Not being a masochist I had no intention of seeing “The Day the Earth Stood Still” remake until it hit the torrents or the DVD bargain bin.

But a group of friends insisted I go.  They even offered to pay.  I couldn’t say no (though I did end up paying…bastards).

Going in, I expected to be dismayed by the new movie’s thematic drift from the original.  So I was surprised to find I disliked it for a totally unexpected reason.

The aliens are dull, unimaginative douchebags.    I’m not talking about the SFX, which is fine.   I mean that the aliens are very poor problem solvers.

…

After a lot of hemming and hawing and looking deeply into Jen Connelly’s impressively green eyes, Klaatu reveals his purpose: there aren’t many habitable planets in the galaxy.  They’re a precious resource.  We’re wrecking this one with our uncontrolled atmospheric carbon experiment.

To preserve the Earth’s biosphere, we must die.

At first, that grim-liciousness plays right into our current mood, which I call eco-moralizing (self flagellation, as opposed to a positive program of de-carbonization).  But if you’re alert, you blink a few times and then notice a narrative problem: Klaatu’s civilization commands god-like nanotech.  They can remake worlds.  In fact, they’re planning to use this terraforming skill on Earth to get rid of us in an epic sweep of grey, nanobot dust.

Since they can change planet surfaces, atmospheres, and pretty much everything else about a world what the hell prevents them from turning, say, Mars into a chillier version of Ohio?  Or scrubbing our atmosphere clean of excessive C02e and saying, ‘go thou, and sin no more‘?

And then there’s the question of how these aliens got to their current state.  Surely they didn’t climb down from the luminescent Zoopflarp trees of their home world and immediately get to work building interstellar craft.  They must have passed through their own Chrysler Sebring and Britney Spears period before ascending to a state of sublime knowledge.

Who are these assholes to interrupt our development? Do they tour the galaxy like super powered child services agents, looking for bad parents?

Pretty much the whole film zips by and the only person to sort of raise these questions is John Cleese during his four or five line walk-on.

Terrible.

Oh, and here’s another view, from Gawker’s Alex Carnevele.

Hopefully, those of you who’re interested have found time to watch the new season of BSG.

I’ve heard the ratings are down a bit. If so, that’s a shame because the show is reaching its “Apocalypse Now” apotheosis: the trends of previous seasons are maturing. For the characters, the results aren’t pleasant.

Although categorized as science fiction — because of the starships, thinking machines and synthetic, “human form” cybernetics — I think it’s more accurate to call BSG a new and extended speculative political fiction riff on, among other things, the themes covered in “Doctor Strangelove“.

As you probably remember, Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy about the paranoia which defined the high Cold War years. It’s also about the mad pursuit of nuclear ‘defense systems’ created to banish the fear born of that paranoia. (A pursuit which paradoxically increased the very thing it was meant to cast out: an almost Hegelian ‘negation of the negation’).

In BSG’s case, there’s a defining trauma — the Cylon’s near total destruction of humanity — followed by a desperate and reduced life within the rusting bulkheads of the “fugitive fleet”. Because of the painfully undeniable reality of both the near-genocide and the despondent, claustrophobic conditions within the fleet, a multitude of sins and psychoses can be explained and indeed, provisionally forgiven.

But during this final season, brittle social arrangments are starting to break down; intriguingly, this is happening amongst both the fleeing remnant of humanity and the once seemingly all powerful (and, in the case of ‘human form’ Six, always well dressed) Cylons.

Religious conflict and, interestingly, a strange sort of paradoxically hyperactive ennui seem to be at the heart of the growing disorder in both camps.

…

BSG and the Conquest of Mexico

Recently, I’ve started reading William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). This book recounts the remarkable story of Hernan Cortes‘ fatal intervention into Aztec history. Contrary to the tale I was told in school — which was that the Aztecs, overawed by the sight of white men on horseback armed with guns and cannons, quickly surrendered and converted to the Christian creed — Prescott describes a complex, lengthy and violent conflict between European invaders and their ferocious Aztec opponents.

And while the saga has many critical elements — internecine struggle between Spanish factions, discontent amongst the Indian peoples under the yoke of Tenochtitlan, Cortes’ craftiness and dual desire for gold and converts, etc — to me, the key element (and the one most resonant with BSG) is the war of religious ideas.

During last Friday’s BSG episode the Baltar character single handedly raided the makeshift temple (really, only a cramped room onboard Galactica) of a group of polytheists. Declaring their multi-god faith to be false he smashed their icons, disrupting the quiet ceremony and, more ominously, the assumption of peaceful religious coexistence.

This fictional incident reminded me of the following moment from Prescott’s history, in which the conquistadors, eager to prove to one of the subject peoples of the Aztec empire that their gods are false, desecrate a temple.

Prescott writes:

<snip>

These two missionaries vainly laboured to persuade the people of Cozumel to renounce their abominations, and to allow the Indian idols, in which the Christians recognised the true lineaments of Satan, to be thrown down and demolished. The simple natives, filled with horror at the proposed profanation, exclaimed that these were the gods who sent them the sunshine and the storm, and, should any violence be offered, they would be sure to avenge it by sending their lightnings on the heads of its perpetrators.

Cortes was probably not much of a polemic. At all events, he preferred on the present occasion action to argument; and thought that the best way to convince the Indians of their error was to prove the falsehood of the prediction. He accordingly, without further ceremony, caused the venerated images to be rolled down the stairs of the great temple, amidst the groans and lamentations of the natives. An altar was hastily constructed, an image of the Virgin and Child placed over it, and mass was performed by Father Olmedo and his reverend companion for the first time within the walls of a temple in New Spain. The patient ministers tried once more to pour the light of the gospel into the benighted understandings of the islanders, and to expound the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The Indian interpreter must have afforded rather a dubious channel for the transmission of such abstruse doctrines. But they at length found favour with their auditors, who, whether overawed by the bold bearing of the invaders, or convinced of the impotence of deities that could not shield their own shrines from violation, now consented to embrace Christianity.

[...]

Of course, there is irony aplenty here.

Just as penguins begin to enjoy pop cultural godhood in dramatized documentaries and computer generated children’s films, the climate begins to change in ways not beneficial to penguin-dom.

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Ich bin ein Mann, der viele Fragen stellt. Ist hier ein Beispiel.

Letzte Woche, Dienstag denke ich, wunderte mich ich, wenn es eine deutsche Version von Bert und Ernie gab.

Die Frage wurde gestellt und jetzt, habe ich eine Antwort.

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Sometime in the 1980’s, a Professor of Medieval literature, following some unknown impulse, never fully explained, introduced me to this…

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode.

When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day- Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.

Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called “American Streamlined Moderne.” Cohen called it “raygun Gothic.” Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.

Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en- ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran- sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put to- gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym- metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

[...]

Recently, a disturbing memo was placed on my desk by Dr. Hilarity, my orangutan assistant.

The memo’s title was as follows: Your Readers, (all 15.2 of them) Know Nothing About Science.

Sadly, I was forced to agree. Not because it’s true necessarily but because orangutans are very strong and quick to anger.

Fortunately, Momus has identified a series of educational strips that might help.

Module 8: The Brain

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I urge you to view the UK films linked below, each dealing with important scientific matters.

Later, there’ll be a quiz.

Look Around You

Module 1: Maths
Module 2: Water
Module 3: Germs
Module 4: Ghosts
Module 5: Sulphur
Module 6: Music
Module 7: Iron
Module 8: Brain

Momus points his readers towards Japanese musician Cornelius and also, towards this video. Which, as it happens, puts me in precisely (yes, precisely) the correct mood.

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Future Feeder writes:

Inner-City Youth, London is a narrated photo essay by Simon Wheatly. It attempts to capture the lives of Londons under-privalaged youth and the music culture (grime) that is developing out of their real-world experiences and the influence of mainstream American hip-Hop.

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“…ashes to ashes funk to funky
we know major tom’s a junky
strung out on heaven’s high
hitting an all time low…”

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More Four Tet here