Ashley Clifton

Ten Great Movies About New York

Author’s Note: I should have had this post ready for the 25^th Commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on Saturday, but I didn’t. Better late than never, I hope.

Like a lot of Southern boys with a literary bent, I absolutely love New York City. Ever since I went there in the early 1990s to visit a girlfriend (herself a native New Yorker), I have been entranced by the place, a feeling which only deepened after I got a remote job with a Manhattan consulting firm and got to make frequent trips there for business. (That’s the best way to see The City—when someone else is paying for it.)

Ever since then, it’s often occurred to me that NYC is still Hollywood’s most beloved city, too, with L.A. coming in a distant (and often more loathed than loved) second. This is probably due to the fact that NYC is still the cultural and artistic center of the nation, as well as the place where many young actors and directors get their start, still.

Of course, many great films show the dark side of New York. Too many to mention, in fact, but the list includes Rosemary’s Baby, Seven, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Bad Lieutenant, and on and on. However, I want to focus on films that show it in a favorable light. That is, movies where The City is almost a main character, and a great one at that.

Here is a list of my top ten favorites. Note that I am including all five boroughs in my criteria, although Manhattan is, as usual, the stand-out.

Moonstruck

Moonstruck is the greatest romantic comedy film ever made. And so, it makes perfect sense that it takes place in New York City, which is our most romantic city. That is, it has the most character, the most mystery, and the most beauty. Like a lot of the films on this list, it takes place in one of the boroughs—Brooklyn, in this case, with its great Italian-American culture. Never has that city-within-a-city, with its family-owned shops, brownstones, and restaurants, seemed so magical. Like “moonlight in a martini,” as one character says. (He’s speaking of a woman, but close enough.)

Throughout the film, the towers of Manhattan loom in the distance like a fairy-tale kingdom, to which the heroine, Loretta Castorini (Cher), finally ventures with her new unlikely “prince,” Ronny (Nicholas Cage in one of his definitive roles) when he takes her to the opera.

Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s masterpiece from 1989 is not only one of the best movies ever made, it is also one of the very few to depict life in a predominantly black urban community (except crime thrillers full of drug dealers and prostitutes). Set in the legendary Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, it follows the lives of several people who live and work there, including Mookie (Spike Lee), a pizza-delivery man, his sister Jade (Joie Lee), and his boss, Sal (Danny Aiello). The story takes place on a single, hot summer day when tensions—racial, economic, familial, and sexual—all reach a boiling point. It’s a great film with a great soundtrack, to which artists as diverse as Public Enemy and Teddy Riley contributed. With its combination of propulsive music, kinetic cinematography, and excellent, all-in performances by the stars, Do the Right Thing captures the energy and spirit of working-class New York better than any other film. More importantly, it’s one of the first hit movies to focus on the African-American community of New York, which gets a lot more attention than the Italian-American or Irish-American or Any-Other-American community.

Basically, it’s just a great movie.

Manhattan

What list of great New York movies could be complete without at least one entry from The City’s most iconic director, Woody Allen? (Okay, he’s probably tied with Martin Scorsese; see below). Manhattan is Allen’s lyrical cinematic ode to the borough, shot in sumptuous black-and-white and featuring the music of George Gershwin (whose work, apparently, inspired the film). It tells the story of Isaac (Allen), a middle-aged TV comedy writer who is dating a beautiful, brilliant seventeen-year-old, Stacy (Mariel Hemingway). Their relationship might seem ridiculous (even he finds it so), but he’s happy. At least, he thinks he is, until his life is upended by a woman his own age, Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary is Isaac’s equal in intellect, spirit, and sheer neurotic energy, and he finds himself smitten with her. Unfortunately, she is currently the mistress of his best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), who seems to take her affections for granted.

Like most of Allen’s early classics, Manhattan is an almost Dickensian satire of highly-paid, arty New Yorkers, with their hilarious pretensions and absurdly tortured relationships. Isaac laughs at them almost as much as he laughs at himself. But it’s clear that he (like Allen) loves them, too. Especially Mary. She essentially functions as a stand-in for Manhattan (the city) itself—complex, gorgeous, and endlessly changeable.

Arthur

Steven Gordon’s 1981 rom-com Arthur is not a great film, but it is a very, very good one. Not only did it make Dudley Moore a Hollywood movie star (he had already been famous in the U.K. for decades), it revitalized the careers of Shakespearean actor John Gielgud and music-legend Liza Minelli. More importantly, the film brilliantly evokes the magic of Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of rich, alcoholic, and extremely lovable playboy, Arthur Bach.

Arthur (Moore) is a brilliantly witty, talented, and rich man. He is also a congenial drunk. He spends his days enjoying bubble baths in a huge, gilded tub set in the center of his penthouse apartment, sipping martinis made for him by his long-suffering butler, Hobson (Gielgud). Then, he spends his nights wining-and-dining streetwalkers whom he picks up on 8^th Avenue.

In the hands of a lesser actor, Arthur might well have come off as a pathetic—even repulsive—character. But Moore was able to infuse him with so much charm and humor that it’s impossible not to like him. Crucially, Moore also imbues him with his (Moore’s) own wounded and vulnerable qualities. While Arthur has been psychologically crippled by his domineering and sadistic father, Moore was a chronically shy person who grew up with a myriad of physical disabilities (including a clubfoot). And Arthur, like Moore himself, was enchanting in his apparent childishness combined with a rapier wit.

In short, Arthur is a glittering, New York City archetype: the charming drunk who makes good in the end. And the movie’s theme song, Somewhere Between the Moon and New York City, is also a classic.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese is known for a lot of things, but comedy isn’t one of them. Yet his 1985 film, After Hours is one of the funniest movies about NYC ever made. It follows the nightmarish adventure of a likeable, unassuming nebbish, Paul (Griffin Dunne), who works in a Manhattan office as a “word processor.” One day, he ventures to SoHo in pursuit of a beautiful young woman, Marcy (Roseanna Arquette), whom he has met at a café earlier. Things go pear-shaped when Paul loses all his money en route to Marcy’s apartment. When he finally gets there, he meets her equally beautiful—but also dangerous and possibly insane—roommate, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a sculptress who dabbles in S&M. Thus begins a Dantesque—and very funny—descent into the bowels of lower Manhattan, with its odd cast of avant garde artists, deranged cabbies, bar hoppers, burglars, and general freaks. Anyone who’s ever lost their wallet on the wrong side of NYC will instantly relate to this film, which celebrates The City’s weirdness as much as it mocks it.

Dinner Rush

What list of great NYC movies would be complete without at least one film about the restaurant scene? My favorite is a little indie production from 2000, Dinner Rush. Directed by Bob Giraldi, the plot focuses on a single night in the lives of the people who run a posh TriBeCa restaurant. The joint is owned by Louis (Danny Aiello), an avuncular bookie and former mafioso, whose son, Udo, is the brilliant but pretentious head chef. Udo refuses to cook the traditional Italian meals that Louis loves, so the sous-chef, Duncan (Kirk Acevedo), secretly prepares them for him. Duncan is a working-class kid with a bad gambling habit, and Louis obviously thinks of him as a kind of second, “better” son. Duncan and Udo seem to hate each other, but they help each other when the going gets rough.

Intrigues abound among the restaurant staff as well as the diverse array of patrons who show up, including an art gallery owner (and his starving artists), a food critic, two young hoods, a pretty office girl, and a charming, mysterious Wall Street broker whose significance isn’t revealed until the end of the movie. (I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to watch the movie.)

Working Girl

In many ways, Working Girl is the best movie on this list, with its tale of a hive-haired, Staten Island girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith), with the intelligence and audacity to take a shot at success in the cutthroat business world of New York.

Specifically, Tess dreams of becoming an executive in the big Manhattan M&A firm where she works as a secretary. That is, she dreams of becoming her boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver in one of her best roles), a tough-as-nails business operative. Katharine, whose blue-blood background is as upscale as Tess’s is trashy, seems nice at first, and even promises to mentor Tess on her way up the corporate ladder. But when Tess discovers that Katharine has secretly stolen one of Tess’s business ideas and fobbed it off as her own, she decides to beat Katherine and the whole, male-dominated business world at their own game.

I love this movie because not only is it one of the best romantic comedies ever made, it also asks many questions about the nature of the American dream: is it real? Is it corrupt? What does a girl have to do (really) to achieve it?

Fame

Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame is an underrated film about the experiences of “gifted kids” who attend New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. As with any coming-of-age tale, the main characters—who each focus on dance, acting, or music—discover a lot about themselves as people, and also about what it takes to succeed in the arts. That is, how to achieve real fame.

The young actors are all first-rate, including Gene Anthony Ray, who had never acted before. A young Irene Cara is a stand-out. All-in-all, Fame is a great study of that most celebrated aspect of New York City: its music, theater, and dance culture. Basically, it’s about the bush-league for Broadway.

Men in Black

At one point in Barry Sonnenfeld’s classic summer movie, Men in Black, one of the main characters, veteran MIB agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) tells his young trainee that the MIB headquarters are “Just like Casablanca. Only no Nazis.” But this is not quite right. A much more apt description would be Ellis Island, where immigrants from all over the world (galaxy, in this case) come to gain entry to our civilization.

You don’t have to be an English lit major to glean that Men in Black is all about immigration and the diversity that immigration brings. The film opens with the MIB men disrupting an NIS raid of a truck near the Mexican border. (K mocks the way the NIS men treat the “dangerous aliens”—i.e., Mexican immigrants.) Later, the new MIB recruit, J (Will Smith), routinely mistakes weird-looking (but human) people on the streets of New York for extraterrestrials.

The point of the movie is that, well, we’re all people. (Except for those evil bugs, of course.) And diversity is a good thing—a miraculous thing—which is another reason NYC is the coolest city in the universe.

Ghostbusters

One of my favorite scenes in Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters is the one in which the demon-possessed accountant Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) wanders the streets of Central Park West. He encounters a horse-drawn carriage driver and warns the man (and his horse) about the imminent coming of Gozer, the God of Destruction. After Louis staggers off, the driver thinks for a moment and says to himself, “What an asshole.”

To me, this moment reveals the message of the entire movie—that New Yorkers are the toughest, most unflappable people on earth. They can handle anything, so long as they stick together.

While purportedly a horror-comedy, Ghostbusters is mainly one long celebration of that New York attitude, especially as demonstrated by Peter Venkman, the quick-thinking, bullshit-spewing, totally selfish guy who leads the Ghostbuster team. Venkman is one of the great anti-heroes of American cinema. He thinks he’s just looking out for himself—until the shit hits the fan and he has to step up to protect his friends and his city.

Another great example is the old rich guy in the lobby of the building where the heroes catch Slimer. When Venkman, clad in full nuclear-powered GB gear, tries to hold the elevator for the man, the old guy merely puffs on his cigar and deadpans, “I’ll wait.”

Friday Night Rock-Out: “I Will Follow”

No, you are not hallucinating. I am, indeed, lapping myself in terms of Friday Night Rock-Outs. No “real” posts last week. The reason is simple: I’ve been on vacation, visiting family in Pass Christian with my son, Connor. We had a great time, and I did some work on my new novel. But no blogging. Oh, well.

So, I am going to just post another FNRO. This time, I’ve decided to feature one of the best live performances by one of the greatest bands ever. Namely, their performance at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This was in 1983, when the band was on tour for their landmark album War, which is when the band began to achieve true superstardom.

In later years (up to and including today), U2 got a lot of hate for becoming a bit pompous and self-important on certain records. But they were—and still are—a great rock band, with a new album climbing the charts.

Their performance at Red Rocks was probably their best. Already a band known for grand gestures and almost militant power, they found themselves playing their hearts out to a full stadium.

Outdoors.

In the freezing rain.

And they rocked…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Only the Young”

“Only the Young” is one of those great songs whose history is so complicated that even fans can’t quite keep it straight. Originally written by Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry and Neal Schon of Journey, it was first released by the great pop-rock band Scandal in 1984, when the band was fronted by Patty Smyth. Journey then released their own recording of the song in 1985, which was featured on the soundtrack of the Matthew Modine movie Vision Quest. Taylor Swift has since done her own cover of the song, which is, naturally, the one most young people know today (if they know the song at all).

I have featured Journey on my Friday Night Rock-Out Series before with “Any Way You Want It.” In that post, I expressed the somewhat novel opinion that “Any Way You Want It” is Journey’s only “good” song. In retrospect, I see that that statement was unfair. “Only the Young” is, also, a very good song indeed. It somehow gets at the heart of the yearning and frustration that young people feel whenever the previous generation is doing its best to keep them down.

Such was the case in 1984, when young Gen-Xers like myself were in high school or college and doing their best to make it in the wake of the Baby Boomers. And it’s even more the case now, when Gen-Z is coming of age in a United States that has, almost literally, been looted by the old people who control it. They face young adulthood in a denuded world, bankrupt and barren of opportunity. I bet the song resonates for them, too.

My favorite version of the song is still the first one, by Scandal. Patty Smyth was one of the most underrated rock singers of her generation, and this song found her at the height of her powers. (Fun fact: Van Halen offered her the lead singer job after David Lee Roth left; she declined due to her pregnancy.) Her voice positively soars on this song, and whenever I hear it, I am transported back to that long-ago time—which, alas, is looking better by the day.

Rock-on…

New Book Talk Episode!

Attention all book nerds!!! My great friend Margaret Luongo and I have made another book talk video, in which we reveal the various books we’ve each been reading instead of David Copperfield. Enjoy!

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.