Inhuman Swill

Having seen the French caper flick Rififi last night, in which an alarm system is disabled with fire extinguisher foam, what are the odds that I would today read a Donald E. Westlake short story ("The Ultimate Caper: The Purloined Letter") in which an alarm system is disabled with Redi-Whip? Long odds, it seems to me. Long, long odds.

If I hadn't seen the movie last night, I doubt I would have caught that tiny joke in the Westlake story. Yet how many times have you caught a reference that you wouldn't have caught unless you'd seen, read or heard something else within a fairly short amount of time? I know it's happened to me quite often.

As uncanny as these coincidences seem, it seems to me that culture can only exist and be transmitted via a vast network of shared references. There must be a supply of these matching references that is limited only by number of nodes in our network of cultural references, a vast supply, which we only really notice when a pair of them smack us in the face, like foam defeating an alarm system. Rather than finding the coincidence usual, I tend to think that the strange thing is that we don't notice more of these coincidences. After all, they must be going on around us all the time.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

A couple of weeks ago, Laura and I bought tickets online for an evening showing of The King's Speech. We went out to dinner first but failed to leave ourselves enough time to get to the movie theater early. By the time we arrived, our theater was nearly full. We could have sat together in the front row or sat apart. Neither prospect appealed to us so we went to the box office and got a refund. We had to eat the $2.00 online ticketing fee, but it was our own fault for not getting there early enough for decent seats.

Last night we tried seeing The King's Speech again. This time we got to the theater a full hour early. This was probably overkill, but we did end up scoring ourselves the perfect spots, dead center two rows up in the stadium seating section.

Well before the previews started, we couldn't help but overhear an elderly couple bickering in the seats directly behind us. I rolled my eyes, hoping this wouldn't continue once the movie started.

The theater was filling up fast. Shortly after the old man excused himself to go buy popcorn or use the restroom or whatever, we heard a young woman asking the old woman if she would move over so she and her husband could sit together.

"I'm sorry," said the old woman, "but we arrived early so we could have these seats. My husband likes to sit in the center."

"But you could just move over one seat, and we could sit together."

"I'm sorry, but my husband likes to sit in the center."

"All you'd have to do is move over one seat."

"I don't want to move without asking my husband. He's not here right now. When he gets back, you can ask."

"Why won't you just move over one seat?"

The old woman was starting to sound peevish. "My husband likes to sit in the center. He's not here. When he gets back, I'll will ask him."

The young woman eventually went away. Laura and I heard another woman in the row behind us reassuring the old woman that she hadn't done anything wrong.

The movie started, and it was a wonderful film. We laughed, we cried, it became a part of us. The couple behind us didn't make a peep, at least not that I noticed. We were transported.

The lights came up and people started filing out. Laura and I always sit through the end credits when we can, so we stayed put in our seats. When the theater was nearly empty but the credits were still rolling, I heard a young man's voice in the row behind us.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he said, "but do you mind if I ask you question?"

"What is it?" asked the old woman, mildly.

"I want to ask you why you wouldn't move over one seat so my wife and I could sit together," the young man said. "I want to ask why you would be that rude."

"What do you mean? We got here early so we could get the seats we wanted. My husband was out."

"I wasn't here," chimed in her husband. They both sounded so old.

"Why would a person be that rude?" the young man said, with some hostility. "Not to move over one seat. My pregnant wife had to sit by herself."

From his tone, you would have thought the old woman had personally slugged his pregnant wife in the belly. Laura and I both turned around in our seats at the same time, and at the same time we both said, more or less, "She's not the rude one. You're the one being rude."

This was the first I had even seen what the old woman looked like. She had to have been at least eighty, sitting hunched in her seat like a frail, lumpy frog. Her hair looked purple in the half-light.

The young man, on the other hand, was small and slender but very tough-looking. He wore a skin-tight white T-shirt under his jacket, and his hair was shaved down to uniform stubble. He was no older than thirty.

"This is none of your business," he said to us. "How can you defend that kind of rudeness?"

"She didn't do anything wrong," Laura and I both insisted.

"I wasn't even here," the old man said.

My hands were shaking at this point. I am rather confrontation-averse, but who can sit by while some angry thug bullies an old woman?

The "conversation" went back and forth like that for a few more exchanges while I tried to mentally prepare for it to turn violent. Thankfully it never did, but it did end with the seething young man standing up and pointing a finger at the old woman as he retreated down the aisle.

"Shame on you, shame," he said. "And shame on you too, for your rudeness."

"I wasn't even here!" complained the old man.

"I'm not talking to you," said the young man, who was now nearly at the theater exit. "I talking to you and you. Shame on you two for encouraging this kind of rude behavior. Shame! Shame!"

Then he was gone.

The elderly couple thanked us profusely for taking their side, and we reassured them that we didn't think they'd done anything wrong. I kept an eye out for the guy as Laura and I exited the building, but we didn't see him.

We talked the incident over on the way home. We were both glad we had said something, and we were proud of having helped run off a builly. But there were other things we wished we'd had the presence of mind to say to him. One was, "What kind of person needs to bully an old woman just because he didn't get his way?" Another was, "Are you going to stop harassing this woman, or do I need to go talk to a manager?"

I don't know what you think about situations like this, but here's my take. I think there's a culture of entitlement at work here. I'm used to getting my way, I expect to get my way, and if I don't get my way then you are doing me injury. If there's something you could give me that I want and deserve and you don't give it to me, then you are a terrible person. You are rude.

It's a two-year-old's mentality, but you see it in adults all the time. I frequently act that way, I know. But the bottom line is, just because someone could give me something does not mean they are obligated to give it to me. I don't have a right to the theater seat of my choice any more than I have the right to punch you in the nose. Even though I might want to.

Yes, the old woman could have moved over a seat. (Or maybe she couldn't. I don't know what her mobility is like. Maybe she and her husband were waiting to leave until the theater was empty because it takes her five minutes just to stand up.) But when she doesn't, for whatever reason, the adult response is to nod your head and accept the consequences of not arriving at the theater half an hour early. The adult response is not to sit and stew so thoroughly through a two-hour movie that you have to start harassing an old woman afterward.

I don't know, maybe all bullying stems from a sense of entitlement. You have something I don't that I think I deserve to have, so I'm going to take it from you, you rude, selfish person. Even if that something is self-respect.

So that's my take on an incident I'm obviously still stewing over myself. What's your take? Who was right and who was wrong? Or was everyone wrong? I'd like to hear.

I love Google for its geeky in-jokes. If you haven't noticed this one before, search for "recursion" and see what the result page offers as a suggestion under Did you mean.

I'm also reminded of Inglourious Basterds, which I saw yesterday morning, in which one instance of the word "Merci" was translated in the subtitles as "Merci."

It has to have been 1988 when I first read Watchmen. I was a Mormon missionary stationed in Wenatchee, Washington—a zone leader, no less. We weren't allowed even to read newspapers or magazines, let alone comic books, but some sainted individual at church (I now forget who) had found out I was an aspiring science fiction writer and decided I needed to know about the most exciting thing to happen in the field in the time I'd been away. He (because he was definitely male) made me a gift of Issues 2 through 12.

I still remember the marathon reading session that went on that night. Two other elders were hanging out at our apartment that night, and as I finished each issue I would hand it off to my companion, who handed it off to the next elder, and so on. I think all our minds were blown that night, to one extent or another. I don't know what stood out for the other elders, but I was as fired up by the formal brilliance of the books, the panel-to-panel transitions and juxtapositions and visual motifs, as I was by the surface level of the story. Even at 20, I could tell that I had just watched a depth charge exploding against the hull of superhero mythology. I could also tell the blow had been delivered in a way no other medium could have accomplished.

My reading experience wasn't crippled, I think, by not having Issue 1 at hand, though the next day I dragged my companion to the first comics store I could find and plunked down something like ten dollars for a copy. That hurt a little, but it was still less than I would have paid for all twelves issues had I bought them as they came out. I still have those books, bagged in plastic and locked in the safe. I'd be hard-pressed to part with them, even though my Issue 1 is not from the first printing.

But now I digress. I've reread Watchmen many times over the years, and even turned my wife into a fan, so like any other fan I approached the news of a movie adaptation actually going into production with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. I didn't go to a midnight screening last Thursday night, but I did see the earliest showing I could get to on Friday. And I sat rapt, thrilled, and hypnotized for nearly three hours. Seeing those familiar scenes translated so beautifully and faithfully to the screen, I was transported.

Is it a good movie or not? I don't know. I honestly can't answer that question. There were moments that struck me as cheesy or overwrought, and certain alterations of the canonical text that I didn't think played as well on screen as they did in their original versions in the book (though I have to admit that, given the necessary simplifications of the plot, I thought the alteration of the ending worked very well in the context of the film). But I have a hard time divorcing myself enough from my pre-existing immersion in the Watchmen world to judge the movie on its own terms.

Would I have enjoyed the film as much as I did if I had never read the original comics? Would I have tolerated some of the hammy acting as well? Would I even have understood what still seems to me to be the top-level story's obvious critique of superhero archetypes, a subtext I believe actually survived the shearing off of the comic's deeper levels? Why did I love this moviegoing experience so much when I felt such utter loathing for the first two Lord of the Rings movies that I have never been able to bring myself to watch the third? I do not know. I can not answer these questions.

I do know that plenty of critics seem to have had their knives out for this movie, and not just for it but for the book and very industry that gave rise to it. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, often a critic worth reading, leaps from a (perfectly fair) evisceration of the movie to a misunderstanding and violent condemnation of Alan Moore's original writing without even having read the book. (It's enough, to Lane, simply to have glanced at a few panels.) A.O. Scott of The New York Times salts his disapproving review with rhetoric that strongly implies he himself was a rabid Watchmen fan in college but has since grown the fuck up.

This is both more and less than I wanted to say on the topic of Watchmen. Really, everything else I've been thinking, which might reasonably be summarized as "I don't know why everyone is so upset," has been more deftly articulated by asphalteden than I could do it. So please, read his review of Watchmen right now, and pretend that I am standing behind his shoulder nodding vigorously.

Netflix is going to eliminate account profiles this September. If you don't know, that's the feature that allows you to maintain separate DVD queues under one account.

YMMV, but to me Netflix is taking a giant step backward with this move in terms of serving its customers. This feature was a godsend when they first implemented it. Until then, if I wanted to be sure I always had a Bill-movie on hand (as opposed to a Laura-movie or a Laura-and-Bill-movie), I had to work hard at managing my queue, moving a new Bill-movie to the top every time I sent a Bill-movie back. Profiles took all the effort out of that effort. I'm used to it now, and it pisses me off that they're taking it away and sending me back to the Stone Age.

Good customer service is about continually making things easier for the customer, not harder. It's about giving the customer good new stuff without taking good old stuff away. I hope Netflix has some killer features they're planning to roll out instead, because otherwise they've just made the first move that would make me reconsider how useful my subscription is to me. And they didn't even ask me first.

It's been such a hell of a long time since I've received any hate mail, I almost forgot what it was like. Thank God that hole in my life is plugged again, though I was more than a little surprised that the precipitating incident was, apparently, my mild slagging-off of the film The Last Starfighter in the course of my nearly-three-year-old review of the stage-musical version of same. I said:

Even to its ardent defenders, the movie version of The Last Starfighter has always played like a low-rent version of Star Wars, with a thinner, more maudlin story, inferior special effects and a production design no more convincing than the original Star Trek's. The genius of this new adaptation lies in its recognition that these apparent weaknesses are really strengths when translated to the musical stage.

My estimable correspondent said:

Re: Your review of The Last Starfighter, musical and film versions.

I loved the movie.
I have it on DVD.
I consider it one of my favorite inspirational films.
The effects are ground breaking in this, the first film to rely completely on CGI.
If you told me the sky was blue, I'd check first.
Screw you, Mary.

Goodness. That's the last time I speak out of turn about the film's ardent defenders. And I won't breathe a word about Tron.

In more news for New York SF fans, check out the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival schedule and start planning your picnic for June 25th.

What a hectic day yesterday was! After most of a frantic morning at the office, I sneaked out to spend an extended lunch hour watching the new independent supernatural thriller First Snow, after which I rushed back to the office to crank out a quick same-day review for SciFi.com, then stayed late at the office working frantically to try to make up for some of the chaos my absence had caused.

At home that night, even with a nice glass of Lagavulin in hand, watching Borat on DVD did little to relax me. Call me not a fan.

This morning Laura and I hauled two rolling suitcases full of books from Queens to the Strand in Manhattan. Nice little payday, and not one of our books was rejected. Laura has really figured out what books they'll take and which ones they won't—which is nice, because the Strand used-book counter I remember from my early days in the city is one characterized by sneering and snobbishness. I like this morning's Strand much better.

My review of the new German film Requiem, about a girl who believes she is possessed by demons, is now available at Sci Fi Weekly.