SF Gospel

Adjustment Bureau: Choosing your Destiny

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon plays a politician named David Norris who gets an accidental peak behind the veil of everyday reality. Right before making a big speech, he runs into an impulsive young lady named Elise in a hotel bathroom. She inspires him to throw his boring old speech out the window and do something off-the-cuff and utterly unforgettable. The speech is a hit, his political future seems assured-- and, we soon learn, Mysterious Forces never want him to see the young lady again. But he does, and before you can say "Dark City" he's being chased around Manhattan by strange guys in fedoras. (Apparently, if you cast John Slattery, you get to borrow freely from Mad Men's costume department.) They're agents-- don't call them angels!-- of a distant and unseen Chairman, who has devised a Plan for Norris, and indeed for the entire world. And those agents will stop at nothing to keep Norris from seeing his inamorata again.

As Gary Westfahl's review ("Philip K., Diminished") points out, The Adjustment Bureau is not so faithful to its source material. That's not, in and of itself, a bad thing: great films are often the result of unfaithfulness to source material. (Heck, look at Blade Runner-- or, more x-tremely, Total Recall!) It's what you do with those changes that matter. Westfahl points out how making the protagonist of the story an up-and-coming politician, rather than insignificant real estate man Ed Fletcher, changes the tone of the story. More disappointing for me is the fact that the film completely chucks out what I consider the centerpiece of the original story: a nightmarish sequence in which the protagonist sees the world around him collapsing into dust and ash. But so be it: that's the name of the adaptation game, right? You take what works, and you leave what doesn't, and maybe that scene just wouldn't have served what George Nolfi (Adjustment Bureau's writer/director) was going for. 

So, what was he going for? Adjustment Bureau is rather clever, when it wants to be. I rather like how Norris plays out the proverbially oxymoronic "honest politician" part, the design of the would-be angels' Plan-tracking notebooks, the inventiveness of the early footchases. But all of this culminates in a conclusion that requires a mess of contrived, arbitrary rules; the angels can teleport, but only if they're wearing their magic hats! They're virtually omniscient-- but not around water! (The latter rule implies that every naval battle in history threw humankind off-Plan, but that's another matter.) It starts to feel a bit... silly. Ever see Lady in the Water?

But, more centrally, more naggingly, the concept of God as "Chairman" just doesn't work here. It's one thing to posit a God who works through efficient means, and entirely another to posit God as an arch-bureaucrat, a beancounter of souls. This is far too simplistic a picture of divine providence-- and, moreover, it makes God into not just a foil for our self-determining protagonist, but an outright villain-by-proxy. Furthermore, Norris' rebellion ends up being too darned easy, on an ontological level. His decisions, once he steps outside the prescribed path, are no different than any impulsive decision you've ever made. The centrality of the Plan implies that every impulsive decision we make is predetermined. the story thus requires that Norris's impulsive decisions be ontologically different somehow-- but this never receives an adequate explanation. Sure, his adjustor napped on the job, but this does not sufficiently account for why his will somehow then becomes more free than everyone else's. 

As for what that freedom is in aid of-- well, tying the "adjustment" that Norris's guardian agent messed up so directly to the Plan's ends serves to streamline the story a bit. In Dick's original the Plan is complex, and the fruits of the adjustment don't become apparent until long after the insignificant protagonist is out of the picture. But that's exactly the point: this is the smallest change possible to achieve some very, very big ends. But Norris, a rising star in national politics, is already part of the big picture, so these means don't end up looking quite so efficient. This doesn't elevate the everyday to cosmic significance-- quite the opposite, in fact. The folks in charge really are the ones that matter, and that's the way it must stay. The angel/agents show a callous disregard for the everyman-- just ask that cab driver who they just "adjusted" into a three-car wreck. 

What Adjustment Bureau's characters, divine and otherwise, really care about is a Hollywood romance that doesn't make too much sense. By the end of the movie, we've seen very little reason why Elise should want to be with Norris; he's treated her like crap for much of their relationship, including abandoning her for months at a time, dumping her while she's in the hospital, etc. (Shades of Twilight here.) And yet, by the rules of romantic logic if not by the Plan, their relationship is destined, so their love must conquer all. If anyone is suffering from an absence of free will, it is these characters in the hands of their screenwriter. At the end of the film, when the Chairman-- spoiler alert!-- abolishes the Plan and hands the reins back to humankind, we haven't been given enough evidence to support believing it's a good thing. Sure, these two get to be together, hooray-credits-roll, but we've already been told that the last time this happened it led directly to the Holocaust. God may have declared this was all a test, but you have to question why he passed: all we've seen him do is make impulsive decisions, consequences be damned. As Jay Michaelson asks in his review for Religion Dispatches, is that really the path we should be leading ourselves down?

In any event, what the film has done by its conclusion is completely invert the attitude of the original story toward predetermination. By the end of "Adjustment Team," Dick's Ed Fletcher has come to a shaky acceptance that our world is controlled by incomprehensible forces. It's a bit like an optimistic Lovecraft story: Fletcher sees behind the veil, and is driven, not to insanity, but to a nervous but respectful understanding. Later in his life, Dick became an admirer of Nicolas Malebranche, a medieval theologian who saw God as the only true actor in every event in the universe: created reality, including human beings, is just a gathering of "occasions" for divine action. Adjustment Bureau just won't have it: its libertarian, if not Nietzschean, dedication to the individual will will brook no consideration of the Chairman's point of view, let alone a really omnipotent deity like that of Malebranche. 

But enough of the big words: is it a good movie? I could say that it's better than I've just made it sound. But here's a more appropriate answer: I'm not at liberty to say...

Philip K. Dick adaptations ranked

Nerve recently asked me to rank and briefly review all of the Philip K. Dick movie adaptations to date. The results are here. I deliberately, but truthfully, went against the conventional wisdom on Blade Runner, which I never thought quite lived up to the hype, at least in terms of narrative and character. Which isn't to say I dislike it-- not at all, in fact-- but I am definitely not inclined to knee-jerk it into the #1 slot. And yeah, I missed Barjo, the French adaptation of Confessions of a Crap Artist, which has yet to be released on DVD, and has been out of print on VHS for, oh, 20 years or so. I would, however, like to give an honorable mention to the oft-overlooked TV series Total Recall 2070, which is far better than you'd expect from a canceled-after-on-season Canadian-produced SF show of the late '90s. 

You will also note a capsule review of Adjustment Bureau in that list. Where is the full review, you ask? It is, after all, an SF film with God as the hero's main antagonist. Short answer: it's coming, soon. In the meantime, there are two very thoughtful reviews of the film worth reading. For Locus, Gary Westfahl details the extent to which Dick's story "Adjustment Team" went out the window in this adaptation, calling into question the very nature of adaptation. Regardless of your opinion on the film, it's a great essay. And for Religion Dispatches, Jay Michaelson (though much more kindly disposed to the film than Westfahl) finds fault with the way it frames, and solves, the question of free will vs. divine providence. Your homework, reader, is to take a look at those two essays; my review (hopefully up in a day or two) will touch on a few of the same points.

Doomsday Film Festival

Don't think the prolonged quiet on this blog is due to inactivity-- quite the opposite. For instance: I'll be speaking on a panel this Saturday at the Doomsday Film Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y. I'm speaking after the late-Cold War anxiety tale Testament. But if you're interested you might as well just get the festival pass, because the entire lineup looks amazing! (I'm most looking forward to Damnation Alley and Hardware.) Buy your tickets soon, because by all accounts the theater is tiny (like a fallout shelter, natch). The festival begins tomorrow night (Friday, Dec. 10th), and my film and panel session begin at 3:30 on Saturday the 11th. See you at the end of the world! 

Radio Free Albemuth: The politics of mystical experience

Radio Free Albemuth is generally considered an oddity in the Philip K. Dick canon. Initially entitled Valisystem A, it was Dick's first attempt at transforming his religious experiences into a novel. When he sent it in to a publisher they returned it with a request for minor revisions; instead he scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch, resulting in the masterful Valis. Valisystem A was essentially forgotten until three years after his death, when it was published under the title it's known by today. There is disagreement among the grand assembly of Dickheads over the relative quality of many of his lesser-known books, but perhaps none is so controversial as RFA. Some think it is a minor footnote in the grander story of Valis (Jonathan Lethem, who left it out of the third Library of America novel in favor of A Maze of Death,* is in this camp); but others-- myself among them-- think it's an overlooked masterpiece, a powerful fusion of theological exploration and science-fictional storytelling.

John Alan Simon, the writer, producer, and director of the recent independent film adaptation of Radio Free Albemuth, clearly falls into the latter camp, as evidenced by his ardently faithful adaptation. It's obviously a labor of love, as underscored by the story of the film's production: Simon has been working on the adaptation for over 15 years. The screenplay hews closely to the novel in both structure and content-- something that no other PKD adaptation has done except A Scanner Darkly. The story is all there: Nicholas Brady, a PKD stand-in, is contacted by a semi-divine alien satellite that hopes to rescue humankind from the ontological injustice underlying not only a growing fascism in the United States, but all human suffering everywhere. His friend, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick, is gradually pulled into Brady's understanding of the world and his attempts at revolutionary action-- an action that cannot be judged in worldly terms of success or failure. The film transcribes the story with painstaking care.

That's not to say there isn't some creative interpretation going on, but the film handles that interpretation smartly. This is especially evident in the numerous dream sequences: the dreams of PKD stand-in Nicholas Brady are a central aspect of the novel (and of Dick's real-life religious experiences), and the film captures the otherworldly quality of those dreams brilliantly. (The bemused look on the face of Jonathan Scarfe, playing Brady, as he receives a computerized message from an alternate-universe "Portuguese States of America" is a particular high point). The film uses an awful lot of computer effects for a movie without a car chase, and those effects pay off-- they are an otherworldly intrusion, just like the alien-divine messages they represent. There's a slightly different look to each dream, including a couple fully-animated sequences. Some are extremely polished; others are deliberately more sketchy, but there's a powerful aesthetic driving all of these sequences. It's clear that a lot of thought went into the look of Brady's visions, which are, after all, the backbone of this story.

There's also a strong emphasis placed on the novel's political message. It gives a sinister illustriation of an America gradually transforming into a police state that reminded me of Southland Tales.** In this context, those contacted by the alien satellite from Albemuth become not just religious visionaries, but revolutionaries as well. Collectively known as "Aramchek," they become the victims of brutal political repression. The falsity of the distinction between politics and religion is a recurring theme in the story. Near the novel's end, the narrator (Philip K. Dick himself, albeit a fictional version thereof) discusses this idea in dialogue closely reproduced in the film:

"[Aramchek believes] that we shouldn't give our loyalty to human rulers. That there is a supreme father in the sky, above the stars, who guides us. Our loyalty should be to him and him alone."

"That's not a political idea," Leon said with disgust. "I thought Aramcheck was a political organization, subversive."

"It is."

"But that's a religious idea. That's the basis of religion. They have been talking about that for five thousand years."

I had to admit that he was right. "Well," I said, "that's Aramchek, an organization guided by the supreme heavenly father."

This political theology-- in essence, a form of Christian anarchism-- is at the heart of Radio Free Albemuth, and the film highlights these concepts brilliantly. That's an element that was significantly diluted in the transition from Albemuth to Valis: bringing the story out of an alternate-universe police state and into something more closely resembling the real world reduces the urgency of this political theology. Simon also holds the film rights to Valis, which goes further down the theological rabbit hole, and has written a screenplay for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which depicts a particularly unpleasant police state. In this context, Radio Free Albemuth may end up occupying the central territory in a sort of trilogy exploring the breadth of Dick's philosophy and theology. The film is currently in search of a distributor, but when it becomes more widely available, it's definitely worth seeking out.

Fore more on Radio Free Albemuth, see the film's official website and the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the premiere.

*Admittedly an overlooked masterpiece in its own right, and an excellent fusion of SF and theology.
**I should probably note that I mean this comparison as a compliment, since not everyone is kindly disposed to that film. See also my comparison of Sunshine to Event Horizon.

Radio Free Albemuth in NYC

We interrupt our (de facto, impromptu, and strictly temporary, I assure you) hiatus to pass on the announcement of a film screening this week: Radio Free Albemuth, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, has its New York premiere this Thursday, October 7th, as part of the Gotham Screen International Film Festival. The novel on which the film is based, originally entitled Valisystem A, was Philip K. Dick's first attempt to communicate his religious experiences into fictional form. Legend has it that the publisher requested fairly minor revisions when he turned in the draft, but he instead completely rewrote the thing, producing Valis. When the Valisystem A draft was found in his papers after his death, it was considered different enough from its descendant to deserve publication under its own cover (and new, disambiguating title). I'm certainly a fan of Valis, but I've always considered Radio Free Albemuth to be at least as good, and in some ways even better. Writer/producer/director John Alan Simon has maintained a healthy level of contact with the PKD community throughout the development of the film, which bodes well for the finished product. I am certainly looking forward to the screening (and, no doubt, pestering Simon with questions about his take on the Exegesis afterward).

Tickets to the screening can be purchased here. 

Philip K. Dick News: Androids and the Exegesis

Cornell University's incoming freshmen are lucky: their summer reading assignment for this year is Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cornell's Carl A. Kroch Library invited me to curate an exhibit on the novel's bibliographic history and broad influence (including its slightly more famous stepchild, Blade Runner). The exhibit is now open and runs through October 8th, but don't worry if you're not planning a trip to Ithaca in the next few weeks-- an online version of the exhibit is available on Cornell's website. I had always enjoyed Androids, but I gained a new level of appreciation for it in researching this exhibit (which is my first official curatorial credit, hurrah).

From my introductory essay:

Dick once described himself as “a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He saw his works as explorations of two primary questions: “What is reality?” and “What is human?” Androids enthusiastically tackles the second question, skillfully fusing its ideas about cruelty and empathy into a compelling detective story. Other works in his oeuvre explore the question as thoroughly--for instance, the novel We Can Build You and the speech “The Android and the Human.” But none do so in so entertaining a fashion as Androids.

This is turning out to be a very busy PKD year for me: in addition to this exhibition, I've read (and will shortly be reviewing, for the SFRA Review) the long-awaited final volume of the Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick. And, most importantly and excitingly, I've joined the team of scholars that is assembling a new, two-volume selection of previously-unpublished theological material from Dick's Exegesis (previously mentioned, prior to my involvement, here). They've got a great group working on this project, and they're doing the job exactly how it should be done. There is absolutely brilliant stuff in there that will soon see the light of day for the first time... and needless to say, I'm pretty thoroughly thrilled. More on that as publicity and propriety allow. In the meantime, check out the exhibit!

Android Dreams: Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott's Replicant Futures

More on Kick-Ass: some links and things.

First: No, I still haven't seen Kick-Ass, though I probably will by the end of the week. A pale glimmer of hope still burns deep within my heart that somehow something good could be harvested from the fairly execrable source material.* But I have been reading much about it in the last few days. To wit:

Roger Ebert did not like it, not at all. In fact, it made him sad. That's perhaps the biggest strike against it yet. I like Roger Ebert. I don't like things that make Roger Ebert sad. He's a nice guy, and he doesn't need to be made sad. More to the point, his reasons: they mostly involve children and violence, not the deeper elements of "missing the point of superheroes" that I discussed in my review of the comic. Let's be clear about this: it's not the violence that bothered me in Kick-Ass-- that is, not the violence alone. Lots of things that I like are violent, and I think violence in entertainment serves important social and psychological purposes. But, in genre terms, the violence needs to be there for a reason beyond itself.** In Kick-Ass-- the comic, at least-- the violence is there simply to be "kick-ass," in support of a story that is no story.

In response, Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News writes a rebuttal that rebuts... nothing. Instead of offering an argument against Ebert's points or a defense of the role that violence plays in the film, he meanders on for a few paragraphs about how the movie isn't for kids, kids today are different than they were in the '50s, and in the '50s kids played with guns anyway, but kids will probably see it despite its R rating, and what were we talking about again? Indeed, by arguing that "the sort of kids that will see Kick-Ass this weekend are well prepared for it," he actually ends up explaining exactly why the film makes Ebert sad, perhaps better than Ebert himself did. 

I quite like Slate's review, because it basically says all the stuff I said about the comic (so maybe I wasn't misreading the whole thing all along!). According to Dana Stevens, the film 

never provides a reason for Dave's transformation into Kick-Ass beyond his vague adolescent notion that being a superhero sounds neat. That may be enough to justify Dave's embarking on the experiment, but it doesn't explain why he continues to venture out in costume after being beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car.

Late in the movie, in voice-over, Dave puts a glum twist on a line from Spider-Man: "With no power comes no responsibility." If this film proposed any alternate moral vision, that line might count a sly reappropriation of the original. As the prelude to a climactic orgy of bloodletting set to the punk anthem "Bad Reputation," the joke comes off as nihilistic and flip. What do these characters consider worthy of killing and dying for? That a protagonist lacks superpowers is no reason for him to lack motivation, conviction, or purpose.

Nicely put. Hey, she even said "nihilistic"! 

Echoing another thread from my review of the comic, friend of this blog Erin Snyder writes on the Middle Room that the movie isn't fun. And might have (gasp) benefitted from being toned down by a studio.

On the other hand, another friend (who watched the movie, very likely with Mr. Snyder, but has not read the comic) informs me that many of the lines I quoted in my review appear in the movie in contexts different enough to invert their original meanings. And I know that the "first mission" was changed from beating up graffiti writers to beating up honest-to-goodness burglars, which likely lessens the racial overtones that irked me. So maybe the film gives more context and a better sense of purpose to the character? I dunno; I'll find out soon. 

Lastly, Millar's recent interview with the Onion AV Club is worth reading. He has some interesting things to say about, for instance, the role that conservatism and conservative characters play in his work. I think he's a bit in error, though, in describing Superman and Batman as "law-enforcement people" and "authority figures." I actually think that superheroes are countercultural figures who critique or even undermine society's values rather than uphold them. More on this later...

*That hope mostly has to do with McLovin, because that kid is hilarious. 

**For this reason I hated the French horror film High Tension/Haute Tension, which has some extreme, and extremely unpleasant, violence at the beginning. Until the final moments of the film, I was hoping it would give me some kind of payoff to justify that unpleasantness; instead it served up one of the worst twists in film history. 

Five reasons to hate Kick-Ass

Sorry to be a contrarian, folks, but I am anything but excited about Kick-Ass. In fact, I hated just about everything about the comic series it's based on, which I felt totally missed the point of superheroes in its ham-fisted attempt at satirizing the genre and its fans. I feel so strongly about it that I wrote a lengthy essay on the story's many, many failings, which you can read as a guest post at SF Signal. An excerpt:

The problem is that Kick-Ass wants to be a superhero, but his conception of heroism is all wrong. “We only get one life,” he says, “and I wanted mine to be exciting.” He sees the thrills, the violence, but not the underlying sense of moral mission. He says himself that he has no real origin, that “It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask... Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.” But Spider-Man or Batman's trauma isn’t just a throwaway aspect of their stories; it’s the guiding force behind their every action. A hero who begins with nothing but “loneliness and despair,” not an all-consuming moral imperative to improve the world, is by definition a nihilistic figure. Dave Lizewski is really not a superhero at all—in genre classic terms, he’s Peter Parker after the radioactive spider-bite but before the death of Uncle Ben. His actions aren’t altruistic in the least—he continues putting on the costume because he likes to ride the ego wave that comes from his Youtube fame... In a recent interview Millar stated that Kick-Ass dons his costume “because it's the right thing to do. In a weird way, if you push past all the blood and the swearing, it's quite a moral tale.”  But because the character lacks a complete origin, a reason to think that what he’s doing is the right thing, it’s not a moral tale—in fact, it’s a decidedly amoral one. And without the sense of a moral mission, he’s simply not a superhero. Without murdered parents, Batman wouldn’t be a hero; he’d just be a guy who dresses up and punch people—which is basically what Kick-Ass is. In short, the book simply doesn’t understand the genre it purports to be commenting on. Superheroes work in large part because of the heroic myth at their core. In throwing out this central, defining trait of that myth, Kick-Ass loses any resonance it might have otherwise had.

Read the full essay at SF Signal.

While researching this essay, I learned that Mark Millar, writer of the comic and executive producer of the film, is a Catholic who attends mass every week. Given my interpretation of Kick-Ass as an amoral, nihilistic, Ennisian mess, I don't know what to make of that fact. Any thoughts? Share 'em below.

Persecuted Jedi in the news again

A while back I wrote a short piece for Religion Dispatches on an odd news item involving the U.K.-based Church of Jediism, involving a would-be Sith Lord's drunken attack on one of the Church's founders and, more importantly, the powerful impact that media attention can have on new religious movements. The Church of the Jedi is in the news again-- a member is claiming that Jobcentre, a job-training organization, discriminated against him by demanding that he remove his hood indoors. Chris Jarvis argues that going hooded in public is part of his faith. "Muslims can walk around in whatever religious gear they like," he noted, "so why can’t I?" After receiving his official complaint, Jobcentre apologized. The Times' religion blog notes that the Church of the Jedi's founder, Daniel Jones, was involved in a similar dispute with Tesco last year, whose response to his complaint was anything but conciliatory: "Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side  and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood."

As with last year's drunken Vader attack, media coverage of this kind of story only helps small groups like the Church of Jediism, no matter how sneering it may be. For a church that literally started at a backyard barbecue, international press coverage, even as news-of-the-weird items, gives them a farther reach than they could ever have on their own. And given the amount of coverage this group has gotten in the last two years, it seems the Force is strong with this new religious movement.

Original story here; also here.

The Muppet Wicker Man

 
Why didn't somebody think of it sooner? An online comic book adaptation of the '70s bizarro-pagan horror classic The Wicker Man, starring... the Muppets. Read it fast, before the lawsuits hit.

And, while you're at it, check out my review of The Wicker Man from a few years ago, in which I explored the movie's depiction of clashing religious ideologies.

UPDATE:

Oh, hey, it's embeddable: