Adam Roberts: The History of Science Fiction "What SF does better than other forms of literature is mediate the scientific and mystical perspectives of the cosmos: rationality and the unnameable."
Get Religion and Beliefnet report that Dimension Films has hired a PR firm known for marketing to conservative Christians to help push The Road. The adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's relentlessly bleak postapocalyptic narrative might seem a tough product to sell to the notoriously-picky Christian market; the story involves lots of violence and cannibalism and not a single cute penguin. Still, Beliefnet thinks the effort to get Christians into the theater is a good thing, arguing that "bringing the movie to evangelicals and other conservative believers may
signal that Hollywood is ready to take them seriously as consumers." Get Religion is worried that the move is wrongheaded, since the kind of redemption found in more religious end-times tales is "is nowhere to be found in The Road."
That contention implies to me that they haven't read the book, at least not all the way through. In my review of the novel a couple years ago, I described it as "one of the most religious postapocalyptic tales since Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz." The novel is, in fact, about the survival of hope and compassion in a hopeless and cruel world. McCarthy brings his world to some pretty low depths, but the point of all that despair is to hint, in the novel's closing pages, that humanity will survive against all odds. (It's a bit surprising to see those themes emerge in the story, given that McCarthy is not exactly known for his optimism.) But that's the overwhelming narrative of postapocalyptic stories in general, as I've arguedelsewhere: hope for survival, order emerging from chaos, the perseverance of the human spirit. If anything, it's the idea that humanity can survive divine wrath that might drive away the Left Behind crowd-- just as McCarthy isn't known for optimism, Tim LaHaye isn't known for humanism. But it's that story of compassion and redemption that makes The Road so impressively religious, so apocalyptically compelling. Will conservative Christians be able to get past the cannibalism to see it? Personally, I doubt it-- I expect the same puritanical impulses that led to the protests against the deeply Christological The Last Temptation of Christ will hold sway here as well.
One thing I noticed was resistance to the idea that this could
actually be a story about religion. Numerous theorists (including
Stephen King) have read possession as code for something else that we
fear either consciously or sub-consciously. According to most film
theorists, The Exorcist is actually about fear of the counter-culture, fear of children, fear of women, etc. Conversely, many critics who thought The Exorcist was actually about demonic possession found it distasteful. S.T. Joshi, for instance, characterizes Blatty as a Catholic evangelist and The Exorcist as a sort of hellfire sermon.
While psychoanalytical readings are interesting, I don’t believe they can explain the behavior of audiences watching The Exorcist
in 1973. I think those reactions can be attributed to a very literal
fear of demonic possession. Furthermore, I think these readings of the
film point to a disconnect between popular religion and the idea of
secularization. The secularization narrative is so powerful, that even
when audiences are fainting from terror while watching The Exorcist,
it is assumed that this is the catharsis of some repressed and
previously unknown fear, rampant in our collective subconscious,
because the idea that modern Westerners could actually be afraid of the
devil seems an impossibility.
And way at the bottom are some very interesting thoughts on apocalyptic folk piety vs. anti-millenarian ecclesiastic religion. It's a great interview, and well worth checking out.
I went to college with Joe. He is a very smart guy, and knows more about the sociology of religion than I ever will. However, I know way more than he does about SF, and probably about comics, too. Maybe if you put us together we would turn into some kind of religion-and-pop-culture robot, and we could fight a giant flying lizard. Also, he is handsome, has good taste in music, and did not pay me to say any of the above.
Repent! Next Sunday, I will be speaking on a panel at the First Annual Doomsday Film Fest & Symposium. The festival runs from Friday Oct. 23rd to Sunday Oct. 25th at the DCTV Theater in New York, and will feature great tales of the end times and after like Mad Max 2 (probably better-known to most of you as The Road Warrior), War Games, and Return of the Living Dead.
My panel, "The End is Nigh: Prophecies of the End Times from the Rapture to 2012," is coupled with a screening of Michael Tolkin's hallucinatory apocalyptic fable The Rapture. Far from being a dispensationalist tract, Tolkin's story (which stars Mimi Rogers and pre-X-Files David Duchovny) is a psychodrama about the nature of belief, and it's certainly one of the stranger movies about religion you'll ever see.
As if that weren't enough, the panel is followed by a screening of David Cronenberg's first feature film, Shivers (a.k.a. They Came From Within, a.k.a. Orgy of the Blood Parasites). All the weirdness you'd expect from Cronenberg is fully present in this early film, about a aphrodisiac venereal disease that turns people into sex-crazed monsters-- the movie leaves the definite sense that the total collapse of society (and hidebound morality) is not a bad thing.
In addition to the Sunday afternoon panel, I will now also be moderating the Friday evening panel "Doomsday Over the Ages"-- which is pretty exciting, not least of all because the panel is followed by a screening of The Road Warrior!
...but it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me...
I can't discuss Moon without giving away major elements of the plot. Therefore:
Spoilers ahead.
Moon is the story of Sam Bell—the sole inhabitant of a moon base that gathers energy to be sent back to Earth. He's on a three-year contract, with two weeks left to go, and the solitude has been getting to him—especially since a damaged communications satellite prevents any real-time communication with his family. He's starting to see things, and it's interfering with his work. While working outside the base, one hallucination causes an accident, and he wakes up in the medical bay with no memory of what happened. He wants to leave the base to get the damaged equipment up and running again, but Gerty, his robotic assistant, won't let him leave. He manages to trick the computer into letting him take a quick moonwalk, and once outside the base he investigates the site of the accident, where he finds... another Sam Bell. There follows some great, tense scenes between the two, as they alternately try to pretend that nothing strange is going on and figure out their bizarre situation.
Before long they are able to squeeze the answer out of Gerty: they're clones of the original Sam Bell, who left the base twelve years ago. Their "three-year contract" is actually a capped life-span, at the end of which their bodies begin to deteriorate and are incinerated. Communications with Earth are being artificially blocked, and the taped conversations he's been having with his wife are fake. Everything he's been living for is an illusion, and, in the Dickian tradition, he's forced to cope with realization of the truth.
Sam Rockwell is a pretty amazing actor, and this movie is a fine showcase for that—it's virtually a one-man show (though I certainly don't want to downplay the contribution of Kevin Spacey, the voice of the very HAL-like Gerty). In the hands of a lesser actor this might have ended up schlocky, but he powerfully communicates the soul-wrecking disillusionment the two Bells experience. (The scene in which the older Bell finally establishes contact with his daughter on Earth is particularly devastating.)
As one might expect from a movie about clones, the core of the story involves questions of identity. Each of these beings truly, completely believes that he is the original, real Sam Bell, that he will return to Earth at the end of his contract, that his wife and infant daughter are waiting for him. And who's to say they're wrong? They have the memories and the emotions that go along with them. They have, dare I say it, the soul of Sam Bell. But the company that runs the moon base treats them as objects, as machines like Gerty. But there are hints that Gerty may have emotions of his own. He does seem to malfunction a bit, like HAL 9000. But rather than going on a homicidal rampage, his malfunction manifests itself as compassion. He's programmed to help Sam Bell, and help him he does—at the film's end, he's instrumental in sending one of the clones back to Earth. There are multiple Turing tests going on in this story, and both clone and machine pass them with flying colors.
The featured story on the website of city planning magazine City Journal is "How Science Fiction Found Religion" by Benjamin A. Plotinsky. (I'm not sure how it fits into the journal's scope, but nevertheless, there it is.) Plotinsky's thesis is that SF movies and TV, which have historically focused on political allegory, are increasingly rooting themselves in Christian symbolism. The article features a quote from yours truly (a bit from The Gospel According to Science Fiction on the inherent messianism of superheroes), which is flattering, but I can't help but take issue with some of Plotinsky's points.
I think his division of SF's thematic elements into "political" and "religious" is a bit sloppy, particularly since the article ends by saying that Battlestar Galactica, one of the most religious SF shows pretty much ever, represents the genre moving back into "politics" and away from "religion." If BSG shows us anything, it's that a show can combine complex politics with mythic depth. (Then again, we already knew that from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show that Plotinsky quite unfairly dismisses. Indeed, that's where BSG re-imaginer Ronald D. Moore cut his religious-and-political teeth.) Not only that, he undermines his own argument that Christian symbolism is a growing factor by citing examples of SF Christ-figures as far back as The Day the Earth Stood Still. And though I agree about the de-mythologizing of the Force in the Star Wars prequels, I don't see much connection between the that retconning and the waning popularity of New Age spirituality (at which Plotinsky takes a couple out-of-place stabs). Nevertheless, it's an interesting read.
What bothered me more is the simple fact that Plotinsky's taste is just... well, idiosyncratic. In his estimation Enterprise was the best Star Trek series since the original; he describes The Next Generation as "phenomenally boring," which I take as an almost-personal insult. Meanwhile Terminator 3 is a "fine film." At times this results in overly simplified or just-plain-wrong readings of important works: the aforementioned Deep Space Nine is dismissed out-of-hand; the epic good-and-evil struggle of The Lord of the Rings is "political, not religious;" The Empire Strikes Back is written off as merely "entertaining" but lacking any religious themes worthy of discussion. (Han Solo frozen in carbonite doesn't at least rate a death-and-resurrection mention?) It's nice to see someone championing Superman Returns, but if that attitude has to come at the expense of The Next Generation, it begins to look like the point has been missed.
Read Benjamin A. Plotinksy's "How Science Fiction Found Religion" here.
If I may briefly descend into totaly nepotism, I encourage everyone to watch the first episode of "Hell Froze Over," a new web short series my friends have been working on. (I'm in an episode later in the season, but they haven't yet told me when it's going up.) The official summary: "To prove to her roommate that her bad luck in love has nothing to do with the men she chooses, Jody decides to date every man she's ever rejected, starting with the guy she just passed on the street." Thus:
I seem incapable of reading all my RSS feeds more often than monthly, unfortunately. But hey—that means big linkdumps like this one, and everyone loves those!
SciFi Scanner interviews Ronald Moore about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica, and roughly half of the interview is about the role of religion in the show. That's the good news. The bad news is this:
The journey is not over, but certainly both sides are suddenly faced with the prospect, "Maybe it's all been for nothing. Maybe there is no God, and if that's the case where do we go from here? What does it all mean and what are we going to do with ourselves?" which I think is a great place to take the characters.
Sure, Ron, it's a good place to take them. Just don't leave them there, OK? 'Cause if the whole point of this occasionally very upsetting journey has been that there's no point to anything... well, let's just say BSG won't be on the list of 14 awesome things about 2009.
I knew Richard Dawkins was a humorless bastard, but this takes the cake: he suspects fantasy novels might have an "insidious affect on rationality." The best part? This whole discussion takes place in the context of Mr. "Do-Not-Indoctrinate-Your-Children" announcing that he's going to write "a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking."
Also in the Humorless Bastards Department, the Fourth Annual Christian Filmmakers Academy will focus on the theology of SF film—and not in a good way, from the sound of things. Founder Doug Phillips states: "The popular genre has been responsible for persuading American thrill-and-chill- seekers that fictional speculation is reality—especially in regard to the creation of the universe, life on earth, and the 'certainty' of extraterrestrial life." This is pretty much the same anti-SF stance given by James A. Herrick in his polemical book Scientific Mythologies (review coming within a month, really!). One wonders what these anti-SF evangelicals will say when bacteria are (inevitably) found elsewhere... Oh, and to give you a sense of just what kind of Christian filmmakers make up the Christian Filmmakers Academy, they've declared Ben Stein's histrionic and generally dumb Expelled to be one of "the year’s most groundbreaking films." Yeeeeeaaaah.
The Crotchety Old Fan reviews... SF Gospel! Well, not just me. He's reviewing every site that was included in that ginormous SF Book Reviewers meme that started a few weeks back (and has been turned into a song—I'm in the last verse.) COF goes into a bit more depth on SF Gospel than on some of the other sites. On his comments I say: 1) Oops, you're right—Klaatu didn't speak to the UN in the original; 2) I'm aware of Wise's opinion, but I stand by my interpretation (particularly since Wise didn't write the screenplay); 3) I hope you won't disagree with everything here, and in fact I can guarantee it right now: The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a darned good movie. See, we agree on at least one thing.
Auxiliary Memory takes a look at Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End with an eye to its religious overtones—including a comparison or two to the aforementioned The Day the Earth Stood Still.
As soon as I have time to play video games again, I'm getting this: "The You Testament," an early church simulator by indie game designer MDickie in which you play one of the first disciples of Jesus. You get to wander around Israel preaching, praying, and possibly getting crucified.
Some genre-related, some religion-related, many both. This isn't a top 14, just the first 14 that came to mind, so, in no particular order:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
It's a shame there haven't been more SF books about monks who live in a giant clock, because Stephenson's masterpiece has ended that particular subgenre. All else can't help but be an imitation. So if you've got a monks-in-a-giant-clock manuscript kicking around... well, I'm really sorry. My review is here.
Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh
I'm always intrigued by the delightful weirdness of evangelical pop culture, and Radosh's book sums up why. Check out the online multimedia appendix for clips from Bibleman and Ultimate Christian Wrestling. (If I were smart I'd put together something like that for The Gospel According to Science Fiction.)
Doctor Who Season 4
"The Runaway Bride" was hardly my favorite episode, so I wasn't the only one who was... disappointed to hear that Catherine Tate would be returning to Doctor Who for a whole season. Imagine my surprise, then, when Donna Noble ends up one of the most interesting companions in the 45-year history of the program. Billie Piper's Rose casts a long shadow, but Tate successfully made the show hers—in a very good way. And the finale is pretty much a blueprint for how to make geeks feel happy.
Ex Machina by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris
I surprise myself saying this, since Brian K. Vaughan's other series have often left me cold, but this is one of the best comics coming out right now. My favorite moment of the year occurred in #33, in which Mayor Mitchell Hundred has a vision of the word made concrete: God as an embodiment of New York.
Cloverfield
I'm a big kaiju fan, so of course I was anticipating seeing this view-from-the-ground of a giant monster rampage. I thought it might lose some of its luster on second viewing, but I recently watched it again and I'm glad to say it didn't. Can there ever be a better fake-found-footage-documentary? I doubt it. My review appeared on Religion Dispatches.
Wall-E
I didn't make that big a deal of it or anything, but yeah, this was pretty great. And all about Plato's cave!
"The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's, February 2008)
An amazing parable about love, fate, and alien artifacts. I reviewed it here. I'll be brief: this story deserves a Hugo. Come to think of it...
Asimov's in general
Sheila Williams has really, really good taste in stories, and the last year of Asimov's was nothing short of amazing. Check out my choices for the 2008 readers' poll to see some of the reasons why. Here's a tip: quit reading blog posts about the decline of the science fiction magazines and subscribe to this one. You'll be very, very glad you did.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Until Dollhouse—and possibly even after that—TTSCC is the closest network TV is going to get to Buffy at the moment. It's not perfect, sure, but it has moments of brilliance, chief among them the first season finale's robot-versus-SWAT-team battle set to Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around." For a for-instance, here's my review of the season two premiere.
Alien Nation: The Ultimate Movie Collection
A couple years ago Fox put out a DVD set entitled Alien Nation: The Complete Series. The problem? It wasn't: it excluded the five TV movies Fox aired over the eight years after the hourly show was canceled. Alien Nation had the potential to be one of the best SF shows of all time before Fox killed it (sound familiar?), and the release of this DVD set (which originally came out last year, but only as a Best Buy exclusive) means that the whole thing is finally available for real.
Iron Man
I was not that into The Dark Knight, which struck me as relentlessly cynical (and a bit nonsensical, too). After its ridiculously huge opening weekend I feared that we were destined for a few years of "grim n' gritty" antisuperhero movies wherein the good guys are really bad guys and everything is sad. And maybe we are. But Iron Man offers a glimmer of hope that there might still be some superhero movies coming up that are made for people who like fun.
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti is probably the best horror writer since Lovecraft, but he has a very hard time keeping his books in print. Many of his best stories were only available in expensive small-press hardcovers and even more expensive out-of-print omnibuses. Virgin Books has done us all a favor by releasing an affordable trade paperback of Teatro Grottesco, which includes many of his best stories (such as my favorite, "Gas Station Carnivals"). Anybody for some existential despair?
Hulu's only 9 months old, but dang, it's hard to remember the Internet without it. It's got a slew of good genre shows both new and old (Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the not-as-bad-as-you'd-expect Total Recall 2070) and some not-entirely-great-but-hey-it's-free ones, too (Swamp Thing, Lost In Space, and even the freakin' Time Tunnel). Netflix's Watch Instantly stepped up this year as well, lifting time restrictions for most users and allowing them to watch as much as they want—which allowed me to watch Quantum Leap in its entirety this summer. Who needs DVR?
***UPDATE***
Wow, I totally forgot to put Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on here. Oops. So let's call it 15 awesome things. Well, you probably already know why it's great—and if you don't, why not just watch it?
In Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, modern pop culture forms the stage of a very unusual Passion play. The film places Golgotha within the squared circle: it presents a wrestling match as a drama of violence that brings salvation. But who is the redeemer and who is the redeemed?
Mickey Rourke plays—though "embodies" might be a better word—Randy "the Ram" Robinson (born Robin Ramzinsky), a fifty-something professional wrestler quietly fading into oblivion in south Jersey. He still wrestles on weekends, but superstardom has long-since passed him by, and he struggles to make rent on his dreary mobile home. He is, like Travis Bickle, God's lonely man. His estranged daughter refuses to speak to him, and the closest he has to a friend is Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper who thinks of him as a customer rather than a companion. After a particularly brutal match, the Ram's years of physical and chemical abuse overtake him: he suffers a heart attack, and he is told he'll likely die if he continues wrestling. Thus robbed of his identity, Randy struggles to find his way in the world. Ultimately, he realizes that he needs wrestling, and, throwing caution to the wind, he goes ahead with a 20th-anniversary rematch against his old rival, a faux-Libyan heel named the Ayatollah.*
The Wrestler is a movie all about redemptive suffering, as we see the central role that dramatized violence plays in the Ram's life. At a couple points this is made perhaps too clear, as in an early scene where Randy shows Cassidy the scars his career has left him with. She responds by quoting Isaiah 53:5 by way of The Passion of the Christ's opening epigraph: "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds we are healed." She makes the connection even more clear moments later, dubbing Randy "the sacrificial Ram," and later in the film we see a tattoo in the center of his back of Jesus crowned with thorns. Clearly, the film wants us to view wrestling as a spectacle of redemptive suffering.
And at times that suffering is extreme. In perhaps the most powerful sequence in the film, we see an ultraviolent match between the Ram and real-life hardcore wrestler Necro Butcher**. The two mangle one another with a variety of sharp implements scattered around the ring, and the action is intercut with scenes of backstage doctors patching the two up immediately after the match. The violence is intense: Necro takes a staplegun first to his own body, then to the Ram's; he stabs the Ram in the forehead with a fork; both crash through sheets of glass and tangles of barbed wire. (And, lest we forget what it all means, the Ram ends up with a sizable gash on the side of his torso.) It's a messy, bloody affair, and the audience loves it—but it's interesting to note that they express their enjoyment of the match by hurling abuse at the masochistic Necro (chanting, for instance, "You sick fuck" while he staples himself). Despite the extreme violence of the spectacle, the match still establishes a normative morality.
But what comes across most clearly is that this is a very, very different kind of wrestling than the Ram enacted twenty years ago. Wrestling in the '80s was simple, straightforward theater. In the final act of the film, the Ram tries to plan out his match with the Ayatollah, who responds: "You're the face, I'm the heel. Done." Compare this to a conversation Randy and Necro have before their match, in which Necro carefully explains what weapons he's going to use. In the Ram's day, wrestling was all good guys and bad guys, simplified stories of right and wrong. Necro Butcher's style of wrestling is still theater, but it's theater of a very different kind; it's something more akin to performance art. The stage is no longer the canvas, but the actual flesh of the wrestlers—flesh that is, by the end of the match, visibly torn and battered. Things have changed, and the Ram has a hard time staying current. In his day, wrestling was a drama of violence, but with a sturdy layer of make-believe on top. There's no faking being stabbed in the forehead with a fork. It's little surprise that, after a cursory patching-up in the aftermath of the match with Necro, the Ram ends up in the hospital anyway.
It's not stated explicitly in the film, but the match against Necro Butcher is a "Bring Your Own Weapons" match, a staple of CZW (Combat Zone Wrestling) events in which fans provide the tools with which the wrestlers mangle one another. The barbed wire, forks, and thumbtacks that nearly kill the Ram are provided by the audience; this is participatory violence. In this context, the audience's chanting takes on the audience's role in a Passion play. "Crucify him!" is replaced by "Fuck you Necro," but the end result is the same: the audience makes the violence possible (and necessary).
So perhaps it is the audience that is redeemed: through participating in the violent spectacle, aspects of their worldview (America is better than not-America; reluctant masochism is better than enthusiastic masochism) are reinforced. But the real salvation here is for the Ram himself. The movie makes it clear that he finds a clarity inside the ring that he can't find in the ambiguities of his real life. (It's little surprise that a wrestler of the '80s who dramatizes suffering falls for a stripper who offers fake pleasure.) His attempts to find a new normalcy (a new job, a better relationship with his daughter) end in frustrated disaster. Ultimately, the Ram can't simply be a character that Randy plays. He is the Ram; his true identity can only become manifest in the simple drama of an old-school wrestling match. Without wrestling, he has no identity, so he sacrifices his reality for fiction, and finds redemption in the bargain. When he emerges from behind the curtain to fight his final match, he truly becomes the character he's been playing in Passion plays for his entire life. The Ram is the salvator salvandus, the redeemed redeemer. His final entry into the ring is a resurrection: Robin Ramzinski has died, but Randy the Ram, the legend, the "spiritual body" that transcends ordinary existence, will live forever.
Many thanks to wrestling fans extraordinare Mark Hugo and Michael Benni Pierce for their assistance with this essay.
*The reference is to the mid-'80s rivalry between Sgt. Slaughter and the Iron Sheik.
**Who I suspect may have gotten his name from the bass player for Norwegian black metal band Mayhem.
My latest piece for Religion Dispatches is an essay on John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt, a parable about Vatican II, gendered power, and sex abuse scandals.
On the surface Doubt is a torn-from-the-headlines story about the abuse scandals that have rocked the Church over the last decade. At its heart, however, Shanley’s story is a parable of Vatican II. It's critical here to point out that Doubt is set in 1964, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council; in that context the story reflects the Church’s growing pains. Sister Aloysius is the old church, authoritarian and inflexible. Father Flynn is the new order, the jocular, friendly face of a Church whose pastors no longer turn their backs to the congregation.
I saw the play on which the film was based during its Broadway run, and it was, simply put, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The movie is very good, but not quite that good. It turns the volume up a little, which does away with some of the subtlety and points things a little more toward melodrama. Nevertheless, the story is still powerful; the tug-of-war between the two principal characters is an incredibly compelling conflict. I'm pretty sure Meryl Streep saw the play too; she definitely borrowed a couple of mannerisms from Cherry Jones, who originated the role.
