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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Open the pod bay doors

Today and tomorrow, while I’m doing various filial duties in Virginia Beach, my blog will have a mind of its own.  Here, by largely unpopular demand, is a lightly edited version of my essay on 2001:  A Space Odyssey; the original, along with ten more wacky and daffy essays, can be found in this attractive volume.  Part one today, part two Thursday.

And in the meantime, don’t forget to tune in to my debate with Elizabeth Kantor, author of this unattractive volume, on the Michael Medved Show!  4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific.

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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:  A Space Odyssey is not a political film.  A quarter century after its release in April 1968 (its public debut took place on the day before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.), 2001 is usually remembered for its images, for the music, or for its groundbreaking special effects--all of which are widely and routinely cited in the general culture.  The mysterious monolith turns up in New Yorker cartoons ("it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand"), “Thus Spake Zarathustra” becomes a staple of Sesame Street phonetics lessons, the balletic representations of space flight provide material for a Lenny Kravitz video and an episode of The Simpsons.  Much of the movie’s audience might hesitate to ascribe a “plot” to 2001 at all, much less a “plot” in the “political” sense; the movie’s initial reviews tended to center on the monolith and on HAL, and rereading those reviews today chiefly affords one the spectacle of watching dozens of puzzled film critics circle curiously around this large, black slab in their midst.

To be sure, the scenes aboard the spaceship Discovery, which culminate in the famous breakdown of HAL and his murder of four astronauts, suggest that Kubrick’s concern with humans and machines did not end with Dr. Strangelove, and most of the film’s commentators have appropriately reached the conclusion that, as Alexander Walker has put it, ”2001 is nothing less than an epic-sized essay on the nature of intelligence.” [Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick Directs (1972), 244; hereafter cited as SKD.] So it’s not as though the movie is entirely nonnarrative or nonpropositional, even if its director considers it “essentially a nonverbal experience.” [Quoted in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (1970), 7; hereafter cited as Making.] All the same, my sense is that most people would think it takes a strange critical mind to see the movie as a commentary on the Cold War and the rise of the national security state.  But all I’ll be doing here is uncovering one of the film’s premises, a subtext it doesn’t need to elaborate insofar as it takes that subtext for granted (as does its audience).  To date, there hasn’t been any discussion of what 2001 might have meant to the politics of national security and manned space exploration in 1968.  I think that critical silence is itself readable, and that it testifies not only to cultural work the film has done, but also to the possibility that some forms of textual politics may be most powerful when least explicit.

The broader (and broadly deconstructive) theoretical principle at work here is worth stating in full.  The idea is this:  silence is not an absence of discourse, but an integral part of discourse—just as ignorance is not something lying at the outer borders of the map of knowledge (marked “here there be tygers"), but something licensed and sustained by specific regimes of knowledge that tell you implicitly you don’t need to know or you shouldn’t want to know.  Both formulations of this idea are integral to 2001, whose central drama turns on the politics of silence and ignorance.  Basically, I’m restating a well-known passage of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Part I, in which Foucault writes:

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. . . .  There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. [Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.  Volume I: An Introduction (1978), 27.]

Because I find this passage too general for general consumption, I usually annotate it in the classroom by asking students the difference between what’s “unmentionable” and what “goes without saying.” To these vastly different kinds of silence we can then add the silences of tacit agreement and disagreement, the silence of hostile opposition, the silence of not blowing your friend’s cover, the silence of the unfathomable (itself a special subcategory of “ignorance"), the silence of trying to find out what the other person knows, and, not least of these, the silence of not being prepared for class.  Kubrick’s 2001 turns out to be composed of almost all these “silences.” That shouldn’t be surprising, since 2001 is literally a “silent” movie in a number of ways:  it’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie that contains only forty minutes of dialogue; it’s the first (and maybe the only) SF movie whose soundtrack maintains strict silence in the vacuum of space; and some of its most dramatic moments are silent—as when, just before the film’s intermission, we watch from HAL’s point of view as the computer lip-reads astronauts Bowman and Poole discussing whether to disconnect HAL’s higher brain functions.  But although everyone knows that 2001 broaches the unfathomable (human encounters with alien intelligences) and the unspeakable (thermonuclear war), no one seems to have talked about the political narrative that goes without saying in 2001, nor have we asked ourselves what that very silence might tell us.

*****

The premise of the movie, as derived from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1950 short story, “The Sentinel,” is that humans find an object on the moon, an object whose purpose is unclear but that at the very least testifies to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  In reworking the story for the film’s screenplay and for his own prose treatment of the script, Clarke simply expanded on this premise, suggesting that Earth had been visited by an alien species four million years ago, when early humans—more specifically, proto-Australopithicene hominids—were still lousy predators:  weak, flat-toothed, slow, and threatened by drought.  The aliens, wanting to foster the spread of intelligent life in the galaxy but wanting to do it “passively,” leave behind a monolith that teaches the hominids to use tools, with which they can kill prey, eat meat—and attack each other.  In Clarke’s rewriting of the Genesis myth, then, the hominids eat of the trees of life and of knowledge, introduce murder and sin into the African plains, and eventually develop toolmaking skills that allow them to become Godlike enough to destroy their own planet.  This much is adumbrated in the most abrupt flash-forward in the history of film, when Kubrick cuts from the first tool—the bone with which the ape-humans have clubbed to death a member of a neighboring tribe—to an artificial Earth satellite.  The satellite is a nuclear warhead, but because the film refuses to make this clear in any narrative voiceover (I’ll say more about that below), and because the flash-forward is also a graphic match of long white tools, it’s possible at first to read the flash-forward as a triumphant affirmation of human evolution.  The rest of the film follows from the discovery on the moon of a black slab similar to the one that appeared amidst the “apes”—but the second monolith is more or less an alarm, buried beneath the lunar surface and activated by sunlight.  It sends a radio signal to Jupiter when the sun’s rays strike its surface; from Jupiter the signal is relayed, we know not where, and the monolith’s creators are thus presumably alerted to the fact that humans have survived the drought, subdued their predators, opened a chain of 7-11s, built spacecraft, and uncovered a strange black thing on the moon.

What’s most successful about this premise, as Kubrick and Clarke hashed it out over four years of rewrites, is that it neatly combines both the pessimist and triumphalist narratives of postwar, postnuclear science fiction.  Unlike some science fiction narratives (Star Trek is the most obvious contemporaneous example), 2001 does not predicate a future in which humans have overcome a bloody, apocalyptic phase of war and carnage; on the contrary, it suggests that there’s really no survival value to intelligence at all.  Although meliorist accounts of evolution like to believe that the universe—or at least terrestrial history—inevitably rewards self-conscious forms of life, 2001 opens by suggesting that tool-wielding intelligence is inseparable from murderous aggression, and that protohuman bipeds wouldn’t have made it anyway without a crucial push from forces unknown.

On the other hand, of course, the very existence of those forces is reason for hope, and the triumphalist aspects of 2001 certainly do imply that the development of intelligence—as it manifests itself specifically in space travel—is the “natural” destiny of self-replicating molecules (i.e., life) after all.  The film’s emphasis on space travel as the index of intelligence is of course a staple of science fiction, but its resonance in 1968, for a nation about to land men on the moon, is particularly strong; indeed, Wernher von Braun put the movie’s cosmic optimism in so many words when he declared that “what we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.” [Quoted in Dale Carter, The Final Frontier:  The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (1988), 196; hereafter cited as FF.] In 2001, apparently, the cosmos agree with this account of our evolution, for when humans uncover the lunar monolith they become automatically eligible for entry into the galactic club of alien superintelligences.

Well, not quite “automatically”:  there’s one final hurdle, a manned mission to Jupiter to find out where the moon monolith’s signal went and why.  This mission takes up most of the film, provides its only sustained drama, and culminates in the battle between HAL and the Discovery‘s sole remaining astronaut, David Bowman.  HAL’s breakdown is, understandably, the central enigma for most critical commentary on the film:  it parallels the narrative of the Doomsday Machine in Strangelove (as well as subsequent Cold War films like 1983’s WarGames), warning us, as Gene Phillips would have it, that “human fallibility is less likely to destroy man than the relinquishing of his moral responsibilities to machines” [Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick:  A Film Odyssey (1975), 141]; it underlines the movie’s linkage of instrumental reason and deadly aggression; and it solidifies many viewers’ impressions that HAL is the film’s only interesting character.

The man-versus-machine narrative, in 2001 as elsewhere, has long held its attractions for twentieth-century Western countercultures, science fiction fans, and technophobes of all political stripes.  And it can’t be denied that the film deliberately invokes and blurs the distinction between humans and machines, since its human actors are so robotic and its computer so complexly “human.” I grant, moreover, that Kubrick deliberately invited attempts to “psychologize” the computer precisely by stripping the film of the explanatory narrative that would have contextualized the mission and the rationale for HAL’s programming.  All the same, as I’ll demonstrate, the human/ machine binary is strangely inapposite to 2001, and critics’ readings of HAL, accordingly, tend to underread the sources (and the effects) of his programming, while ascribing too much “ineffably human” pluck and initiative to Bowman’s eventual victory over HAL.  [Here I’m cutting a boring footnote to a couple of people who think that Bowman’s decision to re-enter Discovery through the emergency airlock is a “stroke of genius” rather than an obvious and unavoidable decision, and who quite foolishly believe that HAL is incapable of “intelligent improvisation.”]

Kubrick’s explicators are almost uniformly silent on what we might call the “social context” of the Jupiter mission.  Norman Kagan writes that “when he begins to acquire emotions, an ego, and the beginning of a personality, when he starts to be a man [sic], HAL begins to misbehave because of the precariousness of his self-worth, his own emptiness”; Thomas Allen Nelson claims that “once programmed to be human,” HAL “becomes imbued with a consciousness of his own fallibility”; Daniel De Vries says, “he is proud and willful, and when his pride is hurt and his life threatened, he does what any other human being would do:  he becomes murderous”; and Michel Ciment concludes that HAL is a creature “which, rebelling against its mission, falling prey to anxiety and the fear of death, wreaks vengeance on those who no longer have confidence in it by finally sinking into criminal madness.” [Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, 160; Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, 125; De Vries, The Films of Stanley Kubrick, 53; Michel Ciment, Kubrick, tr. Gilbert Adair, 134.] In making HAL out as a kind of silicon-based existential Oedipus, complete with anxiety, hubris, and Being-toward-death, these readings strikingly fail to acknowledge the film’s most basic point:  HAL has been programmed to conceal the purpose of the mission, even from the astronauts on board.  At the same time, he has been programmed to perform flawlessly:  as he puts it to a BBC interviewer, “no 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.” Lurking beneath the human/machine binary, in other words, is a specific set of instructions in HAL’s software, all written by very human members of the U.S. national security apparatus.  HAL does not rebel against his mission, and his self-worth is not in question.  He simply seeks to reconcile contradictory mission imperatives, and he does so with nothing more emotional than the microchips in his logic centers; behind the “conflict” between men and machines in 2001 are still more men.

This much can be gleaned, with some difficulty, from the text of the film itself:  its last spoken words are those of Dr. Heywood Floyd, chairman of the National Council of Astronautics (the film’s stand-in for NASA), who appears on a video screen in Discovery‘s computer center just as David Bowman has shut down HAL.  Floyd is of course ignorant of how badly the mission has gone awry, but his message serves to fill in Bowman (and us) on why HAL might have wanted to sever the spacecraft’s communicative link with Earth—and perhaps complete the mission alone:

Good day, gentlemen.  This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and which for security reasons of the highest priority has been known on board during the mission only by your HAL 9000 computer.  Now that you are in Jupiter space, and the entire crew is revived, it can be told to you.  Eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered.  It was buried forty feet below the lunar surface, near the crater Tycho.  Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery.

It’s not clear whether Floyd’s message comes on automatically, as a result of HAL’s “death,” or whether HAL has “released” the tape to Bowman as a final, uncomputerlike gesture either of goodwill (to inform Bowman of the mission profile) or apology (to explain that he had been passively deceiving the crew all along). [Some critics have suggested that the recording comes on automatically because the ship has entered orbit around Jupiter.  This makes no sense whatsoever.] Be this ambiguity as it may, Floyd’s speech is one of Kubrick’s few concessions to narrative intelligibility, and it practically demands that one see the film again in order to go over Floyd’s earlier screen appearances (and I’ll go over them in a moment).

Kubrick’s collaborators and consultants registered a few complaints about this aspect of the film’s reticence to explain itself.  As Arthur C. Clarke said:

I personally would like to have seen a rationale of HAL’s behavior.  It’s perfectly understandable, and in fact would have made HAL a very sympathetic character; he had been fouled by those clods at Mission Control.  HAL was indeed correct in attributing his mistaken report to human error. (Quoted in Making, 133)

Astronomer and astronautics researcher Frederick Ordway, a scientific and technical consultant to 2001, similarly weighed in with a lengthy critique of Kubrick’s final version.  The full text of his response to the film can be found in Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, and it indicates how thoroughly Kubrick excised all narration and explanatory voiceovers from his final cut:  originally, the movie opened with documentary narrative on the hominids’ possible extinction, on U.S.-Soviet relations (specifying that the first two satellites we see are nuclear warheads), on the radio emission from the lunar monolith, and on the enigmatic “Star Gate” orbiting Jupiter.  Where Ridley Scott gave in at the last moment and supplied a voiceover “noir” narrative to Blade Runner (1982), the notoriously difficult Kubrick did the opposite, purging his film of narration—notably, for the first time in his career.  What’s most crucial to my argument, however, is that as Ordway’s memo makes clear, Kubrick even excised dialogue between the astronauts and HAL that would have raised the question of who knows what about the spacecraft’s mission (and thus would have let viewers know that there was something else to know about the mission).  This is Ordway’s sense of the script:

Indispensable dialogue regarding the three hibernating astronauts was lacking; see particularly C12, where Bowman and Poole first become aware that “there is something about the mission the sleeping beauties know and that we don’t know. . . .” These few words are probably the most critical to the logic [sic] structure of the entire film, and lead to a valid reason why HAL breaks down.  Yet they were inexplicably cut out.  Poole tells HAL that there is “something about this mission that we weren’t told.  Something the rest of the crew know and that you know.  We would like to know if this is true.” HAL enigmatically answers:  “I’m sorry, Frank, but I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing everything that all of you know.” (Qtd. in Making, 197).

At this point, I realize, 2001‘s politics of silence and ignorance become confusing; it would seem a simpler task to determine who knows what about ghosts in “The Turn of the Screw.” But here’s what’s at stake in this “silence.” When Bowman and Poole realize that HAL knows something they don’t (and recall that Bowman is putatively Discovery‘s Mission Commander), they ask for simple confirmation of whether this is so, only to be met with doubletalk from HAL that suggests Bowman and Poole have the informational advantage on him.  Yet this entire exchange is “inexplicably” cut from the film, so that we don’t know—until Floyd’s tape appears, when it is too late—that Bowman doesn’t know what HAL knows, just as we don’t know that HAL knows that Bowman doesn’t know what mission he’s “commander” of.  The on-screen title that announces this segment of 2001 tells us that this is the Jupiter Mission, “eighteen months later,” but Kubrick has put us in the same narrative position into which Mission Control has put Bowman:  we don’t know what this “mission” is, or why it’s going to Jupiter, and Kubrick has kept us in ignorance by striking from the script the one exchange that would have alerted us to the fact that HAL is hiding something from his human crewmembers. [Puzzling as the “Jupiter Mission” title is, coming abruptly after the moon-monolith scene, it’s actually one of Kubrick’s few concessions to narrative intelligibility; as Gene Phillips reports (149), Kubrick added the two titles, “Jupiter Mission 18 Months Later” and “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” after the film’s puzzling premiere on April 1.]

Only one scene gives us any clue to the status of mission information aboard Discovery, and that scene, too, is gnomic at best.  HAL’s breakdown begins when he reports—falsely—the imminent failure of the AE-35 unit that will keep Discovery in touch with Mission Control (so the “breakdown” itself, as Clarke’s novel makes clear, turns on the availability of information and ostensible control of the mission).  But his false report about the AE-35 follows crucially from his tentative questioning of Bowman, when (on my reading) he tries to determine whether Bowman has any suspicion of the truth.  After asking Bowman if he’s noticed any of the “extremely odd things” about the mission—the absolute secrecy, the decision to place astronauts on board already in hibernation, and the “strange stories floating around before we left, rumors about something being dug up on the moon,” HAL is rebuffed:  Bowman replies, “you’re working up your crew psychology report.” Retreating from his inquiry, HAL says, “Of course I am.  Sorry about this.  I know it’s a bit silly,” whereupon he announces the fault in the AE-35 unit.  Having determined that Bowman is merely a good company man who sees no ambiguity in anything he’s been told about his job, HAL thereby ascertains that he cannot discuss the mission’s real objectives with Bowman until he is cleared to release the prerecorded briefing from Floyd.  It is then that HAL reports the failure of the communications unit; whether he does so out of impending “guilt” over his deception of Bowman and Poole (brought on by the aporia at the heart of his mission programming), or for a more sinister reason (which I’ll discuss below), is, to quote the film’s last words, a total mystery.

So far this narrative is still fairly routine, even if, like the lunar monolith, it does require some serious digging before it becomes visible.  Evil gremlins in the military-industrial complex misprogram a supercomputer, and the misprogramming backfires horribly; as Carolyn Geduld writes, following Clarke’s account, “HAL is messed up by some Dr. Strangelove working in Mission Control on Earth.” [Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1973), 59.] But when we turn back to Dr. Floyd’s role in the film, we begin to realize how inadequate even these accounts (including Clarke’s) really are.  First of all, contra Clarke, HAL was not “fouled” by “clods,” and contra Geduld, his programming was not derailed by a Dr. Strangelove; as Floyd’s closing statement says explicitly, the decision to withhold mission information from the Discovery crew has the highest security clearance.  It is not the work of a lone Strangelove in Mission Control, but of the entire national security apparatus.  Second—and this is critical to my reading of the film—the information blackout aboard Discovery gives the lie, retroactively, to everything Dr. Floyd has said in his three earlier scenes, on Space Station 5 (in Earth orbit) and on the moon.  And since Floyd’s trip to the moon presents itself, on first viewing, as a gradual uncovering of the “truth” about the monolith, it’s worth going over those scenes more carefully, for here is where we can see Kubrick’s depiction of space-race paranoia working most effectively—again, because most silently.

_______

Tomorrow: we go over those scenes more carefully!  Keep it right here for more critical thrills and spills!

Posted by Michael on 12/20 at 09:29 AM
(60) Comments • (4) Trackbacks • Permalink

Monday, December 18, 2006

Post mortem post

All right, so the results are now official, and you are now officially reading the Best Educatious Blog on the Internets.  I think Sherman Dorn, of the rival (and craftily-named) Education Policy Blog has precisely the right attitude about all this as he graciously offers you, my faithful readers, his heartfelt salute:

a tentative congrats to Michael Bérubé’s loyal readership for having beaten out the readership of a defunct homeschool blog, an Ivy League gossip site, and all the others.

As I pointed out in my comment chez EdPoliBlog, Sherman forgot to say that we barely beat out the readership of a defunct homeschool blog.  And not without some controversy along the way, which Sherman generously refers to as “the silly competition to see who can get away with the most fraud in the 2006 Weblog Awards for best educationalisteseazamatazz blog.”

Well, merci beaucoup, Sherman!  We appreciate the gesture, and we congratulate you and Education Policy Wonk Blog of Wonkers on a most impressive three-way tie for eighth place:

Michael Bérubé 38.62 % (6177)
SpunkyHomeSchool 34.41 % (5505)
IvyGate 14.59 % (2334)
A Shrewdness of Apes 3.01 % (482)
Joanne Jacobs 2.34 % (374)
Eduwonk 1.93 % (309)
Faith and Theology 1.71 % (273)
Education Policy Blog 1.22 % (195)
History is Elementary 1.17 % (187)
The Education Wonks 1.00 % (160)

Total votes: 15996

But I do have two serious things to say about this.  The first is that I’m sorry for inadvertently antagonizing homeschoolers when I should have been mocking Education Policy Blog instead.  As Bill Benzon kept pointing out in comments, people homeschool their kids for all kinds of reasons.  Some of those reasons, I should add, sometimes have to do with children with learning disabilities.  For obvious reasons, though, the Christian-secular split involved here threatened to overshadow everything else.  Now, it did not escape my notice that the only Weblog Awards races that generated any ill will were the ones that involved people from significantly different political communities, as in the Kos v. LGF heavyweight bout and the Lesbian Dad v. Hang Right Politics undercard.  Those races got real nasty real fast; ours didn’t.  But when those illegal votes and cheating scripts started coming in, it became clear that some of our fans were, indeed, taking this thing too seriously.  So my sincere thanks to Spunky and the Harris twins for helping put everything in perspective when things got weird—and for being such charitable competitors.

Besides (this is thing two), the important point isn’t that we won or they won.  The important point is that I avenged last year’s inexplicable loss to Sadly, No! Last year, you’ll recall, the chortling snarkmeisters at S,N! just managed to squeak by us in the crucial Best of the Two Hundred and Fifty-First Through Five Hundredth Blogs as Ranked by Some Capricious Ranking Device competition, 2240 votes to 1318.  This year, Sadly, No! stomped all over its right-wing competitors in a noticeably Poor Man-less field, winning 5604 votes, 36.94 percent of the 15,170 votes cast in their category.  So the real totals, for those of you keeping track of the real competition, are:

Michael Bérubé 38.62 % (6177)
Sadly, No!  36.94% (5604)

And so we are the champions, my friends.  Never mind the petty technicalities.  Let’s not bicker and argue about who was in what category, now!  The people have spoken.  Some of them more than once!

I have to say, though, that I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to write my big concession speech.  After all, those of you who’ve been following this blog since its early days in 2004, when it was still “cool” and was opening for The Arcade Fire in tiny Montréal clubs, know that writing concession speeches is one of our specialities here at Le Blogue Bérubé.  In early 2005 we fought over Best New Blog with James Wolcott and BradBlog only to wind up pwned by Amanda Marcotte; we battled over Most Humorous Post with the Rude Pundit only to lose to The Poor Man; we struggled vainly for Best Writing with Wolcott and Meteor Blades only to fall to the mighty Digby.  In late 2005 we lost inexplicably, inexplicably I say, to Sadly, No!  In early 2006 we finished second in Best Series to some blog called FireDogLake.  And then, in the unkindest cut of all, Todd Gitlin came out of nowhere in the third heat (as FrontPage reset their results again and again) to strip me of my rightful title as America’s Most Dangeral Professor.

So this time, as I squared off (I thought) against IvyGate only to be (I thought) beaten by SpunkyHomeSchool, I composed a concession speech in which I congratulated Spunky on a race well run (that still holds!) and noted that this competition marked the first time I’d been beaten by a defunct blog.  Granted, Spunky’s blog was newly-defunct, having posted its farewell on December 5, but still.  So I was going to take this opportunity for reflection and post a few draft chapters of my forthcoming Blogging and Time about Being-Toward-Defunctness (Ger. Sein-zum-Defunkt).  For someday, this too will be a defunct blog.  Possibly quite soon!  You never know.  For defunctness comes to us all in its own time, and at my back from time to time I hear the GNF’s winged chariot hurrying near.

Not just yet, though.  I still have to give a couple of blog-related talks at the MLA later this month, and I have no intention of doing so as an ex-blogger.  I haven’t yet replied adequately to this contribution and that contribution to Liberalpalooza®, or Mark Bauerlein’s essay in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.  We still haven’t quite completed the saga of my journey to the Land that Time Forgot.  And there are a couple more things on our mind as well, like the question of how we wound up speaking about ourselves in the first person plural again even though we just used “mind” in the singular.

In the meantime, here’s this week’s schedule.  I’m flying down to Virginia Beach tomorrow and staying through Friday to help take care of my mother, who recently fractured her hip and broke her wrist.  (All this talk of my sports-related injuries has been mere deflection, you see.) Send her some good wishes and Skele-Gro!  I’ll post a few excerpts from my essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey in the meantime, because research suggests that almost two percent of all commenters on the previous thread might actually be interested in reading ‘em.  And I’ll be back on Friday, don’t you worry, don’t you fret, with the most arbitrary Friday yet.

Thanks again to everyone who voted for me (legally) in this Weblog Awards thing, and to everyone who made our Cage Match and Show Trial such a world-historical success!

Posted by Michael on 12/18 at 03:38 PM
(47) Comments • (29) Trackbacks • Permalink

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Spacing out

Through no fault of my own, I watched some television recently and learned some things.  Last night, for example, watching Saturday Night Live with Janet for the first time in years, I learned that Justin Timberlake is (a) reasonably talented, (b) not particularly attractive, and (c), a decent comic-sketch actor and a really, really good sport.  So that’s something.

A couple of days ago, while taking a break from student papers and show trials and Weblog Award weirdnesses, I caught the last forty minutes of Aliens on channel 33,573.  I hadn’t seen it since its release in 1986, and you know, it’s a pretty good SF-meets-action flick after all.  Easily the best item in the franchise.  I remember reading an essay a few years later about how the film gives you SF/action’s first ass-kicking female lead but does so, via a curious kind of compensatory logic, in a film that’s all about the icky-and-terrifying qualities of eggs and organs and pregnancy and reproduction.  But mostly I was reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s hilarious turn as Gwen DeMarco in Galaxy Quest (one of our fave movies in this house), where she’s frantically crawling through the ship’s vents with Tim Allen, yelling, “vents!  why is it always vents?” The line is funny on its own, since the crawling-through-vents motif is common to any number of films, but I’d forgotten that a good portion of the closing sequences of Aliens involves crawling through the vents.  So that was a nice little intertextual moment, and another point for Galaxy Quest, one of the smartest-and-funnest movies of recent years.

And then at the very end of Aliens, I came upon something odd.  Ripley and Newt escape, Ripley puts them both into hibernation, the screen goes dark, the credits roll, and what do we hear but Aram Khachaturian’s “Gayane Ballet Suite” (Adagio).

That’s right, Aram Khachaturian’s “Gayane Ballet Suite.” Are you kidding me?  What film or SF geek wouldn’t know that the “Gayane Ballet Suite” was used in the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey?  What is this, soundtrack homage?  Or just plain laziness?

For those of you who aren’t obsessed by such things, the “Gayane Ballet Suite” sequence in 2001 occurs just after the monolith on the moon has let out that piercing shriek.  Humans are standing around the monolith, about to take a group picture with the thing, when suddenly there’s a horrible electronic wail that brings them all to their knees.  Why?  We don’t know.  Maybe the monolith doesn’t like being photographed!  No, not really.  It turns out, as I’m sure you remember, that the thing was designed to send a signal back to its designers when it was struck by sunlight.  The idea is that if the grunting hominids of four million BCE ever got it together and discovered the big magnetic thing the Extraterrestrial Intelligences left on the moon, said hominids, or their descendents (that’s us!), would become eligible for membership in the Galactic Club of Giant Floating Fetuses.  Anyway, next thing we know, there’s an utterly bizarre spacecraft floating through the void, a kind of elongated spine with a big antenna in the middle and an eerie knob on one end, with a kind of black visor and three round ports, looking like a Face that is No Face.  The title reads “Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later,” and there is no explanation of why there is a Jupiter Mission.  Indeed, in the version screened in the premiere, there weren’t even any titles.  Kubrick, being Kubrick, didn’t want to explain anything at all.  He stripped out the entire film’s voiceover at the last minute (a very good move—think Blade Runner in reverse), but the result was so completely confusing that he put a couple of titles in there (“The Dawn of Man,” etc.) as a concession to our limited intelligence.  (The movie is still confusing, but that’s quite deliberate, of course, and if you ask me nicely I’ll post whole sections of my essay about 2001 and superpower paranoia from Public Access.) Anyway, as this bizarre ship glides across the screen from left to right, and an astronaut in t-shirt and shorts runs around the centrifuge in the eerie “head” of the ship, we hear this achingly sad and beautiful music that seems to suggest loneliness and loss and profound longing.  It is, for me, one of the most unheimlich moments in science fiction, and pretty amazing in any genre.  The choice of the “Gayane Ballet Suite” is a masterstroke.  Kubrick, being Kubrick, commissioned a score and then (again at the last minute) scrapped it, replacing it with some of his favorite tunes.  So you get the hair-raising “Requiem” of Gyorgi Ligeti whenever we hominids gather round the monolith, and Ligeti’s ethereal “Lux Aeterna” when the Americans are taking the moon shuttle over to the monolith site, and of course the Strauss everyone knows.  But think of the tonal difference between waltzing to the moon on the strains of “The Blue Danube” (where space flight seems grand and joyous and kind of jolly) and drifting mournfully to Jupiter in a creepy skeletal ship to the plaintive, haunting strains of the “Gayane Ballet Suite.” That’s all the tonal difference in the world, folks. 

Anyway, what I’m saying is that the sequence is deservedly famous, and you should go watch it now.  And as I crawled off to bed at 1 a.m. that night, having just heard a thinner rendition of the “Gayane Ballet Suite” over the credits for Aliens (where it just doesn’t have the same emotional impact, let me tell you), I wondered just what in the world James Cameron was thinking.  Fortunately, thanks to the Internets, I found this illuminating item on the Internets Movie Database:

In an interview, composer James Horner felt that James Cameron had given him so little time to write a musical score for the film, he was forced to cannibalize previous scores he had done as well as adapt a rendition of “Gayane Ballet Suite” for the main and end titles.

So that explains that.  Still, even if you were working to score a science fiction film on an impossible deadline, raiding the “Gayane Ballet Suite” has to be one of your worst possible options.  It’s a little like scoring a Vietnam movie and deciding, “hey, maybe something by the Doors would work here.”

Posted by Michael on 12/17 at 10:39 AM
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Friday, December 15, 2006

You know, I had a feeling about that word

“In What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts, Bérubé comes off as spunky, likable. . . .”

Posted by Michael on 12/15 at 09:45 PM
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Final lap

[This post has been edited time and again.—MB]

And the score is:

SpunkyHomeSchool 5437 4599
This Humble Blog 5404 5139

I think the stakes are clear.  And why is SpunkyHomeSchool, a defunct blog, matching us stride for stride?  Because, friends, a “meme” has gone around the Internets.  It can be found on dozens of Christian blogs and websites, and it looks something like this:

This has really and truly come down to a battle of Christian ideals versus Secular ideals, Godly values versus Godless values. As reported on the ever-fantastic blog The Rebelution, “Michael Bérubé recently commented… ‘The important thing is that...I crush the homeschoolers.’ ”

Well, of course that quote was taken drastically out of context.  What I actually said, of course, was

the important thing is that IvyGate and I crush the homeschoolers.

Things have apparently gotten so bad that some Spunky-friendly sites won’t even mention IvyGate, which one of them refers to as “an Ivy League College gossip and s*x blog.” (I hope someone will explain that to me in comments.  I don’t see what IvyGate has to do with sox.)

But with regard to the big picture, of course, they’re right:  this is basically a battle between Good and Evil.  And I implore you, dear readers, not to let Good win!

To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist.  If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which ofttimes may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.

And what if we be down a few votes right now?  Remember, th’ascent is easy then!

I thank you, and Secular Ideals® thanks you.

_______

Updated update about those illegal votes tagged by Wizbang (967 for Spunky, 480 for me, 58 for IvyGate):  you know, I was kinda having fun with this Weblog Awards thing until now.  But you know what would be really cool if all three blogs were disqualified or chastised or publicly shamed or something for having overeager and unprincipled supporters?  That would put A Shrewdness of Apes in first place, and she’s not a Christian homeschooler or an Ivy League gossip-and-s*x maniac or a smug annoying liberal elitist college professor.  She’s “an anonymous American public high school teacher, guitar goddess, black belt, softball jockette, working mom, exhausted wife, dutiful daughter, bibliophile, autodidact, and terrible housekeeper.” Really!  She says so herself!  And her fine blog is actually about education! So get out there and vote for A Shrewdness of Apes, everyone!

Posted by Michael on 12/15 at 12:26 PM
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What’s going on around here?

Last year, during Weblog Awards Week, I switched templates and blog formats and even prose styles with Sadly, No! in order to . . . well, I forget why we did it, exactly, but it was convoluted and in-jokey and involved all kinds of wacky hijinx that demonstrated once again the amazing frictionlessness and vertiginousness of the Internets.  But I couldn’t do that again this year—it would be too obvious!  Also, I’m not in Sadly, No!s category this time around.  They’re in some kind of “humor” competition that involves one smart and principled conservative blogger, Jon Swift, along with a bunch of wankers—but the category doesn’t even include The Poor Man Institute, so, I mean, come on already.  You call that “humor”?

Besides, my student papers came in on December 5; I spoke at The Tank (and journeyed to Lands Unknown on December 6; and I’ve been grading papers and preparing exams and doing sundry other end-of-semester things ever since.  So I knew there was no way I’d be able to do any serious posting this week, and it seemed like bad manners to go on hiatus when I’m supposed to be some kind of educamacationalist blog.

So Oaktown Girl and spyder and Bill Benzon and Peter Ramus and Chris Clarke (yes, even Chris Clarke—he has confessed his crimes and has been readmitted to the fold) stepped in, first with the Ted Haggard Cage Match and then with the Chris Clarke Show Trial.  Dozens of regulars and irregulars chimed in with brilliant comments.  And on my side, papers got graded and exams got prepared and even one long-overdue essay got written.  (No, not that one.  Another one.)

Now, I know that some of you found all of this kinda convoluted and weird and maybe even offputting.  “I don’t get all these in-jokes,” you said.  “What, is Bérubé assuming we’ve read every single last one of his comment threads for the past three months?”

To you I say this:  you know, in-jokes get lonely too.  I thought it was really nice of Oaktown Girl and Associates to convene this forum so that a massive bunch of in-jokes in the progressive blogosphere could get together and have a year-end reunion.  “The in-jokes they’re using to run this show trial could power the entire town of Elko, Nevada,” Clarke wrote.  “It’s just wasteful.” Wasteful to whom, might I ask?  Those in-jokes were just floating around unharnessed until this week.  And Elko didn’t mind the rolling blackouts, anyway.  We told ‘em it was all Enron’s doing.

And was it all too convoluted? Compared to what? Goodness gracious, people, two years ago a mysterious blogger known only as Tristero mock-accused me of inventing a batshit insane essay by David Gelernter and creating a parody of the Weekly Standard website, and in response, I mock-confessed to the forgery, and the whole exchange was festooned with Borges and Nabokov allusions and hyperlinks that went nowhere and lots of sly Pynchonian puns.  Now, that was convoluted.  This here Show Trial and Cage Match was sincerity itself by comparison.

But what you didn’t know is that, quite apart from the end-of-semester crush, I’ve been in no shape to blog this week.  Every keystroke is an agony.  OK, not an agony, exactly, but a bit of a pain.

Here’s why.  Last Saturday morning, I showed up to my regularly scheduled Nittany Hockey League game.  I was tired and distracted and not at all in the mood for hockey.  Worst of all, I hadn’t worked out all week—and thanks to my insane schedule since mid-October, I’m barely in any kind of game shape anyway.  How distracted was I?  I forgot to pack nice thick skate sox in my bag, and therefore had to play in my thin black dress sox, and I didn’t notice that the attachment doodads on my garter belt had disappeared, rendering the garter belt next to useless.  “Just let me get through this one,” I thought, “and get back to paper-gradin’ and overdue-essay writin’.”

So you can guess what happened next, right?  Ten minutes into the game, I came deep down the left wing alone, cut hard toward the middle, and, just as I was crossing the goalmouth, shot five-hole to give us a 2-1 lead.  One shift later I flipped in a rebound to make the score 3-2.  A few minutes after that I came down the right side this time, and, instead of repeating the move from goal number one, cut across the goalmouth, waited for the goalie to commit, and then tucked a little backhand in the far side from a sharp angle.

“Yikes,” Janet said when I told her this tale later that day.  “That goalie must’ve hated your guts.”

Well, yes, he did.  He began slashing me in the crease and uttering imprecations of all kinds, and though I probably shouldn’t admit this, those imprecations really hurt.  Anyway, with the score now 5-4 I came in alone on a breakaway, having stripped their defenseman of the puck at the point, and because I’d already used Move One and Move Two on goals one and three, simply shot high glove side over his left arm for goal four.  And what do you think this goalie did?  Fully extending his right leg (for those of you keeping score at home, that would be the limb furthest from the shot, a limb whose extension was not at all necessary to stop the puck), he neatly sent me flying through the air to the left side of the net and into the boards.

The right-shoulder crash into the boards didn’t do any damage, but let me tell you, that ice is hard and unforgiving.  I got up unable to extend my left shoulder, with which I’d hit the ice when I was all done with flying through the air.

Just for good measure, though, I put yet another rebound off the far post and in with five minutes left to make the score 7-5.  We added another late goal as well.  Heh heh heh.

I haven’t had a five-goal game in three years—since a wild 6-6 tie on December 13, 2003.  And it was only my third since moving to Pennsylvania.  But just as I injured my hip in a game in October in such a way as to make it very difficult to get in and out of cars, I injured my shoulder in such a way as to make it very difficult to close car doors from the driver’s seat—or raise my arm above my head, or put on a jacket, or blog.  All this week, I’ve been typing hurt, people.  So I owe an extra special thanks to Oaktown Girl and Associates for stepping up in my time of need.

Besides, people have been complaining for months that my blog is graphics-poor.  “What I like about your blog,” said one reader, “is the endless columns of scrolling text, followed by more endless columns of scrolling text.” So my thanks to peter ramus and Bill Benzon and company for fixing that!

And last but not least, thanks to everyone who’s voted for me in the Educatic Blog race.  Today’s the last day for voting, so please stop by and help PZ and the Giant Squid defeat the Bad Half-Naked Astronomers from Planet Xycron, too!  Right now that wonderfully diverting race is 7418-7382 in favor of the shirtless ones, and the drama is only gonna get better as the day wears on.

Posted by Michael on 12/15 at 08:57 AM
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