Category: Media

A disquieting little segment on RadioLab last year detailed the practical dangers of satellites and other objects in earth’s orbit colliding — the gist being that there’s around 20,000 objects large enough to track flying around constantly at incredible speeds, and teams of international monitors are constantly sending alerts to help avoid collisions. Day-to-day, they get the job done, but the scary thing is that there may be up to half a million other, smaller objects in orbit that are not large enough to track, and these objects can still wreak havoc (a fleck of paint colliding with a space station can crack multiple layers of windows at the speeds at which these things orbit, they say). So this all gives rise to a fear of cascading impacts denominated as the Kessler syndrome — wherein one collision causes an explosion that creates millions of tiny pieces of debris that causes ever more dangerous collisions until certain layers of orbit become practically overwhelmed with speeding debris, making it impossible to pilot a rocket out of orbit, or, for that matter, potentially take down the world’s satellite communications systems.

Which means, if you’re an enterprising writer looking for a new kind of villain for your next thriller, may I suggest the billionaire with access to rockets intent on sending a shipping container full of hammers into orbit and then opening the doors.

How fun!

I don’t think I have ever seen a piece of surrealist film-making as effective as the one-man dance party at the conclusion of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.

It is optimized on every dimension: the surrealism comes out of nowhere; it sharply inverts the tone of the film; expresses the character in a way the character is constitutionally incapable of expressing himself; and both plays off of and releases a tension that we have been painfully watching build for 90 minutes. Mwah.

There’s something wildly depressing about the NYT’s Diary of a Pop Song, although no one involved seems to be aware. How many amusical handlers need to fly how many miles to shepherd a modest clip of a girl’s idea for a chorus hook through a thousand impersonal interpolators before assigning the track to a random aspiring celebrity who doesn’t even recognize the writer when she meets her, nor seem to think she’s anything of mention when told. Holy shit, this is dystopic. This is peak soulless.

I’m always a year late to comment on recent films, but I wanted to throw in that “Ex Machina” might be the smartest science-fiction film I’ve ever seen, for two (spoilerish) reasons, below:​

1. Takes a super well-known test in technology and philosophy — the Turing Test, which stipulates that a machine can be considered conscious if its performance were indistinguishable from a human’s in a series of interactions — and realizes that even the most clinical application of such a test might be rich dramatic ground. Watching a fully-informed, skeptical human observer interact with a machine in a way that convinces the observer, and by extension us, the viewers taking his perspective, that the machine may be every bit as alive as we are is riveting. To reach this point, the observer has to become mentally entangled with the machine, has to become invested in the machine’s well-being, has to realize against all his better judgment that the machine has come to mean more to him than even another human, standing next to him in the room. The film doesn’t fuss this up with a bunch of extraneous stakes — the test may extend outside the interaction room, but every element of the film is more or less still the test. And being “indistinguishable” from a human means more than getting jokes and pausing self-reflectively, the movie insists. The clinical application of such a simple, well-known test, taken to its logical ends, has to undress the value of being human.
2. Takes a completely separate, rich question in technology and science — when and how will AI overtake us — and suggests the answer is buried in its treatment of Question One. Technophiles have been collectively freaking out about this issue for years — billionaire computing moguls invest spooky sums of money in efforts to understand and control the eventual AI uprising (are they not just a little self-flattering in their alarm, you have to wonder). Guys like Nick Bostrom, whose “Superintelligence” was one of the most widely read speculative science books on this subject in the last few years, spend pages wondering about how machines will violently usurp a people who cannot understand or anticipate their methods anymore. If we simply tell an AI to figure out how to make as many paperclips as it can, Bostrom speculates, who is to say that it won’t eventually think up some hitherto unimaginable means to get out of its confinement, take to the streets, and start cutting up human bodies to extract rare bits of metal inside that could be paperclip components? [Bostrom develops this idea out into a way more plausible nightmare scenario over many chapters, but this is the gist]. “Ex Machina” reframes the question in a visionary way: instead of worrying about the violent uprising of machines against humans who can’t understand their superintelligence in order to stop it, maybe we should be concerned by an essentially peaceful scenario. If a machine could convince us that it was fully conscious, with all of the relative moral value of a human, would it even have to overtake us violently? Might we more or less make way for it, understanding the entire time how it operates, because we cease to care that it is not human? Is that not the ultimate end of the Turing Test, where a machine carries all the moral weight of an organic human being in our eyes, and might make a transparent, compelling argument to inherit the earth?

The reason Jurassic Park (the film, 1993) worked, and why none of its sequels have come close, is because the first film is essentially the same dynamics as the first half of Frankenstein, and the sequels all lose the plot from there.

The first hour and change of the 1993 film are moving, exciting, exhilarating even if the dinosaurs never escape. We are watching deeply nerdy people who have dedicated their lives to science and discovery achieve a miracle. The looks on their faces communicate awe, inspiration, even love, from the moment they see the first brachiosaurus, through the shot below of Sam Neil cuddling a sick triceratops, and on. I have been laughed at over too many parties for insisting that the real story of the film is essentially a love story, but I’m sticking with it.

The point at which the movie turns is, of course, once they realize they can’t control the miracle they’ve created. It begins to destroy them. So far, we’re right along with Frankenstein. People run, die, cry, regret, but then they escape the island, and the conflict is essentially paused.

At this point the JP franchise loses the singular thing that made its premise compelling in the first place. From here on out, our dinosaurs serve the same function for our future protagonists as Godzilla.

No one looks at these creatures with the same sense of awe, pride, marvel, accomplishment, or beauty again. We’re completely unconflicted about them. They’re here to eat us, and our feelings are pretty simple about that.

If the franchise ever wants to make good on its promise, the most compelling sequel of JP possible is simply the last half of Frankenstein. Bring back the creators, with all their pride and devotion to the monster, and make the creators resolve to destroy their creation. Make them choose to unmake the miracle. Give us the grief of that resolution, through the eyes of the people most affected by it.

Until you do, it’s just more Godzillas with different branding.