Parallax View

Ground Control to Major Tom

Houston, we have a problem.  It's outer space again, and the aliens. We think they're trying to make contact.  Two films of recent vintage, Moon and District 9, very different on their surface, seem to be carrying the same disturbing message underneath.  I think you'd better take a look at this.

Sorry, did I say outer space?  Turns out they’re a lot closer than that.

In Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, 2009), a lunar mining base provides helium for an utopian energy grid on earth.  Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), the only occupant of the base, oversees the regular scrapings of lunar rovers, and the just-as-regular transports of rocks.  His tour is for three years, after which his replacement will arrive, in efficient military metaphor. There are no aliens; there are no other people.  Just Sam, his robot (GERTY), and pre-recorded video from the folks back home. He fills the silence by working out and whittling.

In Moon the look is clean, spare.  Interiors are smooth, the moon is empty, and the fonts are appropriately bold.  There are a few inconsistent notes in this modernist meditation – a post-it note on the robot, Sam's beard, some disturbing dreams – but overall the look is streamlined and functional, an architecture of reassurance and control.

District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009) looks like a completely different film. Messy, crowded, chaotic, it concerns a giant spaceship hovering over Johannesburg à la Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood’s End.  But unlike Clarke's endtime emissaries, the occupants of this spaceship are pathetic, injured and confused. When the military finally breaks in (after no signal from the ship for weeks), it finds a neglected refugee camp of insectoid, weakened aliens in the hull, which it wastes no time in transferring to a neglected refugee camp of insectoid, weakened aliens just outside city limits.  The aliens probably would have been dispensed with immediately except for their superior weaponry, laser guns that evaporate targets on contact.  These have a catch, literally – only aliens can fire them. And only aliens can fly the spaceship, their technology works on a biotech interface right out of the X-Files and Area 51.

Collaged together from shaky handheld camera and faked news video, the look of District 9 is the artless presentation we associate with reality TV – and reality itself.  This is control scrambling for reassurance, and not making it.

So far these are not similar at all: no aliens : aliens. Clean : messy. Stylistic : reality TV.  Empty : chaotic.  Space : no space. 

We need to go deeper.

Sam Bell is a clone.  He discovers this when the system, literally, breaks down.  He revives the previous clone, left for dead in a crash with the rover (generally old clones break down and are disposed of before new ones are revived, in about 3-year cycles).  The crash is a manifestation of the degradation inherent in the copying process; with each copy a little more data is lost, a few more errors creep into the system.  As implants jumped from memories to hallucinations, Sam1 started to see his wife and daughter on the lunar surface.  GERTY is also complicit: it has been programmed, along the lines of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, to "Help Sam."  In this case helping means revealing to him the truth about his nature as a clone: all Sam’s memories have been implanted, like the androids in Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1992).  There are no live video feeds from his family because – it's not his family.  It's the family of the original Sam Bell, who may or may not know about his cloned "spawn."

District 9, meanwhile, has actual aliens, "prawns" in the film's slang, resembling 9-ft cockroaches with tentacles.  Upon their removal to earth they've immediately displaced the underclass in a race to the bottom.  It's not great, but it's relatively stable.  Wikus, a middling bureaucrat at MNU, the multinational agency whose mandate it is to "manage" the aliens, is appointed to head up a field census team. But the census is only a thin cover for another forced relocation, weapons searches, and violence. While in District 9, the aliens' decrepit shantytown, a vial of mysterious black liquid sprays into Wikus' face.  The liquid is a special alien biotech used to interface with the spaceship.  But we don't know that yet.  Wikus starts mutating into an alien, left arm first.

In both films this is only the beginning. It's not that *things are not as they seem, the paranoid narrative that’s fueled all Noir, all mysteries, all horror tales – and our political landscape since Watergate.  It's that *we are not.

Outer space is the great escape, the jumping-off point from the all-too-messy planet, a final divorce of the mind from the body.  A rational philosophy where everything is clean, logical, and moves at the speed of light, or thought.  Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) falls safely within this trajectory, where Dave's final apotheosis occurs far out in space, or "far out" in his mind, and is presented as an evolution from earth and the body into the purely mental realm, where physical distances are as nothing, atmospheres are beautiful mirrored nebulae, and there is room for all the Italianate palaces of the imagination one might possibly wish to inhabit.

Italianate palaces are notably absent from Moon and District 9.  To wish to evolve away from the body betrays a dangerous ignorance of what the body is.  Because what it is, is a mutant: a hodgepodge of cells and information, a nightmare of maintenance and redundancies, an inefficient delicacy in the face of logic, a porous envelope for a magpie's trash; some glittery, some useless, and none having any relation to another except as an accident of proximity.  All this is collected together in the scrapbook we call DNA; a language that, despite having only 4 letters, comes trailing etymologies that precede the human.

(And if this reminds you of a certain other Book, cobbled together from multiple, often contradictory sources so ancient as to be untraceable, which we have declared to be a single, infallible entity – you would not be far wrong.) 

We can't escape into some dream of perfection, we have to *deal. We are always already mutants.  This is an idea that carries within it the seeds of its own implementation: to understand is to start to mutate. Sam and Wikus are both exaggerations, the unwilling products of advanced biotechnology – one very planned and project-managed, the other accidental and "wild."  Significantly, neither gets anything done alone.  Only once they have accepted their essential plurality – Sam in company with Sam2 (the other revived clone), and Wikus in company with the alien cells in his body – do things start to really happen. And the otherness at the heart of the self is only the beginning: the whole thing is open to manipulation, the entire social contract and everyone in it can be rewritten and mashed up, DNA as art material. Because it always already is.  

It's not all good.  But watching them run, we start to realize that the possibilities for being are much wider for a mutant.  Their feats become appropriately cinematic.  They break into and out of impenetrable fortresses.  They defeat unstoppable enemies equipped with advanced technology.  They forge impossible alliances and make them pay off.  And they both finally do, in a way, escape.

The superhero is meant to be human, or almost human, but with some larger-than-life capabilities.  But what if these capabilities were actually rebranded deficiencies?  What if the biotech attachment was actually a prosthetic, needed to partially compensate for some terrible loss? And what if the biotech was at the cellular level – you didn't lose your arm, but you're growing a new one from the inside out.  Or an entire new self, with of course greater capabilities than your old self.  In the conventional superhero story, this is great!  Here, it is – horrifying. 

And *then it is great.

The mutation spreads, from cells, to self-consciousness, to society. Sam2 stows away on a helium transport; we hear news reports from the trial (for illegal cloning) of the mining company, a mediated soundtrack against a moon-based background of stars.  Wikus disappears.  We're left with some final clues that he may now be an alien, but with human memories and mind.  Meanwhile, the ripple effects percolate through the final credits and the exodus of the audience, unresolved, unpredictable, uncontained.

The films are not cynical about our possible futures among the stars. But both use outer space more as a metaphor for inner exploration, where boldly going requires that those 4 letters be manipulated by more than the correct font.  Look deep enough into space, they say, and you'll find the aliens.  They will be you.

Explaining Adele

I have an essay up at OtherZine [LINK] about my Twitter movie, In Search of Adele H [LINK].  In it I discuss why I'm calling it a movie, the problem of text for a visual medium, the seduction of re-enactment, Fluxus, and artmaking in an ADHD culture.

From the essay:

"A Twitter movie requires a different kind of viewing, and not only because it is conceptual or interactive. It is watched or read or imagined in the moment, in little interruptions throughout the day, not all at once in a time and place reserved for it. The project has more in common with graffiti, guerrilla theater and micro-cinemas, in that it lives outside the white-walled galleries and functions instead as an intervention in public, common space. In this case the cultural commons is virtual, but the approach is the same. 

There are any number of complaints these days about our shrinking attention spans. This is an attempt to make an art for the speed and fragmentation of contemporary life."

OtherZine, issue 17, Fall 2009, AdeleH/Nelson

Critical distance

There is something in the predator that needs the prey. There is something in the predator that hates the prey, because of this. I'm talking about criticism, as a position. But also about analysis, just generally. To analyze and explain something is to break it down into tiny bits; to then write it up is to create something different with the pieces. This is in essence a violent act. There is something satisfying, and necessary, in the act - this is how reason works. But there is something - maybe the same thing - dangerously seductive there too, a ripping and tearing and breaking, then arranging in a pile so that what you have killed becomes yours.

I have felt this when I have written about art (mostly, reviews of beyond-obscure films) as opposed to making art, in that the other work of art, the one that you're purportedly writing about, becomes only material for the "thing" that your essay will become. This is not necessarily bad, it can be another swing in a creative volley, where works of art (I would argue) are always bouncing off other works of art, taking pieces and re-forming, etc. But even when handled well, criticism is inherently dangerous. And sometimes it should be unleashed, some things should be taken down, taken apart, their incoherencies exposed and left to the vultures. Aesthetic errors should not go undissected. But neither should beautiful animals be destroyed for pleasure in destruction. We may disagree where the line is drawn, but we all agree that there are lines. The struggle is felt so deeply because the struggle is real: thanatos vs eros: epic.

More mashups of the classics, straight from the E Channel: Madonna and Jesus

In celebrity trash news today, Madonna said to be contemplating marriage to Jesus. No word yet from His Dad.

Or from Tom Lehrer:

Happy B-Day, "Brigitte Bardot"

Blonde bombshell BRIGITTE BARDOT (born 1934) exploded onto the world stage in the 1950s. A woman with the neotenic features of a child, Bardot's Bézier curves measured pure sex appeal, and have been templatized by generations of heat-seeking starlets since. 

It was no coincidence when in 1953 she caused a sensation at Cannes by wearing a bikini: named for the barely-there Pacific atoll destroyed by nuclear testing, the bikini represented the sartorial id, and Bardot's appearance caused a corresponding eruption of libido in a buttoned-down world. 

But she was not merely the passive recipient of all this energy; Bardot played with and against her image. Cast, in Godard's critically acclaimed Contempt (1963), as the trophy wife of a screenwriter pimping her up the food chain, Bardot's character rebelled against the naked power dynamics and would not play to lose. Especially in film, Bardot reminds us, we become what we project.

- Originally posted in Hilo Heros, Hilobrow.com

The Undead Symbol

Now Jesus loved Mary/Mina Magdalene, and her brother Lazarus, His mentor of old. Though but 12 years separated the two, He had oft look't at Lazarus as a father figure. Although being careful not to look on him as The Father figure, who yet had a very low anger-management threshold and was known to smite.

When Jesus had heard therefore that Lazarus was sick, He abode two days still in the same place where He was and did not hurry away.  Because where He was, was in the Medieval Rooms of London's National Gallery, wherein He found many pleasing portraits of Himself to look upon. Being undead He could not admire Himself in worldly mirrors, and reflect on the feathering in his sandy, brown hair. And He saw the paintings, and it was good. However, He did believest that a nice brown Harris Tweed jacket would make better raiment than frat-boy toga robes yet of pink, and of lapis.

But enough already. Pocketing His ever-present lecture notes, on the enoki cult in ancient Aramaic scripture, saith He to His disciples, Let us go into Forks again. His disciples said unto Him, Master, the Freemasons of late sought to stone Thee; and goest Thou thither again? Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him. This is why he best yet fly.

These things said He: and they were mystified, as usual. But after that He said unto them, our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. And Jesus and the Disciples went to the town of the Freemasons, Forks.

Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is undead.

And it was midnight, and Lazarus did rise up and walk again among them. He did also fly, being now at times a tiny bat.

And Jesus saw that it was good.

Jesus said to Mary/Mina Magdalene, Truly I say to you that this very night, before a cock crows, you shall offer your neck to Me three times. And His sandy brown hair brushed her cheek, and His teeth pierced her neck and she did call out. Jesus said unto her, do you not believe that Mine is the way of everlasting life? Mary/Mina Magdalene said yes Lord, but I am troubled still. Be still and be troubled no more!  For I will come to thee a second time and thee shall have faith. And I shall come to thee a third time and take away the sting of mortal death.

But the Freemasons of Forks had doubt in their hearts, and Van Helsing in their midst, and grave were their thoughts at his words. Also did they wonder, that he did not seem to reflect in glass, and avoided the sun and bright places. And he did not seem to consume the olives, of which their dishes were primarily composed, being that of the Mediterranean Diet, of which long - yet not eternal - life is promised. Who doesn't like a few olives, especially presented in a special ceramic dish?  As well they worried about his propensity for Bach, on organs, when the rest of them were perfectly satisfied with flutes and whistles.  Or was it whistles and flutes? No matter, it was never Bach, or, only when encrypted thus with the transgendered Code of Moog, of this they were sure.

Jesus did organize an Initiation Rite for Mary/Mina Magdalene, termed by him a "Supper." Then sought the Disciples for Jesus, and spake among themselves, as they stood in the temple, What think ye, that he will not come to the feast? And yet few knew that Jesus did not partake of solid food, being sustained by the blood of mortals only. Worry not! He appeared just in time, pocketing again his lecture notes. Jesus said, this is My blood, the blood of everlasting life. Drink this cup, so that ye may live forever. And then Jesus said, and I will just have a little sip of yours now too while we're at it, yea too that I am everlasting I also thirst.

Mary/Mina Magdalene said, but the others, my Lord, you've had so many, before; in very many ways, I'm just one more. Jesus smiled a sandy brown smile and replied, Be not afraid. In my father's house there are many McMansions, one for every sacred Wife, and we will journey forth to that land, whereof the scriptures do name it Utah.

At this the Disciples and other Initiates confessed to feeling a little flighty, and did change their forms into tiny bats of an evening to sup from the cows of Forks.

Then said the Freemasons, Behold the Chupacabra! It speaks in tongues and leaves its two-pronged mark on our many livestock, which then do stumble and tip.

Van Helsing said, Truly I say unto thee, in several episodes of recent vintage on National Geographic Travel Channel it was thus revealed the Chupacabra be yet a figment of the people's imagination, and tipped cows were yet living very close to college fraternities, whose hordes are legion.

- Letter of St. Vlad, to the Wallachians

WWJD; He would drink YOUR blood, is what

Got it, the ultimate literary-ho mashup: the Bible, and vampires. YES. I mean it's PERFECT - He rose from the dead, He insisted we drink His Blood, he is obviously undead (and by undead I mean of course his MEME). Co-re-written by Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer. Who of course cast themselves as Jesus (sandy-haired, tweed-jacket-wearing, Cape Ann-dwelling former prep school teacher) and Mary/Mina Magdalene, if Mary/Mina Magdalene was a Mormon, of course.  So like some of the other apostles can also be women, because she's totally OK with that plural marriage thing.  And cults.

Please send my $3 million advance to talkingtshirtanimals [at] paypal [dot] com.  And tell Dave and Regis to get in line, we'll be in touch by manifesting on a piece of burnt toast.

The original cut-and-paste

At Dr. Johnson’s House in London a few weeks ago, was impressed by how the Dictionary was more like collage than writing.  On the top floor, his "garret" (now restored, or at least, re-roofed, after taking a hit during the bombing in WWII), he had his 6 amanuenses, his scraps of paper, his tape and paste, and his vast insight.  And oversight.  They would block out a section of pages, say, "A," and start pasting in words taped to their definitions and to relevant instances of their occurrence. Inevitably, they would have left something out.  At which point there was nothing for it but to disassemble, recalculate, and start taping all over again.  This was not the exception, this was the rule.  A sample work-in-progress with scraps of paper of all different lengths and rough tape all over the place emphasized the visual assemblage.

It didn't look like thinking.  It looked like mad scraps and a tape explosion, a half-finished school project by an errant fifth-grader.  And yet it was, not only thinking, but a guide to how one should think.  And behave.  The official pairing of words to definitions is not merely descriptive, it is normative: this is what it should mean.  This is how one should speak.  Because of course not everything is allowed in, only the right ones.

I had not realized how much of being an amanuensis was manual labor.  MdA told me that at his first job, as amanuensis to Will Self, they "did a lot of walking.”  He added that the pub was 3 miles hence.  It was not clear whether this was a clarification or an addendum.  But I could probably look it up in the Dictionary. 

Johnson's House was only one of the 17 or so places Johnson lived in London, but it is the one where the Dictionary was assembled.  A restless sort, and often strapped for cash, Johnson also "did a lot of walking," but his nomadism was mostly described within the city limits.  But his mind ranged free. Much can be overcome.  Much is possible.

[images: top: collage by Chris Kenny, "Circle of Friends," 2009; middle: lasercut book by Jane Prophet, "Portrait of Samuel Johnson," 2009 (both from "The House of Words" exhibit celebrating the 300-year anniversary of Dr. Johnson's birth, installed at 17 Gough Street); bottom: Dr. Johnson's House, exterior, Gough Square, London]

To the Moon, Alice!

In Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, 2009), Sam Rockwell plays the scruffy hipster-next-door on the moon, who turns out to be both more and less than what he seems.  With impressive set design, constructed with tiny models instead of CGI, Moon inhabits not the 1960s techno-future of visible progress, but the 1970s paranoid present of hidden ulterior motives.  In a way, Moon recalls not so much the actual space race, but the aftermath of plastic modules on the kitchen table, with an excess of glue and tiny pieces that don’t seem to fit anymore.

Drawing from influences ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Solyaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1990), Silent Running (dir. Douglas Trumbull, 1972), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) and, weirdly, The Parent Trap (David Swift, 1961), Moon presents a clean, empty space, full of white, slightly curving surfaces against the stark grey and black of the lunar environment. The moon has been colonized by machines and blocky sans-serif fonts, which have been installed to mine a special kind of rock-held helium from its surface, the clean, efficient, abundant energy that is fueling civilization back on earth.  The lunar enterprise is maintained in person by a single individual, Sam Bell (Rockwell), whose job it is to oversee the machines for a three-year stint.

Machined environments might look cool, but they make for a lonely life.  For companionship Sam has a free-range AI computer, nicknamed GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and pre-recorded video hookups from his family and his corporate bosses back on earth.  He also talks to himself a lot.  But within all these elements are clues to something else, for the system is not as clean and efficient as it seems.  It has broken down, incrementally.  The video hookups are supposed to be live links, but the live capability has broken and no one has the time or know-how to fix it.  GERTY looks like a very used washing machine on wheels, with a 1980s-style “face” screen that displays emoticons, and various messages and reminders on post-it notes stuck to various parts of his anatomy.  And Sam himself has drifted a fair amount from the fitness-and-efficiency Type-A astronaut he styled himself at the beginning.  When the film opens it is almost the end of Sam’s three years, and he has grown a beard, put his feet up, and made small but accumulating diversions from the efficiency aesthetic, looking more like hippie gardener Lowell from Silent Running than Right Stuff John Glenn.  And, most troublingly, there are increasingly ambiguous messages in the videos from his family back on earth.

But it doesn’t matter, his time is almost up, just a few more shipments to send back to earth and then he will finally punch out and return home.

Then something goes wrong.

One of the machines really breaks down, and in heading out to the surface to repair the damage, other gaps in the story appear.  Until, in a cascade of different puzzle pieces clicking into place, we (and Sam) realize that he’s been inhabiting a quite different environment from what he has been told.

But that’s not the end of the story, the “big reveal” that concludes 2001 or Blade Runner.  The significant breakdown occurs very close to the beginning.  Because what Duncan Jones is interested in is not so much the paranoid trajectory, the understory holding up the surface veneer.  More like The Parent Trap, he is interested in, well, NOW what do we do about it?  And that’s where Moon gets different, and very interesting.

Ok, alienation is a given.  We are surrounded by machines, emptiness and false promises.  What of it?  An even closer influence on Jones is of course “Major Tom,” David Bowie (and Jones’ father), who has played alienated aliens both onscreen (Man Who Fell to Earth, dir. Nicholas Roeg, 1972), and off (Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s alien alter ego of indeterminate gender from the 1970s).  This essential aloneness in the middle of society was a central tenet of existentialist philosophy; and, reformatted slightly as an essential aloneness in the middle of nature, has been a similar theme in the American West.  Space travel is an extension of the western narrative: the self-sufficient yet lonely cowboy, the launching out into the unknown, the fraught encounters with alien others, the evocative yet silent geographies.

Sam has a mystery to investigate, a problem to solve, not much time to do it, and powerful forces arrayed against him.  So the film works as a mystery and a bit of a silent, running chase.  But Moon investigates a deeper mystery, a more troubling problem.  What makes us human, Jones offers, are our relationships with others.  And, importantly, it doesn’t count if it’s too mediated.  GERTY is almost human, Kevin Spacey’s smooth suburban tones go a long way towards enlivening the emoticons, and playing with the possibility of motivational ambiguity and dread we know from HAL.  Pre-recorded videos are evidence from humans, connected to something real through causal chains of the appropriate type.  But none of these is direct human contact.  Sam comes to realize that much of what he thought was going on has been one-way, in his mind only.  And the strength of his personal belief doesn’t count.  What does count is the existence on the other end.  He cannot really start to figure out the puzzle, to take initiative, to create a new reality, until he has been heard by at least one other real person, in real time, and in real space.

A clean, efficient system is – not undesirable, but actually not possible.  Mutations in the code are not messy mistakes, but essential elements.  Sam’s story rewrites the space narrative from within, using outer space to highlight inner space.  It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t go out there – Moon actually is quietly optimistic about our eventual extension beyond the planet – but that journeying further out might mean journeying further in at the same time.  Something that Right Stuff John Glenn and the other astronauts were and are no stranger to, themselves.

Our mutant nature is not to be pitied, or cured. It is to be managed, perhaps; and our point of injury may yet become, if not our greatest asset, then at least a portal — although to what, we may not yet know.

[From my review at the Brattle Theatre Film Blog]

Reversals

From my reverse travel blog, http://lesstraveledby.tumblr.com:

Steps descending to water, reflecting air.

Yes it's! more Dan Brown

John Crace has posted a brilliant satire of The Lost Symbol in The Guardian: read it now!

And the comments are also excellent. For an example:

"Just reading the 20 worst dan brown sentences:

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

This is impossible, I just tried it (and everyone in my office looked at me like I was some sort of deranged freak, engaging in freakish behaviour because he was deranged).

Seriously, try it: Tuck your chin in hard to you chest and throw your sholders back. It's fucking impossible.

-from radgecore [username]

Mad, bad and danger-- oh forget it, I have to get to the office

Byron is just - not - *practical, one realizes, after a point. And that is both a relief and a sadness.

In my mad impetuous youth days, I used to think I could FEEL my way to the truth, if only I felt, truly, enough. And then later I thought I could THINK my way to it. Same result.

I suppose it's no wonder that my work has become about the beauty of inauthenticity.