I updated my original blog review of Inception to turn it into a more coherent essay. It is freshly minted at Reality Sandwich. Meanwhile, you might be interested in the above video, which a commenter posted at the RS sight. It’s strangely related to what I had written, though the video is less cogent (me thinks!). I don’t totally get the “528″ reference. The video seems to be borderline spam (you need to read the video description at YouTube to understand why). The purpose and intent of the video is confusing. Which is exactly the point of my article: it’s getting too difficult to tell the difference between people and media bots.
It took months to arrive, but Inception finally screened in Italy this weekend. Here’s my take. There are spoilers here, but I assume everyone who’s interested has seen it by now.
Regardless of what anyone says, Inception is a good object to think with.
And I think Christopher Nolan is a clever filmmaker. Mind you, clever doesn’t always mean wise. But he has a knack for making films that can splinter your mind. Even the Batman franchise’s The Dark Night had some deep guano buried within its pyrotechnics. But is Inception the zeitgeist film it aspires to be? Continue reading →
Sci-fi great William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here– it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That could also be said of sci-fi protagonists: the depiction of non-whites is unevenly distributed. In fact, Gibson–who I admire and respect greatly– has been critiqued for focusing on characters who solely work within the networks of elite power. They are technically literate and savvy, and though may on the surface appear to be on the fringes of society, more often than not their lives spin centrifugally towards money and global corporate power brokers.
This is why I have found Octavia E. Butler‘s work so refreshing. In Parable of the Sower (and its sequel Parable of the Talents) it is easy to imagine the novels’ characters inhabiting the same world as Gibson’s cyberpunk sprawls. The difference is that Butler’s characters don’t have access to technology, money or power. Most are barely literate and live in a semi-medieval reality that rims the Emerald City of Cyberspace and sexy hi-tech. They forge and self-organize to defend themselves against an indifferent political disorder that re-legalizes slavery and privatizes the public good. Police, education, water and the fire department are privatized entities beyond the access of poor people, in particular blacks and Latinos. Even television is rare for this population, let alone the ability to read and write.
So while we can imagine cyberpunk cowboys trolling virtual reality and jet-setting at the behest of multinational corporate bosses, in the desert exburbs encircling Butler’s near-future Los Angeles, the planetary underclass struggles to survive amidst the walled communities and ruins of capital’s primitive accumulation. It is in this realm that a New Age religion emerges–founded by a young black woman– which is non-hierarchical and serves the poor. This is a far more hopeful post-collapse vision than one offered by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ll have to read the series to see how the Christian Right captures the flimsy threads of democracy and predictably use that power against the anti-slavers and self-empowered “minorities” who threaten white supremacy.
I think Gibson and Butler are complimentary: they offer parallel visions of a world characterized by the neoliberal logic of social disintegration. These are “alternate” realities, yet also offer stark scenarios that we can hope and pray never transpire. Yet for billions of people, this is a world that also exists today. As any aficionado of sci-fi knows, these books are always about the future present. In an age in which science and rationality have disorganized the world, sci-fi authors are natural prophets. Reluctantly, me thinks.
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
If you are at all a perceptive being, then you feel that “collapse” is in their air. The rise in apocalyptic fiction, books, TV shows, documentaries and cultural groups are expanding exponentially. This Fall’s slate of blockbuster films is no exception. As cultural interpreters, what can we glean from the craze? Well, first of all, it’s not new. Disaster films were big in the ’70s, not coincidentally at the moment when the US was reeling from the oil crisis, failed imperial war, disgraced presidency and flat economy. Still, in regards to the state of our global ecology, the sense of impending doom is not trivial. But whereas one generation’s response was the punk anthem, “no future,” the current 2012 meme is the end of the future. Period.
Unless you are a Hollywood producer.
Nonetheless, it’s about time that time ended. Mechanical time, like our outmoded view of nature, needs to be destroyed. But when it’s done in film, it may stave off the necessary cultural adjustment needed at a time of crisis. Many media theorists have pointed out that film, photography and mechanical recordings have a way of capturing “contingency.” If we can put it into film and be entertained by it, then the danger has been contained, because media has a way of turning the inexplicable into a narrative (for example, post-9/11 TV news turned the disaster into a visual narrative so it would look like a movie instead of crisis with complex origins). Christians have borrowed from Aristotle’s notion of the three act play in which there is a final, concluding drama that culminates the historical and linear drama of civilization. Now we have Monday Night Football.
To put this on the Maya (because it is from them we get this idea of 2012 ending time) is too bad, because it is a wild misapplication of Western metaphysics on non-Western perception. The Maya believe (I use present tense because they still exist) time is *circular*– 2012 can not end something that is nonlinear. This doesn’t mean that their ancient calendar is not important or insignificant. There is a great deal of correlating evidence that shows that the calendar is quite accurate in mapping solar sunspot cycles, which introduce more radiation and potential for mutation than at other points of time. As we know from observing nature, there are cycles within cycles within cycles, but we tend to be oblivious of the impact of sunspots on evolution. What may be hitting our intuitive radar is the transition from one large solar cycle to another. As sensitive biological creatures we may know that. But because of our cultural aptitude, our way of dealing with that sensitivity is to turn it into cathartic spectacles rather than as a tool for organizing political action.
Anyhow, you may enjoy the following trailers. I think they offer a good feel for the cultural Zeitgeist, including the few that have bimbo intros which make global destruction sound as enticing as Michael Jackson’s funeral.
The first ad is the latest from Barclay’s Bank which seeks to distinguish itself from the financial fakers. Ironically, though, they seem to have aligned themselves with all the other sci-fi genre films dealing with false realities (such as Dark City, also posted above– see also The Matrix and Truman Show). The troubling thing for Barclay’s is that in all these dystopic scenarios, the only ones who have a grip on reality are the aliens, TV producers and machines with artificial intelligence. I guess this puts Barclay’s in like-minded company.
I’ve written an extended essay about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica. I hope you will click through and read the whole piece at Reality Sandwich.
“Earth, a dream we’ve been chasing for a long time.”–Admiral Adama
So concludes one of the greatest epic runs of sci-fi on TV: Battlestar Galactica (reimagined). Ripe with sci-fi’s prime directive to comment not on the future, but the present reality, like its cult-like progenitor Star Trek, BSG was rich in allegory, philosophy, and literary references. A sure sign of this is the how BSG generated a cottage industry of fan Websites, books, podcasts, Webisodes, fan films, chats and wikis that manifested all the positives of the current convergence media environment. By leveraging the collective intelligence and participatory components of the contemporary pop commons, BSG illuminated a vast zeitgeist embedded in the historical tension between humans and their technological tools. The show was a kind of conjuring of the collective unconsciousness, with the producers acting as media alchemists distilling cultural properties like mad mediacologists hermeneutically absorbed by the world’s pop culture dream code.
Thank the Great Whatever that someone compiled the top 25 sci-fi movie ads. It is something I started on my own a while back but couldn’t find the time or energy to get it done. The scene from Minority Report (clip above) is in my opinion the most likely future scenario (aside from ads being directed to inside your skull a la Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon).
Some of the promo spots to come may literally make you explode…
Whether video or printed, advertisements only have moments to engage the viewer/reader and convey an enormous amount of information. Therefore they can be a great benefit to science-fiction films which have complex societal or technological backstories essential to the core plot, but which are a potential drag on pushing the narrative forward.
Apart from this practical consideration, the scope for humour and societal satire is immense when inventing ads in this particular genre. Robocop writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner admit that they strip-mined the rich vein of satire – much of which is contained in commercials – in the UK Judge Dredd comic (created by John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra). Dredd’s incisive take on advertising culture has spread through Robocop not only into that film’s sequels but also into a number of other SF movies since, including many by Robocop director Paul Verhoeven and his Total Recall collaborator Arnold Schwarzenegger. As we shall see…
Air Force Academy chapel, Colorado Springs, CO Cylon Resurrection Ship, somewhere in outer space
In case you haven’t seen Sci-Fi network’s Battlestar Galactica (I highly recommend that you do), the premise of the story is that a race of robots created by humans decides to destroy their creators. The cyborgs, called Cylons, have developed a theistic construct of the universe, believing in a single God (the humans are polytheists who warship something akin to the the Greek pantheon). It’s one of the more interesting twists in the series plot lines. The Cylons eventually believe they are doing “God’s” work, so instead of simply destroying the fleshy heathens they decide to invade and occupy a human colony in order to convert them to their cybernetic lord (sound familiar?). In the process of the occupation the Cylons torture, detain and kill the humans without a hint of irony (again, sound familiar?). The hint that perhaps the Cylons are stand-ins for fundamentalists comes with their ability to “resurrect” their consciousness into cloned bodies whenever one of their advanced humanoid models is killed. The “resurrection ship” (pictured above) contains fresh cyborgs that can be downloaded with the consciousness of terminated or killed Cylons.
The religious pursuits of the Cylons obviously have their real world analog, and is a sophisticated commentary on the nature of fundamentalist religion. In it I find echoes of my own sense that monotheism is a bit like a dangerous thought virus that has no logical basis in reality, yet has a way of repeating and transferring itself from one generation to another. Thus I was intrigued to discover the similarities of the Air Force Academy chapel (the first image) with the resurrection ship. Since we know Cylons are not modernists (as the chapel was made in the 1960s and is clearly inspired by modernist architecture), it’s probably a clue that Battlestar Galactica’s writers do in fact view the Cylons as a type of fundamentalist culture which is militaristic, dogmatic and homogeneous. After all, one of the key reasons the Cylons initially attack the human race is that they are viewed as sinful and impure. All these elements happen to be aspects of what is transpiring at the Air Force Academy– and the US military in general– which has become a fierce fundamentalist conversion center, thereby combining high tech with militancy and intense faith. Things get a little loopy, however, when it turns out that it’s tied to the ministry of Ted Haggard (you know, the preacher guy who apparently loved speed and hard (male) bodies).
The Christian supremacist fascism first reported at the Air Force Academy is endemic throughout the military. From the top down, there has been a complete repudiation of constitutional values and time-honored codes of ethics and honor codes in favor of religious ideology. And we now have a revolving door between Blackwater USA, which is Bush’s Praetorian Guard, and the U.S. military at every level. The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders in control of the world’s most powerful military. The risks to our democratic form of government cannot be overstated.
It’s expedient for the warmongering neocons to encourage fundamentalist militancy in the armed forces because it gives them a hardcore base to execute their goals for economic domination of Muslim controlled oil fields. But like the Cylons, the danger of cultivating such a class of “theo-cons” is that they ultimately may not be controllable and will put forward their own agenda of apocalypse and rapture, something Bush apparently believes in, although I find that to be an excuse at best, and a deadly ruse to hide more nefarious goals. The connection between the mercenary army, Blackwater, and Christian supremacy is an example of the kinds of bad things that happen when you let the tiger out of the cage. In the end, by deploying its private fundamentalist army in the heart of Iraq, the White House may have ultimately undermined its mission. It’s hard to put a smily face mask on extremists in the age of transparent global media. So we may be saved from a Cylon attack after all.
How do you turn mat art into a viral video? Sci-Fi’s Tin Man series has this wormhole site that draws you into its various worlds– one after another. It’s a compelling visual fantasy; you have to give the creators credit for having cajones to tackle the Oz story and contemporize it with darker themes. I don’t know if they can top Gregory Maquire’s Wicked, which envisions Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch, but given the trend of recent remakes, I bet it’s a fairly bleak retelling.
…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction’s best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.
William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997.
It would be misleading to say that William Gibson’s appearance in Second Life would be his first, since anytime a phone call is made that is what happens, but his entry seemed to mark an important nexus between sci-fi and the present world. It’s kind of hilarious how he’s delivered into his “reading”; he’s unveiled from something that looks a bit like a shipping container, which releases him as if he were imprisoned by the “other side.” Check out the above video to see a report.
Though I haven’t “played” in Second Life (I use quotes because it appears that there is some debate concerning whether or not the site is a video game, a social space or both), it’s a bit different than how I imagined the cyberspace of Neuromancer. I always pictured a virtual reality environment as completely immersive like a dream. So far Second Life looks more like how we remember things, a bit in the third person with our abstracted selves performing in our minds eye. I’d be curious to know what Second Life is like, although I’m avoiding it because I barely have enough hours in a day to keep afloat in this world.
A viral sci-fi video on MySpace called Afterworld (this is the first in 130 2-3 minute movies) has an animated character lamenting that his contribution to the spread of technology led to the end of the world. Hmmm. So maybe we should take him for his word and believe that some day an animated program will wake up and there will be no more humans. To me that is more plausible than the statistical anomaly of the last man in the world would be a rich white guy, considering that he would only represent about 1% of the world’s population.
PS It is really annoying that the video I’m posting has an embedded BudTV ad. That makes me mad!
I hate re-blogging BoingBoing, but this item really got my attention. In case you haven’t read the Red, Green, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, it is a great allegory about the various strategies a society can make to create a sustainable planet. It is the best ecological sci-fi series next to Dune that you will read. Consequently, I think the following article has a great idea, which is to reframe our world, as Bucky Fuller once did, as “spaceship earth.”
We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.
Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.
On Mars most of those services are unavailable. Mars is the most attractive local planet precisely because it does have some services, most notably a 24 (and-a-half) hour day, potentially fertile soil, and ready water from underground sources. Still, that’s not much compared with even the Gobi desert. Our assumption on landing there has to be that the 24-hour day is about the only service we’re going to get. Everything else–from air to agricultural production–has to be provided by us.
Well kidz, once again we are in for a treat. There is a new William Gibson book, Spook Country, on the horizon and I can’t wait. Pattern Recognition was such a prescient look at media, I’m always curious to see what Gibson’s imagination conjures from the global pop ethers. For his new book, Gibson posted segments on his blog for feedback. Whereas Neuromancer was made on a typewriter, he is actually is now getting caught up with current technology and incorporating it into his process. (BTW, his initial inspiration for “cyberspace” was simple arcade video games of the early ’80s variety.) digital digs: William Gibson’s Spook Country:
The promise of Spook Country as a kind of continutation of Pattern Recognition makes me happy as I thought his last novel was one of his best. It was a decided departure from the more speculative/futuristic content of his earlier work in that it is set in the present and, as Gibson says in the interview, explores the cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11.
That said, it shares a common theme in exploring the intersection of technology and politics. As Gibson notes, technology is very rarely legislated into existence. That obviously shouldn’t be taken to mean technology emerges in apolitical spaces. However it does mean that technological development can disrupt political order, a very Marxian observation, I would think.
So, it turns out Blade Runner turned 25, a film that almost wasn’t made. Thank the Great Whatever that it was, for it remains one of the most near and dear to my heart as the standard of science fiction filmmaking. This is one of those situations that when confronted with such a great work of art, all words fail to capture its immensity. But here are some random thoughts anyway.
I was fortunate to take a class with the Blade Runner’s cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, who at the time had severe Parkinson’s Disease. We watched the film shot by shot as he explained the film’s innovative lighting. What sticks out is how often the lights are shooting and strobing through the windows into your eyes, like the ubiquitous police helicopter lights in contemporary Los Angeles.
Apparently William Gibson was so shocked when he saw the film, because its gestalt is so much like Neuromancer, that he had to walk out of the screening.
My favorite detail is the street shot that has the Million Dollar Theater, a Mexican movie house that is still in downtown LA (last I checked) and is actually across the street from the Bradbury Building where the film’s toy maker J.F. Sebastian lived.
At the time I saw it (1982) I was living in LA and just getting into punk. Somehow the movie captured all the sensibilities of our multicultural apocalyptic vision of the city. In particular I love Edward James Olmos’ character, Gaff, whose gruff Zoot Suit demeanor was betrayed by his origami skills. If you haven’t seen the director’s cut (by far the best version), pay special attention to the last scene.
One of the best writings I’ve come across that relates the film to critical theory is David Harvey’s “The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change”. According to him, Blade Runner has these key components:
• Replicants return to earth to find their maker (309) by infiltrating the heart of the apparatus that made them
• Both Deckard and replicants exist in a similar relation to the dominant power of society (Deckard forced out of retirement)
• Hidden bond of sympathy between hunted and hunter (they sace each other’s lives while trying to destroy each other)
• post industrial decay – garbage, infrastructures in varying degrees of disintegration
• scavengers, city-speak, informal labour practices everywhere
• The chaos of signs (311), recycling, explosion of boundaries
• a sense of hidden organizing power – the Tyrell corporation
• Replicants discovered on the basis of no real history
• lack the experience of human socialization
• Photographs represent a real history no matter what the truth of that history may have been.
• Replicant conflict consists of people living in different time scales
• in the end, the difference between replicant and human becomes indistinguishable (they fall in love)
With the exception of Children of Men, Blade Runner and Brazil (OK, I know there are a few more out there), there is a strangely clinical feel to future spaces. So I was thrilled when I encountered today this wonderful futuristic sports arena in Rome, Palazzetto dello sport by Pier Luigi Nervi, built for the 1960 Olympics. It’s all weathered and beaten by the elements. If I were to make a sci-fi, this is how my future would look!
I was a big fan of Lost, but since moving to Europe I have not been able to watch it. ABC blocks foreign access to the free viewings available in the US. Though news of the Lost college course is being offered is old news, I found the following post interesting. Some critics still think studying pop culture is a waste, but I found from my own study of the program an emerging critique of our media and electronic system. You can read some of these thoughts on one of my previous posts here. In it I wrote:
The surprise breakout on ABC is most definitely not your average program, and the one thing that keeps me interested is my view that Lost’s island is a metaphor for the mediated reality we find ourselves in. The island’s environment, inhabited by ghosts and “the others,” is like a dream space in which objects produce their own space, similar to the acoustic-like, all encompassing ecology of media where we currently live. The plane is our civilization, crashed, destroyed, in pieces. The survivors must learn to cope with their new environment, just as we have to adjust to ours.
The Future is Lost: Economic, Social, and Technological Impact of a Cult (and Cultural) Phenomenon
The course: When a plane crashed on more than 18.5 million American television screens in September 2004, a new television show had taken up the mantle of “cult hit.” Lost, seemingly a mix of Survivor and The X-Files, was an instant paradox: a mainstream media blockbuster that defied categorization and appealed to some of the most fringe elements of human nature. In three short years, the show has spawned an empire of entertainment, marketing, and community that eclipses the show itself. Its producers have pushed Lost to the bleeding edge of new media; online communities take pride in dissecting each episode, from literary references to philosophical allusion; and the show’s format has inspired dozens of copycats on networks desperate to adapt to a newly demanding audience. This course is an interdisciplinary endeavor into the heart of the phenomenon. We’ll examine the economic circumstances that led to the development of the show, the societal context that it evolves in, and the possible effects of the show on technology and the future of media.
This is not necessarily media related, but since I love sci-fi, I just want to gush at the possibility that Sunshine may be the next “2001.” Shot by Trainspotting director Danny Boyle, Sunshine has an intriguing plot. From IMDB:
The Sun is being destroyed from inside out by a type of highly stable form of matter that renders nuclear fusion impossible, by turning common matter on its own kind. The only hope is to send a team of astronauts to detonate a massive, highly energetic bomb, able able to destroy this strange matter and restore Sun’s natural state. Written by Anonymous
50 years into the future, the Sun begins to die, and Earth is dying as a result. A team of astronauts are sent to revive the Sun – but the mission fails. Seven years later, a new team are sent to finish the mission as they are Earth’s last hope.
Assuming this is an allegory of the present moment, it will be interesting to see what the film is saying about climate change. I can’t wait to see.
A clever marketing trick: make a commercial from a fictional product in your book that is unusual, strange and sexy. Add YouTube and the blogosphere, mix and you have a meme. Additionally the Web tie-in is similar to what the ABC series Lost has done with its show by constructing a parallel universe on the Web that features characters, companies and false histories that coincide with the show. In the case of Lost, the program has also devised games that are like treasure hunts which use its various Web sites and video games for generating clues. It’s a vastly more interesting form of entertainment than we are normally accostomed to because it goes beyond the normal boundary of the program, thereby expanding the initial ecology of the media piece. In the case of of Michael Crichton’s book, NEXT, this is a very interesting development for books, his position on global warming not withstanding.
Visit the book’s fictional company at NEXTgencode.
The story celebrates life amidst so much death, but you can barely avoid mortality’s stench. The moving moments offer hope for the alternate reality creeping up on our horizon line. Coming from Mexico, I suspect that Cuaron has true instincts for the reality of future megalopolises, and a great suspicion of the cruel combination of fear, power and racism. Like all sci-fi, Children of Men is as much about the future as it is about the present.
For supplemental reading, I recommend a few pieces by people much smarter than me. I really enjoyed Sheerly Avni’s piece, “‘Children of Men’: Universal’s Orphaned Masterpiece,” which goes into how Universal is doing everything it can to bury this decidedly anti-Bush/Blair/Neo-Con movie. Also, at the Children of Men Web site, there is some really interesting commentary from chic philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. I quote it entirely here:
