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Aronofsky and Recasting Creation in the Anthropocene

Before Mother! was a critical darling, I think you can find seeds of Aronofsky recasting creationism from a darker perspective — informed by the extra-humanism of the Anthropocene (a perspective I live inside of a lot) — in, of all things, Noah. Which is a testament both to his vision as a writer and a stunning exposure of how the film industry operates, seeing as this interpretive rebuke got funded as a faith-based inspirational.

The visionary subversion at the heart of Aronofsky’s treatment of the Biblical flood is the conceit that God did not intend for humanity to survive. That He chose Noah because He needed someone to build the Ark, and intended that Noah’s offspring not be able to reproduce thereafter. This is pretty sharp stuff. Aronofsky interrogates the creation myth, and uncovers lurking in it a wholly alternate reading, one that exposes how nakedly we have privileged ourselves in the dominant interpretation of the story.

Aronosky’s interpretation instead privileges nature. Noah is deeply invested in calling back to the Garden of Eden, invoking its perfection (man in the Garden is central to the recurrent visions that tell him to build the Ark), and interpreting the task of saving two of every creature as recreating that perfection. In that reading, man is a pollution on the garden. Man’s survival through the flood therefore becomes our history’s formative error. In the film, God commands Noah to kill the newborn daughters of his assumed-infertile daughter-in-law while they are still on the Ark. Noah is morally incapable of carrying out this command. In some service to the dominant myth, Emma Watson gives us a pat explanation that this was God’s way of seeing whether man deserved to live or die – if Noah, uniquely situated to judge his fellow man after fighting to survive them all, could see it in his heart to exterminate the species, the choice would be self-justifying (we do get a bit of commentary from the avatar of man’s immorality in the film, a local warlord descended from Cain, that man’s defining quality is the ability to kill, which Noah cannot here). If not, then it would be because man deserved to live on.

But Noah doesn’t seem too assured of his own (purportedly) divinely-endorsed wisdom. Noah interprets his choice as a moral failure (and hell, Noah stabbed plenty of guys fending them off from the Ark earlier, didn’t he?). In a call-back to the Eden motif, the Biblical account of Noah later falling drunk and naked and being seen by Ham, who was therefore exiled, becomes an expression of Noah’s depression at dooming creation to suffer man’s evils again. Noah’s dipso mindless state, his nakedness, evokes a subconscious appeal to the Garden perfection he was attempting to revive, and Ham’s sin of knowledge of his father’s nakedness perpetuates the cycle of the fall (the genetic determinism theme here is also well-played – the film focuses on exterminating the spawn of Cain, who have become dominant, in the flood. The spawn of Ham, similarly, have been posited as a cursed line in some racist Biblical interpretive history).

The significance of Noah’s agency in even making the choice, though, is key to the moral doubt we are left with as an audience. The creator leaves it to Noah to interpret man’s worthiness in the world, effectively ceding the role of creator. Noah’s moral uncertainty suits the moment. The creator has expressed a kind of divine indifference to man’s fate, and so man lives on regretfully. When God exits stage right, it is almost as if to say that we have inherited the earth now, and tough luck, jerks. He will not wipe us out again because He has left us responsible for our own moral failings. Noah is drunk on the beach in a blinding depression because in violating God’s directive, he has asserted himself over the creator, and the creator is content to concede that authority to us. Noah cannot bear the responsibility he has claimed (which is a pretty resonant theme for us here in the Anthropocene, acting as gods over our planet).

The fact that this got marketed as a faith-based inspirational shows how stunningly little respect the studio has for that market. A quick CGI of the strobe-light rainbow at the end is basically all the service their reading of the myth gets here.

In the Anthropocene, we’ve broken down certain conceptual barriers between us and, well — everything that isn’t us — the animals (Darwin), the climate, the sum of natural resources on the planet. We have the means to understand our role in creation in a radically different way than we did in the year 1800, and culture (again, I posit) is still trying to react, break open its models of storytelling from explaining everything in terms of man’s relation to man to interrogating man’s relation to anything/everything extra-human.

One of the most pointed ways we can mark this shift in perspective is not the creation of new myth, though. It’s showing the marginal shift in old myth to stay relevant. It’s reinterpreting the myths that define our species in a way that specifically marks the evolution in our thinking. That’s what I really appreciate about this recent tear that Aronofsky’s on, he’s invested in documenting that evolution.

Climate, Latour, and post-modernism as Best Fact’s best friend

Last week: a beautiful piece in the NY Times on Bruno Latour, post-modernist philosopher who famously critiqued the way we think about science going back to the ’70s — that its findings are not objective, but based on a network of human relations that agree to support certain processes of scientific inquiry — that those networks and agreements and processes can be called into question — that what we call a fact in one social environment might be created or construed rather differently in another —

all of which naturally put him in an uneasy relationship with the scientific community (he’s been memorably asked if he believed in reality) —

and which, naturally, these days, seems like it might have been an irresponsible line of questioning to have started down, seeing the corroded state of institutional authorities and what passes for truth now in our politics.

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The gist of the article, however, being that Latour is returning to science now, in the post-truth political moment, not with his tail between his legs, but perhaps with answers. If post-modernism breaks down authority, it does it to reveal how authority is (or should be) constructed.

“Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims …. [emphasizing] the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information. The climate denialists, by contrast … [have] none of this institutional architecture …. [These are] the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established.”

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There is, of course, capital-R Reality. It sits around us all the time, letting us stub our toes, and doesn’t talk much.

When we start talking about it, though, we start creating a social reality. And there’s an awful lot of Reality that we can’t very well comprehend unless it comes mediated to us by some story that we socially create. I can stub my toe on this rock and pretty well comprehend an aspect of physical reality. But if I’m to understand that said rock is 99% empty space between its atoms, we’re going to need to tell a whole chain of stories to get me there.

Those stories are only as good as the networks, agreements, processes we use to create them. These determine how closely or usefully that social reality gets to Reality. It’s in interrogating that process (taking it out of its “black box,” Latour would say) that we can really assess the quality of our facts.

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There are going to be competing social realities. That’s the dirty social truth implied in Latour’s early work critiquing scientific authority. It’s not enough to claim self-sanctifying objectivity, because you don’t have it. And if you can’t admit to the subjectivity of all processes, you’re not prepared to win an argument about why yours is comparatively better.

Or, put another way: post-modernism is popularly misconstrued as the enemy of Fact — but in truth, if we use its insights to our advantage, it might be Best Fact’s best friend.

“Self-Similar” out in The Yale Review

Many thanks to Susan Bianconi,  a recent flash fiction of mine, “Self-Similar,” is out today in The Yale Review.

As a light sleeper/vivid dreamer, once in a great while I have the pleasure of waking up having dreamt something that’s the seed of a story or a song. This is a flash fiction, so at 600 words or so, I would say almost the whole thing was there on waking. I typed it out first thing in the morning.

Ice Sings

The Washington Post reports that vibrations in ice sheets can be recorded and condensed to capture the sound of a melting event. Thus manipulated, one can hear the pattern of melt in the tones day by day, and the shifting pitch is likened to song.

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In semiotic theory, what composes a sign and a signified is subject to your school of thought. Charles Pierce, who developed triadic sign theory, opined that signs are not limited to artificial symbols we consciously create to refer to things outside of the system of language. Rather, that there is no outside to the system of language. “All this universe is perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” he proclaimed. He coined the term representamen for the natural object which exists in such a relation to its environment to effectively act as a sign on its environment. “Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun.”

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Semiotics asks us to listen to the environment and find relations and patterns which can aid us in creating a mental reality that reflects or expands on the physical. Art asks us to find the aesthetic in those patterns. Traditionally, the former leads the dance. What’s beautiful and a little stunning is when we require that sense of the aesthetic in order to find the semiotic sense of a thing. We understand that the ice sheet is speaking because it is already mirroring song.

Platform

On a Sunday afternoon, with to the tune of Sven-David Sandstrom, with two pints of tea and a regular stream of of self-induced distraction (what is the cat doing now?), J.R. Gerow built himself a platform.

If it all appears terrible, you may find your way to the contact page and let me know personally, whereby you will be promptly added to the mailing list.

Writing Mass Trauma

Without dumping on anybody’s work in particular –

Writing about mass trauma is tricky. There is a temptation to write paradigmatic — to essentialize the conflict into your characters so as to say you’ve done it justice — but then you’re probably in a derivative story, paying dues to the tragedy without saying anything new. I’d rather find novel characters and conflicts within the mass, even if they’re not representative — giving new faces and stakes to the subject, which begin to suggest to the reader how many staggering different experiences in absentia must be buried within that mass tragedy. Think of the guy in The Pianist – what do we remember about that movie? It’s not the Holocaust. It’s watching him play air piano in the middle of the Holocaust. It’s watching how much he aches to press his fingers down onto the real keys. It broadens what that tragedy means for us.

So use mass tragedy, but give us something bizarre and wondrous and new in the middle of it. Leave us with a sense of wonder at all the other infinite possible worlds that must be balled up inside of it.

Annihilation, Translated

The new (-ish, as in, this year, but I don’t buy movie tickets anymore) Annihilation movie is a beautiful adaptation that really does mutate the source material – see Emily Hughes, who so smartly put it, “How much can you change something before it’s a different creature? The novel asks that question, and the movie embodies it” – but the most significant level at which the material changes has less to do with whether or not we get the Wall-Creeper or any other particular plot point – it’s that it changes the central themes around what Area X means to us.

In Jeff VanderMeer’s text, Area X’s origin or purpose are never explained. The source of its power remains numinous and alternatively alluring and terrifying throughout the entire trilogy, and our characters are therefore drawn more into an existential crisis than a discrete conflict with it. The books do for sci-fi, in a way, what Paul Auster does for mystery, where it’s less of a who-dun-it and more of a did-anyone-do-it, was-it-even-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it. The questions are never answered in Area X, we just watch the characters change and question themselves and their world as they cope with something too strange and powerful for them to understand. It’s got an almost religious dimension that begs us to imagine ourselves vulnerable to its higher power. It’s a delicious subversion of genre in this way.

There are, of course, elements of that world left in Alex Garland’s adaptation – and I have such respect for this writer/director going back to Ex Machina that I’m inclined to go along for any warped journey he wants to take me on – but it’s a very different beast. We are given a rather straightforward, if incomplete, explanation of what Area X is from the first moments of the film. The Area is destroyed in a somewhat pat and unsatisfying way by the end of the running time, letting our mutated heroine and the eerie, Area-X generated clone of her husband meet again on the other side. But in a supremely satisfying payoff, the last frame of a film features our two leads finding each other both so profoundly changed by Area X that they really don’t identify as Kane and Lena anymore – are, in fact, so deeply mutated that they crave each other all the more for being the last living tokens of Area X left in this world, as Lena embraces the disturbing clone that has taken the place of her husband, and we cut to black.

It’s a revolutionary set of changes to the themes of the book, and frankly just as satisfying in a completely different way. I can’t help but wonder at how this metamorphosis took place, and I’m tempted to guess that it might be more than simple disregard/ambition on the part of the adaptation artist, and more a case study in the difference between film and text. That is, I’m wont to believe that Garland didn’t just read the book and say, this could’ve been cooler if we changed all these plot points. Part of the buzz around this movie at the outset was how potentially unfilmable the book was, spending so much time in a kaleidoscopically shifting subjective perspective just to impress on the reader how the characters were changing as a result of their exposure to Area X. And while I don’t think that makes the book strictly unfilmable – obviously, every drug usage sequence in modern film has figured out the tricks of distorting perspective, sound, light, color to let the viewer know that we’re in someone’s tripped-out head – this movie would have had to live in those kinds of shots for such a dominant portion of its length as to become pretty overwhelming, and to potentially lose a lot of viewers around basic questions of what’s happening, what timeline are we watching, real or imagined, and from what perspective. It may have been too much for a director (or his studio, likely) to handle.

So instead Garland imagines a way to convey the profundity of the changes consuming these characters while keeping the camera’s perspective objective throughout. That’s the tradeoff. And that meant putting these characters in a position where they could make a choice that so perfectly expressed their inner evolution (which is another great example of what it really means to show-don’t-tell at a high level) as to say as much as any amount of subjective perspective could have given you behind the lens. We know exactly how profound the changes affecting Lena are when we watch her embrace her monster-of-a-clone-husband. If we don’t get the payoff of that sequence, we have no idea how much of her is different as we watch Natalie Portman keep looking pretty much like Natalie Portman from objective perspective throughout. It’s an ambitious set of choices on Garland’s part, and one can really imagine how the pressure to translate the text into film gave him the mandate to subvert some central themes of the book in order to serve others.

It’s how he manages that tension – in both serving and subverting the text in order to translate it – that deserves respect and attention. I love this guy, definitely on my short list of high-concept filmmakers who give you something to chew on after the credits roll.

Never Waste a Crisis

Because the final season is around the corner —

If you’re in a writer’s room on House of Cards after your star is forced out of the series, this is the greatest creative blessing you’ve ever received. You are now mandated to reinterpret your entire work through the lens of another character, and do so in a way that suggests it is the appropriate thematic conclusion to a story your audience didn’t even fully realize they were watching.
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Pray that they don’t choose the easy spineless way. There are myriad ways one could try and distract, paper over his absence by telling the audience that all the supporting characters are just as interesting, give some credible but inessential plot device to explain where he went and then try to get people to focus elsewhere until you can wrap things up. But how much more fun — and what are the stakes, really, when no one expects this season to be anything more than a whimpering apology — to use his absence as a mandate for a major revolution, ask the audience to actually be obsessed with his absence, because it reinterprets the whole series for them. Swing for the fences.

E.g., Claire had Frank killed. This was always the plan. Every step along the way was her using him to get there. When all Frank’s sins are bared to the press at last, she can even admit to it while remaining the hero. Savior of the Republic. People buy it, evil ascendant.

Or, e.g., Frank was a suicide. Power and conscience unexpectedly overwhelmed him. Claire is shocked. But in the aftermath, as all his sins come out, she is overwhelmed by what she has been complicit in and resigns. Dedicates the rest of her life to healing the wounds that Frank caused, in part on her behalf.

Or literally whatever, as long as it’s revolutionary. If you’re stuck in this unsavory position of having to end something half-heartedly or do something bold and hope people forgive you for your transgressions, go bold. No half-assed hand-waving as you wrestle under your casting constraints. Embrace them, make them a gift.

57,745 words

Nine documents. 57,745 words, not counting comments. This is the length of the outline for the book I’m writing for next year.

The actual book itself, I reckon, may clock in only around 90,000.

The good news is, hopefully, (a) I’ve used up all of the bad words I have to say on the subject, and (b) I’ve written so much around the story that doesn’t need to go in the story that the actual exposition should be somewhat more self-assured.

Or I’ll just end up writing a helpless 600,000 word runaway train.

Life Before Man

“You don’t just stroll into another woman’s life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women’s group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other’s property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself.”
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-Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man