Genre Fiction – Ash Clifton, Writer

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.

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.

The Scientist Hero: Our Newest Cinema Archetype (Repost)

Author’s Note: Well, I finally watched Project Hail Mary a few days ago. The film is a mash-up of The Andromeda Strain, Planet of the Apes, E.T., Wall-E, and at least half-a-dozen other classic sci-fi movies. And that’s okay. Everything is a remix. And Project Hail Mary is a fine film—gorgeous, exciting, suspenseful, and (yes) heartwarming.

It’s also another great example the The Scientist Hero archetype that I suggested a while back (writing about another Andy Weir film, The Martian.) So, I thought I would repost. Enjoy…

One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.

How does he overcome all these challenges?

Science.

The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.

Today I Learned a Word: “Eucatastrophe”

Ever since I stumbled upon it some years ago, In Deep Geek has been one of my favorite video podcasts. In each episode, the creator/narrator (known only as Robert) goes into extreme depth on some subject of profound interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and A Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen those two latter shows (yeah, I know; I live under a rock), but I am a big fan of LOTR, so I watch those episodes with great interest and enjoyment. I don’t know Robert’s background, but I would guess he has some training in English Literature. His explications—which are unfailingly graceful, insightful, and genuinely interesting—remind me of the “close readings” I used to do as an English Major.

One especially perceptive episode is one that I saw recently on the subject of Tolkien’s Eagles. These are, of course, the race of giant, sentient eagles that play a small but crucial role in the lore. In fact, they literally save the heroes from catastrophe, flying in to assist in the Battle of the Five Armies at the conclusion of The Hobbit, and rescuing Frodo and Sam from incineration on the slopes of Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. As Robert explains, the eagles provide a eucatastrophe—a word I had never heard before, and one which (as Robert helpfully goes on to explain) was coined by Tolkien himself.

You don’t need to be a linguist like Tolkien to get the gist of what the word eucatastrophe means. Basically, it’s the opposite of a catastrophe—a sudden, unexpected change of fortune that saves the hero(es) from near certain doom. I think the key adjective here is unexpected. Indeed, a true eucatastrophe must be not only unexpected but unforeseeable, coming (quite literally, in the case of the eagles) out of the blue. For example, the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker uses the Force to blow up the Death Star, is a great, thrilling ending, but it’s not a true eucatastrophe. After all, Luke did what he came there to do. Yes, the odds were incredibly stacked against him, but the ending is not unforeseeable. It’s just very, very unlikely (and, therefore, very exciting and dramatic).

Upon being introduced to the term, one might wonder—as I did—what the difference is between a eucatastrophe and the classic Deus ex machina ending, as used in the theater of ancient Greece. Literally the “God-from-the-Machine,” it took the form of an actor playing Zeus or Poseidon or some other God, who was “levitated” over the stage using a wooden cherry-picker called a mechane. The “God” would then deliver some boon that rescues the protagonists and resolves the drama. Basically, a happy ending, courtesy of the divinity.

All good writers know that a Deus ex machina-style ending is usually pretty lame, simply because it has nothing to do with the drama that has preceded it. It doesn’t force the characters to get themselves out of trouble in a way that has meaning for the reader (or viewer). It’s the sudden “happy ending” that completely subverts the conflicts and themes that the reader has invested themselves in and is anxiously waiting to see how they will be resolved, not by some magical deity swooping in and snapping His fingers, but by the characters themselves.

Clearly, this is not the kind of ending Tolkien had in mind, nor does it describe the rather fabulous and exciting conclusions of both The Return of the King and The Hobbit. Rather, in both cases, the sudden appearance of the eagles seems somehow perfect. Unexpected, yet totally satisfying. And fitting.

But how? How does Tolkien do it?

I think it has something to do with the fact that, in Tolkien, the appearance of the eagles only comes near the end of some great struggle. In The LOTR, for instance, when the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, the main goal of the story has already been achieved. That is, they have already destroyed the ring and defeated Sauron. More importantly, they have overcome—not just Sauron—but themselves. Their own fear, exhaustion, and despair, as they held the true course to victory.

Tolkien knows that if Sam and Frodo were to die afterward, their deaths would serve no purpose, either dramatically or thematically. So, the eagles’ showing up at the critical moment seems not only fitting but logical; the eagles have witnessed the Hobbits’ ordeal, and, like us, they seek a better ending for those poor little fellows who have saved the world.

In other words, unlike a Deus ex machina ending, a true eucatastrophe comes as a result of what has come before. It is a kind of miracle, but an earned miracle.

Also, as Robert points out so beautifully in his video, the eagles also function as a stand-in for God in Tolkien’s legendarium, Eru Ilúvatar. Ultimately, a eucatastrophe represents a kind of divine intervention. A deliverance from evil.

As Robert states:

This is sometimes dismissed rather sneeringly as Deus ex machina…. The writer intervening in the plot to save characters or move things along in a way that otherwise wouldn’t happen in that created world. The eagles, some have said, are a failing in Tolkien’s writing. A convenient, easy way to save characters from whatever scrape they find themselves in. But to think that would be to completely misunderstand Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe and what the eagles represent. The eagles’ appearances aren’t failures of imagination on Tolkien’s part. They are deliberate and intentional, and they are supposed to feel like God intervening. They are God in the works.

The important thing to note is that intervention comes after the fact. The battle, in a sense, must already be won, if only symbolically. In the Battle of the Five Armies, for instance, the true victory—the coming together of dwarves, elves, and men in common purpose—has already been achieved, even before the battle starts. The intervention of he eagles to finally win the day is, more or less, just icing on the metaphysical cake.

Come to think of it, there is a kind of eucatastrophe in Star Wars: A New Hope. It comes, not at the end of the battle for the Death Star, but just before it, when Luke is about to be blown to smithereens by Darth Vader. “I have you now,” Vader intones from inside his deluxe, specially fitted TIE Fighter as he prepares to pull the trigger. At that very last instant, though, Vader’s ship is hit by a laser blast and disabled. Luke is free to finish his mission.

But where did the blast come from? All of Luke’s friends are already dead.

The blast was fired, of course, by Hans Solo, who has come to the rescue in the Millenium Falcon. The moment feels momentous because we, the viewers, know that Solo should not be there. He has, in the previous scene, vehemently declared himself to be a selfish man—a cynic—concerned only with his own survival. He would never be a sucker for any crazy, doomed cause like the Galactic Rebellion.

Yet, there he is—a symbol of people’s ability to change, to discover their own basic, human decency and courage. And, just as the eagles are a stand-in for Eru Ilúvatar, Solo is a stand-in for God, The Force, or whatever you want to call it. He represents the potential for good in all people and living things.

Perfect Films: “Blue Velvet”

Incredibly, forty years have passed since David Lynch’s masterpiece, Blue Velvet, was released to theaters. Actually, “released” isn’t quite the right word; it detonated, hitting the cultural consciousness with the force of an H-bomb. Although not a huge commercial hit compared to other films that came out that year (including such juggernauts as Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and Aliens), Blue Velvet quickly became the most talked about, joked about, and debated about movie in America, at least among the literati.

This was especially true of the English- and Film-major nerd set of which I was a member. I was, in fact, roughly the same age as Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), the film’s young protagonist, who comes home from college to Lumberton, N.C. He is visiting his hospitalized father (who suffers a stroke in the film’s famously surrealistic opening sequence), and soon finds himself wandering around town, adrift. One afternoon, he finds a severed human ear, which he takes to the local police department and hands over to a good-natured detective. “That’s an ear all right,” the man says, in one of many moments of 1950s camp dialog. Thus begins the dark mystery that propels this very, very dark film.

Again, “dark” isn’t quite the right word. For the movie is as concerned with light as much as darkness. Jeffrey soon finds himself drawn to two very different women—Sandy (Laura Dern), the blond-haired, sweet daughter of the detective; and Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), the sultry femme fatale who might have something to do with the severed ear. He experiences a life-altering, mind-blowing moment with each of them, in turn. With Sandy, he glimpses a bit of transcendent, romantic bliss when they first dance together at a party, to the angelic voice of July Cruz on the soundtrack. With Dorothy, he witnesses her violation at the hands of a psychotic drug-lord, Frank, who has sexually enslaved her.

That latter scene, which comes at the end of Act I, is one of the most powerful and perverse in the history of cinema. Even today, in our porn-saturated culture, many people find it shocking. And they should. It’s meant to shock. But it’s also meant to question. To ask the viewer: why is evil so seductive? Why is it so powerful?

Or, as Jeffrey asks Sandy, “Why are there men like Frank?” He might just as well have asked: Do all of us have a sadistic streak like Frank (and maybe Dorothy)? Do all of us have a masochistic streak like Dorothy (and maybe Frank)?

For me, this questioning aspect is what separates art from pornography, even when the line is blurred, as it very much is in Blue Velvet. Val Kilmer, who was in consideration for the role of Jeffrey, dismissed the script as “pornography.” He might have been right about that script, but he was wrong about the final product. Blue Velvet is art. In fact, it’s high art. There is something sublime about it. Something that transcends ordinary definitions and categories. It seems to exist on a higher plane of existence.

Looking back on the film, another aspect I find amazing about it is the sheer number of careers it launched—or, in many cases, rejuvenated. MacLachlan and Dern became movie stars almost overnight. (Yeah, MacLachlan had been in Dune, but the movie bombed). Rossellini went from being a model and cosmetics spokesperson to an acclaimed, A-list actress. Veteran actor Dean Stockwell made an instant comeback based on his one, over-the-top scene in the movie, vamping and lip-synching Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” (which the film also re-popularized). And 1960s counter-culture hero Dennis Hopper—whose performance as Frank was so electrifying that he was nominated for Golden Globe—found his career jumpstarted. He went on to star in many films throughout the 1990s, and also to direct a couple.

But the biggest winner of Blue Velvet was, of course, Lynch himself. He went from being that cool-but-weird art film director (who had somehow made both Dune and also Eraserhead) to a Bonafide cultural phenomenon. A phenomenon would reach its apex a few years later in 1990, when Lynch had both the hippest TV show on air (Twin Peaks) and the hippest movie in theaters (Wild at Heart).

Despite all those later successes (and a few failures, too; he was such a great artist that even his “failures” were pretty damned good), Lynch would never top Blue Velvet. Sure, he came close a few times, especially with his phantasmagoric Hollywood tale, Mulholland Drive in 2001, but he never quite equaled it.

And that’s okay. Blue Velvet remains his masterpiece, not to mention one of my favorite films of all time.

RACNT: What Margaret and Ash Are Reading (Not Charles Dickens)

In the latest episode of our Read a Classic Novel…Together! channel, my great friend Margaret Luongo and I reveal the books we have been cheating with while we were SUPPOSED to be reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

Books (briefly) discussed in this episode:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Rib Joint by Julia Koets

Check it out…!

“Manhunter: The Final Cut” Coming to a Theater Near You!

If you enjoyed my essay on Michael Mann’s great movie Manhunter, you might be interested to learn that a new, remastered, 4K cut of the film has been made. Called Manhunter: The Final Cut, the film will have a limited release in cinemas starting on July 4, 2026 in the U.S. and on September 25 in the U.K.

So, if you live near a theater that sometimes shows re-releases of classic films, keep your eye it. It’s a great film, and everyone should get a chance to see it on the big screen (as I did, lo those forty years ago).

The Roots of Noir Detective Fiction in…Sherlock Holmes?

Whenever I am feeling stressed out in the evening, I re-read something old, familiar, and soothing. For me, that is often the Sherlock Holmes stories. I read a story here, a story there, and pretty soon I’ve worked my way through the entire collection. Again.

On each iteration, though, I discover something new. Recently, I re-read Doyle’s 1904 story, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” It’s one of the lesser known of the Sherlock tales, which is ironic because it’s also one of the best. Part of the reason for its obscurity is due, I suspect, to its boring title (more of a “label” than an actual title). I mean, if you had a choice between reading a story called “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which would you pick?

Anyway, I really admire this story, for a number of reasons. Its titular character, Milverton, is a As for Milverton, we learn that he is a master blackmailer, who funds his lavish lifestyle by obtaining compromising letters (what we would now call kompromat) written by rich, aristocratic ladies. He buys the letters from treacherous servants in the ladies’ households, then uses them to extort ruinous sums from the lady in question, often pouncing right before her wedding to some duke or count or whatever. Holmes explains all this to his friend Watson in 221-B Baker Street as they wait for titular villain to stop by. (Milverton’s latest target, an unnamed rich lady, has hired Holmes to get her letters back.)

It’s a very similar premise to another of Doyle’s great stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which I wrote a post about some years ago entitled “Sherlock Holmes was a Fixer”. As in that prior story, Holmes serves as more of a trouble-shooter than a traditional detective here, using his intellect and knowledge of the underworld to sort out a client’s problems. More importantly, in both stories Holmes finds himself compelled to break the law in order to get his client out of trouble. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he disguises himself as a working-class tradesman in order to infiltrate Milverton’s household. As Holmes explains to Watson after the fact:

“You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?”

“No, indeed!”

“You’ll be interested to hear that I’m engaged.”

“My dear fellow! I congrat——”

“To Milverton’s housemaid.”

“Good heavens, Holmes!”

“I wanted information, Watson.”

“Surely you have gone too far?”

“It was a most necessary step. I am a plumber with a rising business, Escott, by name. I have walked out with her each evening, and I have talked with her. Good heavens, those talks! However, I have got all I wanted. I know Milverton’s house as I know the palm of my hand.”

“But the girl, Holmes?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival, who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned. What a splendid night it is!”

I love that line, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson.” It seems to encapsulate the great theme of the noir and hard-boiled detective fiction that would emerge later in America. Namely, how do you fight evil effectively without becoming evil yourself? The answer, of course, is that you can’t. Not completely. As the morally expedient Sam Spade says to his similarly disapproving secretary in The Maltese Falcon, “That’s just the way it is, dear.”

Speaking of The Maltese Falcon, I would bet that Dashiell Hammett read (and re-read) “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The villain of Hammett’s novel, Gutman (played so with such risible gusto by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version), seems like a direct descendent of Doyle’s Milverton. As Doyle describes him,

Charles Augustus Milverton was a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile, and two keen gray eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, gold-rimmed glasses. There was something of Mr. Pickwick’s benevolence in his appearance, marred only by the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes. His voice was as smooth and suave as his countenance, as he advanced with a plump little hand extended, murmuring his regret for having missed us at his first visit. Holmes disregarded the outstretched hand and looked at him with a face of granite. Milverton’s smile broadened, he shrugged his shoulders, removed his overcoat, folded it with great deliberation over the back of a chair, and then took a seat.

Now look at Hammett’s introduction of Gutman…

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

Note how both villains are presented as soft, one way or another. That is, both are overweight, (Milverton is just “plump” while Gutman is “flabbily fat”), their girth symbolizing not only their greed but their apparent harmlessness. Which makes them all the more dangerous, of course. People underestimate them. They want people to underestimate them. In the same way, both are impeccably mannered and well dressed, with a bit of the dandy about them. The only really threatening thing about them, on the surface, is their compelling eyes (Milverton’s are “hard,” “keen” and penetrating; Gutman’s are “dark and sleek”).

Yet both are formidable opponents, both physically and intellectually. Milverton, for his part, moves “quick as a rat” when Holmes and Watson try to use physical force against him, drawing a revolver to defend himself. He is so capable, in fact, that Holmes resorts to simple robbery in hope of retrieving the kompromat. After seducing Milverton’s hapless maid, he explains how he plans to break into the man’s library and crack his safe.

As in all noir fiction, Holmes’s corruption is contagious. It spreads. Watson insists on coming along on the caper, and soon finds himself enjoying it. As he relates,

My first feeling of fear had passed away, and I thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, all added to the sporting interest of the adventure.

Naturally, the operation goes pear-shaped. After breaking into Milverton’s library, Milverton returns to the room and they are forced to hide behind a tapestry. They listen, helpless, as the man conducts a clandestine, midnight meeting with an unknown woman, one whom he assumes to be another disgruntled maid but who is actually one of his former victims. The lady shoots him dead, then flees. Holmes, having already cracked Milverton’s, tosses all the letters into the fire, after which he and Watson do a runner, barely escaping the dead man’s enraged house staff.

With the main plot essentially over, the story still has a couple of surprises in the last pages. Indeed, there is a bit of transgressive humor near the end, when Holmes and Watson are visited the next morning by Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, seeking their help in a puzzling new case that has arisen overnight—namely, the burgling and murder of one Thomas Milverton! As Lestrade reports, there were two criminals involved in the matter.

“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”

“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”

“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”

“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”

This wonderful black comedy is, of course, another way the story pre-sages noir fiction. Holmes, like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, takes gleeful delight in outwitting the cops, even though he has no real animus towards them. In some ways, Holmes is a prototype of those later detectives. Like them, he is an island unto himself, obeying the law when possible but otherwise following his own, internal, moral code, no matter where it might lead.

It’s a very modern, almost existentialist version of Holmes, one that is seldom seen in the pop-cultural depictions of him.

Not bad, for a story that’s over a century old.

The Anti-Heroes of American Cinema: A Tribute

Author’s Note: I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve read that someone is going to remake John’s Carpenter’s class B-Movie action flick Escape from New York. I’m of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I find it repulsive that someone wants to make a new version of already perfect, classic film that hasn’t gone anywhere. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime right now for cripe’s sake.) On the other hand, I realize that cinema is a popular medium, and young people today deserve a chance to see the tale told anew. (Young actors deserve a shot at it, too.)

At any rate, the news got me thinking about old Snake Plissken, who is one of the greatest anti-heroes in the history of Hollywood. So, I thought I would repost this short essay, which original appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy…!

When I was writing my last post about George Lucas’s digital fiddling with the iconic character of Han Solo, I started think about about the role of the anti-hero in American film. Why is it that so many of our cinematic “heroes” are anything but?

An anti-hero is usually defined as a protagonist who exhibits non-heroic traits, such as selfishness and amorality. Han Solo surely qualifies as a classic American anti-hero in that he firmly avows his own self-interest, only to later commit himself to a cause larger than himself. But when I think of an anti-hero, I usually think of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart’s Rick Blaine is perhaps the pinnacle of the American anti-hero, embodying as he does the core of American isolationism in the face of the Second World War. “I stick my neck out for no one,” Blaine says to his friend, the even more corrupt Captain Renault. Blaine seems to epitomize those very American qualities of pragmatism and an apolitical business sense (he runs the the most profitable bar in Casablanca, after all). But of course, he comes around, in the end, finding himself inextricably bound to humanity in the form of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa.

Blaine might be the ultimate American anti-hero, but he is by no means the first. If you ask me, the American anti-hero has deep roots in the wild west, with our cultural fixation on cowboys, gunfighters, and the men who tamed them. Wyatt Earp might well be our first, best anti-hero, the saloon keeper, gambler, and occasional pimp who became the most famous lawman in history. America is a nation, after all, of exiles, people always seeking the frontier, and the values of the frontiersman are deeply intertwined with our own.

It’s no accident that the greatest Western ever to come out of Hollywood is John Ford’s The Searchers—a movie in which the “hero”, Ethan Edwards, is a borderline psychopath. Ethan (which means “strong” in Hebrew) exudes physical strength and a cold, practical wisdom. (He takes time to rest his horses even when pursuing the Indians who killed his brother.) Only Ethan has the strength to pursue the renegade Comanches and finally kill their leader, Scar, but Ethan comes perilously close to murdering his own niece in the process. Even in our greatest myths, the dark side of the American anti-hero seems to lurk just beneath the surface.

William Holden played not one but two famous anti-heroes in World War II dramas. Both were POWs: the cold-hearted, viciously entrepreneurial Sefton in Stalag 17, and then the resourceful Commander Shears in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Both films seem to acknowledge a kind of philosophical transition that took place in the post-war environment, a shift in values from the resolute, romantic heroism of the British Empire in favor of the more ambiguous, morally flexible version that Americans seemed to espouse. (It was we, after all, who dropped the atomic bomb and thus finished the war that the Old World started.)

All through the 1960s and 1970s, this new, darker, and perhaps more realistic vision of heroism seemed to thrive in counter-cultural films like Easy Rider, Billy Jack, and Cool Hand Luke. Perhaps the greatest actor to inhabit the anti-heroic mold since Bogie was Jack Nicholson, who in 1974’s Chinatown played the world-weary Jake Gittes, a private detective who specializes in taking compromising photos of cheating spouses, and who confesses to his lover that, when he was a cop, he did “as little as possible.” And yet Gittes is a bona fide American hero. Despite his better judgment, he finds himself unable to condone the corruption and evil that surrounds him.

Perhaps the darkest version of the anti-hero can be found in Francis Coppola’s flawed 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen plays the American Army assassin Captain Willard, who is dispatched on a journey through Cambodia to find (and kill) the renegade Colonel Kurz. The movie represents the intersection between our darkest war (Vietnam) and our darkest novel (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the result being a kind of cinematic descent into hell

Even the greatest anti-heroes of science fiction like Mad Max and Snake Plissken have their roots in the post-war characters of Holden and Bogart. When Mad Max paces menacingly across the post-nuclear Outback, he seems like the reincarnation of Ethan Edwards, haunting our depopulated future even as John Wayne haunts our sun-scorched past.

Which brings me to my main point about the American anti-hero. For all their faults, there is one quality that Han Solo and Rick Blaine never come up short on: courage. Characters like Sefton and Gittes may profess to be cowards, but they aren’t. Not really. As Americans, we like to believe that we have no Old World illusions of grandeur, but we also want to believe in our own basic decency and moral integrity (despite all evidence to the contrary). Like Jake Gittes, the American anti-hero often fails—and sometimes fails miserably—but by the very act of attempting to do the right thing, he finds a kind of redemption. Americans pride themselves on not being suckers, but in the end, we want to think we are good.

Otherwise, what was all the fighting about, anyway?

Shameless Plug: Spring Edition

Well, it’s been a long, long time since my last Shameless Plug (okay, it’s been six weeks), but my publisher, Crooked Lane Books, is running a sale on the Amazon Kindle edition of my novel, Twice the Trouble. It’s a one-day only sale on Friday, April 17.

If you like this site and want to support me, Ash, your humble author, please consider buying a copy. It’s just two bucks. Cheap!