Quentin Rides Again

It is not only possible to be nostalgic for a time one never experienced, it is commonplace. I’ve mentioned my own nostalgia for certain aspects of 1940s pop culture, though of course not for the decade’s brutal conflict. The culturally pivotal 1960s have great power to stir nostalgia not only from those who remember the decade but from members of the majority who don’t. For example, writer/director Drew Goddard, born in 1975, evokes 1969 with uncanny precision in his 2018 movie Bad Times at the El Royale. Quentin Tarantino, born 1963, also chose 1969 for his Once upon a Time in Hollywood, currently in theaters. I caught it last Friday. I turned 17 in 1969, by the way, which no doubt gives me a different perspective on the era than younger folk – Drew Goddard included.

As the title suggests, Quentin Tarantino has directed a fairy tale of sorts in Once upon a Time in Hollywood, albeit of the bloody Grimm variety rather than a sanitized Disneyesque version. He has lovingly and humorously portrayed 1960s Hollywood and its denizens in a way that someone who didn’t see them first-hand might regard as parody. It really isn’t. Brief portrayals of Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee, Joey Heatherton (unnamed, but that is who it has to be), and others intersperse the movie. However, when the ‘60s were good they were very very good, but when they were bad they were horrid. (Longfellow’s poem is better known slightly misquoted for some reason, so I’ll stick with the pattern of the misquote.) The horrid aspect remains very much a part of the American psyche and mythology, and it is central to the movie. It is a Tarantino movie after all.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a former TV Western lead who now mostly plays one-off parts as the heavy in TV shows such as Mannix and Bonanza. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is his stunt double and best friend, who, as Booth narrates, is “more than a brother and a little less than a wife.” Dalton is so concerned about being past his prime that after playing a scene (as the heavy) in a movie Western, he is sincerely and deeply moved by validation from an 8-year-old girl (an “actor” not an “actress,” she tells us) who praises his acting. He mulls an offer to star in spaghetti Westerns. Dalton’s house is located on Cielo Drive neighboring one rented by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. (A 50^th anniversary is coming up next week on August 8.) There is a truly menacing scene as Booth gives a teenage girl a ride back to the Spahn Ranch where Charlie Manson and his followers have taken up residence. A well-cast Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, who is on her way up the hill that Dalton has crested. She is still excited enough to see her own name on a marquee that she spontaneously walks into a movie theater to watch herself in a showing of The Wrecking Crew; she enjoys laughs from the audience at her comic turns on screen.

It might be hard to imagine calling anything with these elements a comedy, but to a large degree it is. The soundtrack is a well-selected mix of ‘60s numbers. There is a remarkable cast in minor roles including Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Dakota Fanning. The movie is as un-PC as the decade itself.

This is the 9^th Tarantino movie. Hardly anyone is likely to score it in the top three. Yet, it is fun and definitely re-watchable. This is no Pulp Fiction, but thumbs solidly up.

Dusty Shelves Revisited

I grew up when our only tools were rocks and bones. Our only visual entertainment medium was a pond surface where we watched the ripples caused by throwing one of those rocks in it. Actually the tools were IBM 360s and punch cards while the entertainment was broadcast TV, but those might seem like only modest improvements to someone not old enough to remember a time before smart tablets. Among the many limitations of television entertainment back then, the leading one was viewer choice. In the US the three networks dominated new programming while the independent channels played a lot of syndicated reruns and old movies. (Even New York had only seven VHF channels; most markets had fewer.) They aired what they aired. If there was a particular favorite movie you wanted to re-watch, you just had to wait until it turned up again on some local station’s lineup, which could take months or even years. It might not happen at all.

I remember watching King Kong on my 12-inch portable in my college dorm and thinking how cool it would be to not rely on station programmers to watch it again. One of the tropes of depictions of the ultra-rich in movies and TV shows at the time was a home theater with reel projectors for movies-on-demand. By the late ‘70s VHS cassette players had made a less fancy version of this affordable to almost everyone. The tapes themselves were fairly expensive and bulky, however, so most of us opted to rent them from video stores rather than buy them. Prices of videos dropped over time. When much easier to store DVDs came along, home video libraries became more common and more full. Nowadays, discs, too, are a senescent technology (even the Blu-rays) as Netflix and other on-demand options make them largely superfluous. Nonetheless, they aren’t vanishing entirely. Even the most dedicated Hulu and Netflix fan is still likely to buy (or be given) DVDs here and there. Over the years they add up and start to overflow shelves.

One of my DVD cases

A curious feature of DVD home libraries – which would have surprised my younger King Kong-watching self – is the extent of their disuse. There is something about having a movie at one’s fingertips that makes it easy to put off watching it. Most of us have had the experience of being caught up in a movie airing on TCM that has sat on our shelf unwatched for years. In the past couple of decades I accumulated 16 shelves of DVDs in three cases. That is a smaller stash than it might seem – the shelves are modest in size – but it is still large enough: too large, really. Every now and then I make a point of randomly selecting a DVD from my collection and playing it – or, if the thought of playing it is truly off-putting, discarding it. Starting a week ago I once again picked a disc randomly from each shelf with the plan of rating each as 1) watch and keep, 2) watch and discard, or 3) discard at once. (“Discard” can mean giving it away.) So far I’m eight shelves in. The results are below.

I’ve reviewed some of these movies before (sometimes years ago), but our tastes and opinions (and, with luck, our insight) evolve over time, so I’ll note any changes in those, too. Lest this post becomes too unwieldy, I’ll try to keep the re-reviews as brief as possible.

From shelf #1 was Wings (1927) starring Clara Bow in the first film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Mary (Clara Bow) loves Jack who loves Sylvia who loves David (Jack’s friend and rival). When Jack and David become pilots on the Western Front in World War 1, Clara joins the Women’s Motor Corps so she can be closer to Jack. There is remarkable aerial footage, melodramatic romance, and tragedy involving friendly fire. Extreme naivety in the script alternates with unexpected sophistication. Gung-ho early-20^th century patriotism is balanced by a recognition of the cost of war. My views on this film are the same as when I first saw it long ago and enjoyed it. The DVD is still a Keeper.

Claudette Colbert & Don Ameche

From the next shelf was Midnight (1939), which I already knew was a Keeper but watched again anyway because the whole idea was to make random picks. Putting a first pick back on the shelf no longer would be random. Eve (Claudette Colbert) arrives in Paris broke. For openly financial reasons she goes along with the scheme of the very wealthy Georges (John Barrymore) to pose as a Baroness and draw away to herself the romantic attention of the lover of Georges’ wife. Meantime, taxi driver Tibor (Don Ameche) has his own interest in Eve. It’s a thoroughly pleasant comedy with an attitude in the dialogue and (despite the contrived plot) a naturalness in the human interactions that I miss in movies (and life) today. I’m more cognizant of the historical context of the movie than when I first saw it, but otherwise regard it much the same way.

Cat Women of the Moon (1953). All one need say about this film’s budget is that the acceleration couches in the rocket are lawn chairs. Several obtuse male astronauts plus a female navigator named Helen fly to the moon. Helen is in telepathic contact with Alpha, leader of the moon-dwelling cat women. Despite this connection Helen helps to kill the cat women because they are bad, bad, bad. The movie was remade in 1958 as Missile to the Moon which had enough of a budget for color film but was even sillier. By all rights this should be “Not a Keeper,” but it is the very definition of “so bad it’s good.” So, I’m reluctant to part with it. My reasons for enjoying this movie have changed completely since I was a kid (when I accepted it simply as adventuresome scifi), but it is still a Keeper.

World without End (1956): In this surprisingly good science fiction tale an accident with velocity and time dilation sends astronauts into a post-apocalyptic future where they find effete but technically capable humans hiding underground while the surface is dominated by dangerous primitive mutants. I loved this movie as a kid. Nowadays, the many 1950s cultural presuppositions in the movie are highly visible, but everything is a product of its time – even (maybe especially) the “timeless” movies. This is still a Keeper.

Daisies (1966), directed by Věra Chytilová: Two nihilistic young women, both named Marie, decide that in an absurd and corrupt world one might as well revel in absurdity and corruption. (This Czech film was banned in it its own country until 1975; Marxism and nihilism don’t mix.) They indulge their appetites, play pranks (especially, but not exclusively, on older well-connected men), and destroy a room where an elegant feast is laid out. The young ladies’ philosophy seems sounder to me than in the days of hippie-dom when I first saw the film. Nonetheless, there are consequences to the characters’ behavior, as there would be in real life. This surreal and playful movie is definitely a Keeper.

If… (1968): This movie almost never plays on broadcast or cable TV in the US. Commercial broadcasters’ disinclination to put it on the schedule no doubt derives from the (correct) assumption that many or most viewers would be offended. Boys from the privileged class in an English boarding school are indoctrinated with a code of conduct, not to be confused with a code of ethics. Graduates presumably emerge ready to take on Kipling’s burden. I’d want to go conquer someone after suffering through that school, too. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and a few of his friends are unhappy students. At first they rebel through fantasy, alcohol, and sex (hetero- and homosexual), but ultimately they opt for submachine guns. I first saw If… in the theater in 1968 at age 15. Back then I didn’t care for it: some elements of the film confused me while others annoyed me. I like it better now despite (or because of) its anarchist streak. Total Film rates it the 16^th greatest British movie of all time, which I think is way too high, but it does have merit. Keeper.

Pamela Franklin & Maggie Smith

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969): Once again I was tempted to put this pick back on the shelf, close my eyes, and reach for another because I already knew it was a Keeper. Nonetheless I stuck with the rules (even though they were my rules) and spun up the DVD. Miss Jean Brodie, played by Maggie Smith, is a teacher at a girls school in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a romantic in the broader sense and is an inspirational teacher, but … well ... she’s a fascist. Literally. Nowadays that term gets tossed around carelessly, but she is the real thing. The film’s portrayal of Jean Brodie helps to explain the seductive revolutionary appeal of fascism to so many people. It’s hard not to admire Brodie’s defiance of the prudish, repressive Victorian values she encounters at every turn, especially from the school’s headmistress, but she truly is objectionable in ways the headmistress doesn’t really comprehend. (*SPOILER* ALERT.) Brodie’s most trusted student and “special girl” Sandy eventually turns against her for these reasons and allies herself with the conservative headmistress, who is Wrong in oh-so-many-ways but ultimately less dangerously Wrong than Brodie. Sandy tells Brodie, “You are dangerous and unwholesome, and children should not be exposed to you!” Yet, even in rebellion, Sandy owes her independence of mind about moral choices in large part to Miss Brodie’s influence. Sandy is perfectly played by a young Pamela Franklin on whom I had an instant schoolboy crush when I saw the movie in the theater in 1969. (Is that really 50 years ago?) My opinion of the film is more philosophical than in ‘69, but I liked it then and like it now.

A Boy and His Dog (1975): The intro to the movie tells us “World War IV lasted five days. Politicians had finally solved the problem of urban blight.” In a post-apocalyptic world Vic (a young Don Johnson) travels the wasteland with his trusty companion, a sentient dog who communicates with him telepathically. They meet a woman who tells about an advanced underground society that needs healthy genetic input from the surface. It sounds too good to be true to Vic, and so it turns out to be. Based on a Harlan Ellison novella, this cult film is sardonic and funny. Dog lovers will appreciate Vic’s choices. Keeper.

Well, if my goal was to thin out the shelves of overstock, so far I’m not making much progress toward it. There wasn’t a single Not a Keeper in the first eight. Maybe Round 2 will be different.

Appending 8 trailers would be excessive (and the reader can find them easily enough anyway), so I’ll opt for just one: Daisies

Evil

The word “evil” makes secularists uncomfortable due the word’s association with sin. “Sin” connotes a cosmic origin, a notion they don’t accept. Friedrich Nietzsche specifically rejected the term “evil” on these grounds in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), a book I found illuminating in my youth. He was perfectly OK with “good and bad,” which connote an entirely human origin: in his view the only origin a system of ethics can have. Freudian psychology and 20^th century existentialist philosophy reinforced this view among intellectuals and academics. They still recognized various behaviors as socially unacceptable or even horrifying, but regarded judgments about them to be subjective, relative, and situational. After all, normally kind and honorable people can be capable of the most appalling acts in the context of war (especially civil war) or mob excitement. This relativistic view faced challenges as the century wore on.

In the 1960s the crime rate in the West – and particularly the United States – spiked and continued to rise for decades. Although the violent crime rate in the US actually has dropped back substantially in the past 20 years, it is still well above what it was in 1959; furthermore, crimes of particularly callous natures are far more common than 60 years ago. Accordingly, the term evil began to make a comeback in the 1990s when it became clear that no other term applies to some people. They commit heinous acts (in peacetime and without mob incitement) entirely of their own accord because they choose to. Because they like to. The term re-emerged not only in professional circles but in the popular culture; the 1993 movie Kalifornia, for example, brings a moral relativist (David Duchovny) face to face with a homicidal psychopath (Brad Pitt). In the 2000s criminal psychologist and medical doctor Michael H. Stone devised a 22-level Scale of Evil. The reader might have encountered the TV series Most Evil, hosted by Stone who employed the scale in various accounts of crimes and criminals.

Michael H. Stone collaborated with Gary Brucato, PhD, for their 2019 book The New Evil.  In the introduction they write, “By ‘evil’ we are not referring to spiritually sinful or societally forbidden acts, per se...Rather, we refer to the types of actions that virtually anyone, regardless of faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably horrible and utterly depraved.” Such acts, they say, “are generally preceded by malice aforethought or premeditation, inflict wildly excessive degrees of suffering, and would be considered altogether incomprehensible to the average individual.” Most of the book consists of mind-numbing accounts of abduction, torture, dismemberment, cannibalism and more. There are accounts of serial killers motivated by material gain, perverse pleasure, or deep-seated anger.

All this is very depressing, but what is “new” about it? In absolute terms, not much. Most of the crimes have precedent in historical literature. However, the frequency is new. Stone and Brucato believe that the culture reached a tipping point around 1965; societal forces that previously restrained narcissistic psychopaths fell away. They detail many of the changes (more fatherless males, for example) that correlate with crime. Further, they note that there are some categories of crime today that scarcely existed before. School shootings, for example, simply didn’t happen before 1965. To be sure, there were murders at school, but they weren’t random and the location scarcely mattered; they were one-on-one affairs motivated by jealousy, or humiliation, or revenge that might have happened anywhere. There were no random killings. That’s a modern phenomenon.

Stone and Brucato don’t really offer a solution. Indeed, it would be surprising if they had one. In their less than satisfying final chapter, they do, however, note the importance of recognizing “the danger of a culture that is gradually becoming more coarse, uninhibited, amoral, and selfish.” They also re-emphasize personal will, choice, and self-control: “This growing tendency to blame outside forces is, in fact, a hallmark of narcissism, now encountered on a sweeping societal scale.” They express hope that after “a period of terrible growing pains” Western culture, without giving up the social gains of the past half century, can evolve past the “new evil.”

The New Evil is worth a read, though be aware that the litany of gruesome and perverse crimes filling nearly 500 pages can be truly stomach-churning. Some of us have learned the hard way that there are people in the world who think so differently from the rest of us that it is hard for normal people to comprehend it. This applies not just to the sadistic torturers who occupy so much of this book, but to non-lethal but still callous con artists who bankrupt “friends” without hesitation or twinge. The New Evil tells us they are out there. It is good to be forewarned.

Ike and Tina Turner – Evil Man

Beyond the Pigeon

I bought a small item at the local market the other day. The total with tax was $6.66. “You’d better buy something else, too,” the clerk said. I assumed she was joking. I smiled as I handed her $10. “I’m serious,” she said. “No, that’s OK,” I answered. She sighed as she gave me back change. I could see the exchange really did bother her however.

Numerological hopes and fears are commonplace. Many people play lucky numbers in lotteries and on roulette wheels. (With high frequency those lucky numbers are birthdays.) The number 4 is unlucky in parts of East Asia. Fear of the number 13 is so common in the West that there is a specific word for it (triskaidekaphobia). Many Western buildings lack a 13^th floor – or, more accurately, the 13^th floor is labeled the 14^th. The number is often missing from addresses. As it happens, the street number of my own house is 15. My street is numbered in the usual US fashion with odd numbers on one side and even ones on the opposite side. My adjacent neighbors to left and right are 11 and 17. The assumption, apparently, is that evil gremlins can read “13” on a mail box but that they can’t count.

I don’t normally think about my street number, but it came to mind as I turned into the driveway when returning from the market. It prompted me to pull from my shelf for a reread Superstition by Felix E. Planer. I have the 1988 revised edition. A peek on Amazon reveals that it is out of print; used copies are offered for sale there for $52 and $100. I paid something close to $6.66 back in ’88 or ’89, which is $13.59 in 2019 dollars. It is worth a read: not $52 worth IMHO, but it is worth borrowing from the library anyway. Be aware that some of the terminology in the book, though perfectly correct when written, is regarded as un-PC in some circles today; the reader might find this refreshing.

Planer was born in Berlin in 1914 but moved to London where he earned his doctorate; during the war he conducted scientific and engineering research for the British Admiralty. He was a lifelong skeptic, but was aware he was fighting an uphill battle, not least with himself. People are hardwired to see patterns even where they don’t exist and to worry about them – and not just people. B.F. Skinner’s classic Superstition in the Pigeon demonstrated that pigeons fed on a random schedule develop meaningless rituals; they repeat an action that preceded getting fed the last time, and the more often they repeat it the more likely (just by the odds) they will be fed again soon afterward. So, the ritual behavior is reinforced. This is very similar to a baseball player who eats a Twinkie before a game because he scored a run the last time he did; he might know intellectually that the Twinkie wasn’t the reason, but if he doesn’t eat one he might well be slightly distracted by the thought, which could hurt his batting. That’s how superstition works. It is how obsessive-compulsive disorder works, which is just superstition on overdrive. Fear underlies it, and fear is the problem with it.

Planer’s definition of superstition (in humans: he leaves the pigeons out of it) is therefore two-part: 1) “a belief in influences and events that are incapable of being justified on rational grounds,” and 2) the additional constituent of fear. Planer discusses the global evolution of beliefs in magical objects, rituals, spirits, and the paranormal from Sumerian to modern times. Unlike pigeons, humans are able to think rationally and to overcome superstitions, if not our tendency toward them. Ritual behavior really does temporarily ease superstitious fears, which is why it gets reinforced, but he argues that it is better for longer term happiness and personal freedom to get past them.

I agree for myself, but I’m not sure this is entirely true for everyone. Psychologist Gregg Henriques has written of the three fundamental world views. There is “supernatural dualism, which is the view of most traditional religions.” This posits a spiritual world distinct from the readily tangible material one. Second is “parapsychological mysticism, which refers to a belief about a conscious reality that surpasses conventional scientific understanding.” If this sounds New Age-y, it is. Third is the naturalistic world view, which regards the physical world as all there is. Planer regards the first two as superstition. He may be right (and I think he is) but that doesn’t mean people who belong to the first two categories aren’t happier than naturalistic realists. There is some evidence that a larger percentage of them are: naturally there are depressive and giddy folk in all categories, but the percentages differ. As that may be, each of us believes what he or she must. There are still downsides to many superstitions regardless. Even a mystic might want to give up eating that Twinkie before the big game.

Howlin' Wolf - I Ain't Superstitious

Artificial Intelligence Is Better than None

Humans are having so much fun hating each other these days that other concerns rarely remain in the forefront of public consciousness for long. One such concern that had a flurry of attention in the press in 2018 but then evaporated was the long-term danger posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. Perhaps the death of Stephen Hawking, who warned that AI was an existential threat to humanity, had something to do with the passing interest. Other respected figures added their voices including Elon Musk whose robotic cars roam the highways. Musk warned, “The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe.” I’m sure another press flurry will come soon, for robots aren’t going anywhere – or, more accurately, they are going everywhere.

The kind of dangerous happening Musk had in mind was, in scifi terms, less Skynet, which consciously chose its own objectives, than HAL, which unexpectedly resolved conflicting mission objectives it was given by trying to kill the crew. There is a difference. As we become ever more reliant on AI to route electric power, drive our cars, fly our airplanes, manage our industrial production, and even just control the temperature in different rooms of our homes, the risk to the systems grows. The worry is not so much about narrow AI, such as the algorithms that tell Amazon or Google what products to recommend to you, though even these sometimes behave unpredictably. The concern is about more generalized higher level AIs that reprogram themselves as they learn about the world by interacting with it; they already have done very strange things such as learn (by themselves) to cheat at games by changing the rules. As they get ever more complex and ever better at simulating consciousness they are bound to spring surprises on us – whether or not by “intent.” There are growing numbers of robotic weapons with the capacity to act autonomously, whether or not they are allowed to do so, with some self-evident dangers, but even autonomous machines built for benign purposes can go badly awry. Reliance on AIs also makes us vulnerable to nefarious fellow humans who aim to disable them with EMP or simpler methods.

A particular kind of AI has intrigued us the most, at least since Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) put the word “robot” in the dictionary: androids. Autonomous robots need not be humaniform (android). Scarcely any are at present, and those few are not very high functioning, but they are clearly the end game. We love android robots, sometimes literally. Brothels with robotic love dolls are in business in Toronto and Paris. The appeal is bound to grow as the machines become not only more animate but better conversationalists. They also scare us. Recently the idea that robots might end mankind through love not war has gained some currency: the notion being that we might so prefer machines to actual fellow humans that we don’t bother to reproduce. (See Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross set in an entirely robotic post-human solar system in which the humans weren’t killed but just faded away; I wrote a short story called Circuits Circus set in the waning days of human-to-human sociality.) It is true that many people already have deeper relationships with their smart phones than with their families, and it is also true that online games such as Love Plus that let the player construct a virtual lover (rather than deal with the pesky real thing) are wildly popular. However, the old-fashioned homicidal robot uprising (pioneered in R.U.R.) is still the classic nightmare.

Roboticist Daniel H. Wilson writes science fiction (including the novel Robopocalypse) when he isn’t tinkering together the mechanical successors to humanity. Some years ago, however, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide titled How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion. In it he reveals the various ways your smart house and your car might try to kill you, and he escalates the possibilities up to the full-out terminator-style assault. He discusses the ways to defeat various tracking sensors and recognition technologies. He explains how to exploit the quirks of AI decision-making; they think far faster than you in familiar situations, for instance, but struggle with wholly novel ones. He tells how to recognize a robot if one calls you on the phone by the way it constructs speech. Though he advises running and hiding whenever possible (with tips on how and where), he tells how best to fight back. Blinding cameras by throwing mud on them is a good first step, though it won’t help if the robot can access real-time drone or satellite imagery. All-in-all, it is a fun little field guide, which despite the silliness really does cover many of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of present and future advanced AIs and robots. He says in the intro, “Behind every bit of advice exists an area of real research with genuine answers that have been culled from extensive interviews with robotics experts…You probably found How to Survive a Robot Uprising in the humor section. Let’s hope that is where it belongs.”

So, when the AI assistant in your smart house tells you to change a light bulb, wear shoes with well insulated rubber soles to guard against a sudden power surge. Further, enjoy your robotic inamorata when Amazon delivers the crate to your door, but after you activate him or her, keep track of the kitchen knives.

Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover