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Resist the narrative: thoughts on John Scalzi’s "Red Shirts"

It’s all about story.

That short sentence sums up what’s believed to make for good communications today.

This maxim is applied to everything from popular entertainment, business and academia, to the (high) arts. According to scholar Christian Salmon, the cultural obsession with storytelling started back in the 90s and became an unquestioned “best practice” with the explosion of the web. Today, as he notes, terms like “narrative branding” and “storytelling management” have become part of job descriptions.

The rationale behind the trend, of course, is that storytelling touches on something deep in human nature. The cave people did it, we’re told. Stories go deeper than the so-called “rational mind” (that we’ve been trained to despise as phony), sinking beneath it, touching something more “real.”

I’ve wondered about storytelling a lot myself. In my work as a freelance copywriter (or “content provider”, as this job is now called today), I have, in fact, marketed my own skills as a professional “storyteller” quite aggressively.

What strikes me about this trend is that while a lot has been written about its upside, there’s not much out there about the potential dangers of getting swept up in a narrative, especially one that is not your own. John Scalzi’s Hugo award winning science fiction novel, Redshirts, can be read as a witty critique of our "storied" culture.

The book takes the viewpoint of the rank and file crew members on a space exploration voyage. After participating in a number of dangerous missions, they notice that the elite officers who lead these expeditions (a group of five or so prominent characters) always make it back alive, while they, the enlisted orders, tend to get knocked off. 

This unequal distribution of risk is not just the result of the prototypical class war between officers and crew. A character named Jenkins discovers that somehow, “a fictional television show intrudes on our reality and warps it.” The reason the top five officers don’t get killed is because they are this TV show’s main characters. The crew, meanwhile, is expendable — just like movie extras, or “redshirts”, as they are called by fans of the old Star Trek Series.

Characters who accept what’s called “The Narrative” without question end up getting killed. This is because “The Narrative” not only puts them in ridiculously dangerous situations — it even impairs their thinking capabilities. When “The Narrative” takes over, things quit making sense”, Scalzi writes, and…

“People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically. ‘The Narrative’—Jenkins’ term for when the television show crept into their lives, swept away rationality and physical laws and made people know, do and say things they wouldn’t otherwise. You’ve had it happen to you already, Jenkins had said. A fact you didn’t know before just pops into your head. You make a decision or take an action you wouldn’t otherwise make. It’s like an irresistible impulse because it is an irresistible impulse—your will isn’t your own, you’re just a pawn for a writer to move around.”

The danger of buying into popular narratives, as Redshirts illustrates, is that the interests of the people telling the tales sometimes don’t coincide with those of the players in the drama.

Popular wisdom recognizes this fact. In the business world, when some new motivational narrative comes down from management, it’s common for the rank and file to talk about the dangers of “drinking the Koolaid.” Or think of those war movies in which the soldiers who are most gung-ho often end up getting themselves and their crew killed.

But what fascinates me most about Redshirts is how it shows that once narratives get inside you, so to speak, they can change both your thinking and perception of physical reality.

The story that changed taste buds

Marketing guru Seth Godin illustrates how this process happens on a more mundane level. He shows how a story changed the way wine tasted, even for the most discerning drinkers. In his classic All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories, he describes the success of a manufacturer of wine glasses, George Riedel.

Riedel, Godin tells us, is a “tenth-generation glass blower”, “an artisan pursuing an age-old craft”, who believes that the shape of a glass dramatically affects the taste of the wine. There is a poetry to the way Riedel’s brand tells this story. Godin remarks:

“According to Riedel’s Web site: ‘The delivery of a wine’s ‘message,’ its bouquet and taste, depends on the form of the glass. It is the responsibility of a glass to convey the wine’s messages in the best manner to the human senses.’”

Riedel’s story convinced connoisseurs. Robert Parker, “the king of wine reviewers” was sold on the taste-shaping power of the product, remarking: “The effect of these glasses on fine wine is profound. I cannot emphasize enough what a difference they make.”

What happens when such glasses are tested scientifically? Godin comments:

“And yet when the proper tests are done scientifically — double-blind tests that eliminate any chance that the subject would know the shape of the glass — there is absolutely zero detectable difference between glasses. A $1 glass and a $20 glass deliver precisely the same impact on wine: none.”

Rewriting the narrative

Our current political climate is thick with narratives, many of which, if believed, can result in great danger. Think of the stories told about how gun regulation and background checks threaten the American tradition of freedom and individualism. Or the tall tale about how climate change is an exaggeration by nutty, doomsday, leftist scientists.

One way to fight such narratives is the way Scalzi’s characters do.  They find a way to seize control of the story themselves — and revise it, so they don’t get whacked.

Why are we whispering? Thoughts on "Blade Runner 2049."

I finally saw Blade Runner 2049 on cable the other night. Beautiful to look at, sometimes moving, but what really struck me was the degree of low-talking going on.

At times I thought of those comic bits in films where two characters find themselves needlessly speaking in hushed tones. One of them inevitably notices and blurts out, “why are we whispering?”

There are lots of answers you could give to such a question. Perhaps the characters in this dystopia feared surveillance (but would a whisper really mask your speech to the future’s presumably hyper-sensitive bugs?).

Or maybe, since the main characters are androids, they speak in even, quiet tones like AI traditionally does (think of Hal in 2001) in science fiction films. I guess this is to connote emotional control — an inhuman equanimity. But then again, the replicants in this case seem desperate, rather than icy cool.

Or perhaps the voices of these beings are simply muffled by the ambient noise of their chaotic urban landscape, which sometimes seems scored to a track reminiscent of the Beatles’ classic “Revolution number 9.”

None of these answers satisfied me, though. There was something holy about their quiet. Combined with the dark lighting (as I remember it, the movie takes place mostly at night), the whispering made me think I was in a church. I could almost smell the incense.

The religious vibe of the film is inescapable; it’s literally dripping with the biblical. The narrative is centered around a miraculous birth, as a subculture of replicants is excited to discover one of their own was “of woman born.” The mother is Rachel, Sean Young’s character from the first film. At one point, a replicant describing this birth alludes piously to a verse from Genesis: “And God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and allowed her to conceive.”

Religious themes are common to science fiction. Reverential awe often underscores that moment when the wonder of a new technology is revealed: some new device or process cool or horrible enough to promise utopia or threaten apocalypse. The genre never tires of extrapolating on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But Blade Runner 2049 is not that kind of film. The technology isn’t really new.  These androids have been around since at least 1982, when the original film was released. Add to this the fact that the movie centers on a specific form of technology.  Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t feature alien craft, doomsday weapons or time travel devices. It’s object of meditation is the digital.

This focus is unmistakable, as revealed in a particularly poignant scene. Ryan Gosling’s “Officer K”, a replicant cop, views a comparison of android “genetics” to human: the former binary, the latter triplicate (the nucleotide groups of three that make up the human gene). K says something like, “That’s the difference between us and them…” in a despairing tone.

Alexander Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital

A book I’ve been reading recently, by cultural theorist Alexander Galloway, addresses what might be called the “digital despair” alluded to in the film. In Laruelle: Against the Digital, Galloway argues that the way digital technology shapes our worldview produces a sort of alienation — one of the symptoms of which are weird fantasies of transcendence.

Galloway’s argument is complex, and I can’t do it justice here. But to simplify it greatly, he makes the case that digital technology, based in a binary code, is the latest in a tradition of Western thought, from Plato to Heidegger to Derrida, that attempts to describe the real by dividing it into two. Typically, a thinker decides upon two elements as key (whether these be mind/body, being/nothing, self/other, etc.). We are then shown how the two interact, synthesize or build into bigger structures, and voila, how reality “works” is defined.

The problem is, of course, that the “real” is an unwieldy beast, that refuses to be corralled into such schema. In the case of digital media, Galloway traces two results from such framing. First, it produces a feeling of unreality, for “digital relations are always already fake or simulated, for they arise from radical standardization at the atomic level.” And this leads to a second result: a drive to transcend.

A good example of the way this theory plays out, as Galloway alludes to, might be the widely accepted theory that the brain functions like a digital device — i.e. a computer.  This leads to thoughts of transcendence, i.e., the search for a “ghost in the machine.” Or better yet, the fantasy that immortality will one day be attainable, once we upload our “minds” into heavenly digital clouds.

This dynamic is at the heart of Blade Runner 2049. The replicants, aware they are digital products, feel “less than.” They have been programmed to serve rather than to decide. They are alienated beings seeking, in contemporary pop lingo, to become “authentic.” In other words, like us chromosome-based machines, they struggle to be free. 

And I guess there’s nothing holier than that.

How the Film "Arrival" Predicted the U.S. Election

I’ve heard it said that often that the most interesting thing about a story is the part that’s left out. Lately, though, at least when it comes to movies, I’ve found the most fascinating aspect of the film is in what’s been added to the original.

I’m thinking of here of films based on novels, or some other pre-existing story. The written narrative will present the tale one way. But when it is adapted, it will often be embellished – with the goal of making it more exciting on film. And when you look at the embellishments, what’s added sometimes tells another story altogether.  A story that is often about the political mood of the country.

Arrival – The Story

The recent film, Arrival, is a case in point. As has been covered by reviewers, the movie is an adaptation of a novella (titled “The Story of Your Life”) by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. Chiang’s version of this tale is an elegant thought experiment, which explores the implications of a linguistic theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As I remember it, the idea behind this hypothesis is that the way we communicate radically shapes the way we see reality – so much so, that people speaking different languages live, essentially, in separate worlds.

Chiang’s story enacts this concept beautifully. He imagines a first-contact scenario, where, when the aliens arrive (in the form of ships hovering in the atmosphere) no one can figure out why they’re here – or what they’re saying. The military enlists the help of a linguist to decipher their communications. In doing so (by studying the aliens’ circular writing script), she discovers a non-linear, holistic language, where time, as we know it, doesn’t exist. As she learns this language herself, her own sense of time dissolves, and she sees her own past, present and future, her entire biography, at once.

Arrival – The Film

The film version of this story keeps Chiang’s narrative as its center, and does so quite skillfully. As a word-person myself, it’s a thrill to see the great Amy Adams, as hero, lecture the military brass on linguistic theory – and this, in a sci-fi blockbuster! But as I mentioned, what the movie adds is just as intriguing, especially in light of the 2016 election.

To make Chiang’s cerebral tale play more like an action flick, the movie surrounds it with another story, one involving a world crisis. In it, the Russians and Chinese are also trying to decipher the alien script. Unfortunately, they misinterpret what these beings are writing – thinking instead that the aliens are urging the nations of the world to attack each other.

Outraged, they begin to issue ultimatums, ordering the aliens out of their airspace, and they ready their atomic weapons. Luckily, the sane American linguist talks sense (in a rather dramatic way) to the head of the Chinese military, and saves the day. At this point, the aliens split.

The film ends on a utopian note. Collaborating with linguists from all the world’s nations, Adams’ character publishes a guide to learning the aliens’ language. Presumably, once we all learn its script, we will have a universal language to settle our differences in – and a new, more holistic vision of reality to boot.

The Prediction: Global vs. National

Produced well before November 2016, the film’s political subplot predicts, with great accuracy, the forces that would soon divide the U.S. electorate.

In one corner, there are the angry, suspicious nationalists – in this case, the hotheaded Russians, Chinese and more militant members of the U.S. defense forces. In the other, there are the rational cosmopolitans – Adams’ linguist, her partner, a brilliant physicist played by Jeremy Renner, and the other world’s linguists and scientists (some of whom are persecuted). They urge restraint, and a generally a cool, scientific and enlightened attitude.

The event that sets these two camps into opposition is the same one as that which rocked the recent election: the arrival of the alien other. In the movie, these “others” transgress air space; in contemporary politics, they cross borders.

As one might expect, the way the film sketches out these two sides seems hokey and caricaturist (not to mention a bit chauvinistic, in its portrayal of the U.S. as the center of the world's reason!).  But cannot the same be said of our national, political communications?  The Democrats promised repentance for their trade-deal friendly past.  Yet, as Michael Moore predicted, they were nevertheless stereotyped as globalist and “neoliberal”, because of their track record on such issues.

And when it came to the new “America First” party, you had to wonder about the credibility of their patriotic image and rhetoric, when their candidate went around publicly wishing that the election would be hacked by a foreign power.  But, apparently, the nationalistic branding worked well enough.

I wish I could believe that the film, seeing how prescient it was about the this conflict, also offered a way to resolve it. But, here, alas, Arrival seemed to get a bit Pollyanna. For to break such a deadlock, what’s needed is not just a new language – but a new politics altogether.

And that’s not the kind of thing you can get from another world.

 

Only a God(zilla) Can Save Us: the Symbolism of Summer Blockbusters

In an interview the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave later in life, he spoke about how our technology had uprooted us, not only from tradition, but the very earth itself.  He added that this alienation had reached such an advanced state that "only a god can save us."

I found it amusing, and a bit surprising, that in the recent summer blockbuster Godzilla, when this "god" finally arrives, he takes the the form of a giant, fire-breathing dragon.

If you've seen the film, you know that due to our experiments with dangerous technologies (in this case, nuclear energy), great beasts arise from the depths to torment humanity.  Our main persecutor comes in the form of a giant, moth-like creature.  Godzilla follows this "MUTO" ("Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism") up from wherever such beings live, to hunt down and destroy it.  A battle ensues and God(zilla) is on our side all the way.

When I say Godzilla is a god, I mean that literally.  As Director Gareth Edwards put it in The Daily Beast, the MUTO represents "man's abuse of nature," and Godzilla "is a god, really.  He's at the top of the food chain and probably King of the World."  Godzilla is also called a god by characters in the film.

The mission of this godly being is to restore the balance of nature (that the MUTO throws out of whack), saving humanity in the process, as a sort of fortuitous side-effect.  At the end of the film, as Godzilla leaves the ravaged city where his battle with the evil MUTO took place, the crowd watching breaks out in a cheer.

This means, though, that even with its happy ending, the film has a pessimistic, somber mood -- not unlike Heidegger's later philosophy.  Humanity seems helpless.   Most of the action takes place between the behemoths.  All the military/scientific team that gathers in the crisis can do ultimately, is "let them fight," as one character mutters reverently.

This dark mood certainly reflects the zeitgeist concerning ecological issues.  Washington still debates the reality of global warming, while environmental scientists such as James Lovelock  (who invented the Gaia hypothesis), advise us to "enjoy life while [we] can," as "humans are too stupid to prevent climate change."

And yet, despite the reality of the issues the movie alludes to, I found it hard to take the messenger entirely seriously.  A popcorn movie, where a couple of monsters jam it out, after all, can't help but seem more fun and silly than profound.

As a result, I found myself reading into the movie in more mundane ways.  And I thought about Godzilla being a savior of something less grand than the earth itself.

Recently I've been reading a fascinating book about the entertainment industry by Anita Elberse titled Blockbusters.  In it, she shows that the main vehicle the movie business now favors is the big-budget, special-effects flick.   As a result, it follows a strategy in which it sinks most of its investment dollars into such blockbusters, in search of giant wins.  She also shows that the rest of the entertainment industry is pretty much following suit.

Elberse tells us that this industry increasingly relies on blockbusters, in part, to avoid the need to place its bets on smaller, riskier properties, aimed at niche markets -- an approach often associated with the fragmentation of audiences that came about because of the web and the digital age. Instead, the blockbuster makes old-school mass-marketing to a mass audience still possible.

You could say, then, that Godzilla saves not only the earth, but, on a more trivial level, the movie studio that produced the film he stars in, by offering the promise of the kind of big profits that will keep it afloat.

And blockbusters don't just save the movie industry from being at the mercy of niche tastes.  Elberse doesn't talk about this so directly in her book, but another aspect of entertainment in the digital age is that lots of it is free.  Blockbusters, designed for big, 3-D screens, are one of the entertainment products for which people are still willing to pay.

In this light, Godzilla isn't only saving the earth; he's also helping the paid entertainment economy fight off the increasingly powerful free one -- or what Jeremy Rifkin has recently termed the "collaborative commons."

And in this regard, perhaps this economic message is related to the ecological pessimism you see in the film.  For the same, clumsy, old school, big-time capitalism that survives by producing blockbusters, is, according to Rifkin, incapable of dealing with ecological crises.  What he predicts, instead (in The Zero Marginal Cost Society), is the coming of "Collaboratism," a new economic paradigm that transcends both capitalism and socialism.

Until then, I suppose, one might have to agree with Heidegger, that only a god -- or perhaps a Godzilla -- can save us.

Artifice as a Path to Authenticity: Thoughts on Chuck Close, Charles Bernstein and Video Realism

Continuing to think about our habit of reading into facial expressions (see last post), brought to mind an experience I had once viewing an exhibit of visual art.

I was at MOMA a few years back, checking out the Chuck Close retrospective.  In the room that housed his early works from the 60s, I came across the giant, photorealistic portraits for which he is well known.

I had an odd experience viewing these huge "heads" together in one place.  Close has made it clear that his portraits are paintings of photographs -- not studies from "real life."  Because of this fact, you'd think you were several steps away from attributing psychological presence to these works.  In fact, I'm told that if you view them up close, you can actually see the grid of tiny boxes through which they're created; it's as if you're looking at a mosaic made of hundreds of tiles, each with a miniature abstract painting inside.

Yet, oddly, the paintings also seemed to carry symbolic messages.  In the portrait of Philip Glass, for example, the swirling patterns of Glass's hair and skin rhymed, for me, with the epic, circular movement of his music.  It seemed as if his face were some sort of medieval emblem, in which the spirit of his inner creativity manifested in the flesh.

What I found striking was how this inner spirit fought its way through the artificial quality that Close foregrounds.  It was as if a certain presence would not be denied -- even if the artist telegraphed this was a simulation of a simulation; even if you knew the painting's effect was the result of Close's own "smoke and mirrors."

It was almost as if the artificial aspect of the work was precisely what made it more absorbing.

Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"

An especially lucid analysis of the phenomena I've just described is found in a piece I alluded to in the last post: Charles Bernstein's essay-in-verse titled "Artifice of Absorption."  Toward its end, Bernstein describes the experience of watching Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

In this play, the character "Krapp" listens to autobiographical diary entries he made via tape recordings during earlier periods of his life.  But just as he, and we, as audience, begin to be absorbed in these accounts, Krapp reminds himself and us of their artifice.  He frequently switches off the tape, interupting the narrative flow, fast forwarding at times, stopping at others to make sarcastic comments on his own youthful naivete.

But our heightened awareness of the mechanical device through which Krapp's "heartfelt" confessions are communicated, rather than make us more distanced, draws us in.  Bernstein comments:

"Indeed, the very jagged moments when the tape is
abruptly turned off -- moments in which the 
listener's absorption may seem to be
ruptured -- only serve to heighten the dramatic power
of the play.  Beckett's incisively spliced
dislocations have a spellbinding
theatrical effect..."

The emotional content of the performance seems more real, then, precisely because the work refuses to become "absorbed" in the "vain hopes" of the stories the character once told himself.  It's as if a higher degree of honesty -- and hence authenticity -- results from the very acknowledgement of the ephemeral quality of the stories Krapp tells himself.

And the presence of a tape machine in the play underlines the fact that even our most basic sense of our lives and identities is unavoidably mediated -- that an immaculate perception of ourselves is impossible.

Video Realism

Both Close and Beckett come from the realm of high art, but I've also seen forms of popular culture that achieve "realism effects" by doing something similar.

Recently I watched an indie horror film titled Alien Abduction (about so-called true events involving disappearances and "strange lights" that occurred in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina).

 

The story, of course, was far-fetched.  But what made it gripping, nonetheless, was the technique through which it was told.  As we watch this tale of alien abduction involving a small family, we are constantly reminded, by its shaky, hand-held quality (and occasional blackouts) that we are watching a homemade video (in this case, one filmed by an autistic boy).  The camera, in fact, is as much a character in the movie as the people.

As such, the movie is the latest in a low-budget genre that began with the Blair Witch Project, in which outlandish tales gain a degree of realism by seeming to be filmed by "real" people on poor quality equipment.

All of which leads me to wonder whether if, today, in order to achieve a "suspension of disbelief," it helps to have a recording device somewhere nearby.  Thoughts?

Also of Interest:
My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, is now available from Small Press Distribution.  Click here.

Review of The Cheapskates by David Lehman,  click here, and another by Michael Lally (with my poem on Chuck Close),  click here.

Keeping It Weird: Thoughts on the film Dark Skies (with help from the philosopher Graham Harman)

Just saw an alien abduction film via Pay-per-view that received mixed reviews, but that I found a provocative, even philosophical treat.

It's called Dark Skies.  It's produced by the people who developed the Paranormal Activity series, and incorporates some of the "video realism" technique of those films.

 

What I liked about the movie was what some reviewers hated: its vagaries and slow pace.  Rather than following action/horror film conventions, i.e., lots of special effects and overly-long chase sequences, it builds to a slow boil.  When the aliens do appear, they're mostly in shadows, probably due to cost constraints.  But rather than look cheesy, this just adds to their menacing otherness.  And its the chill of this otherness that intrigued me most about the film.

The movie centers on a middle-class suburban family, down on its luck because of the economy.  The father (Josh Hamilton) is looking for a job.  The mother (Keri Russell) sells Real Estate but, since her conscience won't let her hype dingy properties to close a deal, her career is hurting too.  Their adolescent son is becoming alienated from these "losers"; their younger kid is haunted.   He draws pictures of strange beings holding him by the hand.

Disturbing signs build as the movie proceeds.  Flocks of birds dive bomb into their windows.  Some mornings, they find toys, canned food and kitchenware built into bizarre towers in their living room, as if some outsider artist were at work.  Menacing bruises appear on the kids' bodies and behind the ears of the grown-ups.  A web search by Russell reveals that these are all signs of an alien home invasion.

This discovery results in a trip to the city to visit the local ufologist, who, judging from his even dingier apartment, is even more down-on-his-luck than our suburban couple. (Whom the alien gods would destroy, they first make unemployed.)

After reviewing the family's symptoms, he offers a dire prognosis.  They're being readied for the abduction of one of their members.  This can only be prevented if the family sticks together to fight off the alien invaders.

During this scene comes the most crucial conversation of the flick: "why" Russell asks, "did they choose us?  What makes us so special?"  To which the abduction expert tells them that there's actually nothing at all special about them, and that, in fact, mere humans can't understand why they choose who they do.  This would be like being  lab rats trying to understand the mind of the scientist performing the experiments on them.

It's this sentiment, I think, that justifies the murky, vague quality of much of what goes in this this film.  If there are beings we never see clearly, and clues and loose ends that are never tied up neatly, this all goes to support the general incomprehensibility of the characters' experience.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Weird Realism" (According to Graham Harman)

All of which brought to mind a book I've been reading by the philosopher Graham Harman.  Titled Weird Realism, it examines the stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Though some consider Lovecraft Poe's true successor, others complain that his "purple prose" is merely sensationalist, kitschy and most of all, vague.

Harman defends Lovecraft on this score, arguing that what his work is actually about is how impossible it is to capture reality through our representational systems.  And in this light, the garish, literal approaches of much conventional pop culture often miss the boat.  As he puts it:

"The meaning of being might even be defined as untranslatability.  Language (and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present.  Realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world.  Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action or anything else."

This explains why, in Dark Skies, though an alien figure is eventually recorded by the elaborate home surveillance cameras the father sets up, he doesn't go to the police -- insisting he won't be believed.  Because he won't be.  What appears on video is too traumatic for a mere camera to represent.  Presumably, the police wouldn't believe their eyes, even if they saw it.

And what makes the film scary is in fact this pervasive "unstranslatability."  This quality even adds a touch of horror to the precariousness of the characters' economic prospects (that seem controlled by incomprehensible forces as well).

In short, what makes the fear in Dark Skies seem real is the fact that the film can't fully articulate what it's scared of.  Thoughts?

Are We Cynics or Realists? Thoughts on John Barnes' "The Lost Princess Man" (in The New Space Opera 2)

To relax, I keep going back to a big paperback anthology I bought a few months back titled, The New Space Opera 2.  (Earlier post on this book here.)  The gem I found found this time is a story by John Barnes, called "The Lost Princess Man."

One of the things I love about the science fiction genre is that, through its allegorical tales, it offers real insight into contemporary social attitudes and ideology -- often via satire.  In keeping with this Swiftian agenda, "The Lost Princess Man" captures a key aspect of our contemporary structure of feeling.

It tells the tale of an interplanetary con man who navigates his way through a vast and incredibly dangerous totalitarian empire by working a specific scam.  And it's a particularly heartless one.

He preys on destitute young women.  He picks out a victim, and then attempts to convince her that he's been sent from on high because he has evidence that she's of a royal bloodline, and may be the "lost princess" for whom the Imperial government has been searching (to perpetuate its lineage and reign).

Once his prospect agrees to travel with him (to claim what's hers), she is drugged, turned over to plastic surgeons who make her irresistible (according to current fashion), and installed as a high-class prostitute in a ritzy bordello.  "The Lost Princess Man" collects a bounty for every "recruit" he delivers.

But then, we find out something surprising.  He says this of his marks:

"They're blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority.  After listening [to his con] for a while, the girl says, 'I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off the planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and  waiting to have a turn on me.'  At which point, I say, 'Well, of course.'" 

Asked by his interlocutor why he actually admits he's pulling a scam, the "Lost Princess Man" replies that, on balance, what he has to offer is a big improvement over the impoverished lives these young women lead.  Further, they don't get "gang banged", but instead, are considered "luxury goods" -- and (according to "sumptuary laws") their service can only be sold to a limited number of very well off individuals.

As part of the deal, they recieve an education, their artistic and intellectual talents are developed, and they become fluent in multi-planetary cultural manners.  This is why many of those he approaches agree to go along with him voluntarily.

Cynicism or Realism?

The story continues to take wild twists and turns after this (especially after we find out that the Empire really is looking for a "lost princess"), but I'll stop at this passage, because for me it rings all sorts of ideological bells.

The first thing it reminds me of is the way cultural critics such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek characterize the ideology of our moment.

In the old days (according to their writings), when our glitzy, consumer culture promised us it held the key to our self-realization (in the form of eveything from cool clothes, to tech devices, to self-help schemes, to designer drugs, etc.),  we sometimes believed that such enhancements would help us find our inner lost princess or prince.

Now, we're supposedly too hip for all that.  Yet, we continue to use such props anyway -- and in this sense, "go along with the pitch", but now, with a sort of cynicism.  "I know very well," we think, "that this won't help me find the well-being I want, but, what the hell, you gotta have something."

As Zizek puts it: "Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it." 

On the other hand, you could argue that the "marks" in this story, rather than cynics are realists about their actual prospects. I'm thinking here about a remark the philosopher Jacques Ranciere made on contemporary exploitation.  As he put it:

"The dominated do not remain in subordination because they misunderstand the existing state of affairs but because they lack confidence in their capacity to transform it."  He adds, though, that getting such confidence depends upon there being a credible politics that offers a way out.

In the absence of that (or, say, some trustworthy form of inner transformation), perhaps the compliant folks in this story are merely being (wisely) strategic.

Nevertheless, such a tale raises a provocative question.  In our "seen-it-all-before" time, when we make our own Faustian bargains, are we being cynics or realists?  Thoughts? 

The Joys of Dystopian Thinking: Max Weber, Andre Gorz and the Film "Skyline"

The other night, I experienced one of those intoxicating moments where what I was reading seemed to provide the exact key I needed to unlock a mysterious, hidden meaning.

In this case, it was the meaning of a movie --  panned as one of year's worst -- which I, of course, had found utterly entrancing.

The movie was Skyline, which I rented on Pay-Per-View.  It's an alien invasion flick -- more or less a pastiche of films like Cloverfield, War of the Worlds and Independence Day, with a dash of The Matrix thrown in.  As Umberto Eco wrote: "Two cliches make us laugh.  A hundred cliches move us."  The trailer offers a taste: 

 

I couldn't put my finger on what moved me about this particular heap of cliches until when,  soon afterwards, I began reading an essay by the late, great social philosopher Andre Gorz.

Gorz was making a case for the continuing relevance of early 20th century sociologist Max Weber:

"Long before the creators of contemporary scientific dystopias," Gorz wrote, "Max Weber thought that bureaucratization and the onward march of machines would progress to the point where society would become a single megamachine which its human cogs 'would be forced to serve, as powerless as the fellah of Ancient Egypt.'"

The bureaucracy, in Weber's mind, I think, wasn't just "big government", as people often interpret the word today, but any massive, highly rationalized organization -- including corporations, institutions,  and (in our time) the entertainment industry itself -- with goals all of its own.  Goals that its "cogs" may not care about, agree with or even understand.

Such "megamachines" gain your support, in theory at least, by offering benefits (cash, jobs, recognition, distraction, etc. ) -- but often "at the cost of deprivation of meaning and freedom."  This all results in "dehumanization."

Gorz' short exposition reframed, for me, many of the "humans vs. machines" Science Fiction films I've seen in the last few years.  (Think of The Matrix!)  In Skyline, though, it seemed to speak to the specific anxieties of indie artists -- particularly filmmakers.

The film opens with Jarrod, an artist of some sort, and his partner, Elaine, at a ritzy party in L.A. They are boho types (I think from Brooklyn) who are impressed, but almost a little taken aback by, the success of Jarrod's best friend, Terry.  It seems Terry's special effects company has made it to the big time in a big, big way.

The party (at Terry's new pad) is stocked with all the accoutrements of L.A. glamour: posh decor, very beautiful, flirty people, booze and presumably all sorts of other decadent highs.

Mid-way through the party, a friend of Terry's congratulates Jarrod for joining the company and deciding to move to L.A.  Elaine is shocked (has Jarrod sold out?) -- and reveals that she's pregnant.  Jarrod assures her that this is the first he's heard of the gig (and that the matter isn't decided).  Soon after they crash -- and that's when the weirdness begins.

Jarrod wakes in the middle of the night to bright lights.  We soon learn these are from aliens in humongous, robotic craft, hovering near the high rise's window.  And it's not only their overwhelming size and force that make them terrifying.  It's the way the draw you in.

It seems the light they shine into your face is incredibly beautiful.  If you stare a moment too long, you get vacuumed into their craft.  Next thing you know, your brains are sucked out and used as a sort of neurological fuel (and the rest of you is cast, headless, into a pile of other victims).  Your mind becomes one with the machine.  Talk about dehumanization...

But Is It All a Dream?

After reading Gorz, I began to wonder if the last two-thirds of this flick were in fact a literal nightmare -- one expressing the artist Jarrod's anxieties about selling out. Isn't one of the cliches about organizational exploitation that you get sucked dry of your ideas (and cast into the heap of fellow burnouts)?

With a little imagination, you can extend this interpretation to the situation of the film's directors, the special effects gurus the Brothers Strause.  Is not an indie outfit like their own always faced with such creative pressures (not to mention battles over who owns "intellectual property") from the big studios they deal with?

But Why Now?

The theme of humanity vs. "the machine" is older than Science Fiction itself.  Why then its almost incessant repetition today?  I guess one quick answer is that we're simply surrounded by more machines and mega organizations than ever.

A friend told me recently, for example, that after resisting Facebook for years, she finally relented. Upon joining, one of her first welcomes was from a friend who quoted Pink Floyd.

He wrote, simply, eloquently: "Welcome to the Machine."  Thoughts? 

 

Existential Pop: Dr Pepper Meets the Incredible Shrinking Man

Lately, I 've found myself amused at a Dr Pepper commercial (originally created, I think, in 2009) set in a self-help group.  It seems the animated characters in the spot meet for support in dealing with a particular social handicap: the world refuses to acknowledge their existence:

 

What caught my eye about this commercial was its comic light touch -- even when alluding to something everyone from therapists, to philosophers, to the great modern writers seem to agree is a serious one: the establishment of a personal sense of "being" -- or, as it's more commonly referred to today, an "identity."

This concern even got translated into a specific form of cultural politics (usually called "identity politics" or "the politics of recognition").  In the 80s and 90s, "identity" movements arose on the liberal side of the spectrum (concerning rights around the issues of gender, ethnicity and sexuality).  Later, this style of politics was mimicked on the Right, often around religious beliefs and traditionalist lifestyles.

Cultural Studies scholar Nancy Fraser analyzes the philosophical roots of this tendency:

"The usual approach to the politics of recognition -- what I call the 'identity model' -- starts from the Hegelian idea that identity is constructed dialogically, through a process of mutual recognition. According to Hegel, recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects, in which each sees the other both as its equal and also as separate from it.  This relation is constitutive for subjectivity: one becomes an individual subject only by virtue of recognizing, and being recognized by, another subject.  Recognition from others is thus essential to the development of a sense of self."

As Fraser indicates, a sense of identity is created socially as much as it is internally.  One essential for its establishment is that others take you seriously.

What's comic about the spot is that you see this logic  applied to establishing a brand identity.  The problem the Dr Pepper guy has is signaled by Santa Claus: people think what he stands for (a diet soda with great flavor) is a laughable myth.

Intentionally or not, what this setting also brings to mind is the brand identity issue a soda with a hard-to-categorize taste like Dr Pepper already carries with it.  As the Wiki about Dr Pepper puts it:

"W.W. Clements, a former CEO and president of the Dr Pepper/7-Up Company, described the taste of Dr Pepper as one-of-a-kind, saying "I've always maintained  you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like because it's so different. It's not an apple, it's not an orange, it's not a strawberry, it's not a root beer, it's not even a cola."

For that matter, even where the name "Dr Pepper" comes from is somewhat of a mystery.

In any case, such a lighthearted take on angst about the "question of existence" brought to my mind, by way of contrast, another version of pop-culture existentialism -- this one from a much earlier era...

"The Incredible Shrinking Man" Ponders His Existence

If you're obsessed with classic Science Fiction films like I am, you may be familiar with the story of "The Incredible Shrinking Man."  In the 1957 movie, the hero of this flick runs into a radioactive cloud, while he's out boating.  Soon after, as a side effect, he begins to shrink.

As he gets smaller and smaller, common household creatures -- cats and spiders -- turn into horrific monsters.  But as the movie progresses, he becomes too small for even them to see (or torment). Then his problems grow more philosophical.  As he faces the prospect of becoming as tiny as a molecule, or even an atom, he wonders whether, since living things can no longer recognize him, he even still exists.

Here's the way he resolves his quandary in the closing monologue (which ends "I still exist!"):

 

Whatever Happened to the Age of Anxiety?

In this clip, it's the gaze of God that assures the hero of his continuing identity/existence.  But today, it seems to me, many people look elsewhere for the recognition they need to build their sense of self.

Is not one of the appeals of social media, with all the "friending" it encourages, that it offers a quick, technologic way to make a person feel like somebody?  And, establishing an identity this way is certainly achieved with a lighter touch than in previous eras: a modicum of recognition is just a few clicks away.  No wonder even "identity politics" seems to be fading from the scene.

But I wonder, does this mean the "search for authenticity" will soon be passe?  Any thoughts on this -- or these clips?

 

What's So Alien About Artificial Intelligence? Thoughts on AI, Science Fiction and "Consciousness"

Recently I found myself fascinated with a group of articles in Wired Magazine re-examining the theme of Artificial Intelligence.  Enthusiasm about AI, it seems, after a pessimistic "winter', has experienced a renaissance.

The lead piece, by Steven Levy (which offers an enormously useful capsule history of theories about the field) shows that the development of artificial intelligence is proceeding at a faster pace than ever -- but that it comes in a completely different form than was previously imagined.

Gone are the fantasies of the metallic humanoids you saw it movies like I, Robot (itself based on classic science ficton tales from the 40s/50s by Isaac Asimov).  Engineers have given up trying to replicate the human brain (as was thought achievable in the 50s).

But their inability to do so turned out to be a fortunate fault -- for it led to the creation of a rich array of smaller, intelligent machines, each furnished with  "clever algorithms" that enable them to accomplish a limited number of specific tasks:

"Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, " Levy writes, "they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence."

Along the way, "the AI crowd" made a key discovery:

"'The big surprise is that intelligence isn't a unitary thing,'" says Danny Hillis, who cofounded Thinking Machines, a company that made massively parallel supercomputers.  'What we learned is that it's all kinds of different behaviors.'"

Because of the success of these new machines, Levy concludes that we are more dependent on Artificial Intelligence than ever.  We use AI to help us drive, invest, and find answers to nearly everything (via Google), just to name a few of the types of robots who assist us everyday.  Such dependency leads Hillis to conclude, "the computers are in control, and we just live in their world."

And this is a world we don't understand.  Levy tells us that these new machines reason in ways vastly different than human logic.  If anything, their consciousness is more mysterious than the soul searching, existentialist machines imagined (but never realized) during Science Fiction's Golden Age.

Different but Same

I asked myself what I found so intriguing about these ideas, especially seeing as I'm more of a pragmatist than a utopian (or dystopian) when it comes to technology.  At first, I thought it was the cool "otherness" these thinkers achieve when talking about what seem to be mere gadgets.  The vision of AI they propose -- multiple, ubiquitous, alien -- and with a "will of its own", is reminiscent of the founding science fiction narrative of the current technologic sublime: The Matrix.

And then I wondered if what drew me to these ideas was not their alien but familiar quality.  Maybe this is because this tale of alien intelligence replays recent theories of what human consciousness is all about. 

Take the idea, for example, that the minds of the new machines are too strange to comprehend.  In Susan Blackmore's concise introduction to contemporary thinking on "Consciousness", you find out that there is a school of thought, dealing with human and animal consciousness, based around the same assumption. 

Its proponents are labeled "mysterians."  They argue "that we humans are 'cognitively  closed'  with respect to understanding consciousness ... Just as a dog has no hope of being able to read the newspaper, he so happily carries back from the shops." (p. 7-8)

Or the idea of intelligence as multiple rather than unitary.  It turns this is the standard, materialist account of human consciousness as well.  As Blackmore puts it:

"There is no single location from where my decisions are sent out.  Instead, the many different parts of the brain just get on with their own jobs, communicating with each other whenever necessary, and with no central control." (p. 15)

And it's not just in the realm of philosophy such ideas seem familiar.  The arts of our time, both popular and avant-garde, are obsessed with the multiple -- and the "otherness" it supposedly forces one to confront.  And this is not to mention (before the crash at least) the praise heaped upon "de-centralized" approaches to business management and economic policy -- all said to be increasingly necessary in a "multi-centric" world.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that as "otherworldly" as the workings of artificial minds may appear, when it comes to describing them, the influence of worldly, human culture and metaphor is as powerful as that of science.

This may also be why the literature of really great science fiction, rather than being escapist, is the true realism of our time.

For often you need the technology of the future to get a clear look at the now.