictory.  It’s just God is fantastically powerful like Richard Parker.

Even though I disagree with Yann Martel’s assertion, I love his fiction.  See, that’s the real revelation in this.  Fiction is the better story, and Life of Pi is very good fiction.  Humans embraces fiction with an intense passion.  Richard Parker is a better character than a cannibalistic Frenchman.  And for many people, all the stories about God, are a better story than the brutal aspects of reality.  However, there is nothing in fiction that comes within light years of evolution.  All stories about God are just crude children stories compared to the complexity and beauty of evolution.  Evolution is just as brutal as the Old Testament God – it’s just not personal.

Here’s the final kōan:  Did Yann Martel write this story to make us atheists or make us believers in fiction?

JWH – 11/28/12

From Words to Films: Cloud Atlas, The Life of Pi, The Hobbit, Anna Karenina

Yesterday I saw Cloud Atlas at the theater, and it had previews for The Life of Pi and The Hobbit.  I’ve also seen recent previews for Anna Karenina.  All books I’ve read.  While watching the preview for The Life of Pi I wondered what Yann Martel and David Mitchell are feeling now that their words have become movies.  Do they feel like gods creating new worlds?

Lucky writers type words on their computer and a few years later those words become images on the big screen.  How marvelous must that feel for a writer?  Of course, a writer creates all their characters and scenes in their head by themselves, and a movie requires hundreds, if not thousands of people to create images on the screen for us to see.  And often, they aren’t the same visions the writer first imagined.  I can’t imagine David Mitchell picturing so many of his characters looking like Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks with the help of make-up artists have fleshed out Mitchell’s characters in a world of pixels that is so much more vivid than printed words on a page.

I have to admit while watching the previews that I wished I could write something worthy of filming.  Few books are given birth on the big screen, so it’s a very rare honor that few writers get to enjoy. 

Look at the opening page of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – I saw it acted out yesterday.  It’s not the same at all, these words inspired a movie scene on the beach.

 

Next, watch this clip:

 

 

Now read from the The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

 

 

And then look at the trailer for The Life of Pi:

 

These are just two examples.  I wish I had the time and technology to show several examples, with the exact book pages and filmed scenes.  Both Cloud Atlas and The Life of Pi are books of astounding feats of imagination.  I’m sure bookworms hope all their favorite books will become films, but few do.  I’d love to see The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi made into a movie.   That book also exhibited tremendous feats of imagination, although it’s a bleak view of the future.  I’m thinking movie makers prefer upbeat stories based on fantastic events.

I wonder how many writers sit down to write a story they hope will be filmed?  If you’ve read Cloud Atlas or The Life of Pi, you probably thought like me at the time that it would be impossible to film these stories.  Watching the preview of The Life of Pi made me realize that anything a writer can think up movie makers can film.  Watching the preview of Anna Karenina made me realize that movie makers are going far beyond what writers can do with words.  I don’t think any one mind can imagine so much beauty, color and vivid detail.

Look at this photo and then read Tolstoy’s words:

Anna was not in lilac, the colour Kitty was so sure she ought to have worn, but in a low-necked black velvet dress which exposed her full shoulder and bosom that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with the very small hands. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, all her own, she wore a little garland of pansies, and in her girdle, among the lace, a bunch of the same flowers. Her coiffure was very unobtrusive. The only noticeable things about it were the wilful ringlets that always escaped at her temples and on the nape of her neck and added to her beauty. Round her finely chiselled neck she wore a string of pearls.

Well, they got the ringlets.  Can any words ever describe what we actually see?  What is the power of Tolstoy’s words that have made Anna Karenina one of the greatest novels of all time?   It is a novel that has inspired the production of many movies.  Will there be additional productions of The Life of Pi and Cloud Atlas?  Will Martel and Mitchell be as inspiring as Tolstoy?

Like I said, I wish I could write a story other people felt compelled to film.  The old saying is, a picture is worth a thousand words, well that means most novels have about 100 pictures in them.  But novels are really about characters fighting adversity, and that’s where movies and books really overlap.  I believe if I wanted to write a novel worth filming, I’d need to create unique characters facing unique conflicts.  Words are great for that.

I think it’s fascinating to read the words that become movies.  I think it’s even more fascinating see characters on pages become characters on screen.  I think it’s also fascinating  for stories to come alive before our eyes in the dark that we once read as black marks on white pages.

[By the way, is film even a valid word to use regarding movies anymore?  Are movies still filmed?  Or do they use high resolution video cameras?  In our modern times both novels and movies appear on screens.  I guess I could have talked about stories that appear in black and white on small screens and in color on large screens.  Is that the transformation good stories should expect – more pixels with great color depth?]

JWH – 11/5/12

Samsara (2011)–Ron Fricke Shows Us the Diversity of Mankind

It is impossible to express how beautiful Samsara is to see on a big screen.  If you’ve seen Baraka or Chronos at the theater, then you’ll have the best idea of what you are in store for visually.  And this film is all about visuals.  It’s a documentary without narrative.  Beautiful hypnotic music, gorgeous exotic music, lush sacred music adds to the impact of the visuals, but this film is all about seeing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, your mind will race through an encyclopedia worth of words as you watch Samsara.  It’s a rush.

I can’t emphasize this enough, but to truly experience this film you need to go see it in a theater.  I have Baraka on DVD and watch it on a 56” TV, and I love it.  But it’s not the full experience.  Nothing I can say can convey the full impact of the film.  No photograph or film clip does the film justice.

Now I warn you, this is an intensely intellectual film, even though it has no words.  Many people, will find it boring – if you have a fascination about this reality we live in, then your lifetime of thoughts will make this film great.  Your mind will create a narrative as you watch.  This show is a head trip, and your thoughts will script the film as you watch.  You’ll write it different every time you watch it.  The many scenes from around the world are meant to trigger deep philosophical responses. 

Samsara will probably only play one week in your town, so if its on, go see it while you can.

Be sure and set this clip to the highest resolution and watch it full screen.  Or visit the official site and watch the clip there.

Samsara was filmed in 25 countries with 70mm film, and converted to digital with a 8k scan, creating a 20 terabyte file.  That’s a lot of details to shoot up into your brain in one hour and thirty-nine minutes.  Most Blu-Ray films come in around 20 gigabytes, so Samsara has a 1,000 times more bytes of detail.

Samsara is a spiritual ride around the globe, zooming in on monasteries and prisons, jungles and deserts, slums and hi-rises, the poor and the rich, the beautiful and the grotesque, the living and the dead, a baby in the womb, and people in their coffins.

Samsara and Baraka shows how immensely diverse our world is.  It makes you realize that your view of reality, the one you’re so obsessed with, is really so very small.  Just before Samsara came on tonight they had a preview for The Hobbit.  That preview entices movie goers to come see a fantasy world rich in landscape and full of colorful fantasy beings.  It was a thrilling preview until Samsara came on.  The real world Samsara made the fantasy world of The Hobbit seem pathetic and dull.

 

It’s very hard to describe Samsara because it doesn’t stay on any scene for very long.  Each clip is glimpse of a subculture from around the world.  Only a well traveled world traveler will know about most of these sites and people.  There’s even a humorous look of gun owners from around the globe, and beautiful sequences of bullet manufacturing.

Samsara spends quite a lot of time showing exotic locations of religious worship.  This was also true of Baraka.  I believe the filmmakers must be very spiritual people, but I see what they show in a different light.  I see the temples as relics of history, and their worshipers as primitive souls trying to hang onto a dying past in our fast pace world that’s constantly changing.  Our modern world, shown at night, looks like red blood cells coursing through veins.

The Buddhist monks carefully create a mandala with colored sand, but in the end they destroy their creation.  I assume to make it again the next day.  That focus on creating the details in the image is a kind of worship, or prayer.  Filming Samsara is the same kind of worship.

There will be scenes that might shock, disturb or disgust you, but they are all filmed so beautifully that I have to assume that the filmmakers see everything on Earth in a spiritual light.  Many of the scenes are just exotic people that live their lives so much different from ours.  Seeing the film makes me realize how parochial I am.

If Samsara isn’t at a nearby theater, then buy Baraka on Blu-Ray.  You can watch the entire film online, to get some idea of how Ron Fricke sees the world.  Watch it at least long enough to study the faces of the snow monkeys bathing in the warm water.  Think about how they see this world.  Think of the snow monkey watching this film like an alien from outer space seeing our world for the first time.  I’ve watch Baraka many times now, and I want to be the snow monkey.

Samsara and Baraka will not appeal to a lot of people.  I’m sorry that’s so.  People really should spend one evening watching a movie that so much different from their usual multiplex fare.  Take a trip around the real world, it’s more far-out than any CGI world ever created – even Avatar.

JWH – 11/2/12

Prometheus–Intelligent Design Comes to Science Fiction

The Review

As a Saturday afternoon science fiction adventure I’d give Prometheus a generous B.  I enjoyed the film despite all the illogical thinking and action that drives the plot.  The visuals are stunning.  Great android character, and I always love a good artificial being.  Appealing captain character, good hearted, but a bit clichéd.  Not much other characterization, but the film flowed and kept my interest.  Hope I’m not damning it with faint praise, but it’s that kind of flick.  Fun enough, but don’t think about it too much.  It’s pretty weird when the most appealing character is an android.

Prometheus is set in the same universe as Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) and all the other sequels, yet it’s not exactly a prequel or a reboot, and for the most part it’s not like the other movies.  Prometheus has a new storyline and characters, with much better special effects.  It does mirror some plotting of the original Alien, even down to some very specific outcomes.

We don’t get many space adventure movies anymore.  Usually it’s invaders coming to Earth.  I miss movies where we go to alien worlds, so that explains why I enjoyed Prometheus so much, absence make the heart grow fonder.  Space epics are about as common as westerns, my favorite movie genre.  So if you’re up for a space opera, Prometheus might satisfy you – if you’re not too picky.

Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the movie, because I am picky, and I’m going to give everything away when I dissect the science fiction in Prometheus.

The Analysis with Spoilers

Science fiction is generally an idea genre, and the story has to make sense to the readers and watchers, even if its about something impossible like The Matrix or Inception.  Prometheus is based on the idea that aliens seeded Earth with DNA.  Now panspermia is an old idea, and Prometheus deals with directed panspermia.  As a concept it’s rather farfetched, but I don’t have any trouble using directed panspermia as a plot device.  But other factors in Prometheus hint at Chariot of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, which suggests ancient alien astronauts took a direct involvement with human development and claims that early humans couldn’t have done things without alien help, like build the pyramids.  That I found offensive, so my hackles were up for any sign on von Dänikenisms.  For whatever reason, the aliens that left the maps are dubbed The Engineers.  At this point in the movie, the humans don’t know about the DNA, only the maps, and maybe implied interaction with ancient humans, so why call them The Engineers?

In Prometheus we are told the archaeologists Shaw and Holloway discover several ancient human cultures that have star maps that all reveal the same location.  We aren’t told the nature of these star maps, which are unrealistically vague.  We must infer that:

• Ancient humans observed spaceships coming from this location in the sky
• The Engineers caused a certain pattern to appear in the sky that was more obvious than stars
• The Engineers gave the humans the maps to tell where they came from
• The Engineers gave the humans the maps so future humans would travel there someday
• Some Engineers are warning humans about other Engineers.

Clue #1.  We are shown an ancient Engineer seeding the Earth, and we assume it’s before life started.  We are not shown the Engineers appearing to ancient cultures, but isn’t that implied if several ancient human cultures have the same map?

Contention #1.  The archaeological evidence provides enough information to direct modern humans to the star system with the moon LV-223.  This is very bogus and hard to believe from the evidence we are shown.  If all of these ancient human sites held an actual alien star map that we could decipher, then that might be believable.  But several smudges carved in stone like a constellation pattern  is not enough information.

Contention #2.  The Engineers left a map to their home world.  In all first contact stories both aliens and humans are always worried about giving the location of their home world.  At this time the humans of the story do not know the Engineers left DNA seeding the Earth.  All they know about is the maps.  Again, why do they call them The Engineers?  Do they believe the they were ancient alien engineers who built early civilizations on Earth?

Contention #3.  Shaw and Holloway want to meet The Engineers to ask them why?  The implication is its an ontological question.  That they are calling these aliens The Engineers because they created us.  Later on in the movie David asks Holloway why he wants to meet his makers and Holloway replies he wants to ask why.  And David asks why did humans create him, and Holloway replies because we could. Then David asks, will that answer be acceptable to you?  Religious people, and people who believe in Intelligent Design feel humans must have a purpose.  Shaw and Holloway feel The Engineers might reveal our purpose.  I feel that’s both bogus and nasty.  Is there any purpose we can be told that won’t offend us?  Any prescribed purpose will make us a slave.  Do we really want to be the children of superior aliens?

Clue #2.  The map leads the humans to a world where The Engineers were building biological weapons of mass destruction.  This doesn’t make sense either.  Who gives directions to their secret military bases?   Could a group of good Engineers have gone to Earth to warn us about evil Engineers?  This makes sense but the movie never suggests that.  Are they holding back for the sequel?

Contention #3.  The Engineers have DNA that matches ours, and they look like us, and one of them gave his all to seed Earth with his DNA, so they are our makers?  Actually, if you dropped off some DNA strands in a sterile ocean I doubt they would do anything.  Panspermia depends on the initial building blocks of evolution to come from outside of the Earth.  This ain’t that.  Nor is there any reason to believe if they put the starting ingredients in our ocean, that billions of years later humans that look like them would appear on the scene.  Evolution and DNA don’t work that way.

Clue #3.  The reawaken Engineer immediately sees the humans and starts killing them.  If the Engineers seeded many worlds how would they know if humans were from the evil Earth they wanted to destroy or from one of the good planets they wanted to preserve?  Why would a species that looks like us want to kill us?  We assume the target is Earth because the android David discovered how to read their computer system.  If renegade good Engineers created humans maybe bad Engineers would always want to kill them on site.  But does that make us the cockroaches of the galaxy?  Maybe the renegade Engineers are trying to create the saviors of the galaxy – us!

Contention #4.  The Engineers created H. R. Giger killer alien and they were stockpiling the black goo that would be used to infect the Earth.  How long has the Engineer’s ship lain dormant on LV-223?  Why was Earth up for destruction?  The movie is named Prometheus, and the spaceship is named Prometheus, but are we to assume the Engineer that seeded the Earth is a Prometheus?  Remember your mythology.  Prometheus brought fire to the humans and was eternally punished by his fellow gods by having an eagle feed on his liver.  If the Engineer Prometheus defied his fellow Engineers to bring DNA to Earth, why would any of these ancient human cultures know about the Engineers?  If they seeded the Earth before life existed, it would be billions of years before these ancient cultures even existed.  If the Engineers came back to give them star maps, then the Engineers have been keeping an eye on Earth for a very long time indeed.  Then why do they want to destroy it?  Again this points to two factions of Engineers.

Clue #4.  The Engineers were overrun by the H. R. Giger aliens, so they weren’t smart enough to protect themselves from their own weapon.  The human ship Prometheus is fairly easily able to destroy the Engineer’s ship heading for Earth, so they aren’t all that powerful.  And an ancient Engineer attacks a disabled Shaw but she’s able enough to fend him off long enough to sic the alien octopus on him.  These ancient Engineers aren’t that capable, or they are damn unlucky.

Contention #5.  Shaw and David the android know where the Engineer home world is and know how to fly an Engineer ship to it.  Shaw wants to know why they wanted to  attack Earth with the H. R. Giger aliens.   We won’t know the results of this point until the sequel comes up, but it’s not the conclusion I would have made.  Why didn’t Shaw go, “Fuck the Engineers, we’re flying to their home world to deliver they payload they intended for us.”    Why does Shaw continue to believe the Engineers has something to tell us?  Isn’t finding the plans and munitions to destroy Earth enough of a message?  My gut reaction was much different from Shaw’s. It would have been the same as Lester del Rey’s “For I Am a Jealous People.” Since this is a very difficult story to track down I’ll have to tell you the plot. Earth is under attack by aliens. We learn that God is on their side. So we get mad and go after God and the aliens planning to destroy both, because we are a jealous people.

This movie seems to suggest that the only good alien is a dead alien.  Are there no wise, gentle aliens inhabiting the stars that want to be friends?  We’re to assume that Shaw is making the same stupid mistake about meeting the Engineers as Rafe Spall makes when he treats the alien snake as cute?  Prometheus, Alien, Aliens, and all the rest tell us over and over again aliens from space are dangerous.  Of course, these are horror movies, and like the template for most horror movies, all the victims are stupid and all the bad guys are evil.  I hate this message in science fiction movies and books.  Why wasn’t Prometheus different and had the Engineers be noble?  Prometheus is a very cynical film.

Prometheus also sends another offensive message.  Prometheus is a science fictional version of intelligent design.  Why can’t people accept that life on Earth is an accident of evolution?  This Chariot of the Gods approach has the same problem as theology.  If God created us, who created God?  If the Engineers created us, who created the Engineers?  Why do we need an initial cause for our existence?  Prometheus is anti-science.

Shaw and Holloway want to know why humans are on Earth.  They are the driving characters of the story, yet their characterizations are extremely weak.  This is the first flaw of the movie.  By having a couple, the writers diluted the characterization of each.  Shaw eventually becomes the main character of the movie, but we don’t know that until the last fourth of the movie, and she never gelled as a personality.  Prometheus would have been far more gripping if Charlie hadn’t existed, and Shaw’s obsession was the main focus of the story.

The movie further dilutes the creation of strong characterization with the subplot of Peter Weyland, who wants to find the Engineers hoping they will bestow life extension on him.  If this was revealed at the beginning of the mission, it would have created two strong opposing wills, and that might have worked, but leaving Weyland hidden on the ship till near the end as a “surprise” hurt the story badly.  The character has no purpose and is killed off rather quickly.  Meredith Vickers who seems to run things but isn’t the captain, and who might be Weyland’s daughter, is another pointless character.

Great science fiction needs great characters with a clear goals or desires.  Think about Gattaca, we have Vincent a normal human living in a world of genetically enhanced humans.  Vincent wants to go into space, so how can he possibly have the right stuff when the real astronauts have been genetically engineered?  Prometheus doesn’t have strong characters because it had too many characters – nobody stood out, nobody’s goals drives the story.  Shaw’s goal is rather unappealing – wanting to meet The Engineers to ask them why they visited the Earth.  But isn’t that questioned answered when she discovers they brought DNA to Earth?  Are The Engineers the Johnny Appleseeds of life in the galaxy?

Why does Shaw wear a crucifix without stating her Christianity?  Isn’t this Chariot of the Gods plot in direct conflict with Christianity just as much as Darwin’s evolution?

I can buy The Engineers seeding the planets, but there’s no reason given why or if the Engineers visited ancient civilizations.  Why do these civilizations leave records of star patterns in the sky?  Did the Engineers come by to visit?  Did they help develop these civilizations?  And did they tell the people where in the sky they came from?  Why?  So we could come visit some day?  Then why is the location a biological weapon repository?  Why would you tell people it’s location?  That doesn’t make any sense.  In all first contact stories both humans and aliens are leery of revealing their home world.  If the Engineers repeatedly left maps of where to find them, where would they point to?  And why?  Again, my theory that good Engineers were warning everyone about bad Engineers.

You’d think the Engineers would think like Match.com users and plan to meet in a neutral and safe location.  We could also assume, a la Arthur C. Clarke, that the invitation is test of our readiness to be space travelers ourselves.  It’s a sign we’ve evolved.  The film eventually tells us the Engineers didn’t like how we turned out and planned to exterminate us with a black goo that generates the scary aliens of Alien/Aliens.  Are these the bad Engineers going around undoing what the good Engineers have done?

The Engineers look like us.  It’s implied we are their children.  So why destroy us with H. R. Giger aliens?  Are the monster aliens superior to us?  Are they meant to stimulate our development with adversity?  Are they some kind of punishment?  What did we do?

Peter Weyland has a much more powerful need to meet the Engineers, he wants to keep living.  I would claim seeking out aliens for advanced technology to be a greater driving force than religion and ontology, but it’s never really developed.  In fact, the idea is developed so late in the film, and nipped in the bud so quickly, that I think it’s just filler.

My movie companions did not like how Prometheus tried to mix in religion with aliens.  Neither of the two women I went to the show with are religious, and they just thought a cross wearing space woman was unreal.  Why mix Christianity with von Däniken mumbo jumbo?

Clue #5.  In the end, we movie goers get one thing out of the movie, we know where the H. R. Giger aliens come from and why.  They are a biological weapon of The Engineers.  We assumed they created them, but I supposed they could have found them on a planet and just used them.  Either way, we have answers for past Alien movies in the franchise.

Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus

A reader recommended I read “Is Prometheus anti-science? Screenwriter Damon Lindelof responds.”  The interview gives me further clues about Prometheus.  I had forgotten the full title of Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus.  Lindelof talks about the film as “Frankenstein 101.”  This works on several levels.  It emphasizes that Prometheus is also a horror film, that it’s about science and religion, and it’s about monsters.  From this analogy I have to ask: Who is the monster in Prometheus, and who is Frankenstein?

The obvious answer is The Engineers are Frankenstein and the monster are the H. R. Giger aliens, who appear to be created to thrive on humans.  But if we’re to believe they were created to destroy us, does that make us the monster too?  And what about David, is he a monster, and we’re his Frankenstein?  And who is the Frankenstein that created The Engineers?

These are great literary allusions, but this doesn’t sidestep that the Frankenstein theme is also a form of intelligent design philosophy.  I thought the movie was weakened by too many characters, but I think it’s also weakened by too many monsters and Frankensteins.  That could have been solved by not having The Engineers seed Earth with DNA, and then the ancient human star maps would have been warnings.

However, in the end, even though I give Prometheus an overall B, I do give it an A+ for ambition.

JWH – 6/10/12

Questions about The Avengers from a Science Fiction Fan

Are all superheroes as durable and immortal as Wile E. Coyote?  My wife and I went to see The Avengers the other day.  Normally we don’t go to movies about comic book characters, but The Avengers was getting such great reviews we thought we’d give it a try.  I went through a brief comic book reading phase in 1963, and I’ve seen the first Christopher Reeves Superman and the first Michael Keaton Batman, and that’s about it for my comic book experience.  As a child I loved the George Reeves Adventures of Superman TV show and the Mighty Mouse cartoons.  One of my  first blogs was about memories of all us neighborhood kids wanting to fly, “Super Men and Mighty Mice.”

I am a lifelong science fiction fan and computer geek, so I’ve been around a lot of people who love comics.  By all accounts, I should love comics too, but for some reason I don’t.  I’ve read books and watched documentaries about the history of comics and their fans, so I’m not completely ignorant of the genre.  But watching The Avengers was probably what it would be like for me to attend the opera, I was way out of my element.   It made me want to ask a lot of questions.

This isn’t a review of The Avengers.  I’m quite confident it’s a great movie for its intended audience.  I’m not the intended audience, and it left me wondering about many things, and I obviously don’t have the right mindset.  Maybe if I knew how the game was played I could have enjoyed the movie more.

Why people love comic books and superhero movies totally baffles me.  Now I don’t want to be a Grinch about comics, or be a old man fuddy-duddy pooh-pooh other people’s fun, but I do have some questions about comic books and superheroes.

My first question is:  Are you expected to check your mind in at the theater door when going to see a superhero movie?  Is the fun of such a show returning to the state of mind you had before starting 1st grade?  Is part of the thrill forgetting all logic and science?  Is the fun of watching The Avengers pretending to be five years old again?

Many people call superhero movies science fiction, but I really hate that because it suggests that science fiction can be completely ignorant about science.  I’d go so far as to say that superhero movies are anti-science by ignoring the laws of physics and coming up with really insane concepts and suggesting they are science based.  For instance, in The Avengers the whole story is built around a power source called a tesseract.  A tesseract is a geometrical concept, a 4D cube.  The film also has a flying aircraft carrier, space aliens, Norse gods, mutated humans and flying metal suits with no apparent fuel supply.  Plus characters can pound on each other like Warner Brother cartoon characters and behave like the Three Stooges and no one ever gets hurts, much less bruised and bleeding.

I have to ask:  Do superhero movies exist in a reality similar to the reality where Bugs Bunny and Moe, Larry and Curly exist?  That’s okay if that’s how to play the game, but to me fictional realities with no rules ruins the fun of make-believe.

And, why are superheroes like Greek and Roman gods?  They have all kinds of powers, they fly, they are petty and egotistical, and they fight with each other.  Also, we’re asked to believe that the fate of humanity depends on these beings saving us time and again.  Doesn’t that seem like some kind of transference from religion?  Are fans of superheroes worshippers?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying people shouldn’t watch superhero movies.  These movies are loved by millions, and the movie industry makes huge profits, a big US export, so they are great for the economy.  All I’m asking is if other people don’t question the fictional reality of the comic book superhero world.  I love science fiction, and even some fantasy, but the world of superheroes seems way out there, way beyond any possible believability.  Or is that their appeal?  Are comic books a genre about an alternate reality with no scientific laws and magic works?

I mean, we’re talking the age of myths.  It’s like reverting our minds back to a Paleolithic mindset.  Talk about your old time religion, this kind of magical thinking would put us back in the time of Genesis and Exodus, when the world was full of powerful beings, magic and great catastrophes.    Why are superhero movies so appealing?  Do people actual crave a time when the laws of physics were totally unknown and seeing is believing?  Of course this state of mind was how the whole world existed before science.  Maybe comics should be called pre-science fiction.

Watching The Avengers, it bothered me that normal humans were like ants scurrying around waiting for the superheroes to save them.  You could call superhero movies salvation films, because their plots often reflect evil wanting to destroy mankind and superheroes saving us.  Of course, we could just let Joseph Campbell explain the whole hero with a thousand faces again.

I grew up on the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, and he liked to believe that humans were the most dangerous critters in the universe.  He thought normal people could take on all challengers in the galaxy, and only ordinary human heroes were needed.  I thought Heinlein was overly aggressive in wanting to kick alien ass, but I do like his idea that we should live and die by our own abilities.  I don’t want to babysat by gods, mutants and aliens.

Watching The Avengers made me wonder if superhero movies are like porn movies, but instead of making you want sex, they make you lust for power.  That each of the Avengers represents powerful abilities movie goers would love to have themselves.  But if you really think about the Avengers, do you really envy them?  Who would want to be The Hulk?  Or Thor?  I bet most people envy the billionaire playboy, but does being a super-asshole have to come with the power suit?  Captain America seems like a nice guy, but that outfit!  Really?  How important are those awful clothes?  Can Superman fly just in jeans and a t-shirt?  I wouldn’t mind being able to fly like that if I didn’t have to wear a leotard and cape.  And Batman looks like a pimped out S&M freak.

What kind of inner fantasies do superheroes appeal to?  Has anybody asked their therapist?

Movie fans flocked to The Avengers and loved it.  I’m just curious as to why.  Asking me to believe in flying aircraft carriers is insulting to me.  I guess my imagination has limits.  I can accept angels and monotheistic robots in Battlestar Galactica, but I can’t accept flying aircraft carriers.  Why.  Did it do anything up in the air that it couldn’t do floating on the ocean?  Where was it going, and where did it come from?  As far as we knew it was just flying around in a holding pattern.  How was a flying aircraft carrier important to the plot?

Also, why are all the superheroes equal in durability.   Shouldn’t their be some kind of hierarchy of power?  Shouldn’t their be a chain of command?  They should be like rock, paper, scissors. Thor can hammer Loki, Loki can outwit The Hulk, The Hulk can forge Iron Man, Iron Man will bend Captain America, Captain America can romance Black Widow, and Black Widow can seduce Thor.  Why do they squabble and punch each other like Moe, Larry and Curly?  In the movie our heroes spent more time fighting each other than the enemy.  My wife barely liked the movie, and thought it was okay as a comedy.

I was bored.  I’m 60, so I’ve seen a lot of movies with explosions and cities blowing up.  I didn’t see anything new in special effects, or any new action sequences that I didn’t see in 1996 watching Independence Day.  In terms of creating an alternative reality, The Matrix (1999) had just as much comic book action as The Avengers, and it was believable within its own context.  Of course, that leads me to ask:  Am I suppose to assume all superhero movies exist in the same alternate reality and it’s an assumption I should come to the theater believing, or do each of them create a new reality to explore?

I’m used to science fiction where every story invents a new reality for the reader to judge.  So I’m asking:  Are superhero stories all set in a shared comic book reality.  Or is it two realities, Marvel and DC?  Dune isn’t the world of Foundation, and Foundation is not the world of Blade Runner, or Starship Troopers.  To me it seems like superhero reality is one shared by all comic book writers and it would believable that Superman could fly along side Ironman.

Like I said, I really don’t mean to pick on superhero movies.  I love westerns and old movies from the 1930s, and most of my friends don’t.  So I can understand my taste for comic book movies is just not suited for the genre.  My not liking comic book movies is no different from me not getting into opera or basketball.  It’s not a criticism.  I just wondered into the wrong movie theater and went WTF?

JWH – 3/20/12