-
“Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s just hope some robot doesn’t KILL everybody.”“Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s just hope some robot doesn’t KILL everybody.”
2003-02-15 01:53:00
In recognition of international “single people suck” day, I’ve changed my desktop wallpaper.
http://damaged.anime.net/archive/suicide.jpg
(Remember what I said about the peculiar aesthetic?)
No cleverly-phrased entries somehow implying my Don Juan-scale illicit affairs this V-day. Driven from the theaters by the prospect of sitting in a dark room with a hundred cooing twitterpated swooners, I’ve been driven to delay taking in the newest in paper-pulp conversion to nitrocellulose stock at my local arthouse, condemning the opening night figures for a film about a flying blind man to do without my paltry pittance. (I wonder at the marketing for this film anyway. I mean, there’s a school for the blind right down the street from me. You’d expect big posters or……oh…..whoops. Nevermind) Instead I’ll celebrate this epistolary holiday by sitting in my room and getting blasted. Pity poor me.
You, on the other hand, will likely encounter this particular self obsessed missive the morning after some elaborately well-conceived but pathetically executed and-appropriately-accessorized-plea resulted in a pitying sympathy fuck from the subject of your obsessions, thereby justifying your existence and bolstering your ego for the remainder of the 364-day cycle of constant frustration and wearying self abuse, (No, you won’t go blind. That’s an old wives’ tale. Calluses and chapping are what you should be worrying about. Remember to moisturize.) lifted, if you’re lucky, for Christmas and birthdays, perpetuating the eternal cycle of marking special occasions through the supposed expression of the sincere affection one experiences every time you are in your obsess-ee’s presence, but which they can only be bothered to express when convenient or felt that you are owed it.
What, me? Bitter? Nah. Must be your imagination.
Nah. It’s not really me talking up there. The Guinness hasn’t kicked in yet. Here, hopefully this’ll make up for it.
http://216.170.67.34/demo/bitch.mpg
NO. It’s not what you think. It’s a guy complaining about his Macintosh. It’s really fucking hilarious. Not the funniest thing in the world, but there’s a section in the middle that places it about second. Here’s the webpage for the group, although they’ve only got one other, greatly inferior offering (although any AMVer will recognize the music):
http://www.happynowhere.net/extras.html
Damn. Dat’s funny.
(You know, it’s occurred to me recently that the only time I express myself through profanity is either when I wish to add extreme emphasis, or I’m feeling terribly self-abusive. Hmm. Oh well.)
So, I was all set to bitch about how I go missing for two weeks and no-one drops me a note or wonders why I ain’t updated (which, really, is unfair of me, considering how infrequently I’ve kept to a regular updated schedule lately) when I discover that I’ve been immortalized.
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=10407
Yup. My name was mentioned, entirely independent of the people I know personally, in one of the questions on an online survey. (Check third from last.) Funny as hell. “You’ve reached the word limit per journal entry on the journal site….and you’re NOT McWagner?” Other than the “Mc vs. MC” (my initials…I’m not Scottish) neat-o and kinda weird. On another freak-tastic scale, was the discovery that one of my favorite musical groups, TMBG, did a song for Cartoon Network, advertising “Courage the Cowardly Dog.” Whoo hoo! Viva la two Johns! Furthering the freaktasticness, I was in the comic store picking up my weekly allotment of vapid entertainment (I cringe to admit it, but I’ve started picking up an X-book. Exiles. As of this issue. Why? Because of a newly introduced character. Illyana Rasputin. The Darkchilde is back. Please, God, don’t let them screw her up. I swear, if it looks like the new authors haven’t even bothered to go back and read her background (New Mutants #14-65 and Magik 1-4 at least), I will personally set fire to their offices. There are very few things to which I will admit no contamination, and Magik is one of them. Damn my fannish nature.) when I encountered something that should send the plushies squealing in fear. You know plush Cthluhu? The cute little squid-headed, bat-winged cuddly that people marketed as a joke, and kept around when it was discovered that a lot more people than expected got the joke? Including the paisley and Santa-thulu versions? Well, someone took it all up a notch.
They’ve made a plush Nyarlathotep. (God, I’m a geek. I didn’t even need to check how that was spelled.) For the fannish in the crowd, it’s the “Haunter of the Dark” aspect. Only 999 aspects to go.
Well, now that I’ve gravitated fairly far into the post this time around, it’s time to test my theory. My theory is that no-one actually reads this tripe, and I’ve just been talking to myself for the past three months or so, having driven everyone off with constant whining about how my life isn’t turning out how I like, how all my relatives are dying or crazy, and how I would do anything to get out of my current job. Yeah. Bitch bitch bitch. The lack of extensive commentary (excepting Hsien) on the livejournal side has encouraged me in this illusion, (although, secretly, I hope it’s more a matter of material overload leaving people unwilling to contribute….really, guys…I’d like a comment or three.) So, I’m gonna test this particular thesis, by actually requesting a bit of help. I am sick of being unable to properly clip myself a few new avatars, but I’m not willing to dole out the $$$ (after my last car repair) for photoshop. I’d like an arrow towards a freeware image editing software that would let me do at least the basics…cropping, resizing, basic painting, lines o’ text, just so I could make a few avatars that look nice. Nothing fancy. All my video editing software is OK, but due to some weird-ass conflicts that I don’t really understand, it’s been fucking with plain old image files. Any help would be appreciated, and any directions given would refute the impression I’ve gotten that I’m talking to myself. Anyone on the AMV side of things might want to e-mail me instead. Can’t be counted on to keep up with everyone’s AMV journal.
(Lengthy intermission here to watch Oz. We get HBO free here at tech, so, along with Sopranos and Six Feet, Oz for free is one of the fringe benefits one gets from attending Tech. I really appreciate Oz for the intellectualism it injects into the common pop culture pool through the commentary added between scenes. Beyond that, Oz is a well intentioned, intensely dramatic, but essentially cyclical show of violence and intensely warped drama.)
Damn. Getting a little more blasted than I intended. I apologize in advance for any typos. This is actually a source of worry for me. The drinking, not the typos. Oh, it’s well under control at the moment, but my family has a history of alcoholism (one great uncle, who I’ve never met, died of liver failure), and listed on the “am I an alcoholic?” sheet are always two questions. One is “do you drink alone” which I am, most certainly, doing, and the second is “do you lie about drinking” which I most certainly am not. (Three pints, maybe a shot or two I’ll elicit from the French roommates later.)
Hmm. Seem to have run out of interesting anecdotes at this point. One last bit: CN is apparently holding a “giant robot day” during which they’ll be showing the first Eva episodes, Gundam, that sort of thing. However, in and among that, it looks like they’re showing an episode of ORIGINAL Gigantor cartoons. Daymn. Gigantor. Original black and white. On the US cartoon network. As EK said, I’m buying Satan a pair of ice skates for Valentines day.
I suppose I should move on to the reviews at this point. A bit early, but that’s because I’ve got two planned. Neither of them are horror. Neither are movies, either. Whoa.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ancient world.
First up is a comic I ran across while perusing the offerings up to the gods of mercantilism last week. Browsing the available subjects, I encountered an unexpected entry.
Tank Girl.
Damn. There’s a name to rattle the collective memory of pop culture.
For the uninitiated, TG is, for lack of a better description, Australia’s answer to Lobo. As Lobo personifies the Harly-riding, stogie smoking,’bar-brawlin’ American biker, TG is the skanky-ass, tough-as-nails, sarcastic-speakin’, hard-swillin,’ fuck-whoever-cares bitch of the Australian outback dweller. (Or so was the impression given to this sheltered American college student.) I’ve no experiences to list myself, but I understand that Tank Girl was an “underground” (a label with increasingly nebulous definition and ill-defined limitations) comic from back in the day. Essentially punk run wild, it was an Australian comic which’d burnt out it’s tenure a while before I’d grown out of my “superheroes ROCK!” stage of X-men fandom. Completely passed over/under my radar. Super-violent, completely offensive, antithetical to everything mainstream comics was about (or so it would have us believe), TG was one of those comics that was summed up in it’s title. It’s about this girl, see, and she’s got a tank. That’s it. Yeah, there’s this Mad-Maxish world around her, what with the intelligent kangaroos, nuclear wasteland, and rabid kolas, but it seemed basically (from my distanced perspective) a vehicle for stupid-violence-and-taboo-subject revelry. Big explosions. Skanky nudity. The whole shebang.
(Damn, I’m blasted. Something here I’m gonna regret in the morning…I just know it.)
Hell, there was even a movie. I’ve only caught it in reruns, and it strikes me as the epitome of pop-culture flash-in-the-pan productions, but I always kinda liked it. First off, for trying to put some kind of coherent story together out of the essentially one-gag-driven concept of TG, and, second of all, for being the first and only time I’ve seen the concept of comic-book format so nicely meshed into an actual movie. For the cutscene-like sequences of bridging action, they added and partially animated comic book panels, panning and scanning, moving and animating as the situation called. It was kind of a drunken revelry of inspiration that actually worked. Starred Lori Petty, an actress most of the world knows from Free Willy. But I’ll always remember as the registration desk attendant in “Brimstone.”
So whatever possessed me to pick it up?
Yeah, I though the film was kinda neat in the “damn, I bet no one else remembers this” fashion, but still, the frickin’ graphic novel’s nearly eighteen bucks! I could put that toward the DVD of a hideously bad foreign zombie film! (OK, bad example.) What keyed me in to the investment was the back cover. In red letters over a hideous green background was the phrase “Tank Girl vs. Mythology!”
Uh….what?
Reading further, I was more than a little astonished to discover that what I held in my hands was a reinterpretation of Homer’s “The Oddessy.” (And, to a lesser extent, James Joyce’s “Ulysses”…which was based on “The Oddessy” to start with) Using Tank Girl. And crew.
Damn. This I gotta see.
Why? Well, see, I hate Greek mythology. No. Wait. Perhaps I didn’t state that right. I HATE Greek mythology. Why? Because, in high school, I was forced, and I do mean FORCED to read Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” not once, not twice, but THRICE as a prerequisite for AP English. It was the assigned summer reading for AP English for THREE grades, and supplemented by a required test on the details and minutia of that particular set of fairy tales. This alone I might have borne. However, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology purports to be the definitive collection of all significant mythological stories. In it, is 283 pages devoted to Greek and Roman mythology. And 12 (TWELVE!) pages devoted to Norse mythology. The Norwegian blood in me revolted at such an affront. I am well aware that the elder and younger Eddas (texts containing Norse myth) contain less text than all of the Greek myths carried down from generation after generation, (I mean, hell, every one of those myths was repeated ad nauseum by Victorian literary “giants” time after time, cloaked as homages, disguising actual lack of inventiveness.) but COME ON! A little respect is due to those cultures that WEREN’T direct derivatives of the Greek myth system. (IIRC, there’s like six pages for Egyptian myths, and maybe a page and a half for Babylonian. Hardly fair representation, especially considering their affect on the ancient world.)
So, why this book? ‘Cause I wanted to see the ancient Greeks well and truly skewered. TG seemed the girl to pull it off. I plunk down my near-twenty, and off I go.
Imagine my surprise when I discover the book is actually pretty damn clever.
For example, let’s start at the beginning. We’re introduced to “Tele.” The son of TG and Booga. (Booga is a hyper-intelligent kangaroo. Another reason I liked the movie was when TG encounters the “rippers,” intelligent ‘roos. Who does she “fall” for? The beatnik activist? The weapons specialist? Nah. The half-retarded imbecile member of the crew, Booga.) The child was built, not conceived, out of the corpses of washed-up surfers (literally, not figuratively) and has a television (Tele) for a head. Thing is, Booga is constantly sending him on errands. “Tele make us a panther sandwitch. Tele make us a margurita.” “In fact, sometimes he could be mistaken for thinking that his name was Telemakeus.” (For the non-Greek scholars among us, “Telemakus” was the name of Odysseus’s son.) I swear, it took me till halfway through the book to spot this.
So, how does the story of the Odyssey adopt to TG? First, a review (and a helping hand to anyone that has a book report due tomorrow). The Odyssey takes place immediately following the Iliad. The Iliad is the story of all the Greek heroes that go off to rescue Helen of Troy after she is kidnapped by Paris and taken to the city of Troy for safekeeping. (Helen, for her part, seemed to care very little who happened to have her captive at the time.) From the Iliad we get the story of the Trojan horse (and a certain large wooden rabbit) and the eventual fall of the city of Troy. The Odyssey details the trials and travails of Odysseus, who managed to get really fucking LOST on the way back from the war. How lost? Ten fucking years lost, hitting every single island on the way back, and taking remarkably long breaks in-between. Meanwhile, back home, Penelope is being treated like a newly widowed wife…that is, suitors are piling up outside her door, wanting a bit of the goods that should have been Odysseus’s alone.
How on earth does this translate to TG world?
Well, the story starts soon after the movie. And I don’t mean the events of the Tank Girl movie…I mean after the events of MAKING the movie. Interesting twist. TG, drunk and sozzed off of the profits and world wide fame (downplayed as crap attention even in the comic) is settled in as the “not unwilling captive of the ‘Calypso Irish Army’”, boozed and fattened up, in Eccles street: Ireland, off the constant attention of her appreciative musical fans. Meanwhile, Booga is fighting off the advances of a particularly avaricious suitor. For marriage? Nah, something far more valuable. For future movie deals. The suitor is “Tony the Blazer,” a particularly clever and vicious dealer with contracts. Fortunately, Tele is capable of delaying the attempts by sabotage and conspiracy, and, through a connection to the television waves of the world, gets a message to Tank Girl to get home quick and avert the disaster.
She, however, has something of a problem, since she’s put on about two hundred pounds since the movie finished, and can no longer fit in her tank. A fan, “Rose fingered Dawn” (*Groan*) suggests a time honored method of Italian weight loss…”Bully-for-Mea.” TG makes her own way, though. “Don’t be dumb, Dawn. Sticking your fingers down your throat is real stupid…especially if you know where your fingers have been. Instead I used the ‘Andrea Dworkin Pretty and Petite Diet Plan’ It worked a treat!”
Damn. It was right then that I realized that this would be more clever than I expected. (For those of you blissfully unaware of who Andrea Dworken is, she is perhaps the greatest example of feminism lost in its own meta-textual reference. I’ve nothing against feminism, and am, in fact, in favor of it in most cases, but Dworken represents the complete lunatic fringe of the movement. As someone who had to read some of her texts in undergrad, I can attest that many of her treatise are interesting in an academic sense, entirely departed from reality, as though one was looking in to an entirely alien culture from a distance. Applied as a practical theorem, however, most of her stuff is nucking futz. For one, she was the originator of the theory that all sex is rape as far as the female is concerned.
Yeah.
Can you believe she’s married?
Nguh.)
Anyway, TG takes off on her grand Odyssey, (“Staying with calypso singers is a bit like having an ugly but rich boyfriend whose mother doesn’t like you much…don’t ask me why, it just is.”) traveling from Ireland back to Austrailia (a considerably more impressive journey than Odysseus, who just went from Troy back to Greece) after abducting-back a crew long since toasted into not caring at the Lotus inn. (Ngurr. Clever. Painfully so.) Her crew, hoisted aboard the zeppelin-bound tank while drunk into unconsciousness, consists of three men, O’Hell, O’Why, and O’Madagain (stand-ins for the authors), and three girls, Jet Girl (showed up in the film), Sub Girl (who, I understand from other sources, is dead), and Barney (I have no idea). Barney’s struggles, upon the approach of near-sobriety, blows up the zeppelin and plunges the tank-laden bunch into the loamy earth, killing everyone. (Shit, I’m on page 16? Gotta motor.)
While wandering around the “other side,” TG encounters her long-dead mother (There’s an Odyssey parallel…I’ll leave it to the over educated to spot it.) who arranges for their resurrection on one condition. TG has to find the king who’s gathered all the “winds” (here, farts) of the earth to permanently resurrect her friends and herself, on the condition that she raise her own mother for a few minutes so she can dance on the husband’s grave. In case you hadn’t caught on, TG’s mother takes over the role of Poseidon for this story, repeatedly fucking with the crew just as they come in sight of land. See, after TG battles off a lusty necrophiliac and revives the group, Jet girl manages to expire again halfway through, and TG has to use up the last life-giving fart to revive her, canceling her deal with her mother, who sends them spinning around for another few chapters.
The comic is honestly clever throughout, what with TG introducing her own particular brand of solution to every ancient-world dilemma she encounters. At one point, caught in a theater showing the sixteen-hour version of “Heimat” when she has only fifteen hours left to find the “King of the winds,” TG is “…caught on the wings of a dilemma! Either I nip out early and brand myself for all time as a cheap, low-brow cultural leper…or my friends and I will be condemned to a lifetime of death!” So, naturally, she burns the theater down. Hee.
Jumping around a bunch among the numerous and varied encounters, TG runs afoul of Lester Gonadian, the cannibalistic agent and his cronies, who manage to consume O’Why (O’Why indeed) before becoming terminally impotent. (“Hey! With their libidos bridled, the producers are turning to blatant violence to sate their inner tumescence.’ JG: “What did you say?” ‘ I’m not reading it again. It’s what it says on this piece of paper. Far as I can see, they’re going crazy because they can’t hump anymore.”) On the following plane ride, TG runs afoul of Scylla’s Rock Candy supreme and chocolate whirlpool (*groan*) candies and looses a tooth, crashing the plane near the wandering Ricks of Mykonos, where her crew was hopelessly seduced by the raging goth band “the Sirens.” TG’s atrocious hygene saves her (“Great! A fight scene. This is getting just lika an Alan Grant Script!”) only to loose Rose-fingered Dawn to the hotel resort of the Cyclops, encounter trouble after roasting the mafia Godsun’s (Apollo…the sun God’s) cattle, loose O’Madigain to the nefarious Sir Sir’s (Circsi’s) attempt to turn them all into rich, pampered, celebrity pigs, and sneak back into Australia disguised as Charlie Chaplin (The loveable TRAMP). The only disappointing bit is that the Odyssey had about 1/5 of the story devoted to the elaborate plan whereby Odysseus took revenge on his wife’s suitors. TG’s plan consisted of blowing an enormous hole in the side of the mansion, driving the tank in, and killing everyone she didn’t like.
Typical. The end of the story should be no surprise to anyone who had to plough through this stuff for highschool. Blah blah blah.
So, why should you care? I mean, it’s not like a movie released eight years ago holds any immediate pop culture attachment for anyone here, right? I mean, you’ve probably never seen the artists’ work before, right?
Not true.
See, I’m betting that you have a piece of the artist’s, Jamie Hewlett, in your possession right now. Think about it. Anarchistic. Loud. Nonsensically violent. Like trying to blow up a thirty foot moose. Cartoony.
Yeah.
This guy invented “The Gorillaz.”
Tank Girl and the Gorillaz. Beat that shit.
A few ending notes. “Skank” is pretty much the best descriptor for TG I can think of. Or possibly, “skank, and proud of it.” When dressed, she wears only the items of convenience, hideous in color and easily sheddable for whatever incident requires it. On her good days, she’s got three locks of hair, (two blue, one red) and bald everywhere else. She’s got a positioned band-aid (Less Nessman, eat your heart out) all the time, and a balls-out (excuse the terminology) attitude towards life. Sub Girl was the most amusing when I realized that her lime-green wetsuit had a dorsal fin sewn on the back. Somehow highly appropriate, and amusing as hell. Jet Girl was barely there.
Frankly, this is the first time I’ve felt any sort of urge to look up some Greek myth since the sixth grade, mostly to clear up some hazy bits in the parody. It’s not often any work could have that profound an effect on me. As such, I’m bound to recommend it. Albeit only to those not easily offended.
As this took longer than I thought intoxicated, the other half of the ancient world will have to wait until next time. I’m too tired to continue solely on momentum and booze. And my stupid word processor has decided to start reformatting the work. Thinks I want a bibliography.
-
Well, shit.
2003-02-02 23:51:24
I’m sure that we all woke up today to the news of fresh disaster. I don’t mean to be flippant, and in no way to minimize this disaster or its effects in the coming months and years, but I really don’t find myself feeling anything about the Columbia. People always like to list the major world or US events that everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard it. The JFK assassination, VE/J day, the landing on the moon, 9/11, etc. They always list the Challenger disaster as one of those times, and it’s one of the few I was actually alive for. I have no idea where I was for that. Not the faintest clue. I suppose in school, but I’ve no memory of it.
I’m afraid that this is going to go the same way in my memory.
I really can’t figure this out. I even feel a little guilty that I’m not more profoundly emotionally affected by this. I don’t think it’s that I’m callous or immured to events like this. I’ve something of a reputation in that category ever since, upon seeing the first reports of Princess Diana’s death, I flipped the channel with a sigh, saying “Well, we’re going to be hearing about THAT for weeks….” In that case, I felt it was just the death of another celebrity, one whose media attention rarely had anything to do with her actual accomplishment, thus I treated it as I would the death of any stranger. Regrettable, but please stop telling me about it. Here we have high contrast. I have nothing but respect for these astronauts, and all astronauts in general. They face enormous personal risk for the advancement of mankind into the solar system, the performance of scientific experimentation that can be done nowhere on earth, and they pilot perhaps the pinnacle of engineering craft in order to get there. I can think of nothing better to which to aspire. (As a kid, I was sorely disappointed to realize I would never walk on the moon. My hideously bad eyesight and chronic ear problems would have disqualified me for space travel regardless of my physical fitness or intellect.)
And yet, I don’t really feel anything about this disaster one way or another. Oh, I’m sorry it happened, of course. This must come off as terribly self-centered of me, after all, my perspective on this tragedy is hardly important. There are seven grieving families out there, a department in fear of what the analysis will show (lest one decision by one man led to the death of seven men), scientific work lost that spent years in the queue to go up, and a nation already under stress from the recent buildup struck suddenly by tragedy from an unexpected source. My prayers go out to their families, I’m dreading what this might mean for NASA and those three astronauts still aboard the international space station, and my sympathies are with friends who are taking this so badly. But I feel like this should be hitting me, personally, more profoundly.
I don’t even feel “empty” or in shock, or anything. This just washed over me like a wave, and was gone. I didn’t tear up. I didn’t get angry. I just watched the news report for half an hour, and then went out to the store. If anything, I’ve got a feeling similar to KZ’s. “Damn. OK. What next?” Perhaps I have become immured and just don’t realize it. Since I started following the news after 9/11 (which DID affect me, quite profoundly) I got hit on a weekly basis with a report of this or that suicide bomber blowing up a school bus of children (no, I’m not trying to work in a political angle here. I will not try to frame this tragedy in a political light, and I pray no one else will either. It’s disrespectful to the dead, the families, and largely irrelevant to the situation unless the investigation says different, which I severely doubt it will…it was just the closest parallel) I got used to the idea of sudden, senseless death. It doesn’t shock or surprise me anymore. Maybe that’s it.
Or maybe I’d just gotten myself prepared to start hearing about American casualties over in Iraq, and this tragedy just fell into the same category as recent casualties in Afghanistan. Horrific, yes. Understandable (in a cause-and-effect manner), yes. Nevertheless, we move forward and move on. I’d already set my teeth and was ready to weather the tragedies to come, confident that the end result would be better than the alternative. (Awwww crap. I’m getting political. Sorry. Disregard the last.) This really is a layman’s perspective. I never really followed spaceflight proceedings and technical details with any avidity. I regarded the whole process as an exceedingly risky enterprise hurling people into the most inhospitable environ available that we humans went about with startling regularity because we were brave enough and there was much to be gained. I regarded spaceflight in the twenty-first century as routine, but the most dangerous and adventurous routine in the world. That’s what should really be remembered. Many people are mitigating this disaster, pointing to the fact it is only the third deadly disaster in US space history in so many missions, and they are right, but they’re missing the point. These men knew the risks. They knew what could go wrong, and how disastrously it could go wrong, and they went anyway. Not out of reassurance in the technology that lifted them aloft or confidence in the men on the ground that guided them, but in spite of the flaws they knew might exist in those people and those machines. In many ways, they required only a little less bravery than Yuri Gagarin. In the words of Glenn Reynolds: “What makes the Columbia's loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It's not that astronauts' lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it's what they do, and what it stands for.”
Actually, there was one aspect of this disaster that did affect me, but it doesn’t speak too well of me. Perhaps I work with symbols too much, but the thing that did bring a tear to my eye was when I remembered what the Israeli astronaut had brought on board the shuttle with him.
It was this:
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_yad/press_room/press_releases/ilan_ramon.html
A picture drawn in 1942 by Petr Ginz. A 14-year-old boy who dreamed of the surface of the moon. He was killed in Auschwitz.
Well, at least it made it into space.
As for the future and the rest of it, I don’t know. Mayhap the attention focused on NASA will actually help their funding. Some good from the bad. There was talk of radical new developments in spaceflight technology, but I’ve no idea how this will be affected by the Colombia disaster. As far as the president’s speech on the matter, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, despite being a devout Christian myself, I wish he wouldn’t have gone with the biblical quotes. Not because I object to their application in this case, but because it’ll be just one more bout of flaming idiocy I have to suffer from angry atheists. On the other hand, if the families and the astronauts themselves were devout (I’m not up on my Jewish holy books, but I’m pretty sure Isaiah is in there) than I could care less about public sensibilities. This is a time for the astronauts and their families. Everyone else comes second.
I was going to post a series of links here directing people to the couple of incidents of stupidity and venom that has already started welling up in a few noted places around the world….but I re-read what I just wrote above and realized that would be pretty hypocritical of me. Instead, I’ll just steal a bit of inspiration from someone else and post a passage of Heinlein.
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
Hmmm. I guess I do get all teary-eyed over this.
You might also want to see what William Gibson has to say in his blog.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
(Lest you think me callous and self-centered, most of the following was written Friday night.)
_____________________________________________________________
Well, the Frenchmen are starting to invade my personal space. I really didn’t mind when they started using my dishes, as they always cleaned them up afterwards, but someone has apparently decided to use my good carving knife as a can-opener. Or, at least, that’s the only immediately evident manner in which the very tip of the knife could be bent over like that, keeping in mind that all of my current roommates are still accounted for and I’m fairly experienced at this point in recognizing bloodstains in every aspect of cleanup.
At least they know better than to take my beer. That would be downright uncivilized.
In other news, apparently I am only allowed a certain quantity of happy, and when I go over that particular amount, the karma of the situation whips back like a released treebranch and slaps me in the face. How do I know this? First off, the program is working. I do apologize for not keeping everyone I called on updated on this matter (especially you, Franklin) but the things that were wrong with it (or at least my perception thereof) were mutating so weirdly and so quickly that, several times, I had people contact me with a correction when I was already two steps further down the road. The Nelder-Mead optimization subroutine turned out to be suffering from a SINGLE typo (one of the zeros was actually a capital “o”) that produced TWELVE error messages, ranging from lines far on either side of the error. It was all rendered moot, however, when the original programmer mailed the original program off to me with a functioning subroutine. Still didn’t work. Couldn’t get the programs to pay attention to one another. So I said “the hell with it” and pasted the subroutine onto the bottom of the program. I was surprised as hell when it worked. Sort of. Worked, that is. Turns out there were two errors systematically integrated into the program itself involving the referencing devices. The original programmer had apparently cut-and-pasted the copy for his thesis out of old material without realizing it, and left those errors in there. Sorted that out, and now the program really runs!
It’s just giving me nonsensical results.
(I realize this is probably making no sense at all to the experienced programmers, but I don’t know the official terms for what’s going wrong here.)
*Sigh*
But, see, the trick is that I didn’t know about the nonsensical model fits on Monday night when I went out to the weekly anime meeting. So I was very happy.
Which, naturally, pissed off my karmic balance.
So I’m driving down the road at about 70mph, coming up on Wade Green, when both the oil and battery light come on and the engine disengages.
Oooo. That bad… Both lights go off, and the engine reengages. I make it to the end of the onramp, and the “check engine” light comes on. Hrm. OH HELL! THE TEMPERATURE GAUGE IS PEGGED! Right, I know what to do! [ See, when your engine is overheating due to lack of coolant, one of the quickest ways to mitigate the temperature rise is turn on the heater. The heater works essentially by running currents of cool water near the engine, where it picks up a substantial amount of heat, and moving it back to the heating element, where air is blown over a device, transferring the heat to the air, and warming the interior of the car. Thus, the heater acts as an adjustable heat-sink for the engine. Not terribly effective, but it’ll help in a pinch. (Driving works even better, as the air flowing over the engine does the same thing on a larger scale. That’s why it takes the heater a while to “warm up.”) My previous car introduced me to the worst sequential breakdowns possible. The thermostat went out, allowing overheats since the engine-cooling fan wouldn’t engage. What’s the worst thing to break in conjunction with that? Anything major would just leave you on the side of the road and force you to get it fixed. Oh, no. Procrastinator me got the one that let me suffer. The automatic window motor broke. Picture me, sitting in my BLACK car, in the middle of summer, without a cloud in the sky with the engine temperature slowly rising, bumper-to-bumper traffic on 85 going under spaghetti junction at a rate of two car-lengths a minute with the heater going on full blast and all the windows rolled up. I think I lost six pounds that day, all of it to my car seat. Hee. I tell ‘cause it’s funny. True, though.]
So, anyway, I figure I’ve got a mile and a half left in it, I should try to cool down the engine, and, at the next stoplight, I turn on the heater.
And the car fills with smoke.
WHOOPS! THAT’S NOT GOOD. Pull into the nearest strip mall and park the car. Pop the hood and find the entire engine, wiring, and every manner of accessory coated with a rapidly-evaporating, foul-smelling liquid.
My choices were as follows. 1) Wait, and chance completing the drive out to CiCi’s pizza where the anime group had chosen to congregate before the usual showing. Things really didn’t look good in that category. What with the hissing and the spitting and all. I was afraid that what had given out was the oil pump, in which case I stood a chance of cracking the engine block if I went much further. 2) Walk into the nearest shop, con my way into using the phone, and call AAA. But that would mean standing out in the cold waiting for God knows how long, and, more importantly, missing anime. Couldn’t do that. That left 3) Walk to CiCi’s, and quickly, lest I miss everyone and have to walk the longer route back to Patrick’s. I confess that I didn’t know how far it was, as distances tend to compress while in a car. But that really was the only viable option, my cellphone having gone out last week and my not having any of the anime friends’ #’s anyway.
So, that’s how I spent the night celebrating the success with that stupid FORTRAN program. A 45 minute walk in the lower 20’s down the darkest damn road in the county. Oh well. At least it had sidewalks. Most of the way.
(For those that don’t know me well, kvetching (damn, spellcheck had that?) is my usual method of humor delivery. I’m not actually upset over it.)
Well, the net damage is a blown radiator, a leaking water pump, a bad headlight switch, and soaked timing belts (needed changing anyway) to the tune of $1290.00. Ow.
In other news, for those of you that remember my following of the GITS new series, I’m sorry to disappoint, but they’ve wandered too far into that dastardly plot device known as “continuity” for me to give blow by blow descriptions any more. That, and I’ve forgotten where I left off. Most of what I’ve said in the past about previous episodes seems to hold true. The operatives remain the consummate professionals in execution, except where the pickings are stupidly easy (catching a bunch of college kids). Thankfully, Motoko has been steered solidly away from the “dominatrix” model I was dreading, and more towards the “ice queen,” although less-so than is hinted at in the earlier episodes. (Although she still refuses to wear any pants.) The action sequences are still abrupt, swift, decisive, and almost always heavily weighted on the side of section nine (as a good strategist would ensure). They’re also cool as hell. The tachikomas (independent AI spider-tanks) are the comedic relief without ever actually being stupid. (At one point, one perched on the top of a warehouse takes out the rear tire of a fleeing car without any collateral damage. It’s response? “I ROCK!”) I swear to God, I’m seeing more and more “GIR” in the tachikomas from episode to episode. Really, pick this one up if you get the chance. Looks to be rather solidly smart, with a minimum of the standard anime clichés or characters. (I watch animation for the new vistas it opens. Not for the new rut it can get into.)
Just one other brief note. Something rather disturbing occurred to me yesterday about one of the other series we’re watching. Haibane. (The one with all the main characters as wing-sproutin’ halo totin’ earthbound cutie-pies.) They’re living in a caste system. Think about it. They’re not allowed to earn money, they can take only the discarded remnants of other people’s leavings (clothing, etc.), they aren’t allowed to move outside the “kingdom,” other people pretty much pretend not to see them, they can only earn their keep through the lowest, most disrespected jobs in the worst businesses in town. They live far separated from the rest of human society. They always defer to the judgement of the “normal” humans. (Awwww crap. Just ran outta Guiness. Winding up, too.) So, basically, they occupy the “untouchables” tier in the traditional Indian caste system. The only reason we don’t recognize it is because they’re so damn cheerful. Puts the whole series (thus far) in a new light, don’nit?
So, do I have a new movie for y’all? Boy, do I ever. As promised, the movie I plan to review for you now, is
Hellraiser VI.
“Six?” “Six?” I hear you say. “Since when has there been six Hellraiser movies?” Actually, in my experience, this is a good way for delineating between the veteran and the novice horror film fan. Ask your average moviegoer “how many Hellraiser films have there been?” and most, if they even care, will respond “three.” “Four” will get almost as many responses, but only from those who either liked some of the first few or pay close attention to film releases. Hellraiser 4 did get a theater release, albeit only about three weeks worth of one. There’s a notable drop in numbers when you get to the people who said “five.” These are the people who love either the series, or some essential part of the series, and thus followed the releases closely. I think this one was denied the dignity of a big-screen release, but it did decorate the walls of your local Blockbuster under “New Releases” in it’s ones and twos. Those who say “six” are the poor obsessed saps who haunt the straight-to-video schlock rack in the back of Suncoast or Best Buy, scouring for bargains or cheap-ass fixes with the blank-eyed stare of a man hunting for empty soda cans for the nickel rebate. Or the weirdly lucky. I’ll let y’all decide which of the above I am.
(You know, every once in a while, I wonder how much my heritage does actually affect me. Then I find myself happily eating sardines in mustard sauce that my relatives gave me as a joke. Oh yeah. Must be some Norwegian blood in there somewhere…)
But on to the movie. (Oh, put the kiddies to bed for this. Hellraiser is, by it’s nature, explicit and it messes around in areas of deviance. If you don’t wish this kind of frontal assault on your sensibilities, roll up your sleeves and skip this review.) Of course, I should state at the start that I love these films. I’ve already got the first and the second on rental-remaindered-tape, but I’ll pick up the whole string if they ever release a DVD box set. I commented in Hsien’s livejournal that horror fans love their genre out of a unique aesthetic impression they get nowhere else. Well, for me, the Hellraiser films (to varying degrees) hit every weak point in my horror-fan lovin’ psyche. The inherent problem with reviewing one of the later films, though, is that there’s a lot of groundwork to go over. Establishing concepts to explore, without which the rest will make little sense. This isn’t the simplistic “Jason Voorhees wants revenge on the camp councilors that let him drown” or “Freddy Kruger is a dream-inhabiting ghoul who seeks out the children of the people who burned him alive after his killing spree.” This is something that tries to be a little darker, deeper, and only peripherally understood. Further, the basic concept of the series mutates from film to film, dependant most directly on the writer’s whim. The first film was based loosely off of Clive Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart,” which, I’m afraid, I’ve never read. Barker wrote and directed the first film to magnificent effect, but drifted further and further away with each sequel. He wrote, but didn’t direct the second film, and then is only credited with designing the characters in the third, while Peter Atkins wrote the story. After the third, the cord was cut, and all further sequels were on their own. I’m sure that I’ll do a full review of each of these when I get them individually on DVD (as I intend to), but let’s go through each briefly as a setup.
Hellraiser: An absolute gem of a film. This is one of those few films wherein I can find no fault whatsoever. Beautiful composition, pacing, acting. A personal favorite, thus all comments should be taken with a grain of salt. Far and away the crowning film of the series. Support for the entire rest of the series rests on this masterpiece. It’s a bit complicated but the story circles around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, a hollow-eyed little beauty known for little outside the horror genre), her father Larry, and stepmother Claire. I specifically have to avoid getting sucked into telling every detail of this story, so I’ll just say that the family moves into an old house, wherein they’re surprised to find signs that Kirsty’s uncle Frank, long the black sheep of the family, had been living there. Some time later, Frank…..uh……stops by and hides out in the attic, where only Claire, an old lover of his, knows about him. Seems he’s on the run from some….people, and he holds the only method of contacting them in the form of a small wooden-and-gold-inlay puzzle box. Kirsty happens upon it, steals it, and ends up in a mental hospital where she manages to open the box.
At this point she meets the Cenobites. What is a Cenobite? Not easily answered. The Cenobites are beings of apparent immortal, or at least timeless, nature who….work….within a kind of separate dimension. They’re initially described as “explorers in the furthest realms of experience,” kind of a furthest possible extension of human sensation, only on a scale entirely divorced from any concepts of morality. Their realm is where a child rapist goes when he no longer finds a thrill in his hobby…where the body modification extremists go when trepanny just isn’t enough and they wouldn’t live through their own further explorations…where the serial killer goes when he wants to experience the other side of his trade…where time and pain are eternal, death no longer dwells, and the act of opening the box seals a contract on one’s body and soul, giving oneself over willingly to the most eternal of torments simply because it is there to be explored. The most obvious parallel would be a comparison to S&M, B&D body worship, but that’s not entirely fair. Like much of Clive Barker’s short story horror, there is a strong component of sexuality and the erotic worked into the concept of Cenobites, but not in the traditional sense one usually encounters in deviant horror. (Fairly far cry from all the anguished weaning and waning of an Anne Rice novel.) Oh, sure, there’s the leather and PVC outfits, the bondage themes and the “dominant” personalities of the Cenobites (Pinhead enters a room like a god walking among supplicants), but there’s a severe bend in it that’s a bit outside the more readily recognized fetishes. Having to pick a parallel of some sort, I guess it would be closest to medical fetishists. Halo immobilizing crowns, braces and appendixing, stretching and fixing of flesh, similar to Marylin Manson’s “Beautiful People” video, amputees, piercing, and sutures, combined with excruciating pain. Perhaps more appropriately, J.G. Ballard’s “Crash” would serve as an example. I suppose I’ve managed to scare away much of the audience by this point, and those that remain are giving me really weird looks. I should say that I use words like “sexuality” and “erotic” simply because it’s the closest terms I’ve got for it. The Cenobites themselves aren’t “sexual” in any literal sense.
(Aside. Apparently this isn’t entirely true. At a con where I saw Doug Bradley (Pinhead) giving a Q&A session he told a story about being on set in a deep DEEP south location. He was in full makeup relaxing between scenes when two fairly buxom local fan-girls came up to him. [Hey, his story, not mine.] One of them, rather conversationally, introduced herself by saying “We was wonderin’ if we might have yo’ children.” Doug, paused for a moment, and jokingly responded “I would, girls, but see…the pins go all the way down.” To which the other girl smiled, leaned over, and whispered “We was rather hopin’ they did…”)
Their appeal lies in an “eroticism” of knives, hooks, dismemberment, and, above all, pain. Pain entirely fetishized away from the act of sex itself, or the concept of intercourse. They speak of pain as you would expect them to speak of sex. Perhaps a better parallel would be a phenomenally mind-altering drug. A drug addict, tempered to the effects of every other substance, would turn to the Cenobites for an experience to cut through their numbness. The box itself in the very beginning is treated much like a drug deal. In a Casablanca-like setting an aged oriental man greets someone off screen with the line “Whas’ a’ you pleasure?” whereafter the box is exchanged for a wad of bills.
All of this is explained, almost entirely, at the appearance of the Cenobites. There’s a little exposition, but not much. That’s a pretty good indicator of the profound nature of the Cenobites’ appearances, and the strength of Doug Bradley’s performance.
They, the Cenobites themselves, are alternately flayed, skinned, mutilated, distorted, stretched, and warped, presumably in accord with their own explorations. Remember what I said about “The Cell”? It was trying to be the concept behind Hellraiser. The first film has the four original Cenobites. Five, if you count the scorpion-thing in the hallway. They are never named in any of the films, but they’re listed by obvious nicknames in the credits. Doug Bradly plays “Pinhead” a pallid figure with long pins sprouting in a grid pattern over the entire surface of his exposed head. Close examination finds that he’s secured in his garment by excised and sewn segments of his own still-attached skin. The second is the “Female” Cenobite, a cute little thing with a brace device attached to her cheeks and shoulders that holds the vertical incision in her throat open. The third is the “Butterball” Cenobite, a slug-like obese figure straining at the seams of his outfit and perpetually wearing spec-like shades. The fourth (and the one everyone seems to forget) is the “Chattering” Cenobite, named for the constant clicking of the mute figure’s teeth. The head on this one is badly distorted, the skin pulled far towards the back of the head, stretching the eyelids into long slits and permanently exposing the teeth and gums.
By opening the box, Kirsty effectively “calls” the Cenobites, allowing a sort of bubble-field of their dimension to extend into ours. Walls split, bricks glow and steam, and hooked chains extend from the ceiling. Remarkably, for a horror film, “calling” the Cenobites by opening the box is the only thing that will set them after you. You have to specifically seek them out. They aren’t out to take any random people, and they have no specific vendetta against anyone. But if you opened the box, the contract is signed, and they are quite insistent that you go with them. This also lends to the clever subtlety of the film that I love. This isn’t some random killer out there, this is something after a specific someone for a specific reason. It’s a precipitously narrow focus on the horror of a single person, Kirsty, the diametric opposite of the “world endangering horror” that Japanese takes on western horror always tend towards. Thus the horror can explore the subtleties of Kirsty’s fear and desperation, rather than blow the budget on massacring a building full of people. In the first film, it’s even more interesting in that the Cenobites aren’t really the monsters. Uncle Frank is the true horror of the film. Those of you out there who listen to Aphex Twin know about their most popular song “Come to Daddy.” The line “Come to Daddy” is taken from the first Hellraiser film, and is spoken by Frank, not Pinhead. (“I’ll eat your soul”, the other line, is spoken by Pinhead, though. Doug Bradley has the voice of an old testament God when he speaks as Pinhead.)
Back to the story. Kirsty, in desperation, makes a bargain with the Cenobites. Realizing that Frank was on the run from them, she says she’ll lead them to Frank so they can take him instead of her. They agree. Long story short, Claudia is taken by the ‘bites, the Cenobites get Frank, but then they welsh on the agreement and try to take Kirsty as well. By running the box backwards, she’s able to force them away, effectively “unsummoning” them.
Hellraiser II. This one was almost as good as the first, and contains one of the most horrific-in-concept scenes ever not-shown in a horror film. (Why is it the most horrific scenes always have to do with antique straight-razors?) To be honest, all the sequels following this one, as well as the comic book line, graphic novels, and even the recent action-figures, lean heavily on the qualities of these first two films. They really do represent a core concept different from any of the other straight-slasher films or similarly-constructed aesthetic horror. All the good stuff is at its best in these two. In the second film, Kirsty’s boyfriend, barely present at all in the first film, discovers that a doctor at the psychiatric hospital Kirsty was taken to has an unhealthy obsession with little wooden boxes and the mattress on which Claudia died. Seems he’s one of those unique individuals who are just THAT interested in the extremes of the human mind. Through the not-shown scene I mentioned above, he (the Doctor) helps to pull Claudia back from the Cenobite realm, and Kirsty seeks him out as she believes her father is trapped in “Hell.” This is where the stories start to slip. In this film, the Cenobite realm is “hell,” as in THE “hell,” whereas, before, it was just…sort of…someplace else unspecified. You could still assume that they’re speaking metaphorically, in that the Cenobite realm is a someplace “as-bad-as-Hell” but it gets kinda dodgy. The Doctor opens the pathway with Claudia and they sneak into the realm. Something else interesting happens here, though. The doctor opens the way by proxy with a savant patient of his, and Pinhead stops the others before they take the child. “We are summoned not only by hands, but by desire.” Then why did they go after Kirsty? Surprisingly, they’re mostly ambivalent about Kirsty when she, also, sneaks into their realm. They want to take her, but when she refuses, they back down, confident that she will come to them eventually. (“ ‘Didn’t open the box’ and what was it last time? ‘Didn’t know what the box was’? Really, Kirsty, you are becoming quite the tease.”) Again, the Cenobites aren’t the real monsters here. That would be Claudia and the Doctor. Also, we find that the Cenobites were once human, we’re introduced to their lord and inanimate creator “Leviathan,” and we witness the creation of a new Cenobite in the Doctor. None of this directly contradicts anything in the first film, but it does expand and define them to such an extent that some of the mystery and resultant coolness is removed. The Doctor destroys the original four Cenobites by “unmaking” them (reducing them to their before-transformation state and killing them) before being destroyed himself. Claudia jumps out of her skin, and Kirsty saves the day. Much of the ending of the second film was fundamentally flawed. The Doctor’s death was just…stupid, the Doctor himself was too far over the top, and other parts felt silly.
Hellraiser III (I promise these’ll get shorter.): This one sucked. Worst of the bunch. Enormous budget, but ignored much of the established concept for flare, and shock value. Kirsty is nowhere in this film. Pinhead now wants to INVADE the earth for no established reason, resides quite definitely in the Christian Hell, and starts off his foray into our world by slaughtering an entire nightclub with crappy CG. (Previous kills? = 0. Killing ain’t his thing.) There’s a fifteen minute segment devoted to pissing off Christians as Pinhead torments an old priest, a FIGHT WITH THE COPS for heaven’s sake, and about five new, profoundly stupid Cenobites are made. (One is embedded with CD’s, another wrapped in barbed wire, one with a movie camera through his head, one with a cigarette grafted into her throat, and one with two pistons repeatedly hammering through his skull. Cool tech, stupid concept.) Pinhead is destroyed (yes, again) by being overwhelmed and consumed by his “good psyche,” the spirit of the man he once was. Uh…what? Further, his standard three companions are nowhere to be found. Pinhead is the only repeating Cenobite from here on out. Pinhead and companions were the only monsters here.
Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines This one’s fading a bit in my memory, but I’ll try. This one was told in tripartite fashion. It was trying to wrap up everything associated with the Cenobites and tell us the whole story, explaining what they were, where they were coming from, and where they were going. The three parts are the distant past, telling the story of the box’s construction (special order by an occultist in revolutionary France), short-time-future (the architect of a skyscraper is tricked into designing an enormous conduit for Pinhead’s dimension) and far-flung future (brilliant designer aboard a space station constructs a trap for the Cenobites). It’s called “Bloodlines” because the designer of the box, the building, and the space station were all of the same bloodline. Three (uh…or four, depending on how you count) new Cenobites are created (A female, a…dog?, and a pair of twins get conjoined.) and destroyed, and Pinhead is destroyed (yes…AGAIN…what is with you people and continuity?) when the space station is activated, consuming his entire dimension. Verdict? Eh. Better than three. Another occasion where Pinhead was the monster.
Hellraiser V: Inferno. BREAK OF PACE! Whoooo hooo! This story is a vast deviation from the previous patterns, and, if anything, a return to the core concepts of the first. Ehhhh. Sort of. Hmmm. The film is actually trying to do something new with the Cenobite concept. Surely not every supplicant who opened the box was as exceptional as the people capable of capturing or destroying a Cenobite. Instead, it’s basically showing the sequence of events in a routine “taking” of a supplicant. Joseph Thorne is a corrupt cop investigating the work of a serial killer. He encounters one of the Cenobite boxes at a crime scene, and, much as Kirsty did, accidentally opens it. Nothing happens. At first. The sequence of events that follows jumps around from accelerating hallucinatory states, dreams, and profoundly surreal experiences that start to wear down the cop’s remarkable unfeeling nature. The closest parallel I can think of is Jacob’s Ladder, with the strange visions and hallucinatory events of Jacob’s descent/ascent , although I’ll freely admit that this film was nowhere near that good. The events get downright weird, even for a Hellraiser film. At one point the cop is badly beaten up by a pair of round-house kicking asian cowboys. (No, I’m not kidding.) I confess that I liked this one better than IV mostly because I figured out what they were doing. Before the Cenobites could do anything with the cop, they have to break his shell. At the start, he’s entirely above the physical and emotional planes, immured from experience or emotional attachment. For their eternal torments to have any effect, it was necessary to break down this resilience. Pinhead only appears briefly in two scenes of this film. There are two new Cenobites (no origin scene is given, thank heaven), twin….uh….women with featureless faces and long prehensile tongues. In the most memorable scene, they seductively slip their hands under Joseph’s shirt…except he isn’t wearing a shirt, so they pierce directly under his skin and make do. In the end, this time, Pinhead wins. He was never really threatened, and only really appeared in a kind of iconographic capacity in what must be a fairly standard “taking” of a supplicant. Once more, Pinhead isn’t the monster. Here, Joseph is.
The point of all these summaries (not really reviews…I’ll come back and do the proper reviews when I get the whole set on DVD) was to understand the concepts set up in I and II, see how III and IV tried and failed to extend from those, and, most importantly, understand how V was a vast deviation from the previous. Because, you see, VI is another film in the non-tradition of V.
(Word to the wise. This plot summary is for people who aren’t really planning to watch the film, unless it’s for the effects, as it’s major spoiler-riffic. Like if someone told you how Memento ended/began. Skip down to the marker for the review.
_________________________________________________
Hellraiser: Hellseeker starts off on the yellow brick road. What does that mean? It means that it’s starring Dean Winters, known by most people as Ryan O’Reily, the ‘Orish oik in HBO’s excellent TV series “OZ.” (A series taking place in the Oswald correctional institute, thus “OZ”.) He’s driving down the road rather carelessly while fooling around with “Dorothy,” apparently his wife. Except something’s wrong. His wife…she looks familiar. Could it be? Yup.
It’s Kirsty. Ashley Lawrence. Three movies and fourteen years later, Kirsty’s character reappears, along with the original actress. Whoooo hooooo! I loved her in the first films! A whole new movie starring her! This is gonna be great!
Wait….NO! WATCH OUT! THE SEMI! NOOOOOOOO. Don’t swerve! Not on the bridge! OH CRAP! Now they’re in the water! Quick Riley! Get her out! NOOOO! STUPID DOOR! DON’T LOCK!
DAMMIT! THEY KILLED MY FAVORITE CHARACTER IN THE FIRST FOUR MINUTES?!?
*Whimper*
Riley, in this film named “Trevor” (no last name), subsequently wakes up in the hospital. This was my first indication that Hellseeker was going to follow some of the tropes of Inferno (V). ‘Cause, see, they started messing with time. He’s not there as a result of the accident. It’s actually a month later, and Trevor is in the hospital getting treatment for headaches he’s been getting since the accident. Head trauma and all that. Seems he’s also having some memory problems. Bad memory problems. (The time-jump is something of a plot hole, actually, as the investigation should have proceeded further in that time, but oh well.)
Uh oh, I said to myself, this is gonna be tough to review. I was right. Flashbacks, segments of returning memory, and hallucinatory sequences make it really difficult to summarize this film in sequence. It’s sorta like Memento, in that respect. And Jacob’s Ladder. Later bits also key to concepts or moods in the films Angel Heart, Scrooge, the Ring, and even Naked Lunch. Don’t believe me? Moments later, in the hospital, Trevor gets a drip of some new sedative, and fades out….into an operating theater where a surgeon, rather unconcerned with the fact that the patient is awake, dremmels the top of his pate off, and starts sticking pins directly into his brain. While this is plainly a foreshadowing of Pinhead, it’s also a direct homage to one of the most effective and frightening scenes in Jacob’s Ladder, although it was both longer and used more effectively there.
After Trevor starts suddenly out of this “dream” he’s paid a visit by a Detective Givens, an almost condescendingly sympathetic cop who’s come to check some facts with him about the accident. Seems there’s been some problems with his accounting of it, specifically that they’ve been unable to find Kirsty’s body anywhere. Hokay, this guy is actually my biggest problem with the film. This cop is CONSTANTLY calling Trevor up or bringing him in for questioning, but he rarely has anything new or any new questions. He just asks Trevor to go over the story, again and again, until the very end. His attitude as the “good cop” gets more and more annoyingly condescending as time goes by, and just bugs the audience, as his exaggerated “niceness” pulls us outta the dark that the character’s been wandering around in. Just a touch too much overacting the part, too. His partner, the “bad cop” of the pair is a bit better, but not by much. I’ll skip over the constant callbacks in the story, as they really only break up the tension.
I do need to point out one very important factor about this film. It’s dark. I mean physically. The screen is an over-saturated hue of dark blue for entirely too much of the film. I’m not sure if it’s my poor old 14-inch TV or the video cleaner acting up, or the encode on the DVD itself, but this DVD SWAM for the whole fucking movie, including titles. Blues constantly flickering. Piss me off.
Having had an extremely weird day, Trevor goes home to his apartment and reminisces and grieves over his wife, thinking back to all the good times.
At work the next day, he runs into his talky cubicle-mate who bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi, only a little less Peter Lorrey-ish. (Ain’t him though.) Got that “we’ve got a secret” snide aspect to him, though.
Returning memories hit him as he sits at his terminal and finds a small business card claiming “all problems solved”. He remembers going to a strange warehouse district and entering a….”store”…appearing something like a cross between a sweathouse and an abattoir. There he encounters….Professor Snape. (Not really, but in the dark, it really did look like him.) Back in the real world, Trevor goes for a snack in the break room. After a…distraction…in the breakroom, Trevor encounters his boss, Gwen. Gwen is a bit…assertive, which befuddles him, until another returning memory…clarifies the situation somewhat.
As if he didn’t have enough problems, coming home it seems he’s being followed. Dark shadowy figure in a heavy coat who apparently lives in the apartment across the way. Seems to be watching him. While considering this from the safety of his apartment, Trevor has a hacking fit and spits up…a three foot eel. No…wait. He doesn’t. Damn medications. Knocking at his door, though, is an early twenty-something (“Tawny”) who is just eager as hell to show him her new tattoo. (Jody Thompson, a pretty good actress, probably one of the best in the picture, despite her short screen-time. I haven’t seen any of her other films, but she was “Margie” in Shanghai Noon.) Damn, do women just always throw themselves at Dean Winters? Watch especially for the position of her hands as she walks away in slow motion following Trevor’s light rebuff. He, once again, retreats into mourning and memories of Kirsy. Watches a couple of crappy home movies, wherein he gives Kirsty a present. It’s all wrapped up. Cubic in shape. About four inches to a side. Spider sense going NUTS.
He’s interrupted by a knock at the door again. By another woman throwing herself at him. It’s Gwen. Their relationship is further…clarified, and it explains the scene at work. Damn. Well, we knew the deviant sex was coming. In HRI it was Julia and Frank, HRII Julia and the Doctor, III it was a fetish club, IV it was the seductive supplicant (later, Cenobite), V it was the “underground” places the cop went on his investigations or the “twins.” Here, it turns out Trevor’s got a girl in every port. He’s just forgotten he had them, what with the crack to the head an’ all. Gwen’s a pretty straightforward dom, although mostly just in attitude (no toys, outfits. that’s left to the Cenobites). Turns out later that Tawny’s a mild “bottom” who enjoys being tied up. Ironically, the film is pretty tame on the actual nudity, the girls, at their most nude, never really going beyond bra-panties-and-garter. (There’s a voyeuristic scene where a generic background walker is just down to panties, but it’s from a distance.) Doug never really sheds his work clothes. (Sorry girls.)
Gwen wastes little time in getting Trevor’s camcorder set up and pointed at them, but Trevor ends up rebuffing her as well. Only problem is, no one tells the camcorder. It’s still showing Trevor and Gwen going at it in the chair, long after she’s left. He can zoom in, out, etc. and it still shows them in the empty chair. Starts turning a bit…wrong. These…things…step out from behind the pair and wrap plastic around Gwen’s head. Enter the new Cenobites. Are they cool? Worthy of the title? I don’t know. We never get a clear look at them, and it was compounded by the swimmy-ness of my TV. (Actually, there’s a few seconds of well-lit headshot of one, but the rest are still mysteries.) The commentary track by the director noted that there were five new Cenobites in this film, and, unlike the trend he’d seen in previous films where the ‘bites were trending towards the sexy and sleek (qua? OK, maybe V, but the others were pretty balanced), he wanted to go with the idea that they were creatures of indulgence. Thus all of the new Cenobites trend towards the “Butterball” model…I think. Really, the detail on the new ‘bites was criminally low in this film. I can forgive it, though, in light of what they were trying to do. I loved Jacob’s Ladder for using much the same effects, although more effectively.
The next day, Trevor, seeking relief for his headaches, goes to see an acupuncturist that Buscemi-lookalike recommends. Note to everyone: Do NOT trust an acupuncturist who keeps an icepick in her office. It’s just too similar and too tempting for even the most seasoned professional. He has a further flashback during the session, relating, rather clumsily, how he got the box. Pinhead puts in his first, really damn cool, appearance. Doug Bradley has lost none of his skill in portraying the character, silently phasing out of the acupuncturist’s chart, and pithing Trevor. Wait…no he doesn’t. Damn medication.
His revelries and obsessing over his dead wife at night are starting to bend a bit. Kirsty doesn’t seem quite the loving wife in all the tapes. Tawny interrupts him, but in the middle of it, he starts getting a bit rough, and has a Cenobite “encounter.” Waking up in bed covered in blood, he finds Tawny’s bound corpse in the next room. Apparently he got a lot “rougher” than usual. Another Pinhead appearance, though, and everything’s fixed. Body gone, Tawny living down the hall with someone else, and no memory of him.
The flashes and hallucinations come a lot more quickly now. The police show up (again) and show him this funny little box they dredged outta the river. Steve Buscemi actually rousts him for money in the breakroom. Seems a key component that Trevor forgot was that Kirsty was loaded. And he and his cubicle-buddy had decided to bump her off for her inheritance.
Damn, but those headaches are getting bad. Back to the acupuncturist. And SHE throws herself at him. Yeah, another one. This one seems to be into a bit of pain. Giving, mostly, ‘specially with that icepick. (Told you.) Waking up in an ambulance, Trevor finds out that, apparently, his acupuncturist’s visit never happened.
Damn medication.
So, we go to the doctor. ‘Cept her office is gone, and the Doctor disappears, leaving Trevor talking to empty air. Now he’s remembering everything. Kirsty’s anger. Kirsty’s discovering his affairs. Trevor makes his way back to the abbitoir-sweatshop, but the place is deserted. Pinhead puts in an unreachable performance, walking beneath the surface of an inch-deep puddle in on the cement floor. With his typical aplomb, Bradley taunts the disoriented Trevor and disappears. (This was the worst-shot scene on my TV. Too damn dark to see anything but general images.) Leaving, Trevor holds a brief conversation with Buscemi-lookalike before he…exits. Hmm. Guess he knew something.
Back to the acupuncturist’s. Damn, that musta hurt. ‘Course, the police find him there, and take him in on murder. The police station, though is…changing. The hallucinations are merging with reality as he sees people in interviewing rooms being electrocuted through barely opened doors, beatings in frosted-glass-walled offices spattering blood around, and a “holding cell” holding a man rapidly running out of sanguineous aspect. Taken down to the morgue to identify Kirsty’s body, he learns the truth about “good cop/bad cop” relationships. (Not great CG here, but I make allowances for low budget horror flicks.) The film ends in the morgue (situated in a steam tunnel) with Pinhead’s final appearance. The morgue itself is gruesome, a final departure for all the blue hues of the film with organs and utensils scattered about on the specimen tables. As is practically a requirement, Pinhead’s meathooks put in their appearance here, restraining the inmate for his final revelation. (A rather meaningless change here, the hooks burst from the floor instead of the usual dark void above. Don’t really like that, as it gradually pulls the inmate out of view of the camera, and it’s a break with cannon just for the hell of it, but a minor point.)
What’s the revelation? Spoiler city here.
Remember “The Sixth Sense?” Yeah. Only a lot worse. Yes, Trevor found the box and gave it to Kirsty. Yes, he’d grown bored of their marriage, and was looking for a permanent way out. After all, he had all these other, far more interesting girls lined up.
Yes, Kirsty’d opened the box.
This is the key point of the film, and it is both cool as hell, and terribly flawed. Turns out this was all a machination of Pinhead’s to get Kirsty after all this time. In flashback, Kirsty opens the box out of anger at Trevor’s betrayal.
Now what does this say about Kirsty? She knows who is waiting. She knows the bargain she is making by opening the box. She knows better than anyone what should happen. Way back in II, I asked why the Cenobites were after Kirsty at all, since it was not only hands, but desire that called them. Apparently, they can tell when someone truly wishes to supplicate to their realm. And Kirsty alone they continue to chase. Hmm. Not convinced? The best scene of the film is when Kirsty opens the box and once again faces off with Pinhead. She’s no longer the screaming girl of the first films, but she is plainly terrified. If you watch this film, stop at the point where the box opens, and go to the “special features.” There’s an extended version of this scene in there. It was abridged because “the only ones who would understand it are the fanbase.” (Uh….durrr. The only ones WATCHING the SIXTH installment of an esoteric horror flick ARE the fanbase! Leave the frickin’ scene alone!) The extended version is a magnificent piece for Doug Bradley. In the extended version, she protests that she gave them Uncle Frank in exchange for herself, thus they should no longer chase her. The next bit is cool as hell. Pinhead responds “Don’t think I’m not grateful. I am. Eternally grateful. But there was another bargain, wasn’t there? You will not have forgotten that I gave myself to let you run. Did you think that gift was nobly and freely given?”
Ooooohh. Damn, that’s cool. Fourteen years later, an answer to a somewhat inexplicable scene in HR II. Pinhead stands against the Doctor so Kirsty can run. Why? Because she’d fairly paid off the Cenobites twice, once with Frank, once with information, and there no longer existed a bond of debt between them. But by giving of himself, Kirsty is in Pinhead’s debt again, simply because he desires her above all others.
Which makes the next bit inexplicable. (Oh, one other quibble. Pinhead claims to have Kirsty’s father. That’s just not possible in the context of the film for reasons too complex to go into here.) Kirsty offers another deal. Perhaps Pinhead is still convinced of his eventual attainment of her, because he knows Kirsty desires to enter his realm, so he accepts her offer of five souls for her own. Nonetheless, it seems weird that Pinhead would deliberately let her slip from his grasp for a THIRD time, when he could literally just reach out and take her, as the balance is in his favor.
But wait. Again, what does this say about Kirsty? She’s no longer the crusader for good that she once was. She’s literally offering to turn over five…well, not innocent, but uninvolved souls to Pinhead’s realm by her own hand. Damning people through her own terrified actions. She is becoming one of them. She admits as much: “I had a great teacher.” Pinhead must recognize that, and he’s cultivating it. She will make a Cenobite of extraordinary power when she finally passes into his realm.
DAMN.
FANART REQUEST! PLEASE! SOMEONE WHO’S A FAN OF THE SERIES! I WANT THAT!
Who are the five souls? Well, one is a woman who fashions herself as a sexual temptress in domninance, another is one who seeks submission and pain in her pleasure, a third, a dealer in pain and the release thereof, the fourth is a deceiver and accomplice to murder…and the fifth, naturally, is Trevor, worst of them all, and the one who invited the Cenobites through his own actions.
Back at Trevor, it is, of course, Trevor’s body beneath the sheet in the morgue. (A scene from the original “Christmas Carol,” one rarely incorporated into modern retellings.) Kirsty blew his brains out…in a car. (note) and when they went over the embankment, she swam free and he died, taken by the Cenobites. His body is pulled from the river by the police, (same cop is there) and Kirsty convinces them that Trevor confessed to the murder of all those women and his friend before he tried to kill her. She got the gun away and killed him instead. It was Kirsty who shot and killed the other victims, and she’s framed her dead husband for it. Everything else has been the beginning of Trevor’s eternal torment. The doctor who was so kind to him turns out to be a mortician, and when they recover the body, they find an eel has made its home down his esophagus.
But, of course, the box is recovered as well. And Kirsty takes it with her.
End of summary.
_______________________________________________________________________
So how does this one rank overall? Hrm. I’m a hopeless fanboy of this series, so all estimations should be taken with a pound of salt. Assuming that the technical snafu with my TV is unique to me, I rank the series I, II, V, IV, VI…….III. This is looking back from a great distance on some of these films, though. Taking the deleted scene as cannon instead of the vastly shorter one used in the film scoots VI above IV, about on par with V. (I dislike IV because of its basic attempt to completely define the Cenobite realm, but others may not be as bothered by that.) Just the extended scene with Pinhead and Kirsty interacting is sufficient reason for fans to watch this film. The other extended scenes are less successful, though. They really should have been left out. There’s a confrontation between Kirsty and Trevor in the car, and an extended bit with Trevor’s receipt of the box from Professor Snape. (Hee.) The second is kind of pathetic when you listen to the director’s commentary, because the director had wanted to morph the cube out of a music box that played the Hellraiser theme. But they didn’t have enough money to license the THEME. That’s just sad. There’s also a “walkthrough” the CG special effects sequences with the CG specialist, but most of it is pretty self-evident and rather dull, even for me.
The structure of the story is fairly clever, and the final surprises fairly well concealed if you haven’t seen story structure like this before. Not near the level of craftsmanship that went into The Sixth Sense, but adequate to the job. Not trying to second-guess the film will help your enjoyment, but it’s fairly easy to see the end coming. There’s more than the usual metaphorical level of nattering about Pinhead taking “souls” or desiring Kirsty’s “soul” that I always had a problem with (to the tune of whether or not Pinhead lives in the Christian “Hell”), as I thought it was retconning something that Clive Barker never intended to be there. On the plus side, it appears to entirely ignore the events of Hellraiser III. All in all, the film was better in concept than execution. Listening to the director’s audio track emphasized this. Throughout the whole film, his mantra becomes “well, by this point we were out of money and out of time.” It hurts to hear some of the really keen ideas he had for the film that never got done. Originally, the car was to strike some disfigured goat-creature that caused them to go over the edge, instead of just swerving away from the semi. In a later flash, Trevor hallucinates, Jacob’s-Ladder-style, the carcass being used as yarn by the old crocheting woman on the bus. Brilliant! And NOT in the film! (In an odd turn, the director’s audio track had a ….disclaimer? Weird.) Much of the stuff that was IN the film just flies right past the audience. Apparently, the director worked really hard to get a “water” theme going, to hint about the accident, but it completely flew past me. When it’s pointed out I can kind of see it, but hell, it’s not that strongly inserted. Other immensely cool things got lost in my TV or because of bad filming, can’t tell which. (In the sweatshop, apparently the women are sewing skins together.) The jumping around in time and sequence gets a bit frustrating, operating on a kind of dream-logic that’s never quite pulled off, and the cop is just annoying. The CG effects are just slightly enough sub-par that I kind of care where I usually would cut them slack. Doug Bradly is excellent here, as always, with many more lines than in V, despite his only occasional scenes. The other Cenobites were mostly a disappointment, despite the high-minded approach. Kirsty is pretty good, although she’s barely in this film. Her best scene is the face-off with Pinhead, and the two play off of one another brilliantly. The rest of her scenes are kind of disappointing in their non-relation to the film. She’s still at her best in the hollow-eyed terror state, so much so that I didn’t really recognize her in the first scene. Some scenes had to be cut from the film ‘cause the actress is apparently afraid of water (“Wasn’t comfortable in the tank” was how the director put it.) and apparently she only joined the film at the last minute, with Gwen’s actress as her understudy. She has aged well, though.
One surprise found out during the commentary was that the director showed the film to Clive Barker when they’d reached the pre-production cut stage. Barker actually liked it, (delighting the director) but had a few suggestions. Primarily? More gore. (Oooooo. I like Clive Barker.) So who was this director who respected the originals enough (other comments in the audio track kept referring back to the original Hellraiser with near reverential tone) to hunt down CB’s opinion and take it to heart? His name is Rick Bota. Most recently, he did the David Boreanaz slasher chick-flick “Valentine.” Before that was the remake of “House on Haunted Hill” (the good one, not “The Haunting” which sucked). Also the crap-tastick “Barb Wire” (Pamela Anderson and her three pounds of silicone try to act), and a bunch of Tales from the Crypt episodes, including the first movie. Yeah, he’s paid his dues. More than his dues. But the true geek points he gets from me come from even further back, to his first directing job. The “Werewolf” TV series from back in 1987. Damn. That’s one I thought I’d dreamed up. I have only vauge recollections of catching this show as a kid during one of my parents across-country road trips to New Mexico, and it terrifying me. I loved it. Great show for its time, and I think I’m one of three people out there who still remember it.
In summary, all the parts of the film came together to form a slightly sub-par experience. If you watched and liked any of the other Hellraiser films, that elevates it significantly, and I recommend this film for you. Don’t attempt to watch it if you’ve never seen any of the others, though. At least watch I, and II before this one, the others aren’t necessary. This one is destined for sale to TV where it will be consigned to late-night television and heavily edited. Think there’ll ever be another sequal? I’m sure of it. It’s in filming already, scheduled for 2004. “Deader.” Concerns something about a suicide cult. I just hope they don’t blatantly rip of CB’s Lord of Illusions, and I PRAY they take the series in the direction I suggested above.
-
“I told him that I would not be able to appoint his nominee. This produced an explosion. Yet I refused to become angry myself.”
2003-01-26 20:46:09
“You must always remember that the governor of New York is about six.”
I don’t normally watch the History channel for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s located rather awkwardly on my dial just beyond VH1. For another, the stories told are usually too interesting to accomplish anything else in the meantime. This is perfectly illustrated right now as the special “TR, an American Lion” has prevented me from getting more than ten words down in the last hour and a half. However, I may have to begin watching it more regularly, if only because the advertisements are at least one order of magnitude more intelligent and well crafted than those I usually encounter on the Sci-Fi channel, and at least three orders of magnitude above those on Cartoon Network. (Between the idiotic children’s ads (which, believe me, are actually better than those from when we were kids…trust me, I’ve seen a few old tapes) and their self-promotion, it’s only barely mediated by their clever use of old Hanna Barbara rights.)
The recent penchant for European diplomats to refer to our current president as “a cowboy” caused me to think of the last time that accusation was made. Teddy Roosevelt is something of a idol of mine. Look back at my yardstick for measuring a man, and it would be difficult to find another individual to reach as great a height. I don’t claim that he’s the greatest president the US has ever had, but I might claim that he is the greatest man to ever become president. (This bio leaves much to be desired, though. It merely mentions near the end that TR was blind in one eye. It fails to mention HOW. During the presidency, TR had a private boxing match with an old army pal of his. He got clocked so hard he was permanently blinded in one eye. The only people who knew, however, were his pal and the ringside doctor. He didn’t want to get his friend in trouble, so he never mentioned it to anyone else until shortly before his death.)
That being as far as I want to go into politics in this forum, I’ll now take a sudden right turn into personal issues.
No, things aren’t getting better. In fact, they’re getting a bit worse, although Dr. Wick’s attitude in the week following our encounter makes me think he realized exactly how much of the subtext I was actually hearing. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not yet sure. The Fortran stuff has been progressing, but in such a convoluted manner I haven’t even been able to get the details together in such a fashion that I could ask questions of anyone else. First, I suddenly trip over the fact that the spacing is wrong for the number indexes in the program I wrote…then I can’t find the companion program…then I find a possible companion program but can’t get it to run after typing all eight pages in…then I get rid of the typos but can’t get it to run because of nested loop problems…then I find someone else’s version of the program already typed…but with a format error…then the error is fixed, but still won’t run…now I get the original program back from the first guy who wrote it, but it won’t run…now some cutting and pasting an the fucking thing finally compiles! But won’t run. That’s where I am now.
Having done entirely too much sharing last time around, I think I’ll just wander off into the blasé mediocrity of obsessing over pop culture and crap media again.
So another right turn! This one has been floating around the journals for a while, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Normally I turn my nose up at such surveys as they rarely have anything unique to say, but what the hell. I’ve nothing better to talk about right now.
1. What was the first record you owned?
I had a little toy record player when I was very young with maybe 6-7 scratched up little records I used to play on it, although I can’t for the life of me remember ANY of them. Don’t think they really count though. The first record I actually put money towards and picked out myself was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
2. Is there a song that reminds you most of your childhood?
Anything by Credence Clearwater Revival, or, incongruously, ABBA. (My mom was a big ABBA fan, so I heard a lot of them growing up.) Today’s artists? Counting Crows “Hangin’ Around.”
3. If you could spend a night with five musical artists (three for their minds and two for their bodies) who would they be?
Minds: Hrm… Lessee…Maynard James Keenan, John Linnel (or Flansburg…whichever’s available), Syd Barrett. (Just think of putting those three in a room together. Artistic potential would blow out the windows. Alternately, Bjork and David Bowie. I mean, they’re obviously both changlings…)
Bodies: [At the same time? Would any singer’s ego allow that?] Top of my head…Sarah Brightman (when she was a bit closer to my age)…no one else I can especially think of. I suppose any one of the interchangeable bodies being toted around the country attached to today’s early-twenties singing idols.
4. If your life was a movie, what would play over the following:
Opening credits: “Twilight” ELO
Love scene: Not one for musical accompaniment.
Driving scene: What else? Steppenwolf, “Magic Carpet Ride.”
Closing credits: Closing Theme from Buckaroo Banzai. (Greatest Evah)
5. If applicable, name a song or concert that moved you to tears:
Mike and the Mechanics, “Why Me?” (Thanks to Jeff Taterek…basssard)
6. Name one musical artist you'd like to see banished.
Kid Rock. Am I the only one that sees “poseur” printed on his forehead?
7. Name a song you would rather never hear again.
”Come sail away” by Styx. Blarg. Cartman’s version was more entertaining than the original.
8. Name an album that is perfect all the way through.
”Lincoln” TMBG. “El Oso” Soul Coughing.
9. Music you like that can be considered a guilty pleasure.
Tool. Metallica. NIN. My attempt to be gritty and metal and dark and goth when I ain’t really.
10. If your music collection were about to go up in flames, which 5 CDs would you save?
The ones I haven’t listened to yet. Other than that…TMBG singles (“Why does the sun shine” and “Back to Skull” especially) and Dirty Pair: Project Eden album. They were hard enough to find once, near impossible to replace.
11. Is there a song that describes you or a situation you've been in so well that you could have written it?
Someone here pointed me at Roy Atkinson’s “Pay the Bill.”
12. Best music-related movie?
”O Brother Where Art Thou.” The old musical version of “Scrooge” is stunningly good too.
13. What is your favorite all-time video?
George Michael “Freedom” (DAYMN!) Or ANYTHING by Tool. (NIN’s “Closer” gets an honorable mention.) (AMV? Now, as always, Jingoro’s “In My Heart” video.)
14. Current favorite radio hit?
Counting Crow’s remake “Big yellow Taxi” is OK, although mostly ‘cause I liked the original.
15. Do you sing or play any music instruments?
Four years piddling away at piano. No progress after the first two years, so I gave it up. Can’t even find middle “C” anymore.
On to the review! Got yet another treat for the gorefans out there. Mike and Shelley came through for me in my dark hour and lined me up with a truly awful Italian horror film. Welcome to “Nightmare City.” And what would a Nightmare City be without a bunch of zombies? Probably a lot more hygienic, but that’s hardly the point.
This is probably going to be the shortest review I’ve done in a while, since this film is so straightforward. The plot summary, at least, should be damn short. We start off the film with the fearful announcement of some sort of nuclear disaster happening at a plant somewhere, and the even more fearful development that this film might be Italian. A skeptical reporter (our….hero? MOVIE! I demand to speak with your manager!) is sent to speak on the subject with officials arriving at the airport. When he gets there, though, a mysterious military troop transport is coming in. No response is raised on the radio, and it doesn’t respond to signals from the ground either. The airport clears it a runway, and surrounds the transport when it lands. They yell really effectively at the unresponsive plane for about five minutes (every moment captured on tape) and then…slowly…a hatch is lowered. A diplomatic-looking gentleman steps slowly down, regards the assembled soldiers, and……..
AAAAHHHHHH!!!! ZOMBIES!
Pouring out of all the hatches, falling upon the soldiers, biting! Punching! drinking blood! Swinging axes? Kitchen knives? One of them knocks over a soldier, picks up his machine gun, and mows down the approaching reinforcements. Tool using zombies? This can mean only one thing…
They’re evolving!
I can see it now. Some time in the murky prehistory of Zombie development, some highly-intelligent, less decayed member of the species zombonicus putrefactis discovered that holding a long, pointed stick meant you could poke at victims even when they were entirely surrounded by firstcomers. Also, when held vertically and used as a support, you ran into a lot less trees. Heavy rocks were handy for getting at that tasty marrow without loosing teeth. From this naturally evolved the development of a primitive hatchet, and a primitive semi-automatic machine pistol.
Heeee…
Seriously, though, these zombies are tool-users, rather profoundly intelligent ones at that (for zombies, anyway). Later on in the film, we learn that they’re not really zombies, but ATOMIC zombies, victims of whatever the nuclear tragedy was. (We’re never told.) But you see, these people have been turned into atomic zombies because….they’ve been exposed to lots of radiation! Well, that explains everything. See, the victim’s cells are now filled with ATOMIC ENERGY which means they heal right back whatever damage is done to them, almost as if the special effects guys didn’t have enough bursting blood packs for everyone. Several zombies get riddled with lead on the landing strip, but the twenty or so take out the ENTIRE airport. (Oh yeah, I should mention something else. These zombies are FAST. They might not be marathoners, but they can do windsprints like nobody’s business.) The reason they’re after victims is that their radioactivity kills all of their red blood cells very quickly, and they have to drink fresh blood to keep going. This is actually kinda clever on the writer’s part, although it’s almost certainly by accident. See, red blood cells have no nucleus, and thus no method of producing proteins or running signaling sequences to heal damaged cells or reproduce. When the cells get old, they get filtered out in the spleen and kidneys, and are continuously replaced with new ones from the bone marrow. So the zombie-healing-factor couldn’t help them with their blood, as the blood couldn’t repair itself, and the radiation was continuously damaging it. A little clever.
The zombies themselves are pretty mushy. I mean physically. The early ones look almost human, but they get this kind of mossy Swamp-thing growth over their heads and faces, making it look like an attack by a badly rotted Humpty Dumpty. So really, they’re not undead, they’re just diseased, unkillable humans.
Taking their humanity into account excuses a lot of what comes next. For example, the first place they attack is a studio broadcasting Richard Simmons aerobics. I think we can all understand that. Well, it’s not really Simmons. Richard Simmons usually has better music. The reporter flees to the TV station where he works, and they are broadcasting some hideous late-70’s electronic music while a bunch of badly-choreographed dancers in blue leotards flail around. You know the stuff lileks hates about the 70’s? It’s all over the walls on this set. Reporter gets into an argument with his boss about broadcasting an alert, military guy asserts authority, the girls get back on set and suddenly…
AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! ZOMBIES!
That’s really the whole movie. I mean, it’s only the first few minutes, but the rest of the film is just a sequence of similar events. Random “why were we even introduced?” characters, or family of the soldiers who try to take charge all flee in different ways, have different random encounters, and get slaughtered. None of it’s really connected, or spliced out to maintain tension. We just get occasional scenes of clueless individuals wondering what’s going on, then suddenly….AAAAAHHHHHH!!! ZOMBIES! Oh, they try to make us care. It’ just doesn’t work. We get a few lines for character development, this guy’s a letch, that one is worried, that one does sculpture, but the acting is so bad and the dialogue so badly written that any point without serious zombie-on-victim action is just boring.
Oh the zombie-on-victim action is just precious. Not quite to the level of Hercules-wrestling-a-stuffed-lion, but a little amusing just the same. What isn’t amusing, though, is just disturbing. You can tell this is a European flick, because there’s a couple of topless scenes just thrown in randomly throughout the film. Most of them, though, happen when some zombie is disemboweling some young thing and sucking the blood (karo syrup w/ red food coloring) out of her. Well, a lot of the girls get stabbed in the breast. This leaves you with the uncomfortable impression that you just walked in on a very noisy union between Suzie from down the street and a moss-covered homeless man. Ewwww.
The gore here is a bit disturbing as well. See, the director of this flick is Umberto Lenzi. He’s got a resume longer than my arm in half a dozen genres, but apparently he is most famous for jump-starting the Italian sub-genre of “cannibal” films with his film “A Man From Deep River” and followed up with gems like “Make Them Die Slowly.” I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Italian cannibal sub-genre. Looking at some of the stills from those flicks, I’m not sure I wanna know about it, as it has the flavor of someone trying to make a fake Faces of Death film, while coming up with the most difficult-to-look-at tortures they can imagine. Apparently there were real animal kills on camera for some of those. Well, some of that particular attitude carries over into this film. Unlike the fun-loving gore of Evil Dead and Dead Alive, this tries for explicitness and uncomfortable-seat-squirming. Axe to the head of a supine woman. Another gets half of her breast carved off. A third, near the end, spends about fourty seconds with her eye being pried out via a metal skewer. How is this different from the usual fare I cover? Hard to say. If you watch it, it’s as different as night and day, but it’s hard to get down into words. It may have something to do with more of a focus on the victims, and their processes of death, whereas most other horror films concentrate on the killer, and the way in which they kill. It also helps that other horror films usually elevate the violence to the level of the absurd, thus placing it safely out of the reasonable sphere of events. This feels more like a mob of deranged serial killers happening upon a catholic girls school and just laying about them with machetes. Sort of the difference between a romance flick and porn. Yeah, gore-porn. That’s about right.
So anyway, our “hero” escapes with the aid of a Molotov TV set (how do you catch two zombies on fire with a thrown TV?) and runs off to rescue his wife from the hospital where she works. Rescues her, and they go on a countryside tour while the zombies wreak havoc at a bunch of random locations. I kinda wished he hadn’t rescued her, since most of her non-zombie-intensive screen time was spent on a placidly-earnest “no-nukes” message for the audience. There’s a lot of elaborate stuff with flashbacks to the military base, but it all comes to nothing, and could have been cut out of the film entirely without leaving any scars. In the end, the reporter and wife are chased up to the top of a roller coaster in an amusement park where they’re rescued by a passing military helicopter. Except that wifey doesn’t have that strong of a grip, and (played by re-suss-a-annie) she tumbles off the rescue line, hitting every girder of the rollercoaster on the way down.
Then the reporter wakes up.
God DAMN it! For all the faults this film had, the campyness and ludicrous situations were kinda fun until it all got sucked down with this plot twist of ultimate suckitude. You know, I think there was a time when the whole “it was all a dream” storyline was considered clever and avante-garde and it lasted about a year until everyone realized it was the most flamingly stupid and overplayed concept to come down the pipe since “the butler did it!” All “he woke up” films were made in that year, which, according to this film, was 1980. After 1980 everyone went home and never spoke of this event again. That’s my theory, anyway.
And the reporter, having woken up, goes to work, where he’s assigned to go speak to experts arriving from the nuclear accident….and there’s the plane that doesn’t respond…etc. etc. Yup. They lapped the frickin’ plot.
To be honest, this film is what people who hate horror films think of when they list their objections. It’s far too long for the story they have to tell, it’s random, low budget, campy, exploitive, and very badly written or paced. The direction and cinematography is OK (except for that weird “is it dubbed or is it live” thing I’ve noticed in other Italian films), but it can’t make up for the rest of the problems. They don’t even really get their rules down very well. The nearly unkillable zombies are dropping left and right by the end of the film once everyone knows to aim for the head, (who DOESN’T know that?) but the situation is still “hopeless.” The zombies are said to reproduce..kinda…but the street is still littered with the corpses of their victims who, for some reason, haven’t gotten up yet. Feels like the whole thing was a more-expensive-than-average made-for-TV movie. All this taken into account, this would make an excellent MST3K film. Shock! at the blasphemous horror of a zombie clergyman with his battle candles! (Yawn.) Thrill! at the skill of the ninja surgeon with his throwing scalpels! Witness! the inefficiency of Herbie the love bug in bowling over zombies! See! the ingenuity of a zombie elevator repairman in “rescuing” people trapped when the power went out! (Yup, he repairs the elevator to get at the people in it. Doubly-screwed situation there.) Cheer! at the prospect of a zombie road trip! (Yup, they can drive too.) See! the reporter defend his love by bashing a zombie with a rolled up blanket! Puzzle! why the zombies insist on attacking the only barricaded entrance! Wonder! at the high combustibility of Italian ambulances!
The funniest, and most memorable moment is seen from a military helicopter zooming over a flock (plague? fester? gaggle?) of zombies. Evidently they’re studying the zombie migration routes, since the zombies run and fan out exactly like antelope herds in those national Geographic specials. I thought this was hilarious.
In summary, a bad, bad, bad film. Hard to watch in parts, even harder to stay awake through in others. Some camp value. Some slightly disturbing gore points. All in all, just what I needed.
Perhaps the worst part, though, is the “extras” interview with the director. He’s apparently convinced that this is still a masterful work, although it’s evident that he hasn’t watched it himself in years. (At one point in the interview, he can’t remember the ending phrase, guessing it might be a big question mark.) He actually holds that his movie has come true, what with the AIDS epidemic and all. Gahhh. Yeah, AIDS patients are known for their murderous, moss-covered rampages through the streets. What planet is this guy from? I can almost see what he’s getting at, but in the end it’s just a stupid after-the-fact attempt at intellectualism out of a gorefest, much like the no-nukes thing earlier.
At any rate, next time: The cube goes to Emerald City. -
Part I of II (damn journal entry pagelimit
2003-01-21 01:40:59
Start at this post, read down, then start on the post below. Hopefully this will forestall any confusion.
“We were five miles outside of the Shire when the drugs started to take effect.”
Before I say anything else I would just like to say
GO HERE!
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=d1ee8f86d26ed7ad25ebff7eb27d0239&threadid=138905&perpage=50&pagenumber=1
No, it’s not porn. Man, can no one be trusted anymore?
(Dammit. Backdate the following incessant whining by a week. Been busy.)
Next, a bit of rambling discontent.
WhatkindofagoddamnideaisittonotletmebuybeeronaSundaywhenIneeditsodesperately, howcouldtheyconceiveofrefusingmemypreciousGUINNESSwiththeirfascistpoliciesina vainattempttoappeasethosewhoholdthatGodreallycareswhetherornotyoufeellikealittle fermentedgrainonhisholydaysespeciallywhentheweekhasbeensodisastrouslybadAND they’recarryingtwiceasmanybottledGuinnessascannedandtheyranoutofcannedandnowI’m leftwiththefuckingflatstoutandcan’tevenbuythatANDIhavetodealwiththefactthatontopof everythingelsethecheckoutgirlwasreallynicetomeevenifshedidsayIlookedlikeKennyGso I’mnotevenallowedtobemadaboutit?
There. That’s done.
So where have I been for nearly three weeks? First off, I’ve been off on a much needed vacation to bridge the Christmas and New Years holidays. Then, last week, everything blew up in my face and I’ve been in serious need of a lot of really heavy drinks. Here, here’s the entry that I started before everything blew up.
“I cannot live with that guy. He’s loud, he’s creepy, and he doesn’t wear a shirt.”
So my new roommates are here. And, once again, they are French. I flipped a coin this time and decided to like them, but am currently hiding out in my room as they are gathered in the living room with a bunch of their friends and are all talking in French. Someone help, what’s the polite thing to do in this situation? Stay hidden as a hermit, or venture out and force everyone to speak in broken English out of consideration?
I have no idea how long this one is going to be, or, more importantly, how many days I’m gonna rattle away at it before finally posting. There’s been a lot of time since the last post, but that was mostly due to the holidays getting in my way. Now, of course, there’s trouble at work. Trouble so bad I don’t even want to talk about it, so I’ll just skip down to the next item on the list.
Spent the Yuletide up in the great state of cheese with the remaining grandparent. For once, my vacation time exactly matched up with the travel schedule, so I didn’t have to empty out my last days of vacation in order to manage a few days with the folks. As is our wont, the ‘rents and I drove the whole way from Atl to Milwaukee. I swear, the trip gets shorter each year. This time around it was barely 15 hours on the road total (spread over two days so we didn’t have to hurry) and I pitched in my 3 both ways. (Hey, gotta get something out of being the “kid” in the family.) The drive has always been my favorite part of vacation. Don’t have to deal with anyone. Get a chance to catch up with the parents. Plenty of reading material and sodas within easy reach. (Actually, nix that last one. My mom’s allergic to caffeine and my dad’s diabetic, so no soft drinks any more.) Hell, you can crash out and sleep for two hours, wake up and start reading again. I haven’t had nearly enough time to read as of late, and I welcomed the opportunity. (Well, that’s not entirely true. My comics stack has been increasing fairly regularly, and that fills my head fairly well. (And, as a further parenthetical, if you aren’t reading “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” go out and get the collected volume RIGHT NOW and start collecting the second series (up to issue 4 so far). Why? Well, beyond the pure imaginative grandeur of seeing Miss Wilhemina Murray, Mr. Alan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, and Dr. Jekyl (“wait” you say…there’s someone missing…..why yes, there is.) facing off against those canister-spawned horrors from beyond the stars which landed in a green and pleasant land, Ms. Murray and Mr. Quatermain have been sent in search of someone else. Someone holed up in a twisted English wood. A devil doctor, “red in tooth and claw.”
They’re looking for Dr. Moreau.
(If you haven’t read “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” just know that I consider it the best novel H.G. Wells ever wrote. Yes, the movie adaptation blew chunks, but the novel itself is such a solid crystallization of horrific imagery, it stands untarnished by petty attempts to destroy it. Be warned that it also possesses some of the awkward social commentary that SF authors originally believed was the true aim of their works, but it’s less cloying than others, and much better written than the abysmal “Time Machine.” Anyway, Moreau is a vivisectionist (think “surgeon without anesthesia”) committed to taking animals and MAKING them into humans. Surgically. He meets with limited success. ) Moreau hasn’t shown up in the comic yet, but Moore has yet to disappoint. My only real complaint is that, whereas the other members of the League could, theoretically, have survived their ordeals and come to this crew (Dr. Jekyl starts off his book having disappeared, Nemo’s demise in “The Mysterious Island” was never witnessed, Griffith’s…uh…the same, and I don’t believe Quatermain or Murray were ever recorded as having died) Moreau is most certainly dead at the end of his book. Like, all over the room dead. Straining their credibility a bit…) Heh, fun with parentheticals.)
So anyway, drove all the way up there for the annual get-together. Hung out with the cousins for a bit. Both are younger than me (I used to be the oldest cousin) and we don’t have too many common points of reference anymore, but we found things to talk about. One is finally sounding like she’s loosened up a bit at college, and the other devoting his spare time to movie marathons with his friends. (I swear, this isn’t really a thing with my family. Just an odd coincidence.) Mostly the visit was uneventful. We spent up till Christmas eve throwing the traditional ‘eve dinner for EVERYONE (head count of 29 this year) that any relation knew who didn’t have anything planned. Got that cleaned up and crashed. The next morning everything got totally disorganized around daily naps so that the opening of presents didn’t start until 3:00. (Thank God we didn’t have any young children there. When I was ten, if I’d had to wait until after noon to open presents I think I would have exploded.) I made out like a bandit ‘cause my parents know I’m stressing out and everyone else is at a loss what to get for me (Absinthe spoon! Come on people!) so I get a bunch of gift certificates and checks, and some fairly large items from the folks. Got a few more additions to mount DVD, including one so fascinating you may hear about it soon, few books, some (badly needed) clothes, and another hard drive for my poor failing computer. (Stutters so badly I can barely surf the net anymore.) After that it was the standard hullabaloo as those with shorter vacations had to up and leave the next day. I took a trip out to the local “Half Price Bookstore” to spend a gift certificate before we left (chain doesn’t reach down to GA) and walked out with four books for a $15 gift card. (Damn I love that store.) Picked up a hardcover collection of Weird Tales, a copy of “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” a “Borderlands” compilation, and a game book. No, not a CoC gamebook, a Vampire gamebook. (No I ain’t gonna do an extended review of it. Just sit still for a min’) So why did I pick that up? Let me be really clear on one point first. I fuckin’ hate Vampire the Masquerade. Not on principle, but from actual experience. I really don’t like the concept, and what seed of creativity was present within it has (in my admittedly A) biased and B) not-fully-informed opinion) long since been lost in the game mechanics and smothered over with restrictive detail (see my complaints long ago about what they did to Werewolf). Long ago when I was a gaming novice, a friend picked up V:TM shortly after I picked up CoC. We humored one another into playing a couple of pickup games, but neither ever really got off the ground due to restrictive school schedules, etc. (I still don’t know how we ever got enough time to even attempt that Dangerous Journeys campaign. My character was 17 pages long. 17! What was Gygax thinking?) Anyway, this was the same friend who was into all the Ann Rice novels when they first came out, (Going so far as to track down the Anne Rampling novels as well. If you don’t know what they are….well I ain’t gonna tell you.) so he was more than a little obsessed on the topic and eventually hunted down another storyteller so he could actually play the game. Talked me into going with him. Long story short (HA!) the guy was a major asshole. The game was boring, he was more obsessed with fleshing out his own favorite characters (with which he’d populated the story) and introducing us to them than actually moving the story forward, and I hate any system that lets me roll eight dice at once and have them all come up as botches. AND we’d agreed to an all-night session. Soured me on the system and the concept ever since, and managed to cut me free of that particular miasma of gaming cliquedom before it drifted too far afield into the “OK, that’s pathetic, uncross your frickin’ arms” realm. (Get me really damn drunk sometime and I might also tell you why I don’t LARP….but my story when I’m sober is that I object to it on principle.)
So why buy the book? Curiosity. See, the V:TM books are put out by White Wolf publishing (down here in Stone Mtn.). The concept behind the games was rather revolutionary at the time (an elaborate social world wherein you play the sadistic monsters) and drew quite a bit of fire from lots of quarters (especially after that little double-homicide-cult thing by a group of truly crazy players…final word, if he hadn’t had the game he would’ve gone the more traditional route to ersatz devil-cult or “black magic”…the guy was seriously whacked) so the original work was a bit milder than the creators might have liked. After a long while on the market, the creators wanted to start upping the ante, filling the books out with faux attacks on Christianity, standard sexual mores, etc. You know, rebelling teenager stuff. Problem was they’d established themselves at a certain level, and they didn’t want to alienate the casual player by just “changing” the system to make it directly antagonistic to their softer crowd. So they established Black Dog
Yeah, so pretty standard shit from me. The eventual punchline was my unimpression with the book, declaring “This is a Black Dog book?” and turning it over to find out that, whoops, it wasn’t. D’oh.
Went to see LoTR:TTT again with the relations (one aunt who never gets out actually got talked into sitting through the whole first DVD and then we went to see the sequel the next day). Almost as good the second time through. (Oh, first time around, while waiting for the film to start some friends and I passed the times with a few hands of kitten poker. I think I got sharped. I was cleaned out down to three kittens before I stepped down.) Decided against a full review of the film this time, ‘cause most everyone has already said what I was going to say. Yeah, the last bit with Frodo did feel a bit re-written, although I couldn’t tell at the time ‘cause I haven’t read the books in years, and the pacing was a bit infuriating because of constantly moving between different stories and exiting right when it was getting good, but all in all, a worthy follow up to the first film. I think I prefer the first one, but only because the Balrog was always such a powerful image to me. In other bits….Wormtongue is the OILIEST MAN ON EARTH. Seriously, I think a good dose of degreaser woulda’ killed him. Cut right through that skin. My only major disappointment was with the Ents. Uh oh, I think I can hear the flames starting up already. Let me explain. See, LoTR is my mother’s favorite story. She’s read the series five times (going on six now) and we have five copies stashed away in the basement because every time she felt like reading them, we couldn’t find the previous copies. (Invested in hardbound this time around, so were able to track them down.) When I was around three or four my mother read the whole trilogy to me. Uh, sort of. My memory is pretty damn fuzzy on the point, but I think we mainly turned pages and she summarized for me. I could barely follow the stories, but I did come away with two major impressions. One was the Balrog, a beastie that really isn’t described very clearly in the books, and my little mind went wild with dark shadows and tenticled manes, assisted to some degree by the animated version. (Very pleased with how it appeared in the film, although not quite how I envisioned it. Unlike everyone else, I actually saw it as smaller.) The other was the Ents. (Not the Nazgul, for some reason. Huh.) Now, at the time, our house was halfway down a hill in several square miles of dense deciduous woods (though only a couple acres of it was ours), so I was well familiar with trees. Problem was A) the trees I was familiar with were towering beech and oaks and flagpole pines, with only a few dogwood, white pine, and sasafrass thrown in and B) I was THREE. Trees are a HELL of a lot bigger when you’re only two and a half feet tall. So, when I envisioned Ents I wasn’t thinking of something 30-40 feet high, like in the film. I was thinking of creatures over a hundred feet tall and forty feet thick. (How can you herd trees if you aren’t bigger than them?) I was envisioning walking monoliths. The battle at Sauruman’s tower I saw as four or maybe even eight of these powerhouses trundling out of the forest (Which, you have to admit, was a pathetically short and twisted forest in the film.) wading through orcs and the foundry fires like one would kick over an anthill, grabbing hold of the tower, and just pushing it over. The Ents in the film were all well and good, well animated, well acted (did you know that Gimli was Treebeard’s voice as well?) but they were a lot faster than I imagined and a lot shorter. In my version there wasn’t a great deal of worry over the battle either. When you’re three, an 80-foot tall tree is just about as indestructible as anything gets. Doesn’t help that I lost a fight with a Dogwood in our front yard when I was six. Still got the scar from that.
Rattled on back home in time for New Years.
New Years was OK, spent it over at Patrick’s with the rest of the crew, got talked into a game of strip-Cranium (“Matt can’t play until he’s had more to drink!”) although we all collapsed before it got very interesting. Between the entire group I think we went through two cases of Guinness.
Those of you reading in AMV land should know that I’ve been almost entirely subsumed by livejournal. I hate the layout, and the system is actually more frequently fucked over (in my experience) than the AMV journal, but the ability to answer directly to posts via a message-board format is highly appealing, and they have a system for indexing the “friends” you want to keep up with so you can just go down one list rather than loading up multiple journals at once. As a result, I haven’t been keeping up with the journals in AMV, for which I apologize, but my internet habit has to be reigned in or my situation might get even worse. I’ll keep posting here, although I can’t promise I’ll see any responses with any regularity. If you really need to contact me, or you just wanna be sure I’ll spot your response, e-mail me at gte106k@prism.gatech.edu . That I’ll see.
[What follows here is a bout of unmitigated whining, self-psycoanalysis, and navel-gazing, and general personal stuff about me, which I normally never do. I debated for quite a while about whether or not I should post it, as it’s the sum product of several of the worst weeks of my recent life, but in the end I decided that I don't whine for sympathy too often, and I kinda wanted to engender sympathy from someone other than the four concrete walls of my room, so I posted it for whoever cares. (And if you think that’s maudlin, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.) All in all it’s probably smarter to jump down about eight pages and look for the dividing-line where I put the review.] (Oh, and if you're one of the people who sees me on a regular basis, please don't mention this entry to me in person. I'm trying to cut down on awkward silences in my life.)
There’s been a rash of those “how well do you know ‘X’” surveys going up on livejournal over the past few days that kinda got me wondering. I don’t usually bother with things like that, as I barely have time to update my own journal (yeah, yeah….shuddup…) and they always strike me as the adult version of those paper “choose a number, choose a color” things girls always had in grade school, but it got me wondering a bit about how I’m perceived. Last week at anime someone (I think it was Shelly) said something along the lines of “Yeah everybody thinks Matt’s just a sweet kid, but we know better.” It wasn’t exactly that (memory failing me) and it kinda faded off at the end since it sounded like it was heading towards a punchline but never quite got there.
(Interlude: Damn….maybe Pepsi Blue and Gin won’t become my “Oh my God I’m out of Guinness” desperation drink Starting to fuck with depth perception.)
It’s just that recently I’ve started to realize how well this particular little Potempkin village of a personality I’ve set up has maintained itself with little effort from me, and how little most of my current friends know of me. I’m not gonna argue that I’m all deep and shit, and start wailing goth/beatnik poetry at you (wait for the review), but it’s a simple fact that I have very few friends around now who were around when I actually developed the personality I’m using now, much less the fake one I normally prop up for dealing with strangers. I’m not really certain what to make of this in any respect. How do you actually establish a “normality” when you only see the surface level of even your closest friends? Does everyone have these fundamental problems with reality? This fucking difficulty with merely establishing a controlling discipline? Discerning one’s place and station and providing a site of reference against which to judge one’s own progress and self worth? If you have any way in which to measure the world around you, what happens when you find yourself unable to measure up to your own standards, and mysteriously unable to catch up?
(Awwwww damn. Yeah, gin goin’ back in the fridge. Expect spelling errors to follow.)
I used to have a little tactile test set up in my room. At first it was just a system to help refine my sense of touch. Then it became a way to freak the hell out of my roommate. See, I have a computer desk taking up half my room which was custom made by my dad. The thing is level as hell, and I used to spend my time balancing pennies on edge across the only free surface of the desk. For about four months I had $1.43 in pennies balanced on edge on my desk. Used to set ‘em up while watching TV. Got so my roommates started watching me funny every time I started to set up another group. They were pretty tightly packed by the end, and the slightest tap on the table (the table itself…careful typing did nothing) would drop about a dollar’s worth with little notice. Still I backtracked and set them up again, working continuously until either the show was over, or all the pennies were standing. This was especially difficult since several pennies had apparently gone through a garbage disposal at some point, or spent several years on the tarmac getting repeatedly run over. I had to give it up after one set of roommates left because it got too depressing. I started seeing it as a metaphor for my work. Paying close attention to details, I would work hard and long at aligning the details and making sure that everything was in place before continuing to the next step, hovering my hand above the field already repleat with carefully balanced data, experiments, and hypothesis, I would slowly lower the next item into its slot without nudging anything surrounding it. More than anything, it was a lesson on patience. And the lesson was:
It fucking SUCKS.
Tolerate excruciating boredom to have only one false move undo hours worth of work.
Well, last week, the novice experimentalist came into my carefully assembled field and kicked the fucking table. An enormous amount of work instantly spiraled the drain. ‘Course, if it was just an accident I could tolerate it. If it was done maliciously, that I could handle. If it was some mistake of hers that destroyed all my files, I could recreate them. That I could do. The problem was that she was right, and all the data is officially gone. Worthless. And it’s directly my fault.
I mentioned above that none of my current friends really knows much about me. I honestly don’t know if that’s true. See, my personality, so far as I’ve ever had anything to say about it, is the direct result of exactly three events. One I will never talk about. One I might talk about if I ever get soused enough. One I plan on mentioning later on in this missive. (Oh, I’ll say this much, as I’m betting some guesses have already been placed. It has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever read or watched. These were actual events, not some cheeseball “this book changed my life” absorption of someone else’s ideals of how life should be lived.) But the point is that all three of these events pre-date almost any friendships I currently hold, and definitely pre-date the friendships I have with anyone on this board. Thus, all the friends I’ve formed within the last 6-8 years have been done with this façade in place, and I’ve no idea how transparent it happens to be to even my closest friends these days.
It may seem like I’m holding two conversations at once here, but I’m about to bring them together. After the event with the novice experimentalist (I should note that the mistake affected her as well, although to a degree several logs lower) I, naturally, had to tell my boss. Knowing that putting it off would only make it worse, I told him immediately. He was quite a bit less than pleased. Several days later, when sufficiently cooled off, he let me have it with both barrels in the most calm, regulated manner and voice possible. See, at least on the surface, he and I are quite a bit similar. Esoteric humor, opinionated, similar in manner, expression, and temperament, and presenting a façade to cover for a force-socialized antipathy for other people’s faults, and an ingrained, inviolate judgmentalism. None of my current friends have ever actually seen me honest-to-God angry, in that manner of calm calculation, but I can confirm that it’s not a pretty thing. Since we are so much alike, I could see past any of the subtle statements, turns of phrase, and cushioning of the blow he was employing, although there wasn’t much padding there. To put it simply, I’ve always been able to tell what he meant. Phrases used included the “we need to talk” startoff, and statements along the lines of “I don’t want to see you fail,” “There needs to be a drastic change,” “I don’t know how to say it any more clearly” and even “…then you need to decide if this is the field you want to be in, and if not, then what you are doing here.” Among the list of words pointedly not said were “incompetent,” “regret,” and “failure.” Needless to say, my job is in a great deal of danger. I’m not sure he realizes how well I can read him, which leaves me to wonder if the fact that this meeting went on for over an hour and a half was a blind attempt to force apparently obscured criticisms into my head, or a vindicated sadism on his part. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be called incompetent and a failure by someone who you know holds exactly the same value system as you? By someone whose judgement you trust?
All of this is leading me to the conclusion that I’m not all that good at this whole “life” thing. On the yardstick by which I measure my life, my position keeps changing relative to those around me, but I keep sliding further and further back along the scale. Let’s take stock. I’m coming up on 27 and I’m still in school. Friends around me are delving into the intricacies of societal and employment advancements, making an honest wage and indulging in such things as homes, marriages, and raises, and I’m still living in a 10-foot cube with cartoon posters on the walls and sharing a bathroom with a guy I barely ever see. Friends who’ve entered the grad school system AFTER me have now bypassed me and are well on their way out. I pay my own way whenever possible, but the grad student pay for CHE at Tech is so abysmally low I’m occasionally still required to lean on my parents for a hundred bucks or so. The rate of marriages among my friends is accelerating to a frightening rate, and three close friends my own age are already raising children. Me? I can count the number of meaningful dates I’ve been on in the last eighteen months on no fingers. Friday nights, more often than not, I’ll be found lying in bed watching TV until the wee hours of the morning, with no impetus to change my situation. Much has been made in the past (by my friends) of my supposed intelligence, but most of the time I come off feeling like a fraud. My only remarkable mental attributes are an extraordinary memory for pop culture esoterica, a large vocabulary, an ability to run unstoppably at the fingers, and a bullshitting ability that gives the impression I know a lot more than I do. As has been pointed out to me by recent events, I’m actually rather sloppy in technical fields and short-sighted or forgetful in the handling of complex issues. In all respects I fall into a rut far too easily. Socially, I’ve really only got my sense of humor going for me (and the aforementioned skill with esoterica). My personal “style” consists of long-ground habits of necessity and an intense dislike of haircuts. (And now I’m told, by my mother of all people, that I might be getting a bit thin on top. *Sigh*) I hate most typical social gatherings, and am, at heart, intensely shy about meeting new people or attempting to progress any relationships. (A fact that has screwed me over more times than I care to think about.) My mood can shift so suddenly and dramatically I’ve had people think I was bi-polar in the past. Artistically, my writing hasn’t progressed in years. I’d intended for these journal entries to jump-start my inspiration, but they’ve grown to entirely replace any habit towards writing I’d developed, and in the meantime my two best stories have become entirely lost during the transition between computers. (In a fantastical coincidence, my best story is now entirely gone after a corrupted file and a box lost by the movers erased all digital and physical memory of the work.) I’m unable to maintain any computer in sufficient shape to actually run an AMV editor any more, which I’m starting to think isn’t that big of a loss. I’ve no skill in drawing or music. My political opinions and leanings are almost entirely directed by online pundits I regularly read. I maintain my current weight and physical “shape” not by regular exercise and a regimented diet, but by fucking over my metabolism on a regular basis, a habit that will likely lead me to some difficulty considering my family’s history of diabetes. (Oh, I’ve got a rich tableau in my family’s medical history. Let’s see, alcoholism, diabetes, heart problems, pancreatic cancer, Parkinson’s, brain cancer, lupus, and a list of mental imbalance problems longer than my arm.) My health is probably permanently fucked as a result. I’m drifting away from what remains of my family just when they might need me the most, as they’ve started a nova-like slow collapse in on themselves since the death of my Grandfather. Practically all the time I could be using to improve any one of these situations has instead been pulled into pointless endeavors, exploring some long (and likely rightly) shadowed corner of pop culture, gaming, or film, or just wasted outright.
Damn. I really am Davin.
“So what?” I hear you say. “Life is for the living! Just enjoy it!” Everything else aside, that’s just it. I don’t enjoy it. Practially everything I enjoy in my life is an active attempt to ESCAPE it. I watch sci-fi shows and horror films. I watch anime. I game a lot. I read. I listen to absurdist music. My room is overflowing (sometimes literally) with the manner and aspect of every way in which I try to escape. And I don’t even feel good about doing it. (As you might’ve guessed from this missive.) At times, the guilt and depression weighs on me like a physical object. (Like right now, although this is one of the more extreme instances. What are the chances of a 26-year old getting congestive heart failure?)
So, the $64,000 question is why? If escapism is all I like in the world, why don’t I just throw myself full-bore into it? Get a job in relation to these fields. Mediocre writing comes fairly easily to me, I’ve some experience in the gaming fields, I have a pretty good knowledge of comics and books. Why not just work in those fields enough to get by and support my constant delvings into fictional worlds? You know, like a heroine addict?
This brings me to the “event” I said I’d tell you about, and, coincidentally, the chronological first of the three as well.
When I was very young and just started figuring out exactly how the world worked in the “big picture,” I was struck by exactly how recursive much of the world was. (OK, this is my interpretation of it now. Much of this was a sort of nebulous unease and inability to express it properly that has plagued me for a dozen years or so. I’m still not sure I’ve got it all exactly nailed down, but I’m closer than I used to be. For example, way back when this first started occurring to me, I didn’t know the word “recursive.”) A lot of the world seemed to be involved in a massive circular race, forever cycling through the same motions over and over again with no end or final purpose in sight. (What follows will be the massive generalizations of a young child. Take no offense if I assault your livelihood or personal ambition.) I was struck first by this in relation to my teachers, and it remains my most obvious example. A teacher will impart proven and well-know information onto students. If it is well taught, the information will stick and inspire said student, moving them along the path of their education, and enabling the child to improve him/herself. But, what is this to the teacher? The child may have been inspired by the information the teacher passed along, and may go on to do great things, but that is the accomplishment of the child, not the teacher. The knowledge imparted by the teacher was not theirs, but the cumulative results of human endeavor catalogued elsewhere. The teacher imparts, and moves on. Imparts, and moves on. Year after year, to a continuous cavalcade of students, going over and over the same old ground. Wherein lies the accomplishment? At what point can the teacher have claimed to have accomplished something great or unique, as there is never an actual product of their work? I don’t mean this in the nature of a physical object, but the ability to point to some great accomplishement, achievement, ADVANCEMENT of the human race and say “There. That is the justification for my existence on this planet. I did that.” The teacher’s primary goal, at best, could be seen as a mute assistant, a conduit through which information and ideas travel to reach developing minds, and their accomplishment lies only in their ability to convey someone else’s accomplishments to others in such a manner that the others might then go on to great accomplishments themselves. They can take credit neither for the accomplishment of the information they impart, nor for the accomplishments of those they inspired, because they had no direct hand in the discovery/advancement themselves, even if they did inspire the child to work towards such a goal, for it was still the child whose brain accomplished the work. The best the teacher can do is not fuck it up. Really good teachers inspired students to become teachers…and perpetuate the cycle indefinitely, with the caveat that all positions for the job were already filled (at ludicrously low pay) so we get a lot of unemployed English majors.
This is, of course, unfair to teachers on two levels. Their technique in imparting information might constitute a new discovery or application whereby the information becomes easier for children to understand. That would be a legitimate advancement, an improvement in efficency, and a rightly hailed discovery. (Although most experimental teaching techniques I’ve ever encountered ended up abysmal failures, that’s not to say there won’t be some that work.) This work, however, isn’t really within the realm of teaching, but rather a scientific investigation into parts of the realm of teaching. So when this discovery/advancement is made, they are acting as technical experimentalists, not teachers. Secondarily, teachers in a field may also be workers in that, or related fields. Issac Asimov, most people don’t realize, was actually a chemistry teacher in his day job. Day in and day out he taught countless children the basics of chemistry. When we think of his significant accomplishments, however, the teaching never really comes up. We point to his several hundred scientific papers. We point to his over three hundred books (many of them were non-fiction scientific manuals or collections of his essays for Science-Fiction Analog, which is why you haven’t heard of more of them) and say “There. This is the justification for his existence.” (Actually, there’s a lot more you could list for old IA, but I’m trying to keep this simple.) The point being that no one else could have written all of those books the way he did, as they constituted a unique artistic creation. No one else could have written those papers, as they constituted a unique scientific discovery.
Anyone could have taught the class. (Again, excepting unique technique, etc.)
Journalism is another good example of these “conduit” achievements. A reporter acts only as a manner by which to impart information. Unbaised reporting especially. He holds no responsibility for the events he reports on (excepting weird circumstances), he helps or hinders them not at all. He merely passes on the information. Nothing is created, nothing is accomplished, no advancement is made by HIM. His only virtue is in not fucking it up. (Once again, making exception for situations similar to the “experimental teachers” mentioned above, and those who regard the presentation as artistry…like photography.) Ironically, reporting that is decried most frequently, that of biased presentation or straight fabrication, is a sign of actual contribution, whether it be positive or negative in nature. (Biased reporting can be positive, when it admits to bias, for that is an attempt at interpretation and possible solution, rather than merely imparting.) There, the conduit is creating or destroying something, presumably based on aesthetic sense or a kind of political experimentation. Had Pullitzer not goaded the US into the Spanish-American war through blatant and purposeful manipulation of the facts he had to further his own political aims (“yellow journalism”) we’d likely not even remember him. (OK, yeah, he had that award too.) For good or ill, (uhh…mostly ill in this case) he actually DID something. He affected the world in his passing through it, and, in the end, that is the distinguishing point of people who actually live their lives, rather than merely existing. The course of the world is determined by people who DO something (or, knowing better, decide to refrain from doing something) rather than those who merely act as conduits for other’s actions. Those “accomplishments” could be maintained by anyone. Add in here the “accomplishments” of people who justify their lives through the collection of other people’s accomplishments (complete comic run….whooo hooo…), and those who strive towards some kind of personal, internalized accomplishment that benefits none beyond themselves. (Karate specialist, bodybuilder, spiritual enlightenment, etc….though any of these might somehow be converted into actual advancement accomplishments.)
Put more simply, the “justification” could be worded as “Have you done ANYTHING that no one else could have/would have done that has some permanent effect?”
In the end, I came to the conclusion that the only people who could actually justify their existence, mitigate their taking up space that could be equally used by any other mindless drone, were divided into three categories, defined thusly:
Scientists discover.
Engineers apply.
Artists create.
(Engineers used to be lumped in with Scientists before I could distinguish between them.) All advancement of humanity as progressed by the individual (IMO) has taken place through their actions as one or several of these categories, although I define them so widely, that it’s almost difficult to slip through without hitting one or all three. The act of discovery and experimentation is seen through any exploration of the world as we know it. Thus Columbus and the early Vikings were “scientists” the same as physicists. Application is the use of any knowledge to change and affect the world around us, thus politicians are as much “engineers” (through application of sociology and political science) as architects. Engineers are thus directly integrated to scientists, and scientists rely upon engineers to grant their discovery some meaning. Artistry is even harder to limit, as any originality, any aesthetic decision, any invention of the fevered human mind, related to the world around it or not, could fall into the realm of “creation.” In every case of the successful application of any of these three categories, there is a product. Something that can be pointed at and said “I did that.” For a multiple-application, look at a business entrepreneur. He is an artist in the way that he created something (the business) where there was nothing before, an engineer in the application of fiscal laws, and a scientist in the experimentation of seeing what the market or fiscal environment will bear, feeling out cultural and societal niches. At the end of his life, a business owner can point to the business and say “There. I did that.”
To state it even more simply, the nature of human creation is discovery and decision. Any action that involves discovery or decision would thus be existentially justifying. Those people who follow the directives of others with no input from themselves, or those who merely act as conduits for the accomplishments of others, are thus not justified by this system.
In other words, it wasn’t Einstein’s work at the patent office that justified his existence.
So why should anyone care? I mean, who says we have to justify our existence anyway? Well, I did. I was a really maudlin kid. I decided early on that sustaining life is not an end unto itself. The existence of life does not justify its continuance. Humans are born as rational beings with the capacity to think. To live out your life in a continuous cycle of eating, sleeping, and just coasting through the days is an abomination, a rendering pointless of the only point that could be in this existence; thinking. (I state this as a fact because I really have no way of proving it empirically. If you don’t accept this essentially moral concept at face value, than none of the reasoning that preceeded it has any support, and you’ve just wasted twenty minutes. Sorry.)
Of course, the practicality of this theory requires some commentary as well. As much as it may disregard teachers, it is nonetheless evident that we need them, and not every classroom can be an experimental setting, lest the unevenness in student education lead to societal disruption. The entire service industry is, likewise, also needed, as are many others that brook no individual contribution. The simple answer is that occupation and justification needn’t go hand in hand. Struggling artists of every stripe have day jobs, and Einstein’s most famous formula was created when home from the patent office. If an individual wishes to justify their existence via this theory, all it requires is time, force of will, and some modicum of success. Whether it’s their actual job or a hobby means nothing at all. Of course, that’s the point. True accomplishment is devoid of qualifiers. An accomplishment, however small or large, stands apart from the conditions by which it was achieved.
“So all of this was ‘the big event?’ That’s pretty lame. We thought it was gonna be something like an alien abduction.”
Well, yes and no. (Uh, definite no on the alien abduction.) See, this entire theory wasn’t generated spontaneously. It built up over the years, and has pretty much served as my raison-de-etre (?) for just about every decision in my life. I wanted to maximize my potential effect on the world, so I did my best to become exemplary in all three categories. However, this didn’t have its roots in any sort of magnanamosity of spirit or charitable nature, it was entirely selfish. Ever since I was very little I’ve had an unreasoning fear of being “left behind.” Not physically, as in a fear of being left somewhere by my parents (although my tendency to wander off in malls as a kid ensured a healthy respect for that possibility), but in achievement, being surpassed by friends and family in world regard. I have no idea where it came from originally, but I’ve had this impression of always having to remain in the lead in every respect for as long as I can remember. The entire moral structure you just ploughed through grew out of this fear. When very young I apparently took some kind of IQ test and got placed in a “gifted” school for fourth and fifth grade. (I’d already skipped a grade by then.) To some degree, that’s doomed my perspective of myself from there on out. My sudden leapfrogging up the educational ladder with relative ease combined with this unreasoning fear led me to expect similar ease with accelerated advancement in the future, and gave me a massively inflated opinion of my own intelligence, one that has been rapidly leaking air ever since. I’d convinced myself that I was going to be the next renaissance man. Knowing everything there is to know, staying at the forefront of all sciences, good at every art, and a social butterfly besides. (Yeah, I was an ambitious little fucker.) Well, what I discovered as I went along was that all the fields kept getting wider. Every step of the way along every discipline, the path branched out further and further from the starting point, spreading my attention thinner and thinner across every subject I encountered. In the public library I’d cleaned out the children’s section as fast as I could. The young reader’s section went down almost as quick. When I graduated up to the adult section on the floor above I nearly ruptured something trying to comprehend the sheer volume of books I “needed” to read.
So what does this have to do with anything? Let me introduce you to the dark side of philosophy. By my own reckoning, my life would be justified by advancement in discovery, application, or creation. The more the better. The writing always came fairly easily to me, so I directed my attentions towards science as the most probable source of contribution. (If you followed that logic, you’re beginning to see how I think.) But science kept getting broader. And I kept trying to study all of it. The net result has made me something of a neurotic. Trying to keep up with everything has guaranteed that I never will, and granted me such an incredibly scattered attention span that I can be sure of remaining interested in one particular idea or field for only a few weeks at most. It also means that I will come to be utterly bored by whatever field I finally settle on, and unable to maintain interest in my own work.
So I pick a field that should hold my attention for a little while, but doesn’t.
So I get into a rut.
And mistakes slip in.
And they get perpetuated, because I don’t notice them.
Because I’m too flaming bored by the subject now.
And they’re discovered too late.
So I end up making NO contribution and NO accomplishments.
And my attempt to excel by my single driving philosophy has made certain that I will never be able to measure up to it myself.
And my friends surpass me in every respect.
So I end up holding myself in utter contempt as I fail by my own value system due to my own disintrest in the subject.
(And my friends all thought I was stable.)
I’ve been left behind. By my own hand and shortcomings. And I’m scared.
“So, abandon the philosophy!” I hear you say. “Why keep it when it’s not doing you any good?”
Because I still believe it. My failure doesn’t contradict the basic tenants of the system. Everything still adds up. I’ve just failed.
And now, ‘cause I enjoy the irony, the review.
I managed to get through only one real book during my entire vacation. It’s a book I’ve been thumping my head against for a while now, but hadn’t made much progress on, both due to general content and its own sheer immensity.
The book is “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.
When I first started into this book, I said that I had two types of friends, those who couldn’t believe I would read such a book, and those who couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it already. I wanted to approach the book with an entirely clear mind so I could try to evaluate at a base level what exactly Ayn Rand had been trying to say. This really wasn’t that easy, because all I really knew of her work was through parodies and derisive comments, or the stony-eyed acceptance of her tenants on the opposite end of the scale. There didn’t seem to be anyone anywhere in the middle who was remotely outspoken on the subject. It seemed that the only types of people who thought of her work at all were those who swallowed the whole work hook, line and sinker, and defiantly declared it to be so, or political factions within which her name and ideas were a slur, a name for the enemy among liberal policy advocates. Presumably, there are people who hold a middle ground on the topic, but I’ve noticed a distinct unwillingness to ever come down even slightly on the side of Rand’s philosophy, lest one be branded the sort to kick old people into the snow. To inspire such polarization of opinion is usually either the mark of a great intellectual, or a flaming idiot, and I was curious which this book actually represented. (Similar situations can be found on internet message boards.)
I also think it’s a bit remarkable how infrequently this book is actually read for something discussed so virulently. Like the Communist Manifesto or Mao’s “Little Red Book,” the summary and interpretations of its text are more frequently read than the actual document itself. So here I am to even the playing field. I’m no great philosopher, but I’ll tell you what happens and what my impressions are, and save y’all the trouble of pretending you’re going to read it someday. (It really is frickin’ long.)
So, did I like the book? Let me summarize it this way:
“A Dystopia of finely ruled lines. A Utopia of crayon.”
“Atlas Shrugged” (1957) is, I believe, the culmination of Rand’s work, a further extension on ideas presented in “The Fountainhead”, but to be honest, this is just a guess, since AS is the only work of hers I’ve ever read.
The story itself is an enormous (1084 pages) metaphor for and manner for presentation of Rand’s philosophy of life. Hell, this copy of the book itself is a support of her philosophy. I picked the thousand-page paperback up a second-hand bookstore for $0.64, and despite being over a thousand pages long there are no flyleaves, no blank pages, and the text is in tiny 10 (maybe 9) point font with quarter-inch margins. In keeping with that (and again with the irony) I used a dollar bill as my bookmark. The only detraction to the physical book itself is an absolutely horrid cover image. Some sort of hideous early-70’s abstract art of mostly blank page with a pseudo-face in the center done in watercolor. The sort you might associate with truly cheap and high-minded sci-fi novels from that era. (Which I suppose this might qualify as.)
The story itself circles around two to four main characters. The most primary character is Dagny Taggart, descendant of Nat Taggart, a rail baron who ruthlessly built a massive transcontinental rail system across the US. (Fictional, of course. A lot of this stuff is going to sound like it’s referencing actual events, but I’ll point out anything real that comes along specifically.) She and her brother James had inherited the controlling positions in Taggart Transcontinental railways and between the two of them, kept the entire system running. The difference, though, is that Dagny keeps the rail-line running through timetables, resource management, staff evaluations, technical advancements, directives and physically keeping an eye on everything, spending night after late night in her office making sure everything runs smoothly. James, the titular head of the company, keeps Taggart running through champagne luncheons, elbow rubbing, greased palms, slimy deals, trusts, sneaky bills, and political influence. The book draws a very clear line between the two of them, and the sorts of people who give credit to the one or the other for actually running the company. Half the time Dagny is forced to run the company in spite of James, as some whim or attempt to impress his friends in Washington leads him to make some incontrovertibly ludicrous demand of the system, like arranging for shiny new engines on an essentially profitless run down into Mexico.
-
Part II of II (Damn pagelimit on Journal Entries.)
2003-01-21 01:36:48
The book begins on an ominous portent, one to be repeated over and over throughout the story, (one might even say “ad nauseum”) Dagny meets with one of her most talented engineers who’s been with the company for nearly his entire life, and he announces his resignation. He gives no explanation, will accept no counteroffer, he merely wanted to tell her in person. Earlier that night was another portent. While drowsing, Dagny hears a brakeman whistling the tune from an concerto…a tune in the distinct style of her favorite composer, but the tune itself is new when the composer had retired and disappeared years ago. Questioning the brakeman revealed nothing but a sly grin.
Round about this point, we start learning of the economic difficulties of the times in which Dagny lives. The story takes place at some undefined point in the future…but the story is distinctly dated enough to the late 50’s that now, with the turn of 2000, it feels like, as Tom Servo would put it, “our OLD future.” All of the industries we encounter, and there are quite a lot of them, are being hit with a kind of double-whammy. A steady stream of legislation designed against the “greedy industrialists” and a mysterious “brain drain” of the best and the brightest. There simply aren’t enough enterprising young souls out there to force progress along, to make inventions and developments that would keep any particular company ahead of the game. Each industry seems to be slowly stagnating while being torn apart by legislation, and the survival of individual companies grows to depend more on political pull than on hard work and invention. The book is very clear that the US is actually feeling the least of this phenomenon, and it is much worse in Europe and South America. Whenever someone looks for a reason for the growing incompetence and the rapid disintegration of the structure of commerce, it’s always dismissed with the same phrase. “Who is John Galt?” No one is sure where the phrase came from, but everyone knows that it means a kind of resigned throwing-up-of-the-hands. “Why didn’t the steel shipment get here on time?” “Who is John Galt?” It means the question is pointless, as answering it won’t solve the problem or resolve the delay.
One exception to this disintegration stands out, however, in the form of Rearden steelworks. Hank Rearden controls his steelworks with the same degree of attention to detail and incredible work ethic as Dagny. Throughout the book Hank’s description struck me as a kind of monolith. A Frankenstein’s monster of a man, enormous and unstoppable in person as he is in business. Despite this, he is frequently stopped, most often by his marriage vows to a conniving, scheming, sadistically cruel but beautiful woman named Lillian, a mother who constantly berates him for his unfeeling stature, and a good-for-nothing sychophant of a brother Phillip. Rearden tries throughout to please them, or, failing that, to get them to leave him alone, but anything he attempts seems only to dissatisfy them further, or act as the source of some ridicule. Rearden begins the book with his greatest accomplishment, an alloy he, personally, has been developing for over ten years, that’s immensely stronger and more durable than steel while being only fractionally more expensive. He stands to make a killing at it. His family couldn’t care less.
A series of events pull these two together. First, Mexico, in a surprise move, nationalizes the southern San Sebastian Line of Taggart Transcontinental, a rail line servicing the Francisco d’Anconia copper mines. (By “nationalize” they mean “the government took over ‘cause the government wants to run it.” In this case, because the Mexican government was running out of money.) The Mexican government is stunned to discover that the mine itself is nearly empty, mining out a tiny vein that’s not even supporting the working costs of the mine itself. Francisco is the third main-ish character throughout the book, but his appearances are so irregularly scattered until the final revelation at the end that I might as well introduce him now. As hardworking as Dagny is portrayed to be, Francisco is characterized as twice her match, and, unlike either Dagny or Rearden, incredibly handsome to boot. The two were the loyalist of childhood friends, meeting up every summer to plan what they would do when they ran their family’s companies. Sneaking off to the railyards at the age of 14, he even beat Dagny to working on her family’s rail company. Francisco’s family, starting from nothing at their arrival in the US, now controls the largest series of copper mines in the world, and is generally regarded as the most secure company in the world. Dagny and Francisco became romantically entangled when first starting out at the lowest levels of their respective companies, and began climbing their respective ranks together. Then, following an exceedingly odd late-night meeting when they had both ascended to sole control of their companies, Francisco suddenly became a layabout. Spending his company’s money like water, he became the most flagrant neuveau rich stereotype and hedonistic layabout that Dagny couldn’t bare to see him anymore. Until the “big revelation” near the end, Francisco shows up on occasion, seemingly to witness the massive collapse of some industrial giant or another, almost laughing at the collapse of the petty, grasping politicians around him. Strangely enough, Francisco seems to hold Hank Rearden in high regard.
The second event that drive our two industrialists together is the passage of the “anti dog-eat-dog” bill, by the national railway council. According to this rule, “destructive competition” was outlawed between railways in certain restricted areas. All rail business within a restricted area went directly to the rail with the most seniority, and the other rail had to shut down their lines in the area within nine months. Theoretically, the bill was passed as a stop-gap against the current economic hardships to prevent the stresses of competition from ruining both companies and inflating prices on essentials. In actuality it was a political machination on the part of several rail barons, including James Taggart, to wipe out some younger railways, including Dan Conway, who was the main railway for Ellis Wyatt’s Oil pumping and refinery stations in Colorado. (This is only the tip of the intricate machinations and names to keep track of.) Ellis Wyatt is probably my favorite character in the book, but I’ll come to why later. He’s basically a much more abrasive version of Rearden.
So anyway, due to the bill, Dan Conway is knocked out of competition with Dagny Taggart (Dagny resents this action by her brother highly, since she didn’t beat him out by honest competiton), and Dagny has 9 months to build a rail from the nearest Taggart line to Wyatt’s refinery. She decides to build the rail from Rearden metal, and thus provide the first, and thus far only, showcase for the remarkable metal. See, Rearden is encountering resistance of his own. The novel’s version of the national science foundation is asking him to refrain from producing the metal….basically because it would make the NSF look bad. They’d been spending millions in taxpayer monies to try and invent stronger steels and had come up with squat. That Rearden had made it himself would give the foundation a black eye. (The encounter between the NSF representative and Rearden was very well written. The rep. keeps hinting and talking sideways at Rearden, promising cash, threatening legal actions, but never coming to the point. Rearden keeps furrowing away until he finally gets what the guy is talking about, and refuses. When asked why, he replies “You won’t understand, but I’ll tell you anyway. Because the Rearden metal is good.” This exchange is echoed ad nauseum throughout the novel.) Then the NSF issues carefully worded press releases on the Rearden metal, talking in circles and saying nothing, but LOOKING like a scientific condemnation of the metal. So no one wants to buy it. Dagny, meanwhile, is bawled out by her brother, and the board condemns her, for choosing an “experimental” metal to construct the line (which has, on the spur of the moment, been named “The John Galt Line”). So she performs and elaborate machination whereby she splits off from Taggart Transcontinental, and forms her own company on the condition that the line will be sold back to TT after it’s completed. A dozen more events like this occur, but Dagny discovers during it that she’s enjoying her work more than ever since she’s having to build it from the ground up. What more could happen? Another bill gets passed, this one preventing the ownership of vertical monopolies. (You own the raw material suppliers, the power suppliers, the factories, and the distributors for your product, thus profit can be spread out down the line. Someone else might make the same product as you, but you own the entire means to make your own, and don’t have to buy anything from anyone. Horizontal monopolies are when someone is the only maker of a particular product.) Rearden has to sell off his coal mines (fuel for the foundries) to his good-for-nothing brother, knowing that he’ll run them into the ground. (There’s a chance I’m getting the sequence of events out of order here….it’s a long damn book.) Then, of course, there’s all the other industries just suddenly up and closing, their renowned and competent industrial magnates suddenly pulling up stakes and retiring for no reason.
But still, the John Galt line is finally built. The rails are of Rearden metal, and the bridges are tiny, narrowly supported constructs. In a demonstration of their trust in the new metal, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart elect to ride in the first train down the entire length of the line, along with a crew made entirely of volunteers. This is probably the best written section of the book, and Rand really captures the idealism and hope of the characters at this point. Needless to say, the bridges stay up and the rails perform beautifully. Dagny and Rearden ride the engine all the way to Wyatt’s refineries, where they go off to Wyatt’s deserted mountaintop resort and have lots and lots of sex.
Yeah.
This was the biggest surprise of the book for me. Starting about here, there is a hell of a lot of sex in this book. A lot. Rand goes into about the level of weird metaphorical detail one would expect from a standard bodice-ripper from the romance section, stopping just short of “thrusting manhood” or “quivering mound.” I really wasn’t expecting this for two reasons. One, the book is usually quoted with the same dry regard as a political science text. Two, earlier in the book, Rand goes to great lengths to describe our heroes as distinctly un-pretty.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about all the sex in this book is the soliloquizing about it. Characters have great political speeches the morning after, with intense thoughts on “debt,” “trade,” “ownership,” etc. etc. etc. It hit me as more than a little hilarious, but it was really sort of par for the course. Earlier in the book Dagny kept encountering the common man on the street or in a diner who went into a sudden speech about the state of the world and how no one can stand against this gradual winding-down. Everyone is a street-corner philosopher in this book, and everyone can sense that something big and ominous is coming.
So Dagny and Rearden draw strength from one another and carry out a long and industry-inspiring torrid affair, with Rearden constantly guilt-ridden about his wife, and Dagny trying to stem the tide of collapse of every industry, including her own, throughout the country. This occupies a good portion of the middle of the book, the intricacies of which I won’t try to remember (the long list of machinations above was to supply an example). Ludicrous and stupid laws get passed, designed to eliminate competition, and yet force industries to scale back so they have to employ more people. One notable event is yet another bill, one which nationalizes Wyatt’s oil fields. Dagny, knowing something awful is about to happen, rushes towards the refinery just in time to see it go up in flames. Wyatt has disappeared, destroying his own refineries, and leaving just one message behind. “I’m leaving it as I found it. Take it. It’s yours.” Essentially, this wraps up one of the messages of the book, that of people who try to take as their just property the things that someone else has built to make. The ones trying to take it couldn’t have built it in the first place, and thus have no real right to it. Moreover, when they have it, they’ll destroy it through their incompetence anyway.
This bit happens at the end of a secretive vacation Dagny and Rearden take. On the vacation, they come to an abandoned factory and the desolate, near-brass-age village around it where the workers used to live. Once the factory closed, the people dropped down to a subsistence-level life and stagnated. Exploring the factory, however, they make an amazing discovery in a back room. A prototype of a generator that runs off of the earth’s magnetic field. Dagny and Rearden take the motor back and begin scouring the country for ANYONE competent enough to study it while all the other crises hit. Eventually they find someone (all these things are going on at the same time) who studies it in the basement of a defunct university.
Meanwhile, the country is collapsing, tier by tier.
Rearden is put on trial, basically, for selling his metal to someone who can afford to pay for it, and the courtroom drama plays out like Sophocles’s trial. Rearden basically tells everyone to get stuffed, since he knows he’s the only one who could run his plant anyway, and they’ve no choice but to let him continue or risk the collapse of the steel industry.
Later, blackmailed with the scandal of his and Dagny’s affair, Rearden is forced to sign his patent for Rearden metal over to the government “as the country so desperately needed the metal that it was criminal for a single man to be the only one allowed to produce it.”
The NSF is basically required to prostitute itself out (through it’s head researcher) after the fact for the construction of a horrific war weapon. (Didn’t think we were going to get away without one of those mentioned in the 50’s did you?)
Looking in to all the disappearances and retirements of the top industrialists, Dagny becomes aware of something just ahead of her, just preceeding the retirement of an industrialist, someone comes to see them, and all of a sudden, all the fight goes out of them. They seem happy enough, but they all retire and leave. Dagny starts referring to whatever precedes the disappearances as “The Destroyer” and starts trying to track it’s progress.
Finally, she anticipates the Destroyer and races to the place she thinks he’s about to strike…at the scientist she has investigating the mystery motor. Arriving too late, she reaches an airfield immediately after her scientist and the Destroyer have taken off. Commandeering a plane, she follows them into the mountains, where they disappear impossibly. Attempting to follow, she discovers an elaborate optical illusion that entirely shields a mid-range valley in the Colorado Rockies, and she crash lands therein.
Whew. Finally.
Dagny awakes to find herself in a capitalist utopia. This is where the book really falls down, in my opinion. The entirety of the world up to this point has been a detailed and elaborately constructed descent into a dystopia, the worst of all possible worlds. The utopia alternative Rand presents, however, is almost childish. Here in the mountains is an entire society built of those people who had suddenly retired or been otherwise “destroyed.” Here, everyone is self-determined, tilling the land for their food, producing things, mining things, building factories, artists holding recitals, etc. No man depends on his neighbor for any ounce of charity or consideration, everything is paid for in hard currency.
Let me take that as an example. The currency is minted in solid gold. Why? Because the gold has an inherent value, not one dependant upon the support of a government or other organization. Uh, yeah. Hmmm. Why? ‘Cause it’s pretty? “Pretty” is a damn unstable basis for your currency. ‘Cause it’s conductive? Depends on the need for the application. Help us out here.
Put simply, despite an apparent exacting understanding of how a capitalist system could go spiraling down the drain, setting up a stable one seems nearly impossible for Rand. If we take the whole valley community as a metaphor, it makes more sense, but…wait, there’s some other stuff to explain first.
Among the people she meets in the valley are all of her workers who up and quit on her, the composer of that tune she once heard, and, most importantly, “The Destroyer.” He turns out to be none other than John Galt. So who is John Galt? He was the one who invented that marvelous engine back in the abandoned factory. The factory had been the leader in its field when Galt first joined it, but the owner got old and died, and his offspring took over. When the kids (two men and a woman) took over the company, they instituted “the plan.” What was “the plan”? Well, basically, it was communism. Everyone was to work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. Sick relative? Poor boy, you get the money for Bill’s overtime work last week. Bad back? Take a week off at more than full pay. (This part was all explained previous to these events during Dagny’s investigations. I’m leaving a HELL of a lot out here.) This was all explained to the workers at a big meeting, and everyone approved it, as they all thought they would be the ones to benefit. Galt heard the whole thing out got up and walked out, declaring that he would bring the world to a stop before he let their plan stand.
Then he went to formulate his own plan. He gathered together three other men. His old philosophy teacher, from whom he’d learned all of his principles, Francisco, and his philosopher friend Ragnar Danneskjold. The plan is basically simple. The people in power in the country were not of the sort who could actually build something. They were of the sort who believed that the world owed them its riches, and they intended to get it by “looting” (a term used INCESSANTLY) from those who did build. But once they had it, they couldn’t use it, because they’d kicked out the genius that’d made it. Not only kicked out, but guilted into believing that they’d been greedy to want anything for it in the first place. Over time, they reasoned, this steady progression of guilt and theft would destroy mankind by squashing the very geniuses they depended upon. But it wouldn’t happen fast enough for anyone to be able to recover. So they had to help the system along. This was done by getting to all the great industrialists when they were left reeling from some mighty legislative theft or stupid failure, explain these concepts to them, and whisk them away to the valley (discovered later by one of their first recruits, a great financier). Deprived of the motivating geniuses (and working down the ladder to whisk away anyone of ability, promise, and the sort of genius that could have made great things and, well intentionedly, forestall the great collapse) the industries would fall, followed by the countries and all the great looters would be left with nothing left to loot. To further help them along, Ragnar became a pirate (he’s mentioned much earlier in the book as a kind of “industrial pirate”) sinking iron ore boats, copper trawlers, closing down shipping lanes to any kind of relief that would, again, forestall the inevitable. Francisco, it turns out, was another of the earliest recruits. Unfortunately, his empire had been built so well that even a fool would have taken decades to run it into the ground, so Francisco had to stick around and sabotage his own company, taking as many others down with him as possible. (He shows up in the valley as well, and shows Dagny the future site (I can’t believe this) of his COPPER MINE right there in the valley. And guess what? Dagny starts designing a RAILROAD to service the copper mine. Now, economics isn’t my strong suit, but I don’t think a ONE MAN operation mining copper for that small of a community is going to be able to make near enough to support paying for the INSTALLATION of a ¼ mile RAILROAD to haul the ore. I mean, hell, you’re all in THE SAME VALLEY. How much business can a railroad have, when you’ve already got an AUTO PRODUCTION FACILITY in town? Hmm?)
Long story even longer, Dagny is trapped in the valley for a few weeks, as it was a sequestration holiday of sorts and no one was let out for any reason. Further, Dagny hadn’t been approached by the Destroyer yet, because she hadn’t really been “broken.” She still loved TT too much to just abandon it, so she had to swear that she’d not tell anyone about the place until it was time for her to come back. In the meantime, she had to pay her way while there. (Ragnar had been converting his spoils into gold bars for each of the great industrialists, keeping track of the money “stolen” from them through income taxes, but Dagny would have none of it.) She became Galt’s housekeeper and cook, a job that paid $10 for the two weeks in gold coins. That’s OK, though, as one could live for a month off of that in this inflation-free, reasonably priced town of industrialists all doing what they really wanted to do…till the soil and work with their hands. (Another fairly weird little bit. Housing costs you $0.25 a week…how reasonably priced! Obviously this price would appeal to anyone…but the value is essentially meaningless in a system utterly detached from a…you know….actual dollar.) Also, through various flirting and coy phrases Rand works in it becomes blatantly evident that she’s in love with Galt. This depressed the hell outta me, ‘cause I was rooting for Hank Rearden, but to make her political point about “the ideal man” Rand has to have Dagny fall for Galt. None the less, they pointedly do NOT have tawdry sex while in the valley….the first time.
Dagny goes back to TT, greeted by her true friends, and told by her brother that she has to appear on the radio to tell everyone that she HADN’T traitorously abandoned the world like, you know, all those other guys did. When she refuses, Lillian Rearden shows up and threatens her with the exposure of her affair with Hank. Dagny agrees to appear on the radio. When she does, rather than say what they want her to, she proceeds to describe, in exacting detail, her steamy love affair with Rearden. From the transmission Rearden also deduces that Dagny no longer loves him…and takes it ludicrously well.
Whew. The world basically starts spiraling the drain. People start to actually starve when a political move secretly diverts a quarter of the railcars to assist in a senator’s pet project while the wheat that should have been on board rots in the rain. Dagny is forced to begin entirely abandoning sections of the country just to keep the railcars running. The insistence of a few impatient politicians, enough leverage, and a drunk engineer run a coal-burning train through an 8-mile tunnel, suffocating everyone on board and collapsing the tunnel when the boiler, unattended, blows. James Taggart’s wife, an idealist akin to Dagny who married James under the mistaken assumption that he was the one to accomplish the business of the railroad, ends up committing a pathetic suicide off a collapsed bridge. Dagny’s assistant ends up trying to restart a stalled engine in the middle of the Nevada desert. A political go-between assigned to Rearden comes around and begs Rearden for an honest job that Rearden isn’t legally allowed to give him, only to be shot when defending the foundry. If there were puppies in this book, you can consider them thoroughly kicked. If there were kittens, consider them drowned. Hank finally breaks when a politically-arranged riot at his foundry over “inadequate living conditions” (the conspirators had been funneling in plants to fill any slots emptied by “The Destroyer”) allows enough of a political opening to nationalize the foundries. Francisco shows up in person to recruit him.
(This is all hideously out of order, but at this point it doesn’t matter. You get the idea.)
Fucking FINALLY we come to the point. If you are just curious about the details of Rand’s philosophy, turn to the chapter entitled “This is John Galt speaking.” Dagny has, once again, been talked into appearing on the radio, an enormous hullabaloo that had been built up to for months, so the whole country would be listening. Before the transmission begins, however, the signal is “jacked” (no word for it back then) and John Galt takes over.
Boy does he ever.
By the end of this chapter you really wish that John Galt would SHUT UP. Geez. The chapter is 66 pages long, and it is the most excruciating segment of the whole fucking book. I had to sit in the basement and read for two and a half hours just to follow it.
Basically, he describes what he’s done, the philosophy behind it, and tells everyone that they’re on their own. If they want to follow his philosophy, go out into the wilderness, found a town, and run it with only honest, hardworking people, repelling anyone who wants to get something for nothing, or wants to loot, or appeal to their sympathies. At the end of it, he says that he’s been talking for three hours straight, and I believe it.
Everything after that is denouement. Dagny is nearly broken, but risks a meeting with Galt. She is followed, and Galt is captured. He is held for interrogation, as the heads of the country try to get him to tell them how to save the country…but refuse to actually do anything that he suggests. Several lengthy and rhetorical discussions take place.
The head of the NSF, driven mad by the consequences of his conversation with Galt (effectively) drives out to that doomsday weapon, gets in a fight with the general attempting to commandeer it, someone trips over something, and a hundred-mile radius circle is cut out of the junctions of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennesee. (I think.) Destroying the southern junctions of the rail lines. This finally breaks Dagny, but the enemy still have Galt, and they’ve dragged him off to a specially designed scientific torture chamber to try and torture him into agreeing to lead them.
Yeah.
Rearden, Francisco, Dagny, and Ragnar stage a daring, and ultimately silly, daylight raid on the compound and rescue him, whisking everyone away to the valley. At the very end they look out over the US, entirely dark since the collapse of the last power plants,
*Gasp* *Gasp* *Gasp*
And that’s the whole story!
Whew.
Any questions?
“Yes…what WAS this great philosophy driving all the characters?”
Dammit.
Hokay. The philosophy. Hmm. Well, it was kind of a self-determinism with strong anti-socialist leanings and a grounding in straight materialism….uh…actually, it’s best if you read that bit word for word yourself. Go to a bookstore and stand there for an hour or so reading the start of the “This is John Galt Speaking” chapter. I’ll try to do a little comparative analysis here to give you the gist though…
One of the most instructional manners to look at would be a comparison to straight Marxist Communism. From my understanding, what we have here is a basic disagreement about the production of wealth. Communists believe that the actual wealth being produced in a factory setting comes from the workers, as they are the ones doing all the manual labor, assembling things, producing, tote and carrying, whereas the foremen and owners just sit in their offices looking down over the workers, doing the books and living the good life. Thus the bosses (and the bosses bosses) are exploiting the workers by receiving the money from the sale of goods produced by the workers, but only letting a pittance trickle down to the workers themselves. Randism (Randyness? Aynalism?) is something of a direct reply to these ideas, as well as to socialist flavors thereof. Randists state that, without the “bosses” (industrialists) there would be no factory there in the first place. Invention, drive, genius, and competition are the source of the wealth. However, Randists allow that physical, hands-on labor is also very important. The sort of boss who would not be able to, or is not willing to, do the day-laborer work, is directly ridiculed in the book through James Taggart. These bosses would be unable to maintain the system under the Randist system, as they would be the scrabbling looters attempting to forestall the collapse of their company for just another few days, spending their time trying to manage pull and political leverage. In a healthly economy, the downward spiral of such bosses would last for generations, which is why Galt wanted to speed it up.
Like Enron.
Randists also allow that anyone willing to work hard enough and long enough and be inventive enough could rise up, start their own company, and drive their opponent out of competiton, so a “non-boss” could always become a “boss.”
What we’re seeing in this book is sort of a direct assault on communism and socialism, once the effects and intents of such policies on governments and industries had been seen. Nationalization of industries was a particularly hot topic at the time this was written, as was the influence of Unions for making unreasonable demands. (Unions at the time were still sorting out their strengths, and were just as likely to drive a business under as get any concessions.) Communism was developed at a time where things were worked on a factory-by-factory basis, whereas Randism came along when developments (dictating industrial and marketplace policy) were occurring on a governmental level. Thus, Communists are concerned with exploitation on an individual basis, whereas Randists were concerned with “looting” on a legislative level. The attentive reader will be able to notice a startling similarity of some of the bills and laws passed in the book to policies enacted throughout some sectors of Europe, and similar leanings in laws in the US today. Attitudes and tactics will also ring a bell, with the constant forestalling of the inevitable instead of addressing what the real problem is (I don’t want to start a debate here, but this is what I see whenever I look at social security). The most common line of the criminals and “looters” in the book is either “It’s not my fault!”, the continuous buck-passing, or a declaration that “It was done with the best of intentions,” meaning, of course, that it failed.
Ironically, Randism does have something in common with Communism. The requirement of a revolution. In Communism (Marxist), it’s considered inevitable that, eventually, the bosses will push too hard and the common man, realizing that he is being exploited, will rise up in bloody revolution, throw off the boss, and run the factories themselves, with no one being the “boss.” In Randism, it’s the bosses, the industrialists who, having grown tired of all the dead weight and hangers-on that the government forces them to support with the overflow from their own work, working themselves to death out of the kindness of their hearts but without gain for themselves, throw off all this deadweight, leave the remains for the looters who wanted them, and gather all the competent, hard-working men together to start over elsewhere. The skilled movers of the earth leave the deadweight behind. Atlas “shrugs” and drops the world. The “looters,” meanwhile, strip of value everything within their reach, until there’s nothing left to loot. Then they starve. Either way, a whole lot of people, many of them at least passively innocent, will have to die.
The problem with Communism has pretty much been played out in Russia well enough that I don’t need to go over it. The problem with Randism, as I see it, is in the whole “the great industrialists get up and leave to a better place to work.” I mentioned this at the start with the “crayola utopia” crack. Basically, I don’t think industry can scale down as far as Ayn Rand would have us believe without collapsing entirely. This may just be a reflection of the advances since this book was written, but, say, how would that community create computers? (Of course Wyatt had an oil refinery set up in the valley as well…with two whole employees!) How do you build a clean room in a grassy field? Where do you get the sulfuric acid for the chemical imprinting of the chips? The superconductors? Even as it was presented in the book, the entire economy of the valley must have been balanced on a knife’s edge. One bad year for the harvests (since they’re all in one place, even if tended individually) and half the inhabitants would starve. (Food could only be bought in theory, as a starving man isn’t willing to sell you his meager crop…and you couldn’t take it without being a looter, and you couldn’t get anyone to distribute it “fairly” as that’s looting by legislation…so if you did worse than your neighbor, you just starve.) The world of industry and science is entirely too integrated to scale down the way it’s been presented here.
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
(That’s a bit unfair, actually, as Rand plainly shows her heroes as entirely self-sufficient, but it’s still the most common criticism, and the Communist rebuttal.)
Further, close examination reveals some really weird omissions. There’s the obvious disapproval of income taxes brought up repeatedly, but Galt says elsewhere that governments are necessary for the defense of such workers against looters…but without taxes, were does the government come from? You say you need an army, but who is in charge of running it? Where does the money come from to pay them, if not from the community they protect? If you require payment for the military…..you get the idea. The utopia that Rand has built is a hollow outline with a number of internal contradictions and a whole lot of empty space waiting to be filled. Courts? Defenses? Currency support? The government you’ve admitted is needed? Put simply, the societal utopia invented by Rand can’t scale up from the site where she’s placed it, and the industrial processes can’t be scaled down to meet it. This is especially surprising in light of how carefully she examines the dystopian breakdown of current society, with each and every step ringing frighteningly true, although far more extreme in it’s bluntness.
The greatest irony, though, is that the Randists and the Communists are both searching for the same thing. The honest, hardworking “ubermensch.” They just differ on where they think they’ll find it. In that respect, this book is very similar to another anti-communist work, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” In that book, one could paint the horse as the put-upon industrialist of Rand’s book. With the best of intentions, and realizing that he was the only one who could accomplish the work they had to do, the horse works himself near-to-death trying to accomplish everything for the rest of the farm. When he became crippled, however, the pigs whom he was doing all the work for ended up betraying him, branding him a traitor, and selling him to the knackers.
But for the utopia model, we might like to turn to another far-seeing sociology book by Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World.” In it, in one passage, the main character is questioning the way in which the worldwide system has been set up. People’s intelligences are carefully regulated so that they remain happy with their jobs. The main character asks why don’t they just make everyone as smart as possible? Wouldn’t that result in a better life for everyone all around? The answer, he is told, is no. At some point in the past, during the first steps of the utopia construction, they created a mass of “A” (smartest) –type personalities and left them alone on an island to make their way. The result was a disaster. Everyone wanted to lead and no one wanted to follow, so nothing ever got done, and, by the end, they had begun to starve. Now, admittedly, Brave New World is much more highly metaphorical than Atlas Shrugged, reducing these questions to an almost child-like level while still remaining poignant, but this passage does point out the essential difference in the regard for human’s character from Rand and Huxley. One has utter confidence in the character of hardworking men, the other has a complete lack of same.
Ah, the almighty dollar. Let me get one thing straight. Randists do NOT worship the dollar. Literally or figuratively. I’ve heard that one so many times before now I kept expecting it to crop up somewhere in the text. This is an ETHIC, not a religion. Money itself is not an “end” for Randists. Money, however, in an ideal system, follows naturally from hard, productive work. So the dollar is symbolic and representative of good, hard, productive work. Like an A+ grade. You don’t love the grade…you love what the grade represents. Excellent work. The dollar sign is used throughout the book to represent Galt’s plans, and the repercussions of such. (Even there it’s kind of regarded as an inside joke.) The Randist system is intensely capitalistic, with everything that entails. Basically, that, so long as no one cheats through dishonesty, sabotage, or legislation, capitalism is a self-regulating system for ensuring that the best rise to the top, the greatest advancement occurs, and those less deserving remain in the lower levels until they straighten up and work harder.
While on the subject of religion, I’d heard elsewhere that “objectivism” (the final form of Randism as put forward in more direct philosophy texts) was intensely anti-religious. I kept an eye out for it throughout, but spotted next to nothing on the topic. There’s one sentence in Galt’s speech that barely amounts to a sidelong pot-shot and isn’t even original (“May the God you invented forgive you.”) but other than that religion isn’t touched upon at all. There’s an occasional reference to “mystics,” but that almost certainly was referring to social and political activists / advocates who favored feelings and “spiritual elevation” of the workers over material advancement and solid production, as it was used most commonly in conjunction with derision towards those groups.
It should also be mentioned that the book is strongly nationalistic and very patriotic about the US. Rand makes a great deal out of the fact that the US was founded on the ideals of hard work and human equality to achieve, and portrays the US as the final country to fall before the unrelenting assault of imbecility and incompetence. At the same time, the book is violently anti-union and anti-socialist. (Perhaps most profoundly the latter.)
On a point of my own, I’d like to point out one particular idea in the book that caught me by surprise. The final third of the book is named “A equals A.” Anyone who’s taken rudimentary logic courses will recognize this as the identity principal. Something is equal to itself. Stupidly simple, right? Originally proposed first (I think) by Aristotle as the founding principle of mathematics and logic, this has to rank really damn high on the “why are we learning this” scale in courses. Of course, the formula’s utility doesn’t lie in the positive form, which is merely redundant, but in the negative, whereby it disproves statements. Great elaborate logical reductions of concepts will all boil down to one of two statements. Either A equals A, in which case the statement is correct, or A equals not-A, an impossibility, and thus the statement is false. For example: Igneous rock is cooled Lava. (A = B) This rock is an Igneous rock (C = A) This (same) rock is made of compressed sediment mortamophosed into solid rock. (C = D). Thus, A=B, C=A, C=D. C=A=B=D. Disposing of extra terms, B=D. Is rock formed from compressed sediment the same thing as rock from cooled lava? No? Then B=non-B, and the statement was false. So, really, A=A is the final reduction to which all logical arguments descend when controlled properly. It’s used as a kind of idealistic tenent by the Randists in the book when they reduce all of the contradictory arguments against them intended to guilt them into playing along. (Rearden’s wife attempts to blackmail him with news of the affair. Rearden thinks about it for a bit and realizes that she is confronting him with evidence that he is not faithful. (Hank = Unfaithful) Therefore he is not virtuous. (Faithless=Not Virtuous) But she counts on him to not want the scandal released. (Hank = Conceal Scandal) So she counts on him to be virtuous. (Conceal Scandal = Virtuous). Thus Hank = Faithless = Conceal Scandal. Virtuous = Not Virtuous. Falsehood.) This segment surprised me, because someone tried to use it on me over a year ago. I got into a rather heated and protracted discussion with someone online about the existence or non-existence of God. (If you think this thing is long, you should have seen those. Truly mammoth posts.) I was on the “we could never tell” side, whereas he was on the “logic disproves the existence of a God” side. The discussion wandered about far too elaborately for me to detail here, but it ended on a point like this. He attempted to disprove the possibility of miracles by using A=A on the water-to-wine miracle. Stating simply that water is water and therefore not wine, he seemed to think this settled the matter. I was so dumfounded at the evident stupidity of the statement that I never got back to it. (Well, that and the fact that he was beginning to reiterate some of the topics we’d already gone over and concluded earlier. Getting frustrated enough without having to continually go over old ground.) The way in which he presented this is almost exactly mirrored word-for-word in Rand’s book. Now I know where he fished it out of. Of course, in this instance, he was just being sloppy, since he completely ignored the actuality of CHANGE. The Bible was in no way claiming that the water was water and wine simultaneously, but rather that it was water that became wine. It was not afterwards what it was before. So A=>B, B=B, A=A, B (not equal) A. For a simpler analogy, his argument said that wine could never exist at all…because anything that was not wine could never become wine, even, say, water and grape juice that had yeast added to it and was stored in a celler for a couple of years. The simple fact this does happen disproved his apparent logical disproval of the water to wine miracle. (No, I don’t consider this a proper rebuttal, since the individual isn’t around to defend himself….but I can’t really confront him with it since I’ve no idea where he is anymore, and I wanted to get this off my chest.)
So, considering all the faults I found with the book’s utopia system, do I not recommend considering it? Studying it? Examining it? Well, in the past I would have said that its virtue lay in its dystopia, an interesting worse-case scenario, but one that would never happen. There would be too many people unwilling to just let the world die for a while to teach them all a lesson, too many people able to see through the ludicrous legislature and catastrophic social attitudes, and not enough people truly crazy enough to drive everything all the way to their foregone conclusion. But that was a while ago. The actuality of the matter, however, is that the dystopia is in action, and driving headlong into the void. No, not in the US. I’m not that alarmist and I’m not that blind.
I’m talking about Zimbabwe.
Many years ago Zimbabwe was referred to as the “breadbasket of Africa.” It’s farms were incredibly productive, and the country made a healthy living out of selling their produce to the rest of Africa, making them the largest grain dealers on the entire continent. There was one major problem, though. The farms were all owned by whites. Way back in the colonial days, Zimbabwe was settled by the British (I believe…someone correct me if I’ve got it wrong) who, in their typical colonial ways, set up industry there employing the natives as workers on their enormous plantations. In the 1970’s there was a war fought for black-majority rule over the white-supremacist regime in Rhodesia (as it was called then), with independence coming in 1980. Since then, the big farms, the ones responsible for the country’s prosperity have always been passed down among families, and thus remained mostly white. Yes, after the British governance left and the Zimbabwean people were allowed to manage their own country, farms were started up by the indigenous people. As you would guess, however, the European farms sat on the best farming land, and the extensive experience with their fields by this time gave the white farmers a distinct industrial advantage over the newcomers. Whites make up less than 1% of the population in the country, but controlled the vast majority of the wealth. As you would expect, grievances and a certain amount of anti-white sentiment grew up around this disparity, much like you might expect to see in South Africa during Apartheid. All the whites in the country were fairly rich, and they employed significantly worse-off blacks on their farms. For a time it appeared that things were blowing over when Robert Mugabe became president, and, in a famous 1980 speech, granted a blanket amnesty to everyone on either side of the conflicts leading up to the independence. He called on all the peoples of the country to dismiss their grievances against one another in a gesture to start over so that they could make the country prosperous together. “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. . . . The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or black against white. “
Unfortunately, it was not to last. Two years later he ordered the slaughter of twenty thousand people living in a region that was strong with support for his political rival. It’s a little elaborate with the details here (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020603fa_FACT1) but Mugabe fell under the influence of a man calling himself “Hitler Hunzvi” who claimed to be representing the “War Veterans” from the fight for independence. In their name, Hunzvi demanded reparations of land and money in ever increasing amounts as compensation to the veterans for their troubles in the war. In reality, many of the people Hunzvi “represented” were never in the war (including Hunzvi himself), and many were even too young to HAVE been in it. The actuality was that Hunzvi was the head of an enormous roving band of thugs getting more and more money and land from the government. Mugabe began to nationalize, without compensation, the privately-owned farms across Zimbabwe so he could have land to give to the mercenary Hunzvi’s “veterans.” This has progressed rapidly across the last three years, with more nationalizations announced only a few days ago (http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2003/January/January16/387.shtml). So what is the net effect? The net effect is that the land is now in the hands of people who don’t know how to farm. Claimed by thugs as a prestige symbol, the nationalization of land has immediately scared away all foreign investment. The “redistributed” lands, at best, are serving as subsistence sites for the poor rural peoples who were supposed to be the ones best served by these policies, and, at worst, lie fallow, with no one allowed to work on them. Mugabe, at the eve of the 2000 elections, pinned the blame on the whites in Zimbabwe, promised to more evenly distribute the evident wealth that the whites had achieved from exploiting the native Zimbabweans, and TOOK BACK his speech from 1980. Took. It. back. Damn. Zimbabwe, the breadbasket of Africa, has applied to the UN for emergency famine aid. (From the year-old article linked above: “The annual inflation is close to a hundred and fifteen per cent. The national treasury is bankrupt. The Army is engaged in a futile intervention in Congo's civil war, at a cost of dozens of lives and an estimated million dollars a day. The health-care system is essentially defunct, and, with a quarter of the population infected with AIDS, the funeral business is among the country's last remaining growth industries.” Unemployment is at 60%.) But wait, it gets better. The US, in answer to this call for famine aid, shipped over an immense amount of US corn to be used in the famine relief efforts.
And it was turned away.
The reason? There might, possibly, have been some genetically-engineered corn among the shipment. No one’s really sure, but it might have been. Mugabe was furious, saying that the US was trying to poison his population out of hatred for black people, and turned away the entire shipment. This contrasts starkly with the political stance of most of his constituency, who said “Please give us the corn. We are starving to death. We don’t care about the genetic engineering.” Remarkably, there seems to even be a pattern to this. People have reported being turned away from food deliveries if their voting card didn’t show them to be a member of Mugabe’s political party. Startling? Atrocious? It’s been going on for 15 years. Mugabe has said in the past that his country suffered from overpopulation…perhaps he means to do something more direct about it.
And last year. At the UN summit. Mugabe got a standing ovation from the diplomats.
To me, this sequence of events plays out like a microcosm of Rand’s book, saying that there is a good deal of legitimacy to some of her concepts concerning dystopic descent.
Nonetheless, I find her utopian ideals ludicrously underdeveloped. Thus, as I began, “Dystopia of finely ruled lines. Utopia of crayon.”
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
Current server time: Jan 09, 2025 16:45:33