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Looking Back On Looking Forward
da6d writes "The Independent Online Edition has an article on the release of interviews Stanley Kubrick conducted of numerous prominent scientific minds of the day in preparation for the movie 2001. The topic of the interviews: extra-terrestrial intelligence. The transcripts of the interviews are due for release in book form next month. The actual footage of the interviews seems to have been swallowed by time." From the article: "Some of the interviewees have looked back at their original comments. Professor Good stood by his, including his suggestion that computers might have personality traits: 'My Windows 98 computer tells lies and often forces me to shut down improperly. Such behaviour in a human would be called neurotic.'"
I disagree about the bit about Win98 'lying' and being 'neurotic'. It's fun to anthropomorphize but Win98 is a product of various engineering compromises that allowed the Windows userbase to move as seamlessly as possible from DOS to NT (a process that took ~8 years). Its crashes etc are completely explainable when you understand the limitations of its core OS and in particular its driver model.
What is more interesting is that Prof Good is passing off behavior he doesn't understand (I'm willing to bet he's NOT a Win32 dev) as 'neurotic'. Makes one wonder how we'll see mentally challenged people once we have a far better understanding of the brain than we have now...
Off topic perhaps, but the title of this article reminds me of the afterward of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.
When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Ten years after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the Ancient Greek perspective is certainly appropriate. What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.
According to IMDB trivia:
1) Rock Hudson walked out of the Los Angeles premiere, saying, "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?"
2) Arthur C. Clarke once said, "If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered."
Dude, Solaris was a powerful film. Claustrophobic.
There's an interesting film out right now called Stay, also sometimes claustrophobic.
I work in film and here's the general audience's biggest gripe about sci-fi movies. No one wants to feel dumb. This is marketing 101 - the reason why films are rehashed and plotlines redone over and over is because only a small minority are comfortable in uncertainty... with not knowing. It's a manifestation of the adventurers spirit.
So you do a smart sci-fi film that challenges a Christian's notion of the universe, and they get scared. They dont want that feeling... that they're wrong, that they don't know. So next summer, another alien space movie will probably come out, and some elite team will be sent it to investigate, the lesbian gunner will die first and the black guy second, etc. and most will eat popcorn and they'll go home satisfied that aliens can never defeat us with our crude projectile weapons, religious sentiment and irrepressible warrior ethos. It's collective masturbation. And they'll polish their guns and dust off their bibles unafraid.
I've worked as a script consultant and 90 percent of my work over the past year has been to "dumb-down" scripts. Three modalities: get a PG-13 at the script stage, nothing more complex than a sixth grade level (aforementioned PG-13 rating; nothing troubling; no f-words, etc; avoid religion, no frontal nudity), after which point the one-liner guy comes onto the script and does what is called a polish (read: "smarten" up the dialogue with one-liners and slang, etc).
un burrito me trampeó.