Odd prop in a realistic movie: the rock in Joon-ho Bong's Mother

I'm a big fan of the South Korean director/writer Joon-ho Bong.  Last night I watched his most recent movie, Mother.

Excellent, like all of his movies, though I still think Memories of Murder is my favorite.  Mother has some themes in common with that earlier murder investigation movie: lazy, incompetent cops; corrupt late-middle-aged upper class males (in this case a delightfully self-absorbed lawyer and some pompous professors); too-knowing schoolchildren; and a tattered semi-urban landscape of small shops, government offices, and piled-together dwellings.

I won't detail the plot, which intense and creepy.  I'll just mention something I found truly odd.  A rock plays a significant role in the narrative. A big rock.  A boulder, in fact. The thing probably weighs eighty pounds, but people, including a small adolescent girl, toss it around like a brick. It's almost magic realist, particularly given the rest of the movie's careful realism.

I remember being struck by a scene in the postwar movie Best Years of Our Lives. Dana Andrews, as a returning serviceman having trouble readjusting to civilian life, punches somebody out in a department store. The guy falls onto a display case--which shatters into a thousand pieces, as Hollywood props always do.  Nothing bursts into flame, but, again, the movie was determinedly realistic aside from this one bit of absurd prop work.

Physical reality in movies is always way more plastic than it is in real life, often so something "reads" in a way that can quicly be identified, with smashing objects standing in for the bodily damage a movie can't effectively show. Still, the easily tossed boulder tossed me out of an otherwise compelling movie for a few moments.  I still think it was an odd and unnecessary choice.

Where's a prima when you need her? The failure of Black Swan

As part of a marital negotiation (hint:  I lost), I saw Black Swan a few weeks ago.  Everyone else has already written about it, but there is something about this alleged ballet movie that struck me that I have not seen mentioned.

It is the absence of the prima ballerina, or, if you go whole hog, prima ballerina assoluta.  Natalie Portman, whose popularity and reputation are an absolute mystery to me, can do OK playing what she seems to be in real life: an anxious, hard-working teacher's pet. But not much more than that.

Primas work hard, but they are paranoiac rather than anxious, and their real genius is for projecting their own personality and suppressing yours. Primas are brilliant, infuriating, high-maintenance, charismatic, sexy, and dangerous.  M. Portman is none of these things, and a ballet movie without a prima lacks a power source.

The movie sets up a false dichotomy: White Swan vs. Black Swan.  It implies that mere technical accuracy is necessary to play the White Swan, whereas you need real passion for the Black Swan, passion you can acquire by getting high, having anonymous sex, yelling at your mother, throwing your "Symbol of Immaturity"-brand stuffed animals away, and then losing your mind in some indeterminate way. If you think convincingly playing the unnattainable object of passionate love is a purely technical problem, stick with clog dancing. Portman as Nina Sayers couldn't succeed at either.

Just for the record, I don't think Winona Ryder did much better as the prima incumbent.  Primas on the skids can really do some damage--they have nothing to lose, but still have the ability to punch your heart out of your ribcage with their toe shoes. Ryder wasn't dangerous, she was just sloppy.

Darren Aranofsky's previous movie, The Wrestler, did have a prima:  Mickey Rourke. Wrecked, powerful, unreliable, but a performer to the end, with a body as tortured and deformed as any ballerina's.  Plus you got to see Marisa Tomei, who has more sex appeal in her pinkie fingernail than Portman has in her entire resume-with-attached-transcripts. Professional wrestling and ballet have more in common than you might think, a connection worth examining, but Aranofsky has gone back to that well once too often.

Now, oh joy, there seems to be a plethora of Portman vehicles in theaters, an index of our fallen age (Black Swan will be unwatchable only a year or two from now, and no one will understand why it was successful).  Having given in on BS, I am safe from them.

Arisia: where I will be

I'll be at one of my home town conventions this weekend: Arisia.  My panels will be:

Fri 6:30 PM Boston as setting

Our shared world anthology Future Boston, recently popped back up, as me and other participants were interviewed by two fun staffers from the Boston Phoenix.  Both had been fans of the book in their youth.  So I'm probably just going to recycle whatever I said to them.

Fri 9:30 PM Conservatism in SF and Fantasy

I must be crazy to participate in this.  But as what passes for a libertarian here in Cambridge (that is, probably not recognizable as such elsewhere) I felt obliged to try to steer some kind of course between oppression by the nanny state and oppression by tradition and habit.

Sat 9:30 AM SF/Mainstream Convergence

Delia Sherman is unavailable, so I will be moderating this, and thus unable to pompously hold forth as much as I would like.  This is a noble sacrifice, which I hope the audience appreciates.

Torchwood and the surveillance society

I watched a couple of more episodes of Torchwood, which I was a bit disappointed by a few days ago.  I'd say it gets better, though Gwen is still nothing like a cop (or--let's be clear here--she is nothing like a cop like I have seen portrayed in other books, movies, and TV shows.  My actual contacts with actual police are limited to automotive contexts).  She lets a suspect escape in episode 2, and only a magic device saves the situation. In episode 3 she has clearly never even picked up a gun.  Now, maybe UK cops are still unarmed, but presumably they receive some training. She accidentally kills someone by having slow reflexes (and despite having been warned that something like it was going to happen).

But the main thing that strikes me in watching these episodes (and it really has been only these three) is the prevalence of surveillance, and the casual way in which it is accepted and used.  The Torchwood team has access to security cameras everywhere. They track suspects, rewatch tapes of incidents in dark alleyways, and can actually look at things that happened in a bathroom at a dance club the previous night. They get access to private medical records and discuss the contents with no sign that this might be even remotely confidential. The show portrays the UK as a place where privacy of any kind is unknown. From my other reading, that is pretty much the truth.

Again, I find the conflict between the Torchwood team's vision of themselves and the actual impact they have on the world to be the interesting story (particularly as they never actually figure anything out--they seem to run around for a while, and then store the alien gizmo away in a secure location without ever understanding how it works or where it came from).

As always, works that fail in some way are more useful to me than works that fully succeed.

SF TV vs. regular TV: the case of Torchwood

Even in my youth, I didn't much care for SF movies and TV shows. This should have been a warning sign as to the course of my future career. Even sophisticated writers and readers of SF usually like things like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly.

But that doesn't mean I don't try such shows on occasion, just to keep up. A lot of people I talk to liked Torchwood, the British Dr. Who spinoff. So I decided to give it a try. And a real try, which means that the fact that I thought the first episode was terrible, and the first part of the second even worse will not keep me from watching one more, just to see if I can figure out what all the fuss is about.

But as I watched, I had a whole bunch of ideas on how I would have rewritten the show, which is both dumb (the show was popular, and clearly my changes would have made it less so), and fun (rewriting while watching ensured I actually enjoyed watching the show, and I can use my ideas somewhere else).

(Spoilers follow, for those who are reading this, haven't watched the show, and still might)

Gwen is a cop in Cardiff, Wales. She is hanging around a crime scene, where the body of the victim of a serial killer is lying out in the rain. And I do mean "hanging around". She never actually seems to be a cop, and never does a lick of work throughout the entire episode. She sees a team of young, high-status people stride in and bring the corpse back to life for two minutes. She decides to figure out who they are and what they do.

They seem to be leading her on, by leaving obvious clues.  They build a "secure" facility on the top floor of police HQ (which must have a lot of unused office space to make this possible), where they keep a homicidal alien beastie.  The security door consist of a sheet of plastic with a slit cut through it. There isn't so much as a Keep Out sign. Gwen and a workman investigate.  The workman gets his throat ripped out by the alien. Our professional cop runs away without trying to help him, and doesn't report the death to anyone. The "show Gwen a cool weird thing" facility seems to vanish completely after this.

Then she follows a car to a city plaza, where she wanders around for a while. She eventually disguises herself as a pizza delivery person and gets into the super secret headquarters, full of cool alien stuff. The leader takes her out for a beer, tells her a lot of stuff about the operation, and then gives her a drug to give her amnesia. He does explain that they weren't interrogating the dead guy because they were interested in finding the actual killer: they were just practicing their resurrection techniques.

Later, by chance, she learns what the murder weapon used in three murders looks like. This gives her some vague flashbacks, enabling her to go back to the vicinity of the secret headquarters. The murderer comes out, waves the murder weapon, confesses to everything ("monologuing", as they call it in The Incredibles), decides not the kill Gwen with the weird stabbing thing, and fumbles in her purse for a gun. Gwen stands and watches. The murderer finally pulls a big pistol out of the purse and points it at Gwen, who starts to cry.

A miracle occurs, and she is saved. Because she is so brave and clever, she is offered a job in the secret organization, Torchwood.

She starts off the next episode by making a really dumb mistake. But no one mentions the murderer, who was a friend and part of their team, or worries that they may have serious organizational problems.

OK, fine, she's a lame character, someone who needs everything explained to her so that we viewers understand it. But she is so lame that it's a wonder she could ever hold a job. Even though she makes fun of her boyfriend at one point, implying that he's the dumb one. Look at how many fingers are pointing back at you, Gwen....

But consider an alternate approach, one I genuinely think is more appealing. She is a cop, a decent cop. Some outsiders intervene in a crime scene, one she is responsible for, and the higher-ups allow it. And these outsiders do something mysterious. She's curious, but she also has a murderer to catch. She checks them out in her spare time. Her geeky boyfriend (a charming character, actually) has some information, an old colleague or someone she has arrested on occasion has more. She tracks these guys--they are overconfident, and their security isn't as good as they think.

Their organization is in deep trouble. It harbors a murderer, and the staff has been misusing the alien technology in their care.  This is great suspense-generating situation. As its stands, the writers use it all just to get Gwen into Torchwood, kind of like Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper using the royal seal to crack nuts.

Another murder occurs. She knows they will be there to check it out, and sets a trap for them. And she is beginning to suspect there is a connection between them and the deaths. It really is only one of them, not the group, but she figures this out only after doing them some damage and getting into serious conflict with them. Someone senior in her organization warns her off (don't they always?), because the Torchwood unit has some powerful protectors. This doesn't stop her.

Eventually, she finds the killer at the heart of Torchwood. This revelation can't just be a casual thing, as it is in the current show, with all the emotional impact of someone in another department getting laid off. A person they worked closely with and trusted turned out to be a serial killer. And they never knew, until this dumb cop showed up and started checking things out. This has to have serious emotional aftereffects.

Maybe she pressures them to bring her in. She must have ambitions, or fears, or something else that makes her accept this job, even knowing how dangerously mismanaged this organization has been.

There is a lot of sex and violence, so Torchwood is described as "adult" science fiction. Actually, "adult" should mean things like sophisticated narrative and subtle characters.

Anyway, that was how I got through the first episode.  I have a fun idea for the ending of the second episode, so I'll skim to the end to see if it's true. If not, I have another possible plot to use.

It's just light entertainment, you say? Why am I getting so hot under the collar about it? Because it's only a little harder to do it right. If science fiction aspires to be a genre of interest to adults, it will need to.

Tip gets snipped: part two of the sad end of The Marvelous Land of Oz

Yesterday we went into my boyhood crush on General Jinjur, in probably more detail than you wanted.

Today we deal with the most searing element of Baum's The Marvellous Land of Oz: the revealed real identity of Tip.

Tip, or Tippetarius (his full name is given only once, and then simply to be dismissed as too long--this is one of those things that starts obsessive exegetes speculating about hidden narratives, since it is never mentioned again) starts the book, and is its main point of view character. He is apparently orphaned, and being raised by a mean old witch named Mombi. The neighbors dislike her, and so Tip is left all alone. He does his best, eventually stealing some magic, bringing a pumpkin-headed mannikin to life, and fleeing old Mombi.

We follow him through many adventures, until, at the end, Mombi confesses a terrible thing: he is actually a girl, Ozma, the rightful heir to the throne.

Tip's response is completely natural:

"Oh, let Jinjur be the Queen!" exclaimed Tip, ready to cry. "I want to stay a boy, and travel with the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, and the Woggle-Bug, and Jack--yes! and my friend the Saw-Horse--and the Gump! I don't want to be a girl!

I'm with you, Tip. But, desperate for a legitimate heir, and buffaloed by the charismatic Glinda, all of his supposed friends instantly tell him to...dissolve his identity and become someone he does not remember being.

"Never mind, old chap. It don't hurt to be a girl."Comforting words, Nick, coming from someone who chopped himself up with his own ax and is now made of tin. Fine role model you turned out to be.

They all pile on, like Job's miserable comforters (Job never had a problem like this one). No one has any interest in "Tip". They've been imprisoned together, and shared dramatic escapes and adventures. None of that matters. Tip does not exist, as far as they are concerned. He is a figment. All of his needs and ambitions are merely the chrysalis for a royal butterfly. Who cares if he thinks he has a right to existence?

Stunned by the universal betrayal (remember, he was raised alone and has no other friends or relatives), Tip first waffles, wanting to try the girl thing temporarily. Glinda snapishly dismisses this attempt to straddle the issue, and Tip gives in.

As a result, he disappears and is replaced by

Ozma, fashion victim

Holy....! At least she could have been revealed as someone charismatic and compelling, like Jinjur, but, instead she's a female version of the Infant of Prague.  And Tip is gone, with no one to mourn his passing. It would at least be appropriate for Mombi to do so, since she is, in effect, his mother.  I feel an alternative narrative coming on...more news as it happens.

I can't express the gut grip this ending gave me as a boy. Tip is a girl? Nothing made any sense. Charming feminine rulers who, beneath their lovely veneer, were absolutely ruthless (Glinda: "We must lay siege to the city, and starve it into submission.") would do their best to crush me. And maybe my sense of myself was a complete illusion.

And if you think bookish ten-year-old boys aren't anxious about issues like that, think again. But the turnabout has, in the end, the effect of great literature: it affected me, and I still remember it.

I'd like to say that the ending causes you the reavaluate the book the precedes it, but it does nothing of the sort.  It's like one of those "twist endings" in a Hollywood suspense movie, where the main character is revealed to really be someone else, making a mockery of all previous events. It's just desperate plot doctoring by the fifth pair of screenwriters hired to do something about the miserable script, not something organic to the conception.

Somewhere, the wraith of Tippetarius still wanders, weeping for all the Jinjurs he will never get to meet. Spare a moment of thought for him.

Jinjur in chains: part one of the sad end of The Marvelous Land of Oz

My friend and colleague Jim Cambias (who, energetically, has two blogs, one with his wife Diane, Science Made Cool, one on his own, on literary topics, at Just the Caffeine Talking), has been Ozblogging, and recently did a series of posts on the second book in the Oz series, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

Reading Jim's entries got me to thinking about how affected I was when I read the book as a young boy, probably about ten years old. It was in an old green volume on the shelves in my house, and I think it was the first Oz book I read--in fact, I don't think I read the actual Wizard of Oz until I was reading them to my children, as an adult.

Marvelous Land is distinctive for two main reasons: the wonderful General Jinjur, and the psyche-scarring fate of Tip, a boy I followed throughout the narrative to his incomprehensibly weird end. It came as a shock I still remember.

First, the babe: Jinjur. She is described as being dressed in brightly colored silks in a "splendor...almost barbaric", and, more importantly, as "pretty enough...but [with] an expression of discontent coupled to a shade of defiance or audacity". She has promoted herself General and wants to seize control of the Emerald City. She has simply decided to do this, because the Scarecrow is a miserable administrator. She has no hereditary office. In a world where authority is either inherited or simply granted by Glinda, Jinjur's ambitions are rare.

The artist, John R. Neill, went to town on her. Here is her glamor headshot:

Giving the Gibson Girl a run for her moneyBut to truly appreciate her, you have to see her in action. Here she is on a giant emerald commanding her army of knitting-needle-armed women to seize control of the Emerald City:

Kick 'em in the cobblers!Despite the multicolored beauty of her outfit, Jinjur is underappreciated and gets only a single color panel in the book. Here, the team of characters who we've been following, Tip, Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, Wogglebug, and Jack Pumpkinhead, try to oust her from her palace. Jinjur, as you can see, can do languid as well as she can do frenetic:

"You are very absurd creatures"

(An actual, and accurate, quote from Jinjur in the book)

But all good things come to an end. After several conflicts, the heroes finally call in the big guns: Glinda. And Glinda invades with her army of Stormtrooper Rockettes, and wins the day, as we know she will.  Jinjur, the only person in the book (or in most of Oz, for that matter) with ambition and goals, is deposed. Fortunately, our fascination with this mercurial, high-maintenance, easily bored usurper is rewarded with an image of her held in bondage by Glinda's Rockettes:

Man, I hate blondes

Oz turns out to be way more fun than you remember.

The concept of a media tie-in is far from new, and all these gals are ready for an "authorized performance" kickline somewhere in the sticks. Most Oz books, in fact, read like musical comedies without the songs, and got modified in a variety of ways for the stage. The final movie version had the advantage of almost four decades of road-testing. While Arlen and Harburg wrote original songs, they benefited from knowing what concepts had worked on stage in the past.

But Jinjur, delectable though she is, is only a side issue, particularly here at the dramatic conclusion, because it is here that we learn that Tip, the spunky, interpid young lad we've been following, is actually....

Let's wait until tomorrow to find out the horrible truth about Tip's hidden identity.

The writer's bait and switch: Tana French

Some time ago, a friend lent me two books by the Irish author Tana French, In the Woods, and The Likeness.  I enjoyed them both--obviously I enjoyed the first or would not have read the second. Oddly, despite French's obviously popularity, I had never heard of her, so I'm grateful to Sherri for having introduced me to her. Who else am I missing?

Both are mysteries, the first ostensibly a police procedural, the second a kind of "agent in place" investigation. Both have problems (which I'll get to in a minute), but, on a sentence-by-sentence, scene-by-scene read move right along, with sharp description, dialogue, characterization, and pace. As I think I've said before, high-end mysteries have it all over science fiction in the area of pure technical skill. And by that, I don't mean some kind of arid mechanics. I mean the deliberate means by which prose induces emotional, intellectual, and visceral reactions in the reader. I'm reminded of a fine mystery writer from across the North Channel in Scotland, Denise Mina--though Mina is much meaner to her characters than French is. I'll have to deal with her elsewhere.

When you find problems in an otherwise extremely well done book, you have to question whether the problem is an inherent consequence of the same choices that made the book work in the first place. There is no perfect narrative solution to certain issues, and sometimes focusing on certain difficiencies just makes you look clueless.  You don't look to comedies for deep characterization, and epiphany-directed stories don't benefit from suspense.

So what are the issues?  In In The Woods, French presents a scarring past experience involving a couple of vanished children, which in the end, plays little role save as "character's secret hurt" and is never explained. This is just a tease, a selling point in the initial pitch, and the source of cover copy. It's always important to remember that books are not just discrete chunks of prose, but devices that need to operate in the market as well as in the individual reader's head.  This kind of bait-and-switch is annoying, but somewhat understandable.

The point of view character, Rob Ryan, needs that secret hurt to make him interesting, and to motivate him when necessary, so it's not just a tease. His relationship with his partner, Cassie, is an extended adolescent crush, which eventually gets tiresome, though his emotional retardation (he's in his 30s, and a homicide cop, for heaven's sake) plays a plot role too, because Rob has to be almost absurdly obtuse at a couple of points to keep the plot going. Tiresome, but the plot does keep going, so you forgive the kludges that let it do so.

The Likeness, in which Carrie is the point of view character, depends on a piece of melodramatic coincidence so absurd the experienced science fiction reader instantly reaches for explanations from our genre:  time travel, matter duplication, cloning.  Cassie's exact double is found dead, murdered.  If you're wondering whether you'll ever find out why they are exact doubles, forget it:  this is the given that generates the plot, and is never explained.  Pick a science fictional explanation, if you want.

Cassie takes over the other woman's identity in order to find out who killed her. That's a great suspense generator. She finds herself in a hothouse situation in a beautiful old house full of beautiful academics.  Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine likes this kind of forcing vat of interpersonal conflict. It's also clearly reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, as well as part of a P. D. James novel, An Unsuitable Job For a Woman, in which the reluctant detective, Cordelia Gray, must infiltrate a similar academic idyll.  That book also works with some of the class stresses that underlie French's work.  I enjoyed The Likeness too, on a page by page level, but found the contrivance more annoying than I would have liked. But, again, no contrivance, no book, so it's a trade I'm willing to make.

While there is clearly a limit, readers are willing to forgive a lot in order to get an entertaining, compelling book. In workshops we often pound on the logic of the story. Sometimes resolving all the contradictions resolves the book into nothing. Something I, addicted to rationality, will need to think about.

Good books.  Recommended.

Levels of architectural complexity

One thing modern architecture seems to want to get rid of is texture. All surfaces are supposed to be clean, mathematically precise planes or curves, leading to the suspicion that their highest and best form is as an architectural model peered at from above by clients holding glasses of white wine. The lack of detail at the smaller scales leads to tedium when they are life sized.

Mary and I like the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. This weekend the children (who are less than enthralled) were both otherwise occupied, so we made a trip up there, had breakfast at Red's, and took in maritime art and a few old houses.  Sorry, 'historic" houses.

The museum is the union of two old Salem institutions. When they joined, they hired Moshe Safdie, of nearby Somerville, to build an addition.  Museum additions tend to bring out the worst in architects (cf. the new wing of the MFA, and don't get me started on the hangar being attached to the Gardner), but, in this case, Safdie did a thoughtful job.  The main atrium is actually light and charming, and a great place to drink coffee.  And it gives a view of the five brick houselike structures that house the maritime and special collections.  I'd never looked at them consciously before.

First, I admired the way the sun hit the wall.

Then I started wondering why I was enjoying that so much. I am a man of simple pleasures, but, still, a brick wall.... Then I noticed that there was a lot of detail in the wall.  Not just the sandstone stringcourses, but something about the bricks themselves.

Each brick is different, with a complex surface pattern that casts shadows. I hadn't consciously noticed it, but I certainly had responded to it.

No one two hundred years ago building a Federal style house a few blocks away, in what is now the McIntire Historic District, would ever have allowed such clearly defective bricks in their facades, of course. They were aiming at a smoothness of surface and failing, lacking the technology. We have achieved it, and now should have a better sense of when it makes sense and when it doesn't.

As a writer, I should give you a little lesson about sentences and large scale structures about here, but it is late, and I must get to bed. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

[REC]: further adventures of the first-person vomitcam

[REC] is a Spanish zombie movie from 2007, all allegedly found footage, from a TV show about night jobs that goes horribly wrong when the fire crew a reporter and her cameraman are following gets a call to help a delusional old lady in her apartment who proves to have something more serious than Alzheimer's.

It's tight, scary fun, with a lean 78 minute running time, a novella among films, and, aside from the usual what's-the-rated-life-of-that-battery question about the camera (particularly pressing in one of its predecessors, The Blair Witch Project, which allowed shooting for days), made narrative sense, until a poorly conceived scene near the end, which purports to "explain" something.

I've never gotten why people feel they need to explain zombies. Zombies don't, um, actually exist, so any explanation is just as ridiculous as the zombies themselves. And this one comes out of left field, and is mostly to make us relax a bit before the final horror arrives. Understanding helps nothing.

Now, as usual, I'll come up with a couple of twists I thought the movie would have that it didn't, and are thus fair game for any works I may create in the future.

At one point during the steady collapse of the culture inside the sealed apartment building, ethnic tensions rise between a couple of Asian immigrants and the Spaniards, in an extremely convincing way. The Spanish call them Chinese, though they are actually Japanese. Unfortunately, this tension plays no role in how events play out, and I think it would have been more interesting if it had, and a possible solution to their problems proves impossible because of their squabbling.

All the video is from one camera run by a single cameraman. Several times he drops the camera, or there is some other interruption. It would have been interesting if something significant happened during the dark time, and then we, as viewers, would have to figure out what that might have been, since everyone else went through it and knows it perfectly.

Who is the cameraman?  His name is Pablo, but has no real existence. But he is just as terrified by zombies, and just as likely to have bad things happen to him as anyone else. Could you tell that something has gone badly wrong by a significant change in his camerawork?  Can how you pan, focus, and zoom be diagnostic of becoming a zombie? After one of those significant blackouts, someone else, not as skilled, is running the camera.

I don't make movies, but the use of the "actually part of the movie" camera would seem to make stunts like that irresistable.

Anyway: face ripping, sinister child, buckets of gore. As Joe Bob Briggs used to say, check it out.

"The Secret in Their Eyes" vs. "Memories of Murder": the police procedural under oppressive regimes

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the excellent South Korean film Memories of Murder. Now I have seen Argentina's entry in the "police procedural under oppressive regime" genre, The Secret in Their Eyes. Despite its Oscar, it is far inferior to the other film, substituting a touching but bland romance for the interpersonal complexities that characterized Memories.

Joon-ho Bong's film is interesting because the consequences of the oppression are seen through its effects on character. The rural cops have spent their time breaking up demonstrations and beating demonstrators. A real criminal is something far beyond their experience. And the thuggish and befuddled cops are, finally, sympathetic characters, or at least characters whose fate we care about. In Secret, who is oppressive and who isn't is kept carefully clear, so that there is no audience confusion about the compromises everyone makes in order to survive in an unfree society.

Secret seems like half a movie.  It sets up a situation, and then pretty much fritters it away, quickly getting to an ending that doesn't really make any sense. I won't say what it is, except that you have to spend a lot of time with the least interesting of the story's characters, to discover that he has kept an impossible secret for decades.

In order to buy the way things get resolved, we have to believe that a woman, a woman in macho Argentinean society, humiliates and degrades a violent sex criminal who ends up being a deadly and active secret policeman--and then has to have no fear of the consequences. This is the key piece of tension, and the film-makers decided to completely ignore it.

Various reviewers compared this to an episode of Law & Order, partially because of director Juan Jose Campanella's history with the show. It is really more like the first episode of a two-parter, where you only got to see previews for the second episode. Extremely unsatisfying. And don't get me started on the ridiculous typerwriter with a missing key, which seems a lot of build up for changing one word to another.

Of course, no episode of even the dumbest TV cop show would have someone fingering the killer because of a few sidelong glances in the background of photos in a photo album. Esposito's certainty (not just "here's a possibility") is itself a totalitarian attitude. He breaks into a house without a warrant, seeking evidence.  His certainty is exactly that of the rural South Korean cops of Memories, except that, through the generosity of the writer, he turns out to be right, whereas they, much more realistically, get it, not only wrong, but wrong in a way that actively hampers their investigation.

Secret does have an extremely well-cut and paced foot chase scene through a soccer stadium, and a great character in Esposito's drunken and self-sacrificial friend Sandoval.

As so often happens, my feeling about the movie is quite at odds with most commentators, who seem to universally love it.  Now, to be clear, it wasn't a terrible movie.  But it certainly does not deserve the amount of praise heaped on it.  See Memories of Murder instead.

Movie review: Timecrimes

I don't usually watch science fiction movies, and rarely enjoy them when I actually do.  They usually seem fairly pedestrian when compared to either written SF or other movies.  I've made a few exceptions in the past couple of weeks, with, I'd say, largely positive results. But that's because the movies are odd.

First up, the Spanish time-travel tale Timecrimes. A middle-class householder in a new house sits in his backyard, looking around through binoculars, and sees an attractive young woman remove her shirt.  A little later, he looks again, and she lies unconscious and naked. His wife is off running errands, so he naturally wanders off to check things out. He gets pursued through the woods and ends up at a mysterious facility his realtor really should have told him about. Things go downhill from there.

Any low-budget loop-back time travel movie must be compared to the nerdy extra-credit-homework-assignment Primer. Timecrimes adds bare breasts and eliminates motivation, but leaves in the nerd (in the person of the stiff "Is this what it's really like in front of the camera?" director, Nacho Vigalondo). Primer was unsatisfactory in its human dimension, suddenly adding some murder-at-a-party huggermugger when it exhausts its initial  backwards-self-storage premise. Timecrimes starts out being about violence and sexual perversity, but never makes the existence of time travel make any sense at all.  Both are short, and kind of fun, and despite their flaws, are worth seeing. Neither is about using time travel to restore some lost love, which is a much more common, and more boring theme, using SF as just another way to deny the existence of death.

Intricate loopback time plots have been around for decades. I don't know if Heinlein's "By His Boostraps" was the first, but it was the one that caught my attention when I read it as a boy. That one relies on a startlingly obtuse POV character, but who wouldn't be obtuse when confronted with a double from the future?

The problem with each of these knots of crisscrossing character is that it exists without ever being tied.  It's as if they were created along with all of space-time.  All we see is the smooth embroidery on one side. What does the tangle of stitches look like on the back side? That's what I'd like to see.

The nerd in Timecrimes is a befuddled tech working the weekend in a gleaming but empty facility that apparently lets him monkey with the fabric of reality as long as he gets his regular job done. He is utterly clueless, and never seems to catch up with things, though you would expect him to have a bit of a jump on the main character, since he's been working with this machine for a while, and must have considered the possibilities. Primer really treats its nerd heroes with realistic respect. They aren't ethically superior to anyone, as the plot of that movie makes clear to them. But they can figure things out.

Timecrimes' soullessness is exemplified by the way it treats the main female character who, significantly, never even gets a name.  She is listed in the credits as La Chica en el Bosque, like some character in the background of a single scene.  You get to see her take her shirt off. You get to see her naked and unconscious. You get to see our former voyeur smack her around, chase her, force her to play the role of someone else, and then do something truly terrible to her. The movie would have left me feeling vaguely degraded if it had left me feeling anything at all. Because, of course, if someone has traveled in time, he knows things you cannot possibly know, and can take advantage of you in ways you cannot figure out.

The movie lets the main character be creepy, but why he's creepy, and what he's after, is completely obscure.

By their nature, time travel narratives challenge our understanding of free will. Now, of course, daily existence challenges our understanding of free will, if we're paying attention, but science fiction is about "heightening the contradictions", to use an old Marxist term.  Science fiction is the laboratory of exquisite tortures, and that is why we (or at least some of us) keep going back to it, to experiment with human needs, potentialities, and flaws.

Timecrimes does play the sexual perversity card, which, now that it is played, seems inevitable. As I mentioned, time looping gives you power, by giving you knowledge no one else has, or could have.
But that doesn't make the time looper smarter than everyone else. It only appears to. So the first thing I would do would be to have a really smart non-looping character. An outsider could actually spot the looping before the inside looper would, because he could see multiple versions of the same person. This would be an interesting conflict. And the looping character can excuse all sorts of vile behavior under the rubric of keeping paradoxes from consuming all of spacetime and bringing the universe to an end. Who can argue? I'm already thinking about the possibilities.

The existence of the time knot implies someone who tied it--and that entity is outside the immediate structure of the knot. A time machine exists--and does not stop existing, at least not in this narrative. In whose interest is this particular knot? What does it accomplish? It is not an accident.

Now Timecrimes gets along fine without that metanarrative, because it is a fast-paced violent movie that lets you see some skin. In this regard it is my favorite type of movie, fun, interesting, but with something missing, or a narrative path not taken. It gets the wheels turning.

Brutalist architecture: a style whose time will never come.

I had occasion to bring up Boston's City Hall the other day, and say that I didn't think it was as bad as people say.  Certainly not the ugliest building in the world.  Whoever can say that simply hasn't traveled very much.

But, a few months ago, there was a flurry of articles here in Boston about rehabilitating the Brutalist concrete architecture of the period from roughly the late 50s to the early 70s, starting with City Hall, but including the truly appalling Government (or State) Service Center, which I ride past every day on my way to work.

The argument seems to be, "much fine architecture of the past fell out of fashion, was denigrated, and then torn down.  We now miss these buildings.  These Brutalist works are denigrated, and people want to tear them down.  If we do, someday we will miss them."

Despite the logical fallacy, it could still be true.  But since they seem to me somewhat Pyongyang-like, I don't think it's true. There really are poor works of architecture, that start unattractive and stay unattractive.  Sometimes they gain some affection just by hanging around for a long time and getting associated with some supposedly better past era.  But the 70s--energy crisis, bellbottoms, sideburns, Jimmy Carter, Iranian hostage crisis, Son of Sam--can be a tough sell, particularly as it was the tail end of the architectural heart of darkness the country entered after the end of WWII.  Great popular music, though, better than anything since.  And blockbuster summer movies.  So it had some great art forms.

Not architecture, though.  Every era has art forms that exemplify its genius, and others that...don't.

The Globe architecture critic, Robert Campbell does not agree.  He says

I’m against tearing things down just because we happen not to like their looks. What you do with ugly buildings is live with them, add to them, give them a new face or a new use, and treat them with disrespect — not with murder

(I think he means "respect", but maybe not)

What would city life be like if you could never tear a building down? "Murder"?  Sounds like architecture critics should spend a little more time talking with real estate developers, businesspeople, and citizens, and less time with...architects.  To keep things living you tear down even pretty good buildings--something that can be a real problem in "historic" areas, where age equals virtue. The fact that a mistake was made with a lot of concrete doesn't require you to keep it.

Architecture is hard. In fact, I think it is too hard for an individual depending solely on genius. In the past, no one depended solely on genius. They came out of a tradition with a series of rules and established patterns, had peers who could tell good work from bad, and worked with masters of various building trades who were trained in the same tradition. One advantage of a tradition is that it is both more complex and more flexible than an invented style. With a good architectural tradition, even a non-genius can create good work. Without it, even a genius can succeed only occasionally, and almost by accident.

As I said above, I don't hate Boston City Hall.  I think the problem with City Hall (at least in its external aspect--I'm not a resident of the city and have never had to transact bureaucratic business there) is mostly its setting.  The vast Soviet-style plaza in front of it, the tedious Center Plaza with its relentless windows, and the other bureaucratic storage containers around it create a zone of architectural tedium that it seems to fit into.  But it has some level of complexity to its facade. If I were redoing Boston, I'd keep it to represent the period, while eliminating its fellows. Then I'd build up around it so that you get glimpses of it down streets before seeing it whole, and maybe grown vines on it.  It actually looks designed to survive the collapse of civilization and to spend the better part of its existence in ruins, like the Colosseum.

Get rid of the rest of them, though.  They tend to be huge superblocks, so each one could open up space for a half dozen decent structures.  Do we dare?

Read the histories

One annoying piece of advice from a know-it-all fictional character immediately after stating some dubious political opinion such as "whenever people turn to entertainment rather than to duty, the system collapses within a decade", or "democracies only last fifty years" is: "read the histories!" This is supposed to demonstrate the truth of the assertion.

Robert Heinlein, for example, liked to do this, and I think he got it from GB Shaw.  They never say which histories, exactly, though I suspect they mostly mean works by Thucydides, Tacitus, and Plutarch. A Classical historian writing about Classical events with a moralizing atttude always gives the most status to your pronouncements.

I read the histories. The more I read, the less sure I am that they really tell us anything particularly clear about what moral virtues we should possess to successfully run a civilization, or a life. The Romans were corrupt, depraved, and totally self-interested while they were on their way up, while they ruled a vast empire, and while they were on their way down. Trying to find some kind of overall civic virtue among the squabbling generalissimos of the Later Republic is a futile endeavor.  Republican government was then submerged in the rule of the Emperor--and the system went on from triumph to triumph for another two and a half centuries, and remained incredibly powerful for two centuries beyond that.  What does that tell us about republican virtue?

And then there are the events, and the interpretation of them. To have to clearly distinguish between what is known to have happened, and what people of said about them: "This is reminiscent of the way William III had to let James escape to the Continent so he wouldn't have to try him: Macauley's account is not without interest here...." or "You cite Justinian's reconquest of the West as an example of imperial overstretch, but there is reason to believe that without the plague, he might well have succeeded in reincorporating at least North Africa and Italy for the long term...and don't pay too much attention to Procopius, that Sixth Century Kitty Kelley."

Of course, once you get specific, you've given your opponent (or person you're trying earnestly to instruct) something to argue with: "Just think of how much better atheists would have handled both those situations!" Better to stick with "read the histories".

Classical architecture standing on one leg

I recently wrote a story in which one of the characters, a woman named Andrea, is an architect who has some distinct positions on the history of Classical architecture. My workshop colleague, Steve Popkes, suggested that this particular potted history overloaded the story, and, on revision, I decided he was right.  The story is about public spaces and some particularly high-tech ways of formulating them, not about architecture per se.

Steve also suggested I put it in the blog, and I decided he was right about that too.  Read it here, because you won't be able to read it there.

Andrea had always insisted that the original Greek style had never travelled as well as people thought.  It was developed with foursquare structures supported by forests of columns, with a big cult statue inside.  Sacrifices and divination rituals took place in the open air out front:  once you’d stuck in enough  columns to hold up the roof, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

The Romans had conquered Greece, taken their graduate students as slaves to teach them literature and history, and mushed up their architecture to spread as a paste over triumphal arches, circular arenas where people were murdered for entertainment, and vaulted concrete baths.

Then people had to let the whole thing slide for a while.  The one thing the sight of Classical architecture did tell you was that there was a powerful state around, with some taxing power.  When the Renaissance decided the previous thousand years or so had been a big mistake—a horrendous job, a terrible marriage—and demanded a do-over, they fell on Classical remains and the notes of Vitruvius and then wrote their own stories about them in stone:  architectural fanfic.  Through analysis and experiment they created tight ratios of proportion:  column height, arch width, bay spacing.  Mess with the ratios, and whatever you built became a drunken slur.  Like any language created rather than evolved, it said some things much better than others, and some concepts were inexpressible.

The following Baroque loved the implied hierarchy of the language, the austere discipline not so much.  They stretched the triumphal arch into entire cathedrals, cut the pediments into pieces, and covered everything with swollen swags and simpering cherubs.  As long as the pastry cart included an acanthus leaf or two, they were happy.

After some screwing around with Gothic, Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian pastiches, there had been a renewed period of more academic revival--not stringy-haired fanboys scribbling late at night but grad students grimly bucking for tenure with heavily footnoted articles—that had dominated the offices of government departments, banks, and other bureaucratic institutions across the European and American national states.

Then it ended altogether, and everyone forgot about it, except as random details on suburban office parks and drivethrough banks…and except for Andrea.

How likely is intelligence?

On The Big Questions, Steve Landsburg addresses a perennial SF question:  how likely is evolution to evolve? He quotes a review by an astroscientist Charley Lineweaver of a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe, where Lineweaver eloquently denounces what he calls the "Planet of the Apes Hypothesis", or convergentism.

In the movies "Planet of the Apes", humans are wiped out, and various great apes evolve toward intelligence, making it seem inevitable that intelligence will evolve.

Lineweaver cites what he calls five natural experiments whose result oppose this conclusion:  the island continents of South America, Australia, North America, Madagascar, and India. Intelligence did not evolve on any of them.  There is nothing convergent about the evolution of intelligence, nothing inevitable.

Let's leave aside the fact that "Planet of the Apes" is more satire than investigation of evolutionary process (talking animals, like Jonathan Swift's intelligent Houyhnhnms, are a staple of satire), and consider what might or might not be convergent in evolution.

Certain things seem to be widely applicable.  Eyes, for example.  There are so many eyes in the world, working so many different ways, that you can say evolution converges on them.  Wings too.  Birds, bats, insects...the damn things are so useful, that they often evolve.  Not everything needs them, so not everything has them.

Intelligence...not so much.  It's clearly not as useful a gadget as eyes or wings. But, leaving various hominins aside, has the outer edge of intelligence been pushing upward over time?  Hominins are a statistical outlier, but can we say that the most intelligent species on the planet in, say, the Oligocene was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Jurassic, which was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Ordovician?

Hard enough to tell what body parts those things had, much less what their behavior must have been like. From my limited knowledge, I'd say that Jurassic beats Ordovician, but it's harder to prove that Oligocene beats Jurassic.  If there was another mass extinction, including us, would the next go-round create an even more intelligent species, or are we just a fluke?

Can anyone think of a way to confirm or deny the hypothesis that the "smartest thing on the planet" has been getting smarter through time?

How's the weather inside?

The main point of a building is to keep the weather (particularly water) out. But as we gain control over airflow, temperature, and moisture, we might be seeing more things like this:

This is a movie about a tornado generated inside the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart.  It gets an award from the Guinness Book of World Records at the end, for some the insanely specific record of World's Largest Artificial Tornado, so the end of the video is a couple of German car executives holding plaques (more here).

Robert Heinlein once wrote an odd little story called "Our Fair City", which involves using an intelligent-seeming urban vortex called Kitten as a weapon against political corruption. Not worth seeking out, if you're wondering--I have it in a collection called 6xH. That whirlwind gets decorated with streamers and balloons, an addition the Germans haven't seemed to have thought of. So, the first step is for that tornado to be a permanent feature, a natural consequence of the ventilation of the building.

As buildings get duller and larger, it might be possible to spiff them up with all manner of localized weather patterns: mist pouring down the stairs, glaciers in the upper hallways, lighting storms enlivening the cafeteria. And the eternal tornado in the lobby, the tutelary diety of the company, mascot of the soccer team, to whom employees come with requests for promotions, window space, and office supplies. Going home will seem a comedown from the meteorological mysticism of the workplace. Employers seeking ways to retain and motivate employees take note.

(via BLDGBLOG)

The place of houses

Since I've been thinking about cities (and planning to fit realistic future cities into my fiction), I've also been thinking about buildings, more specifically domestic architecture.

Consider the humble single family house. In my town, Cambridge, single family houses are relatively rare: only 14% of the housing stock consists of them.  In Manhattan, obviously, the number is far lower.  But in much of the United States, single-family houses are the order of the day.

On my shelves are a number of architectural field guides. One I've used, both for touring and for realistic portrayal of period houses in fiction, is Virginia and Lee McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses.

When you look through it, you see specific regions and periods of style that architects and builders worked within.  Some of this was based on the requirements of local climate (rain, snow, heat, etc.), as well as local material (brick, stone, wood), but much of it was just style.  One builder trained with another, clients saw houses they liked and demanded ones that were similar. And these styles lasted for quite some time.  You see a Greek Revival house in my neighborhood, you can peg it to the 1830s or 40s.  An elaborate Queen Anne Revival from the 1880s to the turn of the century.  What I learned to call a foursquare ("Vernacular Prairie Style" according to the McAlesters) is more common in the Midwest, where I grew up, than here in New England, but you're looking at something from the turn of the century through the 1920s.

The book peters out after the Second World War, leaving what the book somewhat wanly calls "Neoeclectic".  And so it has been ever since.

Now, I'm not writing this to bemoan the loss of classifiable domestic archictetural styles (or at least, not primarily). it's just that, once you see the consistency of these styles specific to certain times and places, their disappearance is worthy of comment.

That's not to say that a tract house in 1955 is the same as one in 2005.  Clearly there are differences.  But they are mostly in terms of size (both of living space and garage space) and function (bathroom equipment, indoor gyms, entertainment centers). The applique ornament of pediments, columns, and mansard roofs gets smeared on in pretty much the same way over that time.  Not a single one of these house's is worth a second's detour to look at--and I am an avid architectural hobbyist.

Fashions change more and more quickly as time goes by.  The reason there are so many "revival" styles in our popular culture, is that in the past a style had a few years to elaborate, sink into people's lives, get associated with events and personalities, and appear in literature, books, and movies. Do styles now change too quickly to influence houses?  You can get rid of a pair of jeans of outdated cut or a poster of a forgotten band, but what do you do with a house? It continues to proclaim your outdated taste for decades.  Better to have a generic non-style, one that has cut itself loose from any specific history.

Or is there some larger cultural change at work? Does architecture no longer speak of us to ourselves, and of ourselves to others?  If so, why?  Is it because we spend most of our time inside watching one screen or another?

Where do I live? The house I own was built in the 1930s and is of no particular style that I can detect.  It has side gables, and a slight overhang on the roof.  My invaluable Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge:  Northwest Cambridge classifies the houses on my little street as "suburban homes built in the Depression years", which isn't much more than I already know.

Before the house, I lived on the third floor of a 1920s triple decker (a local form of multifamily housing that has served as the first dwelling for many new families).  It had square columns separating the living and dining rooms, hexagonal panes in the bowfronts, elaborate door and window trim, and a built-in hutch (another common local feature). It was the most beautiful place I have ever lived, but too small for our growing family.  I love my little house, which I've done a lot of work on, but I still think of that sun-washed apartment.  An elegant space is not to be undervalued as a source of happiness.

Long science fiction series and hypersystematization

At Boskone I was on a panel about long SF series (despite the fact that I have never written one). Fellow panelists were John Douglas (once an editor of mine), Rosemary Kirstein, and Alastair Reynolds.

To succeed, a long SF series has to keep showing you new facets of the world. Sure, people like to settle in with familiar characters, and, to some extent, relive past adventures. Still, a good SF series is more like a work of architecture, rather than a painting (I wish I'd thought of this while on the panel). You can't see it all from one vantage point. You have to move through it, and while you are seeing it from one angle, there are things you can't see, though you might remember them.

The totality of that integration is a genuine aesthetic pleasure, one that gets shared on a narrative basis with an integrated multivolume work like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The first three books of the quartet show you the same time and place from different points of view, all of which are to some extent incompatible. You read them in order, so each one denounces and corrects the previous version.  It's all about love, one says. No, you got it all wrong, Balthazar says in his "great interlinear". No, it was actually all about politics says the third. Then the fourth book goes on, accepting all that but never resolving the various strands. It is that last element that is not like a work of science fiction.

Science fiction books provide the basic equation that moving through plot means acquiring knowledge, and that the knowledge translates into the power to move to another level, where you may well acquire more knowledge. SF narratives tend to have that open-ended structure, as each answer entails further questions.  That is one reason some personalities find it so compelling.

This penchant for systematic investigation does have its downsides. Systematizing science fiction authors often reach a state of hypersystematization, where, like conspiracy cranks, everything needs to be explained in terms of everything else. Isaac Asimov, for example, reached this phase late in his career, when he felt the need for a unified field theory of Isaac Asimov:  he tried to make out that every single one of his novels was actually a facet of a single universe.

Larry Niven seemed to get trapped inside his own creation of Known Space, and has long depended on collaborators to help him find a way out.  So science fiction is also the home of shared worlds, where collections of writers play in a single universe, sometimes created collaboratively, sometimes leased from a single writer, like Niven, who has grown tired of pushing narrative through the increasingly narrow holes left in his own creation.

And you do get clubs, cults, collections of obsessive fans. That's just the nature of the root psychology of our field. The prototype is probably fans of Sherlock Holmes, with their finicky attention to the Canon, and the contradictions in it. The commentary on Star Trek, Tolkein, etc., dwarf all other commentaries in literature. You could establish entire civilizations based on them.

So, in SF, long series are not just a lazy way of reusing a background that took a lot of work. They are a different literary experience, one that seems long, but is actually thick.  I don't think I have the stamina for doing one, but admire those who can manage it. It is a different type of work.