Monthly Archives: September 2008

More on science fiction (again)

September 29, 2008 By in Books, Critics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Earlier posts on science fiction (see here too) and fantasy have elicited some reactions worth considering; John Markley writes Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic and has a post called The stigma of imagination that I mostly agree with until the last paragraph:

Respectability for fantasy or science fiction is most likely a hopeless cause, at least in the current cultural climate. It has the stigma of childishness and Nerd Cooties at the same time. A genre might be able to get away with one; you won’t get away with both.

Maybe—but I’m not so sure. One very positive outcome of Deconstructionism has been the relative rise of genre fiction and an increase of the perceived merit of texts that aren’t purely in the tradition of Flaubertian realism. Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick have Library of America volumes dedicated to them, cultural studies flourishes, Tolkien has a peer-reviewed journal named “Tolkien Studies,” and Clark University, my alma mater, offers English courses in science fiction. Michael Chabon’s genre bending has engendered widespread critical admiration, and he defends the idea of genre as part of literature in his wonderful essay collection Maps and Legends, at one point saying:

Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, “serious” and “genre” literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.
Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted […]

To be sure, Chabon could be the exception that proves the rule. Nonetheless, I don’t think so; I mentioned Chandler and Dick already, and Philip Pullman has earned a strong and real reputation that brings him a spot along with le Guin among major literary figures. Chabon’s aware that some double standard still exists, saying that “From time to time some writer, through a canny shift in subject matter to focus, or through the coming to literary power of his or her lifelong fans, or through sheer, undeniable literary chops, manages to break out,” but I think he’s overstating the case and that the the double standard he’s implicitly writing about is shrinking by the year. William Gibson and Neal Stephenson wield as much literary authority as anyone this side of Ian McEwan and Louis Menand, and Chabon is busily demolishing whatever barriers might be left.

The result, however, will mean that science fiction is judged relative to other literary books, and by this standard it still too often doesn’t reach high or far enough. Beware of the walls that come down: it lets you into the world, and it also lets the world into you. My problem with science fiction and fantasy isn’t as genres, but when the formula of genre is used by bad writers and then defended by those who don’t appear to have really thought about what great writing means or done the heavy lifting real criticism demands. Some writers—Robert Jordan, I’m looking at you, and The Name of the Wind counts too—the find vociferous followers whose overall literary knowledge often seems low, causing the rest of us who defend the genre but not bad manifestations of the genre much angst.

I have one other partial quibble which isn’t about his assertion but the reasons behind it when Markley writes:

That might explain why magical realism is usually considered legit literature: it has imaginative elements, which is iffy, but it doesn’t compound the sin by thinking about the imaginative elements rationally.

Part of the reason magical realism gets good marks is because it’s associated with what academics like me call post-colonialism, which has been a major topic (or fad, depending on perspective) in universities. This is probably more political than aesthetic, but it partially explains why magical realism has been more accepted than fantasy. Nonetheless, the distinction, if there is one, has been fading, and is likely to continue to fade, like the idea that genre literature isn’t real literature. Notice that magical realism began growing in earnest after Deconstructionism, just like respect for fantasy and science fiction. In addition, speculative elements have long been in literature, as something like Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw or the vast body of myth and myth criticism demonstrates. In some ways, the acceptance of fantasy and science fiction is more a return than an all-out change.

(On a side note, Markley’s post on science fiction and ideology is also worth a read. I’ll add a comment a former professor kept repeating, which is that fantastic literature inevitably returns to comment on the society in which it is produced. I suppose this is opposed to the art-for-art’s-sake school, but I’m buying it nonetheless.)

The Barnes & Nobel Book Clubs forums have a fairly low-level discussion, and I’d like to respond to one poster who says:

I am not familiar with the author of the post on that blog, but what I am assuming they mean is the academic defintion of literary merit. Whether or not one agrees with that point of view (some people see “academic” as elitist), there is a particular approach to evaluating texts seen as standard. However, even from that approach that is a small list. Interestingly, though, in a college course I had on SF and Fantasy lit a few years ago we did read Solaris, Left Hand, Canticle, and Ubik (PKD).

(Mistakes in original)

I responded in the thread with a variation on this and a reply saying that I’m approaching science fiction from overall aesthetic and literary perspective that isn’t really academic. Rather, I think the issue is that some science fiction readers and others are talking past literary critics like the Martian and Tomas in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

By that I mean too much science fiction and fantasy aren’t sufficiently concerned with freshness and vividness in language and expression, which is the positive way of saying they’re too often filled with flatness and cliche, whether in character or plot. So is much literary fiction, but the best rises. What I’m describing will no doubt be misinterpreted: I’m at a very broad level, and to understand it in full would demand reading books like Jane Smiley’s Reading Like a Writer, James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliche, or even Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds, a book that preempted many of my criticisms about science fiction. Some authors transcend this—in addition to Lem and Le Guin, I might add Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

My position isn’t that science fiction is automatically not literary or is literary, but that it can be literary and too infrequently is. Unfortunately, much of the conversation in blogland and print tends to want binaries and fights, and too often the background reading necessary to really contribute to the conversation hadn’t been done. Consequently, as one critic’s comment about the fantasy du jour goes, “There’s not one beautiful sentence in the entire first three books of the Twilight series.” It’s true, at least of the first half of the first one, but if you haven’t put in the time and reading to think about what makes a beautiful sentence, that probably just comes off as snobbery when it’s (probably) not. Real snobs wouldn’t give fantasy or science fiction real attention in the first place, while the rest of us are looking for what we’re always looking for: vigor, crispness, vivacity, and fidelity. If only we could find it more readily, whether in science fiction or elsewhere.

Favorite words

September 28, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Literary agent/blogger/spandex-clad crime fighter Nathan Bransford asked for favorite words on his blog, and I answered: that “my favorite is callipygian, followed closely thereafter by defenestrate.”

Later, he asked for least favorite words, and I settled for academic clichés like epistemological, trope, and destabilize.

Anyone else want to share?

The Stuff of Thought and Steven Pinker in Tucson

September 22, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

It’s sometimes harder to describe what comes naturally than it is what comes artificially. We learn to speak by virtue of being around adults who speak, and yet analyzing the languages humans have developed and what those languages represent is harder than it is for a toddler to intuitively learn them. Speaking develops with no schooling aside from the “school” of other humans—and yet its manifold distinctions are the subject of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, a complex book that gives some answers leading toward still more questions as he tries to explain the paradoxical mysteries of consciousness and perception.

The subtext of The Stuff of Thought seems to be that language affects us more than we consciously realize and that our uses of language tends to occur in previously unexamined patterns that, once perceived, can be better used to our advantage. Such bold statements take some explaining: language reveals a great deal about us, Pinker argues, including theories of causation embedded inflectionally in some languages and syntactically in English. Some examples are simple: “John threw the ball” indicates who acted on what, and in that model it is difficult to misinterpret what is being said and who is doing what to what. Throw in prepositions and other spatial features encoded in language, however, and it becomes steadily harder to grasp precisely why “A sad movie makes you sad, but a sad person is already sad,” even if we understand the difference without being told the rule. The Stuff of Thought is a guided tour through what we didn’t know that we know. “I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut,” and while all three phrases or words might describe the same fundamental behavior, and yet each has very different and apparent shades of meaning, from positive to pejorative.

This is an example of how we “flip frames,” or understand an event in multiple ways depending on its context. In Newsweek, Lynne Spears—the mother of children famous for celebrity and fecundity, in that order—said of one who recently gave birth at 17, “But [despite] a situation that has fallen in her lap, she’s doing exceptionally well[…]” Notice the phrase, “a situation that has fallen in her lap,” as if the person involved had no agency and was struck by a meteor on her way to school. Then again, maybe the girl in question didn’t have as much agency as classical economists would believe; in Dan Ariely’s excellent Predictably Irrational, he discusses an experiment in which students who were aroused admitted to considerably risk taking in an inventory of potential sexual behaviors than those who were not.* The frame Lynne Spears uses betrays at least some idea of her “frame,” but if we’re not paying attention to her statement, we’re likely to miss it. Furthermore, to be fair, Lynne Spears might refer to her daughter’s choice long after conception, at which point it’s too late to remake the past and one must deal with the options at hand. Temporal ambiguity—a subject Pinker discusses in Chapter 4, “Cleaving the Air”—becomes essential, and nothing about what Lynne Spears said indicates the precise time period she meant. It turns out that such relativity is inherent in language, which applies imprecise spatial metaphors to time, leaving us with the uncertainty much celebrated by Deconstructionists.

Other chapters in The Stuff of Thought deal with metaphors, naming, and game theory, but to go into each would expand this post into a weak shadow of the book, rather than a pointer in its direction. Some extra discussion is warranted, though, and Pinker also discusses swearing and how it changes over time in Chapter 7, “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television,” and especially why so much revolves around excretion, sex, and religion. The power of the latter has declined in much of the West along with belief in a literal manifestation of God, and Pinker speculates that phrases like “go to hell,” or “damnit,” that are sufficiently innocuous to be broadcast on television, might have been more threatening when people believed they were Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God (sample: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some detestable insect, over the fire, detests you, and is dreadfully provoked”). Those around excretion and sex, however, still hold more power because they’re both vectors for disease, literally, and the latter can also be a vector for emotional disease, as many pop songs and novels about jilted love attest.

The good news is that Pinker visited Tucson on his tour for the paperback edition of The Stuff of Thought. The bad news for readers is that he hewed so closely to the material in it as to render the talk itself redundant. The points were identical and the examples to support generalizations merely less frequent and deep. But he did expand slightly on issues of swearing and “how to identify and quantify the material world,” and perhaps the most interesting part of his talk was not the talk itself but the audience’s reaction to his discussion of swearing. It’s fairly unusual to hear an impeccably dress professor speculate about the tabooness of words like “fuck” and “cunt,” and the audience tittered appropriately. Pinker can euphemize with the best, referring to “the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance” at one point in The Stuff of Thought. He leapt between high and low registers with relative ease, and I suppose after discussing the issues numerous times it becomes easier to keep one’s equanimity around swearing. At the end Pinker discussed using language and knowledge of what others know as a way to redefine relationships, expressing the dangers of being too blunt or not blunt enough, and suffering the consequences in the form of missed opportunities or social blunders. One might avoid the kinds of problems from Chapter 8, “Games People Play,” by refusing to feel awkwardness or by reducing one’s susceptibility to societal influence. But he never went that far, and some problems he presents leaves us with the implied answers or ameliorations, like a coyer version of Machiavelli in The Prince.

The sense of Pinker giving only a small taste of his book was reflected in the question and answer period: someone would ask a question, Pinker would begin to elaborate, and then refer the questioner to the relevant chapter. Materials as complex as his can’t easily be summarized and grokked, particularly because one of his book’s major virtues is the wealth of examples and metaphors he uses to describe the general principles he and others have derived from language itself. It’s also a drawback of this post: I’ve tried to give a general overview of Pinker’s ideas, but my own writings are at such a surface level that they can do no more than point to the book. Call it the difference between something like Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary, which would’ve been better left a newspaper article and The Stuff of Thought, a book whose teachings are easier to describe than to apply. Pinker has accomplished a difficult task in synthesizing so much research, but its readers have the harder work of deciding what to do with what we’ve learned.

* I won’t give away the experiment design; for that, you’ll have to read Predictably Irrational.

Michael Chabon shows how it's done in Wonder Boys

September 21, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It would not spoil Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys to know that, about halfway through the novel, the wayward protagonist Grady Tripp speculates about the knowledge of his eccentric student, James Leer:

I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place [from a man], he was now on hi sway to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.

What a sentence: its breathlessness mirrors the wild preceding 24 narrative hours. Each event described is, to be sure, unusual, and piled together they make us realize the sheer outrageousness of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Chabon’s skill is such that that this improbable series seems not only plausible but even normal, like good fantasy novels that make supernatural powers an aspect of the landscape no more extraordinary than cars are to us. In another spot, Chabon turns cliche on its head with the chiasmus, “I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster.” Notice the adjective “young” placed in there to emphasize the distance between Tripp and Hannah, along with the temporal play between the expected and actual.

In another section, a character is alive more thoroughly in a paragraph than most achieve in a novel:

He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

Wonder Boys is not flawless—the middle sags like the paunch of its middle-aged protagonist—but even in such a condition Chabon is still leaner and faster than most writers ever are, and the end picks up enough to clear that cloud from the moon—although the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere and hence doesn’t have clouds. But I feel them clearing anyway.

This is the kind of novel that reminds me why I like to read so much, and why I find bad books disappointing out of proportion to their menial sins: because those bad books suck up the time, space, and energy, both mental and physical, that could be devoted to the wonderful and extraordinary.

Michael Chabon shows how it’s done in Wonder Boys

September 21, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It would not spoil Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys to know that, about halfway through the novel, the wayward protagonist Grady Tripp speculates about the knowledge of his eccentric student, James Leer:

I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place [from a man], he was now on hi sway to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.

What a sentence: its breathlessness mirrors the wild preceding 24 narrative hours. Each event described is, to be sure, unusual, and piled together they make us realize the sheer outrageousness of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Chabon’s skill is such that that this improbable series seems not only plausible but even normal, like good fantasy novels that make supernatural powers an aspect of the landscape no more extraordinary than cars are to us. In another spot, Chabon turns cliche on its head with the chiasmus, “I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster.” Notice the adjective “young” placed in there to emphasize the distance between Tripp and Hannah, along with the temporal play between the expected and actual.

In another section, a character is alive more thoroughly in a paragraph than most achieve in a novel:

He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

Wonder Boys is not flawless—the middle sags like the paunch of its middle-aged protagonist—but even in such a condition Chabon is still leaner and faster than most writers ever are, and the end picks up enough to clear that cloud from the moon—although the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere and hence doesn’t have clouds. But I feel them clearing anyway.

This is the kind of novel that reminds me why I like to read so much, and why I find bad books disappointing out of proportion to their menial sins: because those bad books suck up the time, space, and energy, both mental and physical, that could be devoted to the wonderful and extraordinary.

Neal Stephenson and Anathem

September 14, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Jacket Copy, the L.A. Times’ book blog, just posted bits of Neal Stephenson interviews old and new.

My favorite questions relate to Snow Crash and geography:

S.T.: What made you set “Snow Crash” in L.A.?
Neal Stephenson: At the time I was living in New Jersey, and I was really in the space between Philly and New York. So I was in this place where there really was no city center: You could drive for hours in either direction and see the same landscape repeating itself, of strip malls, and…. I don’t think I’d ever lived in anything like that before. You read science fiction, and it’s always on a giant urban core, or it’s on a space station — but from where I’m sitting that’s not the future. From where I’m sitting, the future is this landscape of low-rise sprawl. I think I put it in L.A. — it’s been a long time — because it gave me more options. You have the entertainment industry there, you’ve got high-tech, the Pacific Rim factor…. It just gave me more surface area.

S.T.: You’ve been in the Northwest for a long time now — Seattle’s working for you?
Neal Stephenson: It is really working for me. I like this kind of weather. I like the neighborhoods. There are a lot of interesting people around because of the high-tech world here. And there’s a gritty, practical side to the city that’s easy to miss. But it really informs the way the city works. I think of about the time of the dot-com bubble bursting, there was a crab boat that went down in the Bering Sea — the entire crew was lost. It put everything in perspective. Nobody was whining about the high-tech [bust] anymore.

I just moved from Seattle to Tucson, and although I don’t entirely agree with Stephenson’s comment about Seattle’s grittiness, he nailed the point about interesting people and neighborhoods. Tucson, on the other hand, is vastly more akin New Jersey: endless strip malls and roads until the desert begins. Everything manmade looks pathetic, rundown, and designed to interact with other machines rather than the people who presumably operate said machines. In short, it’s like Snow Crash without the technological wonderful. The designers failed to take into account Jane Jacobs‘ lessons about cars—like many Western cities. Seattle and Portland are the two primary exceptions.

If you’re going to read Stephenson, begin with Cryptonomicon, then go back to the science fiction, and skip the Baroque cycle, which is too much idea and too little story, and what story does exist is sublimated to improbably coincidences and thin dramatizations of debate from that time. But he’s another author so marvelous that his best excuses his worst. Expect to hear more about Anathem.

If that’s not enough Neal Stephenson, see Salon’s fluffy but approving piece, the fuller piece from the L.A. Times, Wired’s preparation guide, and Discover Magazine’s discussion of ends that occurs at the beginning of its review.

Mid-September links: Kindles, swimming, Chile, and programming

September 13, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Kindle-dominated world would mean, um, something new. But what?

* The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are in, and the winner offers a typically horrendous opening that is paradoxically special in its own way:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

I just got inspired to send an entry for next year’s contest as I wrote this entry. Watch this space for more.

* By way of Paper Cuts, In literature, as in life, the art of swimming isn’t hard to master. I mentioned the issue previously at the bottom of this post.

The follow-up about running is here. Yours truly comments in both threads.

* Funny: Bruce Schneider wrote a post for Wired about creating fake identities and the increasing tenuous and yet important link between us and the “data shadows” we generate:

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What’s important now is our shadows; we’re secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

I say “funny,” because I just finished the second draft of a novel that plays with these very ideas. While on the topic of Schneider, he also asks, who needs reason regarding Homeland Insecurity when we can have a culture of perpetual fear instead?

* Speaking of ideas regarding identity, the digital world might be transforming Latin America. In Chile, the New York Times reports a sexual revolution of sorts among the young, driven by technology and connectivity. I wonder what Roberto Bolaño would say.

* Want to be a good programmer? Consider reading.

Life: Existential humor edition

September 8, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Life, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“The hero of my first novel beings by believing that ‘nothing makes any ultimate difference,’ and decides to end his life; he ends by realizing that if nothing makes any difference, that truth makes no ultimate difference either, and so rather than committing suicide he predicts that he’ll go on living in much the same manner as before.”

—John Barth, The Friday Book

Cloverfield

September 5, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Normally this blog focuses on books, but Cloverfield is the rare film with sufficient depth and impact to make it worth a full post, with the second viewing more profound than the first. Cloverfield speaks to modern anxieties about fear, terrorism, and response more effectively than most movies, full stop, let alone horror movies.

The monster itself in Cloverfield is unexplained, much as 9/11 took the vast majority of Americans by surprise—even those who were nominally supposed to guard against such events. The only hint regarding the title comes at the beginning, with a brief video indicating that we’re about to watch a Department of Defense video related to “Cloverfield,” but with no other sign of the name’s meaning, if any. The shot functions like a false “translator’s preface” or statement of authenticity at the beginning of many older novels that claims historical authenticity. Still, it reassures us that civilization—or at least the Department of Defense—has survived the attack long enough to create the video.

The first twenty minutes are a party like too many I’ve been to, except, this being Hollywood, with more attractive participants. Filmed chiefly by Hud, a character notable chiefly for his passivity and lack of character, the movie really begins with reports of the monster and then the lights being extinguished. On the Manhattan streets, a wall of dust rolls toward people—like in videos of the World Trade Center’s collapse. The head of the Statue of Liberty rolls through the street, indicating that perhaps liberty itself has died, or at least has within the monster’s zone. A character says, “I saw it. It’s alive,” leaving the “it” floating in space, imagination filling in the details.

The monster’s purpose, aside from terror, if any, is mysterious, and the response to the unnamed monster becomes steadily more draconian as the movie continues. Over time, the responses to 9/11, especially regarding air traffic and civil rights have become more draconian, culminating to the point that airports, flying, and foreign travel are now burdens that grow more onerous over time (see here, here, and especially the discussion of the apt phrase “security theater” in Bruce Schneier’s philosophical book concerning the modern age, Beyond Fear, which is available free here). Books like The Lucifer Effect demonstrate the effects of systems designed to dehumanize people—and such books are, for the moment, mostly ignored, like distant shooting in a war zone. As Cloverfield continues the constant drone of war in the background becomes like modern cable news. I recently started teaching college freshmen, and the other day I was talking to a guy who made an offhand comment that in turn made me realize that, to him, we’ve virtually always been fighting wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

In this atmosphere, movies are beginning to reflect the larger world, as art always does. Ross Douthat wrote wrote an excellent piece on contemporary movies called The Return of the Paranoid Style, which analyzes movies as a rerun of the 70s:

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.

The essay is not easily excerpted, and is worth reading in full. Cloverfield doesn’t fit well in its thesis: the movie contains little in the way of overt politics, but whether intentionally or not, its manifestations of current fears about monsters that don’t die when we attack with airstrikes or even ground forces. Although Cloverfield is symbolic of fears regarding attack, one of its strengths is its refusal to be partisan. The military is depicted heroically, and there is little in Cloverfield that indicate self-flagellation. It is all immediate reaction and fear, and, like terrorism, tends to leave us with more questions than answers.

An essay in Terry Teachout’s Reader called “Beasts and Superbeasts” observes “nothing thrills us more than stories implying that there are dark forces in the world too powerful to be tamed by human hands.” This was in 1999; he also wrote that “Of late […] cinematic horror has entered a decadent phase in which vampires have mostly given way to serial killers whose murderous frenzies are coolly explained away by psychiatrist-sleuths, while semi-satirical movies like Scream openly spoof the all-too-familiar conventions of the genre […]” Maybe 9/11 has allowed us to return to the mystery of devils walking among us, the unexplained or poorly explained, and the terrifying unknown. It’s not the monster that scares us in Alien, but the fact that we don’t know where the monster is, don’t know why it operates as it does, and can’t reason with it. In Cloverfield, the monster scares us for our inability to understand it or attack it with bullets and bombs.

The impetus for “Beasts and Superbeasts” was The Blair Witch Project, a movie that, “[…] though hugely entertaining, is not especially scary, no doubt because it was all too clearly made by people who do not believe in the demons whose presence they have so cunningly implied.” Although Teachout overstates the case against The Blair Witch Project, as it is scary in more than a “gotcha!” way to me, recalling as it does those times in the woods, his general principle is true. If The Blair Witch Project reflects the decadent 90s in that respect, Cloverfield aesthetically and artistically benefits from the opposite in the 2000s, as the idea of an attack against New York isn’t a fantasy or goblin any longer. That’s bad for the United States but can lend heft to movies. Cloverfield takes its subject seriously, as Teachout argues The Sixth Sense. That’s not to say it has no jokes, usually relating to Hud’s obliviousness, but it has more emotional power thanks to its resonance with events.

Too many recent novels and movies take the first twenty minutes of Cloverfield and extend them onwards and upwards. The bored lassitude of 20-something partiers captured so well by Claire Messud in The Emperor’s Children is evident in the first fifth of Cloverfield, and its cameraman never escapes from the semi-hipster attitude of overgrown children. The characters are smaller-than-life, and their own motivations are barely more articulated than the monster’s—their inchoateness is itself a commentary on the kinds of unexamined lives that seem not uncommon. The difference between Cloverfield and its competitors, and one reason it passes Teachout’s “Beast and Superbeasts” tests, is that it is about something beyond itself, unlike, say, Garden State or London, the latter a smaller movie like Cloverfield but without the monster.

This essay has a central weakness built into its reading of horror and politics in that those who flew planes into buildings were human, as are those who order bombs dropped on cities from 20,000 feet. The motivation for either may appear foreign to those on the receiving end, but it is not wholly un-understandable; Al-Queda regularly posts video haranguing the West, however illogically or unfairly, and the toxic conditions of Afghanistan were a product of a long line of cultural and historical developments. As Charlie Wilson’s War observes, we did to aid in the construction of our Frankenstein’s monster, though we didn’t notice until after the fact. We blundered in Baghdad, as James Fallows argues, though Iraq might eventually become stable. We feel as if 9/11 came from nowhere, like the unnamed monster does in Cloverfield, whose very lack of identifier is appropriate: 9/11 has stuck to the event and day, but it’s an odd moniker, almost by default, especially compared to other infamous events that come with location signifiers (Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin). Still, it’s worth remembering the danger of creating an unknowable other who is easier to demonize in a Lord of the Flies style. The markers tying Cloverfield and terrorism are still there, however, and its warning of the dangers worth remembering.

It’s presidential campaign season, and candidates in both parties are eagerly trying to avoid being associated with the foreign policy snafus of the last five years that are the equivalent of shooting missiles that aren’t effective, as America veers dangerously between wanting to pull out altogether from our “adventure” in Iraq and the temptation to continue striding about the world without paying enough attention to whether we’re about to step on an unexpected landmine. Countries we should be paying more attention to, like many former Soviet Republics, get short shrift, as Douthat says in a blog post, while Iraq and Afghanistan pull more than their weight thanks to the relative size of our commitments there. The worrying thing is that the total focus on Al-Queda and Iraq might let another Cloverfield event occur, seemingly out of nowhere, in which a purely military response will be ineffective when we’re left confused and reacting instead of lifting our eyes from the collective party long enough to see the punch before we land, disoriented, on the floor.

In Cloverfield, to save us, we have to destroy Manhattan, and the ambiguous moral calculus remains just that: ambiguous. The most startling part of Cloverfield is its lack of conclusion or certainty. Characters constantly ask each other, “What was that?” and find no answers. The Brooklyn Bridge is destroyed by the monster, with an American flag falling with it. A TV monitor shows “Manhattan under attack,” followed by an image of military trucks responding to the carnage. But will the military be effective in this situation? At least using conventional, World War II-style tactics, the answer appears to be no. But the thing must be fought anyway, as it’s in Manhattan. Maybe if we can ask the right questions, we’ll eventually learn how to fight it—otherwise, we might have to destroy villages in order to save them.

While on the topic of movies, I was going to also pan The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but Slate provides such a solid hit that I’m left with nothing worth discussing:

The nefarious plot behind the agent’s abduction is so far-fetched I’m itching to spoil it. But I’ll limit myself to observing that, if ever I’m dying of a rare brain disease, I hope my surgeon won’t go home and frantically Google treatment options, as Scully does at one key moment. (Couldn’t she at least log on to Medscape?) The problem with the movie’s semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn’t that the resolution is completely outlandish; it’s that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience. If you’re going to posit stuff this crazy, you’d better have some solid-sounding bullshit to back it up.

[…]

I’m not quite of a mind with Slate’s Troy Patterson in finding the new movie “vomitously stupid”; rather, it’s a gorgeous, lulling, thoroughly unnecessary exercise in high-minded Anglophilia.

Renting Cloverfield and watching it even for the third, fourth, or fifth time is infinitely preferable than the second X-Files movie.

My library on Goodreads

September 3, 2008 By in Books, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary, invited me to Goodreads, a site dedicated to “what your friends are reading.” I don’t have any Goodreads “friends,” as Facebook fulfills my need for electronic distractions, but I did upload my library—including the vaguely embarrassing stuff, the gag gifts, and the like—for the curious or voyeuristic among you.

I feel no great need to point out what might entail “embarrassing stuff.”

EDIT: I switched the “sort” to “random,” which seems more appropriate. In addition, these are cataloged using Delicious Library 2—I didn’t enter each one by hand.

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