| Date: | 2009-07-02 13:05 |
| Subject: | Equilibrium Review (Talen Head) |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  aggravated | | Music: | Doug Ashdown - And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda |
One of the important things I see a reviewer being able to do is combat factual misconceptions. Thanks to a review - of sorts - I learned how one would most appropriately cut through jail bars, how the weather actually works, and whether or not Ben Stiller is in fact a strategically shaved monkey. It is therefore with something of a heavy heart that I must take up my pen and scribe my thoughts about the movie Equilibrium, because I've made no secret that I think the movie is bad.
When I criticize such a beast, however, the immediate thing I find said about it by people who agree with me is that the movie ripped off The Matrix, so I feel I need to address this error before I approach my actual griefs with the movie, in the interest of padding my word count and legitimizing my opinion. After all, if I disliked it because it was a Matrix knock-off, my opinion looks like it's part of a herd.
The three year gap between the release of Matrix and Equilibrium might be, in some people's minds, short enough to allow a full knock-off to be written, developed, shot, and created. On the other hand, it's much more likely that Equilibrium was in production well beforehand, and the success of Matrix let it be pushed forward - as would be germaine, with the two having similar styles. They don't have much overlap once you push past the most superficial elements: - An unlikeable protaganist.
- Trench coats.
- An awesome underutilised actor.
- Retarded use of firearms.
When you strip away these comparisons, the two movies can stand proud and free of one another, as what they are. On the one hand, you have The Matrix, which was a pop-culture sandwich that played on vast number of previous cinematographical historical events and reintroduced eastern cinematics to western audiences, and on the other hand, you have Equilibrium, which is shit.
Oh, it's not particularly bad shit. It's the kind of shit you get when you've been eating bran for a while, the kind of shit you find after a long period of worry about the state of your digestive tract. It's the kind of shit you're slightly glad to have, because even if it is you inspecting your shit, its presence indicates you're at least reasonably healthy. It's the natural byproduct you get of a healthy system, a collection point for ideas and cinematics that served their purpose elsewhere and are now collected in one place for easy disposal.
That is the worst paragraph that I have ever written, and I apologise to you all.
Equilibrium is a 2002 action film directed by Kurt Wimmer, a man blessed with a name that's distinctive but also not attached to anything else, which means there's no massive bandwagon of expectations to attach to his work. It's a real shame when a person creates an artwork that deals with interesting and creative themes that is then dismissed for being too much like X and then simultaneously not enough like X. It's under this shadow that Equilibrium falls for me, but the X in this case is not The Matrix. It's 1984.
Now, part of the problem Equilibrium suffers is that it's an Action Film. Not an Action Film, or a film in the Action Genre, an Action Film. If you ask a proponent of Action Films exactly what they think of any particular Action Film is, do you know what the most common adjective used to describe these Action Films is?
Brainless.
That's right. There's a whole subgenre, which is almost the whole of the genre itself, where even its proponents laud its successful ability to entertain them when they don't engage their brains. Now, to these people, this is a selling point. I'm sure you know these people. I'm sure, time to time, I'm one of these people. But Action Films are built around the promotion and acceptance of cinema which is generally designed to not need to make sense. What does that make them, then? A kind of mentalistic masturbation. And the thing is, Equilibrium may have some pretension towards being an Action Film, or a Film With Action, but it doesn't live up to the standard of an actual movie with a story and a point. It's not. Not even through all its sweaty, lathered-up belabouring of its supposed-points and its attempts at cleverness does Equilibrium successfully engage the brain. Instead, it does what these brainless Action Films do - it takes the moment of emotional sting one gets from a well-delivered piece of actual storytelling, strips away as much of it as it can and then forces it into place in the story (choose your own cynical reasoning for this methodology). It's like a comedy routine made entirely out of punchlines, because developing plot points and character and scenes is too much work.
Instead we get a genre built around stereotypes, where the reader is presumed to know exactly how things should work (because it's an Action Film), so the author can proceed with the snappy one-liners and the biting comebacks without having to justify them. It is incredibly easy writing to do, with an increase in the special effects budget is able to decrease proportionally the amount of work the scriptwriter does. By the way, for the real agent representeur of the Action Film genre, you need look no further than Michael Bay's work.
The thing with Action Films is that they just don't bear up under scrutiny. You can't really analyse them or try to challenge them or explore what they mean because the resounding reveberation you will hear is the hollowness of the piece, and any attempts to discuss it with fans of the piece will be met with It's an Action Movie, as if that explains anything.
With my postulate about the Action Film and its hideousness as it relates to the movie laid out, I'll try and sweep the excessive comparisons to the Matrix away and instead focus on the story, genre, and character elements that make this movie a Bad Movie. If you want to skip past that - which would be weird, but after that paragraph about poo, I can understand if you, as a reader don't trust me to not gross you out for no good reason, just jump down to the phrase Poseur Tenue to hear the last of my words on the matter.
The first grand problem I have with the movie of Equilibrium is in the plot itself. The world is inspired by 1984, where instead of intense societal control and a monolithic, inexplicable entity that promotes a feeling of helplessness, the writers decided that they'd instead lean on a far more sensible and easily implemented plan of every single person in a city drugging themselves up with self-subjugating mind-fucking drugs, every day, multiple times a day, all on time like clockwork.
Now, one of the important things when you write stories are that people should always be people. In a sci-fi story, you have a lot of leeway - you can introduce some very odd things and provided you do it early enough, making them part of the setting, viewers will accept it. The important issue is how people react to those fantastical elements. Therefore, provided you introduce something which keeps people as people, you should be fine.
Prozium broke that rule for me.
You have a city of what, ten thousand people? A hundred thousand? In a city, with an inefficient delivery systems of this wonder-drug, you have a whole population who will go so far as to stop in the street and immediately inject their necks with something. Nobody is late. Nobody is early. Nobody rushes, and apparently, dropping your Prozium is so rare an event as to make a fucking movie about it.
You can say the point of the drug was to erase individuality, but the thing is, it didn't. People still had individual tastes and colourisations and manners, they just didn't act on it a lot. If nothing else, there were black people. Prozium rings hollow to me because I don't see any operation on that scale being feasible. If the drug was in the water, in the air, if it was delivered by some easy method like doping the food, then I find it more tolerable. But instead, the writers chose to use the device of several thousand people performing in lock-step unity, a single action of unnecessary complexity.
Injection based drugs are delivered by injection because it speeds their absorption, or because the drug is based on a biological compound that the body would break down, like steroids. When you have a population of thousands who are engaged regularly in the comission of self-medication, surely, in-universe, you can devise more appropriate ways to do it, especially when the drug already strongly resembles the effects you can get from existing digestable drugs?
I can tell why the author wanted the device of the injection, of course. The methodology in question means that there's more means for a manual failure (dropping the Prozium), that the sequence is more horrific (a room full of people stuffing a needle into their necks is pretty nasty), and to make it feasible for a complete incompetent like John Preston to fall out of the simple norms by dint of a mere accident that could happen to any hoof-handed blitherer. On the other hand, that any hoof-handed blitherer could fuck up his prozium dose does kinda highlight my problem with the delivery method, especially when you consider that while Libria is treated at times like a city, it is more than that treated as a world. Humanity is capable of sustaining massive levels of industrial production, high levels of extremely sophisticated technology, populating cities and regularly scourging the world outside of the domain of the Clerics with aims to destroying anything that can make people feel (which is going to be tricky what with the sun setting and all that), yet it's somehow small enough to routinely supply in a breathtakingly inefficient way that involves giving everyone personal freedom, content in the knowledge that this utopia is supported on the backs of everyone who isn't clumsy.
This is what I mean by Action Films. The premises underlying the setting are potentially very interesting and clever. You could do a great story about a world with that kind of dogmatic, fascist, societal control. But that would involve a great deal of nuance and an understanding of people and howe they react to social pressure and control. Equilibrium can't handle that, it needs to minimize time spent thinking about things so it instead jumps to relying on a magical maguffin in order to support its world. It then throws off that magical maguffin and we're supposed to be impressed.
Part of the horror of 1984 is that people would embrace the lifestyle if you make them afraid enough. The horror was based around the idea that actual people would act this way, that a real society could be transformed into Big Brother's world. The world of Equilibrium is instead a magical world, where the transformative power of a wonder drug takes care of all that messy business and tells you you should be scared, because provided we overcome the total ridiculousness of distributing and enforcing this drug's use, any place might be like this. This brings to mind the image of someone trying to emulate the level of creeping horror of Psycho by putting a man in a dress and having him yell 'Boo.'
So, the setting sucks.
I don't like John Preston. I think I'm well-rounded enough to recognise that my dislike of John Preston is not wholly due to his grim-jawed gravel-voiced stoic untouchability. I know someone who would probably want John Preson to take him roughly. I know that sex appeal can happily distil and set aside elements of a character that people dislike, and while I want to say that John Preston is a bad character acted badly, I'm not so sure I can draw that line too simply. I know that Christian Bale can act, so I can't attribute his performance to incompetence - which means somewhere along the line, the conscious choice was made to make John Preston the protaganist of this story - a man with only one skill who is treated by the story as an everyman of every capability. A highly-trained, exceptional individual who somehow lacks even the most basic of abilities that don't result in and extend to the art of killing people. He's required to interrogate people yet demonstrates no ability to follow social cues, or follow good, efficient interrogation methods. Another element of the Action Film set up. A real interrogation sequence is very different to the kind you see here, with a lot of established behaviours based on years of understanding human psychology. Since that's too complex to deal with, we instead get to see Preston fumble his way through conversations where he really shouldn't be there. A human interrogator gives a human edge to an inhuman society with inhuman practices. I could nitpick further (why can Preston send people out of the room? This guy is allowed to murder people, what is he afraid of them witnessing), but all I'm really doing is skirting the major issue: John Preston is a very simple character that the story treats as if he's complex.
Part of the problem is the setting. The setting relies on a system where deliberately socially retarded people are required to, nay selected to conduct investigations of other human beings to try and root out people who are guilty of thought crime. The setting can't maintain its own premise because no thought was put into doing so. Why? Action Film. It doesn't need an explanation, it doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need verisimillitude, because the whole thing is written as if the people who are here to enjoy the story are going to do so without thinking about it. They're not going to mind if a plot point surfaces and vanishes in a heartbeat, because all that plot point is there to do is to set up the next cutting one-liner, the next stoic jaw-set, the next mechanical stunt.
It seems as the movie goes on that the theme the writers were striving to represent with John is any one man can change the world. This is a theme that's been touched upon quite a bit, and it's quite heartwarming especially when you fail to pay any attention to the events around it. Any one man can change the world, provided that man is a terrifying unmitigated bullet-shitting ubermensch who cannot be harmed and is surrounded on all hands by people who are willing to overcome the fact that he is nothing but a singleminded killing device. Preston's children save his ass, Preston's allies in the resistance actually execute the demolition, Father makes sure 'Preston's' plan succeeds, Preston's buddy Brandt further facilitates Father's plan... and in the end, you instead wind up with one man who is an unreasonably good murderer who is being treated like he's the messiah, as though he has some moral character or special ability that makes him more useful to the plot than any other hoof-fingered authority who could drop his Prozium.
With the idea that the protaganist is bad because of the story but not because of himself, we have to consider the bad guy's big plan. Dupont's plan borders on near-omniscience and displays a completely omnipresent sense of understanding about people that he he has established, previously, would be out of keeping with the taking of Prozium. This type of big, extensive plan is often known as a Xanatos Gambit, after the Gargoyles villain Xanatos. A Xanatos Gambit, in essence, is a plan where it's as bad (or worse) for the hero if he succeeds as if he fails. To be fair to that definition, the Xanatos Gambit isn't quite appropriate to Equilibrium, because Dupont's plan does nothing if John fails except get a perfectly good Tetragrammatron cleric killed. On the other hand, all they're good for, it seems, is killing large groups of people who are incompetent with firearms.
The problem with this type of scheme - well, one of them - is that it ultimately induces large amounts of futility in the audience's investment in the hero. Anything the hero did that worked out in the end (yes, killing lots and lots of cops and innocent people) was all just part of the villain's plan. And in the cause of Equilibrium, there is no real set-up for the twist. There's just the twist, which leaps out from behind the curtain, as is germaine to Action Films. Rather than develop things and explore things, explain and expand on them, the movie realises it's painted itself into a corner where the villain can be seen as a complete cretin (and John's own record of cretinism nearly broken by him helping someone competent with a competent plan), and decides to have said villain leap up on his chair to proudly proclaim "Nuh-uh! I wanted you to do that!" Not very satisfying.
To have this happen, and then have this near-omniscient super-baddy fail to do something as basic as search John for weapons before engaging in some totally inessential gloating which gives John a chance to cut sick, kill everyone in the room, move to another room, kill everyone in that room in some choreographed nonsense with firearms, then move to another room, kill everyone in that room then have to start considering bringing other Tetragrammaton clerics into the issue... I'm getting ahead of myself. The plan shares a failing with most conspiracy theories, which is to presume a super-capable group of shadwoy figures with amazing predictive abilities who nonetheless fuck up so simply as to let a crazed taxi cab driver have all the information necessary to bring them down. Capable of orchestrating an amazing plan but not smart enough to just shoot John in the head the second he outlived his usefulness, Dupont is a wonderful strawman for the Action Film trope that People who plan are stupid, and can be bested by just punching them in the face enough. Far be it from me to claim that the genre I deride is written by anti-intellectual polemics - I think these films are written by marketing departments who cynically recognise that few things make Joe Average feel quite as good as watching someone who he can identify with kicking someone smart in the teeth. That'll teach him for being smart.
This prescience wedded to idiocy makes Dupont's confession at the end that he isn't on Prozium even more baffling. It does, however, serve to cleanse any conscience one might have for the man who was, really, just pursuing the propoganda laid down by Father. In that one confession we see nothing of Dupont's character that has been predicted before this point, and nothing is done by the revelation except to shift him from smarmy jerk to smarmy hypocritical jerk. This very firmly shifts the moral onus of the movie onto Preston, and removes even the faintest shard of complexity the movie might have had. Preston's actions are good because he's the good guy, Dupont's are bad because he's the bad guy. Ignore that Preston has murdered probably hundreds since getting his emotions back and seems to feel no remorse. Feel? Feelings? Remember? the point of the movie?
At this point we have to touch on the final part of the movie that really shits me, and given what a mammoth this review is at this point I figure it's best to not gild the lily. Equilibrium has one of the most consistantly retarded depictions of firearms in any movie I've ever seen, ever. Gun Kata is the kind of lathered up penis-substitution worship that sounds cool when you're twelve, sounds neat when you're explaining it to a focus group of idiots, and can support a whole movie only if you don't have to deal with issues like the fact that guns don't work that way, martial arts don't work that way, sound doesn't work that way, and physics don't work that way. It is the epitome of Action Film idiocy, and to make it an institutionalised martial art with its own adherents and supposed masters just serves to underscore and emphasise how little this movie wants you to think about the things it's showing you.
It's almost a footnote at this point to complain that Sean Bean was underutilised in his appearance. Poseur Tenue aside, Equilibrium was a bad movie caught up so intensely with the idea of appearing clever that it never successfully did anything clever. Nothing but a cardboard cutout standing in for the depth it wanted to have, it's the whiny kid in high school who liked to compare himself to Haulden Caulfield and rubbish on all the popular kids, not realising why he's a classic literary character. The matrix ripped off the Bible, Equilibrium ripped off 1984, so I actually expect far better of Equilibrium. On the other hand, if you're looking for a brainless Action Film, you can watch this and feel slightly cleverer than the people who prefer other, seemingly-stupider Action Films.
4 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2009-06-30 00:41 |
| Subject: | Criticism |
| Security: | Public |
In a conversation with a good friend recently I mentioned two things. The first of these things evoked his surprise, the second of these things evoked his sympathy.
The second thing I said is that I often offer up my opinion feeling like it doesn't really matter to my friends around me. This is something that I realised cuts both ways. I keep from stating my opinion a lot of the time because I feel like the visceral reactions I give aren't helpful, and that more and more, people don't want to hear what I really think, so instead I peck around the edges of expression. This has led to some awfully timid writing and thought of late, where I would delete something as I started it, thinking Someone I know likes this movie. They will probably disregard my opinion because it disagrees with them. They probably will be upset at me for my opinion. More and more I find that I put a lot of effort into creating a review, then for the fear of negative reactions, or worse, no reactions, delete it.
The first thing I said is that I didn't like Wall-E. He was surprised to find this out because I recommended he and his now-girlfriend see it, because I was certain they would like it. It led to the startling revelation that just because I don't like something, doesn't mean I don't see what merits it has. The idea that I can criticize something not just based on my emotional response and make a meaningful suggestion based on what I saw. I could tell the way the themes of Wall-E would play into what he would enjoy. I could tell its sweetness and its lightness made it a good date movie for nerds, one of whom is an astrophysicist, the other of whom imports games from Japan.
I had no need to enjoy the movie myself to recognise what was good in it. I just didn't like it. Once I sat back and considered what I had done in this statement, I wound up realising that if I make someone sad because they don't like my opinion of something they liked, then they need to consider dealing with it themselves. I'm not a jerk. I just didn't like a movie. I don't make fun of movies because I want to make those who like the movies feel bad. My negative reaction to movies tend to run in three broad strokes: - I didn't like this movie. If I don't like a movie, often there's not a lot to talk about. There are heaps of perfectly good movies that don't merit any kind of word about it. These movies won't usually rile me up, they won't usually have any real reason to be considered. They're just there. A good example of this category of movie would be 15 minutes. It wasn't a bad movie, it did some things interestingly, I just found myself not really interested in what was going on.
- This was a bad movie. Welcome to the vast majority of the actual critique I have of movies that spur me to write. Typically speaking, a movie that gets praised while having significant flaws is a movie I think of as bad movie. When you extract a movie from its hype and look at it without the weight of its marketing behind it, you'll find a lot of bad things - thin characterisation, poor storytelling, loose plot threads, misuse of themes, or badly handled subtexts. Sometimes a movie is defined by a badly done story, sometimes by badly done characters. Funnily enough, I tend to not think of special effects or set or music in the same category. Either way, I think of a movie as a bad movie if it has some big failing in its whole script. A bad actor can't make a bad movie. He can just make a movie more painful to watch.
- This movie is actively harmful. This is a very rare category to find a movie in. I haven't seen very many actively harmful movies in a while. For the most part, movies have some really negative or harmful elements - consider the sexist writing in Van Helsing. The film was overall decent enough (if I was pushed to it, I'd consider a 'bad movie', but one I enjoyed), but the way it treated women was something I genuinely think of as harmful.
So with that in mind, of the following movies, I've seen recently, which do you reckon get the title of 'I didn't like it', which do you think get 'Bad movie' and which do you think get 'Actively Harmful'?- 12 Rounds
- Stardust
- Equilibrium
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The spoiler is that I don't think any of these movies were actively harmful, though I thought 12 rounds, Equilibrium, and Wolverine were all bad movies, while I thought Stardust was fucking brilliant. Why did I choose to do it that way? Ask a leading question, present a simple correspondence answer, and then break with my lead-in?
Because, fuck it, I like some movies and I don't hate everything. If I can't get discussion and interest, I might as well try surprise and indignation at inappropriate quiz protocols!
(Hopefully coming soon: Reviews of each)
3 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2009-04-09 14:49 |
| Subject: | Things I wanna write about (Talen Head) |
| Security: | Public |
Been thinking about writing reviews for Equilibrium, Monster, Cave Story, or Tropic Thunder (though I fear that everything's already been said), Dunno which to start on.
1 comment | post a comment
| Date: | 2009-04-04 23:35 |
| Subject: | Passing (Talen Head) |
| Security: | Public |
Three days ago, reading Anzac pledges, I pondered what it would take to get me to cry again, after my long stoic absence from the veil of tears. I wondered how I could do it, what it would take to make me fall to my knees and burst out like I had when I was a child. Tonight, I found anew what that was.
Tonight, at roughly eleven pm, Rowdy Lee, our lovely little brown ferret, with his little mask and his chipped fang, passed away. And his last minutes with his owners around him, blubbering like idiots as they tried to make him feel better, tried to help him.
I wasn't there when it happened. I was in the other room, fumbling for my mobile, trying to call the vet's after-hours, trying to do something, to do anything after having spent ten minutes being bitten and chewed on by a ferret that didn't know what was happening, tried to make the last minutes something better. I sat on the phone ringing for two full minutes before I realised that nobody was picking up.
Tonight, I cried. I cried like I didn't realise I could cry.
I love you, Rowdy. And I'm so sorry that I couldn't do something. I'll remember your face, your lopsided grin, the way you'd chase the carpet fluff. I'll remember you slinking through the tube, the way you bit my toes when you wanted dinner, and I'll remember how indestructable you seemed. In just over three years, you were born, you lived, and now, with two owners who loved you, and knew you loved them back, you passed out of this world, an energy wave that now ripples into places we don't yet understand.
I love you so much Rowdy.
And I can't remember having felt this bad before in my life.
2 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2009-03-31 21:01 |
| Subject: | Who Should Watch The Watchmen? |
| Security: | Public |
I was recently discouraged from continuing my writing on this blog due to the overall negative elements in roughly everything I bother to say. Would I have bothered to review Wall-E if I'd enjoyed it? I'd like to think so, but then, now I find myself worrying about the many ways in which I simultaneously express myself and annoy my friends. Having a blog feature which is explicitly about drawing attention to things I like, things I enjoyed, rather than venting my spleen about the odd things I've read or seen. It seemed for a while there that everything I enjoyed was diminished by my enjoying of it, or my contributing to it - and I was better off just linking it to people rather than trying to offer my thoughts along with it, adding to the discourse.
So we have a movie arrive on the horizon - and yes, we're going to be talking about Watchmen - which is based closely on a seminal work of comic history, something that I both very much enjoy, and, much more uniquely, something that other people take as seriously as I do. This is liberating and obnoxious because suddenly I have to step up to the plate and provide my analysis and opinion in such a way that I don't repeat something everyone already knows while still coming across as appropriately pretentious and gittish else be lost on the sea of uncertainty as to my own identity.
Spoilers ahead, obviously. Jump to the word 'liverpudlian' to get the summary.
So, Watchmen. It's a visually amazing film that draws from the comic book almost perfectly in every visual sense; it carries with itself a shocking amount of grunge and makes the violence overvisceral - the good guys don't just punch people, they put their supposedly-normal fists through concrete. At first, from a reading of the comic, this could be seen as a departure, but I don't see it as such. In 1986, when the comic was written, the mere idea of creating a comic in such a tone was shocking and weird, making the tone and atmosphere quite visceral. By emphasising the violence and exaggerating it in this way, the movie carries on that shocking nature. The reality, the mundanity of the world and the people in it means that that tinge of unsettling nature flows through, while also engaging our adrenal sense.
One of Alan Moore's great complaints about comic movies is that they're trying to make sheep out of cows; that comics are comics and movies are movies and the two things should be kept separate. While I would agree that it would be nice if every work ever created could be striking and individual, not everyone has that gift, and the gift of translating something from one form to another can often breathe new life into it. The beautiful thing to be seen in this movie was that it did. One of the things film does better (in my opinion) than comics is depict point-by-point actions. The way a creature transforms, the way a person fights, these are elements that in comics have to be defined by a huge amount of odd, expository verbiage, in novels by paragraphs that take longer to read than entire fights can take to play out, and in theatre by awkwardly-defined stage dancing. In a movie, done well, you don't see the wires, you don't need to obscure things - if the Comedian is strong enough to incidentally punch through a concrete wall, he can damn well do so.
The opening fight scene, I felt added something else: It highlighted that the Comedian was actually a badass. In the scenes the movie would otherwise show, it would highlight that he was basically nothing but a swaggering bully - flamethrowering VCs, shooting (not punching!) a pregnant woman, firing his shotgun (seemingly) into civilian protesters, and generally being a dick using a big metal penis extension.
One of the themes the comics touch on which the movie seems to skirt is the sexualities of the masks. The original story featured snippets and excerpts from police and medical reports that gave away that no less than three members of the original Minutemen group was 'sexually deviant,' in that they were gay and maligned by the society around them for that. This was actually well-handled in the movie in that it barely mentioned it. While it emphasised a bit more Nite-Owl's need for the heroism sexually (rather than, in my opinion, a need for it to feel empowered at all), the movie generally stepped away from the issue of noting anyone in the movie as being anything but hetrosexual, white, Americans (even Doctor Manhattan, who started out as a white guy). Now, to be fair, the comic had actually a largely diverse and interesting and supremely fucked-up secondary cast, and at least one character who got a whole issue of the comic to himself as a narrator who was black, but by and large, the story is a bit White. Not a big deal, but it does leave a sad aftertaste in my mind - the fact that in a story which did feature multiple touchings upon fucked up people who happened to be gay or black, the ones who got excised from the main thrust of the plot were the ones who inadvertantly interrupted the homogenity of the plot.
The casting was quite good. One of the very good signs, to me, was that I recognised nobody in the cast, nobody at all. If someone who nobody has heard of gets cast as Rorschach or Nite-Owl or Doc Manhattan or something then it's a good, solid sign to me that the person is actually good in the role, not chasing Oscar bait or worse, a reliable character actor who is going to play the same damn person as they always do. The outside third possibility is some young up-and-coming star trying to use a position's sex appeal to try and amplify their career, trying to latch onto movies that are guaranteed to be relatively successful due to built-in fanbases like Shia LeBouf in Transformers - which I feel a need to mention, was shit.
One of the real highlights of the casting was Nite-Owl. He was well-played as a pudgy, bespectacled nerd, someone who genuinely would enjoy an outfit that came with a bit of girdling and painted-on muscle. Someone who could appreciate the effect of being a symbol, someone who would really revel in the superhero lifestyle. While he chooses to give into the lie and let Ozymandias win, chooses to compromise and becomes complicit in the murder of millions, Nite-Owl's character is the closest thing realistic nerds have to a proxy in the movie... and he's sexually dysfunctional, bullied, lives in a rundown dump, squanders his fortune on Cool Toys that he doesn't use and has about two and a half friends in the world. The actor doesn't shirk from this, doesn't try and cool him up, even around Laurie - there are no moments where he isn't exactly what he should be, no moments where he doesn't wear who he is on his sleeve. Some think it's a bit hamfisted the way he shows his emotions in the dark, when Laurie mentions Jon - I think it's perfectly obvious that that's how a guy like him would react.
The music was exceptional. Really, really goddamn good. I found myself really wishing for the soundtrack, up until the rather unfortunate instance of Hallelujah rearing its head. Once upon a time, I thought Hallelujah was a pretty, interesting song; then I heard it again and again and the lyrics began to bother me, then I heard it again and again and again and the appropriateness it had to the scene it was played over would start bothering me, and suddenly it'd be showing up in every film ever and generally only be related to the scene in question because it let people indulge a Chris De Burgh-like fascination with sex under choral guise. I don't think the point of the song was sex (though I've been told that's a theme of Leonard Cohen's), but it gets connected to the same general theme over and over again. At least in one brief stint, it was used in a movie to highlight that someone was about to die. Anyway, I can't gauge the scene fairly - I know there are some people to whom Hallelujah can't be overused, and some people who just plain out like the song. These people might be a bit disappointed with the bafflingly unerotic sex scene that it heralds.
The opening sequence is a wonderful way to demonstrate the way you can use a long song in a movie, by the way; the credits play out to Bob Dylan's The Times, They Are A Changin' and does so with such a wonderful meter that I couldn't help but smile my way through it, watching as the events of my own father's history were played out in this strange, brave new world. None of the music came from after the movie's time-set piece except the ending credits, which was a My Chemical Romance cover of Desolation Row. As of this writing, I can't find a place to get a copy of this song online, and I doubt there will be a Watchman Soundtrack. Either way - good stuff.
The movie brushes on a lot of the reasons people enjoy superhero stories. Rorschach deals with our desire to punish wickedness, beyond all reason, circumventing the societal rules about what to do in these cases. Doctor Manhattan plays to a very real, very human desire to be so powerful that we cannot be threatened, to be the superman that transcends all human limitations. Then there's Nite-Owl, who's the contrast - while Doc Manhattan is our wanting to embrace the superhero because we want to feel better than people, Nite-Owl is embracing power to feel like a person at all. Silk Spectre, our desire to be titillated in a morally acceptable way in a world full of wicked titillation... and then there's Ozymandias, who is a wonderful monument to the nerd fantasy of beating everyone because you're smarter than they are. Which is nonsense - Ozy isn't just smart, he's also super-fast and rich as hell, giving him Wonderful Toys. Unfortunate, that's kinda the point. And the Comedian is the worst half of Rorschach. While Rorschach indulges his raw, murderous kind of justice, he does bad things to bad people - the Comedian just gives into the desire to do bad things to anyone, and then externalised the blame, so he could operate guiltlessly. Bad person? You betcha. But he's the kind of bad person people cheer for.
So what of these types in the movie? Well, they were all handled quite well. Doc Manhattan was able to benefit somewhat from the way science has marched on since the 1980s and has been able to integrate some quantum physics into his discussion, which I suppose kinda sharply highlights his idea of predeterminism. I mean, we know full well that the universe is altered by its observation, and that we may well face quantum universes determined by differentation engines - life, specifically. As far as we know, nothing can serve the same purpose in quantum physics as living observers, which means that nothing but life can collapse wave-forms like we do. In that regard, especially if you view the universe on a quantum level, the presence of life is not some inessential thing, though it might leave a person somewhat convinced of the importance of life in general and instead hell-bent on the removal of the forms of life that might destroy the rest of life - yes, that'd be us. Though I doubt we could really exterminate all life on the planet even if we tried.
There's no real way around the fact that the movie changed the story. The ending in the comic book was playing on our fear of alien invasion, the ending in the movie plays on a semireligious fear of a god made manifest, Doc Manhattan. Ozymandias gets away with it in both cases and Rorschach gets the last laugh from beyond the grave. They didn't have Rorschach come back from the dead, they didn't have him beat Ozymandias, they didn't fall into any of the Hollywoodification I would have feared possible. Many of the things that were changed felt, for the most part, like they were changed for time. It's a long movie, after all, and even things like the device of the Doomsday clock are discarded in the early half of the film just because there was insufficient time to use them. The peeing conversation had between Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre in the prison is cut as well, almost certainly again for time. All the side characters are cut, all the backstory of the Minutemen except for the most obvious ones (the Comedian and the original Silk Spectre, though even their story was compressed). Curiously, despite the fact they weren't going to develop it, they still had Comedian taunting the Hood. Curious, that.
So most of the changes take the route of convenience. Things just don't get said, and sometimes, subtle conclusions that are the result of long strings of dialogue or repeated uses of a motif are instead explicated and summarised ('The Comedian was your father,'). Rather than build the character of Rorschach throughout the whole of his truly paranoid dialogue (though a lot of it is there, including some of the more memorable lines!), they have Nite-Owl yell in his face what he's supposed to evoke to the reader... and then, it underscores Nite-Owl by having him apologise for it. So not all the changes are for the worse, you know? Still...
Of the changed scenes, Rorschach has one that has me gnashing my teeth. For any afficionado of the books, they'll know the scene in question - Rorschach is relating from an event in his past where he dealt with a kidnapper and murderer, with all the 'evidence' he needs for a conviction. In the movie, Rorschach murders his dogs, throw them at him through the window, cuffs him to an oven, threatens him with a cleaver, then chops into his head, with the damning condemnation: Animals get put down. Nice, etcetera.
Now, in the book, Rorschach actually cuffs the man in place, then tosses him a hacksaw and sets the house on fire. He notes that cutting through the chains of the handcuffs will take too long, with the house on fire, and that the man's only option is to cut off his own limb. Dutifully scary and whatnot, but unfortunately, the Saw series has done it. Plus, Rorschach adds a twist to the scene - he waits outside the building, with an axe. I don't think I could live with sitting in a movie theatre and hearing someone mutter, 'Oh, they totally ripped that off Saw.' I would leap the aisle, pulling up a seat as I did it, and brain the person in question, hollering, 'SAW RIPPED OFF THIS, YOU FOOL! AND THIS RIPPED OFF MAD MAX!'
The reason why I liked the scene as it originally played out is it demonstrated three of the iconically understood (at the time) signs of sociopathy, the things you look for in a child. Setting fires, a lack of empathy, and cruelty to animals. Since this is the night that he's 'born' as Rorschach, it was a nice little image to me, a vigilantistic act that contains within itself the message that should be obvious: Something is very, very wrong with this man.
The movie scene is more visceral, less sadistic, and almost exonerates Rorschach with the bad guy claiming he could beat a murder charge without being refuted at all by anything, not even an act of disbelief. Rorschach's actions suggest that he believed it - which implies to the audience that yes, the world is so fucked that having a little girl's bones in your backyard, her blood on your chopping block and her panties in your oven isn't enough evidence to suggest you were involved. It legitimizes the next act - which in the book is an act of utterly unredeemable sadism, while in the movie is just a furious, simple dispatch. After all - Animals get put down.
So, not satisfied with that change.
Another is the way they further the position of Laurie in the ending of the movie, shooting Ozymandias. Since I'd just finished reading Monster (which I might write about), the sequence where she shoots Ozymandias was underscored with a phrase from that book: Always shoot twice. The lone bullet shot is a pleasantly dramatic gesture, but since it'd been telegraphed that Ozymandias can catch a bullet, all that it really did was let Laurie join in on the futilities - made worse by the fact that she's doing so, knowing that it's futile. Rorschach and Nite-Owl fight Ozymandias aggressively when they still think they have a hope to stop things - a hope that should have been well and truly quashed by the fact Laurie was in the crater. Then the shot becomes not about justice but about revenge, and it diminishes what little ideal Laurie has to offer.
It shouldn't bother me - I mean, it's a very realistic thing to want to do at that point, especially if you have the gun (though, two days later, I find myself fumbling with my memory; did that gun get telegraphed somewhere? Or did she just have it?). It's certainly what I think most audiences would want to happen - and it means that Laurie actually does something, rather than the alternative, which is to do nothing and be a prop handed from Doc Manhattan to Nite-Owl. Is it better to be the most futile character there, or to not really be a character there, I wonder?
And the third change, possibly the oddest change, is in the prison, where Big Figure has Rorschach in his cell and is trying to break in. In the comic, it's done by using an acetylene torch, and the death of the man with the arms in the cell is more prosaic - they stab him, he slumps, so they can pull his arms back through the bars without his complaining. In the movie they go for a far gorier end, where they depict the man having both his forearms cut off with an angle grinder. Now, I have to wonder: What the fuck? It's not like the scene was made all that much faster by the showing of it, and it honestly felt like it was done to continue the shock-violence theme. But then we have a lengthy sequence of Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre kicking all kinds of ass downstairs - a scene where the details like differently-pointing legs and massive bloody death are all Not Happening. What was it? An attempt to highlight that the Spectre and Nite-Owl are good guys opposed by bad guys? It loses some of its bite when the same pair had a thoroughly messy fight in an alleyway with random gang thugs.
It wasn't like it was a major moment of problem in the film. It was just something that left me going: What the fuck? Right now my favourite theory is a couple of the special-effects guys had come up with a neat way to shoot the effect of someone's arms being cut off mid-way and wanted to try it out. It certainly has more impact than the alternative, but I think I'd have rathered it - showing that Big Figure was heartless. Being willing to slice a man's arms off is a bit ruthless, a bit messy. Just stabbing him seems far more pragmatic and simple, far more right for a criminal mastermind. Sawing someone's arms off when there are less gory options seems like the kind of order you issue from a Doom Fortress.
Liverpudlian
Alright, so what do I think? Overall, if you're coming into this tabula rasa? Go see it, it's a very good movie with a lot of depth to it and an intense, well-acted storyline that deconstructs the insanity around the Superhero Genre. It's got fantastic music, nicely well-acted characters and really only one awkward scene that I honestly would have skipped. The special effects were nice, but understated, the changes to the plot quite forgiveable and the overall tone of the movie very introspectively hopeful. As with V for Vendetta, I feel that Watchman took a great comic book and made a good enough movie.
3 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2009-03-21 02:02 |
| Subject: | Things I like, huh |
| Security: | Public |
What's wrong with me?
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| Date: | 2009-03-15 20:42 |
| Subject: | Today's writing |
| Security: | Public |
I did a fair bit of a fuss on a blog about the latest change to PVP, and the terriblness of Virtueverse. I also did a bit of work on the Cobrin`Seil book. And got some sleep.
Man, real diaries are fucking boring, aren't they?
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| Date: | 2009-03-15 01:31 |
| Subject: | nrgh |
| Security: | Public |
Right now I would really like to find a way to feel like I'm good at something.
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| Date: | 2009-03-12 22:13 |
| Subject: | So what was today's writing? |
| Security: | Public |
Behold, Snowblasted. These Virtueverse pages are a pleasant relief, something I can sink my teeth into with a pre-existant direction.
Right now I'm finding myself stymied for that feeling, the desire to write something interesting and creative with a direction behind it. I really am surprised how used I became to the pedestal that the SCG community gave me, a place from which to stand and speak, knowing that it would be regarded and read. On a forum, you produce something that long, and people will just snark up with tl;dr. There's no feeling of authority, or at least credence that my writing took some time and effort to create.
Anyway, much of a muchness. Snowblasted's page is up.
I've found of late that I really have been phrasing a lot of my internal dialogue like I'm a presenter on QI. It's especially amusing because that kind of informationally-excessive dialogue is pretty much exactly how I wish I could talk, going on and on and on and on and having everyone follow and not mind that I just spent twenty minutes saying 'Yes, I would like a green salad.' Maybe it's just latent lust for Stephen Fry, I don't know.
I've been flicking through more blogs of late too, trying to make damn sure that I read more than just my normal little circle of Pharyngula and Crooks and Liars. Part of this expansion has added Bad Science, Bad Astronomy, The Society for the Advancement of Dave, and Skepchick to my list of readings. Also with that I've been more inclined to follow random news stories - though I also am trying to avoid excessive reading of Fark, since as it handily reminds me, it's not really news or information, it's just unmitigated snark and funniness. Sometimes that's awesome, but I'm trying to read things that inspire me to write, rather than to just read more.
A curious story element that struck me today at the doctor's office: A lone person who arrives at the surgery every morning and acts like they're waiting for the doctor, talking - but not overly enthusiastically - to all the other patients, even asking them to mind his/her seat while they nip out for lunch or a drink or a bathroom break. In reality, this person has no friends and no home, and lives in this way for the human contact it brings. Subversion: The person in question is homeless, but is actually something of a vagrant superhero, a person with the ability to make perfect and absolute medical analysis of anyone at a glance, serving to filter information to the doctors and discouraging hypochondriacs and other time-wasters.
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| Date: | 2009-03-12 01:49 |
| Subject: | Siiick |
| Security: | Public |
It's 1:45 and I haven't written anything major today. I did make a truly kick-ass dinner that I'm really proud of, but I haven't produced any writing longer than a paragraph or two. Part of it is mood - I'm not very aroused or geeky feeling - and part of it is sickness. I keep having these full-body sneezing fits and the like, which is very much bad for your Feelin' Creative.
Still, I can take comfort in that for all I've been a sputtering, suffering wreck of a man today, I have still nonetheless achieved things. I've done a lot of washing up, I've taken care of Fox and I've contacted my mother to wish her a happy birthday.
My nephew-or-niece, is, at this point... well, late. S/he was supposed to be born four days ago, but the little rascal is insisting on taking his/her time coming out. I'm not sure what to interpret that to mean, and how best to make off-colour jokes about it. My sister will have until Monday, when they'll induce her, and then I'll have to spend weeks at a time hearing about how bored she is and how much she detests the little weasel.
She won't say it, but I'll know it to be true.
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| Date: | 2009-03-11 12:25 |
| Subject: | Yesterday's writing |
| Security: | Public |
Alas, nothing of any fruit back there. I got a chunk written of a story written yesterday that was kicking my ass, but nothing particularly big.
Today, nothing yet. >.>
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| Date: | 2009-03-09 23:28 |
| Subject: | Today's Writing! |
| Security: | Public |
... I can't show you. It's part of the Cobrin Seil Campaign Setting, and was a big slab of flavour text for the organisations and other groups that annoy people to not recognise when I mention them. It's going into the book though.
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| Date: | 2009-03-08 22:09 |
| Subject: | Today's writing |
| Security: | Public |
So today, I finished up Swivel's Virtueverse page, tidying it up and make it complete. Also, elaborating on the individual elements of the character, his voice, and the character of the AI that's slowly taking him over.
It's about 50% new material as of today. No big deal, but still, it's more than nothing.
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| Date: | 2009-03-08 00:40 |
| Subject: | Today |
| Security: | Public |
Showing strongly, I wrote nothing today, but in my defence I was out all day. Instead I came home and fed the pets, tidied up some game stuff and said my gnights online. So to you I now say, good night.
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| Date: | 2009-03-06 14:43 |
| Subject: | Thinkin' and drinkin' |
| Security: | Public |
So, as part of my general motif of treating myself better, I'm limiting myself to two glasses of pepsi max a day. I'm also trying to skip meals less, and when I'm hungry between meals, I'm snacking down on glasses of water. After a bit of poking around, it seems this isn't likely to hurt me in any major way, but it does mean I am constantly sloping off to go pee. There aren't many 'empty' foods - all the fun stuff we like that our tongue seems to react to well is usually doing that reaction with something that is, essentially, bad for us in the levels and concentrations we have. My current theory is that arsenic must taste awesome, because there's no other solid reason I can work out for this tasting metaphor. I'm sitting here, feeling snacky and peckish, but all I can think of that I want to eat is sweet stuff, things like going and frying up some apples in butter, or making myself a jam sandwich.
Bu~u~u~t, that's bad for me, so I need to get my mind off it, so chug water I do. I find myself vaguely paranoid that I might wind up seeming like one of those body-flushing hippies who treat the body like it's an old oily machine press, something they need to wash through every few days with a constant maintenance and upkeep. Ignoring my rants about homeostasis and how you don't wind up collecting extra meat in your colon and all that crap, I was stunned, thinking about those people I know who espouse ridiculous things, and how few of them actually suffer for their odd beliefs. My mother and and my father don't feel anything for their homophobia, for example. Another woman I know believes that chemotheraphy doesn't actually do anything, and is just expensive so as to make money for doctors. Another person has vocalised that atheism is only owned by people who know the Biblical truth, and choose to pretend they don't understand it, and don't embrace it, so as to act morally free.
I dunno. I'm not thinking very clearly right now. I ran through a stack of job applications today and am now waiting by the phone for responses. Oh well, fiddle dee dee. I don't actually have anything interesting to talk about right now, nothing people want to hear me bitching about or complimenting or whatever. And I really, really don't think after the whole situation with Wall-E, people want to hear me reviewing movies, especially onces I've watched recently with friends.
Ah well.
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| Date: | 2009-03-05 10:29 |
| Subject: | Life goals |
| Security: | Public |
I want to have a chance to flirt with Stephen Fry, just once. I also want to watch an episode of QI that has Christopher Hitchens as a panellist. If I can do both on the same day, surely life will be complete.
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| Date: | 2009-03-04 09:00 |
| Subject: | Writing |
| Security: | Public |
Trying to make a point of posting something or writing something every day. Nothing much yet, but today just began.
Lords I didn't sleep well last night. Just kept waking up, waking up, waking up, almost at every single hour. Worse I kept getting snippets of dreams - like working out a way to water the garden and the house at the same time so both would grow, or a handful of far more... racy dreams.
Anyway. Trying to write more.
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| Date: | 2009-03-03 21:55 |
| Subject: | Stuff I Like: Baccano |
| Security: | Public |
It's very easy, I imagine, when dealing with me for more than five minutes, to get the impression that I'm a hate-soaked ogre who sees nothing to actually enjoy in the world around me. At least, I hope you do, otherwise my bid for Ogre in 2012 is doomed to failure.
Sometimes however, it is entirely feasible for a story or series or creative piece of art to punch through that calloused shell and penetrate deep into the heart of my awesome gland, prompting me to vomit rainbows and sunshine for protracted periods of time until everyone is so sick of hearing my positive opinion about something, tells me to shut up, and prompts me to become certian that people only want to hear from me when I'm being a cynical, cranky ass.
Today, I sat down, and after some false starts, watched Baccano. I started watching it while working on other things. That was my mistake - the other things are not going to get worked on, or Baccano is not going to be understood. It has a nonlinear plot and a huge cast - something like sixteen characters or so, all introduced in the opening, and then there are more introduced. It's full of nice touches and moments of surprise and delight, but I just needed to touch on something else, something that is actually, somewhat out of the realm of the characters designed by the author (as they were a novel originally).
Baccano is really fucking sexy. I mean, I'm very susceptible to some kinds of fanservice. Heaving bosoms will often just plain get me going, and provided they're nicely done, T&A are things that can get me to forgive a series of a lot of its flaws (at this point, no examples spring to mind, but I'm sure they're out there). But Baccano actually doesn't do much in the way of arse-shots or dipping cleavage and still manages to leave me constantly aghast at just how attractive all the various characters are.
There are something like, nine female characters, and three males, all of whom I would happily do naughty, naughty things to, and they aren't ever oversexed or really even highlighted. Their hotness is entirely incidental to the story at large and the designs range from ugly to attractive in style, and from plain to downright breathtaking, but there's never a sense that characters are hot because they're important, or are just as much, important because they're hot.
Overall, it's a really exciting, interesting piece, quite confusing to watch unless you're willing to actually pay attention, and it handles cannonball-style watching better than a lot of other anime I've seen lately. So go forth! Find a way to watch it, and enjoy. It's a really good series, with its own clear sense of style and great music to boot.
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| Date: | 2009-03-02 21:35 |
| Subject: | Storm |
| Security: | Public |
With a recently-relaxed download quota (February being a smaller month than normal), I've had the chance to examine a few Youtube videos that I'd been hitherto avoiding, such as this gem from Australian Spicks And Specks presenter, Tim Minchin, titled Storm. What I found the most troubling about Storm after hearing it was, well, twofold. The first thing that struck me was the periodic bother that I was myself, just as obnoxious to those people around me, spattering my mere science knowledge around, relying on evidence and a curious, inquisitive, information and evidence-driven view on the world while disregarding those people around me, being self-satisfied in the smug confrontation with Storm as if I'd either be able to pull it off nearly so well, or that I would ever have the courage to let rip on someone, stranger or otherwise about their views that I saw as bullshit. It's difficult when dealing with a stranger - not something I've personally had major issues with when the sake at stake is my own, such as when I told someone at a friend's wedding that I wrote pornography and was a staunch antitheist, prompting her gobsmacked response that she was a Youth Group Leader. The issue is that invariably, I'm going to always be dealing with someone who believes in something stupid in one of two ways. Either I'm going to be having a short ricochet off a person in which case I can't really hold out hope for the influence I have to be a positive one.
Consider the scenario. I meet a person who believes in bullshit. I am myself, my unvarnished, skeptical, evidence-driven self and voice my opinion wholeheartedly on their views. Alluvial silver is hogshit, quantum healing hands is a lie, cold reading is a circus trick that's been embraced by people as a religious experience and without actually thinking things through, these people have sold themselves as sheep to a concept that rewards them only insofar as a greater, sadder insanity would. Then that person can either react in one of two ways.
- First, the person might hear what I've said, and, in all seriousness and consideration, take to heart what I've said. They will consider the verve and the passion with which I've said it, and perhaps some part of what I've said will linger in their mind, catching fertile ground where it can amidst the lies and the bullshit. Over time, the person might enquire after such things, and come to the evidence and understanding that I have, because let's face it, unlike Christians, I can't sit around and say 'Oh, god will do the rest of the work.' It's up to me to make my point as best I can in favour of actually thinking, because they're not going to do it for me or even meet me half-way.
- Wander away muttering to themselves My, aren't atheists rude?
Either scenario makes me wary. The first sounds foolishly optimistic and can put me in mind of a fear that I might have failed a chance to spread knowledge and enlightenment, and the latter sounds all too realistic. Worse, both sound just as nastily proseltysing as my faithful family do when they talk about setting 'a christian example.'
But it's the Spousal warning in Storm that really sets me on edge. How many times have you been told to be nice? My mum says it all the time. My wife says it too - about her mother, my mother, my grandmother... and she's not wrong. That's where the worst case scenario really raises it head. That you're not dealing in a random dinner party gathering with a complete nobody you've never dealt with nor will ever have to deal with again, but rather are hearing your grandmother talk about her wonderful homeopathic remedies, your father talk about his christian teachings, your mother continue on the topic of her faith as it applies to her schoolwork, your sister's willingness to indulge in extrabiblical activities but her equal rejection of evolution as a science, or even a mother-in-law who tells you she talks to god when she's not suffering from a degenerative mental condition.
It's those moments, those be nice moments that make my gut clench. Christians talk about the burden of responsibility they hold when they deal with people who aren't Christians, why they're not instantly and constantly proseltyising to everyone they deal with. After all, every person they only meet once might be a person that they could have saved from Hell. Most of them get away with it by either cravenly cowering under the blanket of Divine Will and the Good Example, concepts that really do nothing but assuage their personal guilts.
But the thing is, am I really being nice by avoiding this? Am I really being nice by letting my grandmother buy water pills and indulge her placebo effect? I suppose it's a better way to indulge her hypochondria, but that's exceptionally condescending a view to have, isn't it? Isn't all of this?
This is the problem with it. I can't respect these mindsets. I can respect people, but if a person tells me that they believe in fairies or that they think god talks to their minister in private, then I just can't appreciate this person's perspective on the world around them because they're operating under false apprehensions and making up stories that make themselves feel better. I am left with a feeling that I'm a bad person for this, for appreciating and respecting science and disrespecting religious or magical thinking. And that, to me, is a shame. I'm constantly left with a very silly variant on survivor's guilt, stunned that my mother and my father and my sister are sunk so deep in this idiocy that they can't help but wallow in it, while I stand on the sideline wondering how much guilt I can assuage from them.
The worst of it comes in those moments of truth when I consider what's going to happen when my father passes on. If he asks me to pray with him, if he prays for me, if he wants me to read a Bible verse at his funeral - things that I fear he will do, because I know my father well enough to know that he thinks that this entire excursion in my life towards rationalism and freethought is just the same thing as nipping out to the bathroom for an hour or so during the more boring sermons - then what do I do? Can I say to my father, in his last hours: Those words fly no further than the roof, dad.
I have developed a great love for Fox's step-grandmother lately. She and I spoke about her recently-departed - recently? It was over a year ago, wasn't it? - husband, and how, without a faith to lean on, we both instead remember him for who he was, for what he did. We miss him - I knew the man in only the most halting snippets of his life - but he... he was a great, wonderful man with a whole host of flaws and just as many admirable traits that for their quality outshone the stigmatic moments of grouchy arrogance. He was so interesting and engaging to speak to, and in those glimmering moments, showed a real sweetness that I've seen carried on in his son, hidden like rubies in a coalmine.
And I think to myself that I will never be able to truly share a moment like that with my sister when my father's gone. She'll think it's all okay - that he's in heaven, so his death didn't really matter, and all the more hideously, his life wasn't all that important, just a prelude to the real show, put in place only so he had enough time to get his hand stamped and get in the queue.
These are the places my mind goes when I am left alone. This is the sadness I think I bear uniquely amongst my friends, who all seem so wonderfully close and connected to their families. I might be wrong, which isn't really a warm comfort, merely showing that others share in my sadness at being connected to, and loving, a person who wears a daily delusion that forever separates their mind from yours, and worse, their mind from the glorious reality in which we actually are.
*draws a breath*
This is why we need people like Tim. Because honest to god, I hadn't laughed so hard at anything all week as I'd laughed at Storm when I first saw it. It's wonderful, direct, it's well-written and it's not belaboured. And quite frankly, when my thoughts stray too far in these places I need a bit of a laugh... even if it's at a fictional hippy's expense.
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| Date: | 2009-02-04 19:53 |
| Subject: | Discarded writing (Talen head) |
| Security: | Public |
It is the act of the artist to bring to bear on anything he or she creates the sum of all the art he or she has experienced in his or her life. In this way, every artwork contributes to the artwork that comes after it, every little grain of sand trickling down through the hourglass of aeons and adding to our culture. To the holder of the hourglass, each and every grain is irrelevant, nothing more than dust that flows like liquid. But to the sand, each and every one of them is as mighty as a boulder, tumbling through the space and setting off reaction after reaction.
Everything that happens, happens for a reason. It's caused by the things before it and in turn, causes the things after it. Nothing every truly transpires in a vacuum. But to the human element, those watchers and readers and people of this world, who go about their lives, the vacuum is so easily felt. Everyone feels that that which they do is unimportant, so they affix meaning to things they think are greater than themselves, unable to grip the reality of it, unable to grasp the simple, unfeeling, indifferent truth: That everything that happens, happens.
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