Weltschmerz
Jan. 14th, 2004 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistI went to see Paycheck tonight with ID. It's the kind of sci-fi I like, Philip Dick authored, evolved from the space-era, 50s science fiction, similar to Soviet science fiction in preoccupation with the moral implications of technological advances. From horrible dystopian variations to sweet paradoxes, two-dimensional characters illuminating points and counterpoints of cybernetics, neurolinguistics, particle physics, robotics, rudimentary memetics, etc. Parables about the nature of war rooted in game theory, meditations on the historical misnomer of progress, with strong ethical underpinnings. Ethics 101, broken down to bare-bones, to moleculs, to atoms. The monadic units of morality, before postmodernism, before string theory. String theory kinda blew the whole absoluteness of absolute zero out of the water.
The last three years have driven me to desperate Kinbote-ness, looking for Zembla in texts that used to be white noise to me. These Hollywood movies that mine their diluted archetypes from paperbacks with rockets and robots on them. The Sound of Thunder, at the end of which a really wrong president gets elected after a man steps on a butterfly in a prehistorical safari thematically echoes in The Butterfly Effect that is All About Ashton's Angst, like,Dude, Where's My Hamlet? I don't think they will ever make a movie of Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, however, because, like, too depressing and no characters b/c they all perished in the nuclear holocaust, and the mechanical house reciting a Sara Teasdale poem to tenants long-gone:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Of course, the Soviet cartoon factory made that particular Bradbury story into a cartoon that for reasons I don't really understand (but probably involving samogon, the Soviet version of bathtub gin) they once aired on the nightly children's show called "Good Night, Little Ones." The cartoon concluded with a pigeon, mistaking a painting of a landscape within the house for a window, unsuccesfully trying to fly into it over and over as an old record player recited the poem, and nuclear snow fell outside. Get a load of that, Hollywood.
So anyway, I was watching Paycheck, and the premise of the movie is that Ben Afflec is an engineer who takes super-secret jobs for corporations, after the executions of which he gets his memory wiped. He takes a big job, three years long, comes out of it with no memory only to find that he, in his pre-wipe state, forfeited all shares in the company he was working for, as well as his paycheck, and has mailed himself an envelope with 20 seemingly random items. Turns out what he built is a machine that can see the future (there is some flimsy "technological" explanation for how it's possible, involving everyone's favorite enabler, the speed of light), and he knows that his former employers will be after him, and he sees enough of his own future to design his escape with the help of these objects. But the reason he splits from the company and forfeits his shares in the first place is because he sees the future of the world in this machine; the machine predicts a war, and the US government launches a preemtive strike. The machine predicts a plague, and the US government herds all the sick people together, creating a plague. The final image he sees is an atomic explosion wiping the metropolis he lives in. So he vows to destroy the machine.
The sad part is, at this point I gratefully start considering the production of this movie as a political action. I am sickly thankful when the words "preemtive strike" are used in a script as a character is standing before a screen projecting a mushroom cloud. Because everything anti-war, anti-Empire, anti-corporate has been "otherized" into non-mainstream discourse. Oh, things shine through, but they don't stick. Whatever it is that this administration did to the public consciousness, it's like some mind trick out of one of those 50s sci-fi stories. It's not that the information is not available. It is. It's just not presented in a scandalous, sensationalist manner, even though the content of the BushCo scandals lends themselves to a John LeCarre narrative far more than boring, boring Whitewater.
On the train home from the movie theater, I was reading the new New York Press, an article about John Buchanan, a journalist who is challenging Bush on the Republican ticket in the New Hampshire primaries. He found hard evidence of collaborations between the Bush family and the Nazis, even after Pearl Harbor, but was stonewalled by every major newspaper in the US, and his attempt to submit the material to the Miami Herold earned him a visit from the Feds, as a "terrorist sympathizer." This is all huge news, right? At least as big as Paul O'Neill, who probably shouldn't fly in small aircrafts for a while. And yet all the major newspapers are still reporting that there is no challenge to the incumbent. Weirdly enough, in the article he talks about how his original impetus for research was that he wrote a screenplay, and was offered a good deal of money if he substantiated his claims:
In January 2003, Buchanan got involved in the antiwar movement and began researching war profiteering in the Bush administration by way of such companies as the Carlyle Group, Engineered Support Systems, BioPort, Halliburton, Bechtel and Wackenhut. His investigation ultimately led to a screenplay called Project Clear-Vision, taken from the name of an actual CIA anthrax-biowarfare project that may have violated the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
"The plot of the script," he told me, "is that the German principals of Bayer AG, which came out of I.G. Farben after WW II, blackmailed Daddy Bush with the ‘Nazi past’ of the family into allowing the anthrax letters to happen so Cipro sales could save Bayer US from bankruptcy. I got a really hotshot young turk agent in Hollywood who told me on September 2 that he could [sell] the script if I could ‘prove’ the Nazi past and publish the documentation. So, technically speaking, motivated more by sheer greed than patriotism, I set out to sell a movie script for millions of dollars by landing a huge scoop."
Ethics and morality still exist in retro narrative discourses, that's pretty much their last vestige, so if this movie were made, the audience would so totally root for the Ben Afflec character, dressed in American colors as some couragenous whistle-blower. But it can't be documented, only fictionalized. Messages have to be concealed in the folds of allegory 101. Try reading fiction as "literal" for a day; try reading the news as "fiction." See what happens.
The last three years have driven me to desperate Kinbote-ness, looking for Zembla in texts that used to be white noise to me. These Hollywood movies that mine their diluted archetypes from paperbacks with rockets and robots on them. The Sound of Thunder, at the end of which a really wrong president gets elected after a man steps on a butterfly in a prehistorical safari thematically echoes in The Butterfly Effect that is All About Ashton's Angst, like,Dude, Where's My Hamlet? I don't think they will ever make a movie of Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, however, because, like, too depressing and no characters b/c they all perished in the nuclear holocaust, and the mechanical house reciting a Sara Teasdale poem to tenants long-gone:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Of course, the Soviet cartoon factory made that particular Bradbury story into a cartoon that for reasons I don't really understand (but probably involving samogon, the Soviet version of bathtub gin) they once aired on the nightly children's show called "Good Night, Little Ones." The cartoon concluded with a pigeon, mistaking a painting of a landscape within the house for a window, unsuccesfully trying to fly into it over and over as an old record player recited the poem, and nuclear snow fell outside. Get a load of that, Hollywood.
So anyway, I was watching Paycheck, and the premise of the movie is that Ben Afflec is an engineer who takes super-secret jobs for corporations, after the executions of which he gets his memory wiped. He takes a big job, three years long, comes out of it with no memory only to find that he, in his pre-wipe state, forfeited all shares in the company he was working for, as well as his paycheck, and has mailed himself an envelope with 20 seemingly random items. Turns out what he built is a machine that can see the future (there is some flimsy "technological" explanation for how it's possible, involving everyone's favorite enabler, the speed of light), and he knows that his former employers will be after him, and he sees enough of his own future to design his escape with the help of these objects. But the reason he splits from the company and forfeits his shares in the first place is because he sees the future of the world in this machine; the machine predicts a war, and the US government launches a preemtive strike. The machine predicts a plague, and the US government herds all the sick people together, creating a plague. The final image he sees is an atomic explosion wiping the metropolis he lives in. So he vows to destroy the machine.
The sad part is, at this point I gratefully start considering the production of this movie as a political action. I am sickly thankful when the words "preemtive strike" are used in a script as a character is standing before a screen projecting a mushroom cloud. Because everything anti-war, anti-Empire, anti-corporate has been "otherized" into non-mainstream discourse. Oh, things shine through, but they don't stick. Whatever it is that this administration did to the public consciousness, it's like some mind trick out of one of those 50s sci-fi stories. It's not that the information is not available. It is. It's just not presented in a scandalous, sensationalist manner, even though the content of the BushCo scandals lends themselves to a John LeCarre narrative far more than boring, boring Whitewater.
On the train home from the movie theater, I was reading the new New York Press, an article about John Buchanan, a journalist who is challenging Bush on the Republican ticket in the New Hampshire primaries. He found hard evidence of collaborations between the Bush family and the Nazis, even after Pearl Harbor, but was stonewalled by every major newspaper in the US, and his attempt to submit the material to the Miami Herold earned him a visit from the Feds, as a "terrorist sympathizer." This is all huge news, right? At least as big as Paul O'Neill, who probably shouldn't fly in small aircrafts for a while. And yet all the major newspapers are still reporting that there is no challenge to the incumbent. Weirdly enough, in the article he talks about how his original impetus for research was that he wrote a screenplay, and was offered a good deal of money if he substantiated his claims:
In January 2003, Buchanan got involved in the antiwar movement and began researching war profiteering in the Bush administration by way of such companies as the Carlyle Group, Engineered Support Systems, BioPort, Halliburton, Bechtel and Wackenhut. His investigation ultimately led to a screenplay called Project Clear-Vision, taken from the name of an actual CIA anthrax-biowarfare project that may have violated the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
"The plot of the script," he told me, "is that the German principals of Bayer AG, which came out of I.G. Farben after WW II, blackmailed Daddy Bush with the ‘Nazi past’ of the family into allowing the anthrax letters to happen so Cipro sales could save Bayer US from bankruptcy. I got a really hotshot young turk agent in Hollywood who told me on September 2 that he could [sell] the script if I could ‘prove’ the Nazi past and publish the documentation. So, technically speaking, motivated more by sheer greed than patriotism, I set out to sell a movie script for millions of dollars by landing a huge scoop."
Ethics and morality still exist in retro narrative discourses, that's pretty much their last vestige, so if this movie were made, the audience would so totally root for the Ben Afflec character, dressed in American colors as some couragenous whistle-blower. But it can't be documented, only fictionalized. Messages have to be concealed in the folds of allegory 101. Try reading fiction as "literal" for a day; try reading the news as "fiction." See what happens.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-14 08:42 pm (UTC)i have a vaugue memory of seeing a short film based on a ray bradbury story when I was really young, and i think it was there will come soft rains. it was not animated.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-15 07:23 am (UTC)