Reviews - Seth Taylor

The Lost Scientist

“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
-David Cronenberg

There is a particular movie hero that is lost to time, that existed briefly, flourished and then vanished at the dawn of the 1960’s, never to be seen again—the 50’s B-Movie Scientist. Movies change. The tides ebb and flow, the moon waxes and wanes, presidents come and go, and even movies aren’t the same as they were. In the 1950’s the landscape of film was steeped in the atomic age. Suddenly Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and their friends weren’t scary anymore—we needed monsters that were capable of conquering the entire world, whether they were aliens, science experiments gone awry, or a gorilla wearing a space helmet (that last one actually gets the closest out of any of them).

But man has fought monsters on film for as long as movies have existed, Thomas Edison himself was responsible for some of these early… let’s be charitable here film experiments. But there is one thing that sets the horde of 50’s shlock B movies apart from the rest of the crowd—the scientist hero. It has long been my theory that each decade espouses its own movie hero, its ideal, its Charles Atlas for us to look up to. In the 30’s and 40’s we had the jaded detective (Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, The Big Sleep) in the 80’s thanks in large part to WrestleMania, the testosterone and the violence was pumped up, suddenly, we needed action heroes who weren’t just mentally up the task but physically too (Predator, Robocop, Commando, First Blood).

This smoothed out in the 90’s into the more relatable everyman protagonist (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) who still had to kick ass but was emotional, unsure of himself, and had a down to earth personality. All of this leaves the peculiar brand of 1950’s scientist heroes oddly alone. It would not be hard to imagine a scenario where Sam Spade would share drinks and stories with Robocop and Roger Murtaugh, but what about Dr. Cal Meacham from This Island Earth, Dr. Miles Bennell form Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Commander John J. Adams from Forbidden Planet? They are in some ways the spiritual successors of Arthur’s Knights, with the stiff upper lip of the British mixed lovingly with the cocksure bravado that comes with being American. But that alone is not what makes them different.

In the decades before, Raymond Chandler would lay out the qualities the ideal hero would have to possess; “He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” The heroes of the atomic age were no different, but we saw fit to add one more crucial quality to the formula—raw intelligence.

Dr. Miles Bennell was likeable, smooth talking, and honorable to be sure, but he came equipped with intellect, deductive reasoning, and a PhD in Psychology. He is an analyzer not a man of action, his chief weapon against the aliens is his brain.

“Maybe they’re the result of atomic radiation on plant life or animal life. Some weird alien organism—a mutation of some kind… whatever it is, whatever intelligence or instinct it is that
govern the forming of human flesh and blood out of thin air, is fantastically powerful…All that body in your cellar needed was a mind…”

Miles is by no means an isolated case, looking around the veritable explosion of science fiction films of the time reveals almost nothing but doctors. The Fly’s Andre Delambre, the unnamed Professor from Robot Monster, the entire horde of scientists’ aboard steamboat Rita in Creature from the Black Lagoon, noble scientists were as viral as the chicken pox—but why?

Why for an entire decade of film history was the average American in love with the idea of a scientist hero, who wore lab coats instead of fedoras—I have a theory. When the nightmare that was World War II ended America now looked for new terrors, threats beyond our solar system, the fear of technology gone awry, but there was something else—a hope for a new kind of lifestyle, and a new kind of man. If the monsters in these movies represented our fear and paranoia, the scientists represent mankind’s perseverance, intellect, and ability to reason.

All of these films would pave the way for the next generation of sci-fi heroes. The negative and ugly sides of scientific progress would fall by the wayside, as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek would go on to focus on the idealism and the romance of the cosmos. James T. Kirk would embody the smarts and heroism of his ancestors, but he was never corrupted, never succumbed to some horrible fate, and always preserved in the face of evil.

Through all our existence, the frightened and faint hearted have been warning men not to push any further, not to learn any more, not to hope grow, and exceed themselves. I don’t believe we can stop I don’t believe we’re meant to… I must point out the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk is our business.

By the time the 70’s rolled around, the mantle of sci-fi hero passed from Kirk to Skywalker, whose intellect took a back seat to spirituality—but the idealism remained. The lone scientist hero may indeed seem a pastiche from a bygone era, but their spirit lives on. The Scientist and his reluctance to violence, slowness to anger, and intellectual pursuits can still be seen today, in the forms of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Dr. Stephen Strange, and other Marvel mainstays. They are, if anything else, a reminder to analyze our surroundings, to question authority, and to fight back against the unknown till our knuckles bleed and our life spark goes out.

“Alta, about a million years from now the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father’s name will shine again like a beacon in the galaxy. It’s true, it will remind us that we are, after all, not God.”
-Forbidden Planet

Arthur Miller

“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life” – Arthur Miller

When I think of Arthur Miller I cannot help but think of the harsh realism he portrays in his plays. Nowhere is this more evident than in Death of A Salesmen, a stark look at a decaying family through the eyes of an increasingly cruel and mentally unstable man—Willy Loman.

Willy is a senile old salesman, failing in his work, alienating his family, and slipping in and out of paranoid delusions. Miller does not simply give us these characters to pity or gawk at them, but to ask a question. What is the American dream — is it attainable? And what led Willy to his untimely downfall?

The play never really answers that question, but the ride it took me on was one I will scarcely forget anytime soon. Everyone I have met has had different reactions to this play, its characters, and the morality of it. From the very get go, I despise Willy more than I pity him and I find Biff to be the most like-able of the cast, and yet others feel exactly the opposite.

The complete and utter subjectivity of it all is what makes it an incredible rare experience. Watching this play is like peering into fog — you can make out shapes but you cannot discern what’s going on behind the scenes.

Death of A Salesmen is not an easy play; it is not escapism so much as a hard slap of realism, but it is also thoughtful and makes even the lowliest characters admirable in some way. It is a tour de force on every level.

Golden Exits

Golden Exits is a confused film, not in plot but also in its execution. As a viewer you don’t get the sense of a three-act structure, but more of a day-to-day travel log that starts abruptly and ends just as suddenly.

It revolves around a young Australian girl named Naomi (played by Emily Browning) as she moves to New York for the summer to work as archivist for a married man named Nick (played, interestingly enough by Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys) whose advances toward her make their working environment tense if anything else. Along the way she meets Buddy, another married American fellow who she actually takes an interest in. Meanwhile, the wives of these men sit and wonder if their men are still faithful to them in the face of the enormous temptation that Naomi presents. Along for the ride is Alyssa’s sister Gwendolyn, whose hatred of Nick and his past infidelities is so tantamount that it feels as though it’s dripping right through the screen.

Months pass and the movie teases the audience mercilessly over whether or not Nick/Buddy will eventually sleep with Naomi, while the long suffering wives/sisters-in-laws of these men sit with their friends and pontificate about life, romance, and many other subjects that populate the frame of mind of the typical chatty art house character.

The main conceit of the film is the question of whether or not couples can sustain a loving, and loyal relationship in the long term or if they’ll simply ‘exit’ at the first sight of another, younger sexual partner. We’re given characters like Buddy and his wife Sam, who remain hopeful and even behind closed doors seem to genuinely love each other, and then people like Nick and his wife Alyssa whose romance is so completely nonexistent that it makes one wonder why they’re even together in the first place. At the center of it all is Naomi. She is both the first, and last thing we ever see in this film, and most conversations are either with her or are directly about her.

But she’s far from heroic or noble, she just seems to be there to fill the role of “the temptation” and indeed, though she refuses Nick’s advantages she has no qualms whatsoever about having an affair with Buddy, whose faithfulness to his wife is one of the few moments of heroism in the whole piece. In fact, aside from Buddy, none of these characters are presented as particularly good, they just live their often self absorbed lives and we’re simply supposed to view it.

The style of Golden Exits is pure 90’s mumble core, no one emotes very heavily besides an evil look here and there, and every scene is merely a conversation being held in a sparsely decorated room. There are no flourishes in the deco, the camera movement, or even the music, imagine if you can a Wes Anderson film but with the colors, all traces of humor, and the 70’s soundtrack all thrown out.

Overall, it’s a somber film that gives us characters with no real redeeming qualities; it shuns the usual narrative in favor of a slice of life approach to storytelling, going at a very slow but deliberate pace. It does not even attempt to answer any of the philosophical questions it throws at us like a barrage of stones, but simply leaves us with the pieces. Just like Naomi’s transient stay in New York City, it comes, baffles, entices, but then exits as about as nonchalantly as it entered.

Ready Player One — Quests and Avatar

“I am malformed, scarred, and small, but… abed, when the candles are blown out, I am made no worse than other men. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers”

–Tyrion Lannister, A Storm of Swords

Wade, the protagonist of Ready Player One, is in many ways hiding in the shadows. He has aspirations of being one of the fabled heroes of lore, he chooses to don the name Parzival after one of the original grail knights, he sets himself on an almost religious quest to give himself meaning in life, and he falls in love with not so much a woman but a funhouse mirror version of a woman. All of this however, is rooted in the strange world of the OASIS.

“Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.” (2.8)

“I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills.” (2.19)

In the real world, Wade must hide in the shadows both literally and figuratively. He’s overweight, socially awkward, and lives a lonely existence in a dystopian ghetto. The OASIS represents that mysterious other world for him, to really be that courageous knight, to show that he’s “no worse than other men”. It’s almost as if that “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” song plays constantly in his head. In effect, you could read this whole song as Wade’s reason for his quixotic lifestyle.

He wants someone to “Hang with me in my MMO” because he’s horribly alone in real life, he’s desperate to go “many places” because he’s financially and geographically trapped in real life, and he dreads people to “see my actual face” because it’s acne ridden and chubby. But here’s the sad part, he’s “craving to emote with you” because he has no one to share his feeling with in the waking world.

“My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne.” (2.5)

It’s worth nothing that Wade is so in love, so in need of this other life, that when both his and Art3mis’s avatars cross paths for the first time, he refers to meeting her “in person”

“[Art3mis] was even cooler in person than I’d imagined.” (9.43)

Wade might live in a semi-dream world, but it is not completely false. Like Don Quixote of old, Wade’s adventure might be unusual and deviate from the normal parameters of a journey in that he doesn’t actually leave home, but in my estimation it is a hero’s journey in the classical sense.

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.”
― Joseph CampbellThe Hero With a Thousand Faces

Does that not describe Wade? He is searching for what is his own “life-giving elixir”and he does feel like he is lacking something in his normal human experience. Are we to deny that to him? Haven’t we all felt at some point, that we need an escape? Even though Halliday is the one who creates the quest, it is Wade who gives it his own meaning; it is him who gives it its importance, who hangs it to be the sun in the sky of his universe. This fact, is what separates him from living a Truman Show-esque existence… Wade knows he is in a mirror world, but during most of the quest, he accepts it.

Which takes us to the ending. This is where the book takes what is perhaps its most unforgiving misstep. Halliday, a man who even more so than Wade should know the great shelter that the OASIS provides for outcasts, cannot simply tell him to unplug and walk away. OASIS doesn’t have to be a wholly negative thing for Wade or anyone. Telling him to put it away is like burning Tyrion Lannister’s book collection, in my mind it’s simply unjust.

As a lover of art, and fiction I earnest believe that the world outside of this one has merits and must be kept safe guarded. As Sword & Sorcery EP taught, sometimes we just need a little balance between the real and the fiction. Without both we are cursed and cursed again… knowing very little and getting that small fragment wrong too.

Pulp Fiction Screenplay Review

Like many millennials with an interest in film, Quentin Tarantino was one of the first directors who really reached me, and made me realize the power of the auteur. His film Pulp Fiction was a movie that broke all the rules, no matter what, you couldn’t get a handle on it, anticipate what would happen next, or even prescribe it a fixed genre. It’s dark comedy, it’s gangland camp, it’s a fever dream, it’s a classic watershed movie madly in love with other classic watershed movies.

Not surprisingly, all of the memorable dialogue found in movie is verbatim in the script, but what did surprise me is Tarantino’s pension for using other movies to describe his own scenes. I never would’ve thought to compare Pulp Fiction to His Girl Friday but in the opening he literally says that the dialogue should be said like Cary Grant in that film.

It is impossible to tell where the Young Woman is from or how old she is; everything she does contradicts something she did. The boy and girl sit in a booth. Their dialogue is to be said in a rapid pace “HIS GIRL FRIDAY” fashion.

Other interesting things are the little cosmetic changes throughout the script. Jules and Vincent wearing green trench coats? Jules having a huge afro instead of that Jew curl wig he’s sporting in the film?

An old gas guzzling, dirty, white 1974 Chevy Nova BARRELS down a homeless-ridden street in Hollywood. In the front seat are two young fellas – one white, one black – both wearing cheap black suits with thin black ties under long green dusters. Their names are VINCENT VEGA (white) and JULES WINNFIELD (black). Jules is behind the wheel.

Vincent and Jules, their long matching overcoats practically dragging on the ground, walk through the courtyard of what looks like a hacienda-style Hollywood apartment building.

It was weird to imagine the iconic suits worn by John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson from the film covered by green dusters, of all things. But just about everything else in the script is as it appears in the film. Reading the script really is just like watching the film, and it made me think of a quote from the man himself:

“If it works on the page, it can work on the screen”

—Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino’s whole philosophy has been that it all starts with good writing; the rest builds upon that foundation brick by brick. While minor cosmetic things might go by the wayside, the script is the heart and soul of the movie. I learned a lot from reading his scripts, in fact I always have one on hand for when I write one of my own.

Vicissitudes

Pondering over the stories of The Iliad, Burial at Thebes, and The Epic of Gilgamesh I was reminded of a quote by author Lemony Snicket:

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like” (Horseradish).

Lemony may be living centuries apart from the likes of Socrates and Homer, but his words ring true. Despite being incredible, larger-than-life characters, the lead characters of these three tales all learn a similar lesson — that no matter how hard they try, there is absolutely no chance of outrunning fate. This essay will attempt to prove that characters like Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Creon, despite their great and unyielding natures, are all forced to bend the knee to external forces, denoting a fatalistic belief system.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a prime example of this, as the poem begins — Gilgamesh is a man without fear, concern, or many aspirations beyond subjugating the city of Uruk:

Surpassing all other kings, heroic in stature, brave scion of Uruk, wild bull on the rampage! Going at the force he was the vanguard, going at the rear, one his comrades could trust! Who is there can rival his kingly standing, and say like Gilgamesh, ‘It is I am the king’? Gilgamesh was his name from the day he was born, two-thirds god and one third human (2).

Gilgamesh, not merely in feats but on a physiological level stands head and shoulders above his fellow man. As a demigod he is unmatched physically or intellectually and as king of Uruk his power exceeds that of anyone in Samaria. It seems at this point that Gilgamesh is very much in control of his destiny, as he chides the advances of a goddess, slays monsters, and does whatever his heart desires. But, after Gilgamesh is forced to deal with the death of his close friend Enkidu, and begins his journey to find eternal life, he is faced with defeat at nearly every turn, first failing Uta-napishti’s trial and finally losing the precious life-giving plant to the serpent. Realizing his fate, Gilgamesh, the greatest hero in Samaria is moved to tears, not by a monster but by the sheer hopelessness of his situation.

“As it turned away it sloughed its skin. Then Gilgamesh sat down and wept, down his cheeks the tears were coursing, …[he spoke] to Ur-shanabi the boatman:

‘Now far and wide the tide is rising. Having opened the channel I abandoned the tools: what thing would I find that served as my landmark? Had I only turned back, and left the boat on the shore!’ (99).

It is here that Gilgamesh is at the end of his journey and must return to his city, not with a plant, or an artifact, or any semblance of immortality but merely with newfound knowledge of the finite nature of his life.

Achilles leads a similar life in Homer’s Iliad, as he is the mightiest warrior of all the Achaeans, a demigod, and a natural born leader. The main difference being that Gilgamesh bowed to no one, while Achilles must answer to the arrogant King Agamemnon for his actions. His separation from both God and man dooms him to a life of loneliness and confusion from which he cannot escape. This comes to a head when Achilles, exiled from his fellow Acheans and torn from his lover Briseis, falls upon his knees and weeps upon the shoreline.

But Achilles wept, and slipping away from his companions, far apart, sat down on the beach of the heaving gray sea and scanned the endless ocean. Reaching out his arms, again and again he prayed to his dear mother:

“Mother! You gave me life, short as that life will be, so at least Olympian Zeus, thundering up on high, should give me honor—but now he gives me nothing (89 Book 1 line 410).

Achilles, despite his prowess and stature in the Greek army, is like every mortal doomed to suffer and die in this world, in a life destined to be cut short in the prime of his life. Like Gilgamesh, he spends the majority of the poem attempting to avoid his fate, this time using inaction and passivity as opposed to Gilgamesh’s course of action. Nowhere are these ideas of fatalism more apparent than Book IV, where Hektor states:

“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born” (Book IV).

These morals continue into The Burial at Thebes, which pits an immovable object against an unstoppable force in the form of Antigone and Creon. Creon is our third character who realizes that he, like everyone, is a slave to the whims of the gods. He works tirelessly to thwart the actions of the unflinching Antigone, who will go to her death before sacrificing her principals. It is only when he is warned by the blind seer Tiresias that he relents, only to find that he is already doomed from the start. As Chorus almost prophetically states:

Whoever has been spared the worst is lucky. When high gods shake a house that family is going to feel the blow generation after generation… O Zeus on high, beyond all human reach, nothing outwits you and nothing ever will. You cannot be lulled by sleep or slowed by time (39 Heaney).

The stories though markedly different are vastly alike in their fatalistic view on life. In the worlds of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Achilles, Patroclus, Antigone, Haemon, and Creon, choices are not made so much as carried out by performers on a stage. Their heroes is not to seek after riches or some magical item to reverse time, but to come to the realization that life is hard and death is inevitable… no matter who you are. As Lemony Snicket would say:

“The sad truth is, the truth is sad” (Hostile Hospital).

Works Cited

Homer. The Illiad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Snicket, Lemony. Horseradish. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. Print.

Snicket, Lemony. The Hostile Hospital. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. Print.

Sophocles. The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Print.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Noises Off

Noises Off’s approach to comedy is like Keith Richard’s approach to drug use — pure unbridled excess with not a single hint of shame. Paradoxically, that ends up being the play’s greatest strength and its biggest vice. It is beyond the shadow of a doubt a comedic piece, with all notions of realism and sadness melting away like an ice cream cone left in the rain.

If whimsical farce is your cup of tea then Noises Off certainly provides, but if you’re like me and you enjoy a tinge of darkness and sympathy with your laughs then you might find the play lacking.

Part of it I feel however, is its legacy. Noises Off was a smash hit back in it’s 1982 debut, running until 1987, having run 553 performances. Ten years down the line however, the poorly received feature film adaptation was created which probably helped push the work from its classic status, to merely acceptable.

This is a play that demands to be seen live, on stage, with all the shenanigans happening in the moment. Simply reading the play or watching the forgettable movie destroys the piece. That, in conjunction with my general distaste of the genre left me wanting more from Noises Off.

The plot in layman’s terms is about a play within a play, seen entirely from the back, where we see the actors, the director, and everyone else involved. The play itself is lackluster, the actors forget their lines, the director’s a temperamental jerk, there’s a nasty love triangle going on, and it all continues to go down hill until every line of dialogue is improvised, ironically making for much more entertaining performance. Noises Off is a polarizing piece of art and if it must be experienced it must be live — it is far too theatrical to be captured in words.

Aura

Walter Benjamin’s “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a philosophical text that explores the downfall of art due to the age of mass reproduction in which we live. Benjamin classifies art that is original, which exists only as a single whole with no copies, as having an “aura” — a vague atmospheric quality that makes it special. When paintings, text, and all other works of art are reproduced into perfect copies, the object in question loses this “aura” and is now merely counterfeit:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art (Benjamin 2).

Benjamin literally sums up “aura” in a somewhat philosophical twist as the thing that is lost in the age of reproduction. Reproduction is not a form renewal or creation but is a stake to the heart of the original itself. Only making new art, and not hacking pieces off of established work is the way of summoning the hidden auras. Once created they must be closely guarded otherwise, upon mechanical reproduction, the thing in question loses said aura.

Benjaimin’s “aura” is similar to Gilles Deleuze’s use of “Figure” and “figure,” in his work, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, with the “Figure” having all of the qualities of Benjamin’s mysterious “aura.” The “Figures” are works of quality art that are formed by deforming “figures” or clichés into superior art. The ultimate difference is that while “auras” exist by themselves and are destroyed by human hands, “Figures” are not created until “figures” are demolished and reconstructed by an artist’s paintbrush.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Web. 15 December 2014.

Ignorance is Bliss

In the latter end of the 3rd century BC, Solomon, King of Israel wrote down his philosophy on the meaning of life,

“…And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind. Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.” (New American Standard Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:17-18).

Agree or disagree, the above statement holds truth in regards to the passages explored thus far, specifically Two Ways of Seeing a River by Mark Twain, Learning the Language by Perri Klass, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The focus of this essay will therefore, not examine style so much as this omnipresent theme, that knowledge and realization are sometimes equated with sadness.

Nowhere is this more apparent then in Two Ways of Seeing a River, in which Twain, at this time in his life, a steamboat pilot working along the Mississippi river, laments having traded his initial wonder and awe at the natural beauty of the river for benign observation. He describes his first encounter with the river as if he were acting out of reverence towards God himself.

“…the lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me and I had never seen anything like this at home” (Twain 1).

Twain is well known for his fine prose, but here his flourishes are poetic. It’s as if he’s scrounging every word in his expansive vocabulary to describe his emotions but can’t, so in desperation he throws everything he’s got into this passage with the passion and pent up emotion of a 70’s punk rock singer. But halfway through the narrative, his tone shifts from one of astonishment to a heavy, weary, nostalgic, sadness.

“…I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them” (Twain 1).

What has happened? Employment on the ship has forced our hero to sell his feelings for thoughts. His relationship with the river goes from an admirer to that of an associate. To him, the river represents a mechanism, something that is used rather than viewed for the sake of viewing.

“No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat” (Twain 2).

Twain speaks as if he’s confessing to a crime in an attempt to wash his hands of guilt. By obtaining the knowledge necessary to run and operate a steamboat, he has traded an inborn asset, his innocence.

The entire scene becomes so demystified that even his choice of words is flat and professional, which happens to be the very subject of Learning the Language by Perri Klass. Not unlike the Twain piece, this passage follows Klass as she begins a fledging new job in the medical practice.

“I learned a new language this past summer. At times it thrills me to hear myself using it. It enables me to understand my colleagues, to communicate in the hospital” (Klass).

Again similar to the previous author she experiences the thrills of being lost in a totally new environment, experiencing something to unknown and foreign. She uses the choice word: enable, to suggest that without this new found knowledge she could not hope to survive in this world, exactly as Twain would never have been able to hold his position as a pilot without an intimate understanding of the river. However, she continues:

[I] find that this language is becoming my professional speech. It no longer sounds strange in my ears-or coming from my mouth. And I am afraid that as with any new language, to use it properly you must absorb not only the vocabulary but also the structure, the logic, the attitudes (Klass).

Klass reveals that with the acquisition of knowledge comes familiarity, and eventually adaptation. She puts forth that not only does one give up mystique with mastery of a subject, but also that that comprehension changes a person’s identity. Because being an observer and a participant are mutually exclusive, Klass has to sacrifice one for the other.

“At first you may notice these new and alien assumptions every time you put together a sentence, but with time and increased fluency you stop being aware of them at all” (Klass).

The narrative leaves the question of whether or not the change is ultimately worth it, decidedly open, but it does state that the transformation happens so gradually that the participant doesn’t realize they’ve lost something until it’s gone. This reinforces the theme of these texts that knowledge often goes hand in hand with an inescapable feeling of sadness and nostalgia.

Plato’s take is perhaps the most poignant. He paints the picture of life-long prisoners in a cave filled with nothing but darkness.

“Behold! Human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move…” (Plato).

The sad inhabitants of this cave, know nothing except about the world that is the cave itself. Unlike the Mississippi River, there is no obvious beauty apparent in this place. Neither is there the excitement that was found in Klass’s personal experience. It seems that the prisoners in this reality have nothing to look forward to in their existence except the possibility of escape. Plato however, sheds an important light on this notion.

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows… Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formally saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? (Plato).

This famous allegory draws many comparisons and interpretations, and the author of this paper would be quite foolish in assuming that it’s only application is to his thesis. That being said, what does light do in Plato’s cave? It illuminates, and it reveals what was previously hidden. The light is the physical embodiment of any knowledge. Do humans not all start their lives in a cave? Gradually they grow, they adapt, and things become expected of them. They shed their youth, their innocence, and must become adults.

These texts don’t seem to suggest that it would be better or even possible to avoid having one’s mind expanded, changed, and molded. But they do shed light on the sad truth that growing, learning, and progressing in life are a painful experience. While the learned thinking man, might at times regret his decision to leave the comfort and security of the cave, he cannot go back. His only option is to move forward, where hopefully he’ll discover a new vista, and with it his sense of wonder.

Imitator

Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” isn’t so much a story as it is a prolonged attack on privacy and government invasion. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same drive behind “1984”. While updating the message of Orwell’s classic is a good idea in principle, where Doctorow drops the baton is in execution–especially in regards to tone.

Orwell used lean and dour prose to paint a very real, and oppressive society that is as fascinating today as it was in 1948,

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship”

Little Brother on the other hand is both aggressive and thunderous in its thrust,

“It’s our goddamed city! It’s our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we’re free. Once we’re not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You’re young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can’t possibly win, so you’re the only ones who can lead us to victory!”

While this type of expression might work for Rage Against The Machine, in the context of a dystopian novel it just feels like a desperate cry for attention and it almost ruins the immersion of the reader. With every line of dialogue you can almost feel Doctorow digging his elbow into your side and proclaiming, “Get it?”

Another example of Little Brother’s failure to replicate the brilliance of Orwell is in its protagonist, Marcus Yallow, a tech savvy hipster meant to appeal to Generation Y. Marcus, a.k.a w1n5t0n (obvious reference to 1984) starts out being a fairly likeable protagonist overall, but when the novel hits it’s stride it becomes increasingly difficult not to think of him as merely an author surrogate. Ultimately, Cory Doctorow clearly understands great science fiction literature like “Brave New World” and “1984” but when it comes to his own work he doesn’t quite grasp the subtleties.

Dracula

“Das Unheimliche”

A saying by Alfred Hitchcock perfectly encapsulates the book, this book: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” Dracula forgoes copious action for atmosphere and tension. It is a tale told through subtlety, and a strong pacing that weaves a powerful narrative that is light on morals.

Unlike lesser horror stories, Dracula does not commit the cardinal sin of merely introducing the Count as a suave, debonair, gentleman, and then suddenly reveal him as a monster. Early on, the niggling doubts about his employer gradually grow into intense, crippling, revelations, as Harker begins to witness surreal events:

“What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms…I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow, but I kept looking and it could be no delusion.”

The reader is drawn into events that unfold from a single point of view, subjecting him/her to the narrator’s character as it becomes evident that something devilish lies in wait. It is the anticipation that captures the reader. The audience follows the characters and gradually feels as if they are Harker, Seward, or Mina. The reader of Dracula will be left with frightening images, not easy to dispel.

Phantasmagoria

Discussing “Alice in Wonderland” and its sister novel: “Through the Looking Glass” is difficult. Contained within their pages isn’t so much a story as it is a series of strange vignettes with little or no connectivity. Despite the complete lack of a narrative the books are surprisingly absorbing, if only so we can see what sort of claptrap Alice will stumble into next. Stumble is the right word because for the entirety of these books she has no motive or purpose for being anywhere or doing anything–all her actions are at the whim of Wonderland’s eccentric denizens.

More elitist readers might dismiss the above paragraph and try to explain that Alice is actually a deconstruction of childhood innocence or some other seemingly intelligence remark. In their defense, “Wonderland” and “Looking Glass” certainly show glimpses of brilliance–like this scene in first book where Alice is gabbing with the Duchess.

“–I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember in a bit.”

“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”

Whether this is evidence that there is indeed a subliminal message behind Carroll’s gobbledygook or not, is up to the reader. Lewis certainly shows a command over the English language that few other authors possess, with words and phrases that flow seamlessly together to create something wholly unique (even if it is vexing at times.)

But perhaps Carroll wanted us to keep mulling over whether what we just read was a masterpiece or merely pulp fantasy. If that’s the case, then he definitely deserves recognition for accomplishing what he set out to do, even if the end result is just a mass of confusion.

‘You may call it “nonsense” if you like, but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!’ -The Red Queen

Cyrano de Bergerac Review

“Cyrano de Bergerac” is a biographical tragicomedy of sorts, by Edmond Rostand written in 1897, loosely based on the real life poet of the same name. It played at the Folsom Lake College Performing Arts Center for one night only on March 21st 2013 where I viewed it. It’s important to note that I am a fan of Edmond Rostand’s work and the theatre troupe Aquila. So going in I expected a good performance, what I didn’t expect was to experience the rare pleasure of getting completely absorbed in a story being told. During the first moments of the play, I had my usual reviewer mindset on and was merely analyzing the work than really ‘watching’ it. Then something weird happened, I can’t say when exactly but suddenly I was no longer thinking of the review but of the characters and their troubles, personalities, quirks, hopes, dreams, etc. I felt less like an audience member and more like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, completely ignorant of everything except the events unfolding before me. Luckily unlike Mr. Stewart, no one tried to murder me during the procedure and nor did I have to take a fall from a three story building at any point.

I suppose I should back up and describe the plot, (although I’d assume most people are familiar with it thanks in part to the Steve Martin film) it’s set in France, 1640 and centers on the swordsmen/poet/musician/part time theatre critic Cyrano de Bergerac, who apart from Jean Val Jean and Batman is perhaps the smoothest operator in all fiction. Like most great heroes however, he has a flaw that makes him tragically human. For Batman it was dead parents, for Val Jean it was being an ex-con, and for Cyrano it’s an abnormally large, almost phallic shaped nose. An otherwise exquisite and fearless individual, the nose makes Cyrano insecure in his ability to attract women and he even goes so far as to say:

[I am denied] the dream of being loved by an ugly woman

So as you can hazard a guess, the plot is around Cyrano trying to woo a lovely lady and get over his extreme self-confidence issues. Not quite exactly, Cyrano has a debilitating crush on his cousin (distant cousin, mind you) but instead of manning up he decides to live out his fantasy by aiding a handsome but stupid young man named Christian by writing all his letters to her for him, telling him what to say during a date (sometimes on the actual date whilst hiding), and overall Christian basically becomes an extension of Cyrano in all but looks.

The thing that’s truly great about the story is how balanced it all is. The whole situation lends itself well to both comic and dramatic appeal, and most writers couldn’t keep both of those plates spinning. Either they end up milking the comedy to the point where the serious scenes lack weight, or the dramatic sequences make the light comedy feel out of place. It takes the work of a masterful author to be able to conduct people like an orchestra to the point where one moment they’re laughing and the next they’re brushing away tears and when even attempting such a thing, the play will usually have a tendency to go completely snooker loopy and lose all traces of humanity. But it doesn’t, it’s a true testament to a work of fiction’s staying power when it remains both funny and sad over a hundred years after it was written–and presented in a different language no less.

But as anyone worth their salt would know, good writing is all for naught if there are no charismatic actors to read them. Aquila does not drop the ball here, they are definitely a talented and experienced troupe and they handle the source material well. Special mention should go to the fellow playing Cyrano, Jamie Bower (whom I actually took an improv acting class from once). In an odd sort of way his commanding performance reminded me of John Cleese. At the end of the day, no matter who your favorite Python is, when you watch Flying Circus and John Cleese appears, he immediately steals the entire scene. The same is true for Jamie’s Cyrano, every time he appears the other characters almost take a back seat to his shtick, which hilariously is quite befitting to how the actual Cyrano would be as an actor.
Cyrano is pretty much the perfect kind of entertainment because it satisfies on both an intellectual level with its dialogue and the more shameless, visceral part of our minds because of its action and its humor. Is this incarceration of Cyrano the very best? Probably not, the 1950 film version still stands as an immortal classic that gets better with each repeated viewing but this version too stands head and shoulders above the crowd. I think Cyrano himself would give the film a very positive review just for it’s ‘panache’.

Finite

Episodic in nature, The Martian Chronicles features twenty-eight thinly connected vignettes that Ray Bradbury described as “a book of stories pretending to be a novel”. The Martians play very small roles, and as characters they are quite forgettable. Portrayed neither as heroes, nor villains, the aliens have a finite essentiality to the plot and when they supposedly die-out the story merely continues without looking back, which reinforces the book’s notion that no matter how technologically advanced a civilization, it is bound to fall. Mars is the only constant in this ever changing cast of characters.
For example, the marital woes of Ylla and Yll and the desperate attempts of an unnamed taxpayer to board a departing spaceship have very little to do with one another, but ultimately they do have common ground in that they all eventually perish.

Bradbury was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series and the similarity is quite evident; after all, “A Princess of Mars” is one of the first books to instill the idea of Mars as a habitable planet. There’s a certain familiarity we share with Mars; it is close in both size and relative proximity, and overall, makes the perfect replacement for earth.

The residents of Earth don’t occupy The Red Planet like invaders; just the introduction of a new species with simple biological differences. After the sporadic growth of trees in “The Green Morning”, the influx of colonists in “The Locusts”, and the eventual devastation of Earth life, and in what feels like a brief instant the Martians are history.

The last line in the book is the most telling. Surviving humans board a lone rocket for Mars, to start anew. With the last mementos of Earth destroyed, the refugees look into a pool and see–themselves. “The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water…. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….”
It is the perpetuation of the species, or the survival of the fittest; a type of evolutionary change, where the original Martians succumb to the stronger species of Earthlings, and that race continues until some other comes along.

Get Yourself to Mars

A Princess of Mars is a formulaic science fiction romance that chronicles the journey of civil war veteran John Carter to the planet of Mars, where he becomes immersed in an interspecies conflict. Readers might interpret the Barsoom series as a commentary on 18th century western culture, specifically focusing on the troubled relationship between Native American Indians and American-European Settlers. However, in the words of Edgar Rice Burroughs,

“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature … If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”

When analyzing the story from the time frame and point of view of the author it becomes apparent that the theme of a technologically superior race struggling with a nomadic savage people is merely a setting that informs the grand adventure, and not a deliberate social commentary. Burroughs employed the parallels between warring races based upon his real life experience.

Essentially the exact opposite of the 2009 film “Avatar,” “A Princess of Mars” shows the primitive green Martians opening the hostilities, as opposed to the sophisticated human inhabitants. This comes to a head when Dejah Thoris, princess of Helium, is being held prisoner by the Tharks. She says resolutely,

“Why, oh why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows, must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of dumb brutes that serve you!”

If this were to be read as a serious critical analysis, then A Princess of Mars not only demonizes Native Americans, but also paints them as mindless barbarians. Dejah describes Tharks as, “A people without written language, without art, without homes…the victim of eons of the horrible community idea.”
While intriguing, the subtexts in the Barsoom books are not the incentive for reading; Burroughs essentially wrote stories to help pay the bills and aimed them at the common man, just looking for escapism.