An Unfilmed Classic

Dune is one of the best books I've ever read. I haven't read any of the sequels, but the original is a fascinating story with immense personal and political insights. Like most books I really enjoy, I've steered clear of any video adaptations - I saw and was sorely disappointed in David Lynch's 1984 take (the only one of his movies I didn't like). But it's fascinating to see the plans and storyboards for Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted 1975 film. I mean, just look at this design team:

A then-obscure H.R. Giger designed the creepier Harkonnen settings. Dan O’Bannon, known at the time for his work with John Carpenter on the sci-fi film Dark Star, was brought on as the special effects wiz. ... British artist Chris Foss designed the space craft. And Jean Giraud, aka French comic book artist Moebius, brought Jodorowsky’s dreams to life in some 3,000 storyboard drawings that perfectly capture a character or scene with a few quick pencil marks on the page.

Really worth the click through. I agree with the author as he notes "I wonder how all of Jodo’s wild images would have been captured by circa 1975 technology. Probably poorly. In a way, I’m glad the film was never made." I've always thought noble failures are more interesting than masterpieces. This film may be another for the list.

Telling in the Language of Metal

I watched Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim a few weeks back. What a fun movie! Respected it's B-movie origins while updating the genre for our time. What's interesting to me about the movie is that the movie felt like so much more than the fun action scenes and the cool mecha. But most of the dialog in the flick is pretty bad. Cliche-level bad, to the point where Stacker Pentecost's speech at the end of the movie has inspired a lot of parodies. So what set the movie apart? I didn't really understand it until I read Storming the Ivory Tower's excellent post "The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim." It's worth a read in its entirety, as the author details exactly how del Toro uses visuals to tell a lot of his story. In addition, I loved the post's close:

"...a film like Pacific Rim is treated as somehow naive or insignificant because it dares, gasp!, to have not just a unified message, but a quite positive, affirmative message, spoken not in the language of Lifetime movies or this year's crop of Oscar-bait, but in the language of Metal, the language of force and bombast and people in giant fucking robots punching Godzilla in the face.
We have reached a point, and really let this one sink in because it gets more flooring the more you think about it, where it's more radical and unacceptable to say, "Humans can accomplish amazing things when we set aside our differences and disagreements and work together to make the world a better place," than to say something sour and bitter and cynical.
Cynicism used to be the radical thing.
Now it's as mainstream as Greenday.
So, what I'm asking is that you give the film a second look, if you're not already one of us fanatics who loved it the first time through. Give it a chance to speak to you in its own language. Be the Raleigh in this situation--just as he surprised Mako by knowing and speaking Japanese to her, undermining her skepticism, enter a dialogue with the film that speaks in images. Open yourself to alternate ways of thinking and understanding."

Well said. Can't wait to see this one again at home.

Harrison and Han

Get your Star Wars geek on with this history of Harrison Ford's relationship with Han Solo - apparently he was hoping that Lucas was going to kill off Solo in the assault on the new Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Which actually would have given that movie even more emotional heft! Regardless, it's interesting to see how his fame and success changed his viewpoint towards the famous character.

The Cabin in the Woods

Watched The Cabin in the Woods last night. Holy crap. It's now one of my favorite horror movies, up there with The Silence of the Lambs and Alien and all of the other classics in my queue. I don't want to expand upon why the movie's so damned good - part of the enjoyment is the utter surprise of what happens - but I will say that the story is self-referential in a manner that is respectful of its subject matter (horror movies in general) while still acknowledging the absurdity of it all. And done in such a way that it's still scary too!

As Jamie Frevele puts it on The Mary Sue:

"It’s awesome because it’s incredibly effective and well-done. The script, by [Joss] Whedon and Drew Goddard, who also directed, is just spot-on and clever, while also being scary and gory without being gratuitously violent. (It is, after all, slasher movie at heart.) One-dimensional characters are given depth and reasons for being there besides dying. Every scene has a purpose. Everything works beautifully in The Cabin in the Woods, and by the time it’s over, you can’t believe what you have just been through. It’s a movie that happens to you, because it hits you over the head with its sexy, beautiful brains."

IMO, I love the playing of horror movie paradigms in the same manner of Bill Willingham's Fables or some of Neil Gaiman does with fairy tales - by combining characters from different stories together and watching the fireworks. Good stuff!

The New Language of the Cinema

David Mitchell's reaction to having Cloud Atlas adapted into film:

"None of the major changes the film made to my novel “threw me off” in the sense of sticking in my craw. I think that the changes are licensed by the spirit of the novel, and avoid traffic congestion in the film’s flow. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. In the German edition of my last novel, my translator Volker Oldenburg rendered a rhyming panoramic tableau by rescripting the items in order to make it rhyme in German too. He judged that rhythm mattered more than the exact items in the tableau, and it was the right call. Similarly, when the Wachowskis and Tykwer judged that in a translation (into film) of “Cloud Atlas” Zachry’s and Meronym’s future needs more certitude, then I trusted them to make the right call. They want to avoid melodrama and pap and cliché as much as I do, but a film’s payoff works differently to a novel’s payoff, and the unwritten contract between author and reader differs somewhat to the unwritten contract between filmmaker and viewer. Adaptations gloss over these differences at their peril."

It's interesting that, in general, authors appear to give movie directors benevolent license to do whatever they have to do in order to make it work the big screen. Only occasionally do you hear of big disagreements like Stephen King's dislike of Kubrick's version of The Shining. It's very different than the typical reaction of the reader, who often intensely dislike having the pictures in their mind overwhelmed by the overpowering images of a movie.

Originally posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Bride of Tab Dump

Who has time to write up thoughtful reactions to all of the cool things out on the internet? Isn't it easier just to throw you some links and let you read what you want? Enjoy!

• A collection of excellent old SciFi Illustrations by Shusei Nagoka. Although it's incongrous to see cool spaceship art side-by-side with cheezy 70s band cover art. 
• Los Bros Hernandez are continually singing the praises of Bob Bolling's Little Archie comic books as the inspiration for their work on Love and Rockets - in particular the awesome "Lil Kids" segments. Big Blog Comics shows us an example of his work, and it's as fun as you expect.
• Thinking of working in some fartlek work into my running, but haven't actually done so yet.
• Cool footage from Pavel Klushantsev's The Road to the Stars film, an inspiration for 2001
• Miles Davis: Genius, Hustler, and Superstar.
• David Byrne recently published what sounds like a fascinating book: How Music Works. Brain Pickings has a synopsis, while Smithsonian published an excerpt that includes his interesting thoughts on silence:

  In 1969, Unesco passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn’t get talked about much—the right to silence. I think they’re referring to what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting range, or if a disco opens downstairs. They don’t mean you can demand that a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes it’s playing, or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cellphone. It’s a nice thought though—despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic fresh air. To have a meditative moment, a head-clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right.
  John Cage wrote a book called, somewhat ironically, Silence. Ironic because he was increasingly becoming notorious for noise and chaos in his compositions. He once claimed that silence doesn’t exist for us. In a quest to experience it, he went into an anechoic chamber, a room isolated from all outside sounds, with walls designed to inhibit the reflection of sounds. A dead space, acoustically. After a few moments he heard a thumping and whooshing, and was informed those sounds were his own heartbeat and the sound of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. They were louder than he might have expected, but okay. After a while, he heard another sound, a high whine, and was informed that this was his nervous system. He realized then that for human beings there was no such thing as true silence, and this anecdote became a way of explaining that he decided that rather than fighting to shut out the sounds of the world, to compartmentalize music as something outside of the noisy, uncontrollable world of sounds, he’d let them in: “Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Conceptually at least, the entire world now became music.

• What successful people do with the first hour of their work day. 
• Warren Ellis awesome talk on on "How to see the Future" A must read, filled with interesting stories and facts. My favorite is this:
  

  The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space.
  That’s actually got a bit more going for it, as an idea, than exotic red deserts and canals. Imagine living in a Martian culture for a moment, where this thing is a presence in the existence of an entire sentient species. A mountain that you cannot see the top of, because it’s a small world and the summit wraps behind the horizon. Imagine settlements creeping up the side of Olympus Mons. Imagine battles fought over sections of slope. Generations upon generations of explorers dying further and further up its height, technologies iterated and expended upon being able to walk to within leaping distance of orbital space. Manufactured normalcy would suggest that, if we were the Martians, we would find this completely dull within ten years and bitch about not being able to simply fart our way into space.

Last-minute Desperate Solutions to Impossible Problems

This is how I feel at work sometimes:

Casey Ryback: What made you flip like this?
William Strannix: I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people.
Casey Ryback: All of your ridiculous pitiful antics aren't gonna change a thing. You and me, we're *puppets* in the same sick game. We serve the same master, and he's a lunatic and he's ungrateful. But there's nothing we can do about it. You and me, we're the same.
William Strannix: Oh, no. No. No. No. There's a difference, my man. You have faith. I don't!
[a knife fight erupts between them]

From the classic Stephen Segal flick Under Seige

It's a Long Way from Momento

Christopher Nolan has develped a reputation for writing and directing the thinking man's summer blockbusters. Ever since his incredible debut Memento (still worth watching today), he's delivered solidly entertaining movies with food for thought. However, I caught The Dark Knight Rises last night and after having pondered it all day, I think that Nolan has lost his way.

This is not to say that TDKR was a bad movie. Far from it - the movie had more than its fair share of SFX thrills, great acting (Anne Hathaway was a relevation), creepy bad guys (for 3/4s of the movie, Bain is about as good as a villain as you can ask for) and dramatic scenes. And like Nolan's previous Batman movies, he poses pleanty of interesting questions about justice and society. What's been bothering me is how he's either refrained from answering those questions or has answered them in a way that seems logically incoherant. For instance, (and SPOILER ALERT for anyone who hasn't seen the film,) when Bain takes over Gotham in a strange mix of populist and anarchist leadership, I think we're supposed to believe that the people of the city are all participating in the mahem of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor - we just don't actually see any of this happening. Instead, we see either people we're led to believe are hardened criminals or Bain's League of Shadows trained army doing the looting. Where are the common people in the movie? Are they blindly accepting Bane or is there resistance? Is anyone ambiguous about what's occurring? It's never really clear, partly because the movie moves so fast, lurching from one dramatic moment to the next, resulting in another superhero movie where the elete (leaders or superhumans) debate and control the lives of millions of people without us actually seeing or hearing from any of these people - a contradiction of one of the main themes of the movie!

I write the above as just one example of the messiness of the film. There's pleanty more where that comes from, but i'm not enough of a geek to list them all - I honestly don't care that much about it. But for a movie that so obviously strives to be so much more that strict popcorn entertainment, I get the sense that Nolan has started settling for simply posing deep questions without attempting to deal with them in any serious manner, leading to my suspicion that his recent films are morally hollow. And there's nothing wrong with that! I like empty entertainment as much as the next guy. It's just not where I suspected such a promising director to end up.

Cloud Atlas, Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You...

I'm always a bit ambivalent about movie adaptations of novels, especially novels as reliant upon the prose voice of someone as dynamic as the inimitable David Mitchell. But the trailer for Cloud Atlas - produced by the Wachowskis (the creators of The Matrix) and directed by Tom Tykwer (the writer/director of the fantastic Run Lola Run) - looks fantastic:

Damn was that exciting! Cloud Atlas seems like an unfilmable book, but this preview certainly looks like it might have pulled off the trick. And those special effects are incredible. I've found the Wachowski's movies post-Matrix to be visually stunning but emotionally disengaging, so I hope that Tykwer found a way to stay true to the story while allowing for all of this visual drama.

Quick Review: Prometheus

Let me join the chorus of people proclaiming that Ridley Scott's Prometheus is a hot mess of a movie. In a pithy phrase, it's visually stunning but logically incoherent.

I'm not going to go into details here, but even acknowledging that blockbuster movies make money by displaying stunning images together in the most dramatic way possible, don't you think that you'd want to string together these images in a way that makes sense? After all, it can be done - just look at Christopher Nolan's movies, or even The Avengers. But no, Scott's movie lurches from scene to scene with little to no rhyme nor reason, and features characters whose development consists of lines like "i'm a geologist, okay! I love fucking rocks!" Ugh. If the writers had spent three minutes refining the dialog and characters in this movie, then it might have given the flick the credibility it so desperately needed in support of the big questions it was so obviously trying to address. However, having someone occasionally say something like "Wouldn't you want to meet your maker?" does not make your movie deep.

Another problem is that the effect of the aliens themselves have been weakened by continuted exposure to the Alien franchise. Honestly, nothing's really going to match the first time you see the alien pop out of someone's chest, so why even try? It would have been nice to see a twist on the typical themes, but instead we were fed a warmed-over version of what had come before. Dissapointing.

Avengers Assemble!

I pulled in a few chips and stayed up too late, but my trip to the movies last night to see The Avengers was worth it. It's a fun movie that takes the original comics seriously but also includes a liberal dose of absurdest joy at the sheer spectacle of men in tights saving the world.

I'll hopefully have more later, but I will say that the biggest revelation to me was Mark Ruffalo's Hulk. He made the character interesting and relevant again in the same manner that Robert Downey Jr. did with Iron Man a few years back.

Update: Alyssa has a great post about the movie that's worth reading!

Cosmopolis Trailer

While I liked Don Delillo's Cosmopolis, it really did require a suspension of disbelief. I thought certain episodes worked very well, while others most definitely did not. Overall, I enjoyed certain scenes and his observations on society and people, but didn't think the book held together as a whole. Of course, this didn't stop me from reading it twice!

Come to find out that David Cronenberg has made a movie out of the book and it looks quite compelling! Check out the trailer. I try to catch all of Cronenberg's flicks, and now i'm excited to see what he does with the book. Plus, I don't think any of Delillo's books have been made into movies yet, so i'm intrigued to see how his voice and tone translates to the big screen.

Technology and "The Hunger Games"

Discovery News takes a look at technology in The Hunger Games movie, and ponders the implications of the technologies that were chosen to be part of the story's environment:

Some question why a post-apocalyptic North America filled with futuristic technologies would still rely upon coal for its electricity needs; others wonder about the story's complete absence of the Internet. One character in "The Hunger Games" books complains about "forgotten" military technologies such as high-flying planes, military satellites and robotic drones, even as he rides inside a hovercraft.
Such "gaps" in technology don't necessarily represent plot holes, according to historians of science and technology. Real societies have adopted or rejected technologies based on whether they suited their particular economic, political or cultural circumstances.

Who Changed My eBook?

I’m finding it hard to get too worked up about Jonathan Franzen’s comments about eBooks being a threat to our society. I’m not sure that anyone really took them too seriously. (As Eric mentioned, the best reaction to this is from the comments of that article: "While I actually agree with him, not through any coherently constructed argument but on simple instinct and principle, he is such an insufferable bore that I am inclined to go out and purchase a Kindle out of sheer spite." Note that IMO his New Yorker fiction podcast solidified my opinion of him as just that.)

However, I believe he did make some good points around the archival of digital versions of content that got lost in the shuffle. Luckily, Alyssa Rosenberg writing in Think Progress takes up some of the arguments here, and while she makes some good points, I’d like to rebut with a few of my own:

• She mentions some of the more egregious content changes in recent memory (Han shot first: still infuriating) but the flip side of this argument is that sometimes content changes are made for the better. To choose a few examples just off the top of my head – can anyone honestly argue that the Director’s Cut of Bladerunner is honestly better than the commercial version with that godawful voice over? Or that one version of the numerous versions of Walt Whitman’s Blades of Grass is better than another? (And don’t tell me that you’re read and compared the different versions because you’d be a liar.) Content change is neither implicitly good nor bad.
• I think she’s being naive when she twrites that “people’s vigilance will keep content providers honest.” She writes this when the technology is new and people are fascinated with it. When the technology gets old and commonplace and people take advantage of it – as they invariably will – this vigilance will either end or be the province of a small group of people who can’t possibly keep track of everything.

What do you think?

Underwater Seals

Amazing seal calls from underneath the Antartica ice.As taken from the excellent Herzog Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World.

 See also: The Quote of the Day for 9/1/10

The Man behind the Magic

Bill Wyman's take down of Spielberg was interesting reading. I can't claim to have watched all of his movies, but I will say that despite all of his faults - and they are many! - you can't take away the magic that he creates when he's on. The entirety of Raiders of the Lost Ark; hell, any of the Indiana Jones movies. The T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park. The invasion of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. I'm sure there's more i'm forgetting. 

The problem to me is that his later movies have become more spectacle than anything else. Before the specticle was grounded in some good character writing that I personally don't see in many of his latter movies. Think of what he did to Minority Report - he allows Tom Cruise to operate that absurd wall-computer in a skin-tight biceps-revealing shirt, and lets him run around for the entire movie, but doesn't give him any of the quiet or humorous moments that let us love Indiana Jones. As Wyman points out, not only was most of the War of the Worlds sound and fury that didn't hold up to close examination, but the subplot of the parent who can't connect to his kids has become so hackneyed for him and thus doesn't add any depth. In short, he seems to have lost something along the way, and perhaps Wyman's onto something. Until then, i'll watch Raiders for the thousandth time - and love it just as much as the first time.

Revenge of the Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles that I indended to write about, but never found the time.

1. I spend most of my professional life working in PowerPoint. Slide:ology helped me to learn how to design better slides. It could help you too.

2. Justin E.H. Smith argues the, to me, obvious point that marriage is work:

One might suppose rather that love and work—or at least a distinctly modern, capitalist conception of work—are two sides of the same coin: both emerge together at the same moment in history, and both carry with them the ungrounded belief that each of us has our destiny in our own hands, that our happiness is entirely a consequence of our life choices, and our misery a surefire sign that we are doing something wrong. In this connection the contemporary use of "passion" serves as a revealing misnomer. For how many can recall that, originally… to undergo a passion was to suffer an affliction over which one had no control? … in the modern world, in both work and love… we are expected to treat the things that happen to us, that cannot but happen to us, as a result of the way our society is structured, as if they were the result of our own sundry projects of self-creation.

He’s a bit too cynical and determinist for my tastes, but there’s some truth in there: many, many people do not hold their destiny in their hands, for one reason or another.

3. I’d Rather Be Writing ponders a good question for all writers.

I was talking with my wife’s uncle last week about writing strategies for fiction, and whether it’s better to outline everything ahead of time, or figure it out as you go. The former is apparently called a “plotter” method and the latter a “pantser” method (called pantser because you fly by the seat of your pants).
He said there’s no right way, but if you’re planning to figure it out as you go, it’s still a good idea to write your last chapter ahead of time. This way you know generally where you want to end up. If you don’t know how your novel is going to end, he said, you often wander around and eventually end your novel in fanciful/unbelievable way. Further, pantsers often lose motivation because they don’t know the point or meaning of their story.

He goes on to connect this to his life as a Technical Writer. I always enjoy his posts; he’s a thoughtful writer who has some great insights in the details of technical communication.

4. AGNI interviews Johnathan Lethem about sampling and creation. I love how Lethem thinks. Some samples:

• On using quotations in his work: “Girl in Landscape is relatively free of cultural reference. The voice is in the third person omniscient and stays relatively close to a thirteen year old girl who’s not a voracious reader or music listener, who lives in the future, and on this other planet. Yet I know there was at least one moment when some descriptive passage of the desert landscape under the sky slipped into a tiny bit of a Joni Mitchell lyric. It was irresistible, it was like a throb in the voice that just felt right, and there’s no reason in the world why I wanted to resist that. There might have been five words of quotation, but direct quotation, and I just let it be. But that’s notable because it’s so exceptional inside that project."
• On Dylan and his sources: “This whole question of quotation and theft in Dylan tends to be looked at in arguments in favor for or against his unique genius, as though he himself were introducing the very problem that undermines his own claim. In a way it’s giving him too much credit to call him an original thief. He’s a typical thief. So can we now please just leave that question behind? When an ideology exists, no one is free of it. He’s spent a lot of time defending himself or obfuscating about sources because he has absorbed the same frameworks that people are using to judge the work."

Ultimately, if art is working then it’s done something and you only need to become interested in sources if they interest you. Nothing more needs to be said. When art succeeds it’s its own law, it’s its own reason for being.” I know that the few “original” things that I write almost always spin off of something else that I’ve read, either consciously or subconsciously, and certain phrases that I use have been used in that way before. If this should be called “sampling” so be it – I believe that the modern world is better off for it.

5. The world's smallest known vertebrate. I miss having frogs in the house.

6. Gotta say, a movie called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace sounds fascinating: Adam Curtis, the director, describes it as "...This is a story about the rise of the machines/and how they made us believe/we could create a stable world/that would last forever."

7. In her essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood splits hairs and describes her Science Fiction - The Handsmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood - as "speculative fiction" rather than scifi.

8. One of my favorite albums is the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, and probably the most rocking tune off this understated album is the majestic "Big Sky." Adam Fieled overthinks the songs implications.

Watching Dreamscape

Watched Dreamscape tonight, a movie that scared the crap out of me back in the day (in 1984 - 27 years ago!). The plot is essentially Inception for the 80s: a group of scientists have discovered how to insert psychics into people’s dreams. The main psychic, played by an excellent Dennis Quaid, starts off as that typical Hollywood rogue, a cynic who doesn't want to play by the rules or use his powers for anyone else (when we first meet him, he's raking in the cash at the track). However, he quickly gets entangled with a governmental research project about dreams that initially utilizes the technology for good, but once we discover that the POUSA is having nightmares about a nuclear holocaust and thus wants to start leading nuclear disarmament talks (this, of course, can’t happen), it's just a matter of time before things turn ugly. A very satisfying thriller results from the resulting complications, mainly due to an intelligent script and great acting (Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow are in it as well, although the less said about Kate Capshaw, the better).

Overall, the flick stood up really well to how I remembered it, which is not always the case with older movies. In my opinion, it’s aged pretty well, with the exception of the fashions (pink sweaters are just never acceptable), the ginormous computers, and some really wretched electronic music.  You have to take the special effects with a grain of salt, obviously – FX have come a long way in 27 years! – but some of them are surpisingly effective. One scene in particular, a child’s dream about the boogyman, is well done – they present the kids house with all of the house’s angles askew and crooked staircases leading down into pitch-black cellars. Overall, the scene feels like early Tim Burton, but without the ironic humor. Another positive were the fallout scenes with the rivers of nuclear waste and rabid fallout dogs. Not so effective, was the scary snake-man, although it still freaked me out a bit (probably because it scared me so much when I was a kid!) Overall, I'd say that this movie would be ripe for a remake if Inception hadn't basically just told an extremely similar story.

On a personal note, I enjoyed the fact that not one but two Twin Peaks characters were in the flick: David Patrick Kelly (Jerry Horne) and Chris Mulkey (Hank Jennings). I also got a kick out of the fact that the POUSA in the flick looks a little bit like Boris Yeltsin. Little things like this are what keep me going!

Watching "The Girl..." Movies

Over the last few weeks, I watched the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Excellent, captivating movies! I found the lack of qualities that are present in most American blockbusters refreshing, mainly the absence of bombastic music in favor of subdued mood music with downtempo stylings, and the complete lack of violence glorification.

I recommend both movies highly, but must warn you: both of them are damned dark. One of the major themes of the trilogy of books and movies is that "everyone has secrets." This is certainly true enough, but in this world  "secrets" involve murder, violent rape, sex trafficking, theft, and other assorted evil and venial crimes. I'm not sure if this says something about Sweden, or the mindset of Stieg Larsson (the author, who was a newspaper reporter and thus probably saw his fair share of awful situations), but I was struck how few positive notes were struck throughout the movies. The few moments of positivity that shone through were hard fought and short living. Other then that caviat, these well constructed flicks are well worth your time.

Fathers and Sons

A lot of the visual entertainment I’ve seen over the years involves sons dealing with the examples that their fathers have set. Typically, these fathers are absent, and the son struggles to come to terms with the (usually heroic) example that they have set. I’m thinking of the Harry Potter movies, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, Six Feet Under, and I’m sure I could come up with many, many, many more if I sat down and really thought about it. Hell, even Cowboys vs. Aliens served up a big ol’ dish of this!

I've read a number of theories over the last year or so as to why this is the case. In most instances, the theory is that the role of a man in modern society has changed and these works are a way of working through male anxiety over their new role. In other words, comparing the modern “kindler and gentler” man with the more rugged men of our past. (I’m only talking about American culture here. I have no idea if other cultures are experiencing the same phenomenon.) I thought of this when I read William Saletan’s essay in Slate that a recent study on testosterone levels in fathers being lower than other males is being used in the same way:

Testosterone affects and is affected by many things. It probably does adjust to environmental cues as men become mates and then fathers. But we're just beginning to explore how and why this happens. The new evolutionary-psychology theory we're being fed has less to do with earth-shattering evidence than with changes in our economy and culture. Women are gaining more respect and consideration. Wages have shrunk, so both parents have to work for pay. Men have to help out more at home, and they can't get away with cheating the way they used to. For a bunch of reasons, we need a more domestic and egalitarian theory of masculinity. And we're using this study to sell it.

I can’t really speak to the accuracy of this, other than to say it certainly sounds like it could be true. Personally, it would be nice if shows would give this theme a rest in favor of focusing on having these guys handle their masculinity on their own terms would be nice!