Mondaugen's Miscellany

Happy Birthday, Ana Stelline.

Happy Birthday Ana.

It's virtual turtles, all the way down, for you. As for us.

 

You were born today, a fictional character in an alternate universe. As with all artistic creations, you and your character's life are resonant with meaning. And most delightfully, your character is about just that--being an artistic creation, or not, which is the essential human question. Did God make us, or are we the product of an unintentional evolution?

In Blade Runner 2049, we have already seen the first part of your life. Like your parents, you do not know who you are. At the end of the film, you appear to be on the verge of learning who your father is, that your mother was a Replicant, and that your father may be one as well. How will you react to this clarity of identity? And what will it mean to you? We do not find out.

Your profession is to create "realistic" memories, so we know you are filled with them and the lives they represent. You are human, but live trapped(?) in a virtual world because of your immunodeficiency. You seem perceptive, innocent and wise. We have seen you cry before, so we know you are capable of strong emotions. And you seem nothing like Replicant K, the emotionless hollow center of the film, who also does not know what he is. He was not born, but you were. Is that the difference--that because you were born, you have a soul? Or are you different at all?

Whether Denis Villeneuve's s artistic depiction is successful or not, we can step back and find a lovely symmetry -- for we do know that every aspect of your character is meaningful, as each attribute was consciously created, just as you consciously create the memories of Replicants. Within a fictional universe, you live in a bubble of virtual environments, work as an artist of virtual life, created by Replicant parents of virtual life, but you think you are human and real, until you discover that .... the turtle's backs that your turtle's backs stand on are virtual as well, all the way down.

 

How can it not know what it is?

But what is it?

Deckard asks this about the Replicant Rachel in the original film; but this is more of a human question.

Rachel can find out what she is. Her innocence can be replaced with knowledge. Humans can never be sure of who we are or what we mean. We've been trying for millennia, and have yet to reach a consensus.

We might have been created by an omnipotent God. Or by the accidents of evolution. Or designed by Aliens. (We also may be figments of alien imaginations moving through a virtual reality, created by them....) While many of us believe one answer or another, Humanity does not have a universal consensus. A Replicant that knows it is a Replicant has perfect clarity on what it is, and who created it, within its fictional universe.

We humans sure would love to know. So we watch movies about this question and wonder through them.

The key power of a fictional universe is that it was entirely created by a human consciousness. Every part of it was put there for a reason by the artist. All lives have five acts and a death that means something. Only a Human who believes in a religion can say this is true of his or her life. As to religion, we turn to fiction for answers and meaning that we cannot find in reality. We turn to fiction because we doubt the apparent meaning of our lives. Do we matter? And to whom and what? What does it mean when a child commits suicide? Or a father abandons a child so that it may live? Why were we even born in the first place?

We love to know that there are answers out there. That maybe life could be like fiction.

 

I want more life, father.

In the first film, Roy Batty has the singular experience of getting to meet his maker.

What would any of us humans do, were we to meet our maker? What would we ask? Roy has the distinct advantage over every human by knowing who his maker is, and his address. I'm not sure humanity would know what to ask, because we mostly don't know who to ask.

Would we want more of the same, as Roy does? Or something better? Or simply an explanation?

In the final scene of Blade Runner 2049, Ana Stelline meets one of her makers, her father. But we do not see what questions she asks him. Perhaps she will ask who or what made her father.

It's the key question of the film.

And the answer is... the credits roll.

Too much like life.

That aspect of this film -- finding voids where we really want answers -- has been criticized. It's terribly unsatisfying. Like never getting to see the monster. But it is the film's core takeaway, poking at our need for meaning and purpose and denying it in a particularly meaningful way.

Replicant K is the expressionless and apparently emotionally hollow protagonist at the center of the movie. We first see him become convinced he was born, and thereby think his life has meaning. Then we see him lose that meaning and become hollow again. A moment with an advertisement for Joi, his truly hollow fiction of a meaningful relationship, he chooses a path to create real meaning and purpose, for himself, by connecting a father and a daughter. K chooses to enable the real love of a father for his daughter over his ephemeral joy. It is no accident that Luv crushes Joi in an earlier scene.

The conscious, intentional choice to fill the voids in our lives and hearts is the meaningful undercurrent of this rather bleak but beautiful film. We may all weave virtual fictions, as Ana does, to give our realities the purpose that their existence asks.

K's sacrifice, so that Rick and Ana can be together, is how he fills his void.

Our voids?

Ana Stelline, the fictional weaver of fictional memories for fictional people, who lives in a virtual bubble, helps us humans, living in meaning-vague reality realize that we all must write our own stories -- if not by choice, then through ignorance of who or what we are.

 

I know what is real.

So the older Deckard claims.

Wiggly Eye Progress

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is now my favorite movie.

On the first viewing, it edged out my previous favorite movie, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which had edged out Blade Runner: The Director's Cut in 2007, which had edged out Blade Runner in 1992, which had been my favorite since 1982. Got that? Good. Let's move on.

I left the theater enthralled, laughing, delighted, It was as if I had left my brooding, atmospheric and angry youth behind, choosing instead a full embrace of the joyful absurdity and liberating meaninglessness of life. I sort of had, already, when I was in my 20's, but this movie confirmed the move. Mind you, I still love Blade Runner: The Final Cut.

From now on, I fight like Waymond. Ok, I've been fighting like Waymond for some time, without realizing that I was fighting like Waymond.

Kindness is the most powerful tool to resolve conflict and troubles.

Here are some recent efforts in public places, mostly on the EL in Chicago, but also in a private home.

The homes of friends and family are rich hunting grounds for wiggly eye applications:

 

And I am happy to report, that the movement grows. I stayed at a hotel and found this on the bed.

The best places to place googly eyes are where everyone is having the worst time.

We recently spent 2 1/2 hrs at O'Hare airport, waiting in line for customs and immigration. The halls were poorly-ventilated and hot, and there was nowhere to sit.

So I googly-eyed the cloth railings in a dozen spots, just in case any exhausted eyes wandered down.

Forwards and onwards, folks, to remind the world of what a silly place it is.

Insipid Midsommar Sommeil

About the 2019 Art-House Horror Movie Midsommar....

It's generally a bad sign if you fall asleep in the middle of a horror movie. I had to nudge my girlfriend awake once. Not that I felt she was missing much. Just that the iPad was on her lap, tilting dangerously, and I became fascinated with just how bad this movie is. Well, not that fascinated. I did check my cell phone, as maybe someone was reaching out about renewing my apartment insurance, or one of my comments on Facebook got a Like. As there were plenty of scenes in which the characters are doing absolutely nothing but sitting and looking around, pretending to be worried about something, I felt I wouldn't miss anything.

Midsommar may not be as satisfying as a Like on a comment you just made in Facebook, but it is puzzling enough to deserve some post-movie commentary. As with all bad movies, it's simply poorly-made. But it's the way in which it is bad that I found fascinating. Midsommar is what happens when juvenile males with the emotional complexity of still-born squirrels set themselves the task of presenting deep, powerful disturbing psychological truths -- the kind we can't confront in our own lives without the help of brilliant, insightful writers. I want to slap the keyboard from their hands, tell them to go live life for a few hundred years, and then come back with something to say. Midsommar wants us to feel just how scary and powerful emotionally-disturbed girlfriends can be, and how powerful and important it is to belong to a family (oh the evil we will do to belong somewhere!), but comes away feeling more like a PSA against watching poorly-written movies by morons-given-money in Hollywood.

You have been warned.

A synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

Dani and Christian are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, a grieving Dani invites herself to join Christian and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in a land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing. From the visionary mind of Ari Aster comes a dread-soaked cinematic fairytale where a world of darkness unfolds in broad daylight.

I'm not sure what movie this describes, but it surely isn't the one I saw. "Dread-soaked?" consists of our heroes sitting motionlessly at a long dining table waiting for the signal to eat. The village-commune-cult members are all perfectly silent and motionless. Our six American student-anthropologist/psychologist/tourist visitors (yeah, it's kinda complicated, and to no particular point other than they want to "study" them) sit a little less silently (or we'd be well into a Warholian 24-hour film of the Empire State Building). In fairness, they also sit in fields tripping on mushrooms being amazed that it is still daytime. And they stare with looks of boredom and incomprehension at the village-commune-cult people in white shirts with their arms in the air. This is intended to be suspenseful, or amazing, or something other than boring, I suppose. We're all waiting for the jump scare that never happens. We're all waiting for the red-blood spatter across those white clothes. Again, never happens. Trying for silent-looming-dread, I am reminded of Thanksgivings during which we all sat at our places silently, in front of stone-cold food, pretending we weren't there, waiting for my parents to finish arguing a point about who is to blame that the table is wobbling at the far end, or who let Uncle Lester get so drunk, before we could tuck in. The effect is just get on with it.

A "world of darkness?" The Swedish cult members speak English and seem professionally friendly, as if they were all retired SAS airlines flight attendants. In fairness, they give one member of our ill-fated group a blood eagle (great horror movie stuff!), but we never get to see it happen. And they do it in a chicken coop. And the floor is clean. And we never really know why they did it. They do sew one up into a bear skin and set him on fire, but the fellow's bemused expression, as if he'd just been woken up and asked make sense of a Donald Trump Press Conference, fails to fit the circumstances. The death is presented as mundane, which should be disturbing, but it's really effectively mundane. More fog than darkness.

No wait! Maybe these genius filmmakers are trying to make a point about the banality of evil! They looked up Hannah Arendt in Wikipedia! Read all about it! Great counter-intuitive concept! The Swedish Village-Cult members are genuinely banal. And they give one of the American tourists a blood eagle. So the contrast must be creepy! That makes it a horror movie! Nope. The whole scene is just banal because we can't find any way into the why. We don't know why they need to blood eagle anyone. We just can't access the professional flight attendant cult-members' joy-in-evil. So without jump scares, we fall asleep.

The Rotten Tomatoes synopsis was written by someone with a stake in the film's success. It entirely avoids the "emotional arc". What I found was a movie that centers on a caricature of an emotionally-unstable-young woman who gives the cult permission to kill her jerky boyfriend for having super-weird orgy sex while she's off planting corn and a liver in a field. This means she gains acceptance in the emotionally-responsive and involved cult-family she has always wanted (since she was recently orphaned). The person who came up with this deep-psychology story arc has no clue what it is to be human. No clue what it is to be an orphan. No clue what it is to be female. Or male. Or emotionally disturbed. Or afraid. In my humble opinion, horror movies should be written by people who have known fear and can find creative (metaphorical) expressions of the experience. Here we find writers trying to convince themselves that by layering cliches, they'll say something profound.

In fairness, the banality of evil is a perfectly powerful concept. It was explored so very well in the 1988 Dutch movie The Vanishing. The bad guy is super banal. And this movie is super scary. (ignore the crap 1993 Hollywood remake). You come away understanding how easy evil can be, and that it is too easy, and that it is enjoyable for some of us. You don't come away from this movie without the shakes, looking strangers and loved ones in the eye, and wondering what they could be capable of.

The lack of intelligible feeling is Midsommar's failure. No emotion ever feels genuine. Our heroine Dani is supposed to be constantly upset for two reasons. First, that her boyfriend is a jerk who wants out of the relationship because she's clingy. Second, that her sister murdered hear parents and then committed suicide. Which should bother her more and cause the endless crying that bores her boyfriend? We can't really tell, except that she tries to be not-needy and screams a lot in bathrooms and forests. Her boyfriend is just a jerk who can't break up with her, then has wild orgy sex with a teenage-seductress cult member in a super-unsexy ceremony. Frankly, I would have lost my boner when his seducer puts her pubic hair in his lunch. But somehow he keeps it up all the way through to his orgasm, all the while looking confused, and like he would rather be getting stoned and eating pizza with his bros. Maybe he faked his orgasm. That would be believable.

By order of the script, the "normal" people in this movie do not react to events the way normal people do. The evil people do not act or react in any accessible manner. It leaves the rest of humanity on the outside looking in at what seems to be a collection of mismanaged actors. Frankly, the actors here all deserve a shout-out. They need work, after all. If the writers and director hand them unintelligible garbage to act out, there's no way but South for them to go with it.

My theory of how such a movie came about is simple. Perfectly competent male writers let their juvenile side get the better of them, let themselves be convinced that a cliched-ultimate-angry-emotionally-unbalanced-girlfriend-revenge scenario was powerful because their juvenile sides are afraid of it, unable to grant humanity to women, too caught up in themselves to get to know a woman. So they argue to the rest of humanity "hey-aren't emotionally-unbalanced girlfriends scary because when they get angry at their boyfriends they let them be sewn up in bear carcasses and burned alive?" just, well, isn't scary because it's absurd. Our heroine would have to lose her humanity, at some point, and do so for some good reason. But there isn't one. The village-commune-cult people aren't particularly attractive to her. So the idea is absurd. And absurdity isn't scary. It's funny.

If you're after jerky juvenile males being punished by women for being jerks, the torture-porn movie Hostel fits the scare-bill just right. It's scary, not absurd, because the angry women don't fully realize the consequences of their actions. This is universally human, a common life experience, and thereby a powerful horror trope.

6: Blade Runner, or That One Beautiful Movie

30 Objects in 30 Essays

From the objects that I have made, objects other people have made, objects that I live with, and what they have to say. The products of hands and brains. The obvious differences between things and words. The tangible and intangible rewards of effort. Use and beauty as the two primary qualities of objects, words, hands and brains. For through objects we make the stories of our lives: a life made, a life bought, a life well-used, a life beautiful and useful.

---

 

We all have a movie that hit us in the solar plexus.

It arrives at a particular moment in your life, and is unexpectedly, deeply relevant. It makes a connection, perhaps to a deep longing, perhaps to a vulnerability. Maybe it opens a world, or answers a question.

Perhaps you couldn't finish it. Perhaps it became your favorite.

For one friend, that movie was Rocky. For another it was When Harry Met Sally. For another, it was Amelie, and for another The Shaun the Sheep Movie (or so he claims). To each, their own.

For me, that movie was Blade Runner.

One Friday night in 1982, I went to the movies at the Bank Street Theater in New Milford, Connecticut with a friend. I forget what our options were, but we decided on Blade Runner. I was 15 years old.

"My Mother... let me tell you about my mother.... BANG BANG BANG"

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes"

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."

Five years earlier, I had fallen in love with the world of Star Wars. That future -- already old and neglected -- was utterly cool. It was the spirit of New Milford's late 70's urban neglect projected to be our universal fate. Like Luke, while my reality wasn't so bad, I longed to get out and see more of the universe. There had to be something better out there somewhere. The sun still shined in Star Wars. It was a new hope for a future past. But by 1982 that fantasy had grown thin. The Empire Strikes Back hadn't come out yet to renew it.

Blade Runner's world was post-apocalypse, the sun never shined, and hope was an unreasonable commodity. This dark, brooding, sexy, thinky, violent, fantasy world of fear resonated deeply. As if my adolescent hormonal landscape had found an external expression.

I shaved my head like Rick Deckard. I wandered Connecticut in a haze of indifferent acceptance of the death of hope, wishing I had a cool gun to shoot dangerous Replicants on sight (I'd just know). I wanted to climb through that decay of that world, the empty rotting skyscrapers filled with abandoned apartments. I wondered about Roy Batty, the Replicant who wanted more life, even in this hellscape of a world. And I wanted to understand why he saves the man who is trying to kill him at the end. What wisdom about transcendence did Roy attain?

In the pre-internet days, there was no way to see it again except in the theaters, and it was quickly gone. I couldn't discuss it with anyone either. Friends who had seen it found different things to like, different interpretations. Deckard was obviously a Replicant, wasn't he?

"How can it not know what it is?"

---

Watching it again over the years (and in its many versions) has only deepened my appreciation. (This is not true of, say, the Speed Racer cartoons of the 70's that fascinated me when I was five. The subtleties of Speed did not age well with time and a second look.) Blade Runner remains my favorite film. Perhaps it's a bird of a feather thing, but several good friends think the same of it. Of course, they pull out different favorite aspects, and have different interpretations of them (how can Deckard be human???? He can't!). A good movie is a big tent, with room for many eyes, and even an evolution in understanding and appreciation.

As a slightly paunchy and resigned middle-aged man, I see the movie (The Final Cut version, ahem) more through Roy Batty's eyes, the monstrous, murderous more-than-human on a quest for more life.

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

Roy is Conrad's Kurtz on a reversed journey -- from the lawless outer planets to the very center and wellspring of technological civilization. The freedom he gives himself does lead to abomination and murder, as with Kurtz. But Roy's freedom leads him to make an epic demand of his god.

"Then what do you want?"

"I want more life, Father."

Roy's anger at having only a few years of life in an infinite universe is the unspoken cry of every human. Roy's hypersanity and amorality cuts through the murky, unspoken contradictions of our beliefs and accepted routines and compromises. Like Milton's Satan, he is the anti-hero we rejoice in, who dares beyond all who have dared before.

And yet he remains a child, only 4 years old. Everything new dazzles him. Sebastian's apartment, with all his prototypes and toy people, is truly a candy store for Roy. He feels he has found one of the true toy makers, an Archangel of the Realm that made him. 

"Gosh, you have a lot of nice things here."

Balancing this innocence, though, is the least innocent reality of all, the inescapable fact of death. It is the one experience Roy cannot comprehend, learn, or accept.

"What seems to be the problem. Roy?"

"Death."

It is indeed "the problem."

But then again, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Roy, watching sea beams at the Tannhauser Gate, had a mono no aware moment, and came to an understanding of the beauty in the impermanence of things. He would have just hung out with Pris and continued to watch the beams.

But then again, he does have a mono no aware moment--in that final scene moments before he dies. In Roy's final realization, when he sits down and realizes it is time to die, he accepts death, even makes it beautiful.

And he knows his only possible route to 'more life' and immortality is through Deckard -- for the Blade Runner to understand and remember his life of pain and fear (and nice time watching the sea beams). So Roy's sacrifice in the end is selfish: by playing with Deckard's life, but in the end giving it back, Roy gets what he wants: immortality through Deckard's memory.

This is why I enjoy this movie so much. There is so much to tease and pull at in any given moment or scene. Am I right or wrong in my interpretation? I largely don't care, for the pleasure isn't in being right, it's in fiddling with the question.

Deckard's problem is another kind of innocence. Like Rachel, he does not know what he is (I find the film a richer experience if he is a Replicant, revealed through the unicorn reverie). He also does not understand his work very well, what it means, or really why he does it. As in every good film noir, our hero is a couple of steps behind the eight ball. Consider that Deckard is "sushi" in the theatrical release, his wife calls him a "cold fish," pointing to his inability to "feel" as a Replicant. But frankly, none of the humans -- Gaff, Bryant, Holden, Tyrrell -- seem much more empathetic than the Replicants. This is not a warm and fuzzy world -- except for Rachel... vulnerable, fragile, sensitive Rachel. She notably cries. The only other character who cries is Roy... Replicants cry and Humans don't? What devious game is this movie playing on us?

Rachel's quandary is the same as Deckard's -- not knowing what she is, and from that she grows a terrible doubt about everything she knows or feels. That she kills Leon, one of her own kind, to save the man she loves (and thinks is human), reveals a capacity for emotional intelligence that Replicants are not supposed to have. Is Rachel "special" because she can cry? Is Roy special too? She, Roy and Pris all strive to understand (and in Roy and Pris's case, also master) what they are. The film gets us to doubt the categories its world establishes as certain and inviolable -- Human and Replicant, Master and Slave, meaningful life and meaningless machine. 

The race and racist themes underlying Blade Runner seem obvious. Humans think Replicants inferior (because soulless?), and use them like slaves. The Replicants largely acquiesce, apparently, in their offworld jobs; but some rebel. And Roy wants equality, and kills his god for his betrayal in this fundamental basic inequality, denying the full enjoyment of life or even acknowledgement of a soul to the Replicants. 

"I think, therefore I am."

"Very good, Pris. Now show him why."

If a machine has this self awareness, is it not alive? Please don't answer that question.

---

Good film (and all good art) creates an imaginary experience that enhances reality. Art helps us ask questions we assume we already have the answers to. A Romance, for example, might get us to examine our marriage, and an Epic to examine our goals in life. We might thrill with desire to be like the protagonist, or shudder to see the antagonist inside. A science fiction movie asks us what future we want, and a dystopian one, what we might deserve. Through stories, we can examine our lives, from the losses of our past, and future anxieties, to our strangely ungraspable Now. We should come away more aware of our choices, more conscious of what could be. That a film is "entertaining" merely means it offers relevant questions in a way we can make them our own. I think differences in taste can largely be squared with the kinds of questions we allow ourselves to ask about our lives, and the quality of a film by the quality of questions it leaves us wanting to think through.

Blade Runner confronted me with a host of core questions about life that I much enjoy continuing to ask -- Who am I, and how do I know? Would I risk my life for more life? What would I say or do if I could meet my maker? They are happily unanswerable, though delightfully playful answers are offered in the movie.

I suppose our favorite movies type us. I am a sucker for thinky sci-fi (though so many of that genre are absolute crap). If your favorite movie is a romance, do you feel typed? I;m sure if I told you my favorite movie is Spaceballs, you would come to an opinion about that.

---

Sequels are hard to contemplate for ultra fans. There can be no reasonable expectation that the writers, directors and producers of a sequel are interested in expanding or continuing precisely what any one person finds in a film. So they are doomed to disappoint.

Blade Runner 2049, came as a surprise (a sequel made nearly 40 years after the first somehow feels opportunistic). But after two viewings, I come away realizing that it is a better-made film. And I find this conclusion deeply unsettling. It is masterfully and beautifully filmed. The plot is exquisite, the pacing careful (I like slow sometimes). But 2049 asks questions of me that I'd like to think are settled, rather than the ones I enjoy keeping open. And in this regard it falls.

In 2049, K is Pinocchio, the boy who longs to be real (born, not made). First thinking he is a manufactured Replicant, then thinking that he is a born Replicant, then recognizing that he really was manufactured and a plain-old Replicant, he finally chooses a selfless (and notably Christian) sacrifice to define and give meaning to his life. He gives away his joy-in-life, to enable the love between Deckard and his daughter Ana. (That the character Luv crushes the memory stick of his companion Joi, is a clunky but sweet metaphor-hint). Deckard's selfless love for his daughter Ana is the second miracle of the film, after Ana's Replicant birth.

K does not live in fear as Roy did. He lives with hope. And well he should: Blade Runner 2049 offers two miracles. This is a much, much brighter world, with only evil mega-corporations to worry about.

K should live in fear. He is shoved around at work and called a skinjob. His boss tells him she likes him, in spite of what he is. Apparently, the discovery of the born Replicant will start a race war. This is the fear of the summer of 2020, and it is as tangible in the movie as K's complete indifference to it.

The core of 2049's story is less visceral, more intellectual and thereby weaker. K challenges less, liberates less, risks less. The innocence that we associate with hope robs K of knowledge we lack, and hope that he, or another character, might have.

2049 does not pick up on what Deckard owes Roy, or even remembers him, which is a shame as the film touches on immortality and the question of the soul in other ways. Does Joi have a soul, though no body? (And is her love for K a simulation or real?).

The main question the movie raises-- can and should Slaves become Human and achieve full rights? gets answered by a relentless sympathy for the Replicants. We don't see threatening, monstrous machines so much as a cool, and collected good citizens. So of course we want their rights.

Yay Replicants. Boo racist Humans.

This is much less of a question than if a machine slave is Human or not, and how can we know. It is an important lesson for the innocents in our world who do not seek value in all that lives and even all that doesn't, but it is a clunky rhetoric nevertheless.

---

As we create more sophisticated AI, and fiddle with the genetics of known life to create new life, we will one day, perhaps soon, perhaps not so soon, have to wrestle with the basic question of Blade Runner.

Their legal rights are not in question. We already confer them on rivers, trees and such. So machines will earn rights over time. What is in question is our understanding of life, what deserves honor and respect, and what does not.

Who do you honor and respect? (Your parents? Your friends?) Who do you not honor and respect? (your political opponents? other races? animals?)

What do you honor and respect? (Art? Nature?) And what do you not?

---

This is why I find Blade Runner a beautiful and useful work of art.

 

Jaws: Hands versus Teeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You've got City Hands, Mr. Hooper. You've been counting money all your life."

- Quint

 

Would you agree that the measure of a man is best had through the feel of his hands?

Chances are good you do not. Hands are out of fashion. Social justice and environmental stewardship are in. These issues shouldn't be mutually exclusive; in fact, I believe they are mutually supporting. But if you ask around, um, No, Hands are not a big deal these days. Donald Trump's small hands don't even make the news. They are irrelevant. Fox News and MSNBC would even agree on this point.

Hands have been on shaky ground for at least two or three millennia, and in the last three hundred years suffered a catastrophic decline in reputation. As soon as the architect stopped building with his own hands, but found other people to do it for him, the value of hands began its inexorable decline in favor of words and other symbols, and with them, the fine art of theory, and with it, bullshit.

(You're wondering if I'm being serious or joking. Good. I have you right where I want you -- in an uncomfortable spot feeling uncertain whether you should be enjoying this or not, be thoughtful about it or flippant, and how on earth to respond or not. Your instinct is to stop reading, and go find something easier to engage with, such as a self-confirming post on FaceBook, or a pandering Netflix comedy. My essays are distillations of our engagement with real life -- they are both a bitch to find a footing in. You have to work at it, and the reward is uncertain. The question you're not asking yourself is why this is a problem. In either my writing or life itself. Now answer that question: I fear being thought a fool by _____, even though nobody is looking. So when you stop worrying about judgment, you can begin to enjoy my writing as superimposed fragments of serious thought, frivolous humor, and the absence of an authorial parent telling you how to enjoy it. Now, get on with the question of teeth versus hands in the movie Jaws). 

Jaws is not a movie about Hands so much as Teeth. Wondrously Large and Super-Bitey Teeth. Of course by Hollywood Rules, the movie has a happy ending. The Shark doesn't win, People win. And of course they use their hands to win. They have to do things to kill the shark, and hands are (almost) always involved in people doing things. This is all quite obvious.

But what kind of hands will win the day against the Shark? Jaws plays with this question in a light-hearted but powerful manner.

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

What? you ask yourself, and consider switching the channel to Real Housewives of Televisionland. This list makes my brain hurt. It is supposed to. Get used to it. Just remember it for the moment.

First consider what hands can do.

Hands are strong -- they can crush a beer can, and turn the lid off a jar. They can throw a ball accurately at 100 mph, break the nose on another man's face, and hold onto a rope around a wild bull for 8 seconds. Hands pull the rest of the body up a cliff face, and hold a rope for another.

Hands have fine motor control -- they can braid hair and screw in a light bulb. They can thread a needle and handle tools to saw and drill. They can open a car door and make teeny-tiny watch parts with teeny-tiny screwdrivers. They can tickle, they can touch.

Every mammal has a brain, some bigger than ours. But whales have fins, elephants have trunks, bears have paws, sloths have claws (and, yes, sharks have teeth -- see where I'm going?). But none have hands the way we do. They define our relationship with the world. Hands make Humanity. OK, and our brains. Together. With language. It's a menage-a-trois of capability. Other primates have equal hands, but not the same brains or languages.

Back to Jaws: it's three sets of hands against one set of teeth.

Our three heroes: each of them wields tools for a living -- (the ultimate product of hands is technology: Tools!)

Blue-collar Quint crushes a beer can -- Quint has all of his fishing tools at hand on his boat. 

White-collar Hooper crushes a Styrofoam cup -- Hooper loads up the boat with his scientific equipment. 

Brody looks on -- He doesn't bring much, except a change of underpants and his policeman's service pistol. 

The shark crushes surfboards, boats, people, etc. -- The shark has all of its tools in its mouth.

Neither the extensive fishing tackle nor the extensive scientific equipment defeats the Teeth. But Brody sees his shot, and, from a sinking boat, and under tremendous pressure, takes it and makes it.

The point of this essay? You ask for a point? You ALREADY HAVE IT. You should be making it on your own.

I like to think that Brody has spent years at a firing range learning how to shoot accurately; he takes his job seriously, and policing skills include handgun control -- fine motor control in his hands and the ability to place a shot under stress.

The lesson of Jaws, which every astute viewer must conclude leaving the theater, is that Hands Win -- not in direct competition, but through their deep capacity, not just to make, but to master complex skills.

Used un-intelligently, hands will always lose against teeth (everyone we see being eaten by the shark slaps ineffectively at the shark's nose or something). These are lessons for our children: you see that victim slapping helplessly at that shark's nose? That person never spent time learning a specific skill, mastering something, whether it's fishing, oceanography, or simple marksmanship.

These are important life lessons, available even in mostly-mindless summer blockbuster Hollywood movies.

And yes, I'm writing a book about the human hand, a celebration of the its amazing versatility, and an invitation to learn and master a skill that requires fine hand work as a way to find a durable happiness in life. And also winning when pitted against super-bitey sharks.

 

Ad Astra: the Best Absurdist Comedy in a Long While

 

I watched Ad Astra the other day.

It is now one of my favorite films. But not because it is a serious science fiction drama, but because it is an absurdist comic noir masterpiece.

At first it seemed to be a serious science fiction drama. Arthur Clark's space elevator brought to life. Explosions. Heroics. Emotionally resonant reflection. A mission to save the world and resolve the protagonist's issues.

Just like every other science fiction drama.

But the dead-pan delivery, purported to be due to our hero's extreme emotional compartmentalization, begins to raise a wry smile in all the wrong places. In many spots, it is entirely at odds with the overarching seriousness of the situation. And then often enough the situation is so utterly ridiculous, it's also at odds with any overarching seriousness. We're in the War Room of Dr. Strangelove, but nobody is cracking jokes about getting their hair mussed in an atomic exchange. We're in Men in Black except there are no funny aliens. This is a WASP Space Balls with good visual effects. It's as if the universe of Ad Astra is conspiring to make all us serious people thinking serious things about serious matters look rather silly.  

Consider:

Three highly-trained professional astronauts accidentally kill themselves within a matter of one minute in their own capsule while trying to kill our hero. The scene is a parody of physical comedy and slapstick incompetence. Wilie E. Coyote could not have done himself in better. One by banging her head on a wall, another by shooting open a can of some kind of gas, and a third with his own knife. Our hero then radios the people who ordered the deceased to kill him, saying:

Roy McBride: Mission, this is Major Roy McBride. I boarded the Cepheus against mission directives. I did not do so with hostile intent. But because of my actions, I regret to inform you, all crew members are now deceased.

(all quotations from here)

I regret to inform you? Even the US government, when it kills the three Ryan brothers in Saving Private Ryan, sends a person to inform their mother, instead of a form letter. Major Roy McBride's crispy-dry form letter back to his government, after witnessing and participating in one of the most ridiculous accidental triple suicides in film history, is a brilliantly funny bit of black humor.

In this light, earlier scenes that seemed simply bad become funny.

We have top Space Generals asking a top Space Major to please describe what he knows about his World Famous Father.

Lt. Gen. Rivas: Major, what can you tell us about the Lima Project?
Roy McBride: First manned expedition to the outer solar system, sir. Some twenty-nine years ago, as you know.
Lt. Gen. Rivas: And the commander was?
Roy McBride: He was my father, sir.

On one level, this is exposition at its worst. Disengaged actors blandly reading lines to fill the backstory: telling us, not showing us. But here it is so bad that the effect is comic. Rivas asks Roy a question everyone on earth knows the answer to -- is it a Jedi Mind Trick question to elicit a "telling" response from Roy? Well, Roy has just been revealed to be Mr. Super-Even Temper! And he proves it! By telling Rivas the obvious. We've just learned so much!

This is exposition that makes fun of Exposition. This is the insight from Men In Black brought to life-- "Thank you Gentlemen! You are all we have come to expect from years of government training." These Generals are in charge of everything? Dark Helmet asks better questions (such as "What's the matter, Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?")

In addition to the the self-inflicted deaths of three highly-trained professional astronauts at the hands of parts of their own capsule, we have enraged space monkeys eating their minders. Bizarre space horror takes an Ed Wood turn.

Yeah, folks. That's what's out there in space. Our big challenges in conquering the universe are really pissed-off carnivorous experimental monkeys. I saw it coming, I really did. I'm surprised James Gray didn't go for carnivorous tomato plants.

Roy solves the situation by blowing up the monkeys (they go splat rather emphatically). Afterwards he has a moving scene explaining his life philosophy to a computer program. If the simple summary of this scene isn't absurd enough, consider the content of the dialogue:

Roy McBride: Well, that’s it. I mean, we go to work, we do our jobs, and then it’s over. We’re here, and then we’re gone.

Roy's existential philosophical theory in a nutshell, this is. Jean Paul Sartre must have been a consultant on the script.

Then, he really gets into it.

Automated Voice: Please describe how the incident itself affected you.
Roy McBride: The attack, it was full of rage. I understand that rage. I’ve seen that rage in my father, and I’ve seen that rage in me. Because I’m angry that he took off. He left us. You know, but when I look at that anger, and if I push it aside, and just put it away, all I see is hurt. I just see pain. I think it keeps me walled off, walled off from relationships and opening myself up, and, you know, really caring for someone. And I don’t know how to get past that. I don’t know how to get around that. And it worries me. And I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be my dad.
Automated Voice: Your psychological evaluation has been approved.

Putting the oddness of experimental monkey-rage to one side, we find here the core of Roy's motivation, the driving force behind his completely-emotionally-disengaged character. It's a touching moment, or should be: the rage so many sons feel for their absent or disdainful fathers, the lack of any social empathy for it, or any understanding by anyone in his life (some have found this a very moving scene for just this resonance).

And the only response Roy gets is a cold, authoritarian computer voice "approving" his emotions? Bwahahahahaha! The irony would flatten a city of shirts. It's not just heavy, it's Bathos defined. (Now go look up Bathos online, you Philistine).

The scene presents important, deep feelings, and mocks them.

The climactic scene, when dad and son meet, leads to the (omigosh) discovery that we are alone in the galaxy. Our hero Roy's observation, looking at is dad, is that "Now, we know we’re all we’ve got."

The biggest discovery ever! Confirming Fermi's paradox! (more on this later) And all Brad Pitt has to say is a mawkish sentimental observation on the importance of family????? What is this, the Hallmark Channel????

In a Hallmark card, this works. It's a nice thought. It is important to express of connection sometimes to friends and family. With a smiley face emoticon.

The anti-climax of this climax is extreme: the meaning of the universe IS (drumroll please) -- Appreciate the little things in life! After all the serious science fiction drama, all the deaths in getting Roy to his father, the people Clifford has killed on the research vessel, all the destruction from the "Surge" on Earth, we learn that we have each other? Awwwww.

If you insist on this movie as a big-budget, serious science fiction drama, this kind of "insight" gained from trillions of dollars in space exploration and lives wasted, the line "Now, we know we’re all we’ve got" is a clown horn honked at the height of Beethoven's Ninth.

But in an absurdist universe, of course all we have is each other.

No. Wait.

In fact, we don't. As Roy is looking for meaning in an absurdist universe, he's looking for love in all the wrong places, as the old song goes. Clifford says "let me go" and floats off to his death. Sorry Roy! You don't even have each other! Dad just eliminated himself from the equation!

And so the sum of existence is realizing all we have is each other, and that we don't have each other. This is a brilliantly reductionist conclusion, using Hallmark card sentiment in a totally serious manner then proving it wrong, leaving us with...?

Gosh. We're all alone in the universe. I mean alone alone. As in Alone.

Roy's Final Summary Movie Insight is as follows:

Roy McBride: I’m steady, calm. I slept well. No bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I’m aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I’m attentive. I’m focused on the essentials, to the exclusion of all else. I’m unsure of the future, but I’m not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live and love. Submit.

Voltaire could not have penned better lines for Candide. I wonder if Roy thought up his Kindergarten platitudes on his way back to earth and the auto-da-fe awaiting him for disobeying orders.

 

I do wonder if the dry humor of this movie was lost on its actors, who seem to believe they were in a serious, insightful, somber and ambitious drama. It's a bit like watching Eyes Wide Shut in which Kubrick cast two shallow actors to play shallow characters, but didn't let them in on the joke. But at times it feels as if James Gray wasn't even in on the joke, that his script writers handed him stuff and said, with a straight face, "We've written Roy as a very serious man, so conflicted inside (mmmmff)... we've come up with deadly serious obstacles in the way of his eventual closure with his (giggle) father...  saves the solar system along the way... we've embedded deadly serious insightful meaningful (snicker) observations... kept it (bwahaha) simple of course. Roy is simple, he doesn't over-complicate (hehehehehehe)...

So I come away realizing that Ad Astra is just-so-slightly stealthily hilarious! It could only be funnier if the script writers weren't even in on the joke. Then truly, the joke would on humanity as a whole, as we drift through our empty universe making funny noises with our lips to pass the time...

---

A note on Fermi's Paradox

Fermi's Paradox is the real science behind this movie, whether the writers realize it or not.

The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years from edge to edge, Fermi reasoned, which means that a star-faring species would need about 10 million years to traverse it, even if moving at a very modest velocity of 1 percent of the speed of light. Since the galaxy is more than a thousand times older than this, any technological civilization will have had a lot of time in which to expand and colonize the whole galaxy. If one species were to fail in this endeavour, another wouldn’t. Consequently, if intelligent species were out there in any appreciable numbers, they would have been here already. And yet, we do not see them on Earth or in the solar system. For Fermi and many thinkers since, this constituted a paradox.

--Milan Ćirković

 

The "Great Silence" we know, every day we look up at the stars and see/hear nothing is indeed a hard problem for science to answer. To an evolutionist, the idea that somehow we (intelligent, sentient, industrious beings) are all alone in the universe, is repugnant in the extreme.We should be common. But so far, all the (credible) evidence suggests that we are not.

But pause for a moment about the assumptions that Fermi made. The first is that aliens would want to expand into the galaxy the way some of us do (one could argue that whales, or elephants, due to their larger brains, are more intelligent than we are. Technology is a dumb intermediate stage. True intelligent species do not make space rockets and stay home or travel other ways). The second is that aliens could expand into the galaxy (there is much to suggest that life on earth is all interconnected, and uprooting one small part and transplanting it elsewhere is not so easy as finding a planet with liquid water and landing on it. Perhaps it is insurmountable?). The third is that we could recognize alien life if we saw it. Who says it has to be carbon-based meat like us? Maybe we're surrounded by alien life and simply can't recognize it?

In short, Fermi's Paradox is irrelevant. If we're after company in the galaxy, we will never find it, no matter how many space slugs or space whales or sentient clouds the galaxy teems with. And by the absence of any ancient alien radio waves for all our looking, creatures like us (with televisions) do in fact seem to be a bit rare out there.

Cheers to just having each other!

Now go away, kid, you annoy me -- W.C. Fields

A personal movie review of Joker

So my girlfriend Dinah and I went to see Joker last night, because, you know, we're adventurous.

 

What a movie... An experience akin to being chained to a radiator for 2 1/2 hrs. Exhausting.

 

It has a lot to say. And I think it says it well. And it's nothing I want to hear. Much I feel I already know.

 

The plot is a simple parable of the Deplorables against the Liberal Elite. Pretty straightforward. Apparently the Liberal Elite don't give a shit about the Deplorables (called Clowns in the movie), just want to patronize them and solve their problems for them in an impersonal manner.

 

What's lasting though, is watching a mentally-ill person seek, and be endlessly denied, real and benevolent human connection. And then, when he has totally lost it, and become the crazy killer of the comic book world, he remains capable of mercy in a way no "sane" person is.

 

Can't think of another movie that has a stronger plea with modern society to drop media-based understandings of each other, and be generous on a personal level.

 

- 10/14/19 A case in point here.