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Andre Agassi’s Open

Tadhg — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:58:25 +0000

I read Agassi’s autobiography during a five-hour layover in Philadelphia airport this weekend, and have to say I was impressed—with the book, not the layover. I had expected it to be of interest mainly for its hardcore tennis content, with some celebrity stuff thrown in, but I found it gripping throughout and was very impressed with Agassi’s voice.

I probably should have expected this, because I’ve been impressed with Agassi’s commentary on matches in the past. Open starts with a gripping account of his preparations for his 2006 US Open match against Marcos Baghdatis, and then jumps to his childhood days playing against “the dragon”, a ball machine modified by his fairly nuts father. Much of the book is about Agassi’s relationship with his father, and his attempting to find himself and his way in the strange and highly stressful world of professional tennis—and his relationship with tennis itself, which he repeatedly states that he hates.

Obivously I’m a tennis fan, but I think this book would be interesting to anyone interested in athletes generally, and perhaps also those interested in celebrity, because Agassi spent a lot of his life in the public eye, and this is one of the themes of the book.

When it came out, much was made of Agassi’s admission of drug (methamphetamine) use and his having lied about it to the ATP. In the course of the narrative, it seems almost like a natural progression to that point from where Agassi was, although I’m curious about whether or not he struggled more with getting away from it than he revealed in the text. Since it obviously wasn’t a performance enhancer, I’m not of the opinion that Agassi should have been punished for its use in any case (just as I think that calls to punish Richard Gasquet for his cocaine ingestion are ridiculous), and in terms of his tennis career I don’t think it was a big deal—although in terms of the arc of his life, it was clearly a low point, and a dangerous one. But I think that the much earlier incident he reveals, in which his father gave him pills, apparently speed, to help his performance in a juniors tournament (acting on the advice of his brother, Agassi lost on purpose and feigned illness to ensure he wasn’t given them again), was much more shocking and worthy of attention, but this didn’t get much media coverage.

Agassi’s father is clearly a piece of work, and I find it quite interesting that Agassi eventually ended up happily married to Steffi Graf, whose father is also in the same mold. One of the most hilarious sections of the book describes the meeting between Emmanuel Agassi and Peter Graf, which would seem unbelievable if I described it here but becomes all too plausible after reading the earlier parts of Open.

Agassi’s recognition that his father’s approach to parenting was, to say the least, flawed, and his marriage to a woman who went through something similar as a child, make more disturbing one of the messages he delivers to the children in the charter school he sets up: respect for authority. While I admire his dedication to trying to help others, and specifically children, and his desire to provide to others the education he feels he lost out on due to his concentration on tennis, it’s sad to see him touting authority and rules as things that are inherently worthy of respect. It’s clear that he’s trying to steer kids away from what he feels were the mistaken acts of rebellion and acting out he performed in his youth, but I really wish he had some more awareness of the dangers of authority, which should be more evident to him given his experiences with his father and his recognition of how he and his siblings suffered under it. My suspicion is that he doesn’t see how school authorities can be just as harmful as family authorities.

Media focus on the book also centered on Agassi’s comments regarding Pete Sampras; Agassi regarded him as “robotic” and as cheap. It doesn’t come across as much of a big deal in the book itself, and I don’t see how people can really criticize Agassi for pointing out Sampras’ lack of charisma, which has always been quite evident. As for the accusation of being “cheap”, I think Agassi included it largely because he was genuinely incredulous that Sampras had such a different attitude; Agassi himself seems quite generous (sure, it’s his autobiography, but given his work to raise money for philanthropic projects and his attitudes throughout the book, this is probably accurate). Further, it seems that one of the ways in which Agassi tried to deal with the pressures of his life was to reach for more connections with more people—possibly as a result of attempting to build a functional family that wasn’t the dysfunctional one he started out with—whereas the impression of Sampras from Open is that Sampras dealt with the pressures in a much more closed-off way; this contrast between them again fits in with how they’ve appeared in other contexts.

Incidentally, Agassi’s respect for Sampras on the tennis court comes across very strongly in the text, and he was also very open about how painful his losses to Sampras were, and he’s honest about how there were times when he felt his own game was at its height and that he was going to beat Sampras—only to fall, again, in another heartbreaking loss where Sampras raised his tennis to a phenomenal level. He writes also about how he would see Sampras suffering, from illness or injury, prior to a match and then be astounded at the way in which he would pull himself together and display no weakness on court.

Agassi also mentions his media clashes with Jim Courier, but one of the best things that Courier said isn’t covered: at one point Courier, possibly after a win over Agassi, stated that he was fed up with comments about Agassi’s “talent”, and pointed out that his wins over Agassi came partly because Courier was willing to spend hours and hours on the practice court, which Agassi at the time wasn’t doing, and that Courier’s willingness and ability to dedicate himself in such a way was also “talent”. Reading about Agassi’s struggles to focus and his torment over his relationship to the game, especially early in his career, underscores that Courier’s point was an excellent one.

I recommend Open, even to those not overtly interested in tennis.

Tags: books, criticism, reading, reviews, sports, tennis

Doom and Modern First-Person Shooters

Tadhg — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:43:54 +0000

Continuing with the vintage video games theme, here’s “Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom”, an analysis of Doom by J.P. Lebreton, one of the designers of BioShock. Great piece, and especially interesting to me was his focus on how much easier it was for people to create their own maps for Doom than it is for modern FPSes. He wrote the commentary partly to accompany his recreation of one of his BioShock levels as a Doom II level, Arcadia Demade.

Incidentally, he’s also put work into an “abstract FPS” called purity, which makes me wonder what his take on CPMA would be.

Tags: criticism, games

The Architecture of Die Hard

Tadhg — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:04:03 +0000

I found this architectural/sociological (sociospatial? psychospatial?) analysis of modern urban warfare, Die Hard, and cinematic portrayals of urban movement to be entirely fascinating. Tactics, psychology, Jason Bourne, parkour, and late-capitalist nonplaces—how can you go wrong with that?

Tags: architecture, criticism, film, politics, psychology

Don’t Watch Taken

Tadhg — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:12:21 +0000

I was tired and stuck in my seat and made the poor choice of watching this awful Liam Neeson action movie. I say “awful” but I don’t just mean bad, I mean its themes and messages were highly questionable and disturbing. Spoilers will follow, but a) it’s not worth seeing and b) I’m not sure they’re “spoilers” with a movie as predictable as this.

The plot is that Neeson, retired CIA agent Bryan Mills, has retired to try to repair his relationship with his daughter Kim, who he neglected while working for the CIA. His ex-wife, now married to an extravagantely wealthy new husband, has custody of Kim and broadly disapproves of Bryan’s approach to parenting (which appears to consist of being absent doing wetwork for years and then showing up and being creepily overprotective/obsessive). Kim is 17 and, supported by her mother, wants to spend the summer with her friend Amanda in (dun dun DUN) Paris, and Bryan resist on the basis that it’s too dangerous. He is persuaded to change his mind and sign the legal papers required to let his underage daughter go to Europe.

Arriving in Paris, Kim and Amanda are more or less immediately kidnapped by slave traders. (Yes, really.) Kim manages to call her father on the cellphone he insisted she take with her, and he sets out for Paris to recover her before she disappears without trace into the world of slavery and sex trafficking.

The first thing I hated about this movie was its incredibly obvious pandering to the complexes of the American father; it’s set up entirely as a vehicle for the wish-fulfillment fantases of fathers who want a horrifically scary world that justifies their need to control the lives of their daughters.

The second thing I hated was its appropriation of the awful and sordid real-life problem of sex trafficking in order to both sensationalize and add gravitas to its own plot, while blatantly sidestepping any true engagement with the real issues by placing the focus of the film not on the exploitation of marginalized and economically underprivileged women but on the dangers to fantastically rich and well-connected Americans.

The third was an extension of the second, namely that the film laughably posits a world in which the kidnapping of those wealthy and privileged Americans would be treated by various authorities the same way as the suffering of the poor Eastern European women preyed on by the gangs involved. I’m not saying that their being American would automatically trigger massive searching by the French police in reality, but it would certainly spur them to significant efforts (particularly once the wealth of the stepfather and the CIA connections of the father became apparent), and if they had corrupt connections with the slave traders, all nefarious parties concerned would recognize pretty quickly that the most cost-effective thing would be to give the girls back and close the matter before some massive outcry brought a larger crackdown. (Or they’d try to ransom them back.)

There were many more things to hate, but I’m going to focus on one that managed to stand out to me even from all the rest: the film’s treatment of Amanda, the friend that brings Kim to Paris.

She is portrayed as a stereotypical rich Californian party girl. Okay, annoying, but fine. She’s 19 and irresponsible. She’s naive. She’s a bad influence on Kim. The first really bad thing, though, was that as soon as Amanda announced that she intended to sleep with a guy she’d just met in Paris (who turns out to have been the spotter for the slave traders), it was clear to me that she was going to die. That this same conversation revealed that Kim was a virgin just made that realization worse: Amanda would be punished for the awful crime of having sex, while Kim would be saved because she was a “good girl”. I know that this goes on in movies all the time, but somehow Taken’s attempt to give itself a serious air by referring to real-world sex trafficking made it worse in this case. On top of that, the treatment of Amanda as purely a narrative device to convey the preceding message was even more dehumanizing and horrible.

Here’s what I mean: the movie is all about this father’s nightmare scenario that his daughter has been taken by slave traders, and his rescuing her while meting out punishment; the fears of the mother and stepfather are supports for that main thread. Given that this is the case, it seems (to say the least) odd that when Kim is taken, when Bryan hears that she and Amanda are kidnapped right as it happens, he doesn’t ever appear to get in touch with Amanda’s family. Nor do his ex-wife and her husband make any suggestion that they do this. Granted, stressful situation, but it seems like that would spring to someone’s mind.

Later, Bryan finds Amanda, dead of what appears to be a forced drug overdose. This moment is played up primarily to underscore the risks involved, and his own fears for Kim. He doesn’t appear to consider letting Amanda’s parents know that their daughter is dead. (This is actually the most defensible of the Amanda-related issues, because one could argue that Bryan’s absolute singlemindedness would preclude him from considering this, and that would make sense.)

However, at the end of the movie, when Bryan has saved Kim by saving her from and killing (I’m not making this up) the Sheikh who bought her for her virgin status, no mention of Amanda is made. Kim doesn’t ask about her, which is probably excusable at the time… but then they fly back to LA together and have the happy reunion with her mother and stepfather, and again, no mention whatsoever of Amanda. Amanda’s family aren’t at the airport to greet them and demand news of their own daughter. In fact, it appears entirely as if none of them have even considered contacting Amanda’s family, and that her parents might think that she’s alive and well and enjoying a Paris summer with Kim.

I understand some of the reasons they wouldn’t mention this at the end—it’s a happy ending, and that might be a downer—but not ever giving her any consideration whatsoever makes it highly apparent that she wasn’t ever meant to be a person, that she’s just a warning about what happens to “bad girls”. And that, particulary in a film with this subject matter, is just horrific and appalling.

Tags: criticism, film, reviews, sexism

Katie Faulkner, “Loom” and “Until We Know For Sure”

Tadhg — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:50:34 +0000

I went to the West Wave Dance Festival last night with my friends Brian and Anne. I had never heard of Katie Faulkner before, but when I left, I was a fan. I’m pretty sure she’s the first choreographer I’ve even considered being a fan of. That’s not to say I’ve never seen “better” choreographers, but in the past I never really felt I should make an effort to follow their work.

I’m not a huge fan of modern dance, tending to go to it mainly on rare occasions with Brian and Anne. I don’t dislike it, but it’s not one of the arts I tend to follow. I don’t have much of a critical understanding of it, as I’ve discussed before.

The first piece of Faulkner’s was a film, rather than a live piece. That was “Loom”, although I fear that the rather tiny online version I link to doesn’t do it justice. I liked it enough that I made note of the director’s name to look up online later.

I didn’t have a program for the show at that point, so I didn’t realize that the next piece would also be hers. That piece was “Until We Know For Sure", and it was amazing. Absolutely amazing. A duet, featuring Faulkner and a male dancer (credited as “Private Freeman”).

I can’t describe it at all. I can only state that I was stunned both by the understanding of human relationships apparent in the piece and by the fact that the piece managed to well to communicate that understanding.

Not all of the pieces at the show were good, but I would have sat through hours of them just to get to see “Until We Know For Sure”, because it was that good.

Manuelito Biag’s “Terra Incognita” was the main reason Brian and Anne, and hence myself, were there. It was one of the stronger ones, but not at the level of “Until We Know For Sure”. It also featured Katie Faulkner, providing music, so it turns out that not only can she dance and choreograph extremely well, she also writes songs, plays the guitar, and has a great singing voice.

Tags: criticism, dance, personal

Deception and the Rapture

Tadhg — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:51:07 +0000

The Rapture might turn out to be a fake; also, certain books about the Rapture might be fake but contain real Rapture-related messages.

The second link is a lot more fun to read than the first link, but that’s just my opinion.

Tags: criticism, humor, reading, religion

Violence in the Watchmen Movie

Tadhg — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:21:27 +0000

I don’t have much of a problem with film violence generally, and appreciate good fight scenes, but found myself disturbed by the Watchmen movie’s treatment of them.

Watchmen as a comic was a departure in depicting violence in comics. Moore states that:

[I]t’s better that people know that violence results in terrible injury and pain and suffering than that they think that it’s just something that, you know, people get a sock on the jaw and they are unconscious for a couple minutes and then they come around and they are taken off to the police station.
—Andrew Firestone, The Wizard of “Watchmen”, salon.com, 05 March 2009

The film version, however, seems to go well beyond that; further, that kind of shift isn’t really necessary in the same way in the film medium. Snyder seemed to be lingering on the brutality almost lovingly, and also increased the level of it. The clearest example of this is when Dan and Laurie get mugged. In the comic, they certainly beat the crap out of their attackers, and hurt them badly, but in the movie, they kill some of them, and we are treated to shots of graphic bone breakage and stabbing a blade deep into someone’s neck. That might not sound like much described here, but it was fairly sick on screen.

This was the pattern for most of the fight scenes: the violence was made more “extreme”, and not in ways that seemed necessary at all.

Another difference from the comic was in making the violence a little more sadistic, and somewhat less clever. Snyder made the protagonists into hyper-violent martial arts badasses, which isn’t much of a departure from the original, but took away some of what their edge really consisted of. When Rorschach is attacked in the food line in prison, in the book he defends himself first by throwing hot grease on his assailant. It’s a vicious move, no question, but nevetheless he is still acting in self defense, and it shows his awareness of his environment and his tendency to see everything as a potential weapon. In the movie, he first defends himself with straighforward fighting techniques, and then, only once his opponent is more or less incapacitated, does he get the grease and use it. This makes it seem much more like punishment and sadism than self-defense, and is much less impressive in terms of environmental awareness.

When he is attacked in his cell by the goon with the arc-welder, in the comic he defends himself by smashing his toilet, electrocuting the goon because Rorschach had noted that the wiring was damaged. In the movie, he first defends himself by traditional techniques, and only later kills the goon by smashing the toilet bowl.

In both instances, the movie makes Rorschach even more sadistic/psychotic than comic version, which seems rather unnecessary. It also makes him less interesting—some guy who’s a really good fighter is less unique than someone who sees everything around him in terms of its potential as a weapon. It also makes him seem less remarkable, and as if there is less of a difference in kind between him and those he fights.

When Rorschach and Dreiberg attack Veidt in his retreat, it is also treated as a straightforward fight, whereas in the book Veidt also makes excellent use of the things around him: he immobilizes Rorschach by pinning him to the table with his fork, and then protects himself from Dreiberg’s laser by reflecting the ray with his (golden, naturally) plate. Here the point is partly that Veidt probably planned the entire sequence as soon as he saw them, and partly that Veidt is to Rorschach and Dreiberg as Rorschach and Dreiberg are to the common goons (a motif repeated shortly thereafter with Jon’s “smartest termite” exchange with Veidt). By eliminating all of the ingenuity in the previous scenes, and making them into more basic combat sequences, Snyder makes it seem like a progression of martial prowess instead of intelligence/cleverness/ruthlessness, which is much more what the book is trying to get across.

Finally, this overall shift suggests an explanation for why they changed Rorschach’s line when he binds the hands of the thug trying to reach him through his cell door. The thug had asked “What’ve you got?”, and Rorschach, having trapped him, says “Your hands. My perspective.” As demonstrated by this use of what’s around him, his perspective, in both a broad (how he sees morality and his place in the world) and narrow (how he sees his immediate environment) sense really is a key advantage that he possesses. Either not understanding this or choosing to excise it, in the movie his answer is “Your hands. My pleasure.”—a completely different message, again increasing his sadistic side and diminishing his complexity. Which is similar to what the movie does to the original.

Tags: comics, criticism, film

Watchmen Isn’t Out Yet But…

Tadhg — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:54:14 +0000

I am going to go see it. I’m kind of annoyed by this, right now. Because I feel like I have to go see it. They’ve made the trailers look appealing enough that I have to go see it just in case it’s actually good, even though I’m still extremely skeptical.

Wil Wheaton likes it. I don’t know if that means anything to you. I don’t know if that means anything to me, actually. But he does swear by the beard of Zeus that the movie feels like the book. On the other hand, he does wonder why ultra-purists (hi!) would bother to see it at all.

I don’t know. There are already some things I don’t like from the trailers (like Rorschach’s voice and some of the costume changes), but in order to find out whether or not they’re minor details or signs that Snyder’s vision of it is too alien to me, I have to go see it.

Tags: comics, criticism, film

Alternate History Versus Science Fiction

Tadhg — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:36:03 +0000

I finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today. I liked it, although I think it overdid it perhaps a little with its sheer Jewishness—it takes place in an entirely Jewish state, one whose inhabitants are all highly aware of their Jewishness in ways I’ve never encountered in real life. It’s not quite caricature, and it’s definitely a loving portrait in many ways, but it felt like Chabon figured out how to convey “a Jewish atmosphere”, and conveys it, and then hires a trucking company to keep on conveying it from his mind to yours, while you’re trying to follow the plot. I suddenly wonder if At Swim-Two-Birds strikes the non-Irish in a similar way, given that it’s steeped (very steeped) in Irishness. In any case, Chabon’s novel is a good one, and a good read, but my question is: is it science fiction?

I ask this because it won the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Nebula is a science fiction award. It’s also been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel; the Hugo is also a science fiction award. But The Yiddish Policemen’s Union really doesn’t strike me as science fiction.

This statement, of course, immediately demands a definition of what science fiction is. I think the canonical science fiction question is “what does it mean to be human?”, but I also think this question is explored in science fiction in relation to phenomena that overtly raise it. In other words, one could argue that all literature deals with the question of what it means to be human, but science fiction is the genre that contains things making the question explicitly necessary: aliens, artificial intelligences, replicants. Or it deals with what humanity will be like in the future, a prism through which it looks at what humanity’s like today.

Another way in which science fiction explicitly raises this question is by exploring the nature of reality itself, often in relation to the idea of multiple dimensions, so that the question is raised as “what does it mean to be human in the face of this revelation about reality?”

Obviously it’s a huge genre, and covers a great deal of space (ha ha), but I think that every book I’ve read that I’ve thought of as science-fictional covers the ground I just outlined.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union doesn’t seem to me to cover that ground.

So, okay, smart guy, if you say that, why’d it win a Nebula—awarded, presumably, by people who might know what science fiction is?

There’s this genre (or sub-genre, depending on where your view on the boundaries align) called “alternate history” (some might call it “alternative history”, but that brings up a different sent of boundaries), and it’s either in or next to the science fiction territory. The awarders might prefer to expand that territory (they might think of it as their territory), to claim more of literature for their own, and hence extend their honors to Michael Chabon… or they might have already assimilated all alternate history tales into their idea of what science fiction is.

That latter, I think, is the key point, and the reason for the title of this post. I certainly think some alternate history belongs in the science fiction genre (I’m not objecting to the 1963 Hugo for The Man in the High Castle), but all of it?

Many people now prefer the term “speculative fiction” to “science fiction”. In principle, I do too—a focus on scientific discovery simply isn’t necessary to the genre or its key question(s). They go together well, which is why the term arose in the first place, but at this point it seems unwieldy. Nevertheless, I can’t seem to stop using it, because somehow “speculative fiction” seems wrong—in the first place, isn’t all fiction speculative? If not, is it fiction? I sometimes use “sf” or “SF” instead, which in my mind is a handy stand-in for some combination of “science fiction” and “speculative fiction” that sounds right, isn’t redundant, isn’t overly restrictive, and covers just what I want it to cover.

In writing this post, I discovered another feature of “speculative fiction”—to my mind, it doesn’t have the same key questions, partly because it does include alternate history. If alternate history stories aren’t speculative, what is?

“Speculative fiction”, then is a subtly-different superset of “science fiction”.

I should note that the Nebula Awards info page doesn’t address any of these questions at all.

Why is The Man in the High Castle unproblematically sf to me while The Yiddish Policemen’s Union isn’t? Primarily because in the Dick novel, the possibility of other worlds with different historical outcomes is explicitly encountered by the characters. Dick is definitely suggesting that other worlds are possible, that the reality experienced by the characters might not be the only reality. This questioning of the nature of reality is definitely an sf trait. There isn’t any of that in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, as I noted above.

It is, however, very definitely a detective/crime/mystery novel; it even has the classic segment where the protagonist gets drugged by a dodgy doctor and imprisoned in a mental-hospital-like institution.

I like it, it was enjoyable, it deserves awards, but before and after this little exploration, it doesn’t fit as sf. It’s welcome to the Sidewise and the Edgar, however.

(I feel like it’s a shame I feel this way, too, since I oddly want to be happier at/for the first author to win a Pulitzer and Nebula for novels.)

Tags: books, criticism, genre, reading, science-fiction

Fictional Agency

Tadhg — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:37:57 +0000

I came across a distinction in fiction recently that I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to before, and that I don’t know the word(s) (if extant) for: works in which the characters play a part in the major events that occur in their milieu during the narrative, and works in which they play no such part, but are caught up in those larger events.

It’s not fatalism: fatalist narratives can involve, for example, leaders working their plots and causing/influencing (even unintentionally) the major events.

The contrasting examples that brought this idea to mind were Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, both set in India, both during periods of major political upheaval (one historical, the other set in a fictional future). Mistry’s characters are profoundly affected by the political machinations going on at the time, but have no impact on them. McDonald’s characters cannot control the events, but do influence them and are also caught up in them. This strikes me as a rather important thematic difference, and I’m sure there are a ton of other stories where the fact that characters do or do not influence significant phenomena in those stories. I’ll have to look out for more examples. I suspect that the “influenceless” characters/stories are comparatively rare.

Tags: books, criticism

HBO’s Rome

Tadhg — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 06:44:38 +0000

I recently watched the first season of HBO’s Rome. Like most of the series that HBO produces, the quality of the production is extremely high, including the acting, directing, and writing.

I don’t rate it quite as highly as The Wire, The Sopranos, or Deadwood. I’ve only seen one episode of Big Love, and so far prefer Rome.

It’s interesting watching a series like this while already knowing much of what’s going to happen. When Servilia threatens Atia and Octavian at the end of the first season, her words have far less dramatic impact, because you know that things are not going to work out as she imagines. The same is true earlier in the series, when you know how the battles between Caesar and Pompey are going to turn out.

I assume this is one of the reasons why the writers introduced Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, two characters whose historical details are sufficiently scant to allow for a lot of dramatic license. These two form a narrative counterpoint to the intrigues of the more prominent figures such as Caesar, Cato the Younger, Marc Antony, etc. These two also allow exploration of “ordinary” Rome, away from the upper classes.

While the show takes many liberties with history, it seems relatively accurate in terms of the sense of the times, and it is certainly effective in portraying the familiar-yet-alien Roman environment—the setting and characters seem modern much of the time, and then are revealed to have quite different attitudes about slavery, sexuality, death, and honor.

I intend to get the second season when it comes out on DVD, and that seems like a basis for recommending the first season.

Tags: criticism, reviews, television

What Star Wars Episodes II and III Should Have Been: Episode III

Tadhg — Sun, 27 May 2007 03:51:40 +0000

(This is a continuation from yesterday’s post about what Episode II’s plot should have been.)

The Republic is at war, and has been for two years as Anakin Skywalker, commanding the forces of the Republic, has forced Dooku’s Separatists to the outer fringes and destroyed many of their power bases. The Republic is on a war footing, and Senator Palpatine has consolidated his power, with Padmé Amidala’s moderate faction increadingly isolated in their attempts to curtail him.

Skywalker and Palpatine are on the command deck of a Star Destroyer. They are clearly allies, Palpatine running the political effort and Skywalker running the military operations. This particular military operation is anticipated as the final one of the war, with Anakin having cornered Dooku. He leads a fighter assault on Dooku’s forces in space, decimating them. Dooku’s flagship is crippled, and on the command deck Yoda and Obi-Wan tell Palpatine to cease the assault, that they will accept Dooku’s surrender. The Chancellor agrees, and they leave. After they do, Palpatine contacts Anakin to tell him that Dooku cannot be allowed to escape again, and that he knows what must be done before the Jedi arrive.

Anakin boards Dooku’s flagship and attacks him, while Dooku condescendingly claims he knows nothing of the Dark Side. However, Anakin has increased in power and skill since their last meeting, and after a long duel severs first Dooku’s hands and then his body. Yoda and Obi-Wan arrive shortly thereafter, and demand to know what happened. Anakin simply says that he has won the war.

En route back to Coruscant, Palpatine warns Anakin that dark forces are at work in the Republic, jealous of Anakin’s success and desirous of “cutting him down to size”. Palpatine claims that only through clever maneuverings and luck has he been able to keep Anakin’s forces supplied against the wishes of those who would rather grant Dooku his demands than see Palpatine and Anakin as successful leaders.

Amidala and Anakin argue over similar points, with Amidala claiming that Palpatine is warping the Senate out of recognition with his accumulation of power, and Anakin insisting that the war situation required centralized authority. He further insists that the Senate “don’t know what’s good for them” and are fundamentally weak, and that only his efforts—and, he reminds Padmé, their unauthorized intervention on Geonosis—have prevented Dooku from taking over the entire Republic. Padmé protests that the Republic has always been able to defend itself in the past without such concentration of power, but Anakin dismisses this by claiming that the older leaders of the Republic were more capable than the current breed of Senator. Furthermore, he claims that the war demonstrates that such a concentration of power works well, and that he doesn’t like the idea of returning power to the rest of the Senate.

On Coruscan, Palpatine and Anakin are greeted as heroes, and their popularity makes it difficult for opposing factions in the Senate to move against them. Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi know nothing of how to rule properly, and that there is another power in the galaxy that does. Anakin wants to know more, and Palpatine says that he will, soon.

Anakin and Obi-Wan meet for regular sparring, Obi-Wan still trying to train Anakin despite his having “temporarily” given up his apprenticeship in order to lead the war against Dooku. Anakin gets the better of Obi-Wan. Kenobi says that the Jedi Council are worried that some other threat is lurking, but that they don’t know what it is. He says he cannot tell Anakin anything further, but leaves unclear whether this is because he doesn’t know more or because he isn’t permit to share the information with Anakin. Anakin is upset that the Jedi have not brought him back, particularly in light of his achievements and the exceptional circumstances; it also becomes clear that he is extremely proud of having killed Dooku. Obi-Wan is concerned by his tone, and points out that Jedi training is a privilege that Anakin must be patient for. He then suggests another sparring session, and deliberately makes Anakin angry while they duel. This time, Kenobi is the clear winner of the duel. He warns Anakin that he must concentrate on calm and patience, and leaves to resume his own duties.

Padmé goes to the Jedi to try to ge them to accept Anakin again, convinced that a counterweight to Palpatine’s influence is required. They agree to bring him back, and Padmé brings him to the Council. But Anakin insists that he be brought back as a full Jedi, which the balk at, calling him arrogant and prideful. He accuses them of jealousy at his success and stature, and storms out. In a rage, he vents to Palpatine, who reveals that he has knowledge of Sith ways and power and can train Anakin. When Anakin asks how this is possible, Palpatine tells him that before any training begins they must act, because the Senate is about to attempt to remove many of the Chancellor’s powers. In order to prevent the Republic from falling into disarray, they must mobilize their own faction to make Palpatine permanent Chancellor, with Anakin as the Republic’s supreme military commander. With this arrangement, he tells Anakin, they can make the Republic into a vast empire—which appeals to Anakin. He tells Anakin to gather troops, but Anakin, glowing with pride, wants to see Padmé.

Padmé is in her chambers with R2-D2 and C-3PO, happily telling them that she’s sure that Anakin will be overjoyed that she’s pregnant. When he enters, she rushes to him to embrace him. He asks her if she’s heard already, and then explains to her that he is to be the Republic’s second-in-command behind Palpatine. She recoils at this arrangement, saying that Palpatine will be a dictator, and Anakin retorts that he’s a brilliant leader who’s saved the Republic. She tells Anakin that Palpatine cannot be trusted, and that she won’t let this distortion of the Republic occur, then summons the droids to her side and leaves. She goes to her allies and they prepare to try to expose Palpatine and prevent his takeover.

Anakin reports to Palpatine, who is angered by the exposure of his plans to Amidala. He tells Skywalker that he must prevent Padmé from mobilizing the Jedi Council. He also mentions that Padmé would be significantly safer under Anakin’s protection than anywhere else if an ugly conflict arises.

Meanwhile, Padmé has already contacted Obi-Wan, who arrives outside her apartments on an airspeeder. He tells her he has warned the Council and they must leave. She is reluctant to believe that Anakin is really siding with Palpatine, and Anakin enters the door of her apartment with troops. Kenobi asks him to come with them as a friend, and Anakin says he cannot. Kenobi grabs Amidala and jumps out the window onto the speedbike, zooming away. Anakin tells the troops not to fire, and says he’ll catch them himself. Outside, Kenobi swings around to the building’s landing pad and sees Anakin’s personal airspeeder next to the troop transport. As Anakin steps out onto the landing pad, Obi-Wan passes close to his airspeeder and cuts the front of it off with his lightsaber before disappearing into the distance.

Arriving at the Senate building, Anakin finds Palpatine’s guards unconscious, and rushes to the Chancellor’s office. There he finds Palpatine battling Mace Windu, guards and dead Jedi around the room. The battle swings back and forth, Sidious weaker with the lightsaber but able to bring his force lightning into play. Windu can block some of these with his saber, but cannot do this and press the attack against Sidious. Windu says “He is a Sith Lord! We must defeat him!” Sidious says “Aid me! With me you will know true power!”. Deciding, Anakin steps in and cuts off Windu’s saber hand. Palpatine disdainfully drops his own saber and blasts Mace out of the window to his death.

Palpatine tells Anakin that this was his first act as a Sith Lord, and that he is now Darth Vader. Anakin kneels to accept this title, and tells the Chancellor that unless they crush the Jedi immediately, they will encourage rebellion in many systems. Sidious nods and instructs Anakin to exterminate the Jedi in the Temple, and that as Chancellor he will take care of consolidating power.

Vader leaves for the Jedi Temple, where he and his troops kill everyone present.

Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and a number of other Jedi are already on their way off Coruscant with Amidala. Yoda is shaking his head, saying that he now senses a Sith Lord of great power, and that he must have been hidden among them for years. Amidala says, “the Chancellor”. None of the others disagrees. Amidala tells them to head for Naboo, where they will begin to accumulate forces to resist the takeover.

In the Senate, Palpatine, not bothering to hide his Sith powers, is acclaimed as Emperor, Vader at his side, clone troops next to every delegation. After the ceremony, the Emperor tells Vader that the Senate will remain but with vastly curtailed powers, that it’s better to have it as a distraction than to eliminate it. Vader shrugs at this, and says that he is certain that the Jedi will gather at Naboo, and asks for forces to attack them. The Emperor grants him as many as he wants, and Vader leaves.

On Naboo, Amidala is harried and overwhelmed while trying to coordinate the fight against the Emperor. Reports from other systems report military takeovers in the vast majority of them, with scattered resistance. Yoda and Obi-Wan tell her that they cannot stay, that they cannot afford to have all the remaining Jedi in one place, and that they must disperse as widely as possible. She protests, saying that they are fighting against the power of the Sith as well as the troops, and that without Jedi their disadvantage will be even greater. Yoda shakes his head and says that the Jedi ways must be preserved even if the war is lost, then walks away. Kenobi says that he must go to help Yoda, but that he will return to help Amidala and the resistance—and that other Jedi will choose to help also.

Shortly after they leave, Vader’s forces arrive in the Naboo system. Padmé is forced to flee, and her people and a main force leave, the stragglers and some of the new arrivals answering her call to resist are annihilated by incoming Star Destroyers. Vader is a fearsome pilot in this battle, singlehandedly wiping out fighter wings attempting to defend the retreating opposition. Amidala nevertheless manages to escape.

Reprising the opening of the film, we see Vader and Sidious together on the command deck of a Star Destroyer, looking over a system map. Vader says, “Velmor will be ours before a day passes” and leaves for his fighter—now a black modified Eta-2 prototype. After wreaking destruction on the fighters defending the planet, he returns to the Star Destroyer to join a troop transport heading for the surface. Landing in the midst of pitched combat, he notes the presence of a Jedi, and encounters Kit Fisto. After a long duel in which Vader’s intensity and athleticism are offset by Fisto’s superb swordsmanship, Vader distracts Fisto when they are close by using his Force choke, then decapitates him. He returns to the Emperor carrying the head.

In numerous other systems, Vader kills more Jedi and conquers more planets, his anger growing. The Emperor encourages him, and takes over more strategic decision-making as Vader concentrates on piloting and on hunting Jedi.

In an asteroid field, Obi-Wan Kenobi docks his ship with Padmé’s. Both are grim, the only bright note being Padmé’s now-obvious pregnancy. Kenobi tells her she should give up some responsibility for the resistance effort, but she says that she cannot, that it must be done. He reports that while he and Yoda have delivered many Jedi to hiding places, the Empire has been quite successful in hunting them. Padmé tells him that the resistance is in tatters, and that they too are hunted successfully. She says that their only hope is to negotiate, which Kenobi tells her is hopeless while the Sith are in power. Padmé tells him that she is leaving for Alderaan shortly, and that he will have to go the rest of the way to his rendezvous alone. He returns to his ship and appears to leave, but actually stows away in the hold.

His guess is good as Padmé goes not to Alderaan but to Mustafar, where Vader is taking command of the forces formerly controlled by the Separatist Council. He boards Padmé’s ship, where Kenobi listens in on their conversation. Vader immediately sees that she is pregnant, and that he didn’t know. She asks him if he will join her against Palpatine, and restore the Old Republic. He laughs and says no, that she will join him and he will kill Sidious, so that they will rule together, followed by their children. They argue, and Vader points out that Padmé cannot refuse, that she is his and will be by his side. At this point Obi-Wan emerges from his hiding spot and Vader accuses Padmé of betrayal, using his Force choke on her. And she collapses, Obi-Wan launches an attack to protect her, and is able to easily ward off the Force choke when Vader attempts it against him. Their duel explodes out of the ship onto the fiery landscape of Mustafar, with a furious Vader pushing a calm Kenobi across the rocks and lava streams. Obi-Wan asks him to leave the dark side, to renounce Palpatine, and Vader retorts, “so I can take orders from you again? Never!” and denounces the Jedi as weak fools, taunting Kenobi with the names of those he has killed. Obi-Wan is hard-pressed to defend against Vader’s rage, but manages to maneuver him so that Kenobi is on safe ground while Vader must make himself vulnerable to escape sinking into lava. Kenobi gives him a last chance to surrender, but he refuses and attacks despite the risk. Obi-Wan seizes the opening and cuts off Vader’s legs and left arm, then takes his lightsaber and leaves him for dead. He returns to Padmé and pilots her ship out of the system. Behind him, Vader tries to claw his way up the slope, somehow still alive.

Vader is rescued by Sidious, who brings him to Coruscant for treatment. Obi-Wan brings Padmé to Yoda and Bail Organa. She goes into labor and dies in childbirth, regaining consciousness only once to whisper that there is still good in Anakin. Her twins are delivered safely.

Her body is made to appear still-pregnant in death, and the existence of the children is kept secret. Leia is adopted by Bail Organa, and Luke is brought to Owen and Beru on Alderaan.

On Coruscant Vader awakes, a cyborg restored by Sidious. The Emperor sees him regain consciousness and tells him, “you have killed your wife and children, and now none shall oppose our rule.”

This was harder than I expected, and doesn’t quite meet my original thoughts. I think that I might have been wrong about being able to do the tale justice in two films. Specifically, I wanted to be able to cover the Clone Wars in more depth, and to have Anakin and Padmé as adversary-lovers on opposite sides, with a final confrontation in which each believed themselves to be betrayed by the other. But it just didn’t seem to fit into what felt like a relatively long movie already.

Tags: criticism, film, science-fiction, writing

What Star Wars Episodes II and III Should Have Been: Episode II

Tadhg — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:39:44 +0000

(I had this idea for a better plot immediately after seeing Episode III, but have been prompted to write it down by the Star Wars Blog-a-Thon that’s marking the 30th anniversary of the first film.)

I’m willing to cede Episode I to Lucas. After all, he wanted to make one “for the kids”, right? So sure. He can have Episode I. Including the pod race, the wacky-implausible Anakin fighter pilot scene, and Jar-Jar. Yes, even Jar-Jar. Despite much of the awfulness there, Lucas still did a good job of introducing/reintroducting characters who made for a compelling story.

But after that, he really went off the rails and destroyed what had been a gripping milieu. Beyond all the other things he did wrong, he screwed them up in two really major (and connected) ways: he copped out with Anakin and he failed to show an epic conflict.

When I was a kid, eagerly devouring everything Star Wars as soon as I could get my hands on it, I was fascinated by the Old Republic, and by what had happened to it. It was a mystery, but you had this sense that the answer was large, majestic, tragic, spanning many years and worlds—epic. Instead, Lucas gave us snippets from a half-assed war, followed by a bunch of Jedi getting shot in the back.

As for Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side, with his treatment of that Lucas eviscerated one of the greatest villains in cinematic and science fiction history, turning Darth Vader from a frightening, ruthless, ultimately conflicted, but still awe-inspiring figure into a whiny adolescent whose reign of terror over the universe now, with the information available, appears to have been driven by childish petulance and temper. How did Lucas manage to do this? By trying to avoid the Dark Side entirely, by trying to have it both ways, by trying to retain the idea that Anakin was really a “good person”—by concocting a ridiculous plotline that involved Anakin somehow turning to the Dark Side because of love. An unbelievable copout. The Dark Side of the Force is hardly about love, but rather about power. The Light Side might not be entirely about love, either, but it’s not about the pursuit of power. To fall believably, and (as importantly) to fall in such a way as to be the Darth Vader of the original trilogy, Anakin has to choose the Dark Side because of power.

The really sad thing is, Lucas sets up the pieces for delivering on all this in Episode I, even with all the rest of the crap. The characters are there, the milieu is there, plotlines are almost there.

So here’s how I think it should have been. I’m dividing it into two parts, each intended to be one movie. I’ll follow up with the final part tomorrow. It’s not that detailed, just an outline. But this is how they should have been.

At the start of the Episode II, much is as it was in Lucas’ version. Anakin is a talented but problematic pupil for Obi-Wan. Palpatine’s machinations are under way, and Dooku is building his robot army.

The assassination attempt on Padmé results in her being assigned Anakin as an escort, and in Obi-Wan journeying to Kamino, where he discovers the secret clone army before leaving for Geonosis. Anakin professes his love for Padmé, who is equally smitten with him, despite misgivings about his age, his politics, and their respective positions. Their burgeoning relationship is pushed off track by Anakin’s dreams about his mother, and they travel together to Tatooine only for them to discover that Shmi was kidnapped by Tuskens, all of whom Anakin slaughters.

Shortly thereafter, Obi-Wan discovers Dooku’s droid army, and before being captured relays what he has discoverd to Anakin to pass onto the Jedi Council. Realizing that the Council might not act in time, Anakin and Padmé decide to act themselves, and Padmé convinces Anakin that he won’t be able to help Obi-Wan on his own but must instead go to Kamino to pick up the Clone Army first. They do this, arriving on Kamino as Dooku is attempting to win Obi-Wan to his side. Obi-Wan plays for time, pretending to an interest in being on the winning side and expressing skepticism that Dooku has any hope of prevailing over the Republic.

On Kamino, using the information from Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé take delivery of the Clone Army and alert the Jedi Council that they are heading to Geonosis to rescue Obi-Wan. Dooku runs out of patience with Kenobi, and has him cast into an arena to provide entertainment while dying. In orbit, Anakin and Padmé plan a quick attack using the advantage of surprise and speed. When they arrive on the planet, Obi-Wan is fighting for his life, and the clones assault an incredulous Dooku’s robot army, throwing them into disarray. As they retreat, Dooku flees, and Yoda arrives, too late to stop the outbreak of the conflict as he had intended. He is angry with Anakin for acting without Council sanction, and warns Anakin not to pursue Dooku. But Obi-Wan is already ahead of Anakin in doing so, and Anakin goes after him. Yoda finds Padmé and sees that she has the area under control.

Dooku, Obi-Wan, and Anakin engage in lightsaber combat, with Dooku quickly knocking Obi-Wan out of the fight. One-on-one, he exploits Anakin’s overconfidence and cuts off his right arm shortly before Yoda arrives, but cannot handle Yoda in a lightsaber duel and distracts him by using the Force to topple a pillar on Anakin and Obi-Wan. Yoda counters this but cannot pursue Dooku at the same time, so Dooku escapes.

Yoda criticizes Anakin and Padmé for their actions, pointing out that it was illegal and rash for them to take command of the clones and attack Dooku without permission. Padmé is more affected by this than Anakin, who remains unrepentant despite his injury.

Senator Palpatine receives a report from Dooku, and assures him that these new developments will only aid their plans.

When they return to Coruscant, Yoda’s renewed attempt to demonstrate to Anakin the error of his ways are interrupted by Palpatine, who congratulates Anakin on his victory, tells him he has done tremendous work for peace and the Republic, and commends him for his obvious military talent. He repeatedly refers to Anakin as a “Jedi”, ignoring Yoda’s corrections that Anakin is an apprentice, and says that he will urge the Senate to both honor Anakin with a medal and consider him as an interim commander for this new force that he has discovered. He also congratulates Padmé on her safe return, but is clearly bestowing all of the glory on Anakin.

In the ensuing days of Anakin’s recovery, Palpatine is frequently present. Having been informed by his spies that a romance is likely between Padmé and Anakin, he ensures that the Senate’s offer of command includes duties that require Anakin to suspend his training with the Jedi. Anakin is torn, but realizes that this will allow him to spend time with Padmé without as much fear of discovery.

Palpatine uses the success on Geonosis as a propaganda vehicle, uses Anakin as a popular young hero, and pushes for increased militarization. Padmé finds her supporters dwindling as she opposes these measures, and she argues with Anakin about the side she is taking. She becomes increasingly suspicious of Palpatine, but Anakin regards him with admiration and gratitude. Palpatine makes clear that he wants Anakin to lead the war effort against Dooku’s forces, a task that Anakin eagerly takes on, becoming comfortable as a military leader and basking in the respect he receives.

Anakin begins to plan a campaign against Dooku, with Palpatine’s support. Palpatine is coldly curious to see whether Dooku or Anakin will prevail, and gives neither of them any information about the other’s plans. He informs Dooku that Dooku has a free hand, and Dooku responds by attacking outlying Republic outposts, in turn fueling fear and militaristic fervor on Coruscant. Anakin asks Padmé to marry him before his campaign begins, and they hold a secret wedding. In the meantime, both Palpatine and Dooku unveil large new military forces, clones and robots respectively.

Tags: criticism, film, science-fiction, writing

Das Leben der Anderen

Tadhg — Tue, 08 May 2007 06:25:53 +0000

I saw this on Sunday night and it was excellent. I highly recommend it. (The full post contains spoilers, so don’t read this yet if you’re going to go see it.)

Das Leben der Anderen is set in late 80s East Berlin, and features a Stasi agent, Gerd Wiesler, who is assigned to watch a prominent playwright, Georg Dreyman. It turns out that the real reason for the surveillance is because Dreyman is in the way of a powerful Party bureaucrat who wants the playwright’s actress girlfriend for himself. This disillusions Wiesler, who at the opening of the film is a committed true believer.

The atmosphere is quite convincing, and I felt that it was probably an accurate portayal of what it was like to live in the DDR of the time. A certain dowdy claustrophobia pervades many of the scenes, in addition to a strong sense of isolation.

My only criticisms would be that Georg Dreyman is a little too saintly in the movie, and that in certain respects the likely actual cunning of the Stasi isn’t fully represented—essentially, I felt that Dreyman gets away with trusting his “activist” friends, when in fact any secret police force will infiltrate “activist” groups first. But those are both minor quibbles.

Because of its setting and theme, it actually has a lot of relevance to the contemporary US, although this is likely not widely recognized. The East German police state is an example of what authoritarian regimes are like, and as such shows the outcome of what many prominent Americans appear to want—virtually unlimited secret police powers with little or no oversight. With no oversight and a lot of power, you obviously end up with a lot of abuse, and that corruption spreads through the entire society. Of course there are vast differences between the DDR then and the USA now, but it should be clear from watching this film that secret police forces need a lot of watching, and that if left unsupervised they will be a significantly threatening to democracy.

Free speech, and the relationship between policing speech and abuse of power, is also relevant here. In one quite chilling scene, a young Stasi officer makes a joke about Erich Honecker where a section head can hear it, and the section head tells him his career is over and he might go to prison. Then the section head laughs it off, revealing his reaction as a cruel joke—but the point is that it might not have been, and that making a joke about the head of state might have resulted in harsh punishment. Note that the actual East German laws were probably not written to outlaw humor, but that the Stasi had enough leeway to criminalize a wide range of speech. This is one of the dangers of such laws: they create authorities that have the ability to decide what counts as forbidden speech and what doesn’t, and over time they will expand the definition greatly. This is one of the most frightening things about American right-wingers claiming that their political opponents should be imprisoned for treason: they are promoting a society in which imprisonment for speech is commonplace and determined on entirely political grounds.

Das Leben der Anderen indicates to me that Germany is coping relatively well with its post-Stasi hangover. The film clearly recognizes both the evils of the DDR regime and the humanity (often, the petty humanity) of its agents, and the latter is sadly often put aside to make room for self-righteous retribution. It’s possible that as a country Germany learned valuable lessons from de-Nazification, and has applied those lessons here (for example, in the rapid opening of the Stasi document archives to the public).

Tags: criticism, film, free speech, politics

300

Tadhg — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 07:59:52 +0000

So the good guys in this movie are the ones who kill off newborn males if they’re “defective” in any way? Hmm…

Despite being a Frank Miller fan, I’ve never read the 300 comic. It just didn’t seem as if it would have enough to hold my interest (plot is rather important to me). Seeing the movie version hasn’t changed my mind.

I don’t think too many modern political allegories should be drawn from the movie. I don’t buy the “Xerces’ army represents the Iranians” or “the Spartans are the Republican Party” arguments. Which is not to say that there aren’t political messages in it—of course there are. It’s profoundly celebratory of militarism, militarism in quite an extreme form, lifelong service. A lifelong service which is avowedly centered around the ideas that killing, and dying in battle, are the ultimate goals in life.

300 seems to waver between making this culture seem psychopathic and creepy (e.g. with the piled skulls of rejected newborns at the start) and making it seem wholesome and honorable (the camaraderie among the Spartans, the noble character of their warriors and king). Mostly, it comes down on the pro-militarism side, and doesn’t seem to ask many questions about what a society that forces all of its men to go through such intense and cruel training would actually be like.

Or perhaps it does, because Spartan society as portrayed in 300 seems very odd, with a significant chunk devoted to the ways of honor and war, and another significant chunk devoted to political intrigue, corruption, and odd religious rituals. That internal conflict, however, does fall away as the film goes on, and the overall conflict is portrayed as between the good, normal, heroic, self-disciplined, white Spartans and the bad, deviant/deformed, treacherous, tyrannized/tyrannizing, multicolored Persians.

I’m really trying not to read too much into it, but the racial/gender/sexual politics coming off of it seem rather unpalatable. The historical omissions are rather important too… Sparta wasn’t a democracy, the Spartans were slave-owners, and their actual role in the Battle of Thermopylae was not quite as the movie suggests. Wikipedia has a good article on it. The actual history seems a lot more interesting than the simplified, stylized movie accout.

Tags: criticism, film, reviews

Inland Empire at the Castro Theatre

Tadhg — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:33:12 +0000

I went to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire at the Castro Theatre tonight, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’m not going to try to explain or summarize it—that would be quite a task. A very quick sketch would be to say that it’s about an actress who gets a part in a film that may be a remake of a previous film that was never finished and might be cursed, and the actress finds herself crossing over into other realms, including into the story of the film itself.

With plenty of bizarre scenes and characters, of course. Lynch seemed more self-referential, and self-mocking, in this film than I’ve noted in any of his other work. Some of the scenes were very much playing up their over-the-top ridiculousness, and early on I strongly suspect that a tight focus on coffee being served is an in-joke.

Laura Dern was excellent in it, as in fact were all the actors. Lynch is consistently able to get extremely good and highly wide-ranging performances from the actors in his films (I think that Mulholland Drive showcases this).

While I don’t want to attempt an “explanation” per se, I do want to go over a theory of what Lynch is doing in this film (and, possibly, in his other work).

We all interpret the world (our world) mediated by our own psychic landscape. We’re often not really aware of that landscape, just like we’re not really aware of the curvature of our eyeball and its effect on what we see. It’s just part of the view. I think that Lynch is underscoring this difference by having his movies show us what it’s like to see the world through someone else’s psychic landscape, with all its bizarre features, including its cosmology—its theory as to how the world fits together and works.

Seeing a Lynch movie is seeing a world via someone else’s mind, with their normally-obscured psychic landscape exposed to our view.

Furthermore, Lynch is also suggesting that we change as people, that our own psyche undergoes dramatic changes, and that seeing the world through our own eyes might be extremely bizarre and jarring if you mess around with time and deprive us of a gradual transition. And on top of that, I think that his interpretation of the self is much more fragmented and malleable than the commonly-held conception, and he shows us the jarring incongruities between the worlds seen by the different selves we each have within us.

And he does this very, very well.

Tags: criticism, film

No Words for Dance

Tadhg — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 07:45:22 +0000

I went to a dance performance at the ODC Theater tonight, one that my friend Brian helped produce. It was enjoyable, but I don’t really know how to write or talk about it.

I’ve noted this problem before—I’ve never studied dance, and I’ve never read books about dance or the theory of dance, and so I don’t know how to describe movements, or how to associate meaning with movements, and that makes it rather difficult to discuss.

I suppose I could talk about what movements look smooth, what movements look awkward (this would be fine except that I’d have to be able to describe those movements in order for this to be useful). But even remembering movements is quite difficult, and this makes sense—one has to associate some meaning with things in order to be able to remember them (hence the fact that chess grandmasters remember board positions better than amateurs, as long as the board positions make sense as part of a real chess game—set up nonsensical or impossible positions and the grandmasters remember them no better than the amateurs).

Overall, I enjoyed it, certainly. But an inability to analyze it, or to take meaning out of it, makes it less enjoyable for me than, for example, theater or cinema. But I definitely appreciate the difference, too, and it’s good to mix things up.

I suppose I could try to learn Labanotation, but I don’t think I have quite enough interest for that.

The performance, “The Shape of Poison”, included a voiceover of Ordinance on Arrival by Naomi Lazard. And I knew I’d heard it before. I came across her work online, some time ago. I know Brian didn’t mention it to me, but have no idea where or how I came across it. I might have been a reference from some political piece I read. It’s a little maddening that I can’t remember, but on the other hand it’s nice to be reminded of the poem, which is quite excellent.

Update: Brian sent me two links to reviews, both of which demonstrate clearly that it’s quite possible to take meaning from, and write meaningfully about, dance performances—not that I doubted it, it’s merely my own vocabularly which is lacking.

Attraction is hell: Manuelito Biag’s The Shape of Poison solidifies his standing as a choreographer on the rise, by Rita Feliciano (SF Bay Guardian)

Biag makes good dancers great in ‘Poison’, by Rachel Howard (SF Chronicle)

Tags: criticism, dance, personal, psychology

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