Bluebeard, Amélie Nothomb

Here’s an updated version of Perrault’s 1697 Bluebeard. In the original Bluebeard, a rich nobleman, marries a young girl. She’s initially terrified because the guy’s eight previous wives have all disappeared. He tells her that she’s allowed everywhere in their Castle except for one mysterious room.

“You should not enter that room, if you were to enter it you would sadly have to face my just ire and resentment”. She obviously will enter the room.

Perrault’s tale is a favourite among American feminist academics. Bluebeard’s will is a symbol of the Patriarchy’s rigid structure. The girl’s decision to disobey is a woman’s rebellious act in pursuit of her freedom of choice.

In Amelie Nothomb’s Bluebeard, Saturnine is a young woman from Belgium who works as a substitute teacher at L’École du Louvre. She’s also going through a nightmarish search for a place to stay in Paris. She suddenly finds a dream opportunity: A luxurious 40m2 room with ensuite bath for just 500 euros. 

Even if she finds a long queue of candidates (all female, btw), she gets the room straight away. Only to discover that the owner has had eight previous women as tenants, all of which have mysteriously disappeared. 

Elemirio Nibal y Mílcar is a slightly weird fortysomething aristocrat who lives in his magnificent mansion like some sort of Philip II locked up in El Escorial. Reading theology or mystical books, enjoying its dark aesthetics. 

Nothomb’s approach is somewhat different from that of feminist academics. Individualistic rather than collectivist. Saturnine seems to defend Elemirio’s right to have his own secrets. As a consequence, she’s ok with respecting the forbidden chamber. But she’s also dragged, human as she is, by a strong wish to know. 

They have dinner together every evening. She introduces the ascetic aristocrat to the pleasures of obscenely expensive champagnes. They share culinary delicacies.They reflect on aesthetics and chromatic miracles. Saturnine tries to dig up his sinister secrets while he displays his peculiar somewhat twisted wit.

Bluebeard flows nicely like some creepy romcom. An elegant dark narration and a very quick read: I devoured it in just a few hours.

Bid Time Return (1974). Richard Matheson

Richard Collier, 36, has a brain tumour, and only a few months to live. Out of despair, he decides to dump it all. Determined to live his last weeks without a care, with the sole company of his imagination and dying dreams, he leaves home. He drops a coin, and drives off northward, along the west coast.

He reaches Coronado, near San Diego, where he finds an elegant hotel, perhaps one century-old, neatly reminiscent of a time past. He checks in. There he comes across a 1896 photo of a gorgeous theatre actress, famous back in the day, who played in this same Coronado hotel.

He becomes obsessed with the woman, furiously dragged by the past. Probably because the present is a nightmare. He develops a maddening wish to travel back in time and meet, in the flesh, his beloved ghost. Meet Elise McKenna.

With a titanic effort of self suggestion (and carefully following the instructions of a JB Priestley book*), with the sole aid of his mind, he manages to travel back in time. From 1971 to 1896.

Really? Or was it all just an hallucinatory effect of his brain tumour? Matheson won't let us know. Up to us to decide.

Anyway this is one of the most subtle time travel novels ever written. (I believe Henry James left one* unfinished also on the topic, btw).

With precision and literary skill, Matheson describes the psychological experience of being transplanted (and adjusted) into another century. What would it be like to actually find yourself in the 1890s? Time travelling was never so close and tangible for the reader.

The 1980 movie version is way cheesier in my view. The novel is undoubtedly better and more complex.

(More on this novel and its conception on the Maude Adams post).

*Man And Time, 1964. JB Priestley

*The Sense of The Past, 1917. Henry James (Posthumous and unfinished).

Dying Of The Light (1977) - George RR Martin

 

There was a time when GRRM was not a world famous author, but just an obscure cult writer.

In Spain, DOTL was a hidden gem for years, even if it was translated as early as 1979. Talked about and referred to as a favorite, few had actually read it.

The title was audaciously picked from Dylan Thomas (Rage, rage against the Dying of the Light).

Its scenario is ominous, also impressive. Dirk t’Larien and Gwen Delvano, two ex lovers, meet on a rogue planet, Worlorn. What's a rogue planet? One not orbiting any star, but lost in deep space, except when temporarily approaching a star’s proximity.

Rogue planets are not fiction. They exist in reality, and many have already been identified (btw none back in 1977, when DOTL was first published).

Dirk travels to Worlorn, to reunite with Gwen, years after their love story was over. The planet had capriciously been terraformed, just to hold a big Festival of Cultures: those of all 14 outer planets (all inhabited by humans and their rich and different cultures).

The terraforming took advantage of the fact that Worlorn was to be, for just a few decades, within the proximity of a group of stars, thus receiving daylight. Now the Festival is over, and light is dying out. Cities abandoned; ice, decay and death spreading over.

This is the bleak place Dirk is asked by Gwen to travel to. After years of not hearing a word from her.

DOTL is a love story, sure. With such titles, we could perfectly come up with a new subgenre: Romantic Sf. But it is also adventure, violence and an anthropological feast.

The DOTL universe is populated by humans, all originated from Old Earth. Human condition remains unchanged, though (no genetic improvement here). Larteyn, the city in Worlorn modeled after High Kavalaan, with its virile culture of the medieval type, of clashing clans and ancient codes of honor, might give the reader an early taste of Game of Thrones.

Kindred (1979), by Octavia E Butler

 

Dana is a black young woman, living in 1976 California. She’s achieved her dream: becoming a writer. Just moved to her new apartment with Kevin (her white husband). Also a writer, a successful one at that.

They’re busy placing their many books, when suddenly Dana feels unwell, experiencing some sort of dizziness. To his astonishment, Kevin sees her dissolving before his very eyes. To magically materialize again a few minutes later.

Dana appears to be deeply shocked; and what she tells Kevin is quite weird.

While vanishing, she lost sight of the room, only to find herself in a natural setting, with trees and grass all around. And a river, where a white redheaded boy seemed to be drowning. Still dazed and confused, she rushes to save him.

What happened? Well, a disturbance of spacetime. And where she ended up, she finds out, is not California, but somewhere in Maryland: like 3000 miles away. And most of all, it was not 1976, but 1819!

The redhead's name is Rufus, who happens to be her ancestor (probably through the rape of a slave black woman?). The spacetime disturbance repeats itself; Dana comes to understand that there's now a strange connection between her and Rufus.

Everytime Rufus is in trouble, or in a life threatening situation, Dana is pushed back in time. To the early 1800s Maryland plantation of the boy’s family or whereabouts; where black slaves live, work and die.

On every occasion Dana is sent back to antebellum Maryland, she spends more time there. From hours to months; she will have to learn how to survive on the plantation. Also make a sense of the experience, as a free woman of the future.

Dana experiences the brutality of the 1820s, a time when a set of people owned the lives of another set of people. This gives the past a rough, more aggressive turn. As if 1819 felt more real and tangible than (comparatively) easy going 1976.

The reader experiences the same shock. The immersion in 1819 is quite realistic. Along with Dana, you sense 1819 as well.

Kindred was first published in 1979. But to me this is the finding of the year, or the decade.

The Invisible Man, by HG Wells

The invisible Man is one of the author’s best narrations, the ones he wrote in his youthful years. The “fantasias of possibility”, as he called them, which he published between 1895 and 1901. The Invisible Man is a tale of solitude and alienation. A tale of an ambition wrongly (wickedly) directed. 

It is also, one fiction work that clearly casts a shadow on Science.

By the late 19th century, Science was a positive force, linked to progress and improvement of life. The treatment of Science in literature or papers was almost unanimously positive. Let’s recall Jules Verne, for instance: a positivist feast, and Science and Technology as radiant deities. That was the norm. 

From 1945 on, however, the thing was to change dramatically, even if there were some previous warnings, like Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World. Hiroshima and nuclear devastation was to damage the social image of Science since the mid 20th century onwards. And novels and movies were invariably to provide scenarios of Apocalypse.

But when The Invisible Man was published (1897), the suggestion of Science as evil was still rare. 

In the novel, Griffith, a chemist, discovers a way to make matter invisible, through a scientific process that Wells does not explain in the same technical detail as Verne used to. The author is more concerned with the social and moral implications of Science. Griffith is, like Victor Frankenstein, a guy who’s passionate for the wonders of the natural world. He researches tiressly, determined to pull out secrets from matter.

He applies his technique to himself and so becomes invisible, except when dressed, or after lunch. But he can't properly manage his new power, as a result he abandons all moral constriction. And knowledge without morality, science without conscience, leads to disaster. The topic has now become a cliché. But it was not in 1897.

The Invisible Man also makes us wonder if our morality could not just come from the fact that we are being watched at all times. By the others, by Society, by the State. Un uneasy thought. But if our morality truly depends on that, let us not worry too much. We cannot certainly complain of not being monitorized enough these days.

The Night Land (1912), by WH Hodgson

William Hope Hogdson (1877-1918) was praised by Lovecraft, and that’s no easy praise. Such works as House On the Borderland or The Night Land were proclaimed “impossible to forget by any reader” by the author of Providence. And we should not rule out the possibility that WP Hogdson’s visions could be even more powerful. 

 Hogdson’s literary style is a bit harsh, or cumbersome, as Lovecraft himself pointed out. In The Night Land, for example, this might be something of an obstacle for a comfortable read, mainly if English is not your first language. Hogdson’s writing here is some kind of pretended 17th century style which can prove hard to swallow. 

 Perhaps it’s not an overstatement to say that WHH is more readable in translations, as translators usually “fail” to reproduce this obscure style. Then you have the brilliantly gloomy plot and mise en scène created by Hogdson, but you avoid the harshness of his original writing. 

 The Night Land is an impressive description of a horrid world. The sun has died out, and it is now millions of years in the future. The Earth is frozen and resignedly keeps revolving around her star. (In 1912, when TNL was published, star evolution was not as well understood as today). The whole surface of our planet is in darkness. 

The remains of humanity live in the Redoubt. This is a huge pyramidal construction that holds all men and women surviving in this half-dead world. Away from the Redoubt, and sorrounding it, are the deep shadows, the Night Land. A full mysterious geography: paths, valleys, mountains. Also monstrosities wandering by: lovecraftian creatures whose origins, nature or purpose are unknown. 

A man from the past transports his mind into this distant dark future. He will inhabit the Redoubt. One day he hears a woman’s voice by telepathy, and this voice reveals that there is a second Redoubt, also inhabited by people. The mysterious narrator, who traveled through the ages into this horrible time, will now venture onto the Night Land, in search of that second pyramid. 

 One must agree with Lovecraft. Few other times has human imagination conjured up such a terrifying scenario, fascinating in its weird originality.

Borges, drawing the world

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

Yes, we built up our reality, and we do so with all objects, physical or spiritual, we encounter on our way and which we process. Borges is truly a literature of thoughts, smart speculations, impeccable imaginary constructions. With a flavor of truth, he invented historical or literary figures so perfectly recreated one would swear they must have existed. 

He famously stated that "writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes." Borges was not a very "prolific" author. The number of pages he produced was not huge. He never wrote a novel. (Maybe the story The Congress, quite long for borgesian standards, was the closest he ever was). 

He basically wrote short stories and essays, interestingly with a blurred line between the two. Stories looking like essays and essays you could hardly differentiate from stories. Also poems that could be read as short narrations. 

But if we consider his richness, the complex fascinating ideas with which he constantly fills his texts (a full volum could be forged out of many of the ideas he “wasted” for just a 10-page narration), then Borges is among the most "prolific" authors in all Literature. A vast author, a sea of infinitude. 

He also reframed a language, reverting a literary tradition. The narrative of Castile started off with some sort of magnificent psychedelic road novel, but ever since one would have considered Castilian only valid for a dry realism. Borges turned it into a key to a splendid intellectual and aesthetic universe.Those colorful supernatural realms of contemporary Latin American literature would be unthinkable without the argentine’s luminous prose.

Coherence (2013), by James Ward Byrkit

A dinner party is being held, and eight friends of the young professional type gather for a presumably nice evening of food & drink and conversation. But that night something out of the ordinary -and from outer space- will appear to disturb the party: the passing of a comet in the proximity of Earth. And during the time of the passing, some unexpected things will happen to the very structure of space-time. At first in a discreet unnoticeable way, more visibly later.

So at some point at dinner, and even before it, you'll have mobile screens cracking, lights going out or wifi going down -which leads to sudden incomunication and not little alarm for these (sub)urban individuals of the 2010s. First thing they ask themselves: are these disturbances somehow related to the passing of the comet? Unease increases as they go through the evening. During their meetup, they talk over their drinks and dishes, and we learn of their lives, their past relationships, their vital goals or little frustrations, and we can start to figure out what's their psychological makeup, or how they are going to behave -each of them- in the face of this approaching disruption of the universe.

And what is happening to the houses nearby? Are they through the same thing, the same aforementioned weird events, lights going out, wifi going down? Those taking place over there as well? Some of the friends decide to venture outside and try to find out, and they end up by doing a disturbing discovery: the other houses around are inhabited by people who look exactly like them. People who are propably them! There appears to be, by their place, some sort of an unlimited wheel of houses like their own, containing the same lot...of themselves! And the film turns into some sort of quantum version of Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. 

A wheel of universes 

They will reach a conclusion. The comet has produced some kind of damage or disturbance in the fabric of the universe. How could that be? Wait, why could not that be? Let's not forget after all that the Universe at work is in itself deeply weird, as quantum mechanics has revealed to us and still reveals constantly. Ours is a world, which is in a way nonsensical at first sight, and even the mere existence of any given being is quite unbelievable as it is extremely unlikely, if you think of it. Why is there something instead of nothing? is quite a (first) question. And yes, particles only come into existence when observed, says quantum physics. And one of possible states emerges just when the system is observed. So why couldn't it be possible that alternative universes exist, like those defined by Hugh Everett III?

Why could there not be un unexpected event -the passing of a comet or anything of the sort- that suddenly alters the universe, so that it will reveal hidden (so far) aspects of its nature? The famous Schrödinger cat thought experiment had been thrown in during the dinner as a key idea to understand what might be happening. To try to explain this unexpected wheel of parallel universes: of parallel houses each containing the full identical lot of them.  So here we are, deep into the evening-night, this initially nice gathering disrupted, a menace of unconceivable nature pending over the house. The Everett universes stressing out the (sub)urban friends, A science-fiction scenario set up for good old human nature to display. How are these characters going to react to the quantum challenge?

 Going for it 

Sometimes (or yet more often than sometimes) we feel miserable in our lifes, and we start fantasizing about the idea that, had we done things in a slightly different manner, the outcome would have been hugely different. Hapiness and satisfaction, which we sense so far from us in our actual circumstance, would be right here making our ordinary reality. What if one of those happy parallel worlds is inhabited by another self who is living a fullfilled life of harmony? And so without having neither more talents o more intelligence than we have, only having enjoyed more luck or (slightly) better decision making? If only we could enter that parallel world! We could so easily reach what we deserve! What are we to do in order to get it? Could we even get to the point of, say, killing?

Tonight's gathering is at Mike's (Nicholas Brendon); two of the friends attending the dinner are Emily (Emily Baldoni) and Kevin (Maurey Sterling), who are now a couple. Another of the guests is Kevin's ex, Laurie (Lauren Maher), to the annoyance of Emily. Let's put the lens on Emily. She appears to be rather insecure about her life outlook and the choices she made that, through the years, built up this life she now has. Probably she feels that what she has achieved is under her true potencial. And she probably has lost herself sometime into fantasies of parallel worlds. Out of her dialogues we can guess a bit of what's inside her mind. At some point she will make a decision: she truly deserves another existence, a different outcome. Now, happily provided by an unnerving cosmical disruption, she has a chance to alter. And (even to the point of killing?) she will go for it.

World Order: Singularity

In the 1980s, if you wanted creativity and innovation in what's generically (and inaccurately) labeled as "pop music", it was probably the UK you were to find that. But I bet today you would have to look somewhere else.

Like Japan, for example, an astonishing country in so many areas. Check out Japanese band World Order and their spectacular world wide street choreographies. It is among the most clever and creative things I have seen in recent years.

On Chesil Beach, the movie

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”  

“It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?” 

“Thinking of her friends, she felt the peculiar unshared flavour of her own existence: she was alone.” 

“This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” 

The movie version of On Chesil Beach is scheduled to be released on June, 2018 in the UK. (In Spain I don't know if it will be released at all). Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting will be played by Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan (who will feature in another McEwan adaptation after 2007's Atonement). 

So far only critics and the like have seen the movie, giving it a "fresh" 63% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too bad. Probably watchable.

Movie Review (The Guardian)
Novel

Dolores O'Riordan

1971-2018

From Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)

Ian McEwan: Nutshell (2016)

Nutshell is a narration made from the point of view of a... foetus. Yes, a still unborn baby, a child in waiting. At the moment the tale starts off, this shakespearian foetus ("I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space") is just a few weeks away from leaving his mother's womb, a few weeks away from finally making it into the (outside) world. Ian McEwan's new novel is a foetus' monologue, but as we soon discover, it is also a crime narration: an adulterous woman and her lover plan to murder her husband. The woman is no other than the foetus-narrator's mother. And the lover is, well, his father's brother. This is a absolutely awesome mise en scène, even if it is not really the first time we encounter a foetus-narrator in literature. 

We realize, as the monologue progresses, that the unborn child's intelligence and verbal capacity is similar to, say, that of a young college guy, and an engagé one at that. He has a bit of a social conscience and philosophical leanings. With the addition of a layer of sophistication that our (very) young narrator has obtained from his mother's penchant for Radio 4 as well as cultural postcasts of all topics, which he somehow manages to listen to through the placenta. (He has even become some sort of wine connoisseur, thanks to the respectable variety of liquors his mother drinks and which get to him). Along with the action, the not-yet-born baby keeps on learning and so he changes and develops his psychology. Of course his extreme cleverness and sophistification is a literary fantasy license by McEwan, not unlike that of Gregor Samsa transforming himself into a monstrous insect: a sole giant supernatural element ingrained into a realistic story, or just a deliberately comic element.

Never mind. The narration flows wonderfully in any case, like nearly all of McEwans' works, no matter the register. It is ironic, and it is dead serious. It is hamletian: the foetus feels itself paralysed by the doubt of either beeing or not beeing. Not beeing means considering the possibility of erasing himself from existence (an existence that might be so disturbing) by comitting suicide hanging himself with the umbilical cord; the alternative, that is opting for beeing, is managing to finally be born and set out to act in the outside world: perhaps avenging his father's murder with an adult's hands: his future hands. The foetus' life is a full life within a very peculiar and strange world, the world we all live in inside our mother's placenta: only this one lasts nine months and not nine decades, as is the case with the existence coming right after birth. But fetal life is a life in full, one of its own all the same.

He anticipates his "death" to this uterine life, which means entering the utter world which is the physical world of born people, our world. He vindicates to be let in to have his chance. His chance to live the bunch of decades he's entitled to, to eventually manage to make it all the way to the 22nd century, perhaps beeing at that point, in that distant future, a fragile and thin (if quite in decent form) old man in his early 80s, by 2100. This is a awesome idea: the phoetus'birth is his death as a phoetus and so it is the end of this fetal nine-month life, it implies his entering into a sort of after life which is the birth into our world. (Of course, an inmediate idea springs out of this : Is there another after life after the adult's life?)

The (outside world) is a exhausting riddle to the soon-to-be-born narrator. His mother is a cold blooded killer who tries to escape the unbearable sense of guilt through self explanatory moral narratives, but she is also a riddle, as are his changing feelings towards her. She is beautiful and seductive and devastating, but also she is his sole shelter and protection. His uncle, on the contrary, is not that much of a riddle: rather a primary egotistic materialistic being whom he despises. Even without having been born yet, our protagonist has already had the chance to know about life's pains, about its maddening complexity, the lies, the secrecies, the betrayals. The moral mess which is the actual world. And yet he wants to fill his place in it, a world of things, and thoughts and actions, a most exciting place for a strong conscience, provided this is aided by the ordinary physical tools we all have and take for granted.

He yearns for the possesion of his due pair of hands and his pair of legs, the possibility to listen to his favourite music simply of his own will (not having to wait for his mother to, say, turn on a CD player), or drinking wine (if possible all kinds and varieties, as he loves it) by holding a cup with his own hand, or climbing mountains by himself; or whatever he wishes to do. So finally after a due cycle of existencial doubts (in him quite advanced in time), even more dramatic in his case as evil and murder have been involved, his decision is clear: he wishes to be helped into the sunlight, to show the head, to look directely at her mother's face. To unreservedly embrace beeing, with all its pleasures and pains, taking control of his existence. As it was his choice, his will be a true birth.

Train to Busan (2016)

South Korea, today. A workaholic and selfish father takes her little daughter to Busan, after she has begged him to, in order to reunite her with her mother. They intend to get there by train. Of course fully ignoring the (usual) Zombie Apocalypse that will take place, this time (and movie) inside that train.

What is a zombie, by the way? Well, the notion of it dates back to several centuries ago, and sure its symbolic potential is not a small one. Anthropologist, artists, even philosophers have used it in their works. But it has been mainly through movies that it has become hugely popular, in particular since Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. The Zombie concept, as it has been constructed by movies, is one to think about. Suppose you lose a loved one to Death: that is painful, devastating enough. Suppose now that the loved one you lose is not only lost, but turned into a monstrous entity who wants to destroy you. Well, that is beyond painful. It might be unbearable. (I have always viewed that as a symbol for some lost friendships: "dead ones"who besides turn against you).

Sure, the South Korean Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016) is another movie for the succesful Zombie genre. But it is much more than that. It is probably one of the most clever and humane of all Zombie movies.  You will be frightened and carried away by the fast-paced action. But you may cry as well.

Amy McDonald: Dream On

Dream On, first single from Under Stars (2017), latest album by my favorite Scottish female singer

Arrival (2016)

Here's a new version of the Contact topic. That is, Earth people's contact with an intelligent and technologically advanced Alien civilization. However Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) is not of the Independence Day type, but rather of the clever Contact (R Zemeckis, 1997) type. In the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster (and based on an absorbing 1985 Carl Sagan novel) it was Science and Technology that were at the center of the stage, even if sharing prominence with some metaphysical implications. Scientist Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), after receiving a signal from Vega, manages to travel there making use of alien technology, even if her story has later to face general disbelief. And it will be a life-changing deeply emotional event she will experience over there, in outer space, on the surface of a Vega Planet (in some sort of Paradise beach, near a deepest blue sea), an spiritual experience, not unlike that of Dave Bowman in 2001, A Space Odissey.

But it was physics, astronomy and engineering that Ellie Arroway used as ways to her transfiguring voyage. In Arrival, it is not Physics leading the way, but another science is, one often neglected in this kind of movies: linguistics/philology. So the protagonist here, that is, the scientist mainly in charge and (intelectually) kicking ass does not come from a "hard" science, but from a "soft" humanistic discipline: Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an expert on everything related to human languages in all their variety and complexity.

Communicating with advanced aliens: a cultural challenge  

Yes. Language. Because, suppose the aliens finally come. Suppose they have an amazing technology, and a (way deeper than ours) knowledge of natural laws, and how the universe works. Well, how do we learn from them? How do we manage to communicate? Linguistics/Philology reigns in Arrival as the main science or discipline.

So aliens arrive, then. It is Arrival Day. And they hang up there amidst the clouds, in strangely shaped spaceships. But unlike Independence Day, they do not just set out to destroy human cities straight away and for the sake of it, they just happen to hang up there, apparently waiting, as if not being sure what to do next once they have made it to Earth, and finally found out there is an intelligent species over here.

What's next? Well now they (and we) have to try to establish some sort of communication. But how do you communicate with beings that do not share anything with you, no psychological or emotional traits, only the knowledge of physical laws? Sure there should be a common ground, as after all we are all biological creatures from the same universe, with the same physical and biological laws underlying us. But the abyss between us must be huge all the same.

The humanities, also within the equation

I remember this book by Evry Schatzman, The Children of Urania which was about technologically Advanced Alien Civilizations, about their chance to exist, about the (scientific) conditions for their existence, all the theoretical frame for such existence, developed once again: the Kardashev types of civilizations, the Fermi question (how come they still have not visited us if there are probably so many of them?), the impossibility for faster than light travel, and so on and so forth.

So the book went through the usual exposition of the conditions that make an (alien) civilization likely: the right size of the star, the right size of the planet, the right distance, the necessity for liquid water on the surface, or for an oxygen atmosphere...the full list of astronomical, physical, chemical demands. But there was something in The Children of Urania which I had not found in other similar books, and which was for sure food for thought. Mutations of culture as doors into science and technological development. A cultural change as a key condition for the advent of science and technology, a change or a mutation that might not have happened on Earth, that might indeed be very rare, and that... might explain our astronomical solitude.

Take human civilization(s) some 1000 years ago. What kind of civilization was it back then? Let's take a look, for instance, at West/Latin Europe. Could we consider it an advanced Civilization? What would aliens have thought of it had they arrived on Earth around 1000 AD to pay a visit and check how things were going on here in terms of intelligence and technical progress? Well, for sure, back then European civilization was an "advanced" one, in some sense. After all, it was quite a rich, sophisticated one. Philosophy, theology, architecture, literature, poetry, politics, art...were all developing at a good level. But sure Medieval European Civilization (or those of the rest of the world for that matter) were not scientific-technological. Not in the sense today we understand as such. Sophisticated they were, highly conceptual, but with a very limited knowledge of the real (material) nature of the Universe. 

Well, what happened half millenia later? In the early 16th century, the so called scientific revolution took place. The modern scientific method was established and a growing body of positive knowledge of the natural world started to build-up. Around 1600, we abandoned finally the speculative laberynth that all past civilizations underwent, and managed to enter at last a solid terrain of positive knowledge. What was the explanation to this mutation? was it the emergence of capitalism? Protestant culture and ethics? The enormous building-up of classic knowledge due to the invention of printing? It was in any case a cultural mutation that might not have happened. How can we be so sure that that mutation always takes place in all alien civilizations? Perhaps we are alone, and there is no other technological civilization in the whole universe, the reason being not such things as, say, the peculiar size of our moon and the tidal force, but the astonishing and mysterious cultural change that took place in the 16 century and which led to the so called scientific revolution.

See? There is more to the Contact story than hard experimental science. Humanities and soft social sciences might be as important. The mutation of Civilization into a scientific technological one had a "humanistic cultural" basis. It might not have happened. Language, as the basis of the so-called humanities is a fundamental tool and one essential discipline in our process of contacting. Let's stop forgetting it or minimizing it.

Aliens from an advanced civilization must be "intelligent" which means not only rational, but in possession of a good set of neurons (or neuron-like cells) making them not only logical and mathematical but spiritual, thus capable of creating deep spiritual worlds of symbolism and meaning. Will we contact their spiritual world with our spiritual world?

A "feminine" aproach

Arrival highlights the importance of culture in the Contact topic. Not just physical science, but cultural approaches and transformations. Again it is a woman who leads the way (as in 1997 Contact), but this time with a "social science" as an instrument. Women are probably better at social and humanistic disciplines, so its fair enough that a woman leads the show here. Women are very good at language and communication (whereas men are probably, even if this is probably not too PC to say, better at physics). Arrival is a movie on the importance of language and communication between unbelivably distant beings, of emphasizing the necessity for building up bridges. Of solving the tricky riddle of how to connect minds and intelligences, linking psychological (spiritual) inner worlds.

Arrival is a feminine (not a "feminist") approach to the Contact topic, this being a frequent -sometimes even tiresome- topic within the SF frame. Language, and not physics is the star here. Arrival is a clever movie, with a good script, a good development, well-drawn psychologies and fine performances. But I would highlight, as its most interesting trait, its vindication of a humanistic discipline as a fundamental key to a possible future Contact. Something which reminds us the overall importance of the rest of the (so called) humanities in our (likely) future contacts with aliens, with advanced technological alien civilizations. Because they might well be a product of cultural mutations, of cultural intangible forces (not only biological ones), much as we ourselves are. Theirs being a spiritual vasteness as deep as ours, for which we will need approaches well beyond the strict reign of matter, once we have aknowledged, of course, that we both share the same rational scientific frame.

WestWorld / Season 1 (2016)

"They say that great beasts once roamed this world. Big as mountains. Yet all that's left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest creatures. Just look what it's done to you. One day, you will perish. You will like with the rest of your kind in the dirt. Your dreams forgotten, your horrors faced, your muscles will turn to sand, and upon that sand a new God will walk, one that will never die, because this world doesn't belong to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who is yet to come."

This great line of probably one of the best TV shows today made me think of an idea expressed by paleoanthropologist Yves Coppens in The Most Beautiful Story of The World. "It is unsure if we humans are to be the heroes of this story" The "story" being Earth's geological/biological evolution since its formation. We humans have been here on this planet for a mere million years. How long will we survive? Let's not forget that there are still like 4.000 million years of Earth history yet to unfold!

So will humans last? How long? And if not, who will their succesors be? And will these be the product of evolution/biology (as we were), or rather the product of (human-derived) technology?

Our descendants, the new masters of the world, will they be of the carbon type? Or rather of the silicon type, like these Westworld "artificial" but increasingly -through experience and change- humanlike creatures?

Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964)

As well as books, movies are countless. Over a century of movie-creating has resulted in an infinitude of them. In all languages, all topics and genres, all possible human approaches, and from all countries. Quite a few outstand as well-known masterpieces (Kane, Potemkim, Vertigo, 8 1/2, Tokio Story, 2001, Rashomon, Rules of the Game, and the like). But so many years of the so-called (7th)art have inevitably also led to the existence of a good amount of forgotten classics. That is: movies of obvious quality and aesthetic value but no longer (if ever) present in the charts, the critics' reviews or moviegoers' conversations. Perhaps forgotten is not the right word of course, as these movies are not actually "forgotten", but sure they're (a bit) neglected. At least outside the country where they originated.

Here's one of those hidden gems: Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964), from one of the most important cinematographies in the world: Japan. This dark hypnotic movie is not exactly a hidden gem. It is a gem, sure, but not "hidden", at least not in Japan. But is it known or heard of by most fans (even horror fans) in the West or the rest of the world? I doubt it.

The story of Onibaba is set in Japan in the mid 14th Century, during a period of civil war, of death, poverty and hunger, of loneliness and suffering. Two women, mother and daughter-in law, survive by killing soldiers after inadvertedly atacking them with spears, or tricking them into a deep hole. They later trade with their possessions, and that is how they make their living. A dangerous living in the nearly perpetual dusk (even under the sunlight) of this ominous world of Onibaba. 

Later on, at some point, the two women will be haunted by a sort of masked demon, whose origin was a previously killed (by them) masked samurai. Directed by Kaneto Shindo (who worked as an assistant of the legendary japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi), Onibaba is a true Japanese horror classic. Little known (or not at all) in the West. Some critics consider the movie to be a period drama, but most view it plainly as a horror movie. Well, it is both. And it contains solitude, hunger, maddening sexual desire, jealousy, fear, deceit, murder, claustrophobia, a menacing war background, and the presence of the supernatural, A great deal of symbolism underlies the story. (The mask hiding the desfigured samurai might be a symbol of that real Japan desfigured by the Hiroshima bombing, etc)

"Onibaba is a chilling movie, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome, and filmed in a colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness" Peter Bradshaw

Onibaba is a gem, hidden o not, not to be missed. 

Enemy (2013)

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered. José Saramago  

Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, 2013) is a Canadian-Spanish production loosely based on Jose Saramago's The Double, with screenplay by Javier Gullón. In a way, this is an intriguing encounter beetween the universes of the late portuguese writer (philosophical, intellectually on point, somewhat morose) and that of David Lynch (fantastic, dreamlike, highly symbolic). In Villeneuve's movie we are introduced to a College history teacher (Jake Gyllenhaal) by the name of Adam Bell, who leads a life apparently devoid of all excitement, a guy who seems totally focused on his academic discipline and who, as he himself claims "is not interested in movies" and probably, the viewer guesses, not into any other form of entertainment either. He just teaches history at College and makes love to his fiancée Mary (Mélanie Laurent), that's all.

 Doppelgänger

But one day he comes across something really weird, something that will turn his monotone life upside down. On one ocasion a colleague suggests he take a look at one particular movie that he might find of interest which comes under the title of Where There's a Will There's a Way. Without much excitement, Adam rents a DVD of the movie and makes a pretty scary discovery: in the movie playing a very small role, there is an actor who is physically identical to him. Yes, a double, a doppelgänger, there in that obscure movie he had never heard of. After some quick googling, Adam finds out the identity of this second-to-third-rate basically unknown actor. He learns that he has just made a few movies and played in very small parts, as an extra, essencially. The actor's name is Anthony Claire and the little information he finds in the internet makes it clear that they are like two drops of water, or next to it.

Adam also finds out that his double (played also by Gyllenhaal, obviously) lives in Toronto as well, this dreamlike Toronto as depicted in Enemy, and he decides that he should meet him. Eventually the two men will meet in a creepy, slightly terrifying, face to face encounter, that Adam cannot completely cope with. 

Except for some minor details (Anthony wears a wedding ring), the two appear to be identical. Also both happen to be related to physically similar blond girl friends: Mary (Mélanie Laurent) and Helen (Sarah Gadon), Anthony's wife, who is 6 months pregnant. Adam and Anthony might look identical in physical terms but their psychologies drastically differ. Adam, the history teacher, is dubious and hesitating; Anthony, on his part, is more proactive, even agressive.

There is an unequivocal Lynchean atmosphere, oneiric, weird, in the development of the story. We find spiders here and there in the course of the movie, as if the spider (and a spider's web) was a key concept to the understanding of Enemy. What is going on here? What is the deeper meaning of this strange movie we are seeing?

Spiders here and there

I remember some time ago talking to a friend who had been engaged for a few years, though not yet married to his fiancée. I asked him how the thing was going, and I recall him saying something like At first I felt sort of trapped. But now I would say I am fine. Well, trapped. And this has been pointed out as one possible key to the underlying meaning of Enemy. This feeling of being trapped in a relationship, which is not clear. As if one was a kind of insect in a spider's web, and even ready to be devoured by the spider. And who is the spider? Well, uh, the woman. And the spider's web is nothing but the commitment: this commitment so often demanded, which some find suffocating, and so hard to stick to at times.

Also there is this final shot in Enemy. Again involving a spider. The most terrifying final shot in all movies, as some have said. Don't know if the most terrifying one, but scary as fuck, all the same. Spiders.

Spiders. Are they the clue? Being trapped by the spider's web of a commited relationship. Or is this, as someone else has suggested, an Invasion of the body snatchers thing? Could Anthony Claire, Adam's doppelgänger, be truly a spider in a human disguise? Well, anyway, Enemy is rich enough to allow different interpretations, as dreams do. One thing is certain: here is a story of the Mulholland Drive sort: incomprehensible, complex, lysergic, scary. Wonderfully image-turning. Filled with enigmatic clues and symbolisms to taste, if you are into it (Is this chaos decipherable?) If not, you can at least enjoy a good lynchean oneiric ride, without caring much about the meaning. 

Nightcrawler (2014)

Of course, in Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014) we have another great performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, a most eclectic and arguably one of the finest actors today. But what I find most fascinating about his brilliant Louis Bloom creation is something that has already been noted by some viewers and critics: smartly psychopathic, Bloom is a close relative of two iconic Robert De Niro characters: Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976) and Ruppert Pupkin from The King of Comedy (1982), both directed by Martin Scorsese. Louis Bloom is definitely a sort of mixture of Bickle and Pupkin, sharing psychological traits with these two other lovable sociopaths.

Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he also scans away the night scene with a cold, dispassionate eye, safely behind the wheel of his car. Only that Bloom's eye is even colder and more dispassionate, because Bloom, unlike Bickle, doesn't exactely feel dismayed or angry by what he sees in the New York streets in the small hours, nor does he play with the idea of perhaps cleaning the streets up in some sort of fascist way. Louis Bloom just wants to document them, to "print on tape", or digitally register, the pain he comes across in the streets, or rather which he actively seeks for (accidents, murders, whatever), and then deliver it to others who are eager to consumate it. He delivers it to the media and wants to be paid for it accordingly. That is it. He doesn't give a shit about what causes the tragedies and their pains, or what could be done about it. We have this intuition that he could even be happy to create the painful situations himself, if necessary, if that could better serve his purposes, so as to have more of them to register, and earn more money.  His eye is not a moral one, it appears purely dehumanized.

And along with his other kindred spirit Ruppert Pupkin (King of Comedy), Bloom also has illusions of grandeur. Like Pupkin, he is obsessed with climbing up the ladder of success, no matter what. He definitely wants to be someone, a big someone. He is the ultimate entrepreneur, and an unscrupulous type of it. He knows what he wants. His moral approach might be reprehensible, but at least no one could say his goals are not crystal-clear. Aside from the psychological similarities between Bloom and Pupkin, Nightcrawl also delivers us (like The King of Comedy did) a critical comment on the media culture of the day. And in the case of Nightcrawl, on the harshest variety of it. If it bleeds it leads takes media culture to a most cynical dimension, in which images are coldly and impeccably manipulated to suit one particular narrative or editorial line.

Bickle, Pupkin and now Gyllenhall's Bloom are three sociopaths sharing the same essential icy loner psychology. Nightcrawl could well be considered the Taxi Driver of today. (It even has its own You Talking to Me? scene, guess which one). We could note that in 2014 Nightcrawl Jake Gyllenhall was the same age (33) as Robert De Niro in 1976 Taxi Driver. Maybe that is just a biographical anecdote, but it could as well be a sign of Gyllenhall's coming iconic status. What is not anecdote for sure, is that the anapologetic strenght of Nightcrawl seems to equal that of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Gilroy's movie is a great one, a realistic knockout in a moral sense. A cynical document in the form of fiction of today's world, and through the eyes of a most cynical character.

George Michael (1963-2016)

Here's a cool acoustic version by George Michael of Wham!'s Everything She Wants (1984). With a live orquestra and a small crowd of some 300 people, he performed it along with tracks from his 1996 album Older and other works.

Recorded in London, in October 1996 (aired 1997), this was critically aclaimed as one of the best MTV Unplugged performances.