Fight for Your Right to Doze

In the late 70s, Joey Ramone wanted to be sedated, in 2008 a film called Berlin Calling looks into the life of a musician for the current generation that seems to look at sedation as the default state of being. The title, of course, is reminiscent of The Clash's masterpiece London Calling, made not long after the Ramones' song and by referencing the seminal punk album Berlin Calling invites comparison. Mostly the film is a run of the mill story of addiction inhabited by character types more than characters and shot in the obsessively clean manner of modern film but there is a charm to its protagonist's ordeal and music by real life electronic musician Paul Kalkbrenner is nice.

Kalkbrenner plays the protagonist, too, DJ Ickarus, a successful artist in a romantic relationship with his manager, Mathilde (Rita Lengyel). She, like everyone else, tries to put up with his angry outbursts.

They both belong to a club going culture of widespread, casual drug use and open relationships, both comfortable having sex with other partners while considering themselves loyal--this isn't even remarked upon. One night Ickarus gets some bad ecstasy and finds himself making trouble in a hotel restaurant the next day.

Mathilde takes him to rehab where he's diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the most part, the film fits comfortably into a prescribed pattern of star addict movies--he's brilliant but he trashes his record label's office, he seems level after getting a prescription then goes off his meds, he manipulates a weak link at the rehab, the doctor in charge doesn't quite understand his music, etc.

Maybe it shows how out of touch I am but I couldn't help feeling the contrast between London Calling and Berlin Calling was a lack of passion in the latter. Ickarus' music is nice in a background way, but there doesn't seem to be any examination or real motive in the film beyond making a film. While London Calling makes the troubled observation that people are lost in the supermarket, normal lifestyles promote sedation and complacency, Berlin Calling, in its inability to break its characters out of type with its clean, commercial imagery of invariably pretty performers with perfect skin, seems to embrace that very complacency. I think the thought behind the film may be best exemplified by the character Corinna (Araba Walton).

A walking deus ex machina, Corinna must be the most self-possessed person in the world. Mathilde's lover, she doesn't mind when Ickarus spontaneously joins in when they have sex right after he and Mathilde had had a loud fight. A couple days later, she's able to physically restrain him and knock him to the ground when he's on something bad again and he's trying to get into Corinna's apartment to see Mathilde. When Ickarus has finished his album and Mathilde is listening to it with her producer, Corinna is also somehow there and her thumbs up is what gets the album released. You got a problem? Corinna will solve it. I half expected to see her receiving a visit from Nick Fury after the credits. But she's part and parcel of a movie that allows very little mess or complication into its story. Of course a superhero would turn up.

Mask of the Beholder

Identity is defined by our experiences and, more importantly, how we process those experiences. Choosing not to process an experience is also a character defining choice and these decisions manifest a personality others might or might not recognise as "you". That's the idea behind 2015's Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh Ich Seh, literally "I See I See"), a film I admire more for its intentions than what it actually accomplishes. Your mileage may vary, but I found the storytelling instincts of directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala to be unequal to their concept. Though, considering the presence of two directors, maybe I'm liking one and disliking the other.

The film takes place almost entirely in a large, harshly modern house deep in the woods. A pair of twins, Elias and Lukas (Elias Schwarz and Lukas Schwarz), greet their mother (Susanne Wuest) who has returned from the hospital with bandages covering most of her face, turning it into a strange mask.

The brothers spend most of their time wandering the woods or playing with their strange collection of cockroaches. They listen to old recordings of their mother and soon begin to question whether the woman with them is really the same person, especially since this woman is less willing to play with them or sing to them and even becomes quite angry with Elias at one point for something that seems trivial. Before long, they become afraid and take to monitoring the woman and sleeping in shifts.

This is a movie with a twist ending so I won't give you much more of the plot. I will say there are quite a few red herrings that seemed at the time like red herrings, things that are really in the movie to make it more of a standard horror film and end up not making any sense. Like a scene where the brothers climb a hill of human bones or a scene where the mother swallows one of the cockroaches. I almost wonder if one of the directors had made a version of the film without all this stuff and then the other was brought in to pad it out with things that could be packaged in the trailer. Though there is also a sense of bad instincts in editing, the film generally feels sort of stiff and academic.

There is something interesting still in the basic idea of exploring identity and experience, though. At first I thought the woman had had cosmetic surgery but then we learn her injuries were the result of a car accident. The mind is led down a certain road about how people try to change who they are by changing their appearance only to be stopped at the realisation that it wasn't her choice. Assuming she's the same person.

Twitter Sonnet #802

A corduroy embargoed dream awaits.
No-one foresees Cortes in ritual.
When circling tide in castle moat abates
Lament and crowns become habitual.
A similar appointment's face appeared.
The fur upon the ground attests to glam.
Steel abbots have in space a star areared.
A Skywalker has took it on the lam.
A shoe misplaced arose to mind the head.
A blanket prank befell reflex enthroned.
Enfeoffed viziers perplex the pale undead.
Tenochtitlan's ballgame is still postponed.
Arrested walking sticks can't compliment.
Avasted wooden legs aren't supplement.

Eventually the Day for Night Shots

Two attractive young women decide to spend their vacation cycling on isolated roads in countryside where they don't speak the local language. Jane and Cathy might be forgiven when we consider the two English girls have chosen to vacation in France but we can anticipate little good fortune in a movie called And Soon the Darkness with a screenplay co-written by Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks. This 1970 film feels more like television than cinema with a story featuring endless baits and switches, unremarkable but serviceable visuals, and average performances. It's a mystery with a lot of red herrings that plays fair for the most part but is more satisfying for its escalating sense of dread.

In all this empty space, these desolate stretches of road between isolated villages, the two young women stop to rest by a little patch of woods where a girl just like them had been raped and murdered a few years ago, something Jane (Pamela Franklin) learns much later. After a little while, Jane wants to move on but Cathy (Michele Dotrice) wants to stay and doze a bit longer. Somehow this turns into a big fight--and a line I suspect was improvised as Jane, moving her bike, says, "Get your great fat legs out of the way!" and Cathy can't suppress a grin. But in any case, the girls separate, Jane goes on to the next village and Cathy says she'll catch up. Of course, she never does.

As Jane becomes increasingly worried, going back and forth between two villages and the spot where they'd stopped, the film gives us a series of suspects who all seem suspicious in each their own way--a man claiming to be a detective who'd investigated the previous murder (Sandor Eles), a Gendarme (John Nettleton) an innkeeper hastily warns Jane to beware of, an English schoolmistress who invites Jane to stay with her.

When we do learn at the end who the villain is, one or two things done by the suspects meant to mislead our suspicions don't add up. But for the most part, the film succeeds in a suspense created by a vulnerable, fish out of water character who suddenly finds herself surrounded by strangers who are all sinister in one way or another.

The Colour has Awakened and Wants Our Women

In 1927, a story by H.P. Lovecraft called "The Colour Out of Space" introduced readers to an innovation in horror, its conception of madness caused by contact with fundamentally alien phenomena was weird and eerily, undeniably insightful. In 1965, the story was adapted as Die, Monster, Die!, a tale about how a disease turns people into monsters that want to kill people and about how a young man has to find the courage to save a helpless, pretty young woman. It's an entertaining, slightly campy film with beautiful sets that probably would be a lot more enjoyable if one has no knowledge of Lovecraft's superior short story.

Maybe Lovecraft wouldn't have hated everything about the film, I suspect the unabashed Anglophile would be somewhat delighted by the idea of his fictional town of Arkham being moved to Britain. Elements like the bizarre, large plantlife growing in the area of the "blasted heath" and the deformed animals are also kept. A term Lovecraft borrowed from Macbeth, instead of a heath blasted by winds or battle, Lovecraft literally blasted his heath, rendered in Die, Monster, Die! in a couple really bad matte paintings.

It looks like to-day Bert has been drawing the blasted heath on the side walk and Mary Poppins has let us jump in and explore.

The protagonist is Stephen, played by Nick Adams like a perpetually irate TV cop, the only American character in the film. He's come to England to hook up with his former classmate, Susan (Suzan Farmer). But no-one in town will tell him how to get to her home, a reluctance to confront the topic which made more sense in the story when it was an all but abandoned farm house. In the movie, as in Corman's adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a humble abode has become a sprawling, gothic manor.

A really lovely one with intricate sets. Dig the model ship in the background of this shot:

That's no ordinary prop but it's never even mentioned.

Nahum, from humble farmer, has been upgraded to a gentleman played by a wheelchair bound Boris Karloff who's intent on harnessing the terrible alien power. His wife, Letitia (Freda Jackson), confines herself behind the shrouds of a grey canopied bed and begs Stephen to take her daughter, Susan, away from the house.

Susan is possibly the single biggest problem with the film, a perky, happy college student in bright pink clothes she's somehow maintained almost total ignorance of the weird shit going down around her until Stephen shows up to irritably lead her around and point things out to her. The happy little lady is like an earnestly drawn Marilyn Munster.

Director Daniel Haller also has a distracting tendency of using false deep focus shots--deep focus meaning things in foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus. But technology didn't permit deep focus compositions keeping extreme foreground and background simultaneously in focus. Orson Welles got around this in Citizen Kane by creating subtle process shots, combining two sequences of footage. William Wyler later used this technique in movies like 1961's The Children's House. In Die, Monster, Die!, Haller employs this technique with no restraint, resulting in perplexing artificial shots like this one:

Here Stephen's just asking a shop keeper the way to the Witley place, did this need to be deep focus so badly?

There's certainly a lot of fun to be had in this film and it's great seeing Boris Karloff still creating atmosphere even confined to a wheelchair most of the time (and inexplicably finding his way up staircases off screen). But do yourself a favour and read "The Colour Out of Space" before seeing this.

The Pinnacle of Colour

If you took Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, mixed them together with Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, and set the whole thing in the greatest hits of Hammer and Roger Corman set designs with absolutely gorgeous costumes you'd have something like 2015's Crimson Peak. An exceptionally beautiful film by a director, Guillermo del Toro, already known for exceptional visuals, I said in my reaction to footage from the film I saw at Comic Con, "if it ends up having the worst screenplay ever written I'm still going to like it." And it didn't have the worst screenplay ever written, which is nice. Actually it's a good screenplay--most people will guess the mystery early on, I think, but the attention to creating characters, particularly the two female leads, is wonderful. It'll be a film that's more enjoyable for most people on the second viewing when they're not worried about the mystery so much. I was more than pleased.

So far I've liked Mia Wasikowska in every movie I've seen her in that's not Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland. I don't think she's as good as Jessica Chastain but she's perfectly adequate here as the young wouldbe novelist, Edith Cushing (a name I assume is a nod to Peter Cushing), daughter of a self-made American tycoon (Jim Beaver). He's the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps type who doesn't approve when the English gentleman, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who was born into his large but impoverished estate, courts his daughter.

Edith can see ghosts but she has no reason to suspect the ominous warning delivered by the beautifully hideous ghost of her mother, "Beware of Crimson Peak", has anything to do with Thomas or his tight lipped sister, Lucille (Chastain). We, the audience, immediately know better, of course.

It's not long before Edith is setting foot on the fully built for the movie Sharpe house interior wearing one of my favourites of a whole series of gorgeous costumes.

It's like blueberries and raspberries in vanilla ice cream. I wish I could take better screenshots but I'm working from the trailer here.

Chastain gets her share of lovely dresses, too. I love the subtle leafy breast on this blue frock:

It's 2015 and Cary Grant can't come in now and carry away the damsel in distress. A woman in trouble has to sort everything out herself, which is gratifying in this case, not the compulsive score-keeping in a film like Jurassic World. This does leave the male characters feeling slightly superfluous but Hiddleston's charm is certainly crucial to the film.

Del Toro does buck the spirit of the times, though, in giving us creatively designed ghosts--as usual in Del Toro's films performed by Doug Jones--instead of the same old plain looking children or plain corpses.

Twitter Sonnet #801

Ambulance rabbit trains careen in steel.
Abandoned baby carrots speak a mystery.
If even outer space can't sort what's real
Then jumping beans may write our history.
Regressed blank ordinance turns clay to dough.
A foot returned to hand and country glove.
Who knows what cranberry can lurk in tow?
A phoney roast a gorgon made with love.
A thought reclaimed the dime for luck too late.
Enormous phone and utility yoked
A dolphin operator crossed to sate
What leprechauns reluctant never stoked.
Addressing mists the ivy clung to ghosts.
The prize was buried under sacks of hosts.

Game of Vikings

There's something kind of hypnotic about listening to Peter Capaldi translate the secret language of babies in to-day's new Doctor Who. Am I remembering right, the Doctor hasn't done that since he was Matt Smith? "The Girl Who Died" felt oddly like it was written for the Eleventh Doctor, it's strange hearing Twelve be so comical after he was so sharp and serious in the previous episode. But I liked "The Girl Who Died", written by Steven Moffat and Jamie Mathieson, the latter having wrote my favourite episode of last season, "Mummy On the Orient Express".

Of course, the big news about this episode was the guest star, Maisie Williams, better known as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones. In a way, one could look at the episode as Doctor Who vs. Game of Thrones. The episode was much about the contrasting philosophies of the two shows--Williams plays a Viking girl who believes in resolving problems with fighting while of course Doctor Who is all about showing how it's best to avoid conflict if at all possible. The episode certainly comes out in the Doctor's favour with Clara in her continuing subplot of acting like the Doctor almost talking the alien menace out of obliterating a Viking village until Arya comes on the with bluster.

I happened to have watched an episode of the History Channel's Vikings last night and the comparison, to say the least, was not in favour of Doctor Who in terms of recreating a sense of the time and place in history. But I guess the Vikings look better than they did in "The Time Meddler", the last time we saw Vikings, if I remember right, on Doctor Who, a First Doctor story.

This episode certainly made me look forward to next week's part two. Hopefully in the Doctor Who universe at least Arya can finally catch a break.

With a Broken Filter

It's not easy to feel happy for a friend or family member when everything you've done in your life has been devalued and derided by those same friends and family. Fifteen year old Mia in 2009's Fish Tank has been conditioned to express rage so casually it's a wonder she attempts to create anything or reach out to anyone. The film is in many ways an impressive work of realism despite some flaws.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), and prepubescent sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), in public housing in East London. All the children in the neighbourhood listen to hip hop and in one of the more effective early scenes Mia loudly criticises a group of girls practising a dance routine while a few boys quietly look on.

The real, imperfect and quite child-like look of the girls in cheap clothes is an illuminating contrast to the standard, oily music video that obviously inspires them. The disposable sexuality of the videos imitated by children is slightly pathetic and sets up a main plot about unwise sexual encounters.

Joanne starts dating Conor, played by Michael Fassbender. Both she and him are improbably pretty with the kinds of bodies that only come with a gym membership, one of the things that really diminishes the sense of realism in the film. But Fassbender is good here, as he can be under the right directors, quickly adopting a paternal attitude towards Mia and her sister. Joanne can only mock Mia's attempts to become a dancer and generally seems jealous of Mia's youth while Conor introduces a genuinely supportive parental presence. Of course, we're constantly put on edge, wondering when his attitude towards Mia will turn sexual while her need for a father figure is confusingly mixed with a sexual attraction to him. But even with him, when he says something to her that could possibly be construed as negative, she immediately begins yelling about how she hates him and stalks off. Almost everyone in this movie has only two settings--angry or numb.

For the most part, the film maintains an interesting examination of character, augmented by a subplot where Mia tries to steal an emaciated horse from owners she thinks are starving it. When all we hear from her up to that point is that she fucking hates everyone, the gesture is appropriately weird and unattainable. For all the bluster, Mia and her mother mostly just come off as intensely vulnerable.

The Mask Behind the Mask

Well, in case you hadn't figured it out, yesterday's post was also my midterm for my Milton class. I ran out of time to make a separate blog entry here and there were formatting problems on the school site where the assignment was supposed to be uploaded so I cross posted it here. I spent more time than I meant to on it, reading through C.S. Lewis and William Empson and Percy Shelley all day and then I just barely managed to get to a showing of Phantom of the Opera I'd bought a ticket for earlier this year to see with my parents, sister, and brother in law. It occurred to me that writing an essay on Paradise Lost and then immediately afterwards seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera is a bit like studying The Odyssey and then going to see Clash of the Titans. Certainly the Phantom is modelled on the Satanic Hero after the Romantic's conception of Milton's character. The Phantom's opera-within-a-musical, Don Juan Triumphant, even recalls Lord Byron's Don Juan which, along with Manfred, really crystallised Romanticist theory on Milton's Satan to create the Byronic hero. Wikipedia tells me "Don Juan Triumphant" was originally the name of a song the Phantom wrote in the 1909 novel that Andrew Lloyd Webber created a larger place for in the story.

The original tale of a disfigured man living under an opera house seems more in line with stories reacting against the Byronic hero like Frankenstein or Moby Dick but Lloyd Webber brings it back full circle by emphasising a rock star quality to the phantom and heightening chemistry between Christine and the Phantom. It's even hinted that the Phantom and Christine eventually end up together since the play opens with the Phantom's rival for her affections, Raoul, evidently abandoned and heartbroken.

I liked the musical a lot when I was a kid, with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles, this new production by Cameron Mackintosh is still a lot of fun. The set designs are really good, particularly during the masquerade ball in a mirrored hall which looked like it was modelled on a Degas painting. Katie Travis as Christine, a ballerina who becomes singer in this version, was pretty good though rather like a Disney Princess. With Elsa in Frozen being Satanic Hero, maybe that's not inappropriate.

Unfortunately, the most crucial role, the Phantom himself, was given to someone named Chris Mann whose singing was so academic and utterly devoid of emotion it was like seeing a teenage amateur. Never does one think he could hold any sex appeal for Christine and he displays a corresponding lack of interest in anything but hitting notes. The "Music of the Night" scene falls totally flat where it was supposed to be selling the character to us.

But, aside from the most important aspect, it wasn't so bad.

Twitter Sonnet #800

The blank yet ricocheted off clear bulkheads.
Defamed the fortune teller grasped a card.
The wand allayed magician night urged dreads.
A kiss from man's contractual film's unmarred.
A rubber ring unheard hits warped tiles.
Distressed adhesive lost its hold of floor.
A riot's page discarded self files.
The clever multitude has jammed the door.
Unstirred the golden mirror mists for shapes.
A hat, a shadow, quick diverged from glass.
The legless pit for bright sapphires gapes.
A ghastly god of gems has choked the pass.
A ladybug astride Falstaff ascends.
The opened book library best amends.

Eternal Darkness

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things."
-Oscar Wilde from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Who is John Milton in Paradise Lost? Is he Satan, is he God, is he the narrator? Is he anyone? The question provoked by the extraordinary nature of the text, written by a man known for his love of scripture in a time when atheism was all but unthinkable and certainly not something one admitted, regards primarily a wonderfully crafted and sympathetic Satan. The debate has now gone on for centuries and will likely continue for centuries more, if Earth survives that long. The work survives partly because of the questions but even more because of the artistic beauty of the work which, as William Empson says, "is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions" (Empson, 13). Empson disagrees with a preface C.S. Lewis wrote for Paradise Lost primarily on the grounds that to Empson Satan resembles more Oliver Cromwell and Satan's forces the leaders of the Commonwealth while God most resembles Charles I. Lewis rejects this idea, affirming the goodness of God and the badness of Satan. Yet it's in taking their contradictory ideas both at once that one most appreciates the work as, with all great works of art, it rises above allegory.

C.S. Lewis was not altogether against allegory as can be seen by anyone who's read his Narnia books and spotted the obvious parallels between Aslan's torture at the Stone Table and the crucifixion of Christ (The Chronicles of, 177). In his Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis begins by discussing at length the nature of epic poem. In discussing the advances Virgil made to the form, Lewis remarks "It will be seen that in these two lines Virgil, with no intention of allegory, has described once and for all the very quality of most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality" (Preface, 39). What Lewis refers to is a superior utility in art that is not allegory in that it touches on a larger subject by not aiming to be just one. The sentiment is better expressed by Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien in a preface to The Fellowship of the Ring.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. (Tolkien, xxiii)

The usefulness of Tolkien's idea can be seen in his own Lord of the Rings where the Ring of Power in the story has variously been interpreted as representing nuclear power or drug abuse. In fact, since Tolkien intended it to be neither, it can be both along with many other things besides. It speaks to a fundamental aspect of human nature that applies to many human problems.

Therefore, Satan in the first two books succeeds as a character not by being Oliver Cromwell or John Milton or even by being the biblical Satan. He succeeds by being Milton's Satan.

Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers (PL, lines 34-39)

Like Milton, Satan seeks excellence in his endeavours, like the King, he seeks glory above peerage. Either interpretation is applicable. Meanwhile, the beauty of the language enchants us. Witness the tumbling alliteration of "Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host." Like in his prose, Milton loves long sentences which compel the tongue to continue reading without pause. At all times because of it there is a sense of movement and energy in the first two books.

Lewis refers to the fact that all contemporary readers of Paradise Lost would have been aware that Satan rebelled against God for pride alone, that obviously Satan and his cohorts did not face the same injustices that drove the Republicans to rebellion. Empson, though, argues that this ignores the power of the rhetoric in isolation from Christian consideration. He remarks on the beauty of the speech Satan gives to his followers:

that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd
In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? (PL, lines 97-105)

The average reader, coming to the work without the context of the Christian religion, "vaguely invents enough background to justify the emphases which the rhetoric and the music require" (Empson, 45). Empson would know, too, having delivered the speech himself to a group of Chinese refugees. "It was received with fierce enthusiasm, but also with a mild groan from some of the older hands, who felt they had been having enough propaganda already" (Empson, 45). In a context so far from Milton's time and place, the words still work because they are in themselves good.

However, the characters in Paradise Lost cannot be wholly divorced from their biblical counterparts. In describing Satan's cohorts, the pagan gods, the poet invokes specific details related to their biblical stories.

And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of BELIAL, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the Streets of SODOM, and that night
In GIBEAH, when hospitable Dores
Yielded thir Matrons to prevent worse rape. (PL, lines 500-505)

One cannot fail to recognise Belial by the incident in Judges 19, surely not actions Milton would wish to ascribe to his comrades any more than the human sacrifice he ascribes to Moloch in impressively gruesome lines. The shadow of Milton himself, though, is still clearly visible in the description of Satan as is asserted by both Lewis and Empson. "The force and music of the poetry here proved that he had been feeling this pent-up comment deeply" Empson says when referring to a line from Satan lamenting the lot of he and his cohorts. Percy Shelley, in an introduction to his Prometheus Unbound, provides an explanation for how Satan can simultaneously be Milton and not Milton.

A poet is the combined product of such
internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external
influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both.
Every man's mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of Nature
and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted
to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms
are reflected, and in which they compose one form. (Shelley, 6)

This mutability of identity in an artist is reminiscent of a curious line in Paradise Lost included as part of the description of Satan's host:

For Spirits when they please
Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their Essence pure,
Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aerie purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfill. (PL, lines 423-431)

The idea that the fallen angels are not of any fixed sex opens the way to intriguing interpretations of Satan's relationship with Sin and Eve, neither of which can apply if one sticks dogmatically to an interpretation based on the English Civil Wars or the Christian Bible. For me, the beauty, the tragedy, of Satan is best expressed in this early speech:

Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. (PL, lines 250-255)

Often cited as evincing an admirable quality of the human mind and its ability to make any place heaven or hell misses the significance of a "mind not to be chang'd by place or time." Satan embraces horror rather than contemplate the possibility that he might be wrong, his damnation is truly at his own hand. In such a case, what can one feel but terrible and profound despair? Milton, in his grace, puts a very human sensibility to it so his Satan becomes something much bigger than a biography of one man.

What the Raptor Said

If Jurassic Park is an udder, then 2015's Jurassic World is the cold, dispassionate hand that relentlessly attempts to milk it over the course of a week producing almost half a glass of milk. It has some entertaining aspects but the most remarkable thing about it is the diversity of bad logic on display.

The concept is there's been a successful theme park operating for years based around the cloned dinosaurs kept on the island. We're introduced to two boys, Gray and Zach (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson), from whose point of view we're introduced to the park as they go to spend a few days there with their aunt, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who happens to be operations manager at the park.

She's busy the day the kids arrive so she has her assistant meet them and show them around the park, a plot point the film dumbly jerks and spreads the resulting liquid thinly to suggest this implies Claire is shallow and the family is falling apart. The kids start to have anxiety over the possibility that their parents are getting divorced and we see their parents brooding over unspecified issues several times but if there was a resolution to this subplot it was left on the cutting room floor. Personally, I imagine Gray and Zach's parents getting a visit from a velociraptor who, after crashing through their living room window, sits them down and helps them work through their issues until the couple decide to renew their vows.

Richard Attenborough is gone so the man in charge of the company that owns the island is now Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), who's also an amateur helicopter pilot and later in the film he inexplicably turns out to be the only man on the island who can fly a helicopter. He enlists Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), the same geneticist from the first film, to craft a brand new dinosaur named Indominus Rex from the DNA of other dinosaurs and modern animals. When Masrani asks Wu which animals were used, Wu says it's classified. Again, Masrani is the owner of the company. Wu works for. And Masrani doesn't bat an eye when Wu tells him he doesn't have clearance for information regarding a project he initiated and funded.

Chris Pratt plays Owen Grady who's part of a project to breed and train raptors for use in war, I guess to replace the tigers and pumas the military currently uses. Despite this project being his life's work, he's completely against Vic (Vincent D'Onofrio), head of Masrani's elite security company, using them as weapons.

Maybe you remember how in Jurassic Park the Tyrannosaurus was bigger and deadlier than the raptors. The raptors were no match for Tyrannosaurus. When Indominus, bred to be deadlier than Tyrannosaurus and somehow impervious to bullets, breaks loose, Vic argues the raptors are the only way to fight it. Owen finally grudgingly agrees it's their only option.

Even though it doesn't make any sense at all.

But that's okay, something even dumber happens when the raptors do meet up with Indominus.

Spoiler ahead

"What?" you may say, "The raptors stop and have a quiet conversation in some raptor language they somehow know and team up with Indominus?"

To which I'd be forced to reply with a sad sigh and resigned nod. It's a language Indominus knows apparently from race memory as Owen makes a big point of how much he disapproves of the way Indominus was raised in total isolation, stunting its ability to socialise. Well, I guess it's not so bad when you're born knowing a whole language.

End spoilers

I have nothing against Bryce Dallas Howard, I liked Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy. The two have a natural charm, but I sense we've gone past the point where we can have the rugged, ranger guy and the whiney, neat freak woman for his romantic interest. Even Jurassic World feels compelled to have a scene where Claire suddenly becomes assertive and cagey, though we're still given this fabulous pin-up shot:

If they really wanted to play with the gender roles--which, of course, they really didn't--they could have had her as the raptor trainer and him as the manager. Or maybe just avoid writing character types instead of characters. But maybe that wouldn't leave enough room for a scene of children in a bullet proof glass ball that's easily broken by the tail of an ankylosaurus.

To-day in My Spider Country

I've watched this spider grow fatter over several months where she lived in the area under my hat rack and behind one of my bookcases. Unlike most of the other spiders in my apartment, she flees and goes into hiding usually when I get too near. Yesterday I found that for the first time she'd moved to a position next to the door. I don't know why. There was a smaller, similar spider nearby. A male? An offspring? To-day I saw she'd moved back to her normal spot and there was a web across the little entrance hall at about my nose level. Naturally she couldn't walk back on the floor.

Every now and then I notice a barely visible network of webs just above my head. There was even one over my shower that lasted a surprisingly long time. Though there hasn't been a lot of steam lately since I take cold showers whenever I can get cold water now. Yesterday, as I mentioned, was 100 Fahrenheit again. I'm not sure which news story I've read this morning is more seductive--NASA's plans for a permanent human settlement on Mars or the station in Antarctica where scientists have been hitting the booze too hard.

Twitter Sonnet #799

A centrifuge's gum is gambled first.
Rickety Facebook breaks its bloomin' back.
A plastic bottle dies of soapy thirst.
In Santa's mind there's no abated sack.
A voyage made through cartilage is soft.
Reserved for things not strong as bone we frame.
The wobbly person shaped tin foil croft
Has earned its drifting spider cellophane.
A living tinsel inches up the walls.
Someone's announced a party line haircut.
Beehives and pompadours circuit malls.
It's Bruegel's phone we see in dark woodcut.
A tree like Daphne plays with botany.
An oaken plank has sparked Ent mutiny.

Milton's Vodun

I saw this yellow jacket a few days ago pushing something around I couldn't identify. Maybe part of a nest.

I'm so sick of the heat. It was supposed to start cooling down but it was over 100 Fahrenheit again. I had to finally do my laundry anyway in the laundry room like a furnace. Afterwards, I went out to lunch to enjoy a blessed hour or two of air conditioning. I took my lap top but forgot to bring any of the files I need and I need to write two essays to-day. I may go out again even though it's cooled to 90 here.

For my Milton class, the professor asks his students to make weekly blog entries on a school site about the weekend's reading. Because the heat is killing my verve fast, I'm just going to copy and paste here what I wrote about Milton to-day, specifically on the subject of Milton's God as portrayed in Paradise Lost.

. . .

My favourite portrayal of the Christian God in cinema of the past fifty years is in Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the reasons it remains the best Indiana Jones film is that it sets up a dichotomy between the overpowering, deadly force of God and the vulnerability and clumsiness of humanity by contrast. For all the Godly power shown in the film, nowhere is there a hint of conscious benevolence. People usually assume Indy and Marion are saved at the end of the film because they're good people and the Nazis are bad. But what if they were saved just because Indy and Marion shut their eyes and the Nazis didn't? Well, an impatient movie goer might brush this aside and say it works out to be the same thing. Indy and Marion knew to show humility, the Nazis didn't. But if God is all about punishing the evil and saving the good, why didn't he kill the Nazis sooner? A question that leads us to wonder why would God allow the Nazis to exist in real life and even further to question why evil exists.

Actually, I also really like Ralph Richardson's portrayal of God in Time Bandits and it's Richardson's voice I tend to hear when reading God's lines in Paradise Lost. Especially lines like this:

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love, Where onely what they needs must do, appeard, Not what they would? what praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid

And yet again we have Milton's own opinion on free will, the necessity of knowing evil, similar to his ideas expressed in his masque commonly called Comus and his pamphlet against requiring licensing for publications, Areogitica. One might argue that, if Milton was consciously siding with Satan in the first two books, he's certainly siding with God now. Except Satan points out a problem with this in observing Paradise:

One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call'd, Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd'n? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord Envie them that? can it be sin to know, Can it be death? and do they onely stand By Ignorance, is that thir happie state, The proof of thir obedience and thir faith?

If God believes in the importance of knowledge, why would he explicitly forbid it to Adam and Eve? My feeling on this, from Genesis, has always been that God wanted the humans to have something to feel guilty about once they did have knowledge. It makes God more frightening. Sure, an all mighty being is scary enough, but how much scarier is he when you know you've done something he told you not to do on pain of death?

Which leads me to C.S. Lewis and his critical piece Preface to Paradise Lost. "Many of those who say they dislike Milton's God only mean that they dislike God," Lewis says in a line that's also quoted by William Empson in his book Milton's God. And, as Empson points out, this is perfectly true and results from a misconception of the Christian God that suggests to me that very few self-proclaimed Christians have actually read the bible. God's wrath in the bible is pretty horrific. One could debate how much free will meant to God when he killed all the first born in Egypt. Lewis also goes on to say that God's love "by its very nature, includes wrath also." Wrath is a sign of love to Lewis and it goes hand in hand with the majesty of mystery in a line describing God from Paradise Lost praised by Lewis: "Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer." Like the "darkness visible" of Hell we see a light that is somehow also darkness. It's no wonder that Lewis chose for his own representation of God in his Narnia books a lion, a creature who inspires awe largely because of its inherent deadliness.

Empson goes even further on the subject of this majesty of deadlines and contradiction, ". . . the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture . . ." Benin sculpture being the sculpture of Vodun. In a somewhat badly written but informative book on the subject called African Vodun by Suzanne Preston Blier, the sculpture of the part of West Africa containing Benin is described, "Features of force, fear, shock, fury, disorder, and deception, in sum, play a critical role in [the effect of the sculpture]. These criteria in turn have a role in effectuating particular types of viewer response--be it of mystification, danger, or awe." This indeed might describe Milton's God.

There's a song by Nick Cave which takes its name from a line in Paradise Lost, Book II, where Belial speaks in fear of God's wrath:

Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage And plunge us in the Flames? or from above Should intermitted vengeance Arme again His red right hand to plague us? what if all Her stores were op'n'd, and this Firmament Of Hell should spout her Cataracts of Fire, Impendent horrors, threatning hideous fall One day upon our heads

Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand" evokes a sense of deadly mystery and doom:

Guitars aren't Just for Pete Townshend's Who Anymore

I admit I was on the fence about Twelve and his guitar before but now, egad, they will so keep this version of the opening if they know what's good for them.

It's just the kick in the pants this frankly flaccid version of the theme needed. It recalls what was so instantly great about the theme from the First Doctor's first episode--that repeated riff played on one, solitary electric guitar instead of the over produced orchestra.

As for the episode itself, definitely Toby Whithouse's best written episode to date, even if it was pretty predictable--I know I have a nerve saying that when I made a prediction last week that didn't come true but I think we all knew who was in that stasis pod before it opened.

The plot strongly reminded me of the audio play Flip-Flop which is a more intricate version of the paradox presented in "Before the Flood". But the Doctor presenting it as a sort of ghost story was nice.

The atmosphere is one of the best aspects of this episode, aided by a more reserved, low key tone from Capaldi, reminding me a bit of Sylvester McCoy in his final season. Oh, and "Before the Flood" has easily the best new creature design in years with the Fisher King.

I predict some people will be calling him Vagina Face but really it's a beautiful design, almost Farscape quality.

Just One of Those Angelic Devils

Wouldn't it have been great if Diana Dors had appeared in an Alfred Hitchcock movie? She seems like she would have been perfect--sexy, calculating, and, of course, blonde. She didn't appear in any of his movies but did appear in two episodes of his two anthology television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Neither episode, sadly, was directed by Hitchcock but, while neither episode is a masterpiece, they both have merit.

The first, a thirty minute 1961 episode called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", is the more interesting. Written by Robert Bloch, the gruesomeness of its featured murder proved too great for the censors and it was not broadcast during the series' initial run. Dors plays an assistant to a magician working at a carnival. A mentally impaired young man she rescues wakes up in their trailer and assumes she's an angel and the magician's the Devil.

It works out to be a fairly unambiguous anti-religious allegory as at first Dors' character is reluctant to accept the young man's vision and then she decides to exploit it. She might have done well remembering the course for those who claim to be God's representatives on Earth doesn't always run smooth. Implicit in the story is a comparison of religion to a magic trick and the wondering trauma the young man experiences seeing Dors getting sawed in half isn't far from a rapturous contemplation of the crucifixion.

The second episode Dors appeared in was two years later, in 1963, "Run for Doom", an hour long story and a pretty standard noir setup--a young man falls in love with a beautiful singer who ends up being in it for his money. Though she does tell him this up front and really no one comes off as a half-way decent person. Except maybe Dors who we at least have some sympathy for when we learn she has had one long term relationship with a physically abusive pianist who takes her back every time she runs off for another short romance. Dors sings twice in the episode, standards "Just One of Those Things" and "How Long has This Been Going On?" thankfully instead of faux-standards written for the episode. It's a rare chance for audiences to see Dors actually was a very good singer:

Twitter Sonnet #798

Hut dominoes demand hybrid respect.
Converging moons in frog sighed bubbles wane.
There's nothing hummingbirds cannot inspect.
Detective Aztec corps examine pain.
Incidental royalty muddles grace.
Sterile blank avalanches broke the glass.
A shadow's footsteps kept no fleshly pace.
So haste's queries return a cooler mass.
Awaiting nothing graphite now repents.
Revelation has come with ink to pens.
A whistling dolphin dream not yet resents.
God found obsidian recycling bins.
A melted red tomato covered us.
Computer dinosaurs awoke in lust.