Enough students have asked me what I thought about Ridley Scott's sort-of-Alien-prequel Prometheus that I finally rented and watched it this last weekend. Here's my initial, scattered thoughts [this post assumes you've already seen the film]:
The big mystery of course left at the end of the film, as articulated by sole-survivor Dr. Shaw to decapitated-android David, is, "First they created us, then they changed their minds. I deserve to know why."
Now, there are numerous problems with this film's understanding of biology, linguistics, physics, even consistent plotting, but we won't get into that now. Instead, I want to focus on this film's themes of unwanted children.
That theme is perhaps best expressed in the infamous "alien abortion" scene, wherein Dr. Shaw uses an automated-medical-chamber to remove an alien-face-hugger from her abdomen, in a sequence that is visceral, grotesque, clautsrophobic, and intense.
Dr. Shaw had earlier revealed, and lamented, the fact that she's infertile. But, the news that she is suddenly pregnant instead freaks her out, and she rushes to have the abomination removed. The first indication for why, perhaps, the Engineers changed their mind about humanity, is implied by the fact that humans, like these aliens, turned out to be something far more grotesque and frightening than the miracle of life that the creators had hoped it would be.
We also get a theme of unwanted children in Vickers and Weyland--the latter is the CEO whom it turns out had snuck himself on board the Prometheus in cryo-freeze in hopes of meeting his maker before he died; the former is the corporate representative on Prometheus who, in a reveal, turns out to be Weyland's daughter.
In a less visceral yet still emotionally-fraught scene, we see that Weyland has, for all intents and purposes, disowned his own daughter. When I rewatched Prometheus the next day, I noticed how resentful Vickers appears when a hologram of Weyland calls the android David "the closest thing I have to a son." Weyland had replaced his own creation, his child, with another creation, a robot.
This scene mirrors how the Engineers had apparently decided to replace humans with the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. Parents are forsaking and replacing children left and right in this film.
The android David especially complicates the film's themes in intriguing ways--as human-like as he appears, the crew is constantly reminding him that he is not human. Even his creator, Weyland, straight up says David "lacks a soul"--and yet it is David that swoons with the most affected gazes upon the incredible technology of the Engineers throughout some of the film's most stunningly-gorgeous visuals. If David can appreciate beauty as the audience can, how then can he be soul-less? What does the term soul actually mean?
All this is intriguing because it is never quite clear if David is really as robotic as he appears; when David asks Charlie why they created him and he replies "Cause we could I guess," David replies, "Imagine how disappointing it would be to hear your own creator say thus." When Charlie rejoins, "Well, it's a good thing you can't feel disappointment then, can you," David...while not contradicting him...does not exactly agree with him either. David poisons Charlie shortly thereafter.
The implication, perhaps, is that the Engineers turn on mankind because, as their copies, they perhaps believe we lack souls worth considering...and our resentment at this dismissal may cause us to turn on them. Freud's castration complex, of the father's fear of being replaced by the son and vice-versa, is on full, predictable display in this film.
The fact that both the ship and the movie are named for the Greek Titan who battled his own children, the Greek Olympians, in order to help their children, mankind, and was thus punished with eternal castration at the hands of the eagles for his trouble--further underlines the themes of fraught parent/child relationships permeating this film.
Also significant is that David is he that first attempts to communicate with the living Engineer. That is, mankind's own creation speaks to mankind's own creators!
But then the resuscitated Engineer turns on his children and even his children's children, as he kills Weyland, decapitates David, goes on homicidal rampage, and prepares to fly his ship of death to Earth--a scene that mirrors Shaw's own abortion of the alien fetus.
The children, then, turn on their creators, as the Prometheus crashes into and destroys the alien craft; meanwhile, the alien fetus, which survived the abortion, grows far larger and kills the Engineer trying to kill Shaw. That is, the creation the creator created to kill his first creation instead kills the creator, which in turn creates a second creation that gestates by killing its creator. It gets complicated.
Yet thankfully, there are also positive parent/child relationships in this film. Shaw is shown to have had a close relationship with her beloved late-father. She also remains steadfastly religious (Catholic, specifically) throughout the film, in spite of all that happens--showing her faith and closeness to her heavenly father.
In fact, when her husband Charlie says she can now quit wearing her cross-necklace, since "now we know who actually created us," she rejoins simply with, "and who do you think created them?" Just as David desires to meet the creators of his creator, so also does Shaw wish to meet the creators of her creators.
The penultimate scene, then, is of Shaw and David hijacking a 2nd alien ship to still seek out the Engineer homeworld. As they launch into space, she says, "It is new year's day, in The Year of Our Lord, 2094." She still seeks to meet her makers.
The actual last scene, however, is of the xenomorph from the main Alien franchise being born out the corpse of the dead Engineer. A life affirming scene is followed by a life-destroying one. We have a healthy parent/child relationship contrasted against a decidedly unhealthy parent/child relationship. Decide for yourself what the difference between the two was.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
Joyce's Exiles
For Halloween, I thought it'd be fun to spend all October with just the "Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe." But, my "Complete Poe" is a bit unwieldy to carry to work (curse you e-readers, you win this round!), so I'm also reading a series of slimmer volumes to read at lunch. This seemed as good an excuse as any to finally check out James Joyce's sole play, "Exiles."
As more dates than I'm proud of have learned, I have sort of a man-crush on Joyce. I'm a fan. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, even that lovable lunatic Finnegans Wake, they all make me happy. It's not even a literary-snob thing, I genuinely love Joyce's books--it makes me honestly sad that the general public doesn't read him--I'm even sadder when fellow English majors merely respect him, as opposed to enjoying him, like he was meant to be, like I do!
And "Exiles" is standard Joyce--it features yet another Joyce stand-in with Richard, a prominent Irish writer returning to Dublin after 9 years abroad. He finds his old friend Robert still has feelings for his wife Bertha...who may or may not reciprocate. Robert is willing to risk him and Richard's friendship to find out...and Richard is willing to let him to find out to in the name of freedom...and Bertha is (understandably) pretty peeved with the behavior of both...I won't spoil the ending--though like all Joyce, the ending merely marks a termination of the text, not any sort of final resolution.
So how is it I've never gotten round to "Exiles?" Probably cause what's enthralled me most about Joyce has been the music and precision of Joyce's prose, the stimulating complexity of his texts; Plays, by their very nature, cannot feature those elements. Hence, with so many other books to read, I'd never considered "Exiles" to be canon, required Joyce.
Yet though "Exiles" cannot portray Joyce's innovations, I'm grateful for the play, because by restricting itself only to dialogue, it throws into sharp relief another element of Joyce's fiction that often gets lost amidst all the erudition and theory--namely, the characters. Joyce's characters, from Dubliners to Ulysses, all feel disconcertingly familiar, passionate, fleshed-out, real. All the textual experimentation in the world wouldn't mean a thing, his books would all just be parlor tricks, forgetful high-wire acts, novelty for novelty's sake, flash-in-the-pan stunts, if it weren't for the desperate realism of his characters.
It's Joyce's characters that give his books their blood and guts, their strum und drang, their heart and soul. They are too much like us you see, they are a highly-polished mirror held up to our own selves. And it's in "Exiles" that one can no longer take refuge in over-literate-allusiveness and High-Modern-irony, oh no--what's left in "Exiles," stripped of all other pretentiousness, is the characters alone--people with hopes and dreams, depression and despondency, loves, passions, and genuine friendships that they wouldn't trade for the world, but maybe would for their own souls.
"Exiles" is a quick read, easy to miss between the much more demanding Portrait and Ulysses, but worth your attention, worth the cursory attention of an hour or two it asks for. It is Joyce.
As more dates than I'm proud of have learned, I have sort of a man-crush on Joyce. I'm a fan. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, even that lovable lunatic Finnegans Wake, they all make me happy. It's not even a literary-snob thing, I genuinely love Joyce's books--it makes me honestly sad that the general public doesn't read him--I'm even sadder when fellow English majors merely respect him, as opposed to enjoying him, like he was meant to be, like I do!
And "Exiles" is standard Joyce--it features yet another Joyce stand-in with Richard, a prominent Irish writer returning to Dublin after 9 years abroad. He finds his old friend Robert still has feelings for his wife Bertha...who may or may not reciprocate. Robert is willing to risk him and Richard's friendship to find out...and Richard is willing to let him to find out to in the name of freedom...and Bertha is (understandably) pretty peeved with the behavior of both...I won't spoil the ending--though like all Joyce, the ending merely marks a termination of the text, not any sort of final resolution.
So how is it I've never gotten round to "Exiles?" Probably cause what's enthralled me most about Joyce has been the music and precision of Joyce's prose, the stimulating complexity of his texts; Plays, by their very nature, cannot feature those elements. Hence, with so many other books to read, I'd never considered "Exiles" to be canon, required Joyce.
Yet though "Exiles" cannot portray Joyce's innovations, I'm grateful for the play, because by restricting itself only to dialogue, it throws into sharp relief another element of Joyce's fiction that often gets lost amidst all the erudition and theory--namely, the characters. Joyce's characters, from Dubliners to Ulysses, all feel disconcertingly familiar, passionate, fleshed-out, real. All the textual experimentation in the world wouldn't mean a thing, his books would all just be parlor tricks, forgetful high-wire acts, novelty for novelty's sake, flash-in-the-pan stunts, if it weren't for the desperate realism of his characters.
It's Joyce's characters that give his books their blood and guts, their strum und drang, their heart and soul. They are too much like us you see, they are a highly-polished mirror held up to our own selves. And it's in "Exiles" that one can no longer take refuge in over-literate-allusiveness and High-Modern-irony, oh no--what's left in "Exiles," stripped of all other pretentiousness, is the characters alone--people with hopes and dreams, depression and despondency, loves, passions, and genuine friendships that they wouldn't trade for the world, but maybe would for their own souls.
"Exiles" is a quick read, easy to miss between the much more demanding Portrait and Ulysses, but worth your attention, worth the cursory attention of an hour or two it asks for. It is Joyce.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
On the quieter impulse behind Seasonal excess...
When I was a child I spoke as a child, and parroted the childish complaints of some adults--the most seasonal of which was that the Holidays have stretched too long, have intruded too far, that Christmas encroaches upon Thanksgiving, and now threatens even Halloween, all while Halloween spreads out into September and even Labor Day. Where is the restraint! the boundaries! where will the madness end! seems to be the hue and a cry. Reasons for seasons are lost, stresses elevated, budgets strained, etc and etc.
But now that I'm a little older, a little more tolerant, a little more wounded, I...maybe don't excuse the increasingly-bloated holidays...but understand the impulse, a little more charitably.
Time flies fast you know; and the older you get, the faster it moves, and the swifter you approach the day when time won't move at all. Holiday seasons that seemed to last a lifetime as a child, are suddenly over almost before they begin. Even now, I'm aware that Halloween will be over in less than a month, and I haven't even started to do anything to enjoy this quirky little season that was once so saturated in childhood wonder. No, I now have papers to grade, lessons to plan, bills to pay, and a myriad other real responsibilities that ration off my attention away from the holidays that once meant so much to me. And if October passes this fast, then what of December?
So what can we do? Maybe we're a little weak, maybe more sentimental than we'd care to be, but we let the season expand a bit, last a little longer, not protest as loudly when the store-front decorations go up a little earlier, perhaps proportionally let the season fill the same amount of our lives that it felt like it filled when we were kids, all in our inevitably-losing battle against the end of time, lest we turn our heads and find we've barely acknowledged yet another of our limited allotment of Christmases...
But now that I'm a little older, a little more tolerant, a little more wounded, I...maybe don't excuse the increasingly-bloated holidays...but understand the impulse, a little more charitably.
Time flies fast you know; and the older you get, the faster it moves, and the swifter you approach the day when time won't move at all. Holiday seasons that seemed to last a lifetime as a child, are suddenly over almost before they begin. Even now, I'm aware that Halloween will be over in less than a month, and I haven't even started to do anything to enjoy this quirky little season that was once so saturated in childhood wonder. No, I now have papers to grade, lessons to plan, bills to pay, and a myriad other real responsibilities that ration off my attention away from the holidays that once meant so much to me. And if October passes this fast, then what of December?
So what can we do? Maybe we're a little weak, maybe more sentimental than we'd care to be, but we let the season expand a bit, last a little longer, not protest as loudly when the store-front decorations go up a little earlier, perhaps proportionally let the season fill the same amount of our lives that it felt like it filled when we were kids, all in our inevitably-losing battle against the end of time, lest we turn our heads and find we've barely acknowledged yet another of our limited allotment of Christmases...
Friday, October 5, 2012
Jurassic Park Revisited
So, last week I rewatched Jurassic Park for perhaps the first time since the Clinton administration. I'd been meaning to recently, ever since I read David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a novella-length essay which details the time in '95 when Wallace was paid by Harper's magazine to find out how an agoraphobic, neurotic hyper-intellectual reacts to a Caribbean cruise (unsurprisingly, not well).
Over the course of said essay, he mentions that JP (still a fairly recent release at the time) played on constant loop on one of the ship's on-board channels; he says he watched it 6 times that 1 week, and found the third act to be weak. (Though he does say that, after losing a chess-match to a 9-year-old prodigy, he felt a sudden sympathy for the Raptors hunting the kids). I wished to revisit the film and decide for myself.
So how does 1993's premier blockbuster hold up 2 decades later? The first thing I noticed was just how 90s it looked--the haircuts, the clothing, the film-stock, the bulky macintoshes, the animation-quality of the Park's intro cartoon, Seinfeld's Newman as the villain, the hilariously-dated use of the word "hacker,"--the film just screams early-90s chick.
Now, to say that the film is dated (what film isn't?) is not say that the film hasn't aged well--on the contrary, whether enforced by then-technological-limitations or as a conscious artistic choice, Spielberg's decision to combine CGI with live-animatronics helps the film immensely. (Just think original Star Wars trilogy with its models and sets vs the prequel trilogy with its...yeah).
What next struck me about this ol' childhood favorite is, well, just how much I remembered of the movie. JP is now just in the air we breath, it has permeated our popular consciousness such that we don't even need to have seen, or even liked the film, to get the references. (The fact that Natural History museums to this day still have videos explaining how you can't clone dinosaurs from amber-mosquito DNA proves the extensive reach of this film). To wit: the ripples in water-cup; "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear"; the lawyer on the toilet; "clever girl"; "nuh-uh-uh! You didn't see the magic word!"; and so forth.
Now, none of this is to imply that JP is a perfect film, either, cause it's not: the big "reveal" that the dinosaurs have figured out how to reproduce in the wild has no follow-through; the "sick Triceratops" development gets introduced and promptly dropped; despite some token armchair-philosophizing about how "life always finds a way," the film's themes aren't particularly more profound than "folks almost get eaten by dinos, then aren't"; genetically, the film isn't far removed from the ol' monster films of the 60s; despite the actors' best efforts, the characters are never really more than bare stereotypes of themselves; the token black-guy predictably dies; and the merchandise commercials are shoe-horned into the screen-time rather obviously and clumsily.
But here now I'm being a curmudgeon--it really is a uber-fun film, isn't it? The story is tight, the technical proficiency dazzling, and the dinosaurs delightful. As much as I respect Wallace, I must heartily disagree with him that the third act is weak--perhaps he thought the T. Rex rescuing our heroes last second from the Raptors was a bit of a narrative cop-out? On the contrary, I think the entire film was building up to that moment when the T. Rex throws the Raptor through the 70 million year-old skeleton, then roars in triumph as the banner reading "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" flutters to the ground. That's the money-shot, right there--when life breaks free of the carefully-controlled commercial restraints that had tried (and failed) to make kitch out of something transcendent.
The failure of commercialism to contain life is present from the opening scene, wherein Costa Rican workers sporting official "Jurassic Park" hard-hats wait with hard-stares for the raptor-container to be unloaded. Those officially-trademarked hats give off a sense of professional control, of this Disney-fied de-clawing of danger, of this assurance that marketing professionals have carefully accounted for all quadrants and demographics, that powerful investors in board meetings have all processes streamlined and ISO2000 certified. Of course, those kitchy logos rest on the sweating heads of hard-eyed men, and before the opening scene is over one of them will be dragged away and eaten by a raptor. Man's folly in trying to control nature is a facile and broad theme; but, commercialism's attempt to Disney-fy and neutralize our chaotic world could've used some more attention.
I also found myself pondering if JP could be classified with such fear-of-technology films as The Terminator, Robocop, The Matrix, even Videodrome, films that express our deep-seated post-modern fear that technology is advancing too rapidly, that the machines by which we rush to master nature will rather master us, that even our best intentioned science may instead be our death (significant is the fact that the dinosaurs here are encountered not by time-travel or finding lost islands, but are actually cloned by human scientists with the latest tech).
Also fascinating is the femininity of the threat; remember that the scientists thought they could control the dinosaur population by breeding them all as female. The implication of course is that femininity is something dangerous that must be repressed and controlled. The appearance of the dino-eggs in the wild is threatening because women are reproducing without men, rendering men unnecessary. The raptors are even first introduced as having claws that can "geld" the young boy in the audience; in Freudian terms, the dinosaurs represent man's unconscious castration complex at the hands of women.
But Freud's no fun! He would've gotten eaten by a raptor in the first five minutes, and the audience would've cheered when it happened. Like I said, Jurassic Park is a genuinely fun film, one I was relieved to find out had lived up to my childhood memories.
And now, in conclusion, Weird Al's "Jurassic Park," a parody that, like most Weird Al songs, is now more recognizable than the original song!
Over the course of said essay, he mentions that JP (still a fairly recent release at the time) played on constant loop on one of the ship's on-board channels; he says he watched it 6 times that 1 week, and found the third act to be weak. (Though he does say that, after losing a chess-match to a 9-year-old prodigy, he felt a sudden sympathy for the Raptors hunting the kids). I wished to revisit the film and decide for myself.
So how does 1993's premier blockbuster hold up 2 decades later? The first thing I noticed was just how 90s it looked--the haircuts, the clothing, the film-stock, the bulky macintoshes, the animation-quality of the Park's intro cartoon, Seinfeld's Newman as the villain, the hilariously-dated use of the word "hacker,"--the film just screams early-90s chick.
Now, to say that the film is dated (what film isn't?) is not say that the film hasn't aged well--on the contrary, whether enforced by then-technological-limitations or as a conscious artistic choice, Spielberg's decision to combine CGI with live-animatronics helps the film immensely. (Just think original Star Wars trilogy with its models and sets vs the prequel trilogy with its...yeah).
What next struck me about this ol' childhood favorite is, well, just how much I remembered of the movie. JP is now just in the air we breath, it has permeated our popular consciousness such that we don't even need to have seen, or even liked the film, to get the references. (The fact that Natural History museums to this day still have videos explaining how you can't clone dinosaurs from amber-mosquito DNA proves the extensive reach of this film). To wit: the ripples in water-cup; "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear"; the lawyer on the toilet; "clever girl"; "nuh-uh-uh! You didn't see the magic word!"; and so forth.
Now, none of this is to imply that JP is a perfect film, either, cause it's not: the big "reveal" that the dinosaurs have figured out how to reproduce in the wild has no follow-through; the "sick Triceratops" development gets introduced and promptly dropped; despite some token armchair-philosophizing about how "life always finds a way," the film's themes aren't particularly more profound than "folks almost get eaten by dinos, then aren't"; genetically, the film isn't far removed from the ol' monster films of the 60s; despite the actors' best efforts, the characters are never really more than bare stereotypes of themselves; the token black-guy predictably dies; and the merchandise commercials are shoe-horned into the screen-time rather obviously and clumsily.
But here now I'm being a curmudgeon--it really is a uber-fun film, isn't it? The story is tight, the technical proficiency dazzling, and the dinosaurs delightful. As much as I respect Wallace, I must heartily disagree with him that the third act is weak--perhaps he thought the T. Rex rescuing our heroes last second from the Raptors was a bit of a narrative cop-out? On the contrary, I think the entire film was building up to that moment when the T. Rex throws the Raptor through the 70 million year-old skeleton, then roars in triumph as the banner reading "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" flutters to the ground. That's the money-shot, right there--when life breaks free of the carefully-controlled commercial restraints that had tried (and failed) to make kitch out of something transcendent.
The failure of commercialism to contain life is present from the opening scene, wherein Costa Rican workers sporting official "Jurassic Park" hard-hats wait with hard-stares for the raptor-container to be unloaded. Those officially-trademarked hats give off a sense of professional control, of this Disney-fied de-clawing of danger, of this assurance that marketing professionals have carefully accounted for all quadrants and demographics, that powerful investors in board meetings have all processes streamlined and ISO2000 certified. Of course, those kitchy logos rest on the sweating heads of hard-eyed men, and before the opening scene is over one of them will be dragged away and eaten by a raptor. Man's folly in trying to control nature is a facile and broad theme; but, commercialism's attempt to Disney-fy and neutralize our chaotic world could've used some more attention.
I also found myself pondering if JP could be classified with such fear-of-technology films as The Terminator, Robocop, The Matrix, even Videodrome, films that express our deep-seated post-modern fear that technology is advancing too rapidly, that the machines by which we rush to master nature will rather master us, that even our best intentioned science may instead be our death (significant is the fact that the dinosaurs here are encountered not by time-travel or finding lost islands, but are actually cloned by human scientists with the latest tech).
Also fascinating is the femininity of the threat; remember that the scientists thought they could control the dinosaur population by breeding them all as female. The implication of course is that femininity is something dangerous that must be repressed and controlled. The appearance of the dino-eggs in the wild is threatening because women are reproducing without men, rendering men unnecessary. The raptors are even first introduced as having claws that can "geld" the young boy in the audience; in Freudian terms, the dinosaurs represent man's unconscious castration complex at the hands of women.
But Freud's no fun! He would've gotten eaten by a raptor in the first five minutes, and the audience would've cheered when it happened. Like I said, Jurassic Park is a genuinely fun film, one I was relieved to find out had lived up to my childhood memories.
And now, in conclusion, Weird Al's "Jurassic Park," a parody that, like most Weird Al songs, is now more recognizable than the original song!
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