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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.'"
'My Windows 98 computer tells lies and often forces me to shut down improperly. Such behaviour in a human would be called neurotic.'
This glass of contaminated water is deceptive in appearance and often causes death. Such behavior in a human would be called sociopathic and homicidal.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
In 1968, there were fast cars, good music and free sex.
In 2005, we watch movies about fast cars, good music and free sex.
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...
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
A few days ago, Fark had a link to an explanation of Kubrick's "2001". I didn't get the movie when I watched it a few years ago, but this explanation seems plausible and made sense (to me) where the movie didn't.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
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.
I don't see how we have come very far - that is still how Science Fiction is portrayed to the masses. Space battles against aliens, aliens invading the earth, etc. etc. What I find fascinating with all this is the science fiction that I read does not usually have this type of plot - just most science fiction movies.
Spielberg "saved" parts of it? The Spielberg parts are the maudlin, emotional, go out of the theatre with a warm glow, your brain be damned parts. Kubrick was fascinated by alienation, whether caused by technology, training, or personal obliviousness (try "Barry Lyndon" some time). Beautifully shot, if somewhat distant, movies.
His interpretation of "The Shining" left you the ambiguity whether Jack is having a break down, or whether there are really ghosts. He went for the long, slow, unsettlement of the audience, rather than the cheap and quick gross-out horror.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Did not "get" the book? He co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke, after which the novel was written.
Cutting edge visuals and cinematography presented with a sweeping score, a healthy dose of symbolism, and slow pacing...all released at a time when a significant proportion of the moviegoing public was experimenting with marijuana and hallucinogenics. Seriously, the word of mouth publicity about what a great movie this was to see while stoned and/or tripping had a LOT to do with its success. I had a professor who claims he saw it two or three times a week when it was out, and then years later saw it sober and couldn't believe how long some of the scenes took to unfold while nothing was happening. You don't need drugs to appreciate the film, but they don't hurt. You also don't need to have read the books to appreciate the film, and in my mind having read them DOES hurt. This is a big example of a movie ignoring a lot of what makes a book good, and it seems to get a free pass because of what it did visually. The movie and the books are both good, but in totally different ways.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
I don't see how we have come very far - that is still how Science Fiction is portrayed to the masses. Space battles against aliens, aliens invading the earth, etc. etc. What I find fascinating with all this is the science fiction that I read does not usually have this type of plot - just most science fiction movies.
... Sagan certainly knew about the culture of religious zealotry). That movie was essentially a flop with the public. But if it had been about an intrepid anthropologist decoding mysterious communications from a lost tribe in Amazonia - critical acclaim!
Ah, the great unwashed entertainment-consuming masses, blahditty blah. Remember Contact, starring Jodie Foster - based on Sagan's book? It was pretty interesting, and a well-made film. No aliens attacking (just religious freaks blowing up things on their own, here at home
Why? Because people like watching stories about unfolding (and usually, resolved) conflict - and "subtle space stuff" doesn't usually compute with most people, just out of sheer momentum. People who like non-explosion stories about complex human interaction are so sure that they won't find that in science fiction films that the market research by the film makers tells them there's a hole there that's not worth filling. Sometimes they try, though:
How about George Clooney's Solaris? Nice sci-fi setting, but basically a morality tale about letting go of your past and your troubles. At the box office? Big snoozer. If, though, it had been about an aging butler, starring Anthony Hopkins... big bucks and Oscars for everyone.
Now, if those Merchant/Ivory fans could only bring themselves to see Lucas's last work, and see the incredibly subtle nuances brought to life as Darth Vader cries, "Noooooooooo!" they'd realize that sci fi can be riveting drama, too. Hopkins Shmopkins!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Dude, Kubrick was a genius.
He did get the book - 2001, that is. He just chose to interpret it differently. I'm actually interested in discussing what you think he missed in regards to 2001.
Shining. Kubrick thought horror films were lame. To him the greatest horror one could experience was the losing of one's own mind (he was pretty much an atheist and existentialist by nature), as one's own mind is all that you are. This was truly horrifiying to him. Interestingly enough, Nicholson is attirbuted to the following about Kubrick: Nicholson was traumatized by the harshness of the script and talked to Kubrick about lightening up the tone a bit. Kubrick responded that the film was optimistic. Nicholson was surprised and asked him to elaborate.... Kubrick's response was that anything that alludes to the existence of an afterlife is optimistic. In his own way, this was his way of alluding to his own beliefs while simultaneously acceding to hope that there is something more. The horror was to lose one's mind... the hope, that there was some form of external cogent cause... the implication in microcosm of some larger framework.
Spielberg saved AI? Are you fucking kidding me? Spielberg is a hack who rehashes his own unresolved father issues in EVERY FILM HE DOES.
Kubrick's only flaws as a filmmaker are that he had no sense of humor; therefore he couldn't give his films a variety of tone. The other is that he was a shitty editor. His films ran too long because he could not edit himself. There's a lot to be said about directors who get final cut because most who do end up producing indulgent films. Kubrick is no exception. You could trim serious fat from almost all of his films.
Oh, and Barry Lyndon is a fucking amazing film and IMO one of the most underrated films of all time.
un burrito me trampeó.
Prof. Good in fact gets it backwards: the "neurotic" diagnosis tells us less about computers than it does about us.
We do anthropomorphize, not just comparatively intelligent things like computers but cars and even utterly inanimate objects. If you stub your toe on a rock, you might well "punish" the rock by hitting it. You know it's irrational but the illusion of anthropomorphization is strong.
The lesson is that we should design our UIs knowing that people will interpret the responses as if they were coming from a human. And yeah, that means that like most people, the computers will appear to be neurotic. Windows 98 is only marginally more neurotic than some of my friends.
Never anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert
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).
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...days gone by have to say about the future we live in today then I recommend Today, Then, a collection of essays written about 100 years ago about now. It's amazing just how off the mark most people are. But there are some great insights: my favorite being one essay that opens saying something like "All mail will be electronic". Not bad for over 100 years ago! I don't recall reading even the slightest hint that number crunching machines would have any significance in anyone's life.
You know, this looking back can be facinating. Humankind succeeded in landing on the Moon (granted with effort) in 40 years (counting from pre-WWII to 1969). Thirty six years later we're struggling to go back. Is that a fair description? I think so. While we have progressed in many areas, we are hardly any better at getting off this planet than we were back then. Legend has it that when 2001: A Space Odyssey was first shown to NASA employees, they were awed by the vision of space exploration the movie portrayed. Up to that point, it is said that NASA was thinking in terms of sensor and robotic exploration. Sound familiar? It should, since that is the kind of mission we design today without exception. Apparently, it looks like the vision in the movie failed to inspire a real change. While I think robotic exploration is the right first step, how long does it take to make that second step of sending human explorers?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Dude, I didn't say that I saw things that way.
My first script consult gig; I made the mistake of voicing general discomfort with the dumbing down process and lost the contract.
I'm not voicing my opinion; this is the machine. This is the way Hollywood goes about making wide swath films. I agree that it is not art.
You have to understand a bit about how films get made.
Studios do not spend their own money on making films. They finance films using loan/credit/financing structures. So as a producer of a film, it is in your vested interest to produce the biggest budget movies possible for two reasons: 1. because producers collect around 10% of the budget as a fee, and 2. high budget films condition the audience against lower budget films which stifles innovation and competition and prevents decentralization of the industry. I watched Primer with my girlfriend (now mind you Primer is a GREAT film) and all she complained about for 90 minutes, was how cheap the film LOOKED. More on Primer later.
When a film's budget approaches 100 million, it has to appeal wide swath. This isn't an artistic demand - this is a corporate demand, coming from finance execs that have to contend with intractable investors. So it's damn near impossible to get a singular vision film made at that scale because of the financial strictures involved. It just doesn't happen.
Studios make money off the library and make structured payments on debt. Individuals (executives, actors, etc.) draw individual weath from the system because they are getting paid from those same VC//investment/banking funds. There is little room in this structure for art.
The system is horribly corrupt and bloated. Since investment funds are being used, everyone in the revenu stream tries to draw the fattest chunk of cash they can, further inflating costs.
What you mention is actually being done. I'll find the link and post it later, but an arthouse distribution network is being currently designed. Mark Cuban's Landmark Theaters is also considered an arthouse distribution model, andhe's experimenting with day-and-date via DVD and digital distribution.
The ability to do an artistic film is directly correlational to the cost. A great movie that came out recently is Primer, a sci fi done by some engineer turned filmmaker in Texas, I think. He did it for 7 grand of his own money, shot on super 16 mm. You want to be an artist in the film industry, be prepared to suffer for your art form. He got a film deal out of it, butthe film had made little to no cash - and he'll probably be presented with some hackneyed stuff so he can cut his teeth in a more professional setting. It's the way.
I personally am using some of the cash from my script consulting to do my own film. The subject: Stanley Kubrick of course. I'm gonna focus specifically on his early years, when he hustled chess in Washington Square Park in New York.
To belatedly answer your questions. Do I want to "make" art, yes. Do I want Hollywood cash. Yes. Can I do both. Yes.
Hollywood responds to the critical mass audience, the lowest common denominator.
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Kubrick's films have always been about more than they appear at first glance. He was notorious for being painstaking with every shot to make sure it contained several layers of detail. As you think that the Shining was just about one man's mental breakdown, let me ask you whether you thought it odd that the hotel lobby had a huge statue of a soldier attacking a native american woman in the lobby, native-american artwork everywhere and whether you noticed that Wendy looked more native-american as the film progressed (especially towards the end)?
Kubrick called his last film "Eyes wide shut" for a reason.
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That is the whole point of "2001," in particular the final section, "Beyond the Infinite."
Kubrick is the only filmmaker who really got the concept of alien contact--ALIEN contact--in his gut. Contact with an alien intelligence, particularly a more advanced one, would be utterly confusing to us. Even the concept and structure of "intelligence" or "technology" is likely to be so alien as to be completely incomprehensible.
2001 is a brilliant movie because it is the only movie in which the audience experiences that first-hand...the movie watcher is thrust into the same overwhelming experience the characters are, with the same utter lack of explanation or exposition. In that respect it is probably the MOST realistic alien encounter movie made.
It is a movie about an alien experience that is, itself, an alien experience. It's the ultimate expression of the "show don't tell" maxim of story making. Its supreme achievement is that it makes such an experience watchable and enjoyable.
In his version of the story, the book "2001", Clarke was hampered by the limits of the medium...he had to tell--it's writing. The only science fiction novel I've read that compares to the movie experience of "2001" is another Clarke book: the original "Rendezvous with Rama." Again the entire experience is detailed, with no explanation forthcoming or even possible (this is why the subsequent books were such a huge dissappointment).
Too many movie fans want to be *told* amazing things. That's why "Contact" was so popular, and is consistently held up as a good science fiction movie. It tells you in clear exposition all the amazing things that are happening, and it wraps it all neatly up in the end.
Ultimately most movie are deeply plot driven--they get you to empathize with a character, then they explain what happens to that character in the course of the story. Most filmmakers do not like to keep the audience in the dark, unless it is to set them up for a big "reveal."
Kubrick was so great because he simply put the viewer into the experience and didn't bother to explain it. That's why his movies are often considered disturbing, and why they stick with you. And 2001 was his best, as it tackles a completely unknown and utterly foreign subject matter that way, and still succeeds.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.