event mechanics

This made me lol!

(via transport)

Here is a little diddy we created during our respective lunch breaks. Shall write up a review in a few days when I have time.

Where thee be,
Faraway tree,
In a faraway land,
On faraway sand.

They live in you,
With skin of blue,
Running through trees,
Running and free.

Floating rocks,
And dragon flocks,
Wisdom does grow,
With plants that glow.

But families, friends
It could all end.
These connected lands,
These connected hands.

A great war of all,
Saw thee tree fall,
Falling, fallen, lost,
Losing home the cost.

Yet united we stand,
To defend this land,
Guns against paws,
Bombs against claws.

Love unifies all creatures,
All their differing features.
An old strength is born,
On the new light of dawn.

By Maarinke and I.

RIP John Hughes, of a time that was just before mine, I am jealous of those who have your films to define their youth

Lazarus: You really think you’re making a difference?
O’Niel: [shrug]
Lazarus: Then why for god’s sake?
O’Niel: Because.. maybe they are right. They send me here to this pile of shit becaue maybe I belong here… I want to find out… well… if they’re right. There is a whole machine that works because everyone does what they are supposed to. I find out I was supposed to be something I didn’t like… that’s whats in the program, that’s my rotten little part, in the rotten machine. I don’t like it… so, I’m going to find out if they’re right.
Lazarus: You’re wife is one stupid lady… You want to go get drunk?
O’Niel: Yes.

In the above section of dialogue in the film Outland the Federal Marshal O’Niel, played by Sean Connery, is explaining to the doctor why he doesn’t just leave the remote mining facility on one of the moons of Jupiter and go back to Earth with his beautiful wife and son. There are obvious connections between Outland and High Noon. Although High Noon is a moralistic celebration of the individual will, Outland is somewhat dystopian. There is a typical resolution in the end of the film but the struggle of the main character is less between O’Niel and the drug dealers and assasins, or even an existential turmoil, but between O’Niel and the ‘rotten system’ where everyone does what they are ’supposed’ to do.

Yes Man is both sinister and refreshing. High concept cinema is oxymoronic by definition. High concept cinema needs to be explained in the briefest possible number of words yet be able to grab your attention quicker; there is nothing conceptual about it.

Yet, all well-crafted popular art highlights a truth or two. Germane problems of everyday life are magnified through the fantastic situations that characters find themselves in. In Yes Man Carrey plays Carl Allen a depressive and the film follows his reawakening from the social lethargy that people suffering from depression are often burdened with. In the diegetic logic of the film Allen breaks free of his depression by saying yes to everything. Zooey Deschanel’s character is the romantic interest in the film. She plays a quirky character that is the lead singer in a band called Münchausen by Proxy. Münchausen syndrome by proxy is a disorder in which a person deliberately causes injury or illness to another person, usually to gain attention or some other benefit.

If Yes Man is read symptomatically to trace the relations that in part produce Carl Allen’s funk, then the proxy for his depression is not a single person, but produced as a constellation of impersonal relations. He doesn’t say no becuase he is depressed, he is depressed because he always says no. He is a ‘no man’ by proxy for the social mechanisms of which he is part (e.g. ignoring homeless people, rejecting loans, deriving enjoyment from the spectacle at the expense of friends, etc.) In a simple sense the film sets up the power of affirmation — Yes — behind the creation of enriching and satisfying relations. Allen becomes a proxy for affirmation.

In some ways this is inspirational and I think I need to be more of a Yes man by proxy.

A few days after the opening day I watched Transformers 2 again. I know some people may think I am punishing myself seeing the movie again, but I missed the first brief section at the first screening and I wanted to see if it got better on second viewing (ala Terminator Salvation). So far the best reviews by far have been Paul Byrne at the Sydney Morning Herald and Charlie Jane Anders at i09. The two dominant modes of film criticism in the last three decades have been the political economy approach, which examines the socio-economic conditions of production, and the psychoanalytic, which critiques the psychological fantasies around which the structure of a film is organised. Byrne takes a quasi-political economy perspective, while Anders takes a quasi-psychoanalytic approach.

Byrne compares the first film to the second and finds it lacking. His assessment of the first Transformers film is spot on:

It had a childish Spielbergian glee at the possibilities of the technology; there was lots of action but it came after character, humour and story. Michael Bay’s tendency to make everything loud and stupid – as in Bad Boys, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor – was kept in check by Spielberg’s fatherly hand.

There are three lines of criticism. The film was without internal logic. For all the talk about Michael Bay’s directing I don’t think he comprehends the purpose and potency of the money shot. Lastly, as a weird paradox, the film serves to reproduce a critical geek subjectivity in older viewers due to its failures.

No Logic
However silly the first Transformers, it had a relatively coherent internal logic. The original cartoon had the Transformers on Earth because their battleship crash landed and they didn’t really have a way home, so they had to adapt and ‘fit in’ with the indigeneous population (humans and human technology); hence the capacity to transform. The sequel live action film completely lacks any reason why the Transformers take on the ‘disguised’ form that they do. To give the film much greater overall coherency only a handful of extra scenes were required. Here are the examples of this I can remember:

1) When Soundwave sends down a minion in the form of a giant lioness-type robot there is no explanation given for why the robot should take this form. Why not have Soundwave accessing psychological research that comes to the conclusion that a certain big cat is the most recogniseable and feared predator on Earth, hence for maximum psychological impact Soundwave gives the robot the form of a big cat.

2) The female terminator-type Transformer could’ve been rationalised with a discussion between a few senior Decepticons explaining why they needed an infiltration-type Transformer to find out what Sam knew.

3) One of the biggest dissapointments would have to be the Constructicons and their collective form, Devastator. It makes sense to have the Destructicons to ‘eat’ away the pyramid to get to the energon-producing, sun-destroying machine underneath. A far better way this could’ve unfolded is to have the Constructicons as separate Decepticons that are forced to take on this form as some kind of ruthless move to get access to the energon machine.

For a good summary of all the stupid plot holes (there are acceptable plot holes in movies if it is necessary for some other reason, these were plot holes without a reason) read this Yahoo movies list or this funny and accurate summary here, sample:

I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I’m just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.

Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.

Fuck you.
I’m serious.

Fuck you. There’s no way.
It’s true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa’s head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he’s awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.

The Money Shot

“Not a scene shown was a “money shot” from the film. I really want to keep them a secret to give everyone a great surprise this summer.” — Michael Bay

The only pay-off for Bay is the money shot. The problem with Bay’s direction is that he liquidates the money shot of any sensical meaning. If a basic form of action is the competition (pursuit or fight), then the audience is drawn into the action by having an understanding of what is at stake in the competition. The final battle in RotF is literally fought by the human soldiers without any conception of why they are fighting, and this is metonymic of the location of the audience in the unfolding dynamics of the film’s plot in general. Again, Paul Byrne isolates the problem here:

The problem with Bay’s direction is that it’s rarely commensurate with the overall needs of the scene. The primary value for him is the shot and he tries to make each one a pay-off, whether appropriate or not. Megan Fox in slo-mo is an example: she is running hand-in-hand with Shia LaBeouf in these shots but she gets the cut-away close-ups rather more than he does – although his fate carries the dramatic weight of the scene Paul Byrnes

When the film is released on DVD or if you have access ot a copy through nerfarious means try this as an experiment. Download the latest version of the VLC player and when an action scene starts, slow the movie down to 0.8 speed. Michael Bay boasted that so much computer power was required to create the movie that a standard PC would not be powerful enough the produce a single scene. Why not slow the action down for every single fight scene so the weird beauty of the rendered Transformer robots can be appreciated in all their glory? Get rid of half the crap that happened, including the scenes involving the female ‘human’ Transformer, and stretch the action out so the intricate rendering can be displayed properly.

Offending Geeks Everywhere
The first film was worthy of my childhood, the second film was not. Charlie Jane Anders argues that Bay has finally made an art film because it is utterly non-sensical. Anders writes, “Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.” Indeed, the film is transformative but not in a adult diaper sort of way. On the contrary, the films incites negative criticism from pretty much every single adult Transformers fan who grew up with the toys. The overwhelming appreciation I got of the film was that someone had read Zizek’s remarks in his book (allegedly) on Deleuze and taken them to heart:

What, however, if there is no puzzled look, but enthusiasm, when the yuppie reads about impersonal imitation of affects, about the communication of affective intensities beneath the level of meaning (“Yes, this is how I design my publicities!”), or when he reads about exploding the limits of self-contained subjectivity and directly coupling man to a machine (“This reminds me of my son’s favourite toy, the action-man that can turn into a car!”), or about the need to reinvent oneself permanently, opening oneself up to a multitude of desires that push us to the limit (“Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I am working on now? It is no longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily contact but of exploding the confines of established reality and imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual pleasures!”). (183)

The self-contained subjectivity of a Transformers fan was attacked and exploded by this film, because it didn’t seemlessly couple the infantile dimension of my subjectivity with my adult appreciation of the Transformers franchise on both the level of the Transformers mythopeia (internal logic) and cinematic conventions of the action flick (money shot). This blog post was originally titled ‘Michael Bay is a Deleuzian’ because he captures in concentrated cinematic form the affects of frustration and violence experienced living in a culture where the culture industry happily pillages the collected childhood of the audience. This is not an action movie, but an unwitting cinematic essay that inspires criticism of the contemporary commercial weaponisation of nostalgia.

Reading Todd McGowan’s article in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy it is clear that Hegelians have a radically different conception of the future than I do, and I guess I am a Deleuzian. McGowan argues that the representation of the future in science fiction cinema can not be but an expression of the present ideologies. I agree. So the future of science fiction is not the future at all, but an ideological representation of the present. What, then, is the future?

Brian Massumi has best explored what I would call the actuality of the future, which is another way of saying, in the first instance (pun intended), the actualised virtuality of the present. The virtual can not be represented as such, only actualised. Does this therefore mean that the future can not be actual or is only ever actual? Otherwise the future would be, without any becoming. The futurity of the present, that which is to come but has not yet been actualised, is both present and in the future. The present is not this instant, the first or otherwise, but what is happening contemporaneously now. That is to say, the present duration does not merely exist within the contemporary now; rather, the contemporary exists beyond the present. The virtual exists as the contemporary that is not present, but in the future. Think of events that you are part. Your marriage, it is happening now, so stop reading this infernal internet, but it is also yet to happen. Your marriage has a future, I hope. The happening has not yet been exhausted.

The actual future, that of the present that has not yet been actualised and that of the contemporary, that is not yet present, has little to do with representations of the future in science fiction. I am very interested in the future, because capitalism functions most demonstratively in this space, in what Negri and Hardt called the passage from the virtual to the actual. My interest is specifically in thinking a Deleuzian conception of the spectacle. I agree with every critique in Guy Debord’s masterwork, The Society of the Spectacle, except for his assumptions regarding time, for his assumptions are far too Hegelian. I’ve written about this somewhere, I need to find it.

My primary example, at this stage, is of the ‘rewards’ card — the frequent shopper card, the Fly Buys card, the ‘points’ card, and most telling, the ‘loyalty’ card. ‘Loyalty’ examined through the lens of the Kantian imperative is a question of moral duty. ‘Loyalty’ examined by way of a Deleuzian event mechanics is an effect of modulating the field of possibility in the passage from the virtual to the actual. It is not a question of identity, but a constriction of the field of action. We are all Pavlov’s dogs, it is the character of the reward that defines us and whether or not we are worthy of it. Some of us are more worthy dogs than others.

The loyalty card operates within the space of the contemporary that is never present. There is a deferral of an actualised present that hums with an affective tension. It is pure ideology in the way a closure and contradiction is represented as an escape, a reward. To invert Derrida’s hauntology, capitalism haunts the present with the future while never escaping the contemporary. A perverted eschatology, the deferral of the present is its own reward.

I watched Terminator 4 again last night. It was better on second viewing. I watched it for what it was doing, rather than watching it filtered through my expectations and what I perceived to be its faults. One thing I did like was Sam Worthington. He can actually act. This I found I little surprising. He expresses it here, in an interview:

Did you see something in that canon that you wanted to bring forward?

Sam: I wanted to make a role where he’d actually feel pain ‘cause I’d never seen that, I’d seen a bit of it in Blade Runner but I’ve never actually seen a movie where a cyborg or a robot hurts, not only physically but mentally and emotionally. I wanted to ramp that up a bit.

Australian actors seem to transition from working in Australia to the big time of Hollywood like they move through a phase space. It is very weird. It is like Australians only get to know about Australian actors once they leave Australia. I think this tells us something about the Australian media. What would happen if there was a fucking ruthless Australian publication or broadcast that only examined Australian popular culture directly and others only indirectly, like they do in the US? Am I stupid, do they already have this? I think it would have a positive effect on Australian culture.

WTF is the Sydney Morning Herald thinking? This is a terrible review of the new Star Trek movie.

The reviewer offers little actual analysis of the film. What does the film do? Instead he offers obvious opinion about what ‘they’ were trying to do. ‘They’ being the nameless people at Paramount or even ‘Hollywood’ like this:

I think the movie is titled this way because Paramount is trying to reinvent the franchise, just as the Bond series did with Casino Royale. It’s known as a reboot but it’s really a rebottling of old wine, one of Hollywood’s core businesses.

Clearly the reviewer, Paul Byrnes, has an over-appreciation for modernist aesthetics. Rebottled? Fail. The movie can stand alone as a science fiction film, it does not need the rest of the Trek universe to prop it up. Tell me I am wrong.

This young Kirk is far from the level-headed character played by William Shatner (who’s not in the movie). He’s set up to be Spock’s antonym all passion, emotion and action, while the other is all control, logic and brain. It’s mechanical but there’s not much room to change the bedrock of the Trek world.

Maybe because HE IS THE YOUNG KIRK! WTF He is the young Kirk becoming Kirk, but in the diegetic world of the film the temporal order has been disrupted, so the young Kirk has to become Kirk in a DIFFERENT WAY to produce a DIFFERENT KIRK. See what we did there? Miss the point much, movie reviewer?

WTF