A Long-Delayed Reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stirling,

Because you're such a big movie buff, I always assume that if I see a classic movie, you've seen it before as well. I'm particularly hoping that that's the case with respect to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Katy and I watched this afternoon for the first time. I'm hoping you can give me some guidance as to what I should be thinking about this film. I came to the movie shockingly unspoilt—other than knowing that there would be monkeys, monoliths, and a computer saying, "I'm sorry, Dave—I'm afraid I can't do that," I had no preconceptions. Here's what I got out of it.

The movie is divided into four essentially self-contained episodes. First, we see prehistoric apes discovering a monolith, which does something—it's not clear what—after which they discover tools, weapons, and warfare. Second, we see a sequence in which we learn that modern, space-faring humans have discovered a similar monolith on the moon, which does something—it's not clear what. Third is the most pop-culturally familiar sequence, in which an astronaut named Dave, in the midst of a mission to Jupiter, faces off against a homicidal artificial intelligence, HAL9000, his ship's onboard computer. Fourth and finally comes a sequence, by turns psychedelic and then just avant-garde, in which Dave reaches Jupiter, discovers another monolith in its orbit, hallucinates (?) for a while, and then finds himself in what appears to be Versailles, except with fluorescent lights for floors, for—I'm guessing here—basically eternity, after which, another monolith does something—it's not clear what—involving Dave being reincarnated as a galactic fetus.

The plot is sort of hazy to me, as you can probably tell. Luckily, I get the feeling that the plot isn't really at the center of the film. The points of connection, in terms of plot, between any of the four episodes are pretty limited. There's no plot point in common between the ape-episode and any of the later ones, unless you count the bare fact that monoliths figure heavily in all of them. The moon- and Jupiter-episodes are connected, we learn fairly late, by the fact that Dave's mission to Jupiter was motivated by the discovery of the moon-monolith. And the only plot connection between the psychedelic episode and the rest of the film is that Dave is present. To put it simply, these aren't chapters in a book—they're short stories in an anthology. Rather than being plot-driven, the important connections between episodes are thematic—themes of humanity, intelligence, and technology are present throughout, as are those pesky monoliths.

But even as I get this, I have to admit that I don't have a clue what's being said about humanity and intelligence and technology and monoliths. Worse yet, I'm not even sure I've identified the relevant questions that I'm intended to take away. In the end, the plot is so loose, and the symbology so underspecified, that I feel I'm just flailing around in the dark. Still, I have to pose the following questions:

1. Are the monoliths alien artifacts, as most of the characters seem to suppose? Or are they naturally occurring objects, somehow (spiritually? metaphysically?) connected to the origin of the universe (and its rebirth)?
2. What are the monoliths doing? What exactly happens to the apes who come into contact with the monolith, that wouldn't have happened to them otherwise? (I mean, is it completely clear that tool-use and warfare are direct effects of the monolith? Are the tool-using apes even the same apes who encountered the monolith, or are they their distant descendants?) What happens to the folks on the moon as they gather around the monolith for a photograph? We're never told. What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith in Jupiter's orbit? (This question could be answered either literally or figuratively—it just needs to be answered). What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith on his deathdbed? (Ditto).
3. Is HAL malfunctioning? I find it somewhat more terrifying to imagine that he's in perfect working order.
4. If HAL is malfunctioning, what is the cause of his malfunction? "Human error," HAL's own diagnosis, seems too trite an answer for this film. All of the other episodes, besides the one in which HAL appears, deal with matters of cosmic significance. To me, there's something absurd about allowing the HAL-episode—the film's indisputable (right?) centerpice—to be contingent upon a programming error by some unknown codemonkey back on earth. Could the malfunction be monolith-related? I ask this in part because the HAL-episode is the only episode in which no monolith appears. That is, the monoliths are conspicuous by their absence from the HAL-episode. But, from a plot standpoint, how would it be possible for a monolith to cause the malfunction?
5. Is HAL a conscious being? Does he have real emotions? Even though the movie explicitly poses these questions, they're never answered, nor, upon reflection, do they seem particularly important thematically. Is the whole issue a total red herring?
6. How literally is the final episode supposed to be taken? Completely literal? Are some parts of it just Dave's hallucinations, and if so, which parts? Or, by the final scene, are we being presented with something that is not the literal experience of any conscious being? For me, I suspected that by the end, we'd traveled even farther beyond the confines of plot than we were before, such that I was no longer even being told a story. Instead, it seemed to me that the movie was just saying things with images. But I don't know what it was saying.

That final sequence, in luminescent, green Versailles, was at the very least a striking bit of film-making. There's something terrifying about it. I remember, beside me on the couch, Katy saying at one point, "Oh, God, he's turning around. He's gonna see Dave. Wait. Where's Dave? Oh no, that's Dave, isn't it?" The mindfuckery of it is off the charts.

And the long minutes without dialogue. For ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, you'll hear nothing but apes caterwauling, or classical music as space vessels spin, or an astronaut's deep breathing as he's out for a spacewalk, or unintelligible human voices rising to a crescendo, in what seems for a long time to be hell, and still, at the end of the film, might be. There's emotional intensity to go around.

And then there's just the technological aspects. The fact that Stanley Kubrick, in the late 1960's, built a bunch of giant hamster-wheels so that he could give the audience a realistic look at how weightlessness and artificial gravity would look. Impressive stuff.

But here's what really got me in the end. To me, it seems that if this movie had been made ten years ago, we wouldn't be talking about it today—it would have been forgotten by now. It wouldn't be a sci-fi classic, remembered fondly by the former adolescents of the 60's and 70's—instead it would have been ghetto-ised as an art house film, so that most people would never have seen it or even heard of it. You'd never be able to assume it as a part of the pop cultural vernacular. What strikes me as most hopeful is that there was ever a time when a large number of Americans would have wanted to be as intellectually and aesthetically challenged by a film as they must have wanted to be in 1968, to have made 2001 such a cultural touchstone.

Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

As you know, Stirling, I was excited about this movie. I thought that a summer blockbuster about biotechnology would be a lot of fun. Katy was skeptical. And it turns out that she was right to be. Here's why:

It was sooo unrealistic, even allowing for the silliness of the premise. So I'm supposed to believe that at a laboratory in which they test gene therapies on chimpanzees, a laboratory that ostensibly employs experts on chimp physiology, nobody noticed that one of the new arrivals was pregnant? Sorry, no. I'm supposed to believe that a phalanx of riot police, with their rifles at the ready, has to be reminded by their superior to take the safeties off? Nope. I'm supposed to believe that an animal trainer who is beaten for a considerable period of time by a several mature chimpanzees is going to be in any condition to explain what happened the next morning? Again, no. He'd have been lucky to have survived that attack at all; at a minimum, his injuries would have been traumatic. But that brings us to the next problem.

I wanted it to be sort of gory and scary, but the violence never rose beyond the level of the cartoonish. This was a movie that just couldn't deal maturely with the violence at its core. There were several instances in this movie in which the victim of chimp-violence ought to have been, by all rights, a bloody mess. (If a chimp starts wailing on you like that, you ought to thank your lucky stars if your most notable injury derives from a bite to your finger). At least in part, the movie's squeamishness about treating this violence seriously has to be related to its depiction of the apes as unambiguous white-hats. If you start showing what really happens when people get attacked by chimpanzees, the audience might lose its warm, fuzzy feelings for our heroes. Me though, I like an ambiguous hero. I come to the cinema in hopes of experiencing complicated emotions. I prefer to be confronted by the ramifications of the real excesses of the side I'm rooting for. Rise of the Planet of the Apes lacks the moral backbone to even confront its own premise.

Another contributing factor to the film's squeamishness must have been its PG-13 rating. I need to learn not to go see PG-13 films, no matter how interesting they look like they might be. Rarely, something like Super 8 comes along, but most of the time, you just get action movies that privilege visual effects over versimilitude and emotional resonance.

Also related to my complaint of cartoonishess, Katy notes that in the course of the film, although we see many chimpanzees from many angles, standing, sitting, running, whatever, we never see any ape genitals. This, if you've ever seen a chimpanzee, is a LARGE omission. See right. This isn't really a complaint. But once you notice what the movie is NOT showing you, you kind of have to laugh about it.

The characters, the writing, and (maybe) the acting were all terrible. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is inhabited by the dullest, flattest characters that I've seen in a movie in a long time. Let's play a game where we try to sum up all of the main human characters in one word each. This is like shooting fish in a barrel:

• Will: self-absorbed
• Will's girlfriend: pretty
• Will's dad: old
• Will's boss: bastard
• Will's neighbor: jerk
• Lab chimp expert: bearded
• Chimp shelter owner: amoral
• Chimp shelter handler no. 1: sadist
• Chimp shelter handler no. 2: stutters

There. That's everything you need to know about the human characters in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and you didn't even have to spend $7.50 and waste two hours of your life. The writing is just as bad. I think that the acting was pretty lousy too, but it was hard to tell. I mean, what were they supposed to do with those lines? "Will, you have to learn that there are some things that aren't meant to be changed." Seriously, that's the line that's supposed to fire up the protagonist to to re-examine his life's work? It's the turning point of the film! The big moment when Will realizes something about himself upon finally, irrevocably losing his father. And that's the best the screenwriter could do? It's so derivative! It's like the mad scientist version of "You just don't get it, do you?" If you're writing a screenplay, and you see this line in it, write harder! Say something interesting—anything interesting—instead! Ugh, my head hurts. I have to go soon.

In light of all this, it's almost irritating how good a job the director and Andy Serkis do in bringing the character of Caesar to life in mostly wordless scenes. Caesar is a compelling character. If this was the best script they could come up with, they should have striven harder for wordlessness.

Retiring the Joker, a Test Case in Uncoverability

I just wanted to post a quick link that has some relevance to the concept of uncoverability that I was writing about last week.

Apparently, a group of folks (purporting to be fans of Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight) are petitioning Warner Bros. to have the Joker retired from further film adaptations. Quoting from the CNN writeup:

Barbella said he thinks any new performance just won't be able to top Ledger's.

"He upgraded the character in a thrilling way," he said. "Although a lot of actors would love the chance to play the Joker, as Batman fans and now Heath Ledger fans, we think no one could ever perform it as well as he did."

Now obviously I'd be shocked if this particular campaign led to anything as official as a retirement of the Joker. But its proponents raise what appears to be a legitimate point: once this brand-renewal cycle for the Batman movie franchise runs its course, and some new upstart director gets it in his head to revive it again, would it be that shocking for him to voluntarily eschew the Joker character, given the outsize influence that Ledger had on the role? Imagine casting the Joker. Imagine directing the Joker. Imagine portraying the Joker for God's sake. Wouldn't you feel that what you were doing was somehow superfluous, and that somehow, the character was already locked down?

This has as much or more to do with the iconography that has grown up around Ledger and the Joker as a result of Ledger's death as it does with the unique quality of Ledger's performance, but I don't think that changes the truth of anything I've said here. Posthumously, Ledger's have become some very big shoes to fill, and, at least from where I stand now, it wouldn't surprise me if it takes a long time for another actor to try them on.

My Chemical Romance Covers Dylan: I Have an Opinion About That, and It's Not (Exactly) What You Think

I think it was Monday evening when Katy came home and told me that My Chemical Romance was contributing a cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to the soundtrack of the upcoming film, Watchmen. Before even hearing the song, I was nonplussed, and remained so afterwards. They tossed some verses, sped it up, applied their traveling circus style of buzzsaw guitar, lifted a riff straight out of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me," and got it down to 3 minutes. And they missed the boat entirely.

I should probably start by saying that although not my cup of tea, the problem is not that My Chemical Romance is contributing the cover. Katy owns two of their albums, I've listened to them, and I don't hate them as much as I'd expected that I would. At their best, they sort of succeed as a dark-ish party band; in some places they actually sound like a successor to Twisted Sister, not great praise necessarily, but not all bad either. My biggest complaint with them is that it seems to me that their lyrics could benefit from another several drafts before hitting the CD press.

My problem is also not the problem that a Dylan purist might have. That is, I think that most Dylan songs can and should be covered. In fact, off the top of my head I can name several covers of his songs that kick his album versions in the teeth and don't quit.

Anyway, those paragraphs were tangents. My problem is not with My Chemical Romance, and my problem is not that the Dylanography is inherently untouchable. My problem is with the choice of song itself; I propose that "Desolation Row" belongs in a class of songs which I will denote "Uncoverable."

In fairness, it was practically inevitable that any attempt to film Watchmen would involve a cover of "Desolation Row," since the graphic novel actually quotes the song. In that connection, I can't help but be reminded of the making-of previews for Watchmen, in which the director says, more or less, "A lot of people think of Watchmen as the unfilmable graphic novel." It just strikes me as interesting that in order to film the unfilmable graphic novel, you have to cover the uncoverable song. Poetic, kinda.

I've heard the concept of uncoverability floating around before. On Last.fm, I remember someone complaining about Johnny Cash's cover of U2's "One," saying effectively that the song was so personal to Bono that any attempt to cover it becomes automatically crass. That's not precisely what I have in mind. I think that a song is uncoverable when the original recorded performance is so radically idiosyncratic that it forces the potential cover artist into a catch-22: either he copies the idiosyncrasy, in which case it swallows up his own contribution to the project, making the cover redundant, or he ditches the idiosyncrasy, in which case everyone wonders what was the point of performing a song whose most interesting aspect has been extracted.

The best relatively contemporary example that I'm coming up with is Bush's "Glycerine." Uncoverable I say. Why? Because the arrangement is completely anomalous, and yet it works so well that a casual listener could hear the song a hundred times and never notice what it is that makes the music so haunting: no percussion. Only vocals, fuzzed-out electric guitar, and a string section. If you were inclined to cover "Glycerine," what would you do? Jettison the attributes that make it sui generis, by incorporating drums? Or play it straight, omit the percussion, and allow the song itself and its history to overpower your performance of it? (The tragic choice might be avoided through schtick, say, by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but I have in mind serious covers, and not parodies).

So what is the radical idiosyncrasy of "Desolation Row"? I suggest you download it from iTunes and see for yourself, but failing that, read on:

First, at 11 minutes, 20 seconds, it is a radically long song, even for Dylan. The first 9 minutes or so are comprised of a sequence of verses featuring characters from and allusions to various works of art, literature, fairy tale, mythology, scripture, and history. Cameos are made by Romeo and Juliet, Cain and Abel, Cinderella, Casanova, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the Phantom of the Opera, among others. Neither the melody nor the arrangement changes appreciably during this section, though changes in diction and emphasis will help to keep you interested. Each verse is essentially self-contained and unrelated to the others.

The other thing worth pointing out is that, while there are emotionally touching standouts (like the Ophelia verse), between one-quarter and one-third of the verses are absolute garbage from the perspective of being well-written or interesting or insightful. In particular I'm thinking of the verses beginning "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood..." and "At midnight, all the agents..." (Interestingly, that latter verse is the one quoted in Watchmen). It's perplexing then, at first, that those verses are there at all, since the song is already too long, and nobody would miss them if they'd been omitted, since they bear no real relation to the other parts.

Then, after all these verses, there is a harmonica interlude, and after it, a final verse, wherein we learn that the foregoing verses were all contained in a letter received by the speaker. The final verse is the speaker's response, and he's having none of it; in fact, he's bored, effectively mocking the audience for any enjoyment it might have derived in the previous ten minutes:

All these people that you mentioned,
Yes I know them—they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces,
And give them all another name.
Right now I can't read too good.
Don't send me no more letters, no,
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.

And that's when it hits you that the radical idiosyncrasies at work in this song are the peculiar chutzpah that it must take for an artist to pull this sort of time-wasting, tear-jerking prank on his audience, and the charisma it takes to make them feel satisfied even after the rug has been pulled neatly out from under them. Dylan knows that he can string you along until the end, maybe move you to the brink of tears, or convince you to sing along, just by employing that timeless, nasal/gravel/gargle he calls a voice (maybe the closest we modern English speakers can come to hearing Beowulf sung), sprinkling some good lines and verses in among the bad ones, and mostly by appealing to the audience's ego: "I've heard of Ophelia!" It's Menippean satire meets the Shaggy Dog Story. It's the take that makes you love getting took.

And that's why it can't be covered. Now that "Desolation Row" is a classic, chutzpah and charisma are no longer required in order to get away with it. But it's the chutzpah and charisma that made it a classic in the first place. The reasons that undergird your desire to cover it are the very reasons why you'll never be able to bring anything to it that is new or interesting or relevant or really very good at all. You shouldn't bother trying.