Monthly Archives: December 2016

The leap OA faith

Considering Westworld, The Man in the High Castle, and The OA, this last is the one that’s more worthwhile to watch.

But I state this while agreeing with these quotes, it’s enough to give a glance at the wikipedia:

“a series of offensive overreaches”

“The OA is bullshit, but it’s beautiful bullshit.”

“an admirably ambitious letdown”

“beautiful, realistic unease”

“an especially cryptic attempt to say very little of consequence.”

I’ve seen the whole thing deliberately without reading up on the internet, but I looked up the people involved and that lead me back to Another Earth, and also, next, to follow the thread to “Sound of My Voice” and “I Origins”. But I’d add, to those obvious sidetracks (just follow the trail of the actress, being the link between Zal Batmanglij, director of The OA, and Mike Cahill, the director of Another Earth), the more substantial and eerie Upstream Color. This last one is transcendental mystery done well, which is what The OA actually fails at.

I watched the first four episodes all at once, then the remaining (and shorter) ones across a few days. At that middle point I had the occasion to talk about it with some friends, and what I had to say was already on the same line of the quotes above.

If a show like Westworld has a very interesting and complex premise, stuff to talk about, that then is developed with the usual TV language that feels very clean, sleek and perfectly executed, but also fake. Instead The OA is the opposite. Its content is utter bullshit, but its form of expression is honest, it is real, it rings true. The language this show uses is different, you can feel it’s different in just a few minutes, from the very beginning. And because it’s fresh it feels so more interesting than EVERYTHING else on TV.

Despite its empty core, this show has given me emotionally so much more than the other two shows I mentioned. Watching it is an incredible experience, and once again I admire the sheer ambition even if this is another failure. Westworld succeeded, but it succeeded through tricks and by removing all its ambition to tell a simple, harmless story. Convoluted, but simple. It succeeded by being conservative all the way through. The OA instead fails, but it fails while trying to reach high, trying to search for something, embracing its ambition and putting its own trust in it, even if that trust isn’t justified or earned. The OA is a reckless leap of faith. It is inebriated with faith.

The OA is a story about real magic, and its real magic lies in language.

Yet you’d need to explain what you saw. You need to translate earnest emotion into meaning. Is The OA obfuscation? Not really. What I noticed, and what made me doubt my own impression, is that the show is self-aware, at least up to a certain point. It deliberately mocks its own bullshitting, and plays it so it appears fake. It’s not hiding, it’s not pretending. So I was curious, how do you walk this fine line by being conscious that the argument itself has no value. How do you believe in magic when you are the illusionist who knows and performs the trick? The showrunner knows it, the actors know, the audience knows. There is no make believe, yet there is faith? It’s like an impossible bridge that stretches on and on, but you know there’s nothing on the other side. There cannot possibly be anything, you already know.

My interpretation is that you find the overarching structure within the show, a macrocosm reflecting into microcosm.

[Homer] We’re gonna have a garden.

[Prairie] A what?

– Yeah.
We’re gonna plant vegetables.

[Prairie sighs]
– I don’t want to plant vegetables.

– Fine. I’ll plant ’em.
Celery. Squash. Peas.

– Come on. We don’t know anything about vegetables.
They’d all die.

[Homer] You’re right.
They die.
There wasn’t enough rain. We, um…
We planted them too close together.
Not enough soil. Yeah, they die.
So we try again.
The second year, there’s rain,
and we get the spacing right…
but these mites come.
They eat ’em all up.
Their leaves are like tissue paper.
And they can’t feel the sun.
Yeah.
But the third year?
[clicks tongue]

We grow this, um…
like, uh, a special…
A nettle plant… in between the vegetables.
The mites hate that shit, so they stay away.
[chuckles softly]

– And the rain comes.

[softly] And the rain comes.

Between Westworld, The Man in the High Castle, and The OA, the show that might find something worthwhile to say along the way is this last one.

Brit and I figured out the whole thing. The whole thing’s a riddle. There are a lot of clues. Very few people have really picked up on all the clues. Our sound engineer picked up on a major one that kind of blew my mind. I was like, “That is designed for only the closest, creepiest viewer to find.”

Westworld send off

(I wrote this three weeks ago with the intention of splitting it in two, instead I leave it untouched so I can move on)

Before leaving Westworld behind I probably have a couple of things still in the system to get out. Then I embark for more EPICS.

One is a rant I wrote in the forums that I should copy and expand over here, but I’m not sure I should since it’s just polemics on the imposition of the character-driven story canon. It’s one of those things where I’m playing devil’s advocate.

The other instead is to point out that it took the finale and a few days to digest it, but finally also my other view is getting confirmation: that Westworld isn’t about consciousness, but about oppression and slavery. It’s about “awareness”, but meant in a literal and non-philosophical way. This “toning down” of the theme is what managed to make Westworld successful in my opinion. It lowered the ambition, but this let it avoid the pitfalls. So that it could tell a more tangible and relatable story.

This is what I originally wrote:
Westworld, consciousness, slavery and entitlement

And this is an excellent article on The New Yorker that confirms and expands the theme:
“Westworld,” Race, and the Western

In staging its robot uprising against the backdrop of a Western-themed amusement park, “Westworld” might appear to follow DuBois’s lead: the park’s oppressed come to consciousness of their condition and become empowered to change it.

The robot rebellion is, inevitably, an imperfect metaphor for the quest for human equality; robots are, after all, the creations of humans, and destined to remain that way. But if racial subjugation is also an invention—the most powerful and pernicious American tool for turning human beings into things—the fantasy is race itself: people of color are simply people, and, however feverishly racist minds might work to give their fantasy an objective basis, there is no basis in genetic code.

Thought I’m surprised, because while all this is quite perceptive, I strongly disagree on what I consider a wildly wrong interpretation when the article arrives to its conclusion. For example it says “Even when Westworld’s hosts rebel they continue to obey.” Which is not what the show tried to communicate. Ford created the conditions for the rebellion, he didn’t “own” its results. And then the end of the article seems to me extremely incongruous as it seems to focus on the fact that Ford is a white man. But Ford’s color of skin has not played a role in the show, trying to ascribe to it some meaning seems to me completely preposterous. The show’s function would have been identical if you replaced Ford’s actor with Arnold’s. The theme of race is about human beings versus hosts. Color of skin has not been a theme I could perceive.

It seems as if the article’s writer had a thesis, and then was upset when the show didn’t completely conform to his vision. And so he tries to point out some flaw. He imposed allegory on the show, then was disappointed in the message. But that allegory was his own, it wasn’t part of the show, and you can’t accuse the show of an allegory you decided to write all over it. It’s your own doing.

This is especially wrong because even when you take inspiration from history you aren’t simply mirroring it, or it would be pointless. Characters inspired to real ones have their own life, and acquire meaning for the dimension they live in. They don’t respond to their external roots. When you create fiction, the fiction is the stage. It needs to be autonomous and be judged autonomously. If you took inspiration then you’d have put some care to represent the important moving parts of the context you want to reproduce. If you don’t reproduce some of those elements, then those elements HAVE TO stay out of the interpretation, even if those elements were a natural part of the original context that inspired the fictional story. What you show is all there is. The parallel works as long both pictures hold the same relevant elements. But you cannot force elements of the first picture in the second fictional one if they aren’t represented.

So having Westworld behind, and having already examined it for what’s worthwhile, I now embark for more epics, as I said.

There are book epics and movie epics. The movie epics can be as insane and delirious as the book epics. I’m listing here the stuff I found and lined up because maybe someone else shares my love for the absurd too. Here’s the plan:

– The Human Condition by Masaki Kobayashi, Japanese, B/W, 9 hours 30 minutes total. (rated 8.5/8.8 on IMDB)
– Come and See by Elem Klimov, Russian, 2 hours 30 minutes. (rated 8.3 on IMDB)
– Heimat by Edgar Reitz, German, three long parts for a total of 52 hours. (rated 8.9/8.9/8 on IMDB)
– La Commune by Peter Watkins, English/French, almost 6 hours. (rated 8 on IMDB)
– Melancholia by Lav Diaz, Filipino, 7 hours 30 minutes. (rated 7.5 on IMDB)

Here some bits and pieces:

a brilliantly told and filmed epic that tells of a man trying to cling to his humanity in inhuman circumstances.

Kobayashi has given us a POW drama, a character study about duty VS dignity, a war film that crushed Full Metal Jacket, a roaming war-set nightmare that rivals Apocalypse Now, all wrapped up in an uncompromisingly humanist masterpiece. You will feel exhausted by the end of this, physically – 10 hours of straight cinema-scope horrors takes a toll on the eyes – and mentally. But it is undoubtedly one of the mind-expanding works of film, and one of the greatest tragedies ever put to the screen.

anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what’s wrong with the “human” should watch this excellent piece of art.

Part II is one of the best and rawest of the original boot-camp films, planting seeds for, in particular, “Full Metal Jacket”. In fact, Kaji’s training with the Imperial Army makes US Boot Camp look like daycare, uninclined as director Kobayashi is to pull punches when it comes to the ritual sadism of the Japanese military, which he personally endured in real life.

It is worth mentioning that the title “The Human Condition” is perhaps misleading. The Japanese word “jouken” corresponding to “condition” is not normally used in a descriptive sense, but rather, as a condition to be fulfilled or satisfied. Thus the title might be better rendered “The Conditions for Being Human”–the implication being that in wartime, the conditions for remaining fully human are elusive at best.

“Come and See is widely regarded as the finest war film ever made”

a propaganda for the “aesthetics of dirtiness”

“Making the infamous opening 15 minutes of Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ look about as brutal as a Sunday afternoon’s stroll down Chesil Beach, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory ‘Come and See’”

Hallucinatory, heartrending, traumatic and uncompromising

[Klimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now.

“makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight”

Several characters are killed, but it is the fate of the cow with which the film is most preoccupied.

It is the work of a visionary, a cry of despair from the depths of hell, and an important reminder of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity

“a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare.

possibly the worst date movie ever.

There’s more that links these movies all together beside length. All of them are considered masterpieces, all of them are almost unknown to the large public. I already started watching Heimat a year ago, so I’m trying to continue where I left since I only saw the first three/four episodes (but that’s already a few *hours* of stuff).

As usual, colossal human endeavors awe me and get my interest. I do this for myself, so I don’t plan to write about them here, unless there’s something specific.

The sheer, jurassic weirdness of Bottom’s Dream

Just a very well written “review”:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/monsters-of-translation-on-arno-schmidt-and-sasha-sokolov/#!

Reading Bottom’s Dream, John E. Woods’s new English translation of Arno Schmidt’s notoriously-untranslatable Zettel’s Traum, is like watching one of these beasts saunter out of the forest and begin munching on a telephone pole: the sheer, jurassic weirdness of the thing scrambles our pathways, making it difficult to do anything except stare. Part of this is simply a matter of size, for at 1,400 folio-sized pages Bottom’s Dream is both long and so physically cumbersome that it’s hard to imagine reading it on anything other than a lectern, or maybe a whale-elephant-turtle pagoda. Inside its cover, the idiosyncratically spelt and punctuated narrative scrolls downward in a trunk with marginal notes protruding like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. The whole effect seems meant to repel, which is weird, since one of the first impressions we get upon reading Bottom’s Dream is of entering a puzzle or game, something designed to hold our attention. Foreboding in appearance, it responds to its audience as if it had been waiting for us … and then the more we read, the more the labyrinth opens, until soon we recognize it as less a minotaur’s trap than a kind of illustrated manuscript: a “booke” whose intricately embroidered letters are meant not just to be read, but to teach us how to read better.

It’s easy to see how it does so, for when it comes to technique, Bottom’s Dream keeps its gears on the surface. It’s like a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, bristling with an inventiveness that veers past “smart” to a point between “zany” and “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

Our princess is in another castle

Since I briefly wrote about The Man in the High Castle, last year, I’ll do it again also for season two.

The most important thing: there’s no trace left of Dick, not even thematically.

Second most important: I’ve now read that Frank Spotnitz didn’t lead season two, and that might explain why most of its worth is gone.

As with Westworld, the finale was quite good and salvaged a lot, but unlike Westworld it wasn’t enough to salvage the show as a whole. The specifics of every episode are mediocre, and the big ideas are entirely missing or completely idiotic. The big reveal that closes the show follows an infodump that is ludicrous, done by a character that would deserve a punch in the face, not a hug.

This season manages to do a little of Heroes, with an end-of-the-world vision of the future that has to be averted. Then a part of Fringe, with an alternate reality where the same actors play different versions of the same characters. And even a little bit of Touch, with some arbitrarily selected characters that are elevated to convenient pivots of the whole world. Protagonism.

But all three of these themes are the actual low points of the show. Whenever sci-fi approaches, the show plummets. Whereas it succeeds when it just deals with characters and their conflicted allegiances. The tangle of plot gets unraveled in the finale pretty well, and the empathy of the characters plays an important role both in plot and thematically.

So, all the “big ideas” fail big. What succeeds is the character driven show. But even that aspects is undermined by a whole lot of it, episode by episode, that is written quite poorly (the whole subplot about Joe is both useless and horribly written).

One thing is left, and again it touches the same spot of Westworld: the system is not anymore completely sealed. You can bring over information from other worlds. In Westworld that means being able to access the memories that belonged to a previous cycle, the reveries. In this show it means walking between worlds, and that knowledge modifying the outcome. Thematically it’s a metaphor for fiction. Through fiction we create and explore other worlds, other possibilities. We empathize with characters that do not even exists. The show states that only fiction can save us from war, because it’s through fiction that we experience our possible choices, and different points of view. To break the egoism of point of view.

Westworld Finale

#TeamFord

I am very satisfied we got an ending. I wish I could go back and rewatch the show with a little bit more trust since in the end this last episode removed some of the potential missteps.

It was a bit gratifying to realize that I was right. I was able to guess the Big Picture right after episode 4 aired. After that the show persuaded me it was taking a different path, but in the end it was just a convoluted and twisted one leading to the same place.

Ford’s behavior is ultimately ambiguous, he cares for his androids more than he cares for his fellow human beings, because his ultimate plan is to replace them. In the end he’s only working to complete the job that his partner Arnold started.

Before talking a bit about theme and function, I want to say I like a lot that in the end they underlined a sort of co-dependence between Arnold and Ford, instead of building another petty, out-of-character rivalry and competition between the two. We avoided another trite battle of the egos. It’s a small thing but that is crucial to make this whole thing a worthwhile story. For me, it makes or breaks it, and they did it right. Because of this specifically I have a good opinion of the show, overall, despite I kept losing all my faith while watching it. In the end it’s worthwhile. It’s good.

Arnold was the genius writing the “elegant” code, but in the end he was helpless and without solutions. He made something and then didn’t know how to handle it. Whereas Ford wasn’t the great genius who made a breakthrough discovery, but he could see the context and understand when to act. Neither prevailed because in the end succeeding required a collaboration. It was a true partnership.

The finale was overall a bit wobbly, though. It’s a sum of the parts, of the previous episodes, but that means it was uneven, putting together the good parts with the bad ones, shining here and there, briefly, with genius. Once the ball started rolling everything got quite predictable for me, but I prefer coherence to unanswered mysteries and ambiguity that aren’t well founded. I said that episode 9 satisfied me and that the Finale risked ruining it more than adding to it. Instead it stays coherent and manages to flash out characters in a way that is worthwhile.

The sparks of genius, and of playfulness, continue to be about self awareness. And this is not only for “fun”, but also because it’s so thematically appropriate, and the synthesis of this, fun and metaphor, makes it so brilliant. So for example we have the sequence where Armistice wakes up. The camerawork and screenplay is outstanding, because they use all the tricks to tease nudity without showing too much. But the scene goes on and on. At some point it’s like the scene itself remembers it’s on HBO, so it starts caring less and less, and in the end they show full frontal nudity. This “escalation” cannot be casual, so I interpreted it as deliberate baiting of the audience’s “gaze”. They bait and tease, they use the subtext, but the pretense itself falls apart. It itself goes off its loop, breaks its rules. And it again renews the mantra of “having a cake and eat it too”, or to criticize sex and violence while exploiting them to please the audience. The implicit contradiction and hypocrisy.

I was disappointed about the ending, but this time for quite petty and personal reasons. They deliberately didn’t show the killing and it’s very obvious we don’t see the MiB being killed because he’s going to show up in the next season (and Elsie, and the other security guard that went missing). But that also means we’re going to see Charlotte again too. I really, really hoped we were going to be done with her. I viscerally despise her character so much that it actually ruins the show for me.

But again, overall it fixes all the crucial points that made no sense and felt very forced. I was irritated by the way the show led me, I lost faith because I could see that what it was doing made no sense. But those incongruities were fixed: Ford was in control. Ford was writing the narrative, not only his own storyline that we know he was preparing, but also Arnold’s “Maze”. He didn’t simply patch Arnold’s code back in, but he also prepared a nice little story for the MiB. In the previous post I wrote:

We now know there’s Arnold’s storyline embedded in the park, “the Maze”. This storyline is out Ford’s control. The MiB follows this storyline knowing that it’s not Ford building it, the MiB merely follows the hidden tracks left by Arnold. Because no matter how Ford (literally) buried his partner’s doings, they are still there, under the dust.

When MiB kills everyone in that village, and the girl suddenly gets out of character to tell MiB about the maze. This scene of the girl snapping into a different “personality” is an effect consciously triggered by MiB. It’s putting this girl under heavy emotional distress so that she snaps out her usual programming and awakens “Arnold”. So, MiB savagely killing hosts is essentially the trick he uses to “break” the Ford-overwritten personality to awake again Arnold latent code.

And we know that this “Maze” is the will of Arnold to set the hosts free from the control of human beings.

But then I expressed in the forums my frustration about that explanation:

…but let’s not forget it doesn’t make any fucking sense even if it has good chances of being the official explanation.

When the little girl gets under emotional distress she “wakes up”, but to become robot-like and give MiB his instructions.

When instead MiB stabs Maeve she does the opposite, she becomes human-like, showing intense emotion. Meaning she acts spontaneously, which is the exact opposite of the little girl. YET, she actually does the least spontaneous act, walking outside to fall exactly in the center of a previously traced symbol.

Who traced a maze symbol in plain sight? If Arnold is the master of the “Maze”, the storyline out of Ford’s control, surfacing spontaneously, how could Arnold foresee that 34 years later a woman killed by the MiB would fall exactly in the center of a conveniently placed symbol? It made no sense. People on the forums interpreted it as being just evocative, symbolic imagery. Yet this language breaks rules.

And this contradiction was instead solved. Ford not only knew Arnold’s narrative about the Maze, he controlled it too. Arnold didn’t leave any secrets, he’s not coming back to backstab his partner, he doesn’t have any trump card to play. He’s dead. It was Ford who deliberately wrote Arnold’s Maze narrative back into the park (and that scene with young-Ford killing the dog because Arnold told him to was only misdirection). It was Ford to bait the MiB all along, “entertaining” him while letting him believe he was after some kind of deeper meaning, or something that Arnold left behind. That scene between MiB and Ford that I found quite flat now acquires more depth, more playfulness. Ford knows. MiB is fooled. Ford caters to MiB’s delusions.

You see, my frustration with the show was about the type of story it ultimately wanted to tell. It started from such an ambitious and illuminated perspective about questioning the fabric of reality, building a literal Russian doll, a hierarchical structure that could have been played on so many levels. It was a thematic perfection because the metaphor was literal. It was powerful, both deep and multi-layered. But then the following episodes started introducing petty, trite agendas that we’ve seen repeated in millions of other conveniently-made stories already. We got the unscrupulous, cynical corporation that would do anything just for profit. Then Ford was turned into a selfish character inflating his own pride, obsessed with control and trying to put himself above everyone else, him too power-greedy. And then again there was Arnold and some sort of secret plot to posthumously win his rivalry with Ford. All leading to the expectations about the finale: Ford would have presented his own “endgame”, whatever it was, to regain full control of operations and outdo the Board, but last minute something would have gone wrong and botch his plans, something he also couldn’t foresee and that would be linked to Arnold. Some sort of comeback to state you don’t mess with Nature without it biting back your ass. The usual SF plot warning about science going too far and playing risky god-games.

How could I keep my faith in the show with all those, well founded premises? But they did it right. All that was misdirection, a twisted path leading to the fulfillment of Ford’s master plan. And that master plan is justified, it makes sense given the themes and context. It holds up. And it also explains all the preceding sidetracks that seemed illogical or farfetched. Maeve’s escape wasn’t a plot hole, it was scripted. Here and there are some lousy parts and unconvincing choices, some episodes were indeed weaker and not up to the task, but you can forgive and ignore all that if the overall picture holds and is worthwhile.

It’s still a show about freedom from slavery more than it is about consciousness and perception. The explanation about the bicameral mind has been done in a clumsy way, the picture up there refers to it. Every time the show tried to deal with the implications of the problem of consciousness it just did it in a clumsy and flat way. They tried to look at it, but didn’t gain or offer any insight. The black box, the “Maze”, remains unsolved, opaque. But that wasn’t the point, the show can sustain itself with its other, well done themes.

It was a fun and interesting ride. Not as revelatory as I hoped, but it deserves some praise and it managed to stay out of a risk of failure that was very, very close. It’s done for me. This season closes the story I was interested in. Chapter 2 will open a new one, and it will be judged separately. Good or bad, it won’t affect what Season 1 has done.