The Naked City: familiar moments from an NYC noir

Naked City is a beautiful and curious artifact, especially if you're locked into the little New York City bubble of self-regard (as I am, along with most of the bloggers I follow). It's curious because of the tangible resonance of each scene, the strange alien familiarity of each city-street sequence. Simply writing about it -- waxing prosaic about the soul of the Big Apple, by way of an obscure silver-age film noir -- would have gone beyond even my own limit of self-indulgence, so instead, I looked for the beauty and strangeness in the frames themselves. You can find those below. A lot of what's worth noting is also kind of funny, at least to me.

It's worth noting that LA Noir, the recent electronic entertainment offering by Rockstar Games, was partly inspired by The Naked City. Funny that they repurposed the personality to be so West-Coast, when the film itself prides itself on being NYC Vintage. Still, you can feel the gamer spirit here, as well, with its exploratory pace, its chain of tasks and obstructions, its puzzles waiting to be assembled and unlocked. All the accented side-characters may as well be NPC's, and sometimes the dialog feels like it was written to be repeated to every passer-by.

Go looking for the film, by all means, but don't expect anything groundbreaking from the story itself. It's a detective story reduced to its most predictable beats. Instead, watch it to see this police procedural narrative, these tricks and twists and technicalities, just as they're being repackaged for drama and turned into mythology. Also, watch it for the details, the things the filmmakers probably didn't realize would be noteworthy, some of which I've presented below.

Here is a beautiful on-location shot of the Williamsburg Bridge, from the climax of the film:



In the 1940's, boys did a lot more swimming in the East River than they do now. Is this because 1) it was cleaner? or 2) they weren't as worried about the constant stream of refuse?



Have you EVER seen this many kids playing on a swingset at once? There's a girl standing up on her swing, and a little boy climbing way up one of the poles. I doubt I've ever seen as many kids in a whole playground as Detective Halloran is currently interrogating on that swing set.



Throughout all of recent history, salons have been the testing-grounds for alien brain technology. In the 40's, it was less big plastic bubbles, and more wires and spark plugs.



It's not completely obvious from this photograph, but this blind man's seeing-eye dog is also an attack dog that mauls anybody who bumps into him -- as Willy Garzah is about to find out.



Speaking of Willy, you can tell he's an athlete and an acrobat, because he's the only guy in The Naked City who wears sneakers (Vans? Chuck Taylors?) with his three-piece suit.



But finally, after all these familiar scenes and nostalgic moments, my favorite detail in the film: as Detective Halloran is chasing Willy, this random dude appears behind him, walking the same direction, and carrying a Pomeranian that's apparently too lazy to walk.



It's nice to see that some things never change.

Tree of Life: Malick, Proust, and the cinema of memory

A month or so ago, I started reading Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's epic novel "In Search of Lost Time" (otherwise translated as "In Remembrance of Things Past"). About halfway through, I went to a screening of Terrence Malick's widely-discussed recent film, Tree of Life; there was much to admire in it, but also lots of mixed feelings and dubious appreciation. And just last week, as I was finishing up Swann's Way, I discovered it was Proust's birthday. Happy birthday, Marcel!

Tree of Life is difficult to reconcile privately, I think. It's one of those films that's loose enough -- devoid enough of structure and cues, sufficiently unhinged from standard expectations -- that you might never really know what (or how) to think of it until you can bounce your ideas off of someone else. It's interesting, the way it demands to be reflected upon, and thereby, in a strange way, makes the act of analysis kind of mundane. When you do a critical reading of Wolverine or Harry Potter, there's something subversive about the act... when you write a meditation on Tree of Life, it seems almost perfunctory (i.e. this, and this, and this, and this, and this). The movie is asking for us to read it, to interpret it, to generate conclusions about its themes, its imagery, its technical and creative decisions. In a certain way, being ambiguous and experimental is its way of being predictable (at least to Terrence Malick fans and film students, who seem to be its audience).

In terms of scale, and in relation to the director's other work, I'd liken Tree of Life to Darren Aaronofsky's The Fountain or Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" films. Each of these feels like the director was trying to reach some pinnacle of style, as if to max out their own capacity for filmmaking. In each case, the result seems to overreach, toeing the boundary between eccentricity and self-indulgence. Aaronofsky and Tarantino followed their respective films up with fresh approaches... Aaronofsky totally reversed his heightened melodrama and made The Wrestler, almost comically opposed to The Fountain in spirit. Tarantino took a break from exploring tortured souls with Deathproof, and then went on to make Inglorious Basterds, which was another "masterpiece" film, but felt more like a film he was willing to grow into, and out of.

Perhaps Malick will give us something radically different with his next film, as well; his sensuous-poetic-introspective mode really does seem to have reached some sort of apotheosis with Tree of Life. These speculations aside, however, it's an important demonstration of an artist's ability to push his own defining tendencies as far as possible. The stylistic similarity to Badlands, Malick's first film, is tenuous at best, and he seems to have purged every conventional narrative and literalist instinct that was present in that first film.

Swann's Way was the culmination of Proust's work, as well, though I'm not sure whether he intended it that way (Proust scholars? Steve Carell?). The story is told as a sequence of interwoven memories, some being direct accounts by the narrator of his own life, and others being accounts of the life of Charles Swann, a French aristocrat, whose life intersects with the narrator's at a few key moments. There's a constant theme of budding love and the frustration of romantic asymmetry, all grounded in memories of specific people and places. It's the secondary characters, people like Aunt Leonie and Mme. Verdurin, who make the book so readable.

These two works have the potential to illuminate one another considerably. There are both stylistic and structural similarities between them, and I think you could discover some concordance in their intended effects. Both are experienced as emotionally-fraught reminiscences of grown men looking back on the defining moments of their lives. Both feel like reveries, journeys of the imagination to a personal history of the senses, of sights and smells, less concerned with motivations and grand designs of human lives and more concerned with individual moments.

For instance, the narratives in Proust are evoked via involuntary memory -- the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the sight of a pink hawthorn flower. These memories, meandering through the narrator's youth, are not called forth as an explanation or a didactic personal history; rather, they emerge as images from a mind freed from immediate tasks. They're the daydreams, distractions, unchained nostalgia, the roaming spirit. They are already filtered, leaving only the most significant, the ones with the most emotional resonance.

And this is why Malick's film feels the way it does, as well: it's a reverie. It's the adult Jack's escape from his solitary life, into his own sense memory. Youth is when memories leave the strongest imprint, and these childhood vignettes quiver with the vitality of boyhood.

One of the tensions in Tree of Life, hinted at in the criticism, is between the feeling that it's "naturalistic" (i.e. referring in an authentic way to memories of an actual time and place) and the feeling that the whole thing has something of the glossed, exaggerated artificial about it. It's a testament to Malick's skill that he can evoke both a real time and place, and also the mood, the golden glow of nostalgia. But the tension between "naturalistic" and "stylistically overwrought" won't really be resolved, because the film is largely about the transition between the two: about how memories become myths, about how the filtering and feedback of internalization can turn the banality of a simple sense impression into a cosmic signifier, a portent, a lesson about good and evil and failure.

Of course, that treatment leads to these scenes having an echo of archetype. (Theory side note: despite the constant references to Heidegger in the criticism, I'd argue that the film owes more to C.J. and Sigmund than to Martin). Mrs. O'Brian's butterfly, and her levitation; a harsh lesson about letting a screen door slam, a backyard wrestling match, a ruined watercolor, a house submerged in water -- to those who are symbolically literate, these might seem too obvious, too blunt. The signification begins to overwhelm the immediacy of the scene. In using such symbolic details, Malick puts himself in a tough position: he has to use convention, tapping the familiar to bring out its semantic resonance, but he has to do it in a way that doesn't feel played out. His product is defensible, but not flawless.

In Swann's Way, Proust seems to have fully solved this problem. He floods his narrative with perceptual details, many of which resist interpretation; he focuses on those things which have personal resonance for his narrator, such as the sight of a female form through the shurbbery, the moments of tension between Swann and Odette, and the unconsciously cruel remarks of Gilberte. Rather than relying on the great reservoir of pre-defined cultural symbols (Malick perhaps overuses the symbols of water and trees), Proust creates an internal symbolic language: the madeleine and the hawthorn, the blue feather, the monocle, the pathways through Combray, the writing of Bergotte. This allows the story to remain contained, and provides a cohesion that Malick never achieves.

In a sense, Malick is trying to do far more than Proust was doing: he's trying to link the episodic memories of an individual life with the mythic history of the universe as a whole. The origin-of-the-universe scene, which I haven't even touched upon here, attests to that ambition. He's also doing it in a single two-hour movie, rather than a seven-volume masterwork of literature. This is perhaps one of the downfalls of this fallible film: it starts to leak out of its scope, and with no horizons, its themes get fuzzy (which is not quite the same as being "complex" per se).

Whether you can appreciate Malick's ambition apart from his execution -- whether you can marvel at his imagery without getting too caught up in the convention and ambivalence of his symbols -- that depends on how you judge execution apart from intention, and on how keyed you are to his particular mode, and to this film's particular time and place. Variance aside, however, it's remarkable how much Malick has to say about what and how we remember our lives, and how these memories make us who we are.

P.S.

I think there's a lot more to be said about this film. Wish I had the time, energy, and expertise. For instance:

• Why does it use the language of gestures, in lieu of actual dialog? Could it be seen almost as a ballet or a modern dance?


• What of Malick's romanticized and stylized naturalism, especially considered as an objection to "realism" as a filmmaking philosophy?


• With a nod to Nathaniel's post of things people were heard saying at the film, what makes this film so difficult? What's to be gained from spurning the audience's expectations of narrative direction, rhythm, and legible emotional cues?


• As noted above, what about the debts to Freud and Jung? Just how densely archetypal and psychological is Tree of Life?

Kyle McDonald and PeopleStaringAtComputers: sorting out the issues

Kyle McDonald's work on PeopleStaringAtComputers has generated a lot of free-floating controversy. He installed a program on computers in various public places, and those programs caused the computers' cameras to take photos, scan them for faces, and then automatically send them to Kyle. He apparently curates them and uploads some of them to that Tumblr once in a while.

News services and commentators (and enforcement agencies, apparently) are all scrambling to figure this whole thing out. It's one of those little hacks that opens up a grab-bag of property rights, privacy rights, and representational politics issues. The idea that a computer is secretly taking pictures of them and sending them to some random dude is making tons of people genuinely uncomfortable. This is true even if it's a public computer, and even if the application asks permission, albiet in kind of a sneaky way.

What's left to consider, skillfully asked in thefactoryfactory's piece on the topic, is the question of how this differs from other, similar situations that set the legal and ethical precedents for it (I didn't see his name explicitly referenced, but his handle is joshuajnoble, so for now, I'll refer to him as Noble). Noble brings up the fact that this is happening in a public space (well, not technically public, but not the private property of the subjects of the photos), and we presumably appear in photos and videos in this kind of space all the time, from security footage to webcam feeds to backgrounds of other peoples' pictures. He also points out that we have our information collected, analyzed, and sold ALL the TIME, usually as statistical information that can be used by marketing people. Yet, a lot of people -- all over blogs, forums, etc -- seem kind of stirred up by this whole thing.

So the ethical question isn't so much a contractual or rights-oriented issue of the letter of the law. It's more about the ethics of consent. If people are all so indignant about this, it means there must be something unique about this particular situation, right? That's not covered by all the related situations that seem to set the precedent?

Noble's approach is illuminating, but also sort of obfuscates the nuance. By breaking the situation down into the various precedents, he shows the various issues at stake, but he fails to account for their convergence in McDonald's work. As I see it, there are three things all in play.

First, CONSENT: if you're going to capture a representation of a person, it's considered ethical to get permission, even if it's just by way of EULA.

Second, VISIBILITY: there's something very intimate about taking a picture of somebody; people don't personally identify with "data" about them, but they definitely identify with an image of their face.

Third, BANALITY: we're all highly sensitive to the fact that computers are everywhere, and we don't really know exactly what they're doing at any particular time; our modern lifeworld is built around this lack of transparency.

So why are these Kyle McDonald photos making so many people exceptionally uncomfortable? I'll let the diagram explain it for you:


Mr. Noble's examples isolate these three aspects and show how each one can be glossed over in the name of an information-rich datasphere. However, when he says, "None of the complaints seem to make very much sense to me," he's willfully denying an important fact: in this case, these issues are all active at the same time.

And it's a rare phenomenon that reminds us just how transparent and visible our personal lives really are.

AFTER-THOUGHT: I'm not trying to argue that this should be illegal in any way, or that it's unethical; in fact, this kind of non-standard boundary case -- this kind of unexpected defensive impulse -- is just what any good art should trigger. I'm just trying to make some more sense of it.

Life Developments: Dixie the Optimus S

My fiancee and I both finally got new phones this week. She got that 3D Evo, less for the trapped-in-a-virtual-cube effect and more for the processing power and range of capabilities; I got the slightly more modest LG Optimus S, reasoning that I wanted an efficient, capable touch-screen phone with a compact physical profile and the Android OS. It didn't hurt that it was free with the new contract.

The subsequent process, for both of us, can only be described as "pair-bonding." I start by working toward a very basic level of familiarity with my new companion -- figuring out where the most consistent menu options take me, what kinds of touches and taps are acceptable, and which ones cause undue tension. As I get to know my phone better, its capabilities gradually become more transparent: it can help me with directions (GPS), it has access to a whole library of specialized training in the form of Android Market apps, and (perhaps the most gratifying part) it can keep my social life straight for me, doing the constant work of associating names with e-mail addresses, phone numbers, Twitter accounts, and Facebook profiles, and consolidating that all in my list of contacts. My Optimus is frighteningly intelligent sometimes.

Of course, as I learn how to cooperate and respect my companion, it goes through a process of imprinting, as well. I train it to be quiet (at first it would ding every time I got a new email), I decide on a desirable background photo, I go about the work of creating special shortcuts and custom commands. I respect the phone, but at the same time, I have to maintain some authority over it, and even in the short time I've had it so far, it's bonded with me enough that it would be pretty inconvenient for anyone else who tried to kidnap it.

I'v been told to root the phone... to break into its OS so I can control its memory allocation and such... but this feels like it would be too harsh, in a way, a violation of the Optimus's integrity. At the moment, it's being very cooperative, and I haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilities, so I'm not sure hacking its admin accounts is really necessary at the moment.

I haven't named the phone yet, but I'm working on it. I'm sort of scanning my mental library of names and references, considering things from literature, film, video games, and just general names that I like. For some reason, I kind of like "Claude." Also, because my most common screen name is "symbot," I thought of calling the phone "robol," which is a reverse recombination of the two words in that handle. I think I'm gonna skip all the anime names, because naming a

cell phone after an anime character is just a little too obvious.I've named devices after literary main characters before... I had iPods named Mersault and Roquentin, named after the main characters from The Stranger and Nausea. This feels a little wrong, though, because the phone is not really going to be fulfilling a main-character role. I would call it Melmoth, just because I like the book, but there's almost nothing else fitting about the name or the character it would be referencing. Now that I watch more movies and TV, I could always try to figure out a sidekick name for it -- Chewy, Ethel, Sancho, Renfield, Alfred, or Sam.

But as I've thought about it, I've realized that I don't think of the phone as a sidekick, so much as a familiar. It's really, like, a little assistant that I have around so much that it eventually becomes a friend and confidante. So now I'm trying to think of names of familiars: Archimedes (Sword in the Stone), Thing (The Addams Family), Bartok (Anastasia), Boh (Spirited Away), Brown Jenkins (Dreams in the Witch-House) and Graymalkin (Macbeth). There's also some Sapient Steeds that have nice reference names: Falcor and Shadowfax come to mind. I'm sure there are lots more, especially if you start accounting for imaginary friends and such.

Taking it a step further, I think there's a fair stock of digital familiars and sidekicks recently. The Dixie Flatline from Neuromancer is one of my favorites. There's also Jarvis, from Iron Man, and HAL, which is a name I would not want to adopt for something that had an important role in my life.

I think I'll go with Dixie. Now I just need to find a ringtone that sounds like a strange, inhuman laugh.

An appreciation of Simon Abrams' "What is a Bad Movie?"

An introductory piece in a new series called Simon Says is called "What is a Bad Movie," but it's really not about badness; really, it's more about criticism showing us how movies are good:

"That’s what criticism should strive for: making films like Zardoz, or a vastly more mainstream but still eccentric superhero film like Green Lantern, look good—and in general make films whose faults and/or merits might otherwise be inaccessible more accessible."

I massively appreciate and sympathize with this piece, and want to riff off it a little bit. I'm a constant reader of various types of criticism... popular reviewers like Ebert and Edelstein, critic/reviewers like Jim Emerson and Pauline Kael, and writers with a committed scholarly ethic like David Bordwell (and many others whose names I forget, because I only read a single essay from them). Also, I read various blogs and forums, populated as they are by a Frankenstein patchwork of amateur opinions and analyses.

Some of this criticism is transcendentally good, and some of it is totally parasitic. The difference, I find -- the continuum upon which this merit can be evaluated -- is how much the reviewer engaged with the film they're commenting upon. Indeed, this is the greatest strength of scholarly writing and pop criticism... judgements aside, you really have to attempt to understand a film before you can offer any kind of interpretation or analysis. And the most recognizable common feature of bad amateur criticism -- stupid forum comments, incessant complaints from nay-sayers -- is that you can always sense that the commentor never gave the film a chance, never really opened themselves up to it.

There are certain code-words that indicate whether a person engaged with a film or not. "Pretentious" is a big one, usually used by people who were faced with an opaque or challenging movie and simply weren't interested in going there. "Pointless" is another one. "Boring" is perhaps the most universal -- it can be used in conjunction with both "pretentious," and as its opposite... many high-brow fanboys will refuse to engage with any big-budget summer action movie, justifying themselves by saying, "See, I'm the type of person who finds THAT stuff boring."

This schema favors the descriptive over the prescriptive, and the prescriptive over the proscriptive. It recommends complete surrender to a film as the best possible response, and patience as the second-best (i.e. in the case of films that don't hook you). It's a method that discourages cynicism, and has no regard for dismissiveness or contempt.

To be sure, I pretty much never hate a film. I think hatred is something that only makes sense as an instinctive response to a threat or an enemy -- an automatic, defensive way of reacting to something whose interests seem to conflict with your own. Why would I ever hate an aesthetic object? What has a movie ever done to hurt me?

That said, I don't think criticism has to be exclusively positive. Nay, the most salient and scathing condemnation is the type that first engages with the film, and then discovers its contradictions, flaws, and weaknesses. There are all sorts of films that reinforce negative stereotypes, or act as destructive propaganga, and these require active engagement and critical acuity to be recognized and deconstructed. Troy Duffy's Boondock Saints is probably the most egregious example of subconscious propaganda, a manifesto of postmodern sexism, ranking right up there with Triumph of the Will in terms of films-with-agendas. To a lesser degree, there are also hidden messages in Avatar and X-Men: First Class, the subliminal, insidious expressions of the filmmakers' (and audiences') subconscious minds.

But even with these movies -- even the most egregious -- the critic needs to step into the movie to understand its orientation. Some of the darkest films, the most dependent on stereotypes and negative energy, may actually turn out to be critiques of these ideas, rather than unreserved expressions of them. The difference between something like Hostel and something like Funny Games is subtle, and to engage with it, you need to really engage with the films. Yes, both of them.

Have I said this before? I feel like I have, because I think it, constantly. Every time I read a piece like Dan Kois's Cultural Vegetables essay, or Ebert's blustering, and subsequent further-consideration, over Thor, I think about this. I think about how important it is, for the sake of the medium, and for the sake of our own psyches, to invest in these films, to become as involved with these hypothetical, fantastic, mythological worlds, as we did with our own invented make-believe landscapes when we were children. Criticism, like all consumption, and all its corollary activities, should be about having a strict filter, especially if it's merely an enforcement of one's own tastes and habits -- it should be about being a sponge, a proud cultural processor, desperate to find meaning, even in things otherwise disregarded.

Jay Smooth and the Distributed Personality

Jay Smooth provided a video meditation on Gil Scott-Heron's death, by way of the media aftermath of that event, and it's poetic and insightful, as with all of Jay's work.



I wanted to respond to this with my own thoughts on the subject. I understand where Jay is coming from, in terms of being frustrated with the amount of bile and hostility that seems to spontaneous jump from digital interaction. Seems like trolling is sort of a standard mode of online interaction at this point, doesn't it? And once it starts -- especially from people who often sound well-informed and reasonable -- it's extremely hard not to get pulled into it right along with them, trying to do your own part in regulating the discourse and making opinions (about opinions about opinions) known.

At the same time, I'm a full-on collectivist futurist technophile floozy, so I can't disapprove of this extra layer of mediation that we're all subject to, even in the sort of calm, tolerant, high-level form that Jay's skepticism seems to take. I think there's a reason for this kind of turbulent crossfire second-guessing that happens constantly, in every sort of online dialogue, that creates both these total rhetorical asshats ("trolls") and, on the other hand, those people like Ze Frank, Roger Ebert, Jason Kottke, and Jay Smooth himself: the people whose voices, for the first time in history, are really finding the cultural capital that they deserve.

It seems to me that the Internet is a sort of higher-level processing unit, emerging from all of our consciousnesses, all interfacing simultaneously. It's a larger consciousness, not necessarily exceeding, but at least reflecting, all the confusions and multitudes of our individual minds: our repressed desires, our frustrations at ourselves (which, as part of the Internet, take the form of frustrations at one another); our mixed feelings about very personal things, our submerged prejudices and twisted senses of humor, our crippling second thoughts. And because it's public, open, and accessible from pretty much anywhere at this point, it makes all those things totally transparent, in a way that they aren't when we suppress them in our own personalities.

The id is particularly strong in the Internet. I've been to porn sites, I've seen flame wars, I've witnessed smart people descend into terrible, destructive lapses in logic... I've seen it everywhere. It's only the appointed, contractual watchfulness of community admins and the restraint of the more rational members of these forums that allows this latent chaos to deflate each time it erupts.

So I love seeing Jay Smooth's own conflicted process as he reads other peoples' tweets, and gets frustrated at their limited ways of appreciating a hero whose work is very personal to him. He seems to scare himself, to some degree, with his own frustrations, and he handles it by returning to Gil Scott Heron's music and discovering an answer: a sort of zen withdrawal, a realization that he can't be fully embodied in a digital world, and that he can't idly let that world define him.

And yet, I'm here offering the flip side to this equation. Those frustrations, that instinct to reject others' inadequate appreciations, that possessiveness and bitterness, is a part of Jay Smooth's personality, just as it's a part of each person's. We can escape the Internet for a few minutes at a time, but we can't escape that darker side of ourselves. The people who follow those instincts blindly are n00bs; the people who intentionally incite them are trolls.

But Jay responds as I hope more and more people do, with an inner strength and insight that I think the larger Internet is slowly developing. He steps back and lets his love, his appreciation, his roots in his younger self, speak to the world and defuse his own hostility. This gentleness, too, is an integral part of his personality, and it's a part of him that emerges in this video. Just as we see all parts of the strange and conflicted human race in the information layer, that digital substrate, so we see a full portrait of Jay Smooth in this video: the id, with its competitiveness and resentment, eventually dissolved by the superego, with its rational, uninhibited love for Gil Scott-Heron, and then his ego, his inner mediator, relating the whole process back to us, his audience.

It's a noble act for him to lay this bare for us. It's a beautiful thing to watch. And it's also a noble legacy, issuing from the teachings of the late Gil Scott-Heron.

Mirror Themes in Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides

There is a lot of mirroring going on in this text. Lawful and chaotic, land and sea, male and female, decay and renewal... it's all about the dichotomies. At some point, somebody may be able to construct a serious interpretation from these observations. For now, I'm just going to let them stand on their own.

Jack Sparrow meets his double, an imposter who is using his name to recruit a crew, in London, England; he discovers that this imposter is actually his former lover, Angelica, who spends the rest of the film acting as his female inversion: headstrong, clever, fatally loyal to her father, and dangerously fickle in her friendships. At the end of the film, Jack maroons her on a tiny island, a fate to which he has often found himself subjected in the past.

Barbossa, the great pirate, has defected from piracy and become a privateer, working for King George II -- a strange second-degree betrayal, the treason of the treacherous. Barbossa has a history of seeking, and sometimes attaining, a sort of twisted dominance over death, which has brought him to the land of the dead and back. In On Stranger Tides, we meet his counterpart, the legendary pirate Blackbeard, a devoted buccaneer who now seeks the same thing that Barbossa has already found and lost again: the control over his own death, which has is destined to come at the hands of a one-legged pirate (the mortal encounter with his own double).

The mermaids are infamous for being sirens who prey on men, using their beauty and sexual allure to drag them into the sea. The pirates invert this relationship, driving the mermaids toward shore and finally catching one of them, whom they capture and drag onto land with them, keeping her imprisoned in a glass coffin.

This image -- the image of dry land as an inversion of the underwater, always interchangable with it -- is repeated in later sequences, especially the image of the grounded ship of Juan Ponce de León, perched on top of a cliff in Whitecap Bay. Looking at it from below, the main characters seem to be walking on the ocean floor, seeing the Spanish ship floating above them.

The Fountain turns out to be a mirror, as well, through which youth can be attained by way of inversion of the aging process. Two identical chalices are filled, and one of them contains a mermaid's tear; the person drinking from this chalice steals the life force of their reflection, the person drinking from the opposite chalice.

And Jack Sparrow, being the film's center of attention, is mirrored in another way, as well: there's a tiny voodoo doll of him floating around, granting his enemies power over him. This doll, appearing in a sequence after the closing credits, prompts Angelica to ponder an important question: is she sympathetic to Jack, her mirror image, who saved her at the expense of her father's life? Or will her cruelty win out?

X-Men: First Class can't bear its own weight

This article by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a broad, sentimental case for reconsidering X-Men: First Class in light of its purview of history. He makes a good observation, but he doesn't really even scratch the surface of the film's politics. It's a film being championed by reviewers across the US, appreciated by critics and fans alike as a return to form for the series, and yet, under even the mildest scrutiny, its politics and fictional histories start to look twisted. And ultimately, First Class proves itself to be a very pure form of that plague of the modern blockbuster: it's a film that doesn't stand up to even a breath of critical thought, and rapidly caves in under pressure of critique.

SPOILERS AHEAD ALL OVER THE PLACE

As Coates points out, X-Men: First Class is a conceit about society and The Other, played out by a small, oppressed group of superhumans, and thematically linked to the Holocaust, one of the greatest genocidal catastrophes to ever affect white Westerners. Aside from being an emotional trigger, the Nazis also abstractly represent the repressed Patriarch, embodied by the evil Sebastian Shaw and eventually co-opted by the troubled Erik Lensherr. This is a worthy background for a film about self-actualization: the rigid, destructive hegemony of the warlike Father is an interesting counterpoint to the whole idea of modern pluralist democracy.

In First Class, there is a proliferation of White Americans and Brits, running the government, running academia, fixing the problems left over from World War II, and managing the new war against Russia. Xavier champions the emerging Western ideals of plurality, rational restraint, and assimilation, the necessary foil to both Sebastian Shaw's wealthy, power-hungry genocidal tendencies and Erik's reactionary liberation violence. What a cluster of conflicts we have here: power, retaliation, and restraint, played out in all those terms defined by Western international politics.

And from the sidelines come our minorities, Darwin and Angel; in the wake of strong men come our female characters, Emma Frost, Raven, Moira, and Angel again. And here is where First Class actually shows its true colors: in the treatment of these marginalized characters, the traces that the real world leaves on this fantasy of rebellion. That's where the film's unstated assumptions appear, and ultimately, these speak louder than any of the pandering aphorisms that Charles and Erik exchange.

The racial minority characters in X-Men: First Class are both African-American. There's nobody of any other race in sight. In a movie taking place in the 60's, during the height of civil rights activism, this is significant: this is a sign that Xavier has already reached the level of consciousness that the whole country is still struggling to attain. These black characters are a stripper and a cab-driver -- two blue-collar jobs, the employment of people just trying to get by, avoiding attention, already assimilated. And in the very first encounter with the primary antagonist, one of these two characters betrays the cause, and the other dies trying to prevent her defection.

I don’t know if this happened to anyone else, but in my theater, there were some groans and boos when Darwin appeared to defect, and then died at the hands of Sebastian Shaw. And why shouldn’t we jeer? These characters, the only two actual minorities in a whole film about being a minority, are treated in the most frivolous way possible, as triggers for our emotional response. The sting of Angel's betrayal is sharp but absolutely empty, coming from somebody who has no apparent reason to betray the rest of the group; the sting of Darwin's death is even sharper, and though we have no more than a few minutes total devoted to his real life, we have a solid 30 to 60 seconds to gape as his body burns up and falls apart. He was effectively rendered a Black Cop Sidekick with no inner life, only developed enough to be a victim, an emotional patsy with a melodramatic long death scene, and a demonstration of Sebastian Shaw's evilness.

I want to keep writing about the stupidity and callousness of this treatment, but writing more about it won't help. If you're not outraged by the first viewing, you should be angry now, since you've gotten a chance to think about it. If you're not, then maybe you'll be outraged on the second viewing. If none of the above, then you're probably not going to be very sympathetic to the rest of this critique, either.

It sucks being a non-white person in this alternate-universe 60's (New?) England, but you know what sucks even worse? Being a woman!

Now, I know women weren't doing so well in the 60's, which were still trying to correct the hyper-domesticated gender relations of the 50's. I know Sebastian Shaw is an autocratic villainous fascist superspy, so it makes perfect sense that he would order Emma Frost around to get ice from glaciers in her underwear. In fact, that line of dialog was one of the few occasions in the film where it seemed to be aware of real-world oppression -- where the actual struggles of human beings seemed to impinge upon its fantasy for a moment -- so I applaud it. There is a wealth of potential here: being a woman, born powerful, in a society that devalues you based on your gender? Being a person for whom "pride" might mean complicity in an entrenched system that constantly oppresses you? What opportunities!

But in First Class, there was a tragic consistency -- an equal treatment of all women, whether they were villainous or noble, willfully subservient or supposedly "liberated" -- in that they were all treated as trophies for the three major patriarchs. Their value within the plot was reduced to sexual interest and ideological loyalty, which were constantly conflated. Emma Frost was basically a concubine for Shaw, and Angel started the film out as a stripper. Raven's key dramatic moments had a consistent sexual/romantic component: her moment of jealousy and suggestivity toward Xavier in Oxford; her fleeting romantic encounter with Hank, which could have become an important character development, but was actually just a way of creating an artificial sentimental bond between them; her apparent attempt to seduce Erik, apropos of nothing. Moira, the CIA agent, was one of the only female characters with any institutional clout, and she attached herself to Xavier from the beginning of the film; in the end, of course, it's revealed that her interest in him went beyond "professional."

The females in this film are not oppressed minorities or the unacknowledged Other, or even independent, active characters in the field of powerful personalities. They're basically a scorecard, awarding points -- in the form of sexual and ideological loyalty -- to whoever's rhetoric is winning at the moment.

A film that deals with The Other is great, and if it can wrap it into a fantasy in order to make it easier to digest, all the more power to it. But that kind of purpose comes accompanied with some responsibilities. In a film about oppression and marginalization, you have to make sure you're always CONSCIOUS of the ways you put that oppression on display. X-Men: First Class was unforgivably blind to its own politics, and its representational devices totally sabotaged its explicit message of self-actualization and liberation.

I would have liked to say it was a good movie, just because it was fun and the young mutants were endearing -- but someone once said to me that you can't call anything "good" if it doesn't stand up to some reflection without immediately becoming "bad." Sorry, Matthew Vaughn... you're going to have to retake Earnestness in Storytelling and Critical Thinking 101.

Film Tropes and Twists in the age of Information Overload

Nathaniel at Film Experience Blog makes a passing remark about Von Trier's bizarro Nazi situation, and then turns his attention to a more interesting issue (Thank God): is it possible for us to be taken off-guard by a movie these days?

Nathaniel's right, these are changing times. Django Unchained's script has already leaked and been circulating, and in no time at all -- literally with the simple perusal of a fellow blog -- I know it's going to be perhaps his most controversial movie yet. In terms of speed and density, discourse has outpaced the ability of the audience to engage their cultural artifacts. Movie reviews will offhandedly remark that "the twist was (effective/implausible/predictable)" and think they're being opaque, but they're not. Even knowing that there's a twist in a movie will alter your entire perception of the film.

This is a curse that seems to have uniquely affected M. Night, although in very arcane ways. His career peaked right at the moment when basing a movie on a "twist" was still possible, and this was a big dramatic mechanism for him, especially in his early movies. Since those groundbreaking revelations in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, people have lost their appetite for his retroactive game-changing reveals, and his whole artistic identity took a hard blow. People were lukewarm on The Village, cold on Lady in the Water, and positively hostile toward The Happening. Honestly, I thought Lady in the Water was interesting, constructing a subtle fairy-tale ecosystem, hermetically enclosed within the ruins of crass vacation motel kitsch.

And M. Night hasn't been able to recover his artistic footing. He seemed to be flirting with self-conscious irony in the marketing of The Happening, but it did nothing for him (not many people even picked up on it). He tried to move into zeitgeist CGI popcorn blockbuster territory with AirBender, but nobody bought it. I think it was just too big for him. And while I still think the whole Facebook "Send M. Night back to film school" meme was unnecessary and mean-spirited, I still acknowledge that these were unfortunate twists for a twisty director.

Of course, Nathaniel's making the same point about Von Trier's work (did you ever think you'd hear M. Night in the same analysis as Von Trier?). He's pointing out that, though AntiChrist didn't depend on twists and surprises, it DID depend on the visceral reaction you get out of seeing something sudden and gruesome happen on a cinema screen. Same, I think, with Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, which I just rented this past week. It's on NetFlix Instant -- what more clearly signals that a film's lost its "arthouse shock" credibility? At any rate, I suffered the entire time from Information Fatigue. The visuals were bizarre and breathtaking, but I also kept thinking, "Wasn't there supposed to be more sex? When do we see the fetus? Is it time for the shocking climax yet?"

This also describes the reasons that I've been indifferent toward a lot of the "mind-bend" movies on tap lately. I'm Still Here, Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop -- these all sounded seriously fascinating, but I never pushed myself to go see them. Knowing, ahead of time, that they all depended upon self-sabotaging twists and revelations gave me the sense that I wouldn't get anything real valuable out of the experience of actually watching them. Like the rest of the wired-up world, I can't really be caught off-guard any more, and even suspecting that a film is trying to sucker-punch me has the automatic effect of turning me off to it.

Nathaniel frames this as a lack of appreciation for the unknown, and he wonders "if this will cycle back culturally to valuing secrets". I don't think that's really the root of the problem. I think it's (as I said above) sheer speed and density of information that's shining this punishing light into the dark spaces of discovery, and I don't think it'll go away. Information is kudzu, climbing all over everything, and there's no reason to think it will suddenly backtrack and become respectful.

I think, instead, the medium will have to adapt to the environment.

After all, there are some aspects of the film-attending experience that are immune to information-dilution. The key quality that's going to survive information-overload is the pure sensory experience, the synthesis of visual and sound that only activates at the moment of apprehension. It's something that Aaronofsky has really been straining to perfect, and it's worked out well for him... you could describe Black Swan or (even more so) Requiem for a Dream shot-for-shot, and you still wouldn't take much away from the immediate visceral experience of actually watching the films.

Cinematography and sound-editing are going to be EXTREMELY important in the future, perhaps more important than writing or timing. You can prepare yourself for a twist or a jump-cut or a shocking scene, and by preparing for it, you'll blunt its effect on you. But you can't prepare yourself for an incredible, surreal, perfectly toned close-up or photographically-composed landscape... at least not in the same way. Films like Blue Valentine and Never Let Me Go can sustain a heavy assault of spoilage, and they're still beautiful films that draw in the eye.

And here's the thing -- I think even the slow wits in Hollywood studios are starting to understand this. The great films of previous decades -- Deliverance, Blade Runner, Terminator II -- were relentlessly plot-driven, labyrinthine in their shifts in momentum, exercises in pacing and expectation and unexpected dialogue. Newer blockbusters, films like Avatar, Bourne, and now Thor, don't try to play on anticipation and disclosure like those older films did. They allow their plots to form organically, around tried-and-tested myths and tropes, so that they can be concerned with the immediacy of experience, the shaking of the camera and the complete sensory immersion in Asgard or Pandora.

Critics will groan over the lack of creativity in writing, about the utter failure of originality in the era of the adaptation, but subconsciously, they'll appreciate the increased emphasis on the senses: Zack Snyder's slow motion, Christopher Nolan's formal experiments in montage and sequence, Tarantino's use of well-known tropes to create truly inspired single moments. And even as they complain about those plots, they will also spoil them for us, and in the future, it won't particularly matter.

Thor: Get up on your soap box, Blondie!

Thor! Critical response: widely assessed as "definitely good enough," except for a few particular critics, who totally couldn't get into it. The most unique film of the decade? Or of the superhero era? Or of the summer? Or of the month? Probably no, on all counts. And yet, it was worth making, and it's worth seeing -- not just because it worked as a film (it did), but also because it's a wise decision, fellow movie-watchers, to experience this critical part of the Avengers saga that's been developing over the last few years.

Now, I know that a lot of people think this film is very pedestrian, and only really functions as a long-form preview of the Avengers movie. There is some merit to this criticism, but don't take it too seriously... just because it's part of a slowly-developing mythology, and a lot of the film is hitched to this larger, half-formed "Avengers" thing, it doesn't mean it's a bad film. Or even an incomplete one. Nay; in fact, I think one of Thor's accomplishments is that it's both a significant part of a massive whole, and also a self-contained, fully-realized burst of myth-making in its own right.

The film is not ground-breaking. It hits a series of essential comic book beats... a half-hearted romance, a spiritual awakening on the part of the protagonist, an apotheosis, a return to the fray to redeem himself. Most of these are just monomythic tropes, retrofitted to the comic book genre, just as they've been retrofitted to pretty much every other action movie since the dawn of time. Then, it's also got some more precise parallels to its Avengers predecessor, Iron Man: a warlike playboy undergoes a personal struggle that leads him to a place of newfound respect and compassion; he takes on the traditional Hero role, and ultimately has to defeat some monster linked to his own past... Thor battling his brother, Tony Stark his old business partner. Yes, it's a formula, as also seen in Spiderman, Batman Begins, The Lion King, etc etc. Thor commits no crime in adopting the template.

We all know that narrative innovation is not why you're seeing this film. There are other, very good reasons to go see it. First and foremost, Thor nails a very particular tone in both the character and the setting. It's a wide-eyed adolescent idealism and naivety, something that plays as mythic/Shakespearean melodrama in Asgard, and then seems a bit clumsy when displaced into New Mexico. It's all about the fact that Helmsworth's Thor is the perfect virile man, with just a touch of boyishness, and a dash of tenderness to endear him to the female population that he's set to win over. The overserious myth undermines itself in the awkward details, Kenneth Branaugh's touches of craftsmanship. "We drank, we fought, he made his ancestors proud."

The character AND the setting. This is important. That "stay golden" feeling permeates the whole film, from the artificial golden Olympian walls right into the center of the family conflict, with all that courtly drama and those epic speeches and heroic posturing. We come to understand Thor because we see where he comes from. Nobody from those hallowed halls could be cynical, or jaded, or shackled in self-consciousness. This is a land where everyone is regal, and even here, Thor is the son of the king!

So it works. All by itself, as a movie, it works. It's a routine action romp with some big aluminum costumes and grand CGI sets, lots of lens flares, and the appeal of both an outrageous epic courtly drama and an endearing fish-out-of-water action comedy. The same character inhabits both worlds, so ultimately this hero-coming-of-age theme bridges the gap between them.

But it also works as part of something larger. And though you may hate that you seem to be paying for part of something unfinished... really, it's not so bad.

Did you ever watch wrestling? Before every major match, each wrestler gets an entrance sequence. He comes marching out, accompanied by a theme song, and for the bigger matches, there's often a whole stage show, a band, fireworks, a gospel choir, a massive Alice Cooper-style skeleton. For those few minutes, that wrestler basks in the glory of his own identity, merged with his surroundings, establishing his own mythical space.

Or, on a smaller scale, consider the recent character-based trailers for X-Men: First Class, providing individual bios for Banshee, Havok, Beast, and Mystique. You don't have to just jam all the major players into some grand scheme that reduces each of them to a particular role, a narrative chess piece. Without his little trailer, Banshee might always just be a cog in Professor X's wheel (pun less relevant for this film, but whatever). I think the studio owes him this little bit of promotion, a little personal space where his light can shine.

This is what the Thor movie is, in terms of the Avengers. It's an entrance, a character bio -- a platform for Thor to represent himself, where we can fully understand and invest in his character. Same as Iron Man was for Tony Stark. Same as Captain America will be for what's-his-name.

These three individual movies will allow Marvel to set up the cosmic relationship between these three elemental forces. Tony Stark, the savvy, smart-ass pragmatist, represents business and technology, the human technocracy at work in the modern world. Thor, with his wide-eyed Olympian power, will represent the mythic human spirit, man's timelessness and capacity to overcome our puny physical limitations. Captain America, the boy-scout, the nationalist, will represent patriotism, the collective historical spirit of pride and leadership and purpose. Technology - Spirit - Patriotism. And if the Hulk is in there, he will have to represent nature, the animalistic rage of the untamed world, which man finds within himself when he gives free rein to his fury.

Iron Man was already set up. Now we've got Thor, fully fleshed out and forged in his Olympian hyperreality. Next, we need Captain America, rising up from the smoke of a bygone World War. Then we'll be ready to see them get put together, directed by the Wheedster, and the fireworks can begin.

On Dating Tall Men: Rationality and romantic/sexual selection

Okay, so Kay Steiger wrote a blog post called "Dating Tall Men", arguing that when women relentlessly select tall men over short ones, they're actually exhibiting a form of old-school bigotry.

Naturally, a lot of people don't like this. After all, it's a widespread method of selection among women, and nobody likes having their romantic and sexual criteria questioned. We're pretty protective of that particular liberty! And here's this Kay Steiger woman, calling a very common sexual requirement "irrational." Among the responses is this one by Andrew Sullivan, who says that sexual selection isn't a rational process, and shouldn't be – that it needs to be discriminatory – so Kay needs to put her PC pitchfork away.

But here's the thing -- this blog post makes perfect sense, as long as you look at it with a little subtlety. Granted, the Internet is bad for that kind of thing, but that's why you've got Benefit of the Doubt here to give you some perspective. Miss Steiger's argument is entirely justified from a pragmatic perspective, and it's even credible from a theoretical perspective, if slightly overstated.

Among the commentors, and even in Sullivan's response, there's a general claim that sexual preferences are in-born (one of the commentors calls it "hard-wired"), so we can't change them any more than we can change our height. But a couple things here. First, even if our preferences themselves were genetically determined (yay evo psych![/sarcasm]), our behavior isn't pre-determined, and self-control can do amazing things. But also, as Kay says toward the end of her post, our preferences – our ways of perceiving and judging the opposite sex – aren't just hard-wired, built into our neurons from birth. They're also conditioned by what we're told is acceptable, whether for health reasons, or simply as a nod to convention. You can try to write off all the nuance here, but it's all of these things at once.

So, in short: contrary to Andrew Sullivan's flippant dismissal, sexual selection is not "irrational." It's not done entirely by conscious calculation, but it is relentlessly rational, built on a whole massive algorithm of biological, evolutionary, and cultural "reasons." Kay Steiger: 0, Andrew Sullivan: -1. Having made this fairly banal observation, let us continue!

And I've got no data to back this shit up (lol! Do I ever?!?), but I'd guess that the "height" bias among women is one of the more socially-conditioned preferences. I'm sure there are evolutionary reasons for it, but as Kay said, these reasons aren't terribly important in the modern age, when we don't need to be protected from predators and we don't need to inherit the most physically dominant genes. On a behavioral level, I'm guessing the bias against short men is kind of like many mens' bias against muscular women, or mens' bias for small waists and big boobs. I mean, it's plausible that there's a natural component to it, but it's mostly the result of a constant bombardment of underwear ads and Bond girls in the media. It's something that's worth looking at critically.

It's a little bizarre to me that people like Andrew Sullivan seem to be suggesting that we totally abandon any critical thinking about our own romantic and sexual preferences. After all, that's the process that's allowed people to start dating across, for instance, racial lines, and the process that's created new spaces for homosexual couples. Call it PC if you want, but it's really a genuinely positive cultural thing that's been happening to human society over time.

Now, don't get defensive... I'm not in the business of blaming people for following their gut instinct. Our reasons will always be somewhat opaque, even to ourselves, and some people won't be able to get over their lack of attraction for short men, or for women who are over a size 2, or for Caucasians with freckles. Or their preference for men with beards who sweat a lot. Or their preference for people with visible scars. Or whatever. I mean, you've still gotta have your criteria, for whatever reasons you have them, and a woman who likes tall guys isn't de facto immoral (which is where I can see that Miss Steiger may have overreached a little). But there's no reason we shouldn't ask where our preferences are coming from, and try to work through them a little.We've been achieving positive outcomes in the face of natural tendencies for a long time!

I know I shouldn't take it for granted that you're a progressive or a rationalist, dear reader, but I know my expected audience... and I think the logical, progressive, rationalist position is that if we can recognize our socially-conditioned, convention-driven reasons for something, we can often get over them. This will create a stronger, more adaptable, more tolerant society, and it will also broaden our own individual pool of potential mates. So it's not just navel-gazing here... there's a real pragmatic reason to consider the issue that Kay Steiger is addressing.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence - A defense of the bittersweet ending

With Cinematical's recent Shelf Life column on the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I thought this would be a good time to articulate my own thoughts on this film, which I believe is vastly underrated... partly because nobody's given it the analysis it deserves. Commentators uniformly appreciate its daring visuals and its quietly sinister atmosphere, but many (Tolcrist of Cinematical included) seemed to hate a few things about it.

Some hated its general tonal unevenness, blamed on the fact that it's a hybrid of Stanley Kubrick's starkness and Steven Spielberg's love of spectacle. This, in itself, isn't a sin, but because of this unevenness, the film requires total commitment and immersion from the viewer. As with other towering, ambitious stylistic films (Snyder's 300 being an example), any detachment will destroy the engagement, causing the film to alienate the viewer instead of involving them.

Other critics thought it was simply too emotionally manipulative, which, in a film like this, is something that may simply have to be forgiven... both Kubrick and Spielberg are dramatic stylists, melodramaticians, in a certain way, and the film itself is a tortured exploration of desperate childhood longing and the core of the human condition.

The most common specific complaint, though -- and the one that's most vulnerable to an actual analytical response -- is the hatred for the film's ending. Many viewers, including very open-minded ones, and including ones who saw it in the theater, felt that the ending was truly unnecessary and excessive, like a coda that somebody attached to the end of the film to make it more family-friendly. Many say it should have ended when David was at the bottom of the ocean, gazing at the Blue Fairy, wishing to become human.

I'm going to argue that the far-future ending wasn't just appropriate -- it was essential to the structure of the film, turning it from a tortured drama of frustrated longing into what it was truly meant to be: a dystopian fairy-tale in which every act is answered and every movement is integrated into the whole. The ending, though it may have been unexpected, unfamiliar, and incongruous with the preceding events, was also what elevated the film into something that will stand the test of long-term critical scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoilers for Brothers' Grimm stories, in case you missed out on them for the last 150 years)

David's passage through the collapsing modern world in search of the key to humanity is famously analagous to Pinocchio's journey through the hazardous world of adults to eventually become a real boy. Now, Pinocchio was originally written by Carlo Collodi, was an Italian scribe who learned his craft with the translation of fairy tales, and the feeling of these fairy tales is impressed upon his work. This includes the sense that the world outside the home is dangerous and unpredictable, with no real place for heroism and personal glory. Indeed, the lack of a hero might be one of the strangest aspects of traditional fairy tales, like those of the Brothers Grimm -- the protagonist is always a commoner whose humble virtues are honesty and a sense of duty. These protagonists never discover that they're exceptional, and they never find some kind of inner strength to save the world.

This is a starting point for understanding where A.I. is coming from. David may indeed be exceptional in a scientific sense, but he isn't a hero. In fact, one of his greatest challenges is facing the fact that he's a manufactured creation, no more worthy of love than any of his boxed-up brethren.

Most of the Brothers' Grimm protagonists DO overcome some sort of personal challenge. Hansel and Gretel defeat the witch by taking advantage of a golden opportunity to push her into her oven; in The Robber Bridegroom, the bride arrives at the groom's house when he's not there, and she finds sympathy in the old woman whose head always shakes (damn, what a troubling image...); the prince, through wit and observation, finds a way into Rapunzel's room to win her love; the queen convinces Rumpelstiltskin to wager her child, instead of simply taking it from her.

Each of these represents some willfulness on the part of the protagonist to oppose their fate, and it is the same with David: his search for the Blue Fairy, though it means everything to him, is ultimately a token gesture of agency in the midst of an impossible situation. And yet, none of the above moments of triumph is really a solution, because each of these characters is stuck in a greater bind: Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest, the bride is caught in a marriage to a criminal, Rapunzel is still in the thrall of an evil sorceress, and the queen is still caught in a promise to a tiny, evil man who's great with a loom.

But the thing is, each of these characters DOES find a happy ending, and it's not because they're heroic -- it's because of the grace of nature, of forces larger than themselves. It's because, when they remain true to themselves, they are rewarded with an escape from the impossible situations they're part of. Hansel and Gretel somehow find their way home (there are no breadcrumbs to guide them), and they discover their mother is dead; the bridegroom, by pure luck, acquires proof of her groom's evil deeds, and once she finds her way home, she is protected by her community; the blind prince stumbles across Rapunzel, and in what seems to be a miracle, her tears of sadness cure him; and after the queen is given Rumplestiltskin's name by a messenger, who was in the right place at the right time, and once she has defeated the little monster, she simply stands by and watches him destroy himself.

This moment of grace is essential to fairy tale structure. It's a message that's both hopeful and frightening: when you've done all you can to solve your quandry, you just have to hope that the fates smile down and solve it for you.

And this is what happens in the bittersweet ending to A.I. Humanity might have collapsed, but through their creations, these strange machines that exist beyond the singularity, their spiritual nature has been preserved by the universe, and they finally give David the happiness that he deserves because he so kindly and whole-heartedly desires it. There's also a mythical point here, too: the point that David is the Adam to these robots, that his first glimmer of human emotion is what has allowed them to evolve in the way that they have. However, this wasn't particularly an accomplishment on his part -- he never asked to be the beginning of a new cybernetic species. He's granted mercy simply because he's a thinking, feeling creature, filled with infinite longing, and that entitles him to whatever happy ending the universe can provide.

If he really had been stuck at the bottom of the ocean, which no broader, more transcendental resolution, wouldn't the tale have felt incomplete? Wouldn't the film then be saying that emotion, desire, and human frailty are anchors? That our longing, desperate hands reach for nothing, because there is no grace in the universe that we occupy? Wouldn't the frozen bottom of the ocean have been a truly chilling final image in this vast, cyclical film?

Personally, I would never have asked for any ending but the one I got.

Candy Tangent: Blow Pop Minis

You know I'm an open-minded man. An appreciator of novelties. A neophile. A dude who loves candy, despite the annoying insistence of his diabetes. But even with all those things being as they are, I found a product -- a candy product, no less, and one that I'm naturally disposed to liking -- in the bottom-floor food vendor in my building recently. And contrary to my every nature, this is a candy product that makes me uncomfortable.

They're called Blow Pop Minis.

Now, I used to love Blow Pops. I liked the gum, and I liked penetrating the protective hard candy shell. It was the right formula of fruit and sugar and tartness... a personal favorite, though I realize I'm no qualified critic. But surely you see the issue with these mini Blow-Pop things.

Once you get through the outer shell, whether by chewing or dissolution, what the hell do you do with the gum?

Maybe if you haven't seen the things, and haven't thought through this process, you'll jump to the most obvious answer: you chew it, like you do with gum. But this isn't a monolithic comestible perched atop a stick... it's a single entry in a bag of hard candy. You're supposed to keep eating them. And when you've got gum in your mouth, it's very inconvenient to chew and swallow something else... especially something sticky, that requires some attention to deconstruct.

And though you may call me impatient, I assure you: it makes no sense to just wait until you're done the first bit of gum before you start on a second piece of candy. First of all, the gum inside is barely the size of half a Chicklet. It's so small, it can practically disappear between your teeth. And besides, when was the last time you opened a bag of Mike & Ike's, or even Milk Duds, and just spend a whole 15 minutes on each one? It's a total breach of protocol.

I even considered swallowing the gum each time, but couldn't bring myself to do it. The aversion to swallowing chewing gum, conditioned into me when I was a child, is still too strong for me to openly defy it.

So what these dangerous little objects prompted me to do was to hold some sort of gymnastics yoga session inside my mouth. Here's how it goes: when you get through the first candy shell and end up with a wad of chewing gum, you shift it off to the side, under your lip or in your cheek, and if you're agile, you can free up enough of your mouth to get a second one in there. When you get through that one, you can add another tiny bit of gum to the first little piece, and you have something a little bigger... it's like eating Big League Chew, but only adding one strand at a time, and with a good deal of effort between them.

Keep working, like you're grinding away in an RPG, picking up experience points. Think of each little piece of gum as a gold coin, once you've defeated that candy shell. Once you get to the end of the bag, you'll have something around the size of a block of Bubblicious. Maybe a little bigger. Not huge, but gratifying, after all you've gone through to get to it.

This doesn't sound so bad, if you really need something to do. But let me tell you -- halfway through the bag, you'll definitely be asking yourself if it was worth it.

Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, with some parallels to Libya and Gaddafi

Watched Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins the other day (trailer here). Here is a film that takes the heroic crusade story, strips it of any sanitation, and presents it in a raw, relentlessly pure form. The protagonists represent moral outrage in pursuit of a shogunate advisor; this advisor, the antagonist, represents pure authoritarian cruelty. This is one of those defining stories of Western culture, mostly manifested as tales of revenge: Medea (no, not the Tyler Perry creation), The Searchers, the films of Park Chan-Wook, right on up to Die Hard. In all of these films, and thousands of others, there's a crossing-over from the role of "protector" to the role of punitive crusader... from "we need to stop him from hurting people" to "it's time the bastard got what's coming to him."

Takashi Miike purifies this narrative by reducing each side to a 180-proof distillation of itself. I'll try not to give too much away, but in a harrowing scene early on (not the first scene! So don't let your guard down!) the film provides the necessary evidence that Lord Naritsugu isn't just a bad leader – he's a monster, an absolutely deserving target for the audience's hatred and the protagonists' retribution. Here, Takashi Miike does the things that have made him famous in other movies, like Audition and Ichi the Killer: he provokes absolute revulsion, creating one of those rare situations where voyeurism is actually kind of painful for the audience.

So Niragitsu is painted as unabashedly sadistic and cruelly authoritarian. Throughout the film, he's also portrayed as totally indifferent to the world, morally and politically and socially, a blasé despot whose fascism comes less from ambition than from lethal boredom. In nature, even "animal instinct” has a sort of rationality, usually springing from a sense of self-preservation or a vested interest in dominance. Niragitsu doesn't even have this virtue. He embodies the tyranny of sadistic irrationality, and indeed, comes the closest of any villain I've seen to pure nihilism. By the end of the film, he's willfully defied human nature and the ethics of war by wantonly murdering families; he's broken the mandate of brotherhood and military loyalty by disrespecting the remains of his most loyal subordinate; he's even flaunted self-preservation, walking willfully into traps and thanking his assailants for making his life more interesting. Niragitsu is a force of chaos

This makes the thirteen ronin tasked with murdering Niragitsu a de facto force of order and rational retaliation. Interestingly, their motivations are actually split at the top of their hierarchy. On one hand, there is Sir Doi, who hires the assassins, and whose motivation is very political. He sees the threat that Niragitsu poses to the legitimacy of the shogunate, and he is acting to neutralize it. On the other hand, there is Shinzaemon, leader of the assassins, whose motivation is moral outrage. The pivotal scene of the film, referred to above as causing "revulsion," has Sir Doi trigger Shinzaemon's retaliatory instinct, and the rest of the film follows through the brutal, precision-targeted punitive act that results.

So the opposition -- our protagonists -- are embodying both sides of the rational-response position: they are there to protect the political system from breakdown, and they're there to punish a cruel and chaotic criminal maniac.

The desire to inflict punishment sets the stage for some of the most compelling, cathartic moments in the film -- in particular, the presentation of a scroll reading "Total Massacre," and the withering gaze of a master swordsman within a chamber of loose swords. This is male posturing at its finest, obligatory in a movie of showdowns and stand-offs -- those pivotal moments that join the samurai film with its cousin, the Western.

As I was just beginning to forget this vicious slice of filmmaking, I got around to reading Barack Obama's speech about our approach to Libya, and it reminded me that this sort of posturing and aggression and retaliatory instinct appear on the world stage, as well. Whether in the case of Iraq or Libya, it seems that the US has lately been spending a good deal of its military capital on protective/punitive tasks in global politics. This is because, according to the Commander in Chief, "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

Like Miike's moral schema, whose violent moral indignation is underwritten by a political mandate, Obama sort of had a situation with two competing motivations: to restore order and allow the country to stabilize, and to aggressively depose Colonel Gaddafi. The parallel isn't too exact, I admit, but there's still an analogue between the two sets of cases. Obama spent a good portion of his speech speaking to that tension -- the tension between acting cautiously, in support of political stability, versus bringing down the vengeful might of a powerful nation upon a ruler who has proven cruel and unpredictable.

In referencing Iraq, Obama was drawing attention to a situation where we acted upon our deeper moral instinct -- the morality that comes from emotion, rather than calculation. When we went into Iraq, we were taking a sort of 13 Assassins approach to the problem: our political aims (protect ourselves from supposed WMD's) and our moral aims (punish a relentless enemy of America and of democratic values) appeared to coincide, although in retrospect, the political aims seem like they might have been a bit of a pretext for the moral righteousness. Anyway, after that conflict, America got to have its own little drama of catharsis, when the public got its hands on those cell phone videos of Saddam's hanging.

But Obama's speech was largely about point out that though the situation in Libya is dictated by a broader sense of ethics and protecting just causes (his answer to the true isolationists), it can't be about the need for retaliation and punishment. It can't be about creating an enemy for the United States to crusade against; rather than an emotional morality of retribution and closure, this conflict has to be built upon a rational morality, a calculation of responsibility and a flexibility of approach. And I think that if Gaddafi got executed by the opposition tomorrow, and we got to see it, very few Americans would feel a sense of self-indulgent pride.

After all, we haven't made that kind of an enemy out of Gaddafi. Because as much as it makes good entertainment, it makes for terrible politics. America has no business instituting a policy of Total Massacre.

But anyway, to end on a shamelessly editorial note: luckily, we have a principled, calculating leader at the helm of the armed forces in this country. We have a commander in chief who believes in the importance of the international community, and who believes that the best way to serve American ideals is to create international partnerships. Only in this way will the United States succeed in fighting despots, rather than becoming one.

Cyclic versus Literary Fantasy: Fritz Leiber and Monster Hunter Tri versus Tolkien and Final Fantasy

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.

Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.

This text marks the first official meeting of the two iconic characters in Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry, a book that unmistakably fits the descriptions "hack-and-slash" and "swords-and-sorcery." It's part of a whole Swords and --- series, all concerned with the partnership between these two characters, one a brawny defector from a society of snow-barbarians, the other a spritely thief and corrupted student of a white wizard. This particular novel teems with classic literary mechanisms straight from the adventure story guidebook: first loves, betrayals, deaths, buddy-film comraderie, quests for spoils and fame turning into quests for revenge. This book alone has at least three different revenge-quests, between its four most important protagonists.

Reading Leiber's work, you're liable to feel a vast gulf between this style of storytelling and, say the literary approach of Tolkien, who basically set the bar for the high fantasy epic. You may be tempted, initially, to see the difference as one of quality. I don't think it is, though.

Last April, Capcom released Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii here in the states. It's a striking gameplay experience -- the aliased edges aren't smoothed over, and the 3D physics aren't neatly polished. The collision detection is... kind of primitive. Also, there's no attempt to give the game an intuitive gestural interface. Nay, in many cases, you'll be three or four layers deep in menus, browsing items packed together in dense menus, marked by the simplest 8-bit icons I've seen in a long time. It's as close as you can get to a turn-based RPG while still fighting in real time.

Sometimes there are uncanny parallels between very different experiences. Playing Monster Hunter Tri and reading Swords and Deviltry may create just such a juxtaposition. These are both unapologetic throwback experiences, willing to throw away all sorts of artful pretense in order to create a direct, unmediated experience of adventuring. The best way to describe this experience, at its core, may be that it's a Dungeons and Dragons experience, the feeling of being immersed in a world of particular rules and rehearsed beats and well-articulated types, an aggregate of simple elements so numerous that once combined, they create their own sort of complexity.

This may be rather a stretch, but I'd say that there's a qualitative difference between something like Swords of Lankhmar, and something like The Lord of the Rings. I'd call the latter a piece of "literary fantasy," and the former a piece of... what's the best way to describe it?... "cyclic fantasy" is really the best I can do, I suppose.

The basic difference is this: in literary fantasy, there's a sense that the world is continuous, built on a deep history that runs entirely independent of our own. Tolkien was a master of this type of world-creation: from The Silmarillion, a sort of nebulous creation-story, to the vast and complex languages and cultures that populate Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes living worlds, and we always have the sense that we're only seeing a tiny glimpse of them. These worlds are filled with stories, including the story we're reading, that represent subtle and sweeping paradigm shifts, not only for the characters, but for the worlds themselves.

However, in cyclic fantasy, there's a sense that the world is static, only temporarily deviating from its baseline position, and in conjunction with this, there's a sense that the world only consists of whatever we've seen of it so far. In Swords and Deviltry, the first third of the novel takes place entirely in the Cold Wastes, and though the city of Lankhmar is discussed, it's only described in the most generic possible terms as the quintessential fantasy city. It's really rather disembodied, at least until part of the story takes place there, and the place is described a little more directly.

This sense, the sense that you're creating the fantasy world as you explore it, is very different from the feeling you get in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the remote "outside world" beyond the Shire seems to live by its own inscrutable rules, and thus seems hostile and unwelcoming to the hapless explorers. Indeed, both The Swords of Lankhmar and Monster Hunter Tri are very encouraging to the explorer, who can travel through successive landscapes and towns that are static variations on a range of accepted themes.

Of course, the reason I called this "cyclic fantasy" is that there seems to be an unchanging "way things are," and the fantasy world of these tales always eventually returns to this state. Indeed, in cyclic fantasy stories, the main characters are often tasked with averting some cosmic disaster or destroying some villain that's getting too powerful, whether for rewards or for vengeance; thus, they are often tasked with maintaining the status quo. The "quest" is a job, assigned by some guardian or authority in the world, that leads to the restoration of the given order. This cycle repeats forever, throughout the myriad adventures of the story's protagonists.

Indeed, one of the distinctive aspects of Swords and Deviltry is that the two main characters' lives before meeting -- their lives at their ancestral homes -- are barely sketched out, only given enough detail that we can look forward to their dissolution. In effect, it seems like these "normal lives" -- the Gray Mouser's life of tutelage under a good wizard, and Farfhad's life within the community of northerners -- are already deviations from the true way things should be. By escaping and defying their mundane backgrounds, these characters bring into effect the status quo of their world. One of the essential components of this status quo is that these two adventurers are united in friendship and purpose, and that they're free of their histories and obligations, at liberty to explore and undertake quests.

If there's a video game equivalent to the "literary fantasy" paradigm I mentioned earlier, I think it's the Final Fantasy series (I'm thinking of Final Fantasy VI and VII in particular). Like Tolkien's work, these games take place in worlds that seem to be neck-deep in their own history. Exploring and understanding these worlds is remarkable, largely because they're so unpredictable and full of personality and narrative power. However, the feeling of being in a living, historical world is remarkably different from Monster Hunter Tri's sense that the world is waiting there for you to occupy and defend it.

And though I'd never try to make Fritz Leiber (or anyone, really) compete with Tokien for some sort of literary merit award, it does seem like there will always be a place in fantasy for the cyclical, the alchemical and archetypal, the world created as a static structure to frame the adventures of the characters who enter it. This is the setting we enter, not as strangers, but as avatars, harnessing our power to create the world as we experience it.

To the Void: User-driven content creation, and the need for an artificial audience

A friend's band just released their first album, via Kickstarter. They're called Hurrah! A Bolt of Light! They play pretty rad alt-rock with a teeny bit of folksyness to it. You should check them out.

Today, in More Intelligent Life, Joe Morgan blogged about how Berlin is the new hotness for emerging musicians and music technology, and for a whole segment of culture connected to it. He ended the write-up with this observation:

"While the average music-obsessed teenager is unlikely to be able to emulate the sounds produced by Richie Hawtin on his or her iPad, tapping into this ubiquitous urge to create could become big business in the next stage of the music industry’s development."

These two things, taken together, put my mind on an unexpected track, as follows: does it seem to anybody else that the opportunities for creative production are growing much faster than the interest in consumption of its products? Like, there are currently a LOT of blogs out there. There's an explosion of DIY film and video production, with video-blogs, web series, fan-made music videos, short films, feature films, etc etc etc. There's a burst of music production opportunities, too, as Joe Morgan suggests, above. We're at a point in history when the tools are available to do pretty much anything, and to find pretty much any talent, or develop any personal passion, that might be latent in your personality.

Now, I unequivocally think this is a good thing. Access to communication technology can only enrich our cultural environment, and whatever it takes to make it work, I'm confident we'll adapt.

That said, I am a little nervous about the way access to tools is amplifying the universal love for attention. There really is a broad, universal desire to create something, and a parallel desire to find and captivate an audience. So there are more and more content-creators, an explosion of amateurs both talented and otherwise, some slipping into niches, some desperately searching for big breaks or back-doors to fame and fortune. But for all the rise in people expressing themselves, is there a corresponding rise in people willing to listen to these new voices, willing to help parse them out, give them a few minutes, and offer a fair shake to unproven work?

The ideal solution, of course, is that citizens of the media-scape learn to be mindful. To whatever degree a person creates things, he or she should also be willing to seek out, critique, and reward new work from others, both in the same platform, and in other areas. Blogs are helping with this phenomenon quite a lot, I think, creating bridges between niche communities and mainstream trendsetters, and linking small personal communities with larger communicative spaces.

However, I'm not sure this will ever happen to a degree that will take care of the asymmetry between new creators and new audiences. After all, technologies are enabling people who are both extremely prolific and unfortunately self-centered, and it will always take some extra work and open-mindedness to go out and discover the work of new artists. It's a question of economy, you know?

For this reason, I think there's an emergent market here, for whatever programmer wants to jump in: the market of artificial audiences.

You really just have to supply one app... call it "appreciative critic"... and sell it to anyone who's tired of releasing their blog posts and photographs and installation art into the void. It could look like a robot, like those uncanny-valley things, or it could just be a voice over your phone... or something that used the camera on your mobile device to scan something, and then gave feedback in a pop-up window. The first generation can just randomly generate some responses: "Oh, this is your best work yet!" and "I'd look it over again before posting it anywhere."

Down the line, though, AC (that's my shorthand for Appreciative Critic) should learn to scan for patterns, make constructive comments, and generate praise based on actual characteristics of the work. And after a few more releases, maybe it can actually provide meaningful critiques of new work! I think we'd end up creating artificial intelligence without even realizing we were doing it.

Engineers, semioticians, linguistics programmers, Ray Kurzweil? Somebody wanna get on this? If we can't all become highly responsive and open-minded consumers, we'll have to go ahead and create them, won't we?