Film

Latent Miller

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

There is an appeal to the idea of being somewhere at the beginning, of wishing to live at that time and be involved in those things. The start of movements, the first iteration of a new art form, the establishment of a new mode of expression. We look up to those pioneers and imagine what it must have been like, and, if we’re honest, sometimes envy them the advantages they enjoyed by being first.

An illusion, of course. There was always something before them and what they did, even if the world paid too little attention to make it special. Those giants we praise were simply at the right place at the right time, when recognition coalesced around a particular example of an art that finally came—somewhat—into its own.

Whitney Scharer’s novel, The Age Of Light, offers some of that nostalgia. Quite a lot of it, really, as she deftly puts us into the heads of the principle players of the Surrealist days in Paris and takes us through events that more or less happened (the details of the behind-closed-doors bits remain speculative) to two of the emergent giants of the era—Lee Miller and Man Ray.

Outside certain circles, both names faded into the vagueries of Lost Generation narratives. Probably a lot of people recognize Man Ray, fewer Lee Miller, but they were central to what became 20th Century Photography. 

Scharer’s novel follows Lee Miller on her journey from high profile model to a want-to-be photographer in Paris. She’s young, naïve, hungry—and on the outside of the circles she wants very much to be part of. A chance encounter introduces her to Man Ray, who was already established as a notable professional photographer (though he wanted to be a painter) and she inserts herself into his life in order to learn. Famously, they became lovers, and it was one of the many tempestuous relationships that went on to fuel stories about that period and those artists from then on.

Lee Miller became an excellent photographer. She was a consummate professional, who was adept at a wide range of work, including fashion, which may be an easy surmise given her connection to that world from the other side of the lens. But she was also a war photographer, traveling through Europe during World War II and doing vital, unflinching work that included the liberation of death camps. The trauma of that period haunted her the rest of her life, but the work she produced is amazing. The only reason she has not been more widely known is likely the reason too many women in the arts get overlooked. 

But her reputation is rising once more with the advent of a new film starring Kate Winslett.

The Age Of Light  treats those later years in short inserts. The main focus of the novel is Miller’s years with Man Ray. Scharer gives us a deft, nuanced portrait of a woman who does not quite know her way into her own heart, but has an idea what direction she wants to go. The give and take, the surrenders, the sublimation to others, especially men, is the thread woven through the narrative, bringing us finally to the point at which Miller understands who she wants to be and decides not to be used anymore. Her portrait of Man Ray as talented but clueless male (who falls very deeply in love with Miller) is sympathetic while being clear-eyed about his faults and limitations. 

No one in this novel is uncomplicated.

But I want to highlight Scharer’s evocation of the period and the profession. As a once-upon-a-time professional photographer, I appreciated the work she put in to getting things right. Yes, there are a couple of mistakes, enough to make me wince, but they are minor compared with what I regard a successful realization of the magic and wonder of photography at that time. This was an art form that had a very difficult road gaining legitimacy in the larger art world. (Even in my youth, starting out, there were people who should have known better who never regarded it as an art.) That it caught the imagination of the Surrealists and the Paris art set is not surprising, but it is noted throughout that art photography never paid the bills. Man Ray and later Lee Miller had to do commercial work in order to make a living.

This is not, however, a nostalgic novel. The “glamor” of the times is subsumed in the austerity of the reality Scharer presents. While it may have triggered some wistful feelings in me (and presumably other photographers, especially of the pre-digital generations) it never wallows in any lost times soft-focus romanticism.

All in all, it is an excellent portrait of its subject. Nicely done. Brava.

Destroyer of Worlds

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Oppenheimer is powerful film. Perhaps it requires someone versed in science fiction to do something like this. The world changed when Trinity went off and the only art form that doggedly tackled the ramifications of that change was science fiction. Unleashing the power of the atom was transformative in ways most people at the time could not fathom. Since the introduction of that power was as a weapon, it is natural that people would be, at best, ambivalent about its potential. The way the country dealt with that over the next 15 years did little to ease people into this new reality. We were in the midst of the second Red Scare at the same time, so everyone’s nerve endings were constantly assaulted by things triggering panic.

What the film manages to do is convey that arc from the collapsing world order through the triumph of community action and the achievement of dedicated people to create something new down into the cesspool of post-war anxiety that poisoned everything. What begins as a youthful encounter with new physics on the cutting edge of revelation becomes the hardened pragmatism of survival (theory only takes you so far) and then disintegrates in the endemic distrust of men trying to contain something they categorically do not understand. The impossibility of isolating the discoveries of the American program becomes the paranoid insistence that no one can be trusted, turning the youthful dream into the nightmares of the guilty.

At the same time, we are treated to several well-placed mini-presentations of problem-solving and the nature of the subatomic realm as revealed by the drive to build The Bomb.

Cillian Murphy is amazing as Oppenheimer. We are treated to glimpses of many of the players involved, each distinct, and perhaps the fairest portrayal of General Groves in any dramatic presentation to date.

But the core of the film is that turn from one world—one kind of world—to another. The Trinity test is just past halfway in and much of the event occurs in eerie silence. Probably accurate, but as useful as that may be, it is the symbolism that strikes home. No word is spoken, no sound, either of bell or crying prophet, no whisper in the vacuum of transition. Nolan ties this together with an interaction at the beginning, a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a lake that is unheard (though tragically misinterpreted by the uninvolved witness), and revelation of what was said at the end. Just as in particle physics, we observe small interactions that ramify into huge consequences.

The scientists who were trying to caution the politicians that this was something for which they were woefully unequipped all seem to underestimate the venality of those with whom they must deal. Most of them, anyway. A few understood quite well and acted on their knowledge for both good and ill. Multiple tragedies emerge.

The movie leaves us with much to ponder, but it is we who must do so and conclude what we will. To say they should not have done what they did is pointless. Many of these people were condemned later, for a variety of reasons, early victims in the emerging world of cynical power management that characterized the post-war years.

And for all its excesses and over-the-top drama, it seems that science fiction was always the best tool for trying to cope with what happened after the genie emerged. Mutability is at the core of SF, mutation both subject and theme, and as absurd as some of it may have appeared to the general public, especially through the radiation scares of the Fifties, it has turned out to be more or less on the nose with respect to the cultural reactions. Which, finally, may be why the best dramatization of all this has come from someone who is familiar and skillful with the tools of SF.

Dust and Destiny

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I went to the theater—an Omnimax—to see Dune Part Two. The anticipation for this film since the first one has been a constant background hum. Other films so hungered for have more often than not disappointed. What could possibly live up to the self-generated hype?

My reaction? I was satisfied.

Oh, it was a thrill to watch, don’t get me wrong. For such a long picture, it flowed effortlessly by, feeling much shorter than its nearly three hours. Scene by scene built logically and solidly upon what went before and while everyone knew how it would end, the ending landed with an acceptable sense of resolution that nevertheless left the door open for the next one, but not in a frustrating way.

The changes from the novel mattered not at all. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is its own thing. Based as it is on legendary source material, a challenge for any filmmaker and one that often humbles lesser artists, Villeneuve was clearly not intimidated, but even so it would be hard to live up to over half a century of lore and cultish expectation. He succeeded by telling the core story in his own way and with a visual sensibility that supported his SFnal understanding.

The previous two attempts feel more than anything like run-ups to this.

Let me get this out of the way. David Lynch’s 1984 film is an epic miss. Lynch is not a science fiction guy, but a horror film maker, and it shows in what then were and remain odd choices for characterization. That said, he managed to get large chunks of it more or less right and for its day it was quite an achievement, but it did not flow well and Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul is a stiff suit filled with pronouncement. MacLachlan is a fine actor so I do not fault him. There were other choices Lynch made that with a slightly more SFnal attitude might have worked, but he kept giving us monsters. The underbudgeted SyFy Network production is underrated by too many. Whatever its other faults, it told the story much more smoothly and far more comprehensibly than the Lynch and some of the choices in cast and presentation were inspired. Paul was closer to what he ought to be, the Baron was closer to what we find in the novel, and on and on. (It failed mainly with Feyd, but then, who could beat Sting? Well…)

Villeneuve, if nothing else, gets science fiction. He seems to understand that it is not something you do by fixing up a contemporary sensibility with a couple of odd bits to make it strange, but that it is wholly strange. Other. He took the original Blade Runner, which is one of the best dozen SF films ever made, and immersed himself in the Otherness of it and produced a film that was fully science fiction. Arrival, which is the closest to a contemporary tableau as he has done in this vein, is all about the doorway into that Otherness and it does not try to reduce it to a suburban trope.

Now Dune.

Everything about this film is a masterclass in how to approach science fiction. And he treated the characters as real. Not mouthpieces. People caught up in enormities of process and disruption and groping for handholds and in their groping make the world different, whether they intend to or not. That is what makes it accessible. They become something other in the face of an ecology removed from contemporary sensibilities. That is what makes it science fiction.

The question, now that this masterpiece has arrived and we who have lived with the legendary attempts to turn a groundbreaking novel from the 1960s into a film, is: why Dune?

Descriptions of what Frank Herbert created have changed over the years. It was an ecological novel. It was a political novel. It is a novel about human-directed evolution. It is a novel about religious extremism. It is an attempt to produce the War and Peace of science fiction.

It is, of course, all of these things. But I think at its core it is a novel about hubris.

Every institution depicted in the novel takes on the accoutrements of final arbiter of human destiny. It is an imperial culture. It has divided its cultural anchors into those who deal with genetic lines and those who deal with technology and mathematics. Thinking machines are outlawed. Anything that might take such matters out of human hands has been eliminated or so constrained as to be powerless. Even transportation is the preserve of an elite. It is a classic Hellenistic culture in its defining customs. And it is a mercantilist society based on guaranteed monopolies, because only the elect can manage such power.

As the story opens, all these strains of self-professed competence are colliding with a break point no one can see because no one can see past their own sense of destiny. Hubris bound to a destiny is the most volatile combination in politics and religion and once those two things combine, you have a critical mass that can only explode.

Paul, at least in Villeneuve’s version, sees all this clearly, and yet cannot stop it. Because he discovers that “destiny” is the ultimate crowd-sourced motivator. In the end he makes the choice every leader in his position makes, which is to try to control it by succumbing to it.

It is one of the better examples of Greek tragedy science fiction has produced.

That is the most compelling thread of the films, the way Villeneuve shows us the inevitability of Paul’s choices as one by one his options disappear in the face of—destiny. Destiny that too many others want to see, others work to avoid, and the entire network of people and institutions around him have carefully constructed to reach, no doubt expecting a different outcome.

We can poke holes in Dune as a parlor game—the ecology doesn’t work, the history is missing important links, the choices the emperor makes are absurd, and on and on—but none of its flaws matter against the central idea of the cyclic tragedy of human-made destiny born of hubris. This is the feature that makes this story fascinating over multiple generations. (Lynch didn’t understand this and tried to turn Paul into a hero on a hero’s journey. He’s not and this isn’t. The SyFy version almost got it, but turned it into a “rise of the CEO” story and at the end the CEO has to step down when he can no longer “see.”)

For perhaps too many people, the affection for Dune rests on its novelties—the great sandworms, the desert vistas, the valiant guerilla fights attacking a much larger enemy, the idea of the Navigators who “fold space”—and for them, these films are a feast. Villeneuve sees science fiction, which in its own way has always been a visual art, urging us to see the future (which is why so many movies and television shows over the years have disappointed, with a few notable exceptions, because they always fell short of where the writers were taking us.) But even for them, that theme, those subtexts, act as hooks on the unconscious, which is why we’re obsessed over this story.

But to my reaction. Satisfied? Not thrilled? One can be thrilled at a flawed attempt, but never satisfied. Many not-great films are still fun to watch. But afterward, when contemplation begins…it has to satisfy to succeed. And this one? Yes, it satisfies.

Seeking Meaning In Sand

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have not yet seen the new film version of Dune. I may write about it after I do, although it is not the entire story. What I am interested in here is the ongoing obsession with the novel. This will be the third cinematic iteration. Famously, there are two uncompleted versions, one by Jodowrosky and another by Ridley Scott. We know how far the former came because there is a fascinating documentary about it, but as for Scott’s version there are mainly rumors and statements that he wanted to do one. Personally, I would have been interested to see that one—I very much like Ridley Scott’s palette: even those of his films that don’t quite work for other reasons I find wonderful to look at—and in some ways he has perhaps played around the edges of it through his Alien franchise. (The first film starts on a world that might have been Arakkis, the second is evocative of Gede Prime, the others keep returning to desert worlds, in theme if not setting. And Ripley becomes a kind of ghola as she is resurrected again and again.)

What is it about the original novel that compels the ongoing obsession, not only of filmmakers, but of fans? (There would be no funding for the films if the audience were not so large and committed. That speaks to the book.)

The history of the novel is something of a publishing legend, like other groundbreaking books. Multiple rejections, ultimate publication, often in a limited way, and a growing audience over years. Dune was famously rejected something like 27 times before finally being taken up by a publisher better known for automobile manuals.

It was, however, serialized in one of the top science fiction magazines, Analog, so dedicated SF readers were the first to encounter it, and doubtless formed the primary audience. I remember reading the ACE paperback from the late Sixties. Its impact on me was almost too large to detail.

I was used to science fiction novels being under 200 pages—average then was 160. From the Golden Age forward you rarely found one more than 250 pages. Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein was an outlier at 408 in its first hardcover incarnation. So here I find this massive book more like the so called classics I’d been reading—Dickens, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy—crammed into the cover of a mass market paperback which included a glossary and indexes, explanatory material (every bit as fictional as the main narrative). It felt important. I was 14, it was dense, I struggled through it. (It led to a profound teaching moment in how to read which I’ve written about elsewhere.) I could feel my horizons expand, even though at the basic level of story it was no more or less fascinating than most other good science fiction novels I had read. But it opened possibilities for narrative depth.

A handful of other novels came out around that time that exploded the confines of the thriller-format SF had been kept to—John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up; Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness; and the coming rage for trilogies (many of which were single narratives published economically in three volumes). By the mid-Seventies publishing had changed to accommodate a new idea of what an SF novel could be, including expanded length to include what has become known as World Building (a technique which in some instances supplanted more important aspects of fiction). Not all by itself, but certainly as a point of history, Dune helped make this possible by creating a market for fuller expositions and more detailed construction. This alone might make it significant.

But that alone would not have made it a perennial seller, almost constantly in print ever since. If Frank Herbert had written nothing else, Dune would have made his career.

It was followed up by two more—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune—completing a cycle. That first trilogy stands as a unified work. The second two books are plot-driven indulgences, but not superfluous. The second trilogy…publishing had discovered by then that science fiction could be best-selling fiction and a frenzy of large advances and high-profile publications mark the late Seventies and early Eighties. Herbert’s publisher enabled him to indulge himself with a second trilogy that often leaves people puzzled. But it kept the spotlight on the primary work.

David Lynch’s movie enlarged the audience again. That film, by a director with a certain reputation for examining the macabre oddnesses of humanity, is a spectacular curiosity. It is a mixed bag of brilliance and weird choices.

Then came a modestly-budgeted miniseries on the SyFy Channel, which went on to include the second two novels. It did a much better job of telling Herbert’s story. The chief complaints seem to be the results of that budget (and that Sting did not reprise the role of Feyd Rautha). It gets dismissed too readily, as if the world were waiting for the “real” cinema treatment.

Which we now, by all accounts, have.

As I say, I have not seen it yet. I want to address the book and its seeming tenacity.

One of the things Herbert did was lace his tale with wise-sounding profundities in the form of aphorisms and epigrams. Each chapter starts with a quote from some serious work by the presumed chronicler of the hero’s life. They sound like quotes from works like the I Ching or SunTzu’s Art of War. This was not a new trick when Herbert did it, but he was particularly adept at it in this book. It is a far future in which, presumably, philosophy has transformed along with everything else. The quasi-feudal politics and economics are given a veneer of newness this way, as if to signal that while it looks like something one would find in the 12th Century, it is not quite the same thing, but you have to take the author’s word for it, because it is the future. The quotes set an aesthetic tone that, among other things, allows us to assume something else is going on instead of just the same old historical thing. In science fiction, veneers matter—they work like orchestrations in a symphony, selecting the right instrument for the right phrase, coloring it. (Veneers should never be mistaken for the story or the theme, which is something unobservant critics do all the time.)

Seriousness established, every significant decision becomes inhabited by purpose, meaning, resonance, and a justification that raises the level of what we read almost to that of destiny, certainly of mythmaking. With this, the writing itself need not be spectacular, just functional.

There are passages in Dune that are breathtaking in what they describe. The ecological aspects of the novel, while in some ways absurd in terms of actual science, take on the same immanence as anything the actors possess. In a way, Dune is one of the first terraforming novels, embracing the idea that human action can transform an entire world. (A couple of years later, we see much more of this, often more pointedly, as in works like Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest—again, the novel opens up a field of possibilities, or at least prepares an audience for more of the same.)

But the characters are hard to relate to—this is a story about archetypes and aristocrats in conflict with emperors and churches. The ordinary people get lost amid the giant legs of the SF manifestations of Greek Heroes. We read this novel for the plot and world and the political revelations. We become engaged because this is in important ways a Lawrence of Arabia story—one toxically mixed with Faust. We read it because we are aware that gods and deserts change the world.

We read it because, as well, we are enamored of the idea of Enlightenment in a Pill.

Herbert was always working in the fields of mind-altering drugs—possibly his best and most relatable novel in this vein is The Santarroga Barrier—and with Melange, the Spice, he created the ultimate in mind-expanding temptations. Its use gives humanity (and others) the universe. Time and space can be brought to heel with it. Visions, prophecies, and clarity are on offer. But it is the ultimate Faustian bargain, for its loss will destroy everything.

It is aptly named. Melange, a mixture of often incongruous elements. A mess, if you will, but messes can evoke wonder, even seem beautiful.

At the heart of this Faustian conundrum are the Fremen, patterned after the Bedu of the Middle East. They are trapped on a world with profoundly limited resources and must be kept that way for the benefit of the rest of the universe. Not quite slaves, but certainly not masters of their own world. Freeing them courts disaster—because part of that freedom entails remaking their world, making it wet. Water, though, is poison to the giant worms that produce the Spice.

Trap after trap after trap populates the novel. Disaster looms. The plot compels.

And of course the relevance to our reality could not be plainer. The teetering sets of balances, all of them with ethical pitfalls, allow Dune to remain trenchant, relevant, challenging. Added to this is the clear connection to the Greek tragedians (especially in the second trilogy—I suggest boning up on Aeschylus and Euripedes before trying them) which gives the book its ongoing frustration of clear, ethical resolution. (And cleverly he took the possibility of building machines that might aid people in their problem-solving off the table, by outlawing thinking machines. It’s all on us and what we bring to the game.)

A final thread woven through the book that seems to make it constantly popular is that it is a coming-of-age story that contains a biting critique of privilege. Whatever Paul might want to be for himself, he is born into a web of expectations that impose their demands from all sides, making any choice he might make impossible outside of a constructed destiny. The adolescent struggling to make sense of the world and find a way to live in it, thinking if only he were god and could command everything to be rational or at least amenable. Paul’s tragedy is that he in fact can become god—and then discovering that this is no solution, either.

How well this new movie deals with all this, I look forward to seeing. For the moment I simply wanted to examine some of the reasons this novel continues to find audiences and why so many filmmakers are drawn to it. The elements it contains transcend the limitations from which it suffers. But whatever the case, this is a novel that allows readers to find meaning—whether that meaning is in the novel or not.

Strange New Worlds

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Fifty-five years ago a television show appeared that changed everything.

it didn’t seem like it at the time. It was clumsy, but for the time it was a marvel of production values. The scripts were occasionally tortured constructs, the characters stiff, the plots absurd. It lasted three seasons, got canceled, and drifted into the twilight zone of fondly-remembered might-have-beens.

Then fandom took over, kept it alive, and eventually it was revived. Not in the way of retreads, as those we see today—reboots that quite often, though with better production values, are not exactly new—but in a resumption. We’ve gotten used to some of this today, what with franchise switching from one network to another, evading cancellation. We’ve even gotten used to quality reboots.

But Star Trek was the first to do all this successfully, in several incarnations.

I recently finished viewing the third season of Star Trek: Discovery and then began a rewatch of the original series. It has become the thing to do to make fun—usually mild fun—of the original, especially Shatner’s over-acting, but also the inconsistency of the universe, the poor special effects, all the flaws that pretty much any television show back then suffered from. And yes, compared to now, the show lacks. But there is a remarkable familial consistency between them. In 1966 Gene Roddenberry helmed a work of fiction that came to exist well outside the confines of the screen. Most of the fare of the day only ever existed during its broadcast window and inside the square of the picture tube. The Federation, in other words, was real.

We’re used to this in written fiction—novels and short stories. World-building that offers the heft and texture of a real place is expected. Television was not like that. The ephemeral nature of the product may have contributed to the attitude that only so much work need be done to make what ended up on the screen serve for a half-hour or hour of viewing. Cancellation was right around the corner. Even those shows with unusual longevity usually relied on the viewers to fill in whatever extended aspects were needed. The Old West was a mythical place most people already believed in. Crime shows only needed the daily news to lend that kind of weight to the stories.

In science fiction is was unprecedented on television. Star Trek offered the kind of substantive world that readers of science fiction had encountered for decades. Despite the awkwardness of some of the episodes, that was the thing that drew many of us. Almost from the first episode, we tuned in to a place different from our world that felt almost as real.

It was a remarkable achievement, one that made possible the best of SF tv that came after. The lesson was hard-learned and it took a few decades, but it was the important element.

As to the rest…Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, the Enterprise, Starfleet—none that would have made any lasting impact without that world.

And about them. They reflected other trios of characters in other shows, most notably (to me, at least, others may have different examples) the principals in Gunsmoke. Matt Dillon, Festus, and Doc. And when you watch, really watch, the acting was superb. It had to be. They were required to convey “belonging” in a world quite alien to ours. Their actions had to seem natural for that context. They had to speak dialogue that would make no sense anywhere else. When McCoy waxes empathetic about the past barbarities of medicine, it conveys several things at once, about the future of medicine, about the sentiment attached to his profession, about the history that has elapsed within the show’s reference between then and now, hence providing actual historical context, not to mention McCoy’s heart and his attitude.

Even Shatner’s performances are less bombastic than the jokes would seem to suggest. The byplay between Kirk and Spock is rather remarkable.

And Nimoy…

One felt it possible to step through the screen and live there, because there would be a There to live in.

Once the franchise was revived, first in the films and then in a new series (Next Generation), the extent of that creation began to manifest more clearly. For 55 years now we have been exploring the Strange New Worlds of that universe. That each new series manages to be as impressive as they are, it becomes even clearer that Star Trek has become a dialogue generator. I mean in the philosophical sense. It puts questions to us that need answers—not for then, not for the 23rd or 24th Centuries, but for Now. The philosophical challenges of the franchise have brought about a massively useful conversation. At the center of it is, perhaps, a simple question that may seem minor: what does it mean to be human? Yes, this is a core question in most if not all drama, but in the case of science fiction it takes on added weight because we find actual representations of different possibilities of Human. And in Star Trek we have a popular forum for that question, asked in that way, in a medium that reaches a much larger audience.

What we learn is that Human has no single, concrete definition—but whatever it is, it seems to be realer than anything else.

Exploring that question…well, that’s the real Five Year Mission, isn’t it? Therein we find the strange new worlds.

Clearly, it has not been, nor cannot be, limited to just five years.

Cinema Versus ‘Theme Parks’

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema.  Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Martin Scorcese said that in an interview about Marvel superhero movies. The observation has sparked some controversy. A lot of people heard him trashing their favorite form of movie, others—including Francis Ford Coppola—found resonance with his statements.

The part of his statement I disagree with is the part that I hear every time someone from the literary world suggests science fiction is not “real” literature—because it doesn’t deal with humans experiencing authentic emotions in a meaningful context. In its own way, Mr. Scorcese has recast the classic dismissal of science fiction and fantasy in regards to film.

To which I would say, “Care to justify that in terms of cinema as a whole?” It can be argued, I think, that the gangster film on which Scorcese made his reputation is not a milieu about ordinary people having emotional experiences in common with their audience, but about a distinct subset of humanity that distorts itself into an extreme condition to pit itself against the world. Their experience are by definition, at least in cinema, going to be over-the-top, magnified, and at odds with the common. The backgrounds are likewise going to be exaggerated and often surreal, set-pieces to support encounters of violence and passions pared down by adrenaline to caricatures of ordinary daily experience. They “entertain” for precisely those factors that for two hours remove us from our mundane lives and give us entreé into lives we will (hopefully) never take part in. The point of them is to allow a vicarious experience completely out of the ordinary.

They are anchored to us by asking “How would we react in the same circumstances?” and honestly following the thread of answers to what connects these people to us.

But the characters themselves, while often despicable, are extraordinary.

As are the characters of the gunslinger, the private detective, the cop, the soldier, the knight, the barbarian, etc.

It is their extraordinariness that attracts us, holds our attention, and carries us along through unlikely adventures to, one hopes, a satisfying and cathartic conclusion.

How is that any different than what we see in Captain America? Iron Man? Thor?

Oh, they come from the worlds of science and fantasy and wield unusual abilities.

So, once again, because they appear to us in the context of science fictional settings and offer challenges outside historical experience, they are not legitimate cinema…

To an extent, Scorcese has a point. They do offer “theme park” rides. It takes a rather extraordinary film like Winter Soldier or, stepping to a different franchise, Wonder Woman to see the genuine human story beneath the glossy, glitzy, hyper-realized settings, but it’s there. And for those films that fail to deliver that human element, well, it’s not that they aren’t cinema, they’re just bad cinema.

But “cinema” has always indulged the exotic, the novel, the visually unique to achieve what may be argued to be its primary advantage as a medium. The full embrace of the exotic cannot be used to reclassify certain films as “not cinema” because they utilize exactly that potential.

No, this is another version of reaction to a genre distinction because you don’t get it.  It’s the reason several excellent SF films failed to find notice with the Academy for years because they were that “spacey kid stuff.” Now good SF is finally being recognized by the Academy, leaving the position of poorly-regarded declassé genre in need of a new resident, and in this instance Mssrs Scorcese and Coppola elect the big superhero franchises.

Let’s face it—there have always been superhero films. Dirty Harry is a species of superhero, as is Jason Bourne and James Bond. Chuck Norris and Steven Segal have made their share of superhero films. And when you think about it, just about any Western where the hero faces impossible odds and wins is a superhero film. One could go down the list and find just cause to name any number of historical or quasi-historical epics as members of that club. Robin Hood is a superhero. The Lone Gunman story is a species of superhero film. And these all draw from various mythologies that are readily accessible as superhero stories. Hercules, Cuchulain, Gilgamesh, Samson…

Of course these films are cinema. Just as science fiction is literature.

You just have to speak the language.

The Downside of Expanded Participation?

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It occurred to me the other day that there is a serious problem with the way audiences and films interact these days. It’s a relatively new problem, one that has grown up with social media, but it has roots in an older aspect of film production, namely the test screening. The idea being that before a general release, a film is shown to select audiences to gauge reactions and tweak the final cut before it is set free into the zeitgeist.  There’s logic to it, certainly, but I’ve always been uncomfortable with it because it’s an attempt to anticipate what should be an honest reaction to a work of art.  I try to imagine Rembrandt showing a painting to a client halfway or two-thirds finished and, depending on the reaction, going back to change it to conform to some inarticulate quibble on the part of someone who has no idea what should be on the canvas. Art, to a large extent, is a gamble, and test screenings are the equivalent of loading the dice or counting cards.

It’s understandable, of course, because a movie is not a painting done by one person, but a hugely expensive collaborative work with investors and questions of market share. But it still bothers me. (What if a test audience had complained that Bogey didn’t get Bergman at the end of Casablanca and the studio went back to change it to suit?)

Today there’s another phenomenon that is related to test audience but is even more invasively surreal. The pre-assessment by fans ahead of release. Sometimes years ahead.

This obsessive speculation has evolved into a form of semi-creative wheel-spinning that mimics a huge test audience, the key difference being that it is “testing” work not yet done. Fanfic seems to be part of this, but only as a minor, and apparently undervalued aspect. We have a large, active community engaged in predetermining what will, should, ought not, and might happen in forthcoming movies. Large enough and active enough that I believe it has affected how those movies are made, possibly unconsciously. The feedback loop is pernicious. The vindictiveness of the test audience can also be so severe as to impact decisions that have yet to be taken up.

The most visible way this has manifest—and this varies from franchise to franchise—is in the “look” of new films, especially in the effects, but also in the selection of cast, location, and choreography. Whether intentional or not, film makers pump things into next productions in an attempt to meet the expectations of this hypercritical superorganism.

This organism constructs alternate narratives, raises possible plot lines, critiques character development, and then, when the finished product fails on some level, engages in the kind of evisceration that cannot but give the creators pause to rethink, check themselves, question (often pointlessly) every choice made to that time.

I’m not sure this process happens at any conscious level, but it seems to mean the Doc Smith approach to bigger, splashier, louder, stranger films, at least in the Marvel and DC universes, and to a lesser extent the related products like Valerian or any given Bruce Willis vehicle of late, is a response to this incessant viral nattering. The anticipatory critical response must get through and affect the people in the main office.

Television has suffered less of this, it seems, because, at least in terms of story, these series suffer less from the kind of crippling second-guessing the motion pictures display.

Before all this near-instantaneous data back-and-forth, studios produced movies, people may have known they were being made, but little else got out to the general public until the trailers announcing upcoming releases. Based on those, you went or didn’t, and the movie was what it was, and you either liked it or didn’t. We were not treated to weekly box-office reports on news broadcasts. The films, with few exceptions, had a two-week first release run at the front line theaters, then moved down the hierarchy for one or two week engagements at smaller chains until they ended up at a tiny local theater, after which they vanished until popping up on tv at some point. You then went to the next and the next and the next. Choice was addressed by the fact that at any one time there might be a dozen new movies coming to the theaters a month. The film was what the producers made it. It was offered, you saw it, you took your response home, that was it.

A lot of the product was mediocre, but often reliably entertaining, and for the most part was made in a way that studios were not threatened with bankruptcy if they failed.  The really great ones came back from time to time or enjoyed extended runs in the theaters.

Fandom evolved and when the age of the internet dawned and the cable industry grew and the on-demand availability of movies was met by videotapes (later DVDs) and now streaming services, the products remained in front of self-selected audiences all the time.

This has changed the way these films are made. Not altogether to the bad, I hasten to add. I believe we’re passing through a kind of golden age of high quality films and certainly exceptional television.

But the budgets, the tendency to ignore better stories that lack the kind of epic myth-stuff of the major franchises, the endless bickering online and subsequently in conversations everywhere, and now this absurd war on what is, for wont of a better term, SJW content…

I can’t help it. Grow up.  So Doctor Who is a woman. Big deal. The character does not belong to you. Instead of chafing that some reification of idealized masculinity in being threatened, try just going with it and see where it takes you. That’s the whole purpose of storytelling! To be remade by narrative and offered a new view! To be challenged out of your day-to-day baseline assumptions!

Star Wars has been ruined by all the SJW crap! Really?

While I can see that discussion groups and this expanded dialogue can be fun and instructive, I think an unintended consequence has been to grant certain (very loud) people a sense of ownership over what is not theirs. The cacophony of anticipatory disappointment actually has a dampening effect on those of us who would simply like to be surprised and delighted all on our own.  There is utility in silence, purpose in the vacuum, a vacuum to be filled by a new film. Box office is (or can be) detrimentally affected by the chattering carps of disillusioned fan critics who are terrified of James Bond becoming black, of Thor being turned into a woman, of the Doctor showing us how gender prejudice applies in our own lives.

I’ve been disappointed with new manifestations of favorite characters in the past, don’t get me wrong. My response has been to turn to something else. Those characters don’t belong to me, I don’t have a right to expect their creators to do what I think they should, and I recognize that probably a whole lot of people are just fine with a new direction. Otherwise sales figures would push them to change it again. it’s the pettiest of sour grapes to try to preload a rejection in advance of actually seeing the product.

I have no numbers to back up my impression, but I think it worth considering that the “my life will end unless the next movie comes out exactly the way I want it” school of anticipatory criticism is having a distorting effect over time, both on the product and on the ability of audiences to simply encounter something “clean” and take a personal and unmitigated response away from it.

Just a thought.

Star Wars and Reality

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Back in 1977, Samuel R. Delany—perhaps one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th Century, certainly conceptually in the top 10 of any honest assessment—wrote a review of the first Star Wars film for Cosmos magazine. In it he pointed out that the universe George Lucas had given us was essentially caucasian, largely midwestern, and predominantly male. While Princess Leia was without a doubt one of the more subversive cinema creations in SF—definitely not a princess, kick-ass, occasionally crude, with all the can-do anyone could possibly want from men with the Right Stuff—she was the only female in the movie other than the tragically short-lived Aunt Ru and the odd extra in the command center on the rebel base.

To quote from his review:

“Sometime, somewhere, somebody is going to write a review of Star Wars that begins: ‘In Lucas’s future, the black races and the yellow races have apparently died out and a sort of mid-Western American (with a few South Westerners who seem to specialize in being war ship pilots) has taken over the universe. By and large, women have also been bred out of the human race and, save for the odd gutsy princess or the isolated and cowed aunt, humanity seems to be breeding quite nicely without them…’

“When these various reviews surface, somebody will no doubt object (and we’ll recognize the voice; it’s the same one who said, earlier, ‘…it’s got a good, solid story!’) with a shout: ‘But that’s not the point. This is entertainment!’

“Well, entertainment is a complex business. And we are talking about an aspect of the film that isn’t particularly entertaining. When you travel across three whole worlds and all the humans you see are so scrupiously caucasian and male, Lucas’s future begins to seem a little dull. And the variation and invention suddenly turn out to be only the province of the set director and special effects crew.

“How does one put in some variety, some human variety? The same way you put in your barrage of allusions to other films, i.e., you just do it and don’t make a big thing.

“To take the tiniest example: wouldn’t that future have been more interesting if, say, three-quarters of the rebel pilots just happened to have been Oriental women—rather than just the guys who didn’t make it onto the Minnisota Ag. football team. It would even be more interesting to the guys at Minnisota Ag. This is science fiction after all.

“[…]

“In the film world in the present, the token woman, token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile their smiles with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of that variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.”

–Samuel R. Delany’s review of Star Wars in Cosmos, 1977

In the wake of The Force Awakens he noted that at the time of the above-quote review, he received almost 2 lbs of hate mail.  Even then, the splenetic refusal to countenance any intrusion of reality into this realm was seen as a violation not to be tolerated by a perversely-attuned minority.  (I find it interesting that he apparently received  no mail in support of his viewpoint.)

No, you cannot use all the weird aliens to excuse the absence of a diverse human presence, because everyone knows they are completely fictional and represent nothing other than window-dressing required to make this a space epic. The film was made by and for human consumption and should speak to us. If you make a film in the given world, be it contemporary or a historical piece, you cast it according to the story you’re telling and are constrained by history, location, and so forth as to how it looks, but this is science fiction and ought to reflect “humanity” in all its variety, because we decide what the story is and what the parameters are.

The whiteness of the original Star Wars is a failure of imagination. Maybe not a conscious one, but the fact that the default failed to include a panorama of humanity is a worse indictment of assumed cultural limits than had it been an overt bit of propagandistic racist fantasy.

The fact is, not many of us noticed back in the day.

Now that the new generation of Star Wars films is indulging that overlooked variety, we all may, however briefly, feel a twinge at the oversight way back when.

Samuel L. Jackson’s casting as one of the putative heads of the Jedi Order was bearable to certain people because, like Leia, he was only one example and as a singular instance could be excused or even ignored. And of course the Natalie Portman character was another Leia, and she was only one. This has always been done in instances like this—only one. Avoid the suggestion that this might be common or acceptable across the whole spectrum of a culture. We can have the one-off female competent, self-made, boss, what have you. The one-off minority as well.

But when more than half the humans you see on the screen are not white…

So some folks are bleating and writing nasty things and all but demanding that All Those People Be Banished because they disturb the unexamined pool of privileged self-deluded unearned superiority lying at the center of their being, their sense of Who They Are.  (Note, most of this complaining is done in camouflage, cloaked as a gripe about supposed SJW intrusions.)

The rest of us feel our instance of embarrassed realization and then move on to the next level of enjoying what is now on the screen with a kind of “Well, of course” reaction.

We saw a similar reaction from certain quarters to Ann Leckie’s apparently unsettling pronoun shift in her Ancillary novels, as well as commensurate screels of pain as women and minorities swept SF awards in the last few years. The kind of thing one might expect from sports fans when their team losses—or simply doesn’t show.

The initial reassessment—for most of us, I hope—settles into a new standard of acceptance, we sit back, strap in, and enjoy the ride with a new vantage available. For some, the unease never seems to abate.

In this, it would seem that reactions to the human diversification in the Star Wars universe tracks real-world reactions to being confronted with racial and gender disparities. Most people wince a little, take a moment or two to accommodate a revised paradigm, and then move on to the important aspects of what is on the screen. This is both good and bad—good, because it suggests people are generally adaptable and willing to expand their sphere of appreciation to include previously overlooked or excluded groups and “normalize” their presence; bad, because such normalization can result in a false conclusion that such exclusions or oversights are “fixed” and we need not worry about them anymore.

A process which has brought us to our current awkward point in the history of human justice.

But we’re talking about Star Wars here and with that in mind I want to examine the cutting conclusion Delany made in his original review of the first movie—that the white palette in which it was painted was, in the end, dull, a failure of imagination. Bad science fiction.

There is a subcategory of SF which deals with apocalyptic scenarios and for many decades one of the chief features has been the downfall of Western Civilization, often in the face of a newly-dominant Eastern polity. For that, read White losing to Non-white. You can choose your starting point. Maybe Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column. But the literature is filled with it. The plucky resistance is almost always white, generally some form of American. Now, it’s not fair to blame any given example for the consequences of the whole, but this trend has informed a larger dialogue that has to do with unexamined cultural and racial assumptions. While in any given example arguments for the soundness of the premise can be made, collectively they make a powerful argument that White equals Good and Not White equals either helpless, evil, or stupid, probably all three together.

One of the most powerful images in these new Star Wars films is that the Bad Guys are all white. If that isn’t clear just from the maskless humans on-screen, the storm troopers have always been white, and one of the more subversive messages throughout the film series has been the idea that the storm troopers are clones—not just white (symbolically—the uniforms subsume any secondary racial variances Fett may have exhibited, the ultimate colonial dominance) but all the same down to their DNA. And that this model fails.

Snoke? Who can say? Post-syphilitic, corrupted madman, with pale eyes and the sallow skin of the very ill. All the rest of the leadership of the First Order is white.

They abandoned the clone model for storm troopers and opted for direct brainwashing, apparently, which fails, apparently. But the only storm trooper who claims his own identity and leaves to join the rebellion is…not white.
There is, especially in this new film, an aggressive advocacy that the usual heroes are not the ones we’re looking for. And Luke Skywalker’s deconstruction of the Jedi as not only a useless but dangerous legend during his session with Rey ought to have driven the message home.

But I would like to address the criticism that, essentially, past iterations of Star Wars have displayed a marked lack of imagination in key respects. Personally, I find them fun on a twelve-year-old level. Compared to films like Blade Runner or the more recent Arrival, this franchise is intellectually and even thematically weak tea. I’ve always contended that they are not, in any significant sense, science fiction at all, but fantasy decked out in SF accoutrements. Even so, the pretense of science fiction seems to have forced the films to be, from time to time, quite subversive of the classic fantasy, starting right off the bat with Leia, who is anything but a damsel. In the first three films she continually defied the stereotypes and refused to be a victim.

But that self-possession has now been expanded to become a norm of this universe, so none of the women, who are now everywhere, adhere to stereotypes, and this is when the wolves of conformity and privilege begin to howl. We have always had examples of the lone exception and they have even been applauded, but when we see what had been an exception normalized, then the assumptions of privilege come under threat.

And they come under threat because they have usually gone unchallenged. It may be the surprise at being shown this side of things that causes the unfortunate reaction, but if we’re talking about science fiction, even the pretense of it, this should be a welcome revelation rather than motive to retreat into the ordinary safety of unrecognized exclusion. You don’t want to be made aware of the problems associated with being a thinking, feeling human being living in the world? Then why are you even a fan, however tepidly, of science fiction? Because SF has always been about dislodging assumptions in the real world via the fulcrum of the SFnal world deployed.

Granted, for the most part it has been a relatively safe way to confront such things, because the field of revelation is usually not ours. It’s the future, out in space, on another world, and in this case in a galaxy far, far away. But that’s never been why it possessed power, because the whole point was to imagine a different reality, one we could conceivably enter.

The question then becomes, if that’s the cool part, why would it bother anyone that some of the most discardable aspects of our given world would be dispensed in a speculative milieu where we might, presumably, do better? Why would anyone want that world to be a preserve for the petty absurdities of this world? And if that’s what you’re looking for, well, then perhaps you don’t understand the nature of the thing you profess to love so much that you would turn it into a gated community with covenants to keep Those People out. Or merely in Their Place.

Do I think we will no longer have racism in the future? No. But I can imagine.

Because if our imagined dreams someday come true, we will meet real aliens, and in that moment we will have to understand that we’re all human and the minor variations among us will be one of our greatest strengths. To continue to insist that those variations are somehow unacceptable to express as human and normal in a film made today and are important enough to become outraged at their portrayal shows a profound lack of imagination.

Cannibale Verité

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 4 Comments

Stories live inside stories. Like Matryoshki dolls, they nest inside each other. The walls are permeable, the delineations indistinct, and viscera moves from one to another to another, and so, osmotically, verisimilitude emerges with reference and resonance. We recognize the truth of stories because they remind. Even when we’ve never heard that particular story before, the lexical and symbolic soup, sometimes called culture, we swim in makes certain elements part and parcel of what we recognize as truth.

Fiction depends on this mantle of story sediment. The better a writer understands the essential reality of the material, the more potent the experience is for the reader. The more we identify with character, connect with setting, and surrender to the flow of the narrative, the more substantive is the story and the truer it feels.

It’s a risky thing for a writer to make the nesting itself part of the story, to show the workings of narrative baldly, like pulling away the curtains on the machinery of the narrative and make it one of the surface elements. Like a magician explaining the trick as it is being performed, the only thing that can save the experience from the failure of banality is if the exposition of form enhances the total experience.

For example, Kea Wilson’s new novel, We Eat Our Own, from the first line exposes its inner workings and makes us complicit in the construction of the experience. The second-person present tense is like a set of instructions. She not only is telling the character what is happening but she is showing us how the inevitable accrues and acquires momentum.

Frightening momentum, in this case.

A young actor, struggling, in 1979, accepts a role in a film being shot in the Columbian rainforest. It’s an Italian horror film, being made by a director with a long list of credits and a certain reputation. This is his first film done on location. Our actor is a last-minute addition because the first American actor they hired would not even get on the plane after reading the script. The director needs an American, preferably an unknown.

In a fine stroke, Wilson keeps the actor’s name from us, eventually referring to him only by his character name. Already we are descending into the caverns of nested narratives. Like Dante who got lost in a dark wood and found his way into Hell, our actor takes the part and gets lost in a dense forest. And because of the way Wilson has chosen to tell her story, not only are we privy to the hell into which he descends, we know how he’s going and are powerless to prevent it.  In fact, we don’t want to prevent it, because we are hungry to know what he does when he realizes where he is.

It’s not all told this way. There are third person stretches, past tense, present tense, and a heady dance of omniscient viewpoint throughout. All of which serves to bring us, layer by layer, into the central theme that carries through the novel like humidity or mosquitoes. Wilson is exploring the way in which we feed on each other. Indeed, how we depend on a kind of food chain of the soul in order to know not only who we are but what we ought to do and where we need to be. For some, those who have a tenuous grasp on self-knowledge to begin with, the cannibalism can take on aspects of gluttony, draped in byzantine rituals designed to keep us blind to our own dysfunctions.

Like our actor, who asked repeatedly to be shown pages, a script, told what his character is supposed to be doing and, most importantly, why—but is repeatedly refused, and in fact looked upon with annoyance because he needs to know. He doesn’t.  But it’s not just his part in this bizarre movie (which involves cannibalism, of course) of which he is ignorant. He has no clue about much of anything.

The assembled production company, cut off from civilization (because a phone line has yet to be run to the town outside of which they’re shooting), stumbles and reels through the whims and impulses of the director, who seems to have a clear idea what he wants but won’t tell anyone what it is. (At one point, during a trial, being asked to defend his film and the risks he took with his people, he demands”Did it frighten you?”)

Into the mix we discover a group of young revolutionaries set up nearby.  They are involved in kidnapping and extortion and have an arrangement with a drug cartel. They need money to fund their grandiose dreams of overthrowing the government and instituting a Marxist state. Maybe.

More layers, more stories, all intersecting, bleeding through each other, fertilizing, polluting, transforming.  Reading Wilson’s prose is like listening to freeform jazz, where everything reaches a point of apparent chaos and then, with startling precision, comes together to create a very precise, rich effect.

Fake deaths, real deaths, soul death, murder, suicide, and the headlong pursuit of a path chosen because, in the end, it seemed like the path available, work hand in glove with the revealed structure of the book to drag us into it in such a way that recognizing an essential aspect of human nature—or our nature—is impossible to avoid.  Wilson shows us the costs of not knowing and the painful necessity of making choices n the face of too little information and too much expectation. Of ourselves and others.

I said this is a new novel.  It is also, impressively, a first novel.  It does not feel like a first novel. It feels like the mature work of someone who understands human nature and sees how the structures we inhabit prompt choices often tragic and surreal.

In the end, that question lingers:  did it frighten you?

It’s about humans on the edge, making art and chaos.

Yes, it did.

…Behind Door Number…

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

After viewing Ex Machina I sat in a bit of a daze wondering what it was I’d just seen.  Stylish, well-acted, the now-expected seamless special effects, and a story with pretensions to significance.

The next day, I spoke to a good friend about it, who has also written about its flaws, and came to the conclusion that the film is not at all what it seems to want to be. In fact, it may be the perfect demonstration of style over substance.

It would be easy to see the film as a misogynistic attempt to intellectualize adolescent cluelessness, and certainly there is that in it, but perhaps that doesn’t go far enough.  Misanthropic may be more accurate.  It has nothing good to say about anyone or anything.  The chopper pilot may be innocent, he’s just doing his job, but once Caleb lands and approaches the isolated superhouse of his employer, Nathan, sympathy for anything human vanishes and we’re treated to a narrow, pseudo-socratic disquisition on how stupid people can be, even with high I.Q.s and a lot of money.

But it is smooth, it is elegantly filmed, and the acting is convincing, and the soul-searching seems genuine, and the robot is so enticing. It feels superior. It says smart things, makes fascinating assertions, but all in the least engaging manner possible.  Instead of actually dealing with the presumptive subject—strong A.I.—we are treated to a reboot of Frankenstein as The Dating Game.  Bachelor Number One, how do you answer these simple questions from Bachelorette Number nth, and do you get to date her when the show is over?

Nathan is the typically clichéd billionaire genius who, instead of trying to learn how to connect with actual people, builds himself a fortress of solitude and sets about building himself a companion. Of course, since he doesn’t understand people as individuals, he keeps making sexbots that fail to meet his expectations. Partly, he excuses this (to himself) by claiming that he’s only pushing the envelope on A.I. instead of searching for a perfect fuck.

No, he never actually says that, but consider the machines.  All women, all one stereotype or another of gorgeous, and he has fitted them out with sensate genitalia. Since until he ropes Caleb into the equation it’s only him interacting with them, why do this if your claim is an interest in their cognitive and self-awareness abilities?  And the almost throwaway line where he reveals Ava’s sexual capabilities is about as arrogant and dismissive as can be.  He wants to create self-aware machine intelligence than can mimic human but talks about them like a new car model with the latest features.

Okay, so Nathan is an asshole.  Dramatically, he’s supposed to be, he’s Victor Frankenstein, whose arrogance foreshadows his doom. In this instance, the one bit of psychological nuance which could have elevated this story above the level of Weird Science (which, in the end, was a more sophisticated film than this one, despite the comedic aspects) his arrogance leads him to assume a specific “type” for women in general and he manages to create one that lives up to his expectations—she stabs him in the back and runs off.

This, in case anyone missed it, is called sexism: the complete failure to understand how one’s expectations shape circumstances to guarantee a thorough and complete misunderstanding of women as people, and then using that to dictate the terms of all interactions with females.  (Note, one does not have to be a male in order to do this, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

But what about Caleb? He’s a presumptive innocent. Why is he left to starve to death, locked in the prison Nathan has built below ground?

Perhaps not so “innocent.”  He is inserted into the storyline to act, ultimately, as Ava’s rescuer, but he is incapable of rescuing himself from the same set of expectations that Nathan exhibits.  He doesn’t want to set her free, which is kind of undefined given the context, but to have her for himself.  Nathan allows that her “design” was more or less aimed at him, so he could not help but respond in the most predictable fashion, which makes Caleb at best an adolescent who can’t tell the difference between what is and is not human, even when the difference is revealed to him at the outset.  But he’s more than just a toy.  He’s a rival.  He’s a thief.  He’s a liar.

Learning from these two examples, it might not be a surprise that Ava has turned out the way she has.

But “she” would have had to have been programmed to manipulate someone other than Nathan, who, we assume, she cannot manipulate because he knows exactly what she is.  Which then suggests that such programming is inevitable in the simulation of Woman.  That she can’t help but be this way from the first instance of her base code, which means that Woman is an essential something that emerges regardless of circumstance.  But if that’s so, then why is the essential woman inevitably a sexually manipulative sociopath?  Because that’s what Ava is.  The only possible way she could have become that is by way of her initial programming, which is Nathan’s—the technobabble about using his search engine’s datamining as the source of her programming is facile; he would have to select and edit or she would simply be a collection of data with little or no organizing principle—which then would be what he has predetermined defines Woman.

Ava does not even attempt to help her predecessors.

The single facet of all this that puts the lie to Nathan’s superficial explanation as to why he made Ava female is that he could have made Ava Alvin.  Or made Ava ten.  Or—and this would have pushed this rat’s maze of a film out of the simplistic—made Ava homosexual or even transgendered.  Push Ava out of the sex toy model she was clearly designed to be so that interaction with Nathan would produce the personally unexpected.

Even that would be a bit conservative.  There are people who are asexual.  Humans do not all fall into binaries.  Nathan is being disingenuous.  At best, he wanted Caleb to trigger in Ava a desire to choose—between him and Nathan or between either of them and an unknown.  Maybe the chopper pilot.  Or one of the other sexbots.

Or the gray box Nathan insists would have no reason for interaction. The final cop-out.  People interact all the time without knowing each other’s gender.  The initial basis of human interaction itself is not sex but Other.

Instead, we are given a treatise on the challenged expectations of a narcissist with the means to externalize his narcissism and what happens when a competitor narcissist enters the bubble to supplant him.  Had the film been more honest about this, it might have been worth the time spent watching two adult adolescents compete over the rights to a masturbatory fantasy.  Ava could, at a minimum, have schooled them on being adults.

There are moments that stop right at the edge of really interesting, but they are subverted constantly by all the testosterone soaking the scenery.

But it looks so good.  It is done in the serious manner we might wish all science fiction were done in, and there is where the final failure is most apparent.  Because obviously the makers wanted it to be taken seriously.  It’s just that they managed to feed right into the pitfalls of both a Turing test exegesis and the presumed realities of gender relations based on search engine dynamics.  They missed the trees for the forest and painted a sexual fantasy that reinforces stereotypes and says almost nothing about intelligence worth discussing—artificial or human.