Two movies from the later parallel (Michael Clayton...

...and Infamous).

Some years back, George Clooney appeared as a slightly traumatised, passionate but questionably ethical lawyer in the Coen brother's farce Intolerable Cruelty. His role was as the genius of a company. It was fun, in some places very very funny, but not the deepest role he could have done (and why would it, and why should he?).

Now there's Michael Clayton, a film in which he plays a slightly traumatised, more defeated but still ethically questionable lawyer (Michael Clayton). Clooney does this thing - at least, I think he does - where, alone, he studies normal objects: lifts, doors, etc. But I don't know if that isn't because that's what people do or if it's something he does in real life himself. At some points, I wanted him to have no expression, for the camera just to hold at his face, expressionless, unaware - no blinking, no rubbing of eyes, no hurt. There's a 'hurt ' expression he uses in Solaris and 'Intolerable Cruelty' that's in this as well. I found myself wondering: can you not sit still?

This does not make his acting here bad. It's great; I've always thought George Clooney is the proper leading man actor of the classic era, and he has used this, sent it up and done it straight in a just right way over the years; also, the guy is very goodlooking, and sadly for him could never really be a bad guy. It's just there seems to be a bottom line, a flat line at the base of his method. He can never disappear himself in the screen. Go black, go silhouette, go cartoon.

Anyway, I won't spoil Clayton. It involves Clooney as a 'fixer' - a lawyer who works on the dark side of a world class law firm. He helps deal with legal and extra-legal problems. Then one of the firm's partners, Arthur - also, a closer friend of Clayton (played by Tom Wilkinson) has an epiphany or has a breakdown, depending on where you look at it. After learning that the pharma he has been defending for six years has been poisoning people, he starts to strip off his clothes on tape. This starts the ball rolling....but.....

[Deep breath, and a step back, and an achy squeeze and crack in the chest:] The opening speech by Tom's character is brilliant. Frightening, perfectly metaphorically true (and to some extent literally true, if you were to take on that view I explored a couple of years back).

I was engrossed by the film, and liked it alot. There's a shiny, harsh brilliance to it, even though the ending is a little too sweet, I think (people will say this alot over he coming years, when they think of it). Syriana was a darker film - BUT, this is a better film. This might be a great film.

Anyway, I was going to write about Infamous as well but have run out of time. But look: Infamous is not as famous as Capote. Hoffman's film is great, and Hoffman is great as him. But this film is better and actually more entertaining. This is like it was made by people who knew Truman Capote - or, at least, New Yorkers. It's much funnier than the other one. It's as sincere, and serious, but less solemn (which can only be a good thing).

Secrets of the Heart

I put this film on tonight, after coming back from work. It started off in a cliched meaningful film way: innocent boy being lied to by older brother, secrets of adults, a school play (which you know will be performed by the end - Brecht's gun I guess), someone who died, someone who's going to die, the family drinking and singing around a table, and it all set in the days when people were people and the spirit could move.

But it grew on me. Maybe I'm a sentimentalist or maybe just the way it ended out was full-hearted. How all the secret shames came to light or became light, and the things remained unsaid were understood. But mainly I just liked the music growing in the last scene. Very beautiful.

Here is a still from the film.. It's of the 'bird' statue in the abandoned house:




Abandoning beautiful things
When I saw this statue off a winged beast, I wasn't paying much attention to the film (it was annoying me at first, for the reasons above). They stop at this abandoned house where, Javi's brother had told him, a man went mad, killed his wife, then killed his friend. Now all'that are left are their ghosts. You can hear them whispering: because they are going mad since they want to tell a secret. Of course we don't believe any of this - this film, about kids, is not for kids - so what we see, and are supposed to see, is an abandoned house. There's nothing in there. Except this statue of what Javi calls a bird.

In fantasy books, and roleplaying games I used play as a kid, ruins have treasures and statues and such in them. But who on earth thinks people would do this, outside of wartime? This is what threw me off this film: at the end, we find the house is just an old house of someone from out of town, but for some reason they left this statue here, an ornate object left in an empty place. Why would anyone do this?

If you saw this statue in an antique shop in one of Amsterdam's Nine Streets, you'd probably think it's unusual but not particularly strange; I've seen a lot odder things for sale in those places. But seeing it on its own in an otherwise stripped-out home, one wonders why it is left. There's a story there.

So you look at the film, and wonder about the statue, and it becomes an unfired gun. No-one explains why it appears there, and what happens in the film doesn't justify why we see it.

Ruins and haunts.
If houses have people living in them, then ruined houses must have ruined people. I wonder if that's my logic about haunted houses near where I lived in Dungarvan.

Dungarvan is a small seaside town, buried deep in an enclosed bay; it  used be one of the main Irish harbours. However, for decades now the harbour has filled up with sand, making the tide shallow and fast, and it is impossible for any large ships to sail in there. Now, it is a main location for  speed surfing, which happens once a year near our old church.

Near my house was an old ruin visible from the road the kids in my area took from school.  It was on the far side of a field owned by a guy called Frankie (and so we called it 'Frankie's Field').  Frankie used pass us every day on our way to school in his horse and cart: I remember a white-haired wiry man, his horse in blinders, with a stick-whip he used snap and say 'hyup'. But he seemed friendly. Incomprehensible but friendly.

The house on the other side of Frankie's Field scared the wits out of me. It  was an empty, lightless place of dread. It's where all the things that scared me lived or floated from to the road across the field: ghosts, watchers, serpents and so on...a panoply of horrors.

It's the unlit doorways at night that do it. But also the collapsed, sagging  roof, the uncertainty of why it is still up there, why it's still standing when nobody lives in it, or could. Is it still there because some non-body lives there instead?

Hegh...the tricks absence played on me as a kid. My own house terrified me during the day when I was sick. My dad would put me in his bedroom, put on the radio, give me white lemonade and toast and go out into town for a bit (never very long). When that happened, there would be no-one else in the house. But, other than those unusual days, at all other times, just as a result of having a big family, there was always someone somewhere in the house: i my sister, my other sister, my mum, my little sister, my brother, my other brother. There was always someone. Even though they weren't in the room, or a nearby room, if you waited long enough, they'd turn up in your room; or listened hard enough, you'd hear them in the garden or downstairs.

So, as a kid this is what you automatically think: there was always someone in the house because there was always someone in the house. On these days dad was out, it was no-one I knew; it was no-one. So, what was it: an alien (I'd read about aliens appearing in someone's garden during the day), a ghost (same again, but indoors) - or once, terrifying and uncalled-for, it was Doomlord (Wikipedia entry). I imagined him coming into my parents' room, the sun streaming in, while I sat helpless in bed, eating... I think, Rivita.

-------------------------------------------------------

Please note: I do not condone reading Doomlord or any Eagle comic stories, even for kids. They were, at best, imperialist trash; and at worst, they are really just stupid. Or.... it's the other way around: stupid: best; trash: worst. Many of the stories in them had a cruel and sadistic, vengeful streak as well. But I really loved them as a kid. This, however, does not mean I'll to go a film about or a revival of Doomlord, Deathwish, M.A.N.NI.X, The Thirteenth Floor, etc. *

Unfortunately, I suffered a bout of adultitus** a while back: the condition of growing out of things and, upon being exposed to them after having done so, am fascinated but have no desire to rekindle or discuss them - only because, and this is the only explanation I can give, I grew out of them.
---------------------------------------
(There are worse things in the world than ghosts of people and shape-shifting aliens. There are mechanical hungry things grown in society, that can change the shape of bodies, have no bodies of their own, but anyway kill you, suck you dry, and use your corpse. That's another story - and one so old now that any hero of it is probably a myth.)


(If we have to keep telling a story about how the world will be saved in some hopeful way, it's because it hasn't been saved in that way. And it hasn't been saved by now, it is because it can't be, because the hero of that sort, that does that heroic deed, or sacrifice, does not exist.)

*This is what I learned from Eagle: enough pudding-sized blobs can eat a whole zoo of giraffes.

**I only recently caught it. Also, given my invention of this word to describe it, I think I'm already getting over it.

A note on working in a call centre and another note on the little book of calm

Because I've returned to college, I am much more broke than the rest of my friends. They of course are not getting up between 7.30 and 9, depending on mood, taking time over making coffee, cutting fruit, listening to BBC Radio 4 before writing about space and time, walking in the woods of Meanwood Ridge.

I'll be returning to a full time job in February. Not because I want to but for the same reason I have always taken a job - because I have to. I have debts, and rent to pay, food to eat, things to buy to make me secure. This makes me no different than most people I know. It's just I'm trying to do it without focussing on it, but instead while focussing on this thesis.

Call Centres
In order to pay my way, I have (like many people again) worked in call centres. They have usually been centres which are there to satisfy an image or as a buffer. The nature of call centres would seem to be about efficiency and convenience, but all those I ever worked in have turned out to be at least slightly charlatan. People just disappear in them, both the employees and the customers. What's left is only their voices: the detached voices of the employees, the trapped voices of the callers.

The reason I think is the natural but dehumanising screen that is thrown up between caller and called. No matter how much one tries, one will never see those people as fully human. No, that's not exactly it - one will never feel like it matters what one does with them or that they care what they do to you. It couldn't - if it really mattered, they wouldn't put it in the hands of distant, interchangeable and otherwise-inaccessible people who one never sees. Physical abuse is replaced by psychological abuse.

There are explicitly bad things about call centres, like acoustic shock, a condition caused by sudden loud noises in the headsets people must wear all day. Although it's not reported here (but I've read it somewhere, so. let's just assume it for now), one condition from it seems to be that people stop hearing certain kinds of noises. It was hinted - in this possibly-imaginary- research - that the failure to hear is partly psychological: we don't hear abuse properly. I'm not sure; I can't find the report - it might just be a mechanical condition you suffer from, like tinnitus.

But it isn't helped by the environment. From that quote above: '"Call centres have been shown to be highly stressful work environments and we are pretty sure that plays a major part in acoustic shock."

What is wearing in call centres is the day to day exposure to complete strangers who
i) Remain strangers,
ii) Feel helpless and alienated by the mode of communication (and you are helpless to remove that),
iii) Who consider you from the beginning to the end of your conversation as only another voice from the ghastly corporate ether. You consider them a pressure pushing on your chest.
iv) Never enjoy speaking to you (unless they're desperately lonely) .....that's.....bad.

And most importantly the feeling that you're a buffer, a decoy for those who the company doesn't want to take seriously. 'My heater's broken' - 'right, we'll get on it'. Bing - gone. Imagine if you wanted to pay for something in a shop and the staff kept saying 'I'll be just with you', then vanished.

Little book of calm's bad advice
The little book of calm suggests that, if you want to remain calm, instead of queueing at the bank/gas company/post office, call, or email, instead. This. Is. The. Single. Worst. Advice. I have. Ever. Heard.

If you queue physically at a place, you will see how long you have left to go. You will also see how many tellers there are: 'twelve people? And four counters. Right.' You will even see and maybe guess how long the people in the queue are likely to be: 'That guy has only an envelope. That woman has her kid pulling on her arm. That guy is sorting through his pockets looking for something, etc...'

If you call, you will either hear a robot voice say: you are the [number] in the queue or no robot voice. That's it - you won't know how many tellers are open, so you won't know how fast the queue is moving. Now, maybe they'll tell you that too - but you can't judge for yourself. You're helpless. And you certainly can't judge the other customers. There may be one person taking calls, and one person in the queue before you, but that person may be confusing, evasive, and watching tv. They may be on for an hour. And you can't even say, if you are at all assertive, 'hey! Stop wasting the staff's time' if you think they are.

There's nothing you can do about the situation because you don't know what it is.

It's as if, going to the bank, you were stopped at the closed door and told: 'Hi, you're very important to us. You're the eighth person in the queue. But I'm afraid you'll have to wait out here and not see what's going on inside.'

Wouldn't you even want to look, to figure out if it's worth it?

Little book of calm? Little book of crap.

Next time, take a walk and queue. It's good for you.

(Of course, none of this applies to people living out in the middle of nowhere. But you know what, you hear birds when you wake up in the morning and can see the stars. So you don't need to avoid that much social stress. Or, to put it another, to hell with you!)

....It would be nice not to return to work in a call centre. It would be nice to see people who are shouting at me...

What's out there?

The Cloud Appreciation Society
This is a fantastic site. I've not joined it even though I constantly take photos of clouds. For example, here is one from my flickr account:

I don't know why I like them so much but there's something to staring up at the sky and working out it is not an illusion: there are things up there. Just as there are stars up there. Just as there are bacteria in the upper atmosphere.

When you think of space, what do you imagine? Vast cold regions or grumpy starchy aliens with bumpy heads? The second, it has to be understood, is not real. Those are the equivalent of Marco Polo's Blemmyae, i.e., humans with faces in their chests, or the viking seamonsters at the edge of the world. What is out there? We don't know -

Wild Blue Yonder (imdb)

This science fiction film by Werner Herzog concerns two missions: the now-over and slightly disappointing attempt by Andromedeans from the planet 'Wild Blue Yonder' to settle in a new home (Earth) and the current mission to find a new home by human beings (which turns out to be Wild Blue Yonder). So....that's the story. But the story seems to be barely the point.

The film has no special effects. It has documentary footage and a grey-haired, cold-looking Brad Dourif, standing in the middle of nowhere, kicking irritably at dirt. He narrates over the stock footage as if he referring to what we are seeing: astronauts travelling through wormholes in space; exploring an alien planet and the site of an intergalactic business venture. Except....we're not. This is just stock footage.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. It's funny, especially Dourif's reaction to what he's telling us but also the interviews with mathematicians which....are they deliberate or set up?

This is what it reminded me of: when I was a kid in my garden, the tree in the corner was a landed rocket, the bird table was an ancient ruin, the bushes were where monsters lived. This film requires using your own imagination.

But I reckon some people will think it's rubbish. And I wouldn't hold it against them.

*I do not have a credit or a debit card, due to my British bank refusing to upgrade my account from basic - and this because I've only lived here, paid taxes, that sort of thing for two years. I don't want a credit card anyway. I need to study not play computer games or ski down a Slovenian slope. But a debit card would be nice, just so I don't have to take out £10 every time I want to buy a tin of tomatoes.

Humanistic science fiction: the uncanny valley and cartoon time

My brother Dermot is a ....well, was a... -is currently some new fangled title in the conceptual design film world. But I would have called him a conceptual designer other than that.

Anyway  - last time I met Dermot we talked about CGI. It's relevant to his industry, especially his latest films. And he told me about this interesting psychological trait of people: the uncanny vallley (eponymous website).

The uncanny valley seems to be the term for when something lifelike stops seeming cartoon-ish or comfortably fake and appears to hang between that and what is real. It's an uncomfortable feeling - a feeling of uncanniness. This applies especially to simulating human features - and in my view, most CGI animated human beings, especially Polar Express (imdb entry).

My version of it is all the cheap, nasty techno tracks I ended up seeing on MTV's 'The Mix' when I couldn't sleep. The characters moved too smoothly, the ground looked too blank; they moved smilingly through eerie and empty  no-places, their surroundings a furniture of no-things.

This eerieness, the sense of emptiness I get from these things, I suspect, is an indication of seeing exactly what these simulcra are. There is nothing there - a CGI of a woman crying does not feel anything, nor does a painting of a woman crying. Nor, incidentally, does a character in a story about a a woman crying.

What feels something is the author who drew, or programmed, or wrote. And if they fail miserably at their job the coldness of the medium pops up. So, some CGI is uncanny because we see the mechanics of what is representing. These mechanics appropriately dehumanise what is not human.

I think.

This would suggest things stop being eerie over time. They stop being discomfiting (discomforting?). By mere repetition of stimuli, and the absence of reasons to scream, run away, have sex, the familiar follows the strange.

This could be all wrong, however. There may be an absolute boundary.

Uncanny Claymation
I have always had a deep-rooted and sincere horror of all claymation other than Aardman. Creature Comforts (home page, imdb entry) is one of my favourite shows (and I can see there's an American version. Good for them!). But ALL OTHER CLAY BASED ANIMATION IS HORRIBLE.

For example,

"Ca bhfuil Ruairi Crainn?" arsa Gregory Grainnoig. "Ca Bhfuil-" [trans. (from Irish, from Gaeilge): "Where is Rory the Tree?", said Gregory the Hedgehog. "Where is-"]. Aghhh! Stay the hell away from me, you creepy monochrome mud-thing!

This was never in any Bosco script, but it should have been, because all I could think, on watching that claymation (made from 'marla' , as it is called in Ireland), was: "Why is there something moving over their skin?"

What I'm talking about is, I think, a direct result of how I claymation works. You have the clay/plasticine molded on to a wire frame. You film the thing* in one position, and then another. But in the process, on a low budget and strict time scales, you can't let the clay really cool in between shots, so the clay becomes a bit soft. Your handprints appear on it, and the surface becomes mushed here, bunched there, in different places from shot to shot. As a result, in a clay animal's motion, its limbs would slightly change shape, indentations would appear and disappear across its artificial skin. That unintended motion looked as real as the rest of the illusionary motion. For a kid watching it that's pretty real.

I think this is another example, then, of the 'uncanny valley' but this time with no reference to modern CGI. And, boy, did I hate it - much much much more than any modern animation distortions (probably only because I'm about 5 times the age).

I think there's this valley in our 'Theory of Mind' (as mind-theorisers call it: see Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on folk psychology  and eliminative materialism): how we understand the thinking of what someone (or something) does. There's a point where something that acts human but isn't is believable, but bring it closer and closer to humanity and it goes....strange. But enough of that for now, as I really do need to sleep.

Brief note on cartoons
I should also write about the baffling and strange 'world' cartoons, i.e. not American, not Disney - although, even if they were Disney, they usually seemed wrong: everything seemed to bob up and down a little, like they were elastic; not Hanna Barbera cartoons, the monochrome ones, which also disappointed me (might as well have shown stills) and not. Looney Tunes, which were just brilliant.

These other cartoons popped up on Sunday afternoon on Irish Television. The conclusions I reached from watching these, as a child,  creeped me out about reality beyond my small town. So, I remember thinking one day, sitting by  myself on a summer day in the dining room, surrounded by copy books and dead flying ants (that's another story). So...children from other places like to watch....Autobahn? This was on a few times on 'Cartoon Time' ; also, one about a girl who melted because she cried so much.

But I won't now, because I'm very tired. Only had four hours sleep last night, for no good reason. (I don't have a social life anymore).

Oh! I can play Tetris now I've internet at home!

----------

So, at some point in animation, things stop looking like cartoons and start looking like something real but.....wrong. It's a fascinating fact of how we perceive things, and is undoubtedly tied up with the fact that, given a convoluted but otherwise featureless blob, we see no pattern, but put in a a dot at any point in the blob, and - wallah - a face. This is the phenomenon of pareidolia (wikipedia entry)). Consider this:

So.....is there a face here? Is there?










Now, consider these two, all just that above with an extra dot put inside the shape:













Do you see a face straightaway, or do you have to look? And what are you doing in either case? What could have such a face (that only a mother blob could love)?

---------------
*I can't call them 'figures'. I can't reify them, 'bring them into the same world' as my own like that. I. Don't. Want. Them. Here.

(My childish nightmares were filled with the breathless chatter of the Tongue Twister Twins. You want an image of them? Luckily, I can't find any.)