Category: science/fiction

Thanks, Judd!

Modern Mechanix is a daily font of fascination. And while the “Fix your nose with this device!” ads and Lucifer Butts inventions sidle up against flying cars and one-wheeled tanks, none have been as bizarre and schizophrenic as I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot. This is Jack Dempsey, the former boxer, claiming that he can beat any boxing robot in the world. Then he explains why, neglecting the reason that there is no such thing as a boxing robot.

I think it’s really interesting that this guy is responding to something that is a real fear — losing relevance as machines are used to supplant humans in many respects — in his domain. John McEnroe was claiming that he could still, at 50-some years old, beat any woman tennis player in action today while Serena Williams regularly serves over 100 mph. The difference here is that mechanical men aren’t people because they don’t exist. That’s an important distinction, I think. How many times was Mr. Depsey hit in the head for this to make sense to him?

On October 4, 1957, the first thing to ever leave earth, did. It was at once a hope for the future for all people and a democidal threat. Such were the ways of the Cold War.

All over the earth, people could tune their radios to the “bip. bip. bip. bip,” as it swung overhead. They could marvel at the intellect that it took to make such a thing happen. And they could hope that such a thing would never be used in anger because there would be no defense against a falling star.

As it turns out, there was an ironic defense: the space race meant that, to a large extent, the United States and the Soviet Union spent energies on exploration and understanding that they could have spent incinerating each other. For those of us outside the cabals of corrupt power, that means us. There were a few dozen men, old imperialists all, commanding whether we lived or died. They gave us a century of hideous, brutal, industrial war, in which our great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and siblings have died. But they also gave us Sputnik to give us hope, the patronizing bastards.

Sputnik was a thing of beauty. It showed us that Earth is a place, and we live in that place, and the Universe is vast — maybe we shouldn’t shit where we eat. The “night sky” is like a movie screen; removed, distant, unmoving, simple. But to look up and see machines that have been thrown there using explosions and insicive thought, that gives perspective. They’re there, 20 miles away, 100 miles away, 500 miles away, and you can see them. They’re things that people have built, sometimes held together with duct tape and courage alone. Soon, the X-Prize participants will start their attempts at landing their robots on the moon, expanding the project from imperialist saber rattling to human curiosity — the love of the unknown.

Sputnik’s orbit completely decayed in January of 1958, having accumulated enough friction with the occasional air molecule that it slowed until the number of air molecules was large enought to melt and burn the watermelon-sized spacecraft into gases, bringing its parts all home to Earth. But while the machine was gone, the knowlege remained: the Universe is vast and we can go see it. As a symbol, Sputnik will orbit for the life of our civilization.

In 1982, when Blade Runner came out, I was really too young to see it. I think my first movie was 2001, which is disturbing but not violent in the way Blade Runner is. 2001 is about facing God. Blade Runner is about shooting a woman in the back and worrying that you don’t feel good about it. At 9 years old, I’m not sure how happy I would have been about that.

But just a few years later, something clicked with that movie for me. In my mid-teenagerhood, I could see that it was deeply critical of society it portrayed, critical of its hero, and sympathetic with its villain. It was an indictment of slavery, of dehumanization of all sorts, and questions the value of any definition of humanity put forth by those who benefit from such a definition.

So when the Director’s Cut came out in 1992, I was all kinds of hopped up about it. I saw it at the Avon in Providence. I think my girlfriend Beth was with me at the time, whose critique of film I respected even more than my own. I’ll never have known if I’d have understood the movie without the voice over, but what I saw was this crisp, creative, beautiful vision that addressed the kinds of things I like speculative fiction to address.

The Director’s Cut released then was a re-edit. Timing remains from the voice-over (leading to some awkward pacing in the movie which I really like, but appreciate might not be part of Scott’s conception), you can see strings holding up the spinners, and continuity and other errors abound. (Who’s the fifth replicant? It doesn’t make sense for it to be Deckard except by way of the most Talmudic explanation; Snakes don’t have differentiated scales; The serial number on the scale doesn’t match the animal dealer’s lines…) Mr. Scott, though, has apparently gotten some funding to tidy things up once and for all, though. Next month, Blade Runner, the Final Cut will be released in LA and NY. It will likely get up here to Northampton eventually. I, for one, want to see how Ridley himself sees the movie.

I think I’ll use this as an excuse to write a bunch of things about the movie. It’s one of the primary reasons I wrote Shock: and it makes for a great running example.

Thanks to Judd for the headsup!