The unexpected science subtext of George Miller's 3,000 Years of Longing

George Miller’s lavishly produced recent film, “3,000 Years of Longing,” could be described as a sort of Aladdin for adults. It is the retelling of a tale from Scheherazade’s 1,001 Arabian Nights set in our mythology-leary world. And, contrary to expectations, if one digs beneath the surface, a surprising story about science reveals itself.

That science will play a role in this reformulation is hinted at early on in the movie. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), a “narratologist” by trade, is arriving for a storytelling conference in modern day Istanbul. Her grip on reality is called into question when we watch her spy a diaphanous, gnome-like man trying to run off with her baggage cart at the airport. Unwelcome apparitions like him continue to appear, unbidden, at the conference’s keynote lecture where a distracted Alithea pauses to declare that the tales of gods and heroes of ancient times have been vanquished to the dustbin of history. According to her, scientific explanations now rule the day.

Given Alithea’s job as an expert on the art of storytelling, this declaration is a surprise. Shouldn’t she at least take some professional pride in the enduring power of ancient myth? Or maybe it’s that, as Alithea has grown older, these just-so stories have lost their appeal. Has tragedy in Alithea’s life drained the magic from her world?

Miller and his co-writer/daughter, Augusta Gore, appear to be setting us up for a tale which will pit the rationality of science against the enchantment of the supernatural. So we ready ourselves to have the hard heart of our cynical protagonist softened by an encounter with magical forces. Thankfully, the writers dodge this predictable storyline and, instead, offer us a story in which science and magic become willing collaborators.

So, when Alithea pries open an antique glass bottle purchased at the Istanbul bazaar releasing Djinn (Idris Elba), she is startled, but, surprisingly, not at all disbelieving. Alithea is not so much concerned that she may be losing her mind when Djinn appears as she is that she will, like a sucker, fall victim to his plea for her to get on with the business of making her three wishes. From experience as a scholar of storytelling, Alithea knows that giving in to this temptation will inevitably lead to a less than happy outcome, no matter how carefully she formulates the statement of her desires.

In order to dissolve Alithea’s skepticism, Djinn launches into his three-thousand-year story as a prisoner of an assortment of lamps and flasks. He describes how he came to be “incarcerated” the first time - by King Solomon, no less - as well as the relationships he has had with the mortals who liberated him after that. In the process, we discover that Djinn desperately longs for lasting freedom, and we also learn that he is capable of deep human attachments. Significantly, for our purposes, it is also revealed that Djinn is a being who is made up of electromagnetic waves. In other words,he is a creature of pure light.

Soon after, the role that light will play in the film is underscored by a set of text panels that flash across the screen briefly. This mini powerpoint presentation telegraphs a schematic history of Djinn’s universe which begins with a burst of electromagnetic waves  - let there be light! - and culminates with the emergence of biological compounds and then, presumably, Darwinian evolution. It appears that, whatever Djinn’s status as a supernatural being is, he sees himself as a participant in a world of natural phenomena. Far from being at odds with one another, in this view of the world science and magic are companionable fellow travelers.

But “3,000 Years” is not done with light yet. As Djinn tells his story, we learn that his most recent liberation, sometime in the nineteenth century it appears, was at the hands of Zefir, the young wife of a Turkish merchant. With a nod to “Faust,” Zefir wishes for all the knowledge in the world. What we see flashing across the screen as a result of her request is a high-speed montage of Zefir devouring book after book supplied by Djinn which contain the scientific findings of the age. 

Usually the graphics presented in such a montage are a mess of mathematical nonsense, a lot of random expressions yanked from a high school algebra text. But the equations that appear in the books that Zefir pours over are, in this case, the real deal. They faithfully retrace the development of the theory of electromagnetism that got underway with Michael Faraday’s experiments in the 1830s in London and culminated in the early 1860 with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Maxwell’s equations, as his system came to be called, was the first unified field theory of modern physics.

This sequence presents us with a tantalizing ambiguity: is Zefir simply reconstructing discoveries reported by contemporary researchers in the books Djinn has provided, or has she, in a stroke of genius, developed a theory of electromagnetic waves all on her own, beating the esteemed Maxwell to the punch? Maybe the famous handful of equations should rightfully be called Zefir’s equations?

This backstory having to do with the phenomena of electricity and magnetism continues into the final act of the film when Alithea returns to London with Djinn as her companion. Creature of light that he is, Djinn is acutely sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that impinges on him. In fact, he is so overwhelmed by the ocean of radio waves, Wi-Fi, and wireless signals that he starts to become ill. (Admittedly, present-day Istanbul, the technological metropolis that it is, should have presented Djinn with similar problems.) Although he manages to maintain his composure in the face of this electromagnetic assault, it slowly begins taking a toll on his well-being.

At the beginning of the film Alithea telegraphs that a science vs. superstition confrontation may be in the offing. And, yes, Djinn’s composition as a creature of light, along with the electromagnetic origins of the universe, is clearly stated. Yet no review of the film that I’ve read takes note of these facts. In addition, the montage of mathematics including Maxwell’s equations streams by so quickly that it takes a trained eye - at least an eye that has been exposed to an intermediate undergraduate course in electricity and magnetism - to make sense of it. Somehow, though, I doubt that physicists were the intended audience for the film.

A possible explanation is that the writers inserted the Easter eggs having to do with electromagnetism as a message in a bottle of sorts into the encasing tale of Alithea and Djinn. And it could be that they expected the occasional viewer, like me, would pick up this bottle and rub it hard enough to have its hidden message revealed. If that is the case, then I count myself as lucky to have happened across “3,000 Years” and to discover, unexpectedly, the science story inside. Being a science nerd, a wish of mine was indeed granted.

The tracks of their tears: a closer look at the replicant faces of Blade Runner 2049

“The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” — Book I, line 462 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Robert Fagles translation

Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) in Blade Runner 2049

[Here there be spoilers.]

Although it has been long established that non-human animal species exhibit displays of sorrow and grief, it still appears that humans are the only primate species which is capable of shedding tears. This is sometimes held out as a marker for our humanity, the way tool-making once was and the way complex language still is.

Now, I don’t buy into the idea that there is a defining behavior that sets humans apart from other animals. But I do believe that our ability to shed tears serves as an important signal of our humanity. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then tears provide a glimpse at that soul’s capacity to recognize the pain of others.

It is telling, therefore, that the only shedding of tears in Denis Villeneuve’s beautifully crafted new film, Blade Runner 2049, is done only by its non-human characters. These include, most notably, two synthetic human slaves known as replicants: the film’s protagonist an LAPD police detective K (Ryan Gosling), the blade runner of the film’s title, whose job it is to hunt down and “retire” rogue replicants, disobedient models from a bygone era; and Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) who serves the lethal girl Friday to the film’s arch-villain Niander Waller (Jared Leto) as well as K’s relentless adversary.

Advanced AIs, namely K’s digital companion Joi, also seem to be capable of the kind of deep personal connection that finds its expression in the welling of tears. As with the AI Samantha in the 2013 movie Her, Blade Runner 2049 challenges us to confront the question: at what point does digitally simulated emotion, designed with superb artifice and textured by the complexity of experience in the world, become the real thing. K, himself, struggles with this question even as Blade Runner 2049 comes to a close.

Yet it is the tears of the replicants that tell the tale at the heart of the new Blade Runner movie.

When we are introduced to K, he is on an assignment in the ecologically devastated wasteland that envelops LA, looking to retire an older model combat replicant. We see in K the embodiment of replicant sangfroid, cool and unfazed even in the aftermath of a harrowing hand-to-hand fight to the death with his “skinjob” target.

Level-headed and ever reserved, K is a careful observer of the non-synthetic humans around him, always calculating the correct response for any situation. He abides anti-replicant slurs without a hint of offense and even deftly handles a come-on from his police superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), whom he calls Madam. Although K and Madam enjoy a kind of illicit friendship, K’s reward for all his brilliant detective work is to be praised as a “good boy,” as though he were not much more than a well-behaved pet.

The main arc of the film is K’s struggle to deal with the emerging possibility that he has been womb-born and not simply a manufactured product of the Wallace Corporation like all other replicants. In his mind, being born would mean that he has a soul. It is this lack of a soul that deprives replicants of moral standing and makes them legitimate targets in K’s ethical universe.

The telltale change that indicates K’s transformation over the course of the film is in his relationship with his own memories. When asked to recall a memory from his early life early in the film, K is dismissive of the value of the question since such a memory is only an “implant,” a fictional story with which he has been equipped as part of the manufacturing process. But, as the film progresses, and as the reality of K’s seminal memory becomes more probable, a different person emerges. And the tears that he sheds as a response are the harbinger of his transformation.

But it is Luv’s struggle with her suppressed humanity and the tears she sheds as a result that speak to a deeper theme of the movie.

At first, it would be easy to dismiss Luv as not much more than Wallace’s diligent robotic henchwoman and to view the inevitable showdown between her and K as something like the duel between the newer model T-1000 and the older model terminator in the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But in fact, Luv’s displays of arrogance, cunning, and wit make her the most human character in the film by far.

[I would add here that Sylvia Hoeks’s portrayal of Luv is what makes Blade Runner 2049 work as a film. It is the kind of performance that begs for a Best Supporting Actress award nomination.]

Early on in the film, we realize that Luv is somehow different when she has to stand by and witness the slaughter of a freshly manufactured replicant. Displeased with this failed replicant product, Wallace has taken a knife and gutted his creation. As Luv watches this horrible deed take place, she remains in place but sheds a tear, outward evidence of the pity and the rage that she is forced to contain within.

Luv’s trials points to what could be called the replicant’s torment: constrained by programming to obey the will of a heartless master, but never able to still an inner voice that cries out that what you are doing — or what you are seeing others do— is wrong.

This isn’t to say that Luv isn’t capable of acts of wanton cruelty — using rockets fired from an aerial drone she kills a dozen humans with casual nonchalance — but it makes sense that the anger she feels toward Wallace for making her commit unconscionable acts should find expression in her own brutality and petulant insistence of her own superiority.

Luv’s tears flow again in the film as she confronts Madam in her pursuit of K under orders from Wallace. Madam could well be Luv’s doppelganger; both have taken on the duty to maintain the order of the world by enforcing the wall that separates humans from replicants, and both unhappily endure the corrosive effects that this corrupt obligation has had on their souls, whether biological or synthetic. It is Luv’s recognition of herself in Madam that brings her to tears as she guts Madam with her knife after announcing the lie she might use to account for the killing to Wallace. It’s feels as though Luv is lying out loud to herself.

It is useful to consider a comparison of the film with the now three-deep Planet of the Apes franchise to look for broader meaning of this film. And it is not far-fetched to see Blade Runner 2049 as a sort of Dawn of the Planet of the Replicants. But this is not solely because of the insurrection against the established human order that it and its Dawn of the Planet of the Apes counterpart launch.

In both dystopian stories, humanity has pretty much run its sad moral course. The evidence is how humans fail to value the well-being of other sentient creatures: in the case of the Planet of the Apes series, it is the routine, inhumane treatment of fellow primate species; in the case of Blade Runner 2049, it is humanity’s casual disregard for the lives of their replicant slaves.

Ironically, in both stories, it is technology that both seals humanity’s fate and holds out hope for redemption of sorts. In the Planet of the Apes saga, through genetic engineering misadventure, humans end up handing dominion of the planet over to intelligent species of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. But in the process of losing control, humans give rise to the possibility of the reemergence of compassion in the world.

In Blade Runner 2049, technology also serves as the midwife for the birth of a successor race of synthetic human-like creatures. It is this successor race of replicants, though, which ultimately can redeem human sins by rediscovering the compassion we have lost. And it is their tears that tell us that hope for this redemption is still alive.

Finn of “The Force Awakens,” a hero for our times

This note contains mild spoilers about "The Force Awakens."]

For me, the best part of the new addition to the Star Wars series, "The Force Awakens," is its three new heroes. And, contrary to what Tina Turner might have to say on the matter, we need another hero. We almost always do.

The movie wastes no time introducing us to two of these new heroes: Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a dashing, x-wing fighter pilot, who is the top-gun of the beleaguered Resistance, and the unlikely FN 2187, a storm trooper serving in the infantry of the evil First Order. We come to know him as Finn (John Boyega). A short while later we meet our third young hero, the beautiful and resourceful, Rey (Daisy Ridley). Rey is stuck in a dead-end job as a parts scavenger on Jakku, a planet that is little more than a junkyard for crashed and abandoned spaceships.

We don't learn that much about Poe in this installment of the series. Whatever his backstory is, it remains to be told in future episodes. Rey is easily the most prominent of the new heroes. As the movie unfolds, it is Rey who will be positioned to take up the mantle of Luke Skywalker and begin the proverbial hero's journey, one which will lead her from a solitary life as a scavenger on a desolate planet to become a citizen of the Galaxy and a leader of the Resistance in the struggle against the First Order. But it is everyman Finn who wins my vote for the kind of hero we need most right now.

I'll be the first to admit that there's no shortage of heroes on movie screens these days. Superheroes, especially, bound and abound. Endowed with special powers, either at birth or by fateful accident, they fight, often after much kvetching, to save the world, all the while battling inner demons and bickering with their super friends. You could get a movie green-lighted on less of a pitch.

Now, it is the case that both Finn and Rey possess special powers. There are hints early on that the Force is strong with both of them. And much of the suspense of the story has to do with whether and when their powers will be revealed. But having superpowers is not what defines the two of them. Instead, their heroism is rooted in character and talent. And, in Finn's case, it is firmly anchored in his sense of common decency.

When we first meet Finn in his guise as FN 2187, his face is hidden behind the mask of a storm trooper's helmet and he is kneeling to come to the aid of a fallen comrade whose bloody hand print marks him for us to follow for the rest of the scene. What follows in that scene is a massacre of disarmed villagers by Finn's stormtrooper platoon. Finn's defining act of heroism is saying "no" to participating in this atrocity.

Finn does this despite the fact that he understands that his disobedience will lead to his being cast out from the only family he has ever known. He also is aware that his refusal will mark him as a despised traitor who will be hunted down relentlessly by his former First Order comrades-in-arms. But Finn says "no" to killing the prisoners, not because he imagines himself a hero, but simply because saying "no" is the right thing to do.

Finn's act of unselfconscious heroism is reminiscent of the stories of the Europeans, many of them Dutch, who saved the lives of Jews seeking refuge during the Holocaust. It is fascinating to watch interviews with these people made long after the war. They appear sometimes genuinely puzzled by the notoriety that has come their way and seldom regard themselves heroes. Quite the contrary, they often protest the designation, saying that they were only doing what conscience demanded, insisting that their deeds were what any right-thinking person would have done under similar circumstances. If only that were the case.

This same "ordinariness" is what makes Finn's kind of heroism such a refreshing change. It doesn't originate with his being rocketed away as an infant from some faraway, doomed planet or from a bite from an errant radioactive spider. And his kind of heroism doesn't set him apart from the rest of society like, say, a misfit with a bizarre genetic mutation or an ancient Norse god unwillingly exiled to Earth.

Indeed, what makes Finn a hero is not how he transcends his humanity but how, in spite of years of inculcation by his First Order captors, he recovers it.

And it is the masterful performance by Boyega that brings Finn's everyman hero convincingly to life. His Finn is unassuming and vulnerable - a veritable ingénue, who casts the shell of storm trooper uniform aside to find himself freshly hatched into a brave, new, uncertain world - but also a person capable unalloyed courage when circumstances demand it.

So, to my delight, what we discover with Finn in "The Force Awakens" is, perhaps, the first fully human character of the Star Wars saga. (R2-D2, a droid more human in most respects than his human masters, is the long-standing contender for this title, at least in my opinion.) It is Finn’s humanity that reminds us that real heroism emerges not from super powers or royal birth, but from a compassionate regard for our fellow beings and a willingness to say "no" when the world around us would have us forsake our obligation to their welfare in favor of a life of security and predictability. He is indeed a hero for our time.

The movie "Self/less" or "Oblivion Can Wait"

This essay on the movie Self/less contains spoilers.

As the movie Self/less opens, we meet Damian Hale (Ben Kingsley), a master of the business universe, if there ever was one. Damian takes no time in demonstrating that he is not about to be fooled or out maneuvered. Losing is not an option for him.

But we soon learn that it looks like this never-say-die competitor, may have finally met his match. Death is knocking on Damian’s door, and it isn’t inclined to take “no” for an answer. Might there be a way for Damian to use his smarts and enormous wealth to win again this time around?

It turns out that, thanks to an entrepreneur-inventor named Albright (Matthew Goode), “life’s a bitch and then you die,” is a restriction that now applies only to the undeserving 99.99%. Albright has developed a technology that allows extraordinarily rich guys like Damian to “shed” their old, faltering bodies and have their consciousnesses transferred into young, robust ones.

After a bit of reflection and a ham-handed attempt to make amends with his estranged daughter, Damian decides to pay his money and take his chances. When Albright’s spinning MRI scanners come to a stop, Damian’s consciousness winds up inside the body of someone who looks a lot like Ryan Reynolds (Ryan Reynolds). Damian, it would appear, has hit the lab-grown body jackpot.

At first the consciousness transfer seems to have come off without a hitch. There is a lengthy montage, reminiscent of a Rocky movie, that shows post-transfer Damian training hard to master the challenges that come with controlling his exquisite, new body. But, fighter that he is, Damian is more than up to the rehabilitation tasks. Vivid flashbacks, though, intrude on Damian’s experience and remind us that all is not right in his brave, new Reynoldsian world.

Sadly, the procedure has not gone well at all when it comes to acting. It ends up feeling like someone forgot to hook up the “personality” cable that connected Damian’s old body with his new one for the consciousness transfer.

The old Damian may have been a crusty old son of a bitch, but in the short period of time that he has on screen, Kingsley somehow lets us know that he is also a complex man who has known ample amounts of both pride and regret during the course of his life.

As portrayed by Reynolds, the young Damian never seems to emerge fully from the confused state of mind that immediately follows the consciousness transfer. Sure, over the course of the movie he winds up showing that he is still a smart adversary and a relentless competitor, but none of the texture of the character handed off to him by Kingsley survives.

The film itself has been promoted as a thought-provoking science fiction thriller that allows us to contemplate the possibility that technology may soon provide a way for us to live forever, while forcing us to consider the moral price that we might pay in doing so. Yet, as with most science fiction, the new-fangled science is only incidental to the retelling of an older, venerated story.

In this case of Self/less, this storyline is a deal with the devil. Here Damian takes on the role of an essentially noble but arrogant Faust and Albright his obsequious and beguiling Mephistopheles. The movie reminds us yet again that striking a bargain to sell one’s soul is never without unanticipated consequences.

It’s also interesting to consider is how Self/less borrows from other genres.

As it turns out, Damian’s consciousness has not just landed in a buff, young body, but it’s the buff, young body of an superbly trained U.S. Army Special Forces soldier. Although the soldier’s still resident conscious awareness is suppressed by medication, his killing instincts kick in reflexively whenever they are needed, and they are needed a lot in the movie.

In this regard the film feels a little like a variation of the action-thriller The Bourne Identity — may be it could be called The Reborn Identity? — in which the hero, a superbly trained C.I.A. killing machine, has lost all conscious memory of his former life as a spy, but is able to draw reflexively on his martial arts skills and detailed knowledge of spycraft to save the day, in spite of his otherwise complete amnesia.

But at its heart, Self/less harkens back to the genre of “second-chance” stories, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, in which death is held at bay, at least briefly, so that the protagonist can return to the world to set things right.

A classic example of this genre is Warren Beatty’s 1978 Heaven Can Wait. In that movie, Beatty’s nice-guy quarterback hero, Joe Pendleton, is snatched up to heaven before his time, and, as a result, must be parked in the body of a no-good tycoon, Leo Farnsworth, until a more suitable one can be found. This celestial mix-up creates an opportunity for Joe to right some of Leo’s corporate wrongs, fall in love with a beautiful woman played by Julie Christie, and win the Superbowl. Not bad at all as far as second chances go.

Given how religious sensibilities have changed in the last forty years, with Self/less it is oblivion, not heaven, that must wait. And Damian’s unfinished work is not all that glorious: it’s simply to rediscover the importance of family and to repair his relationship with his daughter as best he can from beyond the grave. Undoing the nefarious body-snatching enterprise that Albright has set in motion would complete his redemption.

Young Damian does succeed in his second-chance mission. My biggest regret is that old Damian, as portrayed by Ben Kingsley, was not along for the ride.

"Two Days, One Night" - Norma Rae in retreat

Imagine you're in the open ocean drowning and the only thing you can do to get your head above water is to grab ahold of the feet of the companions a few feet above you who are kicking as hard as they can to draw a breath of air. They may be able to rescue you if they work together, but it's possible, even if they try, that they will be pulled under. What can you ask of them? What sacrifice are they obligated to make to help save your life?

This scene captures much of Sandra's (Marion Cotillard) situation at the opening of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's film Two Days, One Night. About to return from disability leave from her job at a small solar panel manufacturing plant in Belgium, Sandra learns that the manager of the factory, M. Dumont, has offered her sixteen co-workers a Faustian bargain of sorts: they can vote to allow Sandra to return to work as before, or they can vote to have her laid off and, as a consequence, each reap a €1,000 bonus.

A vote, taken on the Friday before Sandra is scheduled to return, goes 15-1 against her. But she learns from her one faithful supporter, Julliette, that it has been tainted by the meddling of the plant's foreman. Devastated by the bad news and still beaten down by the depression that has led to her absence from work, it is all Sandra can do to do to get out of bed and to go with Juliette to the plant and plead with Dumont for a makeover vote.

Backing his car out of the parking lot, eager to head home for the weekend, M. Dumont relents and agrees to a second vote on Monday. And thus begins Sandra's two days and one night, the time she has to convince her co-workers to vote to give up their bonus pay so that she can keep her job.

The movie then unfolds as series of tense encounters, as Sandra locates each of them to make her case to stay employed. These typically begin with a knock on the door in a working class neighborhood and a puzzled, but polite, welcome by the co-worker himself or a wife or a child. Each of her pleas becomes an affecting drama in its own right. And Cotillard uses these dramatic moments to display her impressive power as an actor.

But what is most remarkable about Two Days is its unelaborated upon backstory. Globalization and its impact on advanced, once worker-oriented economies of Western Europe is the elephant in the room. Sandra's company, faced with stiff competition from a Chinese solar competitor, is fighting for its financial life and is determined to do so on the backs of its employees.

The unsettling premise of the film is that, when faced with obvious manipulation by management designed to extract concessions from employees and sow dissension in their ranks, workers roll over without complaint. No demands are made for sacrifices from M. Dumont, his higher-ups, or, God forbid, the shareholders of the company. Sandra and her co-workers accept these indignities matter of factly and then proceed to fight among themselves over scraps from the master's table.

In another age, Marion Cotillard, certainly more than beautiful enough, would have played a latter-day Marianne, leading the charge of the economically dispossessed to the barricades to turn back corporate greed, or a Belgian Norma Rae, rallying workers to unite in pursuit of their common economic cause. Instead Sandra's struggle, as compelling as it is as portrayed by Cotillard in Two Days, One Night, is directed solely at her inward demons and not at those roaming unchecked in the outside world.

"National Gallery" Documentary - Pictures of an Exhibition

I didn't know quite what to expect when I went to see “National Gallery,” a documentary about the British National Gallery, the other night. I knew that its runtime was three hours and wondered what kind of approach would be able to carry a film about an art museum for that long. Talking heads wouldn’t do. And a conventional BBC-like treatment I thought would come off feeling like an extended art history class.

"National Gallery" does succeed, in spite of its length, and one thing that makes it so successful is allowing the people of the National Gallery - the docents, the experts in art restoration, and museum officials - to tell us about the museum in their own words, while speaking to their usual audiences: grade school classes, museum patrons, and fellow museum bureaucrats assembled around a backroom conference table. When the filmmakers do resort to talking heads, they use the clever device of filming other filmmakers doing interviews with museum staff.

As I watched “National Gallery," I began to see a structure in the way the elements of the documentary were being assembled. The backroom meetings are the dull underpainting for the picture that the director, Frederick Wiseman, paints for his film. Restorers, woodworkers and cabinetmakers, as well as docents and instructors, form other layers of the composition. And a layer of human faces is built up over the course of the film, each face applied like a brushstroke by the camera as it flits back and forth between the pallet of faces in the pictures hanging on the walls and the pallet of the faces in the crowd examining them. All without commentary or narration.

What a fitting approach to a documentary about an art museum, not as a classroom lecture, but as a painting in its own right. “National Gallery” allows us to contemplate the museum, much as we would a work of art.

Luc Besson's "Lucy" - Girl Gone Transhuman

Avast, there be spoilers here!

How often does an actor, other than Morgan Freeman, get an opportunity to play God twice in one year? In the new sci-fi action-thriller “Lucy,” Scarlett Johansson takes another at bat at being a near deity. Her first try was as an OS, an artificial intelligence who was the disembodied paramore of Joaquin Phoenix in the movie “Her” released last fall. This time around the fully-bodied Johansson (thank God for that) plays the Lucy of the film’s title.

When we first meet her, Lucy is a party-girl living an apparently carefree life in Taiwan. That is until her low-life boyfriend handcuffs her to a briefcase loaded with a new recreational superdrug CPH4 and, without her knowledge, dispatches her into the lions’ den of a murderous, transnational Korean nacro-gang headed by Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi). Mr. Jang, it turns out, has designs on Lucy’s body, not in the usual way, but as a covert system to deliver CPH4 to one of a number of far-flung distribution points on the globe.

Not surprisingly, things don't go as either Mr. Jang or Lucy expect, and soon CPH4 leaking into Lucy’s abdominal cavity begins to work its chemical magic on her brain. After crawling around on the ceiling in a frenzy in a scene reminiscent of the “Exorcist,” a frightened, whimpering Lucy calms down considerably and, realizing that her survival depends on her recovering the rest of Mr. Jang’s CPH4, sets out on a bloody journey that includes sticking it to Mr. Jang in more ways than one.

This all could be a nice premise for a well-conceived science-fiction action-thriller, which “Lucy” is not. Instead, the writer-director Luc Besson imbeds this good idea in a lot of sciencey drivel and tries to anchor Lucy’s transformation from human to more-than-human in a relationship that develops between her and researcher and neuroscience god, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman).

We are introduced to Professor Norman when he stands before a rapt assembly of neuroscientists lecturing them about the factoid that humans are at the pinnacle of biological evolution, since they alone have been able to tap into as much as 10% of their mental capacity.  (The percent-of-our-brains trope is put to much better use in Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life.”) Not content with sharing just that piece of misinformation, Norman goes on to ponder the wondrous (and impossible) things that may come when we progress as a species to using a larger and larger fraction of the neurons we have squirming around in our noggins.

It’s hard to say what’s more disturbing in these scenes, the continued propagation of this silly and unfounded 10% myth about the human brain, or the repeated cuts to Professor Norman’s slavish audience, hanging on his every word as though they were his winged-monkey minion waiting for a command to do his bidding.

My gripe here is not with suspension of disbelief. As I've discussed in another blog post, all sorts of silly ideas can be employed effectively as premises to set science-fiction stories into motion. But, like good supporting actors, these counterfactual elements should introduce themselves early in the performance and then step out of the limelight to give the principal performers plenty of room. Instead, in “Lucy” the percent-of-our-brains canard insists on hanging around near center stage. We get hit over the head with it time and time again as Mr. Besson reminds us exactly where Lucy is in her brain-fraction progression, ticking off the percentages like some sort of thermometer in a public television fundraising drive.

What’s missing in all this is the dramatic tension that, by all rights, should be at the core of this story and that is how Lucy’s headlong rush toward mental perfection necessitates the withering away of her emotional self. And, by all rights, Lucy’s anchor in the world of human affairs, should not have been the distant and avuncular Professor Norman, but her flesh-and-blood (and sexy) companion, Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked), the French police inspector, who reluctantly takes up her cause but eventually becomes her committed friend and ally.

The connection between Lucy and Del Rio is suggested when she explains with a kiss why she is keeping him as a companion, even though she has grown so powerful that she doesn't need his help anymore. But, sadly, this relationship is hardly developed, in spite of what appears to be a serviceable chemistry between Johansson and Waked. The result is that a taut and suspenseful film featuring these two characters at its center is saddled with a subplot that, from what I can tell, only serves to bring Morgan Freeman into the picture to underwrite its box-office success.

More disappointing, though, is how poorly Scarlett Johansson is utilized in the title role. Her transition from human to beyond-human happens far too quickly. A brief phone call with her mother early on serves as a requiem for the life that Lucy is leaving behind as she is impelled, like it or not, toward transcendence. What should have been a wrenching and soul-searching second act of the movie is relegated to little more than one scene. And, although Johansson uses the limited time to good effect, it offers her short shrift as far as real acting goes.

So, after a well-executed turn as a helpless and frightened young woman at the beginning of the movie, Johansson takes on the mien of the soulless automaton that Lucy is fated to become. Aloof, with wide eyes and fixed gaze, she marches zombie-like through the remainder of the film toward Lucy's inevitable godhead. There’s not much acting for Johansson to do here.

How this lapse in attention to his main character may have come about is suggested by the “meaning of life” revelation that Lucy delivers just before her apotheosis. As she travels to the distant past and masters the progression time, moving people backward and forward in Times Square at whim, Lucy comes to the realization that time itself is the central element of our reality, whatever that might mean.

The movie's title “Lucy” refers to a hominid ancestor of ours that lived in Africa’s Afar Triangle some 3 million years ago, it also bears resemblance to the director's own name, Luc. Perhaps Besson is reminding us of the power that he has as a writer-director in manipulating the way a film unfolds, rapidly moving his characters backward and forward in time with God-like ease. That’s all well and good, but he should remember that it’s nice to slow down and get to know them better in all the commotion.

Suspension of Disbelief and the Matter of "Gravity"

Spoiler alert - This blog post contains spoilers about Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity.

Science fiction films by their nature invite us to suspend disbelief. They are vehicles of the imagination, often asking us to buy into improbable or impossible situations. But is there any way for us to assess when their flights into counterfactuality are justified and when they go too far?

Science writer, Dennis Overbye, stakes out a position in this debate in a recent article in the New York Times. In it he discusses, in the company of veteran astronaut Michael J. Massimino, the recently-released film Gravity. The writer and his companion really like the movie. They admire its realistic recreations and, in particular, its faithfulness to the action-reaction demands of Newtonian physics. It is with some reservation, though, that Overbye points out that,

"Unfortunately, with all this verisimilitude, there is a hole in the plot: a gaping orbital impossibility big enough to drive the Starship Enterprise through."

According to Overbye, this hole gapes because the film asks us to suspend disbelief and accept as a premise that the Space Shuttle on a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission and the International Space Station (ISS) would find themselves in the same orbit, indeed within spitting distance of one another. (It should be noted that, thanks to the aforementioned Newton’s laws, spitting distance in the vacuum of space can be considerable.) Overbye may be right as a matter of history, but I believe that he is wrong as a matter of film criticism. And, contrary to his expectation, I don’t think that “space fans will groan” as result of Gravity taking this liberty.

When a film like Gravity asks us to buy into something that we know is unlikely or out-and-out untrue, it does so as part of a bargain. In exchange for our credulity we are promised a compelling story, with the understanding that the impossible or improbable things that we are asked to accept are essential to the tale that is to be told. Whether these whoppers are large or small or whether they numerous or few, they cannot be arbitrary; they have to be critical to the development of place or plot or character in some important way.

Like any work of fiction, Gravity enjoys moderate license to play fast and loose with historical facts. We don’t complain, for example, that its story is impossible because the space shuttle program has come to an end and all surviving instances of that spacecraft have taken up final posts in museums around the country. Nor are we much bothered by the fact that, even if the space shuttle remained operational, it would not be dispatched on another Hubble repair mission. Getting the funds from Congress and a “go” from NASA for the last one was a was a near impossibility.

NASA astronaut Nicole Stott,
poses in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

In exchange for these lapses in historical authenticity we get a plausible space adventure, one which begins with a breathtaking, yet oddly familiar, establishing shot: our protagonists, rookie Mission Specialist Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) space-walking in the vicinity of an orbiting space shuttle and the attached Hubble Space Telescope, floating against the backdrop of a beautiful, blue, cloud-dappled Earth below.

Significantly, this opening scene tells us that director Alfonso Cuarón intends to anchor Gravity in a faithful recreation of contemporary space technology; this movie is not going to be some sort of fluffy sci-fi contrivance filled with make-believe spaceships decorated with bogus control panels. Instead, what Cuarón has in mind is a painstakingly realized period piece, the period being the second decade of the twenty-first century and the setting, the human outposts of low Earth orbit and their surrounds.

Robinson Crusoe illustration,
N.C. Wyeth

The tale that Cuarón has to tell here is, in part, an age-old one of survival against all odds, the triumph, by grit and cunning, of a hapless and isolated wayfarer over the unforgiving forces of nature. Traditionally, stories like this unfold at sea. (Take for example Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in 2012 and Robert Redford’s soon-to-be-released All is Lost.) For centuries our planet’s vast oceans have provided storytellers with the ready possibility of total isolation. Menace in these circumstances is usually delivered in the form of raging storms from above or man-eating predators from below. And, of course, there is the inevitability of death, if food or water should become exhausted.

In Cuarón’s reimagining of this genre, the deep blue sea is replaced by a transparent, airless region of space two hundred miles or so above the surface of the Earth. Vacuum and extreme temperature are the the ever-present predators here, kept at bay by the thin white line of spacesuit and the thin gold one of visor. An expanding cascade of high-velocity space-debris destroys all possibility of communication with Mission Control, drawing the curtain of isolation tightly about our astronauts. To make matters worse, this very same storm of orbiting shrapnel rains down like clockwork every ninety minutes, growing in intensity and destructive force with each circling of the planet. Minutes count. There will be no ticking off the passage of days by anyone with marks on the side of a life raft. Eventually Ryan’s isolation is made total as her partner Kowalski drifts off into the void at the end of the first act of the film. In this environment, hunger and thirst aren't killers; death comes quickly when oxygen runs out.

International Space Station,
May 29, 2011

This is where Overbye's objection about the location of the International Space Station so close to the Hubble comes into the picture. Having stranded his hero, Cuarón is obligated to provide her with a way home. He must do so while remaining faithful to his artistic vision for the film, which means staying true to a recreation of contemporary space technology. So, in defiance of historical fact, the director places the Space Station nearby the orbiting Hubble telescope. It will provide Ryan with a temporary place of refuge and the possibility of using the attached Soyuz spacecraft as a lifeboat to ferry her to Earth and to safety. It will also provide the director with the opportunity to demonstrate his virtuosity at bringing this beautiful and intricately constructed space habitat to life on the screen.

Allowing the Space Station and the Hubble to share the stage in Gravity is a concession which permits the director to relocate the traditional shipwrecked survivor tale to low Earth orbit. The story must supply some way for Ryan to save herself. Using the Space Station seems a reasonable choice, given the artistic restrictions that Cuarón has imposed on himself. In addition, we are rewarded as a result of this choice by a display of CG verisimilitude that is all the more compelling because it is rooted in detail that can be found only in existing engineering marvels such as the International Space Station.

This bargain offered by Gravity was more than enough to meet my criteria for suspension of disbelief. I willingly accepted its premises and, thanks to Alfonso Cuarón, got a plausible and compelling tale of triumph against all odds in return.

"Moneyball" - The Rise of the Planet of the Quants

Imagine a situation characterized by fierce competition over valuable, but limited, resources. The rich few, with the deepest pockets, indifferent to questions of cost, have no problem paying for and monopolizing the best that is available. Meanwhile those in the middle, not to mention those at the very bottom of the economic ladder, are locked out from participation, and must content themselves with the scraps that the wealthy leave behind.

Along comes a man, armed with reason and with numbers, daring to apply dispassionate analysis to this vexing problem in a last-ditch effort to level the playing field for everyone involved. His deliberate, calculated approach, though, is decried as soulless and is called a desecration of tradition, an attack on the established way of doing things that, according to those well-off, is "working just fine, thank you."

Ironically, the abundant criticism leveled at him includes that from the ranks of the disadvantaged, who, it would seem, would be his natural allies. So besotted are they with the mythology that surrounds the status quo, that they fail to appreciate that the system, as it is constructed, is pushing them to the margins more and more each day.

Theodore Roosevelt

Undeterred, our hero presses on, like Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena, "who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

The above, which could have been a description of Barack Obama championing his health care reform plan in the more promising days of the spring of 2009, works well as a set-up for the events that unfold in the baseball bio-pic Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller.

The man in the arena here is Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), and the arena is the world of baseball at the end of the 2001 season, a world in which rich teams like the New York Yankees raid lesser ones, like Billy's, luring away superstar talent with offers of astronomical salaries that owners of teams like the A's could never dream of matching.

As Moneyball opens, we find a desperate Billy seeking guidance from his "wise men" council of baseball scouts - a gaggle of aging men who look like a misplaced assembly of Mafia consiglieri and sound like a post-modern Greek chorus fated to intone endless baseball cliches in response to Billy's pleas for useful advice. Frustrated by their disregard to the peril that confronts them - and the game of baseball itself - Billy heads off to Cleveland, home of baseball's Indians, in a hail-Mary attempt to wheel and deal his way to a team that will keep him in contention.

Jonah Hill as Peter Brand
in Moneyball

There he encounters an unlikely muse in the person of 24-year-old Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, in a breakout role worthy of a supporting-actor Oscar nod). Peter is a recently minted Yale economics graduate and a savant of baseball statistics and finance, a major-league quant, if there ever was one. He has been spinning his wheels working in the Cleveland front office where his insights about the game have been largely ignored. Unlike his Cleveland counterpart, though, who is sitting flush, Billy's mind is keenly focused by the impending execution of his 2002 playoff hopes, and so he is open to ideas from any quarter. A passing remark by Peter in a crowded meeting draws him to Billy's attention, and the rest, as they say, is history - baseball history.

What Peter has figured out, to put it simply, is that you don't need stars to put together a winning team. Indeed, a roster players each of whom gets on base a significant fraction of the time will generate, in aggregate, the number of runs necessary to win games. Their skills on the field, it turns out, are not of much consequence. What is more, such often overlooked or cast-aside players - hobbled by injury or long past their prime, but eager to stay in the "show" - are available at bargain-basement prices.

Billy, who is one smart cookie himself - we learn that he turned down a scholarship at Stanford to pursue his ill-fated major-league dream - groks Peter and his new thinking and is able to see beyond the received baseball wisdom which blinds his own scouts and coaches to the statistical truth. And thus is born a professional partnership between the two men, as well as a burgeoning friendship. Their Mutt and Jeff relationship adds a nice buddy-movie wrinkle to Moneyball, and the story, in a small way, becomes a rite of passage for Peter, providing the young man with the opportunity to be taken seriously for the first time in his life, but also forcing him to confront the burdens that come with leadership.

What I liked most about Moneyball, though, is that it is a refreshing and welcome inversion of what I call the American heart-head parable. These are tales in which embattled heroes triumph by choosing to rely on feelings instead of brains when facing challenges and vanquishing foes.

Luke Skywalker on his final approach
in "Star Wars"

Perhaps nowhere is this elevation of heart over head better captured in a film, than the in the climatic battle scene in the first Star Wars movie in which Luke Skywalker, at the urging of his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, turns off the targeting computer in his X-wing fighter and "uses the Force" in order to direct the shot that will destroy the planetocidal Death Star.

"Liberty Valence" movie poster

Yet the heart-head trope has a distinguished pedigree in American cinema, supported by both an enduring distrust of (dithering) intellectuals and a admiration for (determined) men of action in the culture at large. A notable example is the classic 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, in which Jimmy Stewart plays an educated and earnest, yet ultimately ineffectual, attorney, committed to the rule of law, and John Wayne, a rancher and his school-of-hard-knocks doppelganger, who understands that there are times when, the law be damned, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

For the generation coming of age during the Cold War this film served as a cautionary tale of the inadequacy of law and, by extension deliberative analysis, in confronting genuine evil in the world. Its lesson was one well heeded by those, like Dick Cheney, who advocated for such scurrilous tactics as unwarranted surveillance, water-boarding and extraordinary rendition in response to the 9/11 attacks on this country.

Sadly, the American love affair with political figures who are suspicious of book-learnin' and rely on God and guts as lodestones for their decision-making catapulted the intellectually incurious George W. Bush to the highest office in the land. Hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths and the undermining of the international legal order testify to the destruction left in the wake of this two-term cowboy President. Lest we think that Bush's abject failures at home and abroad have led Americans to reassess the relative value they assign to heart and head when selecting their leaders, Sarah Palin's exhortation to the Tea Party Convention in February, 2010, that "we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern," demonstrates the currency that the world view of Liberty Valence has in American politics.

Doctor and Boy Looking at Thermometer
(Norman Rockwell, 1954)

Erstwhile presidential hopeful Palin herself figures prominently in our ongoing Moneyball moment, that is the debate over healthcare reform, which calls us as a nation to come to grips with the increasingly inequitable distribution of an increasingly costly shared resource, namely medical services. Educated and caring men and women, seeing the failure and imminent collapse of the current system, have entered this arena armed with numbers and with reason. Their approach has been decried as cold and unfeeling, and their plans to allocate resources based on a compassionate weighing of costs and benefits - replacing the arbitrary and unregulated rationing in effect - have been shamelessly misrepresented by Palin and her supporters as "death panels." Furthermore, these champions of rational health care policy have been called out as iconoclasts, intent on undermining the cherished close personal relationship between doctor and patient, a tradition which persists in the paintings of Norman Rockwell's idealized version of mid-twentieth-century America life, complete with house calls, but nowhere else today.

So Moneyball proudly steps up to the plate and, for a change, celebrates a man, Billy Beane, who, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, is not afraid to turn to numbers and analysis when traditional approaches have failed. Billy represents of a new kind of American hero, one who feels passionately about thinking things through, an intellectual, who, like Roosevelt's man in the arena, is not afraid to "dare greatly." In a time when it is crucial for America and its leaders to abandon gut feelings and received wisdom as ways to address the dire problems that we face and, instead, to bring to bear innovative thinking based on a scientific understanding of the world, Moneyball offers us a sorely needed updating of our long-discredited heart-head mythology.


"Moneyball" - The Rise of the Planet of the Quants by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Contagion"- An Ode to Public Health and Medical Science

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is one of that rare breed of films that succeeds as both a compelling drama and as a rich and informative movie about science.

At the heart of the drama here are the stories of the three women who are Contagion's scientists heroes: a World Health Organization disease detective played by Marion Cotillard, who works coolly and systematically to piece together the puzzle of the origin of a rapidly spreading viral illness; an Epidemic Intelligence Service boots-on-the-ground, brave first-responder (a studiously understated Kate Winslet) who puts into place the critical early public health care measures to deal with the emerging pandemic; and the luminous Jennifer Ehle, as a smart CDC virologist who labors tirelessly behind the scenes to understand the nature of their deadly opponent and to devise a vaccine to defeat it.

What makes these stories so engaging is not only that they weave important and realistic medical science roles into the multifaceted plot of the ensemble film, but also that the woman executing them do so with compassion and unassuming self-sacrifice, keeping their heads while those about them are losing theirs, creating a calm, efficient working center at the eye of the swirling global disease storm. It is also interesting to note, reversing conventional gender roles, that it is the CDC head honcho, played convincingly by Laurence Fishburne, who fumbles the ball by letting his personal attachments get in the way of his doing his job.

Off hand, I can think of only one other popular film that delivers so much unvarnished science, and that is Contact, which also happens to feature a brilliant, fearless female scientist (Jodie Foster, of course). The fact is that we learn a lot from Contagion, and the science it communicates rings true, even allowing for the concessions made to narrative compression. (For example, vaccines, in real life, do not confer immediate immunity.) This level of detail and concern for accuracy I attribute largely to director Soderbergh, whose goal was clearly to offer us an ode to medical science and to public health workers. The movie pauses for a quiet exposition on epidemiology - Winslet takes to a whiteboard to explain the mathematics of disease transmission, complete with variables and subscripts, no less - and for a meditation by Ehle at her father's bedside - a short discourse on a Nobel prize won for determining the true cause of ulcers. Can you imagine?

These digressions into the nuts and bolts of science - and there are many of them - would not have made it into a lesser script, much less the final cut of most films.That they survive and are showcased here are a testimony to Soderbergh's independence as a film maker and to his ability to realize Contagion as the remarkable personal vision that it appears to be.