Just The Caffeine Talking

Godel Operation Minus Two

Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here.

Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult. I wrote The Godel Operation with fairly vivid mental pictures of the characters, and consequently I had to do a fair amount of research to find actors who looked like my own imaginings. 

I actually think The Godel Operation would make a splendid film. It's full of exciting action and entertaining plot reversals. The future setting of the Billion Worlds might take a fair amount of computer animation to put on screen, but in a time when even historical dramas have green screens behind the actors to dub in renderings of past landscapes without power lines and jet contrails, that should hardly be an obstacle.

If you're interested, let's do lunch.

 

Inception Et Cetera

I recently saw the film Inception for the first time — I'm not sure why I didn't watch it when it came out, but I didn't. It's a great movie, and it helped me to understand a key difference between science fiction films and novels.

A perennial gripe about SF in movies is that films sacrifice science and plausibility for spectacle. That's true, and I think that's kind of the point. A film is, after all, a visual experience. Showing an amazing shot (like Inception's tilting and zero-gravity hotel, or a fight between people moving in different directions in time in Tenet) is the goal, and the script and storyboard are created to allow that.

Of course a novel can have amazing spectacles, too. Larry Niven's classic book Ringworld is full of marvels — a stellar flare turned into a weapon, teleport sidewalks, flying cities, a giant mountain with a secret at the top, moving planets, and of course the titular ring itself.

But Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception, has one huge advantage that Larry Niven doesn't. He can show you his amazing spectacles, right up there on the screen with Hans Zimmer music playing. Your brain accepts it as real, simply because your brain is accustomed to accept what you see as real.

Larry Niven can't do that. He has to use other methods to fool your brain into accepting his marvels. For a novelist one very effective tool of trickery is plausibility. In a novel you fool the reader's brain by making everything seem so real and scientifically possible that their disbelief gets suspended.

However, these tools work on different aspects of belief. Visuals get accepted right away ("seeing is believing"), but when the viewer leaves the theater there will be some discussion and nitpicking. "Why didn't they . . . ?" Getting the audience to accept written marvels may take more persuading, but the result is more permanent.

So I'm going to stick to my own conviction: that there's no reason to put these things in opposition. Good writing or good visuals are not antithetical to sound science and plausibility. You can have both, and you should. Imagine if Christopher Nolan's movies didn't have to include a character telling the protagonist (and the audience) "Don't think about it too much." 

Thoughts on That Christmas Movie

A lot of people think they've watched the movie It's A Wonderful Life but either haven't actually seen it, or have forgotten most of it. This leads to a lot of misunderstanding. When my family watched it this past Christmas my son was astonished to discover that a good two-thirds of the film's run time is simply a biographical study of George Bailey, leading up to the moment of his suicide attempt.

It's also a lot less saccharine and feel-good than most people imagine. George Bailey's life is full of disappointments and hardships, and the people of Bedford Falls are realistically flawed and three-dimensional. George himself is not especially saintly, either. He's got some selfish impulses and when his frustration finally boils over he's pretty harsh with those around him. That's kind of the point, after all: he's not some paragon of moral perfection, just a generally decent fellow, yet he has a good effect on the world.

Business Matters

The story contrasts George Bailey's charitable, humane approach to Potter's ruthless devotion to business. But if you pay attention to the movie it's pretty obvious that Mr. Potter is actually a terrible businessman.

Specifically, Potter invariably chooses short-term over long-term gains. He owns rental property and apparently skimps on maintenance. He does little or nothing to promote development in Bedford Falls. And in the alternate-historical Potterville, he's apparently willing to let the town be run by gangsters (but see below) — again, not good for the long term, and possibly not even good for Potter himself.

By contrast George Bailey encourages business formation, and thus economic growth. His client Martini owns a restaurant and buys a house, but in the alternate universe the bar is run (but probably not owned) by Nick, and Martini is nowhere to be seen. Bailey encourages his childhood friend Sam Wainwright to open a plastics plant in Bedford Falls, making the whole town more prosperous.

And wait until the post-WWII boom gets underway! Bailey's already begun developing the "Bailey Park" subdivision. He's going to make an absolute killing in the postwar housing market as newly-prosperous residents demand homes of their own — and have the money to pay for them. By 1960 Bailey's going to be a big-time real-estate developer, in the same league as the Levitt Brothers (the builders of Levittown, the archetypical postwar suburb). He'll be able to buy Potter with pocket change.

Although . . . one does hope that after the missing-cash incident George eases his uncle Billy into a comfortable retirement. Seriously, a man who can lose track of $8000 (in 1940s dollars — that's about $100,000 in 2021 play money) does not belong in charge of a business. Keeping him on goes beyond decency and kindness to the verge of irresponsibility. Promote Cousin Tilly to his job; she's been around for thirty years and probably knows more about how the Building & Loan works than anyone.

Potterville

This is a period detail modern viewers may not recognize: the depiction of "Potterville" encodes the place as a "wide-open town" along the lines of Phenix City, Alabama; Butte, Montana (which Dashiell Hammett transmogrified into "Poisonville" in Red Harvest); and Galveston, Texas. All three were notorious "sin cities" of the 1930s and 1940s, completely mobbed-up and corrupt. Audiences of the era would have understood that immediately. The most famous and successful "wide-open town" of all — Las Vegas — came along after It's A Wonderful Life was made.

Nowadays gambling, drugs, and prostitution are legal or tolerated pretty much all over the country. Every town is Potterville now, so of course we mock Bedford Falls for its lack of sophistication.

Interesting note about Potterville: Mr. Potter himself is not in evidence. Is he running the town — or has he been pushed out by the gambling and vice operators he allowed in? Maybe while George was poking around the cemetery in the alternate timeline he could have run across Potter's elaborate tomb, erected after he accidentally rolled down a flight of stairs onto some bullets.

Religious Matters

The depiction of Christianity in It's A Wonderful Life is pretty weird. Its vision of mid-Twentieth Century American Protestant Christianity looks oddly like traditional Chinese belief in its depiction of the afterlife — with the spirits of the dead acting as guides and guardians of the living, and a bureaucratic and hierarchical Heaven. None of that's in the Bible.

To modern eyes the movie is very "religious," with characters praying, thanking God, and a plot driven by literally Divine intervention. But since Frank Capra was trying to downplay the story's religious elements, he avoided the doctrines of any real-world faith, giving it that odd "pseudo-Christian-but-not-really" feel.

For plot reasons, I suppose it would cause problems if the angel was a real Biblical-style angel rather than a sweetly bumbling old gentleman with a copy of Tom Sawyer. Having a being of eyes and flaming wings appear to George on the bridge would definitely undercut his skepticism.

Clarence the "angel" gives his age as "293 next May" in 1946, indicating he was born in 1654. If we assume that he appears as he did at the end of his life, that puts his death date in the early 18th Century, circa 1710-1720. Which means that if Clarence is reading Tom Sawyer he's been keeping up with developments in the mortal world (if somewhat delayed, given that the book was published in 1876 and he's only just getting around to it).  

Summing Up

It's a really good movie — better than the simplistic strawman version that hipsters like to disparage. It's also a fascinating look at another time, and at another time's depiction of other times. You get an idea of how 1946 saw 1919 and 1929. Highly recommended.

Safety Last

I was recently reading about the legendary silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, and learned the interesting fact that he did his famous comedy stunts despite having lost the index finger and thumb of his right hand (he used a glove with prosthetic digits to hide the injury).

Here is Wikipedia's account of how Lloyd lost those fingers:

"On Sunday, August 24, 1919, while posing for some promotional still photographs in the Los Angeles Witzel Photography Studio, he picked up what he thought was a prop bomb and lit it with a cigarette. It exploded and mangled his right hand, causing him to lose a thumb and forefinger."

What is not explained — and what really should be explained — is why did the photo studio have a real bomb lying around in the first place?

This is going to keep me up at nights.

Movie Review: The King

On Thanksgiving, after a huge midday dinner, we all sat down on the couch to watch a movie. We eventually decided to watch David Michod's 2019 movie The King, featuring Timothée Chalamet* as Henry V of England.

The three of us gave it a solid B+ — good acting, good filming, nice locations and costumes, bonus points for no flaming arrows. A decent piece of work.

But I'm left with a feeling of utter bafflement about why this movie was made. It seems to deliberately miss some key opportunities.

I can understand making another film of Shakespeare's plays about Henry IV and Henry V. They're great plays and have plenty of scope for cool stuff on the big screen. Orson Welles, Lawrence Olivier, and Kenneth Branagh have all taken a stab at the Henriad.

I can understand wanting to make a historically accurate biopic of Henry V, paring away the Shakespearian inventions to depict something close to the real man in his real times. That would be a fascinating film.

What I can't make myself understand is why one would make a heavily fictionalized version of Henry's accession to the throne and his campaigns in France, yet turn down the opportunity to use the language of the greatest playwright in the English language.

So we have drunken party-boy Hal slumming it in Eastcheap with his drunken pal old Sir John Falstaff. We have Hal fighting Hotspur in single combat. We have the Dauphin acting like Ming of Mongo — all from Shakespeare. The moviemakers even add some departures from reality of their own that Shakespeare never thought of. So we're not being rigorously accurate here.

But on the morning of the battle of Agincourt, when King Henry V has to make a speech to inspire his men, instead of using the "Saint Crispin's Day" speech from Shakespeare's play, instead the screenwriters have him holler at his men about how they're all about to die in order to unite England or some damned nonsense like that. You can almost see their morale dropping.

"Saint Crispin's Day" is a speech which would make even the most dyed-in-the-wool pacifist's heart race with patriotic fervor and a desire to thrash the nearest Frenchman. You can believe that Henry was a great leader if he could toss that off at his men and lead them to an incredibly lopsided victory over a powerful foe. Why not use it?

Once again I'm convinced that the tiny cog people have saved a misguided film from itself. The moviemakers made their incomprehensible choice, and made a movie which didn't need to be made. What saves it is the effort of the invisible multitude of costumers, set designers, historical advisors, armorers, and prop makers, who made it interesting to look at and reasonably authentic. They deserve all the credit.

*"Timothy Chalmette? Is he related to Harvey Marrero?"

Notes on the Invisible Man

On Friday evenings my wife and I have a regular Movie Night. We've been doing it ever since it became impossible to go out to a real movie theater, and I expect we'll continue after (if) they re-open. To avoid conflicts over what to watch — or, worse yet, an "Abilene Paradox" situation where in an effort to find common ground we would end up seeing something that neither of us wanted to watch — we adopted a simple system. She picks the movie one week, I pick the next, we both watch whatever was picked, and no argument. It works pretty well and I recommend it.

Two weeks ago we watched the 1933 film The Invisible Man, directed by the peerless James Whale, based on H.G. Wells's 1897 novel. It was Claude Rains's breakout role — which is a testament to his physical acting and his amazing voice, because his face only appears for about five seconds at the very end.

As it was quite short, only 90 minutes or so, we spent a little time afterward looking at the special features on the disk, including the inevitable "making of" documentary. Like most specimens of the genre, this one included a couple of film critics trying to act like intellectuals, discussing the metaphorical significance of the Invisible Man in the film and Wells's novel.

And, as so many people do when discussing H.G. Wells, they kind of ran off the road into a ditch. One of them intoned quite solemnly that since H.G. Wells was a "progressive," the book is obviously about how oppressed "others" in society are "invisible."

Oppression as invisiblity was a great metaphor when Ralph Ellison used it for his 1952 novel about being black in America, Invisible Man (no "the"). But I don't think it has much relevance to Wells's book.

Why not? Several reasons.

First, Griffin, the Invisible Man of the title, isn't an "outsider" in the novel. He's short of cash for his research, but he's still a gentleman. An English gentleman in the 1890s was the ultimate insider, part of the class that literally ruled the world. He bosses around his social inferiors with unshakeable assurance and nobody thinks the worse of him for it.

Second, until he starts robbing houses and threatening to murder people, the people in the novel are very accomodating of Griffin. When he checks into a small country inn, all wrapped up to hide his invisibility, the proprietor isn't shocked or frightened — she's pleased at the unexpected windfall of a customer in the off-season. And when she glimpses his bandage-wrapped face she makes a point of mentioning that she has helped care for people with injuries before.

(By contrast, the film does make Griffin very much an outsider — a frightening intruder at the inn, the object of fear and suspicion from the start. Insert boilerplate reference to James Whale's sexuality here, although I suspect the real reason was that Whale was making a horror movie. That means something in the movie has to be scary, and the titular Invisible Man is the obvious choice. Also, Whale apparently loved to film Una O'Connor having hysterics in front of the camera, and she got the chance to really let it rip in this one.)

Finally, the novel has three genuine outsiders in it, and H.G. Wells does not treat them with much sympathy. The first is a tramp, "Mr. Thomas Marvel," who is depicted as ignorant, cowardly, and dishonest. Griffin, the Invisible Man, bullies Marvel into being his henchman, but he betrays and robs Griffin at the earliest opportunity, ultimately getting away with money and the scientist's notebooks which he cannot understand.

The second is Griffin's landlord in London, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who is also depicted as ignorant and cowardly, and gets his house set on fire. The third outsider is the "hunchback," the owner of a small and struggling costume shop in London. Unlike the other two, he is shown to be brave and resourceful, but Griffin beats and robs him anyway.

Griffin isn't the outsider, he's the one beating up outsiders — and the author invites the reader to sympathize with him when he does.

So, if it wasn't a parable against "othering" people, what axe was H.G. Wells grinding in The Invisible Man? Because this is H.G. Wells we're talking about, so there's definitely an axe and it's definitely going to get very thoroughly ground.

Well, it's important to remember that Wells's readers would instantly recognize the source of his idea of an Invisible Man. It's in The Republic, by Plato: the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible. In Plato's dialog, his brother Glaucon uses it as part of a thought experiment about morality. The ring of invisibility meant that the wearer could commit any crime — in Gyges's case, seducing a queen and murdering a king to take the throne — with no fear of punishment. Nobody could identify the criminal, nobody could capture him. Glaucon posits that only the fear of punishment makes men behave justly, and with the Ring of Gyges any man would be unjust and feel no guilt.

As Plato has Glaucon say, "If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice." (Note that Glaucon is asking Socrates to defend justice as a worthwhile good for its own sake; he's just "steelmanning" the side of injustice.)

Socrates's reply goes on for the rest of The Republic, and digresses into the organization of an ideal state, music, the role of fiction, and various other topics. You should read it, if you haven't. Any educated Englishman of the 1890s would know the story of the magic ring and be familiar with the rest of the book.

Now, H.G. Wells was a hard-core materialist. He didn't have any truck with God or divine justice. So, for a materialist, how to answer Glaucon's question? In a Godless universe, is justice merely a social construct, a kind of "mutual assured destruction" system in which humans agree to behave justly because they don't want to be the victims of injustice?

I think The Invisible Man is Wells's attempt to provide an answer. He does that by trying to refute the very premise of the Ring of Gyges: no man can truly escape the consequences of his actions. Not even an Invisible Man.

The novel constantly emphasizes the practical difficulties of Griffin's invisibility. He can't wear clothes, he can't carry things. If his feet get muddy someone will notice. In a crowded city like London he must be hyper-alert because nobody will avoid bumping him, and no driver will swerve to avoid running hi down. What should be a superpower is a curse.

The one deliberate murder Griffin personally commits in the novel is of a gentleman in the countryside who apparently catches sight of something the invisible man is carrying, and keeps following, trying to figure out what's going on. Griffin is already shown to be paranoid and psychopathic, but the thing which drives him to smash a man to death with an iron fence post is that his victim won't leave him alone. He's an invisible man who can't get any privacy!

And ultimately Griffin's "reign of terror" is ended by a road-mender hitting him with a shovel. No superweapon needed. The very idea of a man — even one with the power of invisibility — setting himself in opposition to society and conquering it is shown as absurd, the fantasy of a madman. Ordinary people are quite capable of stopping the invisible man, and I think that was Wells's entire point. People can get away with crimes only if the rest of us allow it.  

Time For Tea!

There's an excellent series of online readings organized by Sarah Smith, Brookline's Grande Dame of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called Teatime Readings. I did one last week, and now everyone can enjoy it here. The first half of the video is me reading a chapter from The Initiate, and the second half is a question-and-answer session about why and how I wrote that book — and some hints about what I'm doing right now!

Hamiltonian Musings

A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton.

Quick summary: it's good. Just like the soundtrack album.

And that's not just damning with faint praise. It is a great musical experience. But the staging of the show was overwhelmed by the songs. It's not a grand spectacle. The dancing is skillful but with a fairly small stage the performers mostly have to strike poses on a rotating floor section because there isn't room to move.

To me it would be as great an experience if the performers were just standing on stage in evening dress in front of the orchestra, with the chorus on risers in the back. And I find myself wondering, why not? A purely static musical performance can be profoundly moving. 

I have heard that a film version is in the works, and I hope the director isn't content to plant a camera in front of the stage. The music would work just as well against a realistic period background. The dancers could really cut loose. Freed from the theater stage, the spectacle of the show could finally match the music.

I was very impressed by the cleverness of the lyrics and the structure of the piece. At some point Mr. Miranda must have sat down with a notepad and jotted down all the words and phrases he could think of connected with a pistol duel, and then tried to build songs around them. I suspect his hard drive contains discarded drafts of a number about "fire," perhaps one about "paces," or "triggers," or "the ground."

I was also impressed by a bit of casting: all the performers who play Hamilton's friends in the first act are his adversaries in the second, which heightens the depiction of a man becoming more and more isolated as his ambition cuts him off from everyone around him. The exception is the man who plays John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton; in both acts he's the Guy Who Dies. I do wonder if in some earlier draft Laurens had a spotlight number in the first half to match Phillip's in the second.

(No doubt there will be a book or three written about this show which might confirm or explode my speculations. Until then, I'm free to guess.)

Jim says check it out.

The Future of Star Wars — And An Initiate Reading!

Andrew Liptak at Tor.com asked some science fiction writers what they'd like to see from future Star Wars projects. You can read my answer here.

And if you're in or near Worcester, Mass., at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow, swing by Annie's Book Stop of Worcester, at 65 James Street on the west side of Worcester (take exit 10 off the Mass Pike and go north on Oxford St.), to hear a reading from my new book The Initiate and get a signed copy! I'll be giving away a bonus gift to one randomly-chosen attendee, so don't miss out!

Movie Review: Color Out Of Space

Well, there's no "U" in "Color" so I guess it sucks.

Actually, it doesn't. Color Out of Space is a sincere and competent attempt to film a completely unfilmable story. As a horror movie, it succeeds at its most basic task: scaring the audience. My wife spent about half the run time in the theater vestibule, peeking in when she thought it would be safe and pulling back when it got too scary.

I say "unfilmable" story, because of course the source material, the short story "The Colour Out of Space" (note the U!) is about a meteor which brings an indescribable color to a New England farm in the late 19th century. Over the next year or two the inhabitants of the farm are driven mad and physically debilitated by the mysterious color, which poisons the entire surrounding area. 

In the real world, a color film can't be about a color which doesn't exist, so they made it magenta. Ah, well.

To pump up the thrill factor the moviemakers made some choices which made for more immediate scariness but had the overall effect of weakening the story, in my opinion. They added psychological elements, including a mild case of what looks like ghost possession, which felt very out-of-place. They tossed in a generous dose of Cronenbergian body horror. And there were a lot of plot threads and themes which were introduced and then abandoned — one character seems to be recovering from cancer, which is mentioned several times, but that more or less gets lost in the more immediate issue of an alien presence draining the life out of everyone. There's a little contrived isolation for plot purposes — the cars won't start but nobody thinks of walking out until it's night, and then they're too scared.

But there are chunks of dialog and narration straight out of the story, and everything comes to a proper Lovecraftian conclusion. Lots of fun shout-outs to HPL's greater "mythos" of towns and family names.

The acting is all good and believable. Nicholas Cage hams it up, but he kind of has to. The rest of the cast are good, even when they're assigned more or less stock character roles. ("You're the little girl from Poltergeist, only you're a boy. Got it?")

I give this movie a solid B. It does exactly what it attempts. Lovecraft fans should see it.

 

For a story about otherworldly presences and invisible horrors, check out my new novel The Initiate, in stores next week!