Dads and Daughters and Dozing Off

John Crowley wrote about Sleep more perfectly than I could ever hope to rival, so I’ll use his words (culled from his novel Little, Big) as padding between my mutterings.

“But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising. On a certain November afternoon, twelve years ago, from a certain nap (why that day? Why that nap?) she had awakened from sleeping: eyes-closed, blankets-up-to-chin, pillow-sleep Sophie awakened, or had been awakened, for good.”

Little, Big pg. 254

Sleep is every sentience’s fellow-traveler, and so, naturally, we’ve all cultivated very personal relationships with her.

For some, it’s affection, even to self-indulgence: a full embrace of the co-dependence, a love that won’t be ashamed when it dozes off at a dinner party or starts its day at twilight.

For others, it’s more of a disciplined respect. Sleep is a solid partner, a trusted support, and neglecting her is unwise. She has time slots and minimum commitments. We can’t make this work without her.

For me, and others like me (though I don’t hear from us very often), it’s another thing entirely. Where others have affection and codependence, we have resentment. Where others have respect, we have defiance. When she lurks in our bedrooms, we try to ignore her, or step outside. If we could cut ties with her, we would do it at a moment. As it is, we are stuck with her.

We are the Citizens Against Slumber, the odd hour keepers, the midnight oil burners. We know Sleeping is a Sucker’s Game, and we only play it because biology bullies us into it.

“You still up?” she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.
“It’s awful,” she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. “Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind’s asleep but your body’s awake—and won’t give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another…”
[…]
“Awful.” He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. 

Little, Big pg 289

What makes sleep so interesting, for me, is how it unhitches my consciousness from continuity.

What is my brain doing, that it has to forget where I am, how old I am, and what’s happened in my life since high school? How does sleep, for a few hours each night, manage to persuade my consciousness to let go of those anchors and drift off into this oneiric ocean?

You’ve seen that moment on-screen… most recently in The Night Of, for instance, but also in The Hangover: where am I? What happened last night? Cinema is the best medium to simulate the sudden break, the jump cut, and the resulting scramble for context. Editing is the art of (dis)continuity.

It happens so fast, too. One serviceable definition of “dozing off” is losing continuity without really losing time: blinking stupidly in your driver’s seat, having to remember why you’re at this light, why you’re on this road, and panicking for a moment, checking to ensure your foot is still on the brake.

This example is especially salient for me, because on a few occasions, I’ve stupidly dozed off while driving. I never hurt myself, or anyone else — dents in cars, maybe, and some calls from insurance companies — but it significantly heightened my awareness of my own mortality. I seem to have outgrown the danger, but I still wonder about those occasions and their counterfactual universe where I veered off the road, collided with the end of a guardrail, or crumpled into the space between a semi’s front and back tires.

It didn’t take many incidents to really amplify this anxiety, and it’s been with me ever since. I don’t grow out of it. I generally trust myself behind a wheel now, but I still don’t really trust myself to sleep.

How does this manifest? It happens when I’m sitting in my car in the driveway, listening to the end of a song before I head inside. It’s warm, and I’m not in a rush, so of course my consciousness drifts a little bit.

I should know I’m safe, shouldn’t I? Isn’t that why I’m so relaxed in the first place?

But when I come out of that doze… when my eyes snap open and my ears recognize the same song, still playing… it’s always accompanied by a moment of panic, feeling like I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, expecting to see a car’s headlights as it collides with my little Nissan.

That’s one of the little offenses that Sleep has for me. I don’t blame her — it’s self-inflicted — just a little prick of karmic retaliation for my tendency to fight her, belittle her, act like I don’t need her.

She also likes to interrupt Netflix movies, and sometimes she smothers me on train rides, or when I’m trying to write essays.

“Now, child,” she said. “What was it you learned from the bears?”
“Sleep,” Lilac said, looking doubtful.
“Sleep, indeed,” said Mrs. Underhill. “Now…”
“I don’t want to sleep,” Lilac said. “Please.”
“Well, how do you know till you’ve tried it? The bears were comfortable enough.” 

Little, Big pg 268

Sleep has a stronger hand to play, now that I’m getting older. She visits me with more regularity — the end of work, the last hour on the edge of normal-person bedtime — and she usually wins.

I remember, with bitter nostalgia, my time as the dominant party in this rivalry.

From my teens until my late twenties, I was assertive with sleep, stern in guarding my boundaries. In a week, I could get by on 30 hours of sleep… several short, productive nights, followed by a low-key “catch up” night, and then back into the fray. I don’t know whether it affected my life expectancy, but it gave me a feeling of control over my time, and I got a lot of writing and gaming and movie-watching and exploring done.

I have a kid now… a toddler, a fucking dream come true of a little girl… and I’ve lost a lot of leverage in these negotiations with Sleep. Even when the little one’s not waking up for comfort in the scarce morning hours, she gets up at 6:30 AM — always, like a milk-crazy alarm clock — so I can’t have those short Saturdays and Sundays any more, where I lose a whole half-day to the blissful, achy shame of daytime slumber.

You know how parents always seem to have these uptight, early-bedtime, high maintenance sleep habits? Well, there’s a reason for that: having a child changes your whole economy of time and energy. It’s such a humbling, such a paradigm shift, it’s hard to imagine it could possibly be worth it, unless you’ve actually had the experience (where you suddenly realize it’s “worth” pretty much anything).

She looks so peaceful in her crib, and she’s so happy when she’s sleeping well, it’s easy to forget that Sleep and I haven’t resolved our antagonism. It’s up to me to mediate that Daughter/Sleep relationship, after all… creating a “good relationship” with Sleep, i.e. creating good sleep habits, is a imperative parenting role.

But I need to remind myself: Sleep isn’t always a friend. We foster these good sleep habits so the little girl has an opportunity to be on good terms with Sleep, so Sleep is ready to help us take care of her. But we are not here to force it on her. And seeing her and admiring her peaceful breathing when she’s asleep? That “Ah, she’s so perfect” moment? That’s for my own satisfaction, not purely for her well-being.

The girl might love Sleep, like her mommy. That would be fine with me. But she also might fight with it, resent it, keep her distance from it. She deserves that chance, too.

So I’m not going to surrender to Sleep. I’m not going to bow down, promise her my Witching Hours in return for comfort and consistency. I will keep resisting her, at my own discretion, until the day when she wins that final battle and my eyes close forever. I think, after this lifetime of short nights, I’ll be able to appreciate that restful eternity even more.

A Defense Against the Dark Clouds

A post shared by Jesse Miksic (@miksimum) on Feb 3, 2017 at 12:35pm PST

It's hard to think about anything except politics these days.

I'm not the first to notice this. It's a known issue, especially within the media-elite bubble of anxiety and outrage. Checking Twitter and Google News and WhatTheFuckJustHappened... these things eat up more of my cognitive real estate than I ever thought I could spare for something so unproductive.

There are other effects, though. One of the most pronounced: I've felt pressured, nigh compelled, to question my creative priorities. I've suddenly grown skeptical of my more fanciful pursuits, like writing fiction (a long-term project) and experimenting in visual art. This is a time for serious reflection and education, right? ... a time when I need to be sharp and intelligible and writing powerful polemics that contribute to the political discourse? No cool drawings or notes on character backgrounds these days! My country needs me to write thinkpieces!

This might be depressing as hell, except for the fact that, the more I think about it, the more I sense that those pursuits of the imagination are not only necessary... they may be more important for than ever, at least for my own ego-integrity. They may, in fact, be one of my only defenses against the dark clouds of the zeitgeist.

I've read a lot of think pieces lately. A LOT. I've never been so responsive to targeted pitches from Medium authors, and I'd never spent so much time reading The Guardian. I have my list (still very short) of essays that really struck me... like this one on Trump as disjunctive president, and this one on Identity-Affirming Society... but even with these nuggets of insight, I have to say, the perennial reading of think pieces has gone well beyond "processing," drifted down through "treading water," and is now turning into genuine masochistic navel-gazing.

The problem is, after a certain amount of ineffectual explaining, I start to sense the emptiness at the heart of this endeavor. Analyzing, investigating, diagnosing... it's always been therapeutic, but it's becoming clear that the syndrome isn't progressing.

I'm quite confident that this is because of the intentional, deeply entrenched ambiguity that's become a tactical framework of the current regime. It's so full of paradox and dissembly, so contemptuous of earnest representation and transparency, that it makes a plaything of the rational instinct. It invites those deconstructions, and then renders them useless, because its leverage is not reasonable or persuasive or principled.

On one hand, as Katherine Cross argues in the essay linked above, it's crucial that we (writers in their writing, and readers in our understanding) remain precise and rigorous about language, so we don't cede the discourse to the irrational forces. However, equally important: we can't be locked into a state of crisis by the regime's linguistic slippage. Even as we maintain our standards, we also have to wrestle with those ambiguities in an endless, infinite-game kind of way. Reality will never entirely submit to reason.

That's where I have to let go of the essayist instinct, and return to art and fiction. These are the sites where I can truly wrestle with ambiguity... where I can diffuse the reality in an image with a spontaneous splash of the formal, or where I can write a character to perform those paradoxical processes of dissolution and reconstruction. There is nothing more satisfying (at least to me) than crafting something that only makes sense in that special, non-verbal language that it constructs for itself.

I am not saying that my art, or anybody's art, will save the country or the world from Trumpism, or from drone strikes, or from structural racism.

What I am saying is that we are all going to need something... some way of thinking or seeing or surrendering... that lets us confront the irrationality bubbling under the surface of the Real. I see it as a sort of hardiness, a personal integrity -- a quality that outlasts the present absurdity, and makes room for the permanent paradoxes -- that's cultivated privately, intimately. In my case, it has to be through these creative gestures.

This is, after all, a monster that can't be debated down, or harassed and vandalized out of existence... it has to be survived, appropriated, and integrated into whatever fortress we eventually build on the debris of the present.

An Aesthetics of Aspect (on Medium)

Today, a sort of philosophy/media theory post on the CREATOR-CONSUMER-CRITIC triad, which I'm calling the Aspect Aesthetic. It provides a quick summary of the big picture, with the triadic diagram to map out the poles and paths, and then it goes into a deeper discussion of the CONSUMER role, touching on fandom, worldbuilding, and the joys of inhabiting a work of art.

Post can be found here:
An Aesthetics of Aspect
https://medium.com/@miksimum/an-aesthetics-of-aspect-1e7d9bc1e20b#.uag3iclvp

Bubble Universes (Welcome to 2017)

First of all, to head off any elevated expectations: this post is mostly about movies. The title sounds broad and philosophical, partly because I'm trying to stretch my frame a little, but movies are where this idea started, and I doubt it's going to wander too far from that starting point.

On New Year's Eve, I did what a lot of people do, aside from watching the ball drop: I caught a couple on-demand movies. In my case, these were The Witch (2015, but really 2016 as far as public release) and The Lobster (2016). These choices were entirely arbitrary, no more thematic than "oh, I remember wanting to see that one!"... and yet, in retrospect (where so many things become more orderly), I feel like they were pretty perfect for closing out 2016 and moving into a new solar cycle.

There's been a lot of talk, of course, about how rough 2016 was, and 2017 is a frontier under such a dark cloud... it's not really a pleasant transition, even if change is welcome. It kind of puts into relief that angst that comes with every New Year... the feeling that under all the celebration, all the rhetoric about renewal, the truth is that it's exactly the same world, just tagged as the next iteration.

But a couple movies like The Witch and The Lobster helped with that transition, it turned out... and not just in a way that every other movie would help (which is distraction and spectacle, mostly). These helped because they did something unique among movies: they created self-contained little bubble universes, and these gave me the stepping stones I needed to move between two troubled years and really feel that threshold.

The Witch creates its bubble universe out of vivid sensory detail and historical specificity. Beyond the incessant use of "thee" and "thou," the world was relentless and textured and -- probably my favorite word for it -- grimy. Full of grime. After William and Katherine leave their Puritan plantation, they are caught in, essentially, a tiny world of two settings: the homestead, and the forest.

The immersion on display here isn't just stylistic or aesthetic. Director Robert Eggers (by his own admission, here) was trying to place his audience in an authentically Puritan frame of mind. This means a gawking fascination with sin and perversion, a manic-depressive relationship with Christianity, and a belief in Satan and witchcraft in their most literal forms. Eggers is trying to rip us out of our modernity and instill in us the fear of a wild, corrupted abyss populated by malevolent forces.

The Lobster does something similar in the abstract, but in almost the opposite way. It also creates a small, self-contained universe ("city," "woods," and a hotel make up the whole world). However, instead of a jarring injection of detail and history, it fashions this world out of the familiar and the taken-for-granted, reconstructed in absurd and unexpected ways. The City has the feeling of Washington, DC (at least that's the closest analog from my own experience), and the hotel feels like any mid-priced Hilton convention center hosting a huge conference.

This world is structured metaphorically, emphasizing the absurdity of the familiar. The Lobster's bubble universe alienates us from everyday life, floating up above and letting us look back on social psychology and romantic conventions as they might appear to an alien anthropologist.

The longer I sit and stare at these films side by side, the more parallels I see. They're both about a breakdown at the margins of an overly-structured society... they're both about exiles, creating rituals in defiance of the rituals that initially excluded them. They're both about the terror and anxiety instilled by the demands of conventional thinking, whether it's consensus or superstition.

All that aside, I'll go back to the title. It was this little skipping action, this move between bubble universes, that's helping me make sense of the New Year transition. In every practical sense, the new world is the same as the old one... I just stepped out of it for a couple movies. But in another sense, we're moving into a reality with a new framework... a whole new set of rules are coming into play.

These new global rules include an escalating authoritarian trend, sudden fractious instability in international consensus (both political and economic), and a step back from reasoned discourse, idealism, and accountability. So in this sense, the "bubble universe" concept might not be such a bad tool: a focus-shifted lens for seeing 2017 as radically, qualitatively different.

In honor of this effect, I'd like to reflect for a moment: what other films have this sort of feeling, that they're taking place in a tightly-constrained reality whose rules are alien and temporarily absolute?

I'll note, and set aside, those horror and science-fiction films that make this a point of premise... The Cube, Snowpiercer, THX 1138, Alien, The Village. Even The Shining is a little more explicit than I'm talking about. I'm trying to come up with movies that tease a larger reality, but then compress it, to wring every drop of significance out of the setting.

Hitchcock tended to do this... The Birds is such a film, I think, since it takes place in an island village, isolated from the outside world.

Rules of the Game has this sense, as well (it's been quite a while since I've seen it).

There must be others... Gilliam? Haneke? Anderson? ... BUELLER?

The Pendulum

Published a piece on Medium called The Pendulum, about the shift from despair to tentative hope while I ponder all the catastrophic implications of the Trump presidency. I also mention the Thai Blind Orchestra. Both of these things came to me in an NPR report this morning, on a drive to take care of some errands.

The Pendulum on Medium:

The future does not look bright. In fact, in some moments, like driving down the road listening to these NPR reports, it looks frankly terrifying. My head constructs something that looks like Flint in the middle of its water crisis, and NYC and Detroit at the height of urban decay, and the Rust Belt and Appalachia at their most desolate, featuring lone-wolf terrorists in prominent roles, both Middle Eastern and radicalized American. I think this is what they call “catastrophizing”… or just “hysteria,” if you want to spare a syllable. 

At these times, I tell myself that I just have to protect my family and seek high ground. Civil society has always been build on the bedrock of a hostile wilderness, after all… will that world, where we have to fight for survival, finally start peeking through? When is it ethical for a non-violent leftist to buy a gun? Is a coming apocalypse the right time to rethink that principle?

At this point, it was not a pleasant drive.

Trump and The Spectacle

Wrote a thing on Medium. Sounds very Guy Debord/Critical Theory, but don't worry, there's nothing particularly rigorous about it. It's just one more moment of me thinking I've "figured it out" because I just had a new thought that seems to have overturned a few previous thoughts at once.

A selection:

The hardest part about reconciling with the present moment — not submitting to it, of course, but finding the right way to exist in relation to it — is going to be resisting the spectacle of it all. We are all, even unto the most cynical and steady, vulnerable to the distraction that comes from bearing witness. Our own need to gaze awestruck upon the bigness of history, and the bigness of our own imperfection, is going to leave us dazzled.

Find it here: The Spectacle

Westworld's Three Domains

I've been gone for some time, but -- this seems as good a time as any to come back, since this blog feels like the best place for my current musings. If this is the only post in a five year span, please forgive me.

My ongoing viewing has been Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot, and Westworld. The first two are currently between seasons, so I'm focused on the third one, whose first season is just coming to an end. I have thoughts. This is the place for them, methinks.

My instinctive reaction to the show is that it's steeped in influences, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's built on foundations of Inception, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Battlestar Galactica, Ex Machina, The Hunger Games, and various other postmodern reality-bending science fiction, and almost every artifact in the show can be seen as a refraction of one or several of these. I don't think it's doing anything ground-breaking with this conceptual material, but it's beautiful and well-executed, and there's nothing wrong with delving deeper into themes that our culture is currently hung up on.

My primary criticism of the show, up until this morning, was that it's too caught up in the self-indulgence of contemporary plotting and writing: the need to always have three, four, or five ongoing plot arcs, each with several characters, to the point where every concern feels trivial. In particular, Maeve's character arc, which represents a massive disruption as far as the setting is concerned (like, she's the lynchpin that's bringing about the end of the whole world of the show), doesn't feel entirely earned. There are enough characters that I can't always keep track of them, and when an old face turns back up in a new context, I find myself scrambling to remember where I saw them, or why it's even interesting.

But I think I've worked out a way of thinking about these plots that will help me make better sense of them, with the finale impending. As far as I can see it, this season consists of three primary narrative arcs: Dolores, Bernard, and Maeve. The other plotlines -- Ford as sinister mastermind, Charlotte and the board of directors, and the Man in Black -- are all background noise, threads that don't serve much except to tie those three major plotlines together.

Those three major plotlines can be thought of as, respectively, Spiritual, Existential, and Political.

I say "spiritual" for Dolores's plotline because it seems to be a journey of self-discovery and transcendence, and it takes on cyclical, mystical overtones. I wouldn't be surprised to discover, in the finale, that her journey brings together Past and Future and Good and Evil, and that she satisfies Westworld's obligatory "messianic" role.

I say "existential" for Bernard's plotline because it's a journey inward, to find the boundaries of Selfhood. The stakes are the limits and accountability of consciousness, and the reality of one's own emotions and experiences.

And Maeve's journey is political in the sense that she's working out, and manipulating, her place in the power structure. If the world is created and activated in the spiritual realm, it's in the political realm that it's ultimately brought to an end, through fire and revolution if necessary.

Some of this is informed by a certain fan theory floating around out there, that seems pretty highly likely as we approach the finale.

As another side-note, I have to say, I wish one of these Artificial Intelligence movies -- AI, Ex Machina, Her, even The Matrix -- would tackle the Hard Problem of Consciousness more directly. They all take it for granted that these intelligent agents have an inner life, perfectly analogous to our own. This is necessary for stories of self-discovery and heroism, but it's also kind of a cop-out.

I wouldn't even mind, if they didn't seem to be approaching this problem and then running away from it, like children running away from the waves lapping up the beach. Westworld is particular is obsessed with the secondary symptoms of this idea. Ford has a whole monologue on how he doesn't believe there's a clear distinction between human and machine consciousness. Logan, William's evil friend, is the epitome of a consciousness skeptic, believing adamantly that however human they appear, these hosts are simply machines, no more self-aware than calculators. And from what it sounds like in that last episode, it seems like "the maze" itself is just a test of sentience for the hosts, a high-powered Turing Test for some pragmatic "consciousness" criteria.

And yet, we're always privy to inner experiences of the hosts. Bernard and Maeve and Dolores have intense flashbacks, many of which seem to be distorted or fabricated, just like human memories. Wouldn't it be creepier if we'd seen, in some experimental sequence, a close-up of Bernard's eye as he's describing a vivid memory, and then a cut to complete black, or to a screen full of code? And wouldn't it be a beautiful moment if we got to see Bernard go from inert self-monitoring terminal to actual conscious mind? I'm not sure how you would do this, cinematically: some visual effect or camera trick representing the first glimmerings of a private, conceptual picture of the world, inaccessible even to the human operators.

Maybe this is part of the larger formal message of Westworld: that consciousness itself is basically a cinematic device showing flashbacks, a film reel that starts at birth and ends at death, that does nothing more interesting than represent the machine to itself. And that this simple mechanism is all that's necessary for "automaton" to become "living thing with a rich inner life."

Lots of questions. No answers, so far. But the finale is bearing down, and perhaps the questions will all least keep getting more interesting.

On Daily Intel and whether male feminists exist

In response to an article from Kat Stoeffel on the Daily Intel.

As an all-oppressor-classes human [cis, white, hetero, male, suburban, American, Yankee, upper-middle class, abled, neurotypical, etc], I've struggled with being an ally for some years. To all men, like me, who are reading this: the first step is, indeed, radical acceptance that you need to be secondary in this conversation; that if your views on gender issues remain forever conflicted, benign, and invisible, that's okay, it probably means you're doing it right. This disclaimer has been brought to you in the name of solidarity.

However, within that fuzzy gap where an oppressor-class human can talk about a movement he cares about, but isn't officially a member of (biologically speaking, and according to Kat, even in terms of identification) -- I want to note: Kat's article is fine in condemning a certain class of social-climber feminist men who rise in the movement's ranks by exercising their own chauvinist impulses. Clymer and Schweizer? Sure. Boorish, self-important, and definitely not good for the movement. However, along with that valid point, this article has a willful divisiveness riding side-saddle, and I doubt it's doing the larger feminist movement many favors.

Why? Because, at least for me, this article triggers some nasty anxieties about whether there is EVER a path to reconciliation for me, and for others like me, who want to contribute quietly and productively to the fashioning of a better world for all people stuck in the gender matrix. I know you (Kat, and other feminists) are not responsible for my "feels," and this isn't intended as a take-down. It just might be worth having on-hand as a data point -- one of many -- as you configure your strategy going forward.

It's this anxiety, triggered by articles like this, that occasionally threatens my interest in being an ally. It communicates, whether intentionally or not, the sense that I'm a permanent target of exclusionary rhetoric. In fact, this kind of wagon-circling is the only thing that gives me hang-ups about supporting feminism. Reading MRA rants and hearing misogynistic remarks? That actually makes me feel more feminism-aligned. I have no desire for solidarity with men who express their masculinity through disrespect and aggression.

Lots of men, some of them perhaps excellent allies, may want to identify as feminists, because  the term refers to a complex of ideas and commitments, a belief in certain values and a broad historical movement (and it's not a biologically-determined identity, like "disabled" or "American Indian"). Exclusionary rhetoric (and also snarky, dog-whistle defensive mechanisms of any kind) just make it seem like I'm not welcome to hold those values, or to adopt any position of support whatsoever vis-a-vis feminism.

Does feminism prefer an eventual reconciliation and mutual acknowledgment between the sexes, as the term "gender equality" would suggest? Or does it favor a permanent state of culture war, which would at least give women a place to fight for their autonomy and identity, even if it never leads to any kind of long-term equilibrium? It is an honest question, and I don't mean to load the answers with pre-judgment.

POSTSCRIPT:

In the spirit of this particular type of ally-ship, I'd like to recognize the good work of Matthew Inman in actually, earnestly apologizing when he writes jokes that offend people. This may be the best possible way to act as an ally... know when it's time to defer to the community. This is especially true if you accept the increasing feminist principles that: 1) silence in the face of injustice is bad, and 2) speaking out clearly enough to derail the movement's focus is bad.

On the Passing of Something (Robin Williams, 1951-2014)

How do you love an actor through their work? A celebrity, a public personality you've never met, never seen in their private moments, never known as anything but what they choose to put on the screen? A lot of questions, all intellectually interesting. Also, all easier to think about than the instigating event. All effective diversions.

I mean, some celebrities don't feel like mere projections, assemblages dispensed by the entertainment industry for the sake of optimal charisma. Some celebrities... some advocates, politicians, comedians, and even comic actors... don't seem to put much of a wall up between their public lives and their private eccentricities and vulnerabilities. Maybe they're just not good at the fakery. Or maybe they're extremely good at it, and my senses haven't caught up. Who knows?

You can't fall in love with on-screen personas the way you do with someone whose hand you've shaken at their wedding reception. You can't fall in love with them the way you do a trusted mentor, or a great psychologist. You can't fall in love with them the way you do with your kids as you tuck them in at night, and you can't be connected to them the way you can to a soul-mate whose trials and troubles you've spent a life trying to shoulder. With an entertainer, there's a degree to which it's all pre-packaged, conducted for your benefit, and for the benefit of several billion others who share your unrequited love.

But in a mediated age like ours, where we're all managing different aspects of ourselves that are being peeled away in fragments and distributed according to the logic of production, I think it's valid... perhaps even necessary... that we can fall in love with projections, with the ideas that people choose to champion and represent. It's been happening for centuries, after all... people have loved saints and athletes and politicians, in moments of hardship they've loved prophets and revolutionaries, in times of prosperity they've loved artists and emperors. They've loved fictional characters and half-serious delusions. These kinds of love are real, and and their mourning warrants expression.

Robin Williams earned our love, and he deserved it. Through the roles he chose, through his commitments to particular characters at particular moments, he came to represent a very specific thing in our culture: the hapless sentimentalist. He was a comic actor -- even his most serious roles were cut with a certain therapeutic irreverence -- but his humor was always an interface with a certain soaring, hopeful, joyful sadness, the kind of heartfelt pathos that's come under siege in the age of smug self-consciousness and detachment.

And goddamn! From a young age, I've fallen in love, repeatedly, with what Robin Williams represented. I was in love with Daniel Hillard and Armand Goldman and Jack Powell and Sean Macguire. His roles all took on this fatherly tenderness... even the heroic roles (Alan Parrish in Jumanji) and even, weirdly enough, the twisted and unhinged antagonist roles (Seymour Parrish of One Hour Photo, Walter Finch of Insomnia). As with many kids (not all, I fully realize), I thought my dad was the most heroic human in the world, and in a way, I loved Robin Williams because his roles seemed to be paying tribute to my own dad (Kevin Costner is the only other actor who managed the same thing from time to time).

Maybe Williams was so good at this because he also knew how to play a kid, and he knew the power that a father-figure or an older mentor can have over a child. This came through most explicitly in Jack, a lovingly-acted role in a movie that I still think about at the most random times. It's also one of the central dimensions of Hook, which is an affectionate, reconstructed hero story built around the father figure rediscovering childhood. Hook is, incidentally, in a three-way tie for my favorite Robin Williams movie.

One of my other favorite Robin Williams characters is the genie in Aladdin. I can't help but see all the good, earnest, loving people I know in that genie... all the people who I've been grateful to have as my mentors and influences. It was a movie all about the relationship between power and dependence and vulnerability, right? About how the greatest power in the world suddenly becomes worthless without the existential sinew of vulnerability and honesty and self-acceptance?

My third favorite: Williams' role as Chris Nielsen in What Dreams May Come, one of the great epic journeys, a walk in the shadow of endless cosmic melancholy. Despite its joyful, almost saccharine ending, there's a profound sadness that permeates What Dreams May Come, a sense of futility and submission to the endless cycles and trials and rediscoveries of history. This is, of course, balanced by the redeeming forces of familial love and loyalty and free will, but one of the most beautiful things about the movie is that it finds a delicate balance... the darkness passes, but it remains on the horizon of the film, even unto its rosy final shot.

I loved Robin Williams, one of the great father figures of the modern age of cinema, and though his story will always be tinged with melancholy, I hope that for him, the darkness has passed. RIP RW.

Lone Survivor: compromised war film

I just saw Lone Survivor, and I formed what I felt was a pretty solid, informed opinion of the film. Then, as one does, I went on Rotten Tomatoes to see how it jives with the rest of the world’s reactions.

Imagine my surprise!

I thought Lone Survivor was astoundingly inept, a mass-produced clot of war film clichés, with a hilariously limited narrative vocabulary. I’d call it "predictable," but that word suggests too much coherence… it was so predictable, it felt like a recitation, or perhaps even a stutter. It was odd, then, that I could read down a litany of positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and discover that other critics found it “grueling, tense, action-soaked” (Jim Schembri, News Talk), “visceral, exciting and thought-provoking” (Henry Fitzherbert, Daily and Sunday Express), and “morally complex” with a climax that was “tense and surprisingly moving” (Ashley Clark, Time Out London). Boy, I did not see the same film as these folks.

Before I jump into it, I have to answer my own ethical quibbles about movie reviewing (which are one of the main reasons I tend not to engage in this highly questionable activity). Because look… if you’re here wondering whether you’ll like the movie, I can give you at least one reliable answer: there’s a 75% chance that you will, because that’s the proportion of reviewers who really dug it. And if that’s what you’re looking for, I’m not sure I’ll be rendering you much of a service by elucidating my own opinions on the topic. At best, I’ll be giving you some starting-points for judging the film by your own standards, and at worst, I’ll be ruining something you might have really enjoyed.

Of course, maybe you're here for the same reason I was at Rotten Tomatoes in the first place… you've already seen the movie, and you're looking for another opinion to validate you (or contradict you, if you're that type of masochist). Or maybe you've got a bunch of indistinct feels about the film, and you're looking for something to help you sort them out. I guess those reasons – the less prescriptive, more reflective reasons – are the reasons I'm going to follow through with writing this mini-critique-review artifact.

It feels weird to enumerate a series of negatives, as if they were positives. It feels like an attempt to quantify an absence, or prove a bunch of counterfactuals. Nonetheless, it’s all I have to go on, and it can be summed up thusly… first, the film was trite and sophistic about its subject matter. Second, its selection of plot developments – what I would call its “narrative vocabulary” – was tragicomically limited. Third, it balked on the basic duty of characterization, which was one of its few promising opportunities to redeem its other shortcomings.

We have to start, of course, with critique number 1: "trite and sophistic about its subject matter." I'm alluding, generally, to the subject matter of battlefield combat and loyalty, all the expectations that are drawn from its genre ("war film" as envisioned in the post-9/11 age). The war film generally has several merits, aside from its basic objective of dramatizing violence. A war film also has to engage with the theme of brotherhood, whether by romanticizing it (Thin Red Line) or subverting it (Platoon) or both (Full Metal Jacket, Forrest Gump). It also has to face larger questions about the morality of war, and its effects on its participants (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker). These questions are always latent in any dramatization of war… if you don’t make some gesture toward them in your narrative, the absence is going to be conspicuous.

Of all the war films I've seen… going all the way back to David Lean, Ivan’s Childhood, and The Last Command… Lone Survivor is the most myopic in these areas, bordering on frank propaganda. Any consideration of motives, or ethics, or moral compromise is replaced by a general sense of righteousness and martyrdom, a sharp line through the middle of the movie that places every character in one of two camps: either they're good people on our side, or they're bad people on the other side. This dynamic governs all the attempted "complexities" of the film: the debate over whether to break the rules of engagement, and the third-act willingness of a local tribe to oppose the Taliban.

This sharp, high-contrast us-versus-them frame has some visual repercussions… the Marines are a quartet of bearded white guys surrounded in a sea of middle eastern hostiles, and they kill dozens with impunity, but never hurt or endanger anyone except their intended targets, the mooks who are firing at them. The primary antagonist, the "target," has no crime and no motivations except for killing Americans… in particular, sending a horde of terrorists after the protagonists. Oddly, the Hollywood terrorists seem fond of wearing eyeliner.

Also, it seems the only “mistake” the SEALs make is following the rules of engagement, and the story is built around this mistake costing the lives of a dozen or more Americans.

The second criticism I noted, above, is the limited narrative vocabulary. The film's defenders will justify this by pointing to the non-fiction basis of the story (the book "Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell, played in the film by Mark Wahlberg). Indeed, from my limited reading (i.e. some related Wikipedia pages), Lone Survivor made a valiant attempt to adhere to the reality of the situation, as it was portrayed in the written account. If this was your sole criteria, the film is probably really excellent. But I need to judge it on its merits as an actual film, and my ultimate impression is that the filmmakers left themselves with very few dramatic devices to leverage.

The movie really had three acts. The first one entailed the following standard scenes: SEALs sitting around making crass jokes and being melancholy about their families back home; SEALs in a briefing room, going over mission details; SEALs in helicopters. This was humanizing, and it showed some promise for the characters (the most interesting of whom isn't included as an active combatant in the mission), but it's really just a montage of generic war-movie deployment scenes.

Approximately the same thing happened in the second act. There were SEALs hiding and looking through their scopes, reliably cycled with sequences of frantic shooting and hiding behind rocks. If this doesn't sound generic enough, I'll break it down further: there were close-ups of SEALs aiming, grunting in pain, and exchanging sentimentalities; medium-shots of terrorists dropping like video game targets; SEALs falling down mountains in brutal detail (this “everyone falling down the rocks” event happened three times); and a few slow, gauzy, backlit heroic death scenes. The pattern was so consistent and so drawn out, it became numbing.

I'll admit that there was one welcome interlude where the four protagonists debated the value of a non-combatant enemy’s life, but this was governed entirely by the above-referenced dynamics: us versus them, mercy as a form of heroic martyrdom, a stimulating American debate about moral compromise carried out over the secure, helpless bodies of primitive locals. If this is all I have left to praise, there's definitely something missing from this 80-minute action centerpiece.

Finally, in the third act, the last remaining SEAL finds some friends among the horde of Others that make up the indigenous population of Afghanistan. This act might have been fascinating, in a stronger movie, but it was left with nothing to stand on. All anybody could do was posture with guns, fire the guns at each other across the dirt, and make serious, suspicious, vaguely sympathetic faces at Mark Wahlberg. Incidentally, this is the part of the film that was least accurate with respect to the events in the book.

I know some reviewers found this relentless barrage of gunfire to be consistently exciting and visually stimulating. For me, it was an exercise in simplicity so basic, it almost crossed the line into minimalism. Unfortunately, there was nothing provocative or experimental about it, nothing to challenge any preconceptions I had, or even to evoke some emotional connection to the violence and its consequences. It was a piecing-together of gun fetish footage and romantic war propaganda, captured by a photographer and stitched together by an editor, decently crafted, but totally bereft of any creativity. As I said above: its visual and narrative vocabulary was limited.

Finally, there's my third point: there was no meaningful characterization in this film. At least one reviewer thought this might be a smart choice (they're supposed to function as a single cohesive unit! Get it?) but with four excellent actors, they might have really capitalized on this angle. So where's the sensitivity, the intimacy, the individuality? Maybe the book was the problem, but really... Did these four guys seem blank, anonymous, and undifferentiated in the book? Did they seem like a countdown, like each SEAL was another life to lose in a Mega Man game?

It wasn't a virtue, and even if it was intentional, it was a bad call. You can do great things with four characters -- give them different motivations (everybody was fighting for America and their spouse back home) and give them a semblance of back-story that might explain their battlefield behavior. Give them time to change... come to some realization, follow some kind of arc. Even the one survivor -- Marcus Luttrell, played by Wahlberg -- had no sense of differentiation, no development, except for maybe the fact that he ordered everyone to follow the rules of engagement. If there was supposed to be some sort of karmic significance in this decision and the subsequent tragedy, the film didn't give any indication of it.

I am not a cinematic pacifist, and I have nothing against the war film as a genre. I think you can romanticize our armed forces, and you can dramatize the pain and tragedy of war, without necessarily committing an offense against taste. But I think Lone Survivor failed to do those things, and its most redeeming contribution, at this point in Hollywood history, is to provide a template for the failed war film: a catalog of predictability, a conspicuous dearth of sophistication, that future war films should see as their lowest common denominator.

Twitter reviews 2013

I was going to post these around the New Year, but apparently I got hung up on a sort of micro-procrastination. Now seems like as good a time as any. I've been doing these for three years now, and it seems I watch fewer movies each year. This sounds like a narrative of decline, but I prefer to think of it as a temporary shift.

As always: all reviews, including the movie title and date, are exactly 140 characters. I give myself some flexibility on words like AND (vs &) and on ending punctuation.

1-10

Gravity (2013) - A film of silences & oscillations: warm to cold, expansive to claustrophobic. Beautifully shot; simply & effectively acted.

Spring Breakers (2013) - Exploitation's compulsive sexuality and violence, unhinged, channeled into an acid gonzo bubblegum pop fever dream.

Conan the Destroyer (1984) - Maybe deserves an award for clumsiest, awkwardest, most creepy and uncomfortable big-budget fantasy movie ever.

Night Tide (1961) - A calm meditation on being an outsider, ripe with shy obsessions and repressed sexuality; almost magical-realist in tone

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) - Alternately whispering & soaring, delivering on the promise of its vast landscapes & eccentric characters.

The Road (2009) -  A decent take on the hopelessness in the novel, and "Son" has a vibrant and evolving emotional life; but maybe too polite?

Black Death (2010) - A grimy, mean-spirited anti-morality tale, blessed with compelling characters & jarring shifts in attitude & credulity.

The Europa Report (2013) - Quiet, wide-eyed & enigmatic, endearing for how sweeping & hypnotic a story it assembles from such a limited palette.

(NOTE: Realize I somehow used the adjective "ballistic" in both of the next two reviews. For the record, I think it applies better to Elysium.)

Elysium (2013) - A ballistic, richly textured journey of heroes and anti-heroes, humane and hard-working, hampered by some tone-deaf writing

Thor: The Dark World (2013) - A ballistic romp of a movie, whose charming asides successfully mediate the (intentionally) overpowering pomp.

11-20

The Hobbit (2013) - A Disneyesque need for broad emotional cues doesn't entirely ruin Tolkien's love of majesty and archaic language

Deadly Blessing (1981) - A weird, shuttered, otherworldly ballet of messed up characters: some shamelessly, and others who barely conceal it

Grandmaster (2013) - Full Wong Kar Wai atmosphere, plus killer fight scenes -- some done the same way "In the Mood for Love" did sex scenes.

Dredd (2012) - Fun, sloppy action film, highly preoccupied with hypersubjective experiences, despite the title character's robotic blankness

Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) - Vivid, tactile, & intimate; a compelling portrait of young love. An achievement of craft, if not concept.

Lovers on the Bridge (1991) - Stormy, vivid, impetuous; an irreducibly beautiful chronicle of love surviving cycles of abuse and abandonment

Unforgiven (1992) - Eastwood's stern meta-Western, a pinpoint-precise portrayal of the insecurity of manhood trapped in a cultural narrative

Dangerous Game (1993) - A bold, semi-successful attempt at gritty experimentalism from Abel Ferrara, seething with barely-contained violence

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) - Serene, meditative... also frigid & tense. The visuals add a studied richness to a desolate narrative.

Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) - A twisted, unsettling little creeper with some of the most vivid characters I've met in cinema.

21-30

Bleeding House (2011) - This tale of psychos colliding is tense and restrained, but sometimes a bit too rushed for its slow-burn aspirations

Dead Presidents (1995) - If 90's reviewers had forseen today's banal pseudo-edginess, they would have welcomed DP's hard-nosed eccentricity.

Only God Forgivess (2013) - Nicolas Winding Refn's deconstruction of the white savior trope, wrapped in a bilious torture chamber of a movie.

Before Sunrise (1995) - Proof that in the absence of suspense, a whole story can coast on earnestness and still feel gratifying and complete

Sabrina (1954) - Props to Wilder for this classic black & white charmer, starring two of the most attractive people in the history of people

Holy Motors (2012) - A wild, sexy tantrum of a movie, seething with all those violent emotions that we keep so buried in our everyday lives.

Everything Must Go (2010) - An anxious indie film with a sort of lukewarm realism. Not a masterpiece, but endearing in its humor and wisdom.

The Eclipse (2009) - A melancholy movie with a tenuous mood, like a creepy old photograph where the shutter stayed open just a bit too long.

Red (2010) - A fun, insubstantial pop collision of Hollywood personalities relieved of their dignity & allowed to wallow in cartoon violence

Eve's Bayou (1997) - Steamy, enigmatic, and twisted, a smart and heartfelt film that weaves us into a vivid setting and emotional ecosystem.

31-40

Upstream Color (2013) - Dreamy, abstract, and surprisingly tense tribute to the power of love and unseen forces; best for patient audiences.

Magnolia (1999) - Ambitious omnibus, suffering mildly from lack of focus, but elevated by its brave performances, both intimate & expansive.

30 Days of Night (2007) - Vicious, terrifying neo-vampire survival horror, perhaps held back because it doesn't push its extremes far enough

Irreversible (2002) - Depraved postmodern trash, redeemed by an amazing formal unity and thematic cohesion, and four courageous performances

Cold Mountain (2003) - Sometimes overwrought, but touched with flashes of brilliance in its depictions of war, hardship, & human connection.

Secret of Kells (2009) - Vivid and enchanting, handcrafted with a soft touch, like a Miyazaki movie smoothed over by a calligrapher's hands.

A Town Called Panic (2009) - A hilarious, flippant manic stop motion buddy movie for the ages. The polar opposite of the last one I reviewed

Valhalla Rising (2009) - An abstraction of grit & violence, brutal and glacially paced that toes the line between hypnotic and mind-numbing.

Hidden Blade (2004) - A wise and intimate cinematic sonata, rich in relationships; one of the most patient & tender samurai films I've seen.

Ashura (2005) - A wildly melodramatic kabuki-style kaidan, whose bad special effects give it a sort of charm, if you're in a forgiving mood.

The ol' Spontaneous Hiatus

Hello, if there are any readers left out there. I haven't written anything in a while. I had a video project I was working on for like a year, which self-destructed recently (hard drive, bed-shit). I've been working on a personal project that I've been keeping a bit closer to my chest than usual, but if the right time ever comes, I'll post something about it on here.

I'm still an occasional photographer, but I haven't been taken with my most recent work in that area.

I'm working very hard on a critical piece on Dark Souls 2, for the ol' Berfrois, who have published some of my work before. That should be emerging pretty soon. I'll put an update up here.

The closest thing I have to a BotD-exclusive piece is a long review I've written of Lone Survivor (2013), which I found kind of off-putting. I'll post that pretty soon, I think.

I might start thinking in blogging-terms again, if possible... I've gotten a couple actual real comments recently, and if something else goes up in Berfrois, it will be very embarrassing to have an empty blog at the end of the link in my profile.

Having furnished a probably-irrelevant update, I shall sign off. Cheerio the Internet!

Horse_ebooks as a Free Will Fetish

"It seems we cannot get enough of our mechanical mirror stage."

- Peggy Nelson, Not a Bot (HiLowBrow.com)

Things like "whimsy" and "dada" (and even the basic human capacity for "spontaneity") all happen at the intersection of meaning and randomness. They fascinate us because, by cross-referencing our symbol systems with the universe's inscrutable patterns of noise and happenstance, we get some sense that the universe itself is actually conscious, or purposeful, or whatever.

@horse_ebooks was a token of that always-captivating emergent significance. My Twitter feed filled up with tearful farewells when it was outed as a human "conceptual art project," and I felt disposed to join them. At least for me, the dismay results from losing that sense of whimsy and emergent meaning. Knowing it's a human, contriving the meaning and simulating the random factor, somehow steals away that elusive magic.

Of course, this illuminates one of the dialectical dissociations that underwrites human consciousness: we are fascinated by randomness, because we cannot entirely come to terms with it. Fortune tellers seeks out the most chaotic, meaningless systems possible (cards shuffling, tea leaves tossed about by convection) and insist on ascribing symbolic significance to the outcomes.

Pure purposefulness (corresponding to a deterministic universe) is boringly predictable. Pure randomness (quantum and non-deterministic) is boringly nihilistic. But somewhere at the threshold between them, we sense free will as a glimmer of purposeful indeterminacy. So we seek out things like @horse_ebooks and divination rituals, which seem to draw a connection between those two causal universes. Maybe this is one of the human mind's integral background processes: to search for evidence of our own agency in the framework of the universe.

For whatever reason, @horse_ebooks is much less interesting as an intentional art project than it was as an algorithmic gesture toward cosmic agency. Some psychological need was obviously being filled, and now it's not, so we're going to have to go back to our tarot cards.

Crypticism 2: Clinically Obscure Language in The Matrix and Cyclonopedia

I shall begin this post with a confession: I loved The Matrix Reloaded. I was shaken by its wild ambition, and being an adolescent, I was a sucker for the absurd fight scenes and the renegade cyber-floozy cyberpunk angle. But looking back on it, what now especially surprises me about the film -- one of the things I find most striking about its structure -- is how bold that climax was, the moment of heightened clinical stillness in the Source, where the Architect confronted Neo with a mind-contorting explanation of the Matrix's edifice of dissimulation.

The first time I watched Reloaded in the theaters, I just struggled to figure out what the Architect was talking about. There was something there about a cycle of Eternal Return, a feedback loop that required a few humans to be liberated so that an anomalous quantity could be vented. Underneath that carnival of abstractions, there were higher issues at stake... Neo as a messiah-sacrifice, guided to this moment by his own inevitable resistance instinct, now being called upon to destroy himself out of love for the larger human race. Somewhere in that dilemma, there was a slave's paradox: survival of the species meant recommitting it to subjugation; the pursuit of freedom was the spill-over that was presently threatening to destroy the Matrix and the species being held there.

I love the first line.

"You have many questions, and though the process has altered your consciousness you remain irrevocably human, ergo some of my answers you will understand and some of them you will not."

In one rather long sentence, the Architect triggers a whole bunch of responses we often have to overwritten prose: the feeling of being lost in a bombardment of phrases, the sense that the author has some kind of contempt for the reader, and the knee-jerk ambivalence (or even disgust) many casual readers feel as a result. Postmodern theorists, with Derrida leading the pack, have made sort of an art out of dragging the reader through dense and twisted prose, and his critics have reacted spitefully. In the process, both Derrida and his critics have provided us with landmarks of cryptic language: Derrida's deconstructionist texts, and Alan Sokal's intentionally meaningless essay Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.

What these writers highlight is the dialectical function of cryptic language to simultaneously reveal and obscure meaning. Arguably (and in my opinion, it's an argument with merit), opaque language is sometimes justified by the complexity and ambition of the concepts behind it... people like Derrida and Heidegger have to make up words and torture their prose because their thought is plumbing depths that common, non-academic language can't yet capture. However, it's hard -- nigh impossible -- to separate this revelatory function from mere self-indulgence, language made artificially incomprehensible in order to obscure an absence of rigor, or a dearth of ideas. This is what's generally referred to "being pretentious" or "trying too hard"... and it's one of the hobgoblins, whether intentional or not, of Alan Sokal's prank paper submitted to Social Text.

What complicates the critique applied by Sokal is the fact that cryptic language has an aesthetic and rhetorical effect, even in its opacity. Derrida was a smart guy, and he was most certainly conscious of his stylistic choices... and once we acknowledge that he was being purposeful and intentional, we can see him less as a fraud and more as a pioneer of the cryptic mode, which the writers of The Matrix Reloaded used to such memorable effect.

The scene with the Architect is fairly long, and the dialogue is brisk, academic, polysyllabic, and witheringly precise. It is also a prime example of intentionally cryptic prose, a sort of dispersed substrate of psychocybernetic jargon that Neo sinks into with his first dignified question to the Architect.

This particular speech, which can be read in its entirety here, is not flat-out incomprehensible (unlike, for instance, Sokal's essay). If you read it over a couple times, and maybe look up a couple terms in cybernetics, you shouldn't have trouble making sense of the Architect's explanations. However, within the conditions of an actual cinematic experience, it's obviously not meant to be simple exposition. For anyone seeing it for the first time, it seems to move at a blinding speed, and those viewers will be lucky to pick up even a few broad ideas from the coleslaw of technical terms.

Most action films hit a plateau of suspense at the climax, cap it off with a violent resolution, and then let out a breath of relief, turning sharply into the denouement. The Matrix jerks this progression off-course when Neo enters the Source, interrupting the intensity of the action with a sudden shock of stillness. In this stillness, the physical intuition that governs the action sequences gives way to a sort of incomplete, elliptical cerebral ambivalence, defined by the Architect's chilling clarity riddled with entropic gaps: the viewer is suddenly pushed to absorb information, to grapple with a conceptual model of the Matrix, but is denied easy access to that big picture, because it’s obscured in this cryptic language.

I see this as a bold decision in The Matrix Reloaded: the decision to hinge the climax on stillness and opacity, the decontextualized clarity at the eye of a storm. Visually, the scene is sterilized, like various other “inner sanctums” of the absolute mind, and the Architect's performance is impassive and lawyerly. Beyond this sense of irrecoverable alienness, though, what are the emotional tones of this scene? In particular, what’s the emotional and narrative resonance of that cryptic language?

First of all, there’s a sense of disorientation and lack of control within a rigidly-controlled text. That voice will continue droning on, it can’t be stopped, and your capacity to process that information can scarcely keep up with the exposition. However, there’s also a sense of overriding order, suggesting the presence of an inaccessible intelligence: either superior, or simply absolutely alien.

The Matrix Reloaded uses this incomprehensibility to project, via implication, an unknowable Other, a superintelligence that has remained obscured behind the Matrix until now. It also suggests, via an array of cues (tone of voice, posture, dismissive attitude) an absolute superiority, an awareness that's much larger than Neo or the audience, with a more complete picture. At this particular moment, the possibility that this entity is simply creating an illusion of superiority is left in the background. It becomes more important in The Matrix Revolutions; it’s also a relevant factor in our own discussion of cryptic language itself, complicated by Sokal's skepticism toward crypticism. For now, though, such caveats are left unacknowledged.

Stuart Hall, a prominent cultural theorist, has talked a lot about how information is encoded for transmission. One of the noteworthy points he makes is that the production end needs to encode information, and then the recipient needs to decode it. Each of these moments in the chain of communication has its own code, its own rules of meaning and grammar and interpretation, and if the message is to maintain its integrity, both codes (the producer's code and the audience's code) need to support it. Hall points out that misunderstanding is generally the result of asymmetrical codes, which are, for that reason, a bad thing.

Encoding/decoding systems give us one way to look at cryptic communication. In cases like The Matrix Reloaded, the dense, over-processed language is used to invoke an asymmetry of code systems: the entity producing the information (the Architect) has much more control over the encoding process than the person trying to consume the information (the audience, and Neo, its surrogate). The decoding process is deficient, and this suggests both the superiority of the encoder, and also the presence of unassimilated meaning, gaps in the final product of the communication due to the failure to decode some of the information and implications.

In fact, The Architect makes a point of this asymmetry. After Neo initially asks, “Why am I here?” the Architect offers a dump of words that sum up Neo’s function in the Matrix. Neo realizes that this sudden rush of information contained a lot of important background, but intentionally left out the key point, so he says, “You haven’t answered my question.” This is apparently an admirable feat of decoding, because the Architect responds, "Quite right. Interesting. That was faster than the others."

The Matrix’s Architect scene is succinct and imbued with grave implications: it is the climax to an ambitiously intense film, and it changes the trajectory of the series in preparation for Revolutions. The use of cryptic language is important, giving a new dimension to the formerly-anonymous AI antagonist, but it’s also deployed carefully. Now it’s time to consider, as a contrast, certain works that have taken the paradox of opaque communication and cryptic language much further.

I’m just finishing a book right now called Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, by Reza Negarestani. Maybe you can tell, just from the title, what kind of pretension this book is operating under? From the blurbs on the cover, the book sounds like a deconstructed horror story, a la House of Leaves. It’s really not, though… it’s actually a book of deranged, highly speculative theory with a lack of supporting evidence, framed as fiction: theory that stops just sort of truth-claim, and only goes so far as to say, “Here is an unsubstantiated, but subversive, interesting, and frightening way to look at the geopolitical universe!”

I can tell you straight away, it would be hard to read Cyclonopedia without some experience reading other kinds of theorists: deconstructionists, continental philosophers, and occultists, especially. It would also help a lot to understand some of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture, which I did not, going into the book. It’s speckled with terms like Wahhabism, Taqiyya, Gog-Magogism, and various other concepts drawn from fields of knowledge that would strike average American readers as esoteric and specialized.

The resulting prose is dense, half-serious, and half-deranged, spilling out of intelligibility and becoming a kind of tortured poetry of abstraction. I liked it at times, although I also found it mind-numbing at other times (your mileage may vary, of course). Some striking ideas echo through the verbal edifice, as well: that the Middle East is a sentient entity, that war is a self-sufficient force that drives politics, that oil is the Earth’s way of resisting the cosmic hegemony of the sun. These ideas are ripe insects, entombed in an amber grave of cryptic theoretical language. If that’s your thing, then give Cyclonopedia a try.

If The Matrix Reloaded used crypticism to establish a character -- or, more properly speaking, an intellect -- then Cyclonopedia took it a step further. The Architect was the encoding party at the other end of a line, but everyone was still in the same place, which was the topic of the shared communication: the Matrix itself, complete with its relationship to humanity and Zion. The language of Cyclonopedia, on the other hand, does not simply reveal/obscure a character... it reveals/obscures an entire world, a mysterious semantic domain, defined largely by its vocabulary, structured by its operative concepts.

This act of world-building through language is part of what connects Cyclonopedia with science fiction as a narrative genre. This is why it's often called "speculative" theory: in order to appreciate it, you have to let yourself sink into its self-contained world, the same way you have to sink into the language in A Clockwork Orange. There are a few anchors to connect Cyclonopedia to our own world -- the Middle East, terrorism, HP Lovecraft -- but it's largely a semantic field unto itself. The cryptic code gives us a dizzy, tightly-constrained glimpse into this world, but it's only enough to suggest that there's a lot more going on in there than we can apprehend.

The Otherness of these works -- the "Other" as an ineffable intellect in The Matrix, or as an impenetrable web of scholarship and mysticism in Cyclonopedia -- should be recognized for its peculiar quality: the fact that it's characterized as intelligent and detached, rather than primitive and violent. This is, after all, the usual issue with portrayals of the Other, whether in Heart of Darkness or in Tolkien's hordes of Orcs and Haradrim (Southmen): the Other, as an object of both fascination and fear, is, at best, romanticized as an innocent child of nature... and more often, as a horde of faceless, undifferentiated, animalistic, hyper-sexualized foes.

These kinds of "Others" are generally described visually, or depicted in images, as Conrad does with the "Africans" (Congolese) he sees from his steamboat: "But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage." Or, in a film like 300, the Other depicted as a sea of masks, never speaking (except perhaps through a translator), an overwhelming visual presence, distanced and detached from the viewer by the objectivity of the optic brain.

So though the Other of cryptic language is still an exotic, unknowable presence (or a dim, half-rendered world), it's an intelligent Other, because language is inherently interior and cerebral. You can mark this as one of the unique features of the cryptic mode of writing, that's difficult to replicate in almost any other medium: the ability to create an Other that is more sophisticated than the POV, more abstract and advanced, and that bears the unique qualities of detachment, artificiality, and absolute self-control.

In an age of accelerating complexity, technology that seems to take on a supervisory role in our lives, and emergence that seems to be overwhelming our traditional mechanisms of control, maybe the runaway intelligence of a cryptic passage is becoming more threatening than the cartoonish tantrums of an Orientalist horde. Welcome to the horror of a new millennium.

Crypticism 1: An introduction to a preoccupation

I've created the term "Crypticism" to describe my current fixation on things that are intentionally, aesthetically incoherent. I don't mean they literally can't be understood... rather, that they push the boundaries of basic comprehensibility. For a couple blog entries, I want to talk about this idea. I know I don't discuss books much, but for at least these entries, I'll be mostly lingering in the realm of literature, with occasional forays into film dialogue.

I like how this word -- "cryptic" -- is connected to the word "crypt," in that both have to do with obscurity and concealment. Here's the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1630s, "hidden, occult, mystical," from Late Latin crypticus, from Greek kryptikos "fit for concealing," from kryptos "hidden" (see crypt). Meaning "mysterious, enigmatic" is recorded from 1920. Related: Cryptically.

It's a strange and amazing analogy... that language is sort of like a cemetery, or a morgue, and that the meaning is the substance that's locked away. The image is totally reversed from our normal picture of language as a device for clarity, communication, and exposure. If, in cryptic language, the meaning is willfully buried, it's because it's lifeless and decaying, a decomposed remnant of what it might have been when it was embodied in vibrant, transparent language.

I don't have to be so Manichean about the whole thing, though... death is not evil, as the Tarot tells us. If we were really to exhume the bodies of our ex-countrymen, we would discover that they've taken on new life... the life of the Earth, with its vermin and bacteria, with its organic evolution of the flesh and the bones and the clothing those bodies were buried in. The "death" of meaning is not so much about its stasis, as it is about its renewal through dissolution. In cryptic language, meaning unfolds from its corporeal shell, returning to the Earth and being resurrected as new raw material.

Cryptic language is not merely a mistake or a trick to conceal incompetence. It is a powerful stylistic tool, a vehicle for flirting with meaning without inflicting the violence of closure. In cryptic language, we can see the borders of a whole world, an interior governed by intimate and alien logics, whose vocabulary only brushes up against consensus. The mode of cryptic language is can be a performance, a misdirection, or a glamour...  a way of preserving mystery and plurality while sculpting meaning... and it can also be ruthlessly authentic beyond any pretense of politeness. The result can be a truly multithreaded text, or it can be an empty shell, a vessel inviting the reader to pour themselves into it.

I've got two types of cryptic language in mind, and hopefully I'll get around to writing about both. The first type is stream-of-consciousness writing, which attempts to access the contents of the mind before it's been structured by language.

The second type of cryptic language I want to discuss is intentionally obscure intellectual exposition, which I've been running across more and more lately. There's probably a whole thesis to write on this topic, as it occurs in postmodern theory, occultism, and at the margins of specialized disciplines. Its use as a stylistic effect is becoming more common, and I don't know of a word that's been invented to describe it.

There are a few particular works that have inspired this little excursion. The first is the iconic, brilliant, hopefully immortal House of Leaves, written by Mark Danielweski. The second is the book I'm just now finishing, Cyclonopedia, which, like HoL, provides some examples of both types of cryptic language. The third is a book I got most of the way through, but didn't quite finish, entitled Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, that (in my reading) is a prime example of stream-of-consciousness writing.

If anybody knows of any writing or studies of language or journal articles that might be relevant, definitely let me know. I'm not an expert on these rhetorical modes, and my musings may be numbingly primitive, or wander far afield of the technical understandings. Still, when I get an idea into my head, I can't help but talk about it. Hope that's okay with everyone.

A letter of appreciation regarding Xenoblade Chronicles (Monolith Soft, 2012)

Dear friend who lent me Xenoblade Chronicles (Monolith Soft, 2012) for the Wii:

I have borrowed a lot of things from a lot of people, and... a confession... I've failed to give a lot of them back. (Dom, if you're reading this, I still have Skyward Sword, and it's totally safe, for whenever you want to play it again). Usually, it's because they didn't seem to care that much about them, but sometimes, it's not even that. Like, here's the exception that demonstrates the point:

I once borrowed my friend's copy of The Women's Room, by Marilyn French. It was her favorite book, and her copy was a special limited-run London edition, and she really wanted me to read it, so she gave it to me, exhorting me to take good care of it. I read about 3/4ths of the way through, and then left it on the Chinatown bus. I wanted to buy her another copy, but that edition was nowhere to be found, so I apologized profusely, and she eventually forgave me. It was one of my more shameful moments.

I kind of promised myself at the time that I would be more considerate of the feelings of those I borrowed things from, but still... I've been in the habit of absently holding onto things until somebody asks for them back. Being a Homer Simpson to everybody else's Ned Flanders is nothing to be proud of, and I try to do better when I can. Your case is an example.

You made it clear to me that you actually care about your games... you see yourself as a bit of a collector, and you avoid lending them out whenever possible. Nonetheless, I really wanted to try Xenoblade Chronicles. My wife and I bond over JRPG's, and we'd heard great things about this one, and it was upwards of $150 to buy it, so it was really a lovely thing when you agreed to lend it to me. That's why I wanted to fulfill my end of the bargain, and take care of that disc, and hold myself to getting it back to you, without forcing me to bug you about it.

So I did all that. The day after we finished it, I put it in its case and gave it back to you, like a regular normal decent human being.

And what irony, then, what karmic poetry, that this one time that I've really made an effort to be responsible about a media artifact, it's the one time that parting with that artifact has really hurt. Because this experience you gave me was brilliant, it was luminous, it was life-changing. My wife and I logged 185 hours in Xenoblade, and we would have kept playing indefinitely (thank God it wasn't procedurally generated, like Nethack!). There were seven playable characters, and I fell in love with all of them, including the cutesy comic-relief (Riki's dignity was preserved by the fact that he was a father and a sensitive family man, remixed as a chibby tribal fluff-ball). When you ask me to name my favorite character, I just list them all, debating with myself, until you get tired of waiting for me and go get a sandwich.

It was the same deal with the landscapes. Was my favorite location the great temple in Sartorl marsh? The glowing shards of Valyk Mountain at night, with its sparse piano background music? Was it the wild, unexplored prairie around Colony 9 and Colony 6? The Makna Waterfall, with its rainbow cascading down with the water? Every location had something that I remember now as sublime, almost mystical.

As I recount these bits and pieces of this epic game, I remember them fondly, with a nostalgia that seems inappropriate considering I experienced them all less than a few months ago. The nostalgia is most salient when I think back to that first moment with Shulk and Reyn, the two intrepid main characters, as they make the decision to leave their home colony and wander the Bionis in search of the monster that attacked their families and friends. This is the moment when the vast game-world opens up, and you feel a rush of freedom and release that's so poignant, it goes beyond anticipation and echoes with a pang of melancholy. It recalls, in a certain way, the departure from Midgar in Final Fantasy VII, but I think Xenoblade nails it even more perfectly, because of how warm and familiar Colony 9 has already come to feel by that time.

Look, all I'm saying is that it was a great game. One of the greatest, I'd say... tied with Final Fantasy VI for my favorite JRPG ever. I know this sounds like a guilt trip for letting me give it back to you, but I want to invert that reading: what you're actually getting here is a massive thank-you, a final, 800-word appreciation for letting us play this breathtaking game. It's a bit of poetry, I think, that we got this experience on loan from a work-friend, and now, that work-friend will have a little part of my soul, stacked in among his Wii games. So please take good care of that.

Thanks again,
Jesse

Being the Body: Henri Bergson and embodiment in Pacific Rim (2013)

Giant Robots everywhere in my life right now... having spent the last month or two playing Xenoblade Chronicles, I've been in the presence of some of the largest robot(-like entities) in any fiction I've come across. In that game, you guide an ensemble of heroes, drawn from various fantasy races, through a landscape entirely situated on the body of a massive humanoid creature, large enough that whole continents can protrude from its limbs and tissue. It places you, the protagonists, on the scale of bacteria, which is a pretty amazing speculative premise.

And then, of course, there's the robot-kaiju film on everybody's tongue: Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim.

As usual (or unusual, in the recent waning of my productivity), I'm going to use the film as a jumping-off point for some thematic observations. If you want to know how I liked it, I liked it. It was a fun, positive, humanistic action film that tapped into our adolescent monster worship without treating us with contempt. It was rich with detail and draped in vibrant production design, and its characters were glowing, sympathetic protagonists, free of cynicism, except for occasional comic effect.

In terms of big themes, the film plays a lot with ideas of embodiment and the relationship between mind and matter. There is, in fact, a particular philosopher who explored these topics at length, and his work dovetails nicely with the devices in Pacific Rim. His name was Henri Bergson... and in recalling the film's motifs, I might actually go so far as to say the universe was kind of Bergsonian. Maybe talking about the parallels will help someone understand Bergson better, or maybe it'll shed some light on the film's universe. I'm lucky... for me, the guy working through these concepts, it did both.

I'm not intimately familiar with Bergson, but from reading a chunk of his book Matter and Memory, I've come to understand and appreciate at least part of his philosophical project. Bergson was a grounded, practical philosopher, looking to dissolve some of the paradoxes that have infected philosophical thinking about the mind and body... in particular, he felt the "realism versus idealism" dichotomy was based on faulty logic, a consequence of our bad habit of seeing the "mind" as an isolated, self-sufficient entity whose primary purpose is passive reflection and knowledge-production.

Bergson took the rather radical position that "matter" should actually be seen as "images" -- halfway between the conceptual objects of the mind and the raw physical objects of the external world -- and that the universe is a system of images interacting with one another. One of these images, of course, is our body, which breathes air, kicks sand, runs away from danger, and reacts in various other ways to its external stimuli. To Bergson, the body is continuous with the outside universe, and the "mind" is just a part of the body that slows down that process of stimulus and response, so that more pathways and branches of causation can be opened up between each stimulus and its resulting action(s).

To Bergson, the way the mind does this is through memory. Most perception, he claims, is actually just memories, conjured up spontaneously to organize the raw data that's always coming in through our senses.

It's easy to apply this framework to the Jaeger, the giant robots in Pacific Rim, which are piloted by multiple human pilots to fight the giant monsters called Kaiju. The body is just an image, a construct that reacts to certain stimuli (responding to a jo staff strike by parrying)... the Jaeger is an extension of this body, an image to contain the image, that scales the body up to the size of its monstrous opponent. Deep inside this construct, the human presence provides a narrow but critical function: it allows the responses to be delayed, multifaceted, and complex. It does this by tapping into and intertwining the memories of two pilots, the twin homunculi of this experiment in embodiment.

Bergson never uses the term embodiment, as far as I know, but it's highly relevant in this context. It's a noteworthy aspect of Bergson's writing that he sees the mind and the body as essentially inseparable... seeing a flash of light is as much an action of the eye as it is the action of the mind, and shielding the eyes is as much a physical function as it is a behavioral decision. Bergson claimed that the rational behavior of the brain is essentially identical to the unconscious impulses of the spinal cord... it's just that the brain slows the process down, so the response can account for more stimuli at once.

It should be noted that the humans piloting the Jaeger are entirely different from the humans in their native form. Operating on a different scale, using a different set of tools, requires extraordinary adaptation by the human mind, to a point where it becomes a totally new kind of entity. To explain why this is true, take a moment and think about the movement of the Jaeger and the human pilots.

If the Jaeger were moving at exactly the speed of their human pilots -- action for action, a second and a half for each step, a half-second for a punch -- they would be moving insanely fast, accelerating faster than any airplane, to a degree that would probably challenge credibility of physical laws. For a human, a punch that takes 0.5 seconds has to cover about 2 feet of distance. For a Jaeger, that same punch has to cover... what, 60 yards? A punch that moved an average of 300 feet per second... that's silly, right? That's not just me? That's why the Jaeger always look like they're moving in slow motion... the filmmakers had to make it clear that their every gesture covered an enormous distance, and it would probably take an unnatural amount of time.

Of course, the pilots could slow down their movements, right? Just get in sync with their massive avatars? Yeah, but this would get pretty weird-looking in fast-paced action sequences... every punch taking 4 to 8 seconds for the people inside the Jaeger cockpits. It really was better for everyone that the film used editing to gloss over this discrepancy.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Bergson? Oh, right! It's the fact that cognitive activity... reaction times, impulses, decisions, the timing and rhythm of movements... is not some kind of isolated process, separate from the physical reality it governs. Thinking is done with the body, as well as the mind. Just as humans have to think on a smaller, faster scale than Jaeger and Kaiju, so it is with other creatures: houseflies, despite having very small brains, have to think on a much smaller, faster scale than humans. When we're going in for a swat, we probably look as slow to the fly as the Jaeger did to us. That's why they can get out of the way so effectively.

If that's not enough brain-twisting epistemology for you, Bergson went deeper into how the body actually processes this data. Turns out, he says, the body turns sense data into actions mainly through a process of discernment... it's actually a highly efficient machine for filtering input. Whereas every other image in the universe -- every rock and leaf and air molecule -- has to react to the whole universe all at once, responding equally to every effect, the body is an image that can choose to react to some stimuli and ignore others. In fact, most stimuli don't even reach us, since they have no relevance to us and don't affect any of our five senses. Of the effects that DO reach us, we are extremely good at sorting it out and only letting the most relevant data into our consciousness. We are reductive machines, organizing all input according to our faculties.

I think it's very possible that this is what the human pilots are doing for their Jaeger, as well: processing all the input from various artificial sensory organs, prioritizing it, and reducing the possible responses to a manageable subset. This is something a computer could certainly do, but come on... nature developed the human mind as the best possible computer for this type of thing, complete with ethical impulses, survival instincts, and carefully-calibrated judgment. The only problem, of course, is that there is always too much data coming into those spinal conduits for a single human mind to effectively filter. Thus, two humans... two bodies, complete with all their cognitive patterns... two filters for reducing and streamlining that massive flow of sensory data. There you go: a possible interpretation of the cryptic phrase "reducing the neural load."

The rest of the stuff in Pacific Rim... the love story, the World War II references, the dubious feminist politics... the other critics can cover that stuff. We can all decide what aspect of this cinematic experience affects us, using these beautiful, strange, reductive brains of ours. For me, it was the subtleties and complexities of embodiment and shared consciousness, and trying to figure out what that might mean. It happens that the best answers I've found are the ones furnished by Henri Bergson, back in 1896.

That's pretty weird, right?