Zones of Bliss

I hope that the idea of guilty pleasure is dying. Not only is the term a copout, it puts up a wall between us and what Joseph Campbell might call our bliss (though I wouldn't be the first to misinterpret his famous statement, so forgive me, eh?). Our enjoyment of art leads us down a path toward better understanding our needs and desires (or anyway, it can if we let it), things we may not otherwise have learned to articulate. I think placing something under the banner of 'guilty pleasures' unintentionally obfuscates clues to the kind of art we find most meaningful or more accurately the properties, shapes, sizes, colours and places that we want to see more of. Recently the brilliant critic Aaron Cutler defined something for me that retuned my antennae, so to speak. He told me a simple difference between poetry and prose: blank space on the page. The second he said it, so much about the films, music, books and paintings I loved came into focus and I think I understood a little more about who I am as both a hyperactive consumer and a person. Cinematic space that makes you feel at ease tells you a lot about the kind of environment that makes you the most comfortable, which may end up helping you decide where you want to live and in what conditions. Or maybe that's just me? The 'blank space on the page' has come to mean a lot to me in the last few months. More and more I see films and feel as though I've been waiting to discover them all my life, namely František Vláčil's Marketa Lazarová, John M. Stahl's Leave Her To Heaven, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell and perhaps most profoundly Kristina Buožyte's Vanishing Waves, which spends a lot of time and energy inventing dream spaces for its characters to inhabit unperturbed by earthly concerns. Every new material and surface the dreamers conjure is a clue to who they are. Each sunrise or sunset a pretty big indicator of how and where they like to spend their time. We make the same choice everytime we put a DVD or Blu-Ray on. I can't go to the humid South Pacific and take a boatride down river to a sun-coated, foliage-enshrouded manse, so instead I watch Wake of the Red Witch, Apocalypse Now Redux and Donovan's Reef. 

Everyone's preferred zones are different, naturally, which is why the best critics rarely agree on anything. I've learned about myself that many of my favourite films are also home to the environs I'd like to mentally vacation in. Last summer I went to Film Forum's essential 35mm screening of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura with the express aim of nodding off before the two lead characters meet each other to start searching for their mutual friend, when the plot changes gears entirely. I've seen L'Avventura more than a dozen times and knew exactly what I wanted from this particular screening: to wake up in the middle of the film. I felt as if I'd been living in the movie's vacant Italian landscape for days. There are few pleasures as rare, and those satisfactions are permanent. Just as I can always search for images of Edward Hopper paintings or listen to Fleetwood Mac's Pious Bird of Good Fortune, anytime of the day or night, I can drink in the technicolor silence of Leave Her To Heaven, drift around James Mason's house in the cold night air of North By Northwest or walk the delectable beaches of M. Hulot's Holiday. There are several movies that posses this stillness, the ability to display a setting and create a mood that fits it like a glove. They're not just works of art, they're places. They needn't even be good movies if they do it, so long as they capture the timeless signposts of the era and frame faces and objects properly. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes that cover the last two films of misanthropic auteur Coleman Francis, Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba (Originally titled Night Train to Mundo Fine), for instance, may be terribly made, horribly bleak visions of this country, but they don't lie about the desert, the cars, the pug faces of men, the depression plainly evident in every look and halting line reading. Mike and the bots commentary make it feel like home (it helps that I grew up with these episodes). I've learned that when a film hits that part of my brain and creates a place I'd love to live in I can become willfully blind to its faults. Or rather, they stop mattering. They're subsumed into the idealized viewing experience and I can't imagine any one part being removed. On Tour, Contempt, Inception, Pandora & The Flying Dutchman, The Lady With The Little Dog, Tabu, Johnny Guitar, The Red Shoes, L'Eclisse, The Tree of Life and 2001: A Space Odyssey and many, many more allow me to become weightless and live a few feet above the ground of beautifully alien landscapes, the kind only cinematographers can create. 

Those last three examples are important because their influence has become a hallmark of a few of my new favourite films. The chain of events starts with L'eclisse, which abandons the characters for the final scene in favor of gorgeously off-kilter street scenes and lifeless architecture. The audience is denied closure and forced to recognize the hopelessness of the narrative, meanwhile Antonioni chases his fascinations down abandoned alleyways, following Joseph Campbell's advice. Knowing how rarely major directors halted their narratives for an experimental flourish that consumes the story makes it no less gripping a divergence after the sixth, tenth or fortieth viewing. It's one of cinema's great endings and the ripples were immediately apparent. The following year Henri-Georges Clouzot began planning a movie called L'enfer that would make extensive use of experimental photography, but he had to scrap it. The techniques he researched would resurface in his final film, 1968's Women in Chains. With a quarter of the film left to go our heroine is in a crash that puts her in a coma and has a colourful nightmare filled with beautiful, geometric abstraction. In the meantime Hiroshi Teshigahara had started experimenting with similar endings to his films The Face of Another and Man Without A Map, visions of apocalypse courtesy of bizarre juxtapositions, the music of Toru Takemitsu, over-exposures and vacant architecture seemingly on loan from Antonioni. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a major event film from one of the most popular American artists, surrenders its plot to a pre-Laser Floyd freakout. Soon stunning tricksy photography begins to warp narratives in progress, as in Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, as filled with perfectly symmetrical compositions as it is mind-altered scenarios and off-colour philosophy and myth-making. Saul Bass' Phase IV films the-endtimes-by-insect with graphic precision, beginning and ending with unnerving suggestion and jagged electronic music. The most obvious thing that unites these films is that they could only work as movies and take full advantage of what a camera can do, and incorporating a full range of poetry, painting and music besides to augment their artistry.

Fast forward a few decades; Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem feels under attack from the gods of John Boorman's Zardoz and ends in a heavy trip from witch burnings to Ken Russell to black metal. Ben Wheatley's A Field In England slowly lets madness creep over it until it finally grabs a handful of mushrooms and bakes under the heat of a black planet while the film regurgitates itself under the influence of strobing effects. At the 45 minute mark Ari Folman's The Congress ditches the 3D world for a splashy cartoon indebted to Ralph Bakshi and allows literally anything to happen to its dogged lead. Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess has its share of hallucinations, not to mention a deadpan leap into colour film for three hysterical minutes at the end of act 2. Last but not least, Jonathan Glazer returned to cinema after a decade with Under The Skin. Glazer has been one of my favourite directors since I was a kid. I loved his music videos back when their was a place on television that ran them, then realized he was the same guy behind Sexy Beast. His follow-up was the textural delight Birth, which I've maintained since the day I saw it is one of the great films of the modern era. That was 2004 after which he made nary a peep but at last the sleeper has awakened with his boldest dare yet. Depending on your point of view, its biggest selling point or its biggest gamble is its myriad reference points. Cinephiles have picked up on them because they're impossible to ignore, but the casual moviegoer interested in a movie about aliens? 

We open on a melding of forms that looks very similar to the eclipse that opens Phase IV, which we see is the creation of a human skin, specifically an eye, as Scarlett Johansson's alien lifeform - Monica Vitti in Mick Jagger's Performance hair - practices human diction beneath the unyielding score by Mica Levi (which often sounds like Jon Brion and John Cale adapting the theme from Gilbert Gunn's The Cosmic Monster). As if the Phase IV connection weren't clear enough, we then get a close-up of that film's nemesis: an ant on Johansson's fingertips. Though it looks like it's ready for a close-up at the start of Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And just like the creatures in Bass's psychodrama, its intelligence is an extraterrestrial gift. All throughout I was reminded of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Women in Chains, Luis Buñuel, Nic Roeg and Eadweard Muybridge, John Carpenter's The Thing, The Face of Another and Glazer's own work as a music video director. Crucially none of these influences ever got in the way or subordinated the purity of Glazer's vision. I'm as suspicious of the term 'pure cinema' as I am 'guilty pleasure' but there is a kind of purity in Glazer's art. It could only be attempted in a film, and only by someone who was probing the outer reaches of the medium's capability, possessing some of Johansson's curiousity about what it's capable of. It may occasionally name drop, but it never feels remotely close to second hand. Knowing that Glazer had taken the time to offer an old-fashioned out-of-plot experience immediately put Under The Skin in my good graces. Practically achieved synesthesia. Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin, quite obviously, pointed their camera directly into lights, producing visions in the midst of a dramatic arc. That's worth a lot to me. 

The main body text is Scarlet Johansson's interactions with unsuspecting Scotsmen, playing The Vanishing with a big van on teeming high traffic areas (concealing our director, probably, looking at the hidden cameras he's placed all around his lead). Like The Tree of Life, the film's acting feels like the product of practiced naturalism put to the test, and has cosmic motives on its mind. Unlike Terrence Malick's masterpiece, however, its focus is rather more unclean, like a thirsty flea on the back of religious art, biting its thumb at divine creation. Johansson's improvised interactions, captured in murky digital, have the purposeful aimlessness of Pedro Costa's documentaries. Like the addicts of Fontainhas, Johansson and her mostly willing captives sit and talk in darkness, unaware of their own power, fueled by the urge to do evil, deafening industrial humming often just out of earshot. The van is unsafe, filled with mystery and the fear of the game ending. Johansson drives away as often as her potential partners walk away, just as full of fear as they are. Her purpose beyond, as we learn, collecting bodies for some twisted, incomprehensible harvest, is to create a zone of constructed mutual fantasy. She must make the men believe in her as a real woman who has taken an interest in them. The space only becomes solidified and false when she enters the mirror-smooth room where the men are collected in a pool of predatory liquid. But by then it is too late. "Why come here?" She asks a tourist of the beautiful rocky vista she's located him in. "Because it's nowhere." Which is certainly true of the sleek studio where she ends her seductions. What causes her to break out of her cycle is when one man doesn't buy into the fiction she has prepared. It takes all of her wiles to get him to submit, and because of his perception of himself. He has a condition that makes him resemble Joseph Merrick and views Johansson's pick-up as the ruse it is, even if he ultimately can't say no. When it's over she looks at herself (after having stared into a face different from her usual subjects) and wonders what it is about her skin that coaxed these men into her company. How many were reluctant? How many couldn't say no? Is it their fault? Reflection turns to empathy and the mission is over and done with, though thankfully the film is not. She can no longer look at human life objectively. Nor can Glazer maintain his distance from her. His camera begins sympathizing with her crises of identity and conscience, and the tricks he used to give us insight into the mechanics of alien existence (which look a lot like some of the imagined spaces and cosmic orgies of Teshigahara, Kubrick and Clouzot) give way to a softer digital embrace, displaying neither the sheen of the draining room nor the Costa-ist roughness of the claustrophobic cruising scenes. The high and low are forced to meet in the middle just as Johansson sheds her solipsistic view of humans. Glazer cares more for her than he has any of his heroes, but in a thematic rhyme with Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac, cruelty runs deeper than any of us can reasonably counter. Lose the distance you keep from your fellow man and they'll quickly attack. 

I loved Under The Skin, but it is such a peculiar, specific vision of what cinema can do and be, that it was destined to polarize and has with gusto. Under The Skin, it turns out, is one of those films I love so much that I'm blind to its faults. Neil Young, a friend and one hell of a critic, hated the ending after greatly enjoying the set-up, and it's hard to argue that the shift from the alien pick-ups to the search for meaning at the end is jarring to say the least. Dan Sallitt, someone I look up to hugely, confessed to hating it but even he found Glazer's direction impossible to write off. David Cairns, who I love like a father, very reasonably points out that Glazer's aim, to show earth through the eyes of an alien, isn't really what winds up on the table. And Richard Brody, in whose direction myself and any half-way smart young film writer genuflects, wrote a perfectly reasoned and typically great pan that I cannot find much fault in. Yet even as I recognize that their opinions aren't wrong (and I don't mean in a diplomatic sense either; I think their charges stick) I can't help but love it all the same. It exists perfectly to me, and I felt compelled to simply exist in the state of suspended animation it reserves for willing viewers, in the blank space between lines. Between its spiky, Duchamp-inspired abstraction, and softer, Romantic portrait of innocence I found something like bliss. 

Don't Let Go: Thoughts on Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Every trailer that made its way to theaters to market Alfonso Cuarón's seven year passion project made it out to be an action packed disaster film where in place of weather or some topically chosen war machine out to destroy America's freedom the only threat the main characters have to face is in the title. Or more accurately the lack there of. What none of the trailers really seem to convey is that nearly every deadly situation will ultimately result in one of the characters drifting off into nothingness and dying a death that when you think about it couldn't be a more peaceful or beautiful way to leave this...world? No that's not right. How about existence. Yeah, let's say that. The premise is achingly simple which I think spares it from scrutiny it might otherwise attract. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock play astronauts stranded in zero-g after their shuttle (and ride home) is wrecked by the debris of a ruined satellite and so now must devise a way home while dealing with both limited oxygen and a communications blackout from Mission Control.

The film opens with a seventeen minute tracking shot beginning with a slow approach on the shuttle crew doing minor (although not routine) work on the Hubble telescope. We know this because that slow approach brings us right into their work space where we can see their hands, facial expressions, even the beads of sweat on Sandra Bullock's forehead as the unbroken shot moves in and out of the astronaut's helmets giving us both an incredible first person view of man-made technology that seems so large and important and a constant reminder that in terms of the universe humans might as well be specs of dust. Cuarón admitted that the reason he wanted to keep the script so short and sweet was so that he could spend the majority of his time working on the visuals. He certainly does this and most of Gravity comes off as a clear excuse for Cuarón and his incredible cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to play. And play they do. Lubezki has been on my personal radar since The New World and Children of Men, two of the most beautiful films I've ever laid eyes on that couldn't have been crafted any more differently from each other. Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, also shot by Lubezki, sort of sealed the deal for me in terms of the beauty that cinema could achieve. Lubezki managed to recreate the way that a child moves and interacts with it's world in a way that I daresay will never be able to be recreated again even with his painstaking attention to detail. And the man isn't even done yet! Gravity achieves a whole new understanding of visuals in film. Namely, how objects move in space. In the same way that Lubezki captures a child's perspective in Tree of Life, he manages to have a camera move exactly like an object in zero gravity. We spin, twist and bounce like the two characters and the experience becomes incredibly immersive because of that.

I've heard several comparisons made between Gravity and James Cameron's Avatar because of the heavy use of CGI to create a world and fully immerse an audience in it. This is a ridiculous comparison. You know who else uses CGI worlds? George Lucas. Zack Snyder. Dreamworks and Pixar. As far as I'm concerned Avatar remains a glorified Pixar movie. Anyone with enough money to throw at an effects team can create a world that's pretty to look at. The reason I hate these comparisons to Gravity is that for less than a third of the budget of Avatar Alfonso Cuarón was able to create an environment and a situation that made me grab my seat for dear life. The only physical reaction I had to Avatar was trying to stifle my yawns. Sure, all of these people and studios have pushed the boundaries of F/X filmmaking but there has to be more. Gravity relies on effects because that was the best way to tell this story. The same argument could be made for Avatar but seeing as most of that movie doesn't use live action at the same time as its digital effects, I'm not going to make it. Gravity's CGI is so immersive that you quickly forget your seat and fully commit to the world of the film. Cuarón pushed to make sure his effects were up to snuff and watching how these digital human beings move with real weight and dimension, I have to say he succeeded.

What's nice about Gravity is that even amidst its 3D CGI madness, Cuarón, along with co-writer and son Jonás, still manage to tug at the heart strings in a way that never comes off as melodramatic. The most powerful shot in the film for me doesn't have exploding space stations or beautifully rendered shots of the Earth. It's the shot of George Clooney watching Sandra Bullock tell a story of her daughter in a small mirror he has attached to his wrist. It takes place in the quietest section  and held a lot of weight because of its tenderness. The sequence is compounded when you learn that Sandra Bullock's daughter died in a fluke accident while on a playground. No hard fought battle with a terminal disease. No murder to be avenged. Just a simple accident. This ends up doubling for Bullock's entire experience. For all the huge dangerous forces endangering her life, what she'll end up succumbing to is the silent emptiness of space. No one will know of her experience. She will die utterly and completely alone.

The only real issue I can find in Gravity is with the score. There's nothing particularly wrong with the music other than that in a movie that is so state of the art and unique in it's approach, Steven Price's score seems very run of the mill. Not to say that there aren't times where the music comes to a full crescendo and chills ripple up your neck while you watch a satellite tear itself apart and become a blizzard of metal. But many people have understandably compared Gravity to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and they're not wrong to do so. The quieter segments where we watch one or both of the film's characters silently floating through space are very reminiscent of Keir Dullea's silent, claustrophobic space walks especially when we get to actually ride the camera right inside Bullock's helmet and see the black from her perspective. Before  and even more so after seeing Gravity I think the more accurate comparison to make would be to Danny Boyle's Sunshine. That film also features high levels of astounding visuals provided by both CGI artists and Alwin H. Küchler's brilliantly off kilter, confined cinematography. But where Sunshine definitely wins out by comparison is in the music. Danny Boyle gave the band Underworld the rough cut and asked them to go to work. The band, heavily influenced by avant-garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti whose work was featured in 2001, generated a full-bodied, astounding score before sending it to John Murphy for finishing touches. The band and composer share credit for the music and their work takes Sunshine to a whole new level. The one place where Cuarón seems to drop the ball is in trying to decide whether he wanted his film to be Sunshine or 2001. That is, whether to be silent and methodically designed or to simply astound its audience with pulse pounding sound design and special effects. I think in terms of relative technical approach Gravity can be comfortably seated next to 2001. Both films broke amazing new ground in terms of special effect filmmaking, but narratively and thematically Gravity and Sunshine are almost companion pieces. They each utilize aggressively stellar visualizations of outerspace that overwhelm the viewer, pay careful attention to pseudo-scientific detail, and a villain in the form of a terrifyingly unstoppable force always lurks just outside the ship's hull. Both the film's titles embody what the characters want more than anything else and the sun and earth are both constantly utilized as both awe inspiring backdrop and endpoint of the narrative journey. Comparisons to both 2001 and Sunshine are warranted even as Cuarón ignores the subliminal close-ups and quick cuts of the latter for the slow patient editing of the former (when not shredding space stations, of course). As a result Gravity seems to fall somewhere in between the two movies. I can't harp on it though since this film is first and foremost a visual wonder. You could watch it on mute and I doubt the experience would change all that much. In fact, I think it would prove a very interesting experiment.

Blinded with Science

I'd like very much to go around calling myself a director, but the sad, shameful truth is that I work at a record store. Which is just as well because even if I were a rich and famous anything, I'd still be a record store geek. I'd debate the merits of proper hip-hop production (as I did just hours ago on Facebook with a friend who was bringing up a very funny point, not trying to start a fucking debate about goddamn hip-hop integrity), I'd sneer when people explained why I need to make room in my brain for whatever dubstep is (ed: this piece will be obsolete in six months. See, I'm doing it again!). If I discover something, I want it to be a proper discovery, not something some of my equally unhip friends know about and passed to me as cultural shrapnel, because if there's something worth knowing, no one will tell you about it. That's the Catch 22 of doing what I do. Incidentally, I'm not unhappy about working at a record store, but I did undergo a process of curbing my contempt for mass, split second culture. If someone asks if you like Amos Lee, I merely smile and admit that he's not for me. That's what a polite person does, or anyway, I think that's what a polite person might do. I have colleagues who'd do a little more or a little less. If I snorted derisively and rolled my eyes, I'd run the risk of being a giant, jobless asshole. So, instead I simply try to see things their way and ignore that my brain is a voracious knowledge monster with an impossibly fierce, snide and picky doorman. It's not fair to everyone else if I stand behind the counter and impose my tastes on customers for the seven seconds I have to perform a service for them that though I'm uniquely qualified for, can easily be taught to someone who is less mean-spirited and impatient than I am. I try to tell myself that in my defense I do seriously believe that consuming mediocre culture because it's around results in more of it. But I can't tell myself that people honestly don't like the music they buy, even if I try to justify that. We sell a lot of Gotye here. I don't know what he sounds like, but the bigger he gets the harder it is to convince myself it's worth listening to because the general impression I get from people buying it is that they have other places to be and this is something that has become mandatory to own and be able to talk about, so just sell it to me, already. But this is wildly unfair to the artist and his fanbase. I'm so far inside the world of labels and side projects and distribution and bands that broke up after one album released before I was conceived, that it's tough to remember that normal people don't care about that and just want to hear songs they like. They don't want to hear that the other side of me not liking something because it's famous is critics and listeners patting themselves on the back for choosing to ignore a band until a particular moment, before which they'd entertained me immensely.

All this brings me to a days-long project where I was asked to alphabetize our DVDs. For the sake of the children, I put the horror, cult and sexploitation films in one section high above the ground because I wanted it that way, and also because I didn't want kids to be able to look at the lurid covers of Suspiria and Friday The 13th, Part V and be scarred for life. Ok, maybe I do want that, but I also want to preserve some of the mystery. Plus, kids don't buy that shit. Next to horror is my newly minted Nicholas Cage section; small but growing. I put the TV and classics at a little below eye level so senior citizens have neither to crane their necks or bend over to reach it. Our meager Criterion section shares a shelf with the few foreign films we've accrued. Children's films are at kid height near the floor. Sports, exercise and documentary come after the large TV section stops. And then the other rack has everything else. I was going to put drama and comedy in separate sections, but why bother? They're utilitarian genres and if you put the comedy together, the combination of pinks and whites and sparkles hurts your eyes. Plus, how many of those films are actually funny? See why I keep all this to myself? Anyway, I didn't care about mixing drama with action or comedy because they all have mass appeal and it's easier to have them together where I can easily keep track of what we don't have. These used to be sections, but putting cards in to delineate doesn't make as much sense as we don't have the shelf space for it anymore. The one thing that gave me pause was Sci-fi.

What I discovered was that my definition of Sci-Fi clearly didn't match the store's previous definition based on everything that used to go in that section. I, Robot, Dark City, Aliens, Star Wars, The Matrix, etc. Ask anyone and they'll probably agree that this is normal, and as a blanket term, I took for granted that these films, whose DVD cases share dark background colors, sleek fonts and people striking fierce poses, earned the distinction of being called Science Fiction. And then I took the phrase apart. What exactly was the science in Aliens? Now, I love Aliens, but beyond the technology, which no one explains except where fire power is concerned, there's no science in this film. All of James Cameron's best known entrees into the genre are all noticably lacking in hard science. The Terminator writes it off with a line of dialogue. Avatar, which would probably be saved in most stores by the fact that Sci-Fi often shares a backslash with the word fantasy, is based in a scientific principle that no one bothers explaining except to say it's too technical and don't fucking worry about it, dipshit, just enjoy the scenery. Well, fine, but you don't deserve the Science Fiction mantle.

Science Fiction got the name because there used to be people with something like an understanding of the way the world worked. Granted there was far less to know back then, but you get my meaning. Paul F. Tompkins likes to joke that Jules Verne's writing is 99% science and 1% fiction. Fair point. The point is that the science needs to drive your plot, not simply inform it. H.G. Wells explains the mechanics behind his time machine, then fuses its inherent moral conundrums to the protagonist as he uses the device to learn things about himself and the way the world works. Verne's science is window-dressing; he's asking moral questions. The technology of the Nautilus or the fact that the center of the earth holds many wonders doesn't really do much more than give his characters something to bicker over. But it's fanciful, anyway, and one could and I assume that people frequently do argue that without a submarine capable of doing what no craft could do at the time could, the stories wouldn't have been written. My qualm with Sci-fi starts, but doesn't end, here.

To call Verne science fiction, nine times out of ten, is being rather more generous than I'm willing to be. If 20,000 Leagues was about specifically which mad scientist had been splicing genes to create the giant squid, and the lifelong process by which he achieved his goal, I doubt we'd be here. Not only because that wouldn't have entertained victorians worth a goddamn, but it would have been scientific. Nemo may be a scientist in Verne's backstory, but he's little more than Robin Hood with the power of a modern army at his command in action. Look at the many different cinematic interpretations of the character and you see what people remember; a sort of hard-nosed adventurer. His research is a means, not an end. Which is much more in line with the mad science that would reign supreme in horror films post-Frankenstein. Everyone had their reasons (ending world hunger, world domination), but the point was they'd used science to create a giant-ass insect or an astro zombie. Or invert that. An alien visits and it's sci-fi because there's a scientist present who pleads of the men of action to "Think of what we could learn!" before they destroy it. Could being the operative word. And that's science as most screenwriters know it. But eventually the science was overwhelmed. The Invisible Man the Wells story is called sci-fi. But there's a reason you could only find the DVD as part of the Universal Monster collection for many years. It was a horror film, or anyway, it was treated like one. The question I have is what criteria are people using to categorize something as Science Fiction? Because in the film adaptation of The Invisible Man, science takes a goddamn hike in favor of Claude Rains' world domination plot. He derails trains, robs people, and behaves rudely. We don't learn a single goddamn ingredient of his invisibility serum, do we? It might as well be The Horrors of Spider Island (a sleazy, sleazy film rightly placed in Horror, that nevertheless is fueled by scientific anomaly) for all the attention it pays to the details of its implausible plot. To further extrapolate; make your protagonist visible and what do you have? Basically The Public Enemy or White Heat. Take a look at The Amazing Transparent Man, which is a way-late-in-the-game Invisible Man rip-off, which is nothing more than a dime store heist movie with sci-fi trappings, placed there with contempt by ever-slumming genius Edgar Ulmer. It's a crime film by any other name, radium or not. The science is bullshit, and furthermore it's borrowed, and never leaves the lab, and could have been replaced with document forging. The point of the movie is to be a potboiler, and to warn about the dangers of fascism (long story). And there's the problem. Take the "science" away from so many of these films and you find another genre film is cheap masquerade. Star Wars was in the science fiction section of every video store I've ever gone into (sadly they've all but vanished), but where the fuck is the science? Put it on Earth and it's Kurosawa's shallowest post-war film in English, if you're feeling generous. If Lucas had an explanation for what makes up the fuel of an X Wing, that can propel a craft so small through the atmosphere of a planet... I assume the planets in those galaxies have atmospheres? Again, all questions we could have been addressing instead of trade routes and taxes. Take out space travel and I imagine you have something very much like Red Tails, a poorly written action-adventure movie with a facile understanding of history that Lucas produced to middling reviews earlier this year. Star Wars has zero interest in what makes it possible for these people to go from Hoth to Endor. Again, I get that that doesn't make for the most interesting viewing. What they used to call Hard Sci-Fi died because once you've been to space and dealt with the mundane truth of the matter, there isn't much left to do. Hence why films like Destination Moon and Riders to the Stars were replaced with The Angry Red Planet and Red Planet Mars, but even creature features and space operas eventually gave way to soberer fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien because of the infinite possibilities space travel presents for looking at the human condition under an advanced microscope. Leave it to the makers of Hard Sci-fi to tell us the how and the why, Ib Melchior and Sid Pink were going to show us fucking monsters and explore ideological problems. So, there's nothing like fact in Lucas' films (he can't even get the whole space is a vacuum thing right), but we forgive it because we want to. The spectacle is doubled (not only explosions, but on another planet) and so people get much more willing to forgive a film's core emptiness. It's so shallow it doesn't even match the philosophical content of something like Journey to the Seventh Planet, which is largely a vessel for blonde women and brain monsters. It is entirely what's in front of your face and there's nothing beneath it, at least nothing you couldn't get from a Commando Cody serial, which flies in the face of the idea of Science or Speculative Fiction. There ain't a fucking question when you leave Star Wars. Or I, Robot. Or Journey to the Center of the Earth. At least none that it's creators felt the need to pose themselves. James Mason or Will Smith will make some offhand comment about why X is Y, but it's an excuse to watch robots fight people or lizards fight each other. Speculative fiction is a much better term for the genre because a good 50% of the major films called Science Fiction don't have a care in the goddamn world for science, hard or otherwise.

And I can be forgiving up to a point. 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't really science fiction, when you get right down to it. It's much more interested in the idea of the coldness of space and of what technology affords rather than how that technology operates. When Keir Dullea disarms Hal, what exactly is he turning off? We get that there's memory in there, but what the hell are all of those things he's pulling out of the computer's hard-drive? No, Kubrick is much more interested in the chicken and egg question of inspiration and our never ending quest for technological advancement. It starts with a tool for hunting, but when we put our lives in the hands of machines, have we gone too far? Machines aren't programmed to reason like humans are. This is fascinating, even if its philosophical first and only scientific to a point. And furthermore I give him a pass because he gets the minutiae of space travel so perfectly. Look at the rules for the zero gravity toilet and tell me he doesn't have the makers of Destination Moon in his heart. He's using space travel to get at enormous philosophical questions, but at least he's not ignoring the facts. Ridley Scott's Alien gets the same pass. It asks so many questions in simply setting up the fact of interplanetary travel that I don't mind that it's a proto-slasher film at heart, Halloween or Jaws with a built in phallic death implement on the face of its killer. Alien makes you think without ever stopping you and asking you to do so. It's also one of the best films ever made, so don't think I'm setting the bar here simply to qualify as Sci-Fi. Though, frankly, look at The Day the Earth Stood Still; it's just The Next Voice You Hear inside out. Robert Wise is excused because, again, the ideas are there and it doesn't matter that this is basically a movie about a dictator holding the world hostage, and also he made one of the last hard sci-fi movies, The Andromeda Strain. But my point is, you don't have to be the most tactful or subtle artist to make what I'd call Science Fiction. Doug Trumbull's Silent Running or Saul Bass' Phase IV (both imperfect films) may be about fusing a hippie mentality to space travel and the mutant insect and asking whether one can actually live and let live when life has lost most of its meaning, but they at least try to get the facts straight. But does entry into the mean bug or space territory automatically grant you entry into the genre? What about The Beginning of the End or Assault on Dome 4? The former has large bugs and the latter is set in space and if you learned anything, you were paying much more careful attention than me. Why can't we see past generic trappings and see genre conventions? I don't think that simply happening in space means that a film should be called goddamn Science, especially because, in case you've forgotten, we haven't really made a lot of headway up there. Anyone living on fucking mars, yet? Anyone smoking a cigarette in a button down shirt up there, or polishing a shotgun or whatever the fuck? I didn't think so. If anything, they want audiences to take all of it for granted because not only do they not care about explaining it to you, but once you figure out that it has nothing to do with the plot, you're going to realize they took a boilerplate action movie and just threw it in space to get more money out of your wallet. And furthermore, it sells some films short. Dune is thought of as sci-fi, but that's more poly-sci. John Carter is a topnotch adventure yarn. Where exactly is the science in a man touching a magic stone and winding up on Mars? Calling it such cripples everyone's understanding of the film, which is based on a novel by someone who was much more interested in anthropology anyway (you don't write Tarzan without at least a passing interest in it), and whose grammar is much more aligned with the silly Verne and Wells adaptations from the 50s and 60s. Logic is gleefully thrown aside so that the film can soar on its own terms. Scientific this is not.

So what about Solaris? Or the films of Duncan Jones? Films that are grounded in scientifically sound situations (Space station? Legit. Human life support in whole buildings on the moon? Not impossible.) and use them to ask questions about our humanity. I have no problem with a film like Moon because though the science is fanciful and largely unexplained, it uses the cushion provided by the trappings of sci-fi to examine humanity in a way you can't down here, today, right now. Cloning and robots are funhouse mirrors, and if we have to define ourselves based on what we're not, then what are we left with? That's where the meat is. That's something you can sink your goddamn teeth into. Is it science? Only faintly. The science got us into the room and while there's no way a screenwriter in the early 70s or even now is going to have anything like the technical know-how to explain cloning or space travel, they don't push the boundaries of existing scientific knowledge any more than their predecessors. Other films and books have asked us to buy clones, so there's no need to do it in Moon. But that really only makes them heirs to the mantle of sci-fi in as much as the films that established the conventions deserved it. Moon leans on 2001, it becomes Science Fiction, so we don't look at the fact that the science, such as it is, isn't even remotely important to the questions posed. Yet, it takes place in space, so it's Science. I call bullshit. What the best science fiction comes down to, based on both my definition and the mainstream acceptance of the genre is whether it makes you think or whether it entertains you with spectacle not possible in the realms of the real. To put this in microcosm: A lot of people called Another Earth sci-fi, but no one calls Melancholia sci-fi. Another Earth is a widgety, twee nightmare over which hangs the idea of an idea. No one speaks for ten seconds about the mathematical probability of a planet that mirrors ours existing, let alone entering our fucking orbit (yeah, that's what I want to know about, how in Christ's Dick does a planet that's EXACTLY LIKE OURS just leave it's fucking orbit when our planet has never done that? Did they all goddamn panic when their planet just leapt out of its galaxy and ambled on over here? Screenwriters? Nothing?). Melancholia uses the same idea in a way that cuts down on improbability and amps ups its metaphor, by making its rogue planet an almost malevolent, empty rock, a much more potent reflection of earth, if you ask me. But the movie itself is about depression. The thing I love about Melancholia is that Lars Von Trier (who, in case you don't know, don't give a fuck) fills his film with scientific speculation, it just all happens to be wrong. And it's probably going to wind up in the drama section of the imaginary video store in my head because it's about people first and gets those details 100% right (this is if said fake video store doesn't have a Lars Von Trier section). Like Kubrick and Tarkovsky before him, he had other shit on his mind than what goes on in space, but paid lip service to actual fact, anyway. This is what real filmmakers do.

Look at any major publication's list of the best science fiction films of all time (fuck it, any blogger) and you'll probably run into a lot of the same titles. Total Film's list makes me furious not only because they consistently put terrible films above great ones but because there's nothing remotely scientific about the worst of them. First of all, don't tell me that Robocop is a better film than Solaris (scratch that; first of all, don't compare them), and do not tell me Robocop's about the fucking science. It's called cocksucking ROBOCOP!!! It's about spectacle, and if you're a Verhoeven apologist, it's about satirically skewering corporate greed and the line between the public's approval of violence and its understanding of violence. If you want to be generous, it's dumbly violent because it's "about" dumb violence. I'd buy that if Verhoeven hadn't made Total Recall, which strips the science out of its source story by Philip K. Dick, to make one of the dumbest, most violent movies ever made (which, incidentally, also called sci-fi despite someone surviving on Mars despite having no helmet for...what, a minute and a half? Two minutes? I forget, because it's one of many scientific snafus in that very stupid movie still called Science Fiction). But anyway, the point of Verhoeven's films, at least his so called Sci-fi films, isn't the science, but the opportunity it grants him to poke fun at some aspect of American culture (and Fuck you, by the way, man; we've got problems but we don't need advice from the guy who made Showgirls, thanks. You contribute to the problem, you don't get to point fingers). Ditto The Matrix. There's only the dimmest scientific thought at work in that obscenely violent film. It's all about world-building and asking if...like...this is the real world...and shit. I'm being condescending because I hate that movie and don't find it entertaining or morally sound, but, anyone can tell you it's about consciousness, not physics, even if its the film's bending of physical reality that grants it its visual potency. The problem with arguing over its scientific relevance is that it ditches reality almost immediately. And yet there it is on the Science Fiction films list, next to 2001 and The Fly. Most of the films generally called great sci-fi, in fact, don't really belong here. Empire Strikes Back? Nope. Inception? Fucking hardly. Aliens? Would you stop. Entertaining films that can't exist in our modern reality, yes. Scientific? In what sense, I'd like to know. And I'd like to make it abundantly clear that I like those three films a good deal, Inception especially, but not because of the way they use the scientific method. Speculative Fiction is the better term for films like this, but we also need a corrective for a film like Aliens or The Deadly Mantis. You could call them horror films, but they want to be war films. Godzilla is a science fiction film. Its sequels are just monster movies. In the meantime we need a term that covers everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing people's arms off on Mars to Mothra destroying Tokyo, because simply going to or coming from space does not qualify as scientific. It's just lazy writing. Furthermore, they're only scientific as long as the equation is new. An alien gets here, and yeah we'd study their anatomy, but then it becomes about anthropology. What is their culture like, how they perceive our lifestyles, etc. And after that, it's just Star Trek. Other planets exist and we can visit them, but soon it's just going to be about interstellar warfare.

I sincerely don't think this is a question of my being too inside of a particular argument. It's simple enough. If you watch a film and goddamn learned something scientific, I'd hear arguments for it being considered Sci-Fi. But my problem is that I think people think they're learning more than they are, which means they're being denied something more than what's out there. And this takes me back to working at the record store. Yeah, it's pretentious and mean-spirited of me to make fun of someone in my head when they ask if we carry One Direction, but only because I've seen just how truly brilliant music can be, and I know that it can be the most profound art and can alter your perception of what's possible in the medium and if you settle for what's on the radio or television, you are denying yourself the pleasure that can come from the greatest music and letting a few people decide your preferences for you. You aren't questioning, you aren't learning, and to my way of thinking, you're limiting how happy you can be. We can call any film that takes place in space Science, but we're limiting ourselves hugely. Break the limit, ask questions, don't believe something just because it's been told to you. It could just be fiction.