Ash Clifton, Writer

Yes, the Marvel Movies Are “Real” Cinema (Repost)

Having once been an art student (well, a creative-writing student; close enough), I know from experience that the quickest way to start an argument among a bunch of art majors is to ask them what the definition of “real” art is. Similarly, the best way to start an argument among a bunch of cinephiles is to ask them what “real” cinema is.

That is essentially what the great director Martin Scorsese did in 2019 when he suggested that Marvel superhero movies (in their zenith, at the time) were “not cinema”. He stated:

Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

Scorsese thus not only managed to make himself sound like a bit of a snob—not to mention a grumpy old man—but to also start an internet flame-war that continues to this day.

Ultimately, though, the whole affair was a tempest-in-a-teapot. Of course the Marvel films are “real” cinema. That is, they are fabulously well-crafted motion pictures that, at their best, have an emotional and even a physical impact on their viewers. They also (again, at their best) make important philosophical and political points.

However, they are a different kind of cinema than what Scorsese works in. In other words, what we’re really talking about her is the difference between literary cinema and popular (that is, genre-based) cinema.

This is the same distinction one must make between literary fiction and genre fiction. The purest and simplest definition of genre fiction is that, for the most part, the reader knows what they’re gonna get. A mystery is going to have a murderer and a sleuth. A horror story is going to have a monster and hero/heroine fighting it. A rom-com is going to have two people who should get together romantically but just can’t, for some reason, until the very end. And a superhero movie is going to have, well, a superhero with some kind of superpowers who is fighting some equally superlative evil.

The devil, of course, is in the details. We consume genre cinema for the same reason we consume genre literature—because we want to see how they pull it off. “They” in the case of cinema, being the director and the writer and the actors. How do they change-up the old formula, make it interesting and somehow new?

That is how genres evolve and adapt to new time periods and new zeitgeists. Daniel Craig’s interpretation of James Bond was different from Sean Connery’s or Roger Moore’s—it was more brutal, more bloodthirsty, and yet somehow more vulnerable, too. Just like us, the American film-viewing public.

In the same way, Marvel superhero movies are different from superhero movies of the 1970s (think Superman) or the 1980s. The characters are more believable, as well as being more complex and even vulnerable. I am, again, thinking of the very best Marvel movies: the first Ironman starring Robert Downey Jr. and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This latter film, which came out in 2014 (yes, it’s been that long), is probably the best film of the entire series. And, yes, it is “real” cinema.

Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”

In fact, as very few people have realized, The Winter Soldier is almost a remake of a 1975 film that most film snobs would agree is “real” cinema: Three Days of the Condor.

The only obvious similarity is that both films feature Robert Redford. In Condor, Redford plays a brilliant but very bookish CIA analyst named Turner who works in a New York City branch office. One day, he comes back from lunch to find everyone in the office dead, murdered by professional assassins. Turner goes on the run. Unsure of who he can trust, he kidnaps an unsuspecting, beautiful woman (Faye Dunnaway) and hides in her apartment. From there, he gradually figures out that the assassins who killed his work-mates were sent by a rogue faction inside the CIA itself. Apparently, Turner’s branch had stumbled upon a secret plot by the faction to invade the Middle East and capture all the oil fields (how very far-fetched, right?). Turner eventually confronts the leader of the faction, as well the head assassin, a Zen-Master-like Frenchman named Joubert (played with brilliant, icy effectiveness by Max von Sydow).

On the surface, Condor might seem like a very different film from The Winter Soldier. But the closer you look, the more The Winter Soldier seems almost like a remix of the earlier film. That is, it has all the same elements. The good-guy-betrayed-by-his-government figure is Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) who, like Turner in Condor, discovers a vast conspiracy within U.S. intelligence (S.H.I.E.L.D, in this case, rather than the CIA). Like Turner, Rogers finds himself on the run with a beautiful woman (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow). He confronts the leader of the conspiracy (played by none other than Robert Redford himself). And of course he confronts the lead assassin, Barnes, who (like Joubert in Condor) turns out to be far more complicated than he appears.

Even some of the individual scenes in The Winter Soldier are eerily reminiscent of those in Condor. Take the now famous elevator sequence, which is not only the best in the film but one of the best in the entire MCU series. On his way out of the high-tech and vaguely fascistic H.Q. of S.H.I.E.L.D., Rogers steps into an elevator and rides down. As the elevator stops at successive floors, more and more men step on, each menacing but seemingly disinterested. The scene works so well because everyone can relate to it, to that sense of unease we all fell when forced into close proximity with strangers. We begin to wonder: what if some of these people were evil. They could hurt us—maybe even kill us—before we could react. And yet, despite this unease, we do nothing because we have no real evidence of evil intent. We’re playing a social role. And that’s just what Rogers—a good-natured man if ever there was one, willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt—does.

I love the moment when Rogers notices sweat streaming down the face of one of the men next to him. He knows—as we, the viewers, know—that this is really, really bad. But there is nothing he can do about it…yet. It’s still in the future. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have done it any better. Nor, for that matter, could Sidney Pollack, who has an almost identical scene in Condor, in which the hapless Turner finds himself in an elevator with Joubert, the master assassin. Each man knows that the other man knows who he really is, but neither can take any action…yet.

Ever since I read Mark Crispin Miller’s landmark essay “Hollywood: The Ad” many years ago, I’ve been fascinated the way in which the tropes and elements of an early “classic” movie can end up rearranged and transformed in a later pop film. Miller gives the example of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). If you look closely, many of the components of the former get transmogrified in the latter. The apes of 2001 become the loyal Wookie Chewbacca. The cold, robotic voice of HAL the computer becomes that of C3PO the droid. The white, sterile interiors of the spaceship Discovery become the stark, sterile halls of the Death Star. And so on and so forth.

That’s just what has happened here, with Condor and The Winter Solider. They’re practically the same movie, but shaken up by time and changing purposes. That is, The Winter Soldier is every inch a pop film, with the full intention of stimulating the audience with all the action and explosions and kung-fu fights that we’ve come to expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. But, on some level, the kernel of Condor is still there. The Winter Soldier is also a story about evil, rapacious men seizing control of government, and also the creeping power of America’s military-industrial complex. It’s also about the dehumanization the soldiers like Rogers and Barnes undergo as pawns in the hands of callous leaders and ruthless institutions.

In short, despite all its roller-coaster-ride thrills and spectacle, The Winter Solider is a “real” movie.

And, yes, it’s “real” cinema.

R.I.P. Dolly Parton

RCA Records – eBayfrontback, Public Domain

I know, I know. The world probably does not need another tribute to the late Dolly Parton, who passed away on Tuesday. There have been so many fine tributes already, penned by so many good people.

But damn it, I have a few things to say myself.

I enjoy telling people that my father was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, the same town in the Delta where Oprah Winfrey was born. In the days since Parton’s death, it occurred to me that she and Oprah Winfrey had a lot in common. Both were born into poverty in rural America (Pittman Center, Tennessee, in Parton’s case). Both were strong, smart, creative women growing up in a working-class Southern culture that emphasized traditional roles and female submissiveness. Yet both, by virtue of their talent and sheer grit, became cultural icons—household mono-names, like Cher and Liberace—beloved by millions. And they got fabulously rich in the process.

Both women also overcame various physical disadvantages. For Winfrey, it was the mere fact of her ethnicity—her blackness—which made success in the deep South that much more difficult. For Parton, it was (paradoxically) her almost absurd beauty. Specifically, her famous voluptuousness, which seemed so exaggerated that it might easily have made her a kind of joke-act—the bombshell blonde who could also sing. But instead of downplaying her sexiness, Parton emphasized it. She leaned into it, as people say nowadays, wearing curvy, rhinestone-encrusted outfits, big wigs, and long fingernails. Essentially, she created the glittering persona of a smart, shrewd, sexy brothel madame—a role she eventually played, to great effect, in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

This persona allowed her to be honest and down-to-earth in a way that very few other musicians could ever manage. She was like the scarlet woman in town whom everyone secretly admired and enjoyed talking to. She was smart and funny, full of life. Better still, you could tell her anything, and she wouldn’t be shocked.

It didn’t hurt that she had a thousand-watt smile.

Of course, this persona would never have worked had Parton not been a fabulous singer, song-writer, and musician. “Jolene” is still one of the finest country songs ever recorded. And Parton was also a great guitarist—a finger-picker in the tradition of Lindsey Buckingham.

But the real thing that made every love Dolly Parton was her nobility. Her obvious kindness and generosity, which manifested in both large ways (her vast philanthropy) and small (e.g., her gentle but spirited defense of Elle King after the young singer appeared inebriated on-stage).

I have a weird, mystical, admittedly woo-woo theory about human consciousness. I believe that, like icebergs, 90% of our being exists beyond this physical plane, invisible to normal perception. Yet, we can all sense a person’s larger essence—whether a person is secretly very good or a real bastard or whatever. It’s like an aura that everyone can feel but no one can adequately describe.

With Dolly Parton, we all sensed her great and unerring goodness, as a person, a spouse, a celebrity, an influencer, and an entrepreneur. She exuded a fineness of character that, for obvious reasons, we desperately need in these dark days. She will be missed very, very much.

Godspeed, Ms. Parton….!!!

(P.S. Here is a great Miley Cyrus cover of “Jolene” that I stumbled upon a few months ago and really enjoyed.)

AI Heaven, AI Hell (Repost)

When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.

Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.

For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.)

Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories.

Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension.

Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.

The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.

Yeah, it’s heavy.

This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself.

Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:

Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.

Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet).

Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.)

As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else.

But that’s a subject for another post.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Every Picture Tells a Story”

You can always tell if a classic rock-song was released in the early 1970s because it goes on and on and on. I mean, Freebird? Jessica? Stairway to Heaven? Are you kidding me? The legendary D.J. Wolfman Jack one joked that if he queued up three or four of these songs, he could go out for dinner and be back before they were done.

Every Picture Tells a Story is yet another long rock song that goes on for almost six minutes. Yet, it doesn’t last long enough! The song positively flies by, in part because it…well, tells a story—the rollicking tale of the high-flying, hard-partying, womanizing narrator (who seems a lot like Rod Stewart) and his search for love around the world. With its crazy, open-form lyrics and acoustic, jam-style musicianship, the song really shouldn’t work, but it does, thanks to the combined genius of Stewart himself and his great friend Ron Wood (who was, at the time, not yet a member of The Rolling Stones).

I decided to feature Stewart on this edition of Friday Night Rock-Out because a review I wrote a few years ago of his fine autobiography is getting a lot of hits lately, perhaps because Stewart recently underwent major surgery and people are Googling him. I’m glad my review is popping up in the feed. It was heartfelt.

Get well soon, Mr. Stewart! And rock on…!

Perfect Films: “Us” (Repost)

** SPOILERS BELOW **

Author’s Note: I was bemused by the recent outrage expressed by some very silly (and possibily racist) people regarding the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Noland’s The Odyssey. That is, outrage regarding the casting of a non-white woman in a surrealist fantasy film that is, itself, an adaptation of a surrealist fantasy story from 3,000 years ago. Yes, a movie with cyclopses and sorceresses and a wooden horse (built on a beach with no trees) big enough to hold 20 men but light enough to be rolled into a city!!!

I thought this would be a good time to repost an essay I wrote some time back about Nyong’o’ truly amazing dual performance in a truly amazing film, Us. Enjoy!

The better part of a decade has passed since Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out was released, marking Peele’s transformation from famed comedy writer and sketch artist to one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Peele has since added two more films to his horror oeuvre—2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.

All three are great, but my favorite is Us. For me, it hits on the deepest and most disturbing level, and it has the richest palette in terms of effects. It’s also the hardest to figure out in terms of plot. With Nope and Get Out, the viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, even early in the film (although the details turn out to be more shocking and terrifying than anyone suspected). But while watching Us, I was totally mystified. I knew it had something to do with evil twins—true doppelgängers in both the literal and the psychological sense—but I had no real idea of what the actual plot would turn out to reveal. And what a reveal it is!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Part of Us’s appeal lies in its slow-burn first act. (This is true of Get Out and Nope, too, but Us takes it to the next level.) The movie starts with a flashback to 1986, when a little girl, Adelaide, breaks away from her bickering parents at a beach boardwalk and finds a strange funhouse. It’s a simple premise, yet so much disturbing stuff is going on in this segment that it’s almost impossible to describe. We have the tension between the parents, raising the specter of divorce (the thing most kids fear more than anything else except death). Then, we have the separation of the child from the parents (another primal fear). And, finally, we have the freakish funhouse, which, though apparently deserted, is still lit with eerie neon light.

Nerds in the News: Alex Cohen

Alex Cohen (Photo Courtesy of Clay Mathematics Institute)

If there are two words dear to every sci-fi nerd’s heart, they are quantum and fractal. How many sci-fi tropes have been created over the past thirty years just by adding one of these words to the front of some other, more pedestrian word? “Quantum drive.” “Quantum torpedo.” “Fractal encryption.” “Fractal-verse.”

So, when I stumbled up this article, “Graduate Student Proves a Quantum Uncertainty Principle for Fractals,” whose title has both “quantum” and “fractal” in it, I clicked immediately. And, after reading the first few paragraphs, I realized two things. First, this must be a truly momentous discovery. Second, it’s really, really cutting-edge, so much so that it doesn’t have many YouTube videos devoted to it, nor even a Wikipedia page.

The article describes how a young physicist, Alex Cohen, who was a grad student at the time, published a paper last year which proves “the fractal uncertainty principle to all higher dimensions.” To break that down a bit, the fractal uncertainty principle is an application of Werner Heisenberg’s famous Quantum Uncertainty Principle—which states that certain combinations of quantum properties such as momentum and position cannot be accurately measured at the same time—to fractals, those mesmerizing, infinitely-repeating mathematical structures that look the same no matter how far you zoom in or out on them.

Of course, at first glance, the two concepts seem completely opposite to each other. The uncertainty principle illuminates the limitations of measurement and predictability, while fractals describe completely pre-determined, unchanging patterns that continue into infinity. What gives?

Article in Quanta Magazine Describing Cohen’s Discovery

It seems that ten years ago, another young nerd named Semyon Dyatlov studied how chaotically moving particles (like the molecules in a gas) can sometimes—if they are occupying a one-dimensional fractal geometric plane—get trapped in a fractal-shaped rabbit-hole, following a fractal path forever. Dyatlov wondered if quantum-based particles (such as electrons or photons) could also become trapped in such a rabbit-hole. As it turns out, they cannot. He proved this mathematically while, at the same time, creating a brand-new concept in physics: the Fractal Quantum Uncertainty Principle, orFUP. (A rare, math-heavy video on the subject is pasted at the end of this post. Watch it if you dare.)

Dyatlov’s brilliant work put paid to the question of quantum particles in a one-dimensional plane. But what about worlds with, you know, more than one dimension? Like ours, for instance?

Turns out, the math to handle this question is extremely friggin hard—even for guys and girls who understand one-dimensional fractal manifolds. As a practical matter, the problem might even be impossible.

Well, you know the old saying about what happens whenever a person (usually a very learned, respected old man) says something is impossible; some young whippersnapper comes along and does it. That’s what occurred last year when an MIT doctoral student wrote a paper proving the FUP in all dimensions. Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, I have no idea how Mr. Cohen actually proved this. I doubt he could explain it to me, even if I gave him a year or two of my full attention and an infinite supply of crayons. But I suspect that his proof will turn out to be a huge, consequential discovery, one that will eventually have real-world, practical applications. After all, I don’t believe there is such a thing as pure science. Every time a branch of intellectual study is labelled as “useless,” someone finds a way to use it—and often with world-altering consequences.

Even if Mr. Dyatlov’s and Mr. Cohen’s discoveries fail to bear practical fruit in my lifetime, I’m sure that all the new science and mathematics that springs from it will be beautiful to behold. If you’re smart enough to understand them.

Which, alas, I am not.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Demolished Man”

As usual, I was on Wikipedia the other night, looking up one of my favorite rock songs of all time—“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There, I was surprised to learn that the first line of the song, “[t]hese are days of the expanding man,” is a reference to a classic sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Donald Fagan apparently said,

The concept of the “expanding man” that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Walter [Becker] and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, “expanding” his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.

Finding this unexpected reference to Bester’s novel was yet another moment of that Synchronicity for Bookworms phenomomenon that I write about so often, mainly because I had been considering to a post on a great cover I had found for the book. And here it is!

I read The Demolished Man in my late twenties and found it a really bizarre yet engrossing sci-fi novel, one that seems to straddle two eras, “Golden Age” (1940s-50s) sci-fi—with its Buck Rogers’ style future and tropes—and New Wave (1960s-70s) sci-fi—with its trippy, subversive themes and immoral main character. (Roger Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, which I posted about recently, is very similar in this respect.)

Bester’s novel asks this intriguing question: How does one commit murder in a world where all the police have E.S.P. and can literally read your mind? Yeah, it’s a very, very similar idea to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, which was published three years later. In Bester’s book, people with telepathic abilities—“espers,” who come in ability levels 1, 2, and 3—form a kind of privileged Mandarin caste on 24^th Century Earth. They run much of the government and law enforcement with apparent competence, benevolence, and integrity. They may only marry and have children within their own esper class, and they prefer their own company. Most importantly, they can suss out crimes, either before they happen (usually) or afterward (always).

So, what’s a brilliant, daring, sociopathic billionaire like Ben Reich to do when his mind tends toward homicide? The target of his animus is an older business rival, Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich despises with a passion bordering on obsession. Reich devises a cunning plan to kill D’Courtney at a swingin’ dinner party they are both scheduled to attend, and he hires the services of a rare corrupt esper to run interference. Reich also—in one of the book’s cleverest plot devices—pays a corporate jingle-writer to play him the most annoying, brain-embedding ear-worm she has. Reich knows that he won’t be able to get the jingle out of his head, which will temporarily flummox any espers who might try to scan him.

After Reich does the deed at the party, an esper police detective, Lincoln Powell, shows up to investigate. Using a mixture of his esper abilities as well as good old-fashioned intuition, Powell immediately realizes that Reich is guilty of the murder but can’t prove it thanks to the layers of interference that Reich has devised. The rest of the book is like a futuristic episode of Columbo as Powell pursues Reich across the solar system, trying to trap him and reveal his guilt.

If Powell does manage to catch him and prosecute him successfully, Reich faces neither prison nor execution but a fate far worse—“demolition,” the process whereby espers mentally strip a person of their memories and personality so that they might be “rehabilitated” as a productive, normal (non-evil, non-insane) member of society.

In this way, The Demolished Man becomes a very suspenseful inverted detective novel, with the reader breathlessly following Powell and wondering how—or whether—he will catch Reich. I also found myself rooting for the wicked, rebellious anti-hero Reich, which was clearly Bester’s intention. The last half of the book has some genuinely surprising and cool plot twists, and it’s very entertaining overall—especially if you can get past Bester’s very 1950s, conservative, often misogynistic sensibilities (which are very similar, alas, to Robert Heinlein’s).

I really like this 1979 cover by Adrian Chesterman because it evokes the sense of horror (of demolition, presumably, but also of insanity, self-discovery, and other dark things) that pervades the book.

It’s also just really, really trippy.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Believe”

Cathy and I have been watching season 4 of Dark Winds on Netflix, and I was thrilled to see the fine German actress Franke Potenta playing the villain. She was Lola in Run Lola Run, one of the coolest films of the 90s. (She was also the love interest in the first Bourne movie.) Nice to see she’s still doing great work.

Run Lola Run was also notable for its amazing, propulsive soundtrack, which perfectly fits the action of the film. (You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean.) I liked the soundtrack so much I bought it–on CD, no less. (Yeah, it’s old. So am I.) And I wrote many line of software code while listening to it. Of course, it’s not really “rock.” It’s techno, or EDM, or whatever they’re calling such music these days.

Whatever it is, it rocks.

Here is the premier track, “Believe,” on which Ms. Potente’s voice can be heard speaking. Enjoy!

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 001: “Goldfinger”

Well, the day has arrived. My debut novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Daily Deal for $1.99 today on Amazon. The offer will stand until 11:59 P.M. tonight, Pacific Standard Time, at which point it will turn into a pumpkin or…something. (Actually, it will just end.)

So, to finish my list of Great Movie Countdowns, I’m selecting what many people think is the greatest James Bond movie of all, 1964’s Goldfinger, directed by series veteran Guy Hamilton.

One of the most magical things about James Bond, the character, is that he knows how to do just about everything. He can fight and shoot, of course. But he can also fly a plane, drive a tank, sail a boat, race a motorcycle, surf, and even (as he shows in Goldfinger) play a mean-and-dirty round of golf.

One thing Bond does not know how to do, unfortunately, is disarm an atomic bomb. Which is a problem, because that’s exactly the threat he faces in the climax of Goldfinger. Bond finds himself locked inside the huge, cavernous vault of Fort Knox, surrounded by stacks of gold bars and handcuffed to said atomic bomb, with just a few minutes ticking down on the device’s timer. (This might be the first use of a digital timer in any major motion picture; let me know in the comments if you can think of an earlier one.)

As if this weren’t bad enough, Bond isn’t alone inside the vault. Goldfinger’s chief henchman, Odd Job, is in there too. If Goldfinger is the best Bond movie ever, then Odd Job is the scariest Bond henchman ever. Played by Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata, he has such a great, imposing physical presence—a hulking man who seems barely able to hold his own strength in check. When he crushes a golf ball with his bare hands, we, as viewers, really believe he could do it! But what really makes Odd Job scary is his evil little smile. He always seems bemused, enjoying himself, even when he throws a guy off a balcony or throws his steel-brimmed bowler hat into someone’s neck.

In the movie’s climactic countdown (yes, another countdown to nuclear self-destruction), Odd Job seems determined—even happy—to make sure the bomb goes off, despite the obvious fact that it will mean his own death, too. Odd Job, it seems, isn’t afraid of anything except failing in his mission, which makes him that much scarier.

My classics professor in college once said that James Bond is the modern version of Heracles, who, like Bond, loves to fight, drink, and sleep around. Sure enough, the final battle between Bond and Odd Job feels a lot like a Greek myth, with the hero battling a monster—one with some really scary weapons—to the death. And, as in a Greek myth, the contest ends with an example of poetic irony. Odd Job is undone by his own superpower—in this case, his favorite weapon, that lethal, steel-brimmed hat. Bond manages to get hold of it and throws it at him. It misses, alas, and lodges into some steel bars. Instead of just finishing Bond off, though, Odd Job goes to retrieve his beloved hat, at which point Bond slides across the floor and touches a loose power cable to the bars. Current conducts through the bars and through the steel hat, electrocuting the villain. Thus, the monster is defeated by his own magic.

But what about the bomb? Looking inside the device, Bond seems genuinely clueless, for once, bewildered by all the wires and blinky lights. Pathetically, he even tries to stop the machine’s spinning cylinder (which holds, we presume, the cobalt-iodine mixture that makes the bomb “particularly dirty,” in Goldfinger’s words). All to no avail.

Then, with mere seconds left, a man’s gentle hand sweeps in, stops Bond’s frantic groping, and turns the bomb off with the flick of a switch. With the crisis averted, Bond and the man—who looks like a wizened college professor, wearing a brown suit and hat, his face serious yet calm—face each other. A strange look passes between them. A mixture of relief, puzzlement, and awe, the look seems to suggest the entire absurd, insane reality of the Cold War, if not modern existence itself. “How did we get here?” the look seems to say.

How, indeed.

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