Denis Villeneuve's "Dune"

Last night I watched Part II of Denis Villeneuve's Dune with my youngest son. Dune was one of the key books of my adolescence, and I read it at least three times; he has never read it. We both thought the movie was excellent. 

It is visually magnificent, the acting is good enough, and even the action sequences are ok. I have developed a strong allergy to dumb things in movie action scenes, so much that I can hardly stand to watch the average sci-fi thriller, but this movie was better and the dumb things mostly flashed by quickly. Enough of the plot was included across the two films (5 hours 21 minutes in total) for my son to follow the story and for me to reimmerse myself in it. I recommend it. 

I thought the business of the Benne Gesserit and their prophecies was particularly well-handled. These witchy women have spread prophecies across the galaxy that they then use to reinforce their power, but the question of whether those prophecies are true seems to hang open; certainly characters in the book disagree about it, and when they seem to be fulfilled it is in a way no one expected.

Dune is just an awesome book for a certain sort of teenage boy. Whether it is for anyone else I couldn't say; there is some heavy gender weirdness that I imagine might bother some girls, and neither the story nor the mythos is robust enough to survive educated adult skepticism. But it completely drew in my 15-year-old self and resonated powerfully in my imagination for at least a decade. I was especially taken with the idea of a hero who is trained in both the feminine mysticism of the Bene Gesserit and the masculine ways of war and calculation, thus combining masculine and feminine powers. I think for me it ranked behind only the Lord of the Rings in captivating me and launching my reveries.

It pleases me that it has finally been put on screen in a version good enough that I can happily share it with my sons.

Dunkirk vs. D-Day

Finally got around to watching Cristopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) last night. I liked it; I thought it had the right tone, pace and color palate for a movie about men just trying to survive.

One of the things that struck me was how small and amateurish it seemed compared to D-Day four years later. So I went and looked up the numbers, and, yeah, it is amazing how much stuff the combattants had built in four years. For example, the Luftwaffe force trying to halt the evacuation had  300 bombers; the Allied air force preparing for D-Day had 2,200 bombers. (And of course they were bigger planes. A majority of them were British, so this wasn't just about US industrial power.) The D-Day paratroop drop involved 925 planes carrying paratroopers and a further 500 towing gliders. 

The Dunkirk evacuation fleet included one cruiser, 48 destroyers, 45 troop ships, 8 eight hospital ships, 36 minesweepers, and about 700 smaller vessels; the D-Day fleet included 5 battleships, 20 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 210 troop and supply ships, 277 minesweepers, and 5,000 smaller vessels.

On the other hand, in terms of people moved across the Channel, the Dunkirk fleet did pretty well. On June 6 the D-Day fleet took 160,000 men across to France, compared to a peak of 68,000 in one day for the Dunkirk evacuation. But the D-Day figure was by far the most taken in one day in 1944. The number for all of June was 875,000, which means that after June 6 an average of 30,000 men per day were taken across. In the nine days of the Dunkirk evacuation, 338,000 were taken over, an average of 37,000 per day. Which right there explains why many British people thought it was a miraculous victory.

"Oppenheimer"

Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer

Saw Oppenheimer last night with four others of my family, and we all loved it. It was longer than it needed to be, and there were a few times when I thought Christopher Nolan was too much in love with his own directorial brilliance, but on the whole I found it very fine. I cannot think of a single other movie that does so well with the character of a complex and brilliant person as Nolan and Cillian Murphy did with J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The film is disarrayed in time. It begins with a short overview of Oppenheimer's whole career, a series of ten-second snippets that array the whole life before you like a collage. That, I think, was part of Nolan's method, to reveal a life to you not so much as a narrative from start to finish but as a single object with many facets, a man, as he is, who moves through different circumstances but is always recognizably the same complex shape.

The cast is amazing. I guess that's another good thing about being Christopher Nolan, that you can do things like recruit Kenneth Branagh for a twenty-second turn as Niels Bohr. My children had fun recognizing all the former child stars who played the young physicists at Los Alamos. My favorite performance was actually by Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock. Tacklock was a beautiful communist with whom Oppenheimer was involved in the 30s and then saw a few more times when he was married, which was used against him in the infamous security clearance hearings. ("Why did you sneak off to visit this known communist in a hotel room?" Well . . .) Nolan and Pugh render Tatlock as the perfect crazily irrestible woman, sexy, irrational, unquittable. Once when Oppenheimer goes to visit her they end up fighting and she says, "I told you we can never see each other again!" "You called me!" "Stop answering the phone!" Perfect.

My one serious complaint about the film is that it doesn't give a very good sense of the work that was done at Los Alamos and how important Oppenheimer was to making it happen. I have read a stack of books about those years – the best is Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb – and I missed the nerd camaraderie of a hundred mostly young men working at the edge of science, and Oppenheimer as the father figure who somehow kept them all on task. For me there was too much politics in the Los Alamos scenes and not enough engineering.

I thought the film was actually better on the physics of the late 1920s, when Oppenheimer went to Germany to study the new world of the quantum. Imagine being a brilliant young physicist in that era, with astonishing new discoveries being published every year, everyone crowding in to lectures by Bohr or Heisenberg where they revealed earth-shaking advances, tearing open the latest journals to see what marvels they unveiled. That was the time to be a physicist.

Without saying so, Nolan seems to be pushing one version of Oppenheimer's decline and fall. I believe this comes from one of his recent biographers, although I can't remember which. The idea is that Oppenheimer was throughout his time at Los Alamos nagged by a sense that this was all a terrible mistake. After the war he pushed for UN control of nuclear weapons and when he failed to have any impact from that direction he engineered his own expulsion from the secret nuclear world, partly as self-punishment and partly so he would be an outsider again, a counter-culture sort of figure dabbling in left-wing causes, as he had been before the war. That, again, is part of what Nolan was trying to do, to show that Oppenheimer was the same man when he was a young physics star and leftist, when he was the magisterial figure making the bomb, when he was thrown out of that world and became a lecturer supporting disarmament.

It may not be true, but it is plausible, especially for the Oppenheimer that Nolan and Murphy have given us. I has been a long time since I felt blessed to have seen a film, but Oppenheimer gave me that feeling.

Ted Gioia Ponders Our Cultural Stagnation

Music critic Ted Gioia worries that even though our gigantic culture industry invests billions every year searching for market share, the whole arts world seems to be stagnating:

The latest news comes today from market research outfit Luminate, who tell us that the share of new music continues to shrink in the face of competition from old songs. I wrote about this a few months ago, and the numbers were already ugly back then.

But they have gotten worse.

The latest report shows that the consumption of old music grew another 14% during the first half of 2022, while demand for new music declined an additional 1.4%. These old tunes now represent a staggering 72% of the market.

And it’s likely to get worse when the full year numbers are released—because we are still in the midst of the Kate Bush/Metallica phenomenon spurred by the showcasing of their old songs on Stranger Things.

Things may be even worse in the movies:

A number of recent articles on Hollywood have announced that we are living in the Golden Age of the Aging Actor. Harrison Ford, who turns 80 this week, may be the most prominent example. As the public face of several major brand franchises, he is still in demand, and will soon show up in another Indiana Jones movie, a kind of Raiders of the Lost AARP Card affair. But this aging Ford assembly line is hardly an isolated example—the graying actor is everywhere. Top Gun is the biggest box office success of the year, and it features Tom Cruise reprising a role he last played in 1986. I fully expect to see a septuagenarian Superman or Batman in the future.

The Ringer recently did the math and found the average age of male leads has risen from around 37 in 2000 to over 45 in 2021. 

I’d like to be amused by all this, or maybe even applaud these senior citizens who have somehow extended their careers beyond normal limits. But the larger picture is disturbing.

Just follow the dollars. Every big budget movie this year is either a reboot, sequel, prequel, remake, or brand extension. Every last one of them. The largest investments in music are the acquisition of old publishing catalogs, while almost nothing is spent developing new artists. . . .

Nobody wants to take a chance on something new and different. It’s just too risky. You could even get fired for that.

Does this matter? Gioia thinks it does:    

But when cultures stop innovating, they soon lose the essential skills they need for their survival. I’m reminded of the Arch of Constantine built by order of the Roman Senate between the years 312 and 315 AD—when the Empire, for all its military might, had forgotten how to create impressive artistic works. As a result, the builders of this monument had to steal parts from older structures.

Decline of empires, etc., etc.

I am not much of a doomster myself, but I share this sense that there isn't much new happening in music, film or television. It has been years since the last time I eagerly awaited a new movie, a new cd, or the new season of a tv show. I am not sure how much of this is a change in me, and how much of that change is caused by cultural malaise. I certainly feel less involved in new cultural products than I used to. Some of that may be aging, but I don't think that's all of it, since my children feel pretty much the same way. I often find myself laughing out loud about the old songs they find to get into. 

I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't feel right.

The Green Knight

The first time I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, at 18, I thought it was stupid.

When I re-read it 15 years later, I found it fascinating. The story is certainly stupid, but the meta-story is something else. The plot is a game within a game within a game: a quest imposed on Gawain, which is part of a trick being played by Morgan le Fey on Guinevere and Arthur, which is in turn part of a world where everything is a contest for fame and glory. Arthur takes us to that world in the first lines, when he announces that they can't start the Christmas feast until something adventurous happens. But at the same time, the world seems magical and, I don't know, eldritch; the landscape these rather silly people move through has magic in its soil, and these tricks may somehow be echoes of ancient, deep, and terrible stories.

I would say that the world is halfway between that of Beowulf and that of Don Quixote; the whole thing is crazy, but instead of laughing we are swept along by the sheer weirdness of the action and the seriousness with which Gawain approaches his ridiculous task. Never mind that the whole thing is contrived and pointless, called a "game" by Arthur right at the beginning; Gawain is still determined to see it through and prove his courage. And maybe the echoes of epic battle and pagan sacrifice indicate that there is some value in the gesture, some repetition of a timeless quest by a timeless hero.

So now there is a movie, The Green Knight, directed by David Lowery, and starring Dev Patel as Gawain. I saw it and thought it was ok.

It is visually fascinating, both in the overall look and in many individual images. There are some good creepy bits, and moments of beauty. It has some ok magic. There is a nice side trip into a famous folk tale.

There are two things that bothered me about it. The first is that the whole structure of the trick has been changed; instead of a petty little attack by Morgan le Fey on Guinevere it is a completely different trick being created by a different person for an altogether more serious purpose, which undermines the thing that now fascinates me about the medieval story: the sense that chivalry is a pointless game people play for fun and honor, but that somehow still echoes grim old epics. This is also shown right at the beginning, for reasons I still don't understand; in the story you have to read to nearly the end to find out what is going on.

Second, the movie's Gawain is one of those utterly unbelievable modern takes on a medieval character. This Gawain is a womanizing drunk, which is ok, there were plenty of noble womanizing drunks in the Middle Ages. But he has a common girlfriend who thinks she might become his wife, and he furthermore does none of the things that even drunken, womanizing noble sons had to do, like train with weapons and boss around servants. Plus, he's a coward. In the world of the Arthurian stories, there is zero chance that Arthur's nephew could be like this.

I thought, from the way it was advertised, that the film would tend toward horror, playing up the creepiness and the fear; but the revelation of the trick at the beginning undermines any fear for Gawain's life. The Green Knight isn't very scary, and a lot more could have been done to make the others Gawain meets along the way creepier. So in the end it isn't very scary at all.

I'm not sure what it was, other than pretty and distracting. But it might still have been the best new (to me) movie I have seen in a year or more. I guess I'm just hard to satisfy these days.

A Trip to the Movies in Switzerland, c. 1912

This is from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), which I listened to for hours and hours on my latest set of long drives. The setting is a resort town in the Swiss Alps, circa 1912, based on a stay Mann made in Davos in that year. 

Life flitted across the screen before their smarting eyes: life chopped into small sections, fleeting, accelerated; a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing, performed to a thin accompaniment of music, which set its actual tempo to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means at its command, yet managed to evoke a whole gamut of pomp and solemnity, passion, abandon, and gurgling sensuality. It was a thrilling drama of love and death they saw silently reeled off; the scenes, laid at the court of an oriental despot, galloped past, full of gorgeousness and naked bodies, thirst of power and raving religious self-abnegation; full of cruelty, appetite, and deathly lust, and slowing down to give a full view of the muscular development of the executioner’s arms. Constructed, in short, to cater to the innermost desires of an onlooking international civilization.  . . .

The despot died beneath the knife, with a soundless shriek. Then came scenes from all parts of the world: the President of the French Republic, in top-hat and cordon, sitting in a landau and replying to a speech of welcome; the Viceroy of India, at the wedding of a rajah; the German Crown Prince in the courtyard of a Potsdam garrison. There was a picture of life in a New Mecklenburg village; a cock-fight in Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose-horns, a wild elephant hunt, a ceremony at the court of the King of Siam, a courtesans’ street in Japan, with geishas sitting behind wooden lattices; Samoveds bundled in furs, driving sledges drawn by reindeer through the snowy wastes of Siberia, Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron; a Persian criminal under the knout. They were present at all these scenes; space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here. A young Moroccan woman, in a costume of striped silk, with trappings in the shape of chains, bracelets, and rings, her swelling breasts half bared, was suddenly brought so close to the camera as to be life-sized; one could see the dilated nostrils, the eyes full of animal life, the features in play as she showed her white teeth in a laugh, and held one of her hands, with its blanched nails, for a shade to her eyes, while with the other she waved to the audience, who stared, taken aback, into the face of the charming apparition. It seemed to see and saw not, it was not moved by the glances bent upon it, its smile and nod were not of the present but of the past, so that the impulse to respond was baffled, and lost in a feeling of impotence. Then the phantom vanished. The screen glared white and empty, with the one word Finis written across it. The entertainment was over, in silence the theatre was emptied, a new audience took the place of that going out, and before their eager eyes the cycle would presently unroll itself again. 

This scene reminds me again of how middle class Europeans had in that era access to more knowledge and images of the world than anyone had ever had before. This, to me, was Europe's real gain from the imperial era, not money (it cost more to administer colonies than they ever paid in taxes) but knowledge. I am reminded of something from my own childhood, the Travelogue, in which a speaker who had visited some exotic land regaled his audience with stories while showing films or slides of gorgeous scenery and exotic customs. I, full of unbounded curiosity, loved them. And of course there was National Geographic and many similar publications.

The west gathered the knowledge of the whole world to itself, and feasted on it.

Russian Troublemaking in Star Wars Fandom

This amused me:

A recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.

Using the analytical tools that other technologists deployed to uncover Russian influence during the 2016 election, Mr. Bay found that “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists” were using the “Star Wars” debate “to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality” and that “a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

Using “Star Wars” as the vehicle was a canny move by the trolls. Fans, like the American electorate, are polarized and angry. Online and in real life, they scream at one another about how Luke Skywalker would really behave decades after finding out that his dad was Darth Vader.

It also makes me wonder: suppose making Americans hate each other really is a goal of Russian policy. Would stirring up trouble among Star Wars fans be a good strategy? Or are we better than that at separating entertainment from politics? Personally I suspect it would be a powerful tactic.

On the other hand, is dividing Americans really useful for Putin? In the short term it may have helped a little bit to elect Trump, but I would worry that in the longer term it might create incentives for a future leader to lash out at Russia to cement his or her position.

RIP Rutger Hauer

Tears in the rain.

Loving Vincent

Trailer for an animated movie about Van Gogh.

Original Star Wars Matte Paintings

I just discovered today how many of the backgrounds in the first three Star War movies were matte paintings. I mean, I knew a lot of stuff was painted but I always thought this scene had actual actors in storm trooper uniforms. But no.

In some scenes, even the characters were painted in.

Nerds Gotta Be Nerds

I just discovered that there is a long-running debate among physicists and engineers, waged with long papers full of equations, over whether the explosion of the Death Star at the end of Return of the Jedi would have destroyed all life on Endor.

The general consensus: "the Ewoks are dead. All of them."

Movie Robots and Us

Very interesting essay by Daniel Mendelsohn on recent robot films and what they say about our hopes and fears:

 Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001, is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

The "Purge" and our Fascination with Anarchy

One of the most interesting details about the Baltimore riots was the way the trouble began last night, with a confrontation between the police and rock-throwing kids right after high schools let out for the day:

Police Commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, said the violence on Monday began with word of a “purge” set to take place at Mondawmin Mall, led by local high school students. Those students confronted about 200 police officers and attacked the police with rocks and cinderblocks after school let out.

Purge? In case you missed it, The Purge was a movie released in 2013 about “an annual 12-hour national holiday in which Americans are legally absolved from every crime, including robbery and homicide.” The film was generally considered pretty bad, but the idea still managed to strike a chord with many viewers. Ever since, police departments around the country have been dogged with rumors of purges:

Last fall, police in Windsor, Conn., tightened security in response to rumors of a “Windsor Purge,” in which teenagers were allegedly planning to spread chaos with BB and paintball guns. No purge occurred.

There have also been postings on the internet about alleged purges, like one in Chicago in which more than a hundred people were supposed to have been killed.

We are fascinated with this myth of a time without rules, when the veneer of civilization would be stripped away and our animal ferocity would emerge unchecked. This explains some of our obsession with post-apocalypse scenarios, from Mad Max to The Walking Dead. And, I suppose, with war. As much as we enjoy civilization, there is a part of us that chafes against its limits, and yearns for a liberating darkness. One way to explore this fantasy is through the notion of a brief window when the limits would be discarded and anarchy would reign. After 12 hours of terror and thrilling freedom, order would return and we could get on with our lives.

But most of us would really rather watch a movie about anarchy, or play the video game, than experience its ugly reality.

Romance is Dead

So first there was Malificent, in which true love turned out to be a mother's for her daughter, and I finally just saw Frozen, in which true love turned out to be between sisters, and now I'm wondering, is this just two Disney movies or is there something important happening in the culture?

RIP Leonard Nimoy

Grief for one who lived so long and well would be illogical, yet my human emotions demand it.

--Matt Zoller Seitz

I always thought of Spock as a hero for Aspergers boys like I was, using logic to figure out how to get along in human society. As an adult I was surprised to learn that he also meant a great deal to other sorts of people, including immigrants who felt like perpetual outsiders, people of mixed race, and many blacks, especially those trying to make it in science or computing. Nimoy was Jewish, the child of Yiddish-speaking immigrants -- he said he invented the Vulcan greeting in imitation of a gesture he saw a rabbi make during a ceremony-- and Spock as a Jew resonated with a great many people. The new series of movies, in which the Vulcans have lost their home planet, seems to be playing up this angle. All of these fans look to Spock as a sign of what people with their own handicaps and troubles could achieve.

The power of a television presence to inspire people is very great. This may be especially true for lonely children and teenagers, desperately seeking for friendship and guidance in the big harsh world. Spock was a great gift to millions, a gift from Gene Roddenberry, the Star Trek writers, and from Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy sensed early on the power of his character, and he always took Star Trek more seriously than the other actors. After the show ended he tried hard to escape from being type cast and took all sorts of crazy roles to change his public persona. But later in life he came to fully embrace his identification with Spock -- I suppose looking back over his career he saw that he had been part of one truly great thing, and that is more than more people can say of their work.

Leonard Nimoy is gone, but Spock, his masterpiece, will live on for as long as our civilization endures.

Ponder This

The Maker, by Christopher Kezelos. Music by Paul Halley. Well worth five minutes of your time.

Maleficent

Just back from watching Maleficent with two children and one young adult -- this is Disney's new Sleeping Beauty, told from the point of view of the angry fairy who casts the curse. We all found it entertaining. It's low-key, not much drama or tension, but amazing to look at. Not to ruin it for you, but the message seems to be that no handsome prince could possibly love you as much as your mother does.

But let me just say that I want wings. I want to fly like Maleficent does. I want my wings to have been stolen away by an evil wizard and locked up in a tower and I want to go on a great quest to retrieve them so that I can fly again.

Ironies of Various Kinds

TLS, November 29, 2013:

John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) stars Humphrey Bogart as Same Spade, a private dick on the trail of a "priceless" work of art, a golden jewel-encrusted falcon, formerly a tribute to Charles V of Spain and latterly the cause of several murders. Based on Dashiell Hammett's novel of 1930, this tangled story of duplicity and greed revolved around the ultimate Hollywood MacGuffin: the object of desire turns out to be worthless. Not so in real life. Despite a bent right-tail feather (the result of an accident during production), the "black bird" statuette was this week snapped up at a Bonham's sale in New York for £2.5 million.

The Phantom Inventory

Delightful little ghost story.

Casey Neistat in Tacloban

20th Century Fox offered Casey Neistat $25,000 to help them promote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by making a video on the theme of living your dreams. Here is what he did instead.