Literary Fiction – Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m Reading: “Mona Lisa Overdrive”

The great sci-fi writer Clifford D. Simak was known for writing novels and short stories with off-beat main characters. Often, his protagonists were cynical, working-class stiffs (often with a drinking problem) who stuck to their own, private, moral code, often at great cost to themselves. One of Simak’s editors once groused that all of his stories were about “losers.”

“I like losers,” Simak replied.

I just read this quote the other day, and I immediately thought of William Gibson’s books—specifically, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I first read MLO back in the early 1990s, just a few years after its publication, and I thought it was great. I never really thought of reading it again, but for some reason—perhaps because I’ve been a bit down, of late—I recently checked-out the book and re-read it. And I’m really glad I did. One of the foundational works of the cyberpunk sub-genre (along with Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and other books), it still holds up, both as a work of speculative fiction as well as just a damned good, vividly imagined, human story.

A lot of people heap praise on Gibson’s novel—and on the Cyberpunk genre in general—because of their ideas, the thematic questions they ask about how humanity can relate in an age of overwhelming, dehumanizing technology. And what are the brutalizing effects of the ever-increasing disparity between the high-tech haves and the lower-tech have nots? Et cetera et cetera.

Myself, I like Gibson’s characters. Often, they are losers, of the sort Simak wrote about. Little people eking-out an existence on the fringes of society. MLO is no exception. The last of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer and Count Zero, it’s set on a near-ish future Earth where mega-corporations, trillionaires, and criminal cartels have replaced all governments, and most of humanity muddles along in a rat-race of late-stage capitalism. The plot is a complicated skein of four interlocking narratives, each centered on a different character: Mona, a teenaged prostitute; Kumiko, the tween-aged daughter of a Yakuza boss; Angie, a beautiful young star of virtual reality films (“simstims”); and Slick Henry, an artist who sculpts robots and suffers from government-inflicted memory loss. I find it interesting that, of these four characters, two are children (Mona is sixteen), one is addicted to drugs, and one is brain-damaged. Additionally, two of them (Mona and Slick Henry) are poor, while the other two “rich” characters (Angie and Kumiko) are virtual prisoners of their wealth and position, separated from any real friendships or human connection.

Most notably, none of them have real families. Mona is an orphan; Kumiko’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and her father is an aloof cypher.

In short, all of Gibson’s view-point characters are underdogs, one way or another. The closest he has ever come to a real, kick-ass hero is in one of his best supporting characters, Molly Millions, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary who figures so prominently throughout the Sprawl trilogy (not to mention Gibson’s landmark short-story “Johnny Mneumonic”, which first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1981; yeah, I read it fresh off the newsstand). And even Molly is more of an anti-hero, selling her services to the highest bidder, yet always displaying a basic, inner decency and compassion.

It is Molly, in fact, who becomes the physical catalyst that eventually brings the four narrative threads of the plot together in the MLO’s final chapters. I don’t want to spoil it completely, but the story involves a plot to kidnap Angie (the simstim star, whom Mona strongly resembles; hint, hint) and prevent her from reuniting with her boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, whose body lies comatose in Slick Henry’s art studio while his mind is busy in cyberspace. Kumiko, too, finds herself caught up in this plot, if only tangentially.

Having just re-read the book for the first time in thirty-odd years, I find myself liking it even more now than I did back then. I am awestruck by how deft Gibson’s prose is (he is surely one of America’s most underrated writers), as well as how quickly the story sucks the reader in. Almost every pop-novel out there these days is written from multiple, shifting points-of-view, but very, very few manage to draw their individual characters so vividly, or keep the reader as invested in the plight of each.

And, yeah, Gibson’s ideas are really, really cool. My favorite revelation in the book is when Slick Henry’s friend, Gentry, figures out that the L.F., the device attached to Bobby’s skull, is really an aleph, referencing the 1945 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. (If you read enough cyberpunk novels—or urban fantasy novels, for that matter—you’re going to run into Borges eventually.)

To sum up, Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of my favorite novels, sci-fi or otherwise. Check it out…

Why Do We Read “Heavy” Novels?

Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine, and at some point in the course of the conversation I told her about one of my favorite thriller novels of the last twenty years. It was Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, who sadly passed away in November. I described the plot to my friend, explaining how it’s about a 16-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, who lives in the Ozark mountains, raising her two little brothers. When her meth-dealing father goes missing, Ree faces the prospect of the bank foreclosing on the family mortgage, which would leave them all homeless (in addition to crushingly poor). To prevent this, Ree goes alone on a quest to find her father—or, at least, to find his body (she suspects he’s dead) so that she can get the money from his life insurance policy. This quest leads her into the mountain-shack domain of the local drug lord.

As I told all this to my friend, her expression became doubtful.

“Sounds dark,” she said.

I was taken aback, momentarily, and not just because my enthusiasm for Woodrell’s book failed to penetrate her skepticism. I was taken aback because I did not, in fact, have a good reply to her complaint. Yes, Winter’s Bone is a dark novel. Very dark. About as dark as you can get in a realistic, literary work. However, my enjoyment of the book is not dark. In fact, I remember the light-hearted, almost giddy thrill I felt while reading it—feverishly, tearing through it in a couple of days. It was the sensation that Vladimir Nabokov called a “kindling of the spine,” which one gets when reading a truly fine book.

What I found myself unable to communicate to my friend is the simple fact that I loved Winter’s Bone, even though its subject matter sounds like the stuff of an awful, depressing PBS documentary. How is this possible? Why do people like me sometimes read, and love, “dark” novels. More to the point, why do we read “heavy” novels in general—novels about tough subjects, adult circumstances, and big, real-life, consequential choices?

Why don’t we only read fun, predictable, pop-novels of the sort that dominate the best seller lists (not to mention the top 100 slots on GoodReads)?

I often think of something the late, great film critic Roger Ebert once said: “Happy movies don’t make you happy, and sad movies don’t make you sad. Good movies make you happy, and bad movies make you sad.”

Such a simple statement, and yet so profound! It applies equally well to novels. Good novels make you happy, and bad novels make you sad (or, at least, bored). Ultimately, though, Ebert’s aphorism is insufficient to answer my friend’s reaction. What does “good” mean in a movie, or a novel? For that matter, what does “happy” mean? Neither word seems easily definable, in this circumstance.

Happiness, in the grand sense, is not the sensation one gets from a book like Winter’s Bone. As thrilling and, yes, entertaining as it is, it does not induce true happiness. Rather, what it grants the reader is a sense of being transported—of movement, into the mind and world of the main character. That is, for each one- or two-hours session of reading the book, one becomes Ree Dolly. Take this opening paragraph:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

What most people misunderstand about books like Winter’s Bone is that they are not merely well written. Yes, good writing is a necessary—but not sufficient—quality of a successful literary novel. What is also required, though, is this shift in psychic awareness. In the paragraph above, we feel Ree’s sense of life—her desperation, her determination to survive in the most severe physical circumstances. We, as readers, are right there with her, standing on the snow, freezing our butts off, wondering how we’re going to survive the winter.

In a later passage, we also get a sense of Ree’s love and compassion for her two little brothers:

Sonny and Harold were eighteen months apart in age. They nearly always went about shoulder to shoulder, running side by side and turning this way or veering that way at the same sudden instant, without a word, moving about in a spooky, instinctive tandem, like scampering quotation marks. Sonny, the older boy, was ten, seed from a brute, strong, hostile, and direct. His hair was the color of a fallen oak leaf, his fists made hard young knots, and he’d become a scrapper at school. Harold trailed Sonny and tried to do as he did, but lacked the same sort of punishing spirit and muscle and often came home in need of fixing, bruised or sprained or humiliated.

The great novelist Martin Amis once related Vladimir Nabokov’s belief that the reader should not identify with the character in a novel; rather, they should identify with the author. But I’ve never believed it. Yes, a good book does impart the wisdom of the author (this especially true in a masterpiece like George Eliot’s Middlemarch), as well as the benefit of their wit and depth of feeling. But that’s not the main reason people read novels. Rather, it is identification with the protagonist. And it’s not just that we identify with the main character; we must sympathize with them. We must participate in their struggle.

Even a rat-bastard character like Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert—the most famous pedophile in literary history—could not keep our attention as readers if we did not, on some level, see ourselves in him. We must like him, if only a little. Feel sorry for him, even. Yes, he commits dreadful acts, but he does so, we sense, in a mistaken pursuit of happiness (that, what he believes is happiness, as he equates it to his sexual possession for Delores Haze). He is, in other words, a very wicked man but not a truly evil one.

Ree Dolly, of course, is neither wicked nor evil. She is, in fact, a completely valiant and admirable character. But that’s not the point. The relative morality or immorality of the main character is almost irrelevant. The only real requirement of a successful novel is that, through the art and skill and sympathy of the author, we are able to pierce the membrane of our own egos and enter that of the character. And, in doing so, we inevitably reflect upon our own, personal, real-life struggles. To paraphrase something I once heard Harry Crews say, it is a psychological truism that, in thinking about and judging a character in a novel, we inevitably come to think about and judge ourselves.

Right about now, you might be thinking of the Ancient Greek concept of carthasis, which refers to that paradoxical feeling of renewal one gets after watching a great, tragic play like Oedipus Rex or Othello. It is the sense of having participated in the plight of the tragic hero and come out the other side, as if reborn. And this idea certainly applies to literary novels. But what I am talking about is even deeper, more elemental, than catharsis. Rather, it has something to do with what Joseph Campbell described as “the rapture of being alive.” The rapture can, and in some ways must, transcend what we normally think of as decency or even morality. It goes deeper. It gets as who—and what—we really are, as beings that exist on both a physical and a spiritual plane.

So, I guess the title of this essay is a trick question. I don’t know why we read heavy, challenging novels. I don’t know why we enjoy them, and even need them. And I doubt anyone else really knows, either.

I just know that we do.

My Christmas Sci-Fi List

For some reason, I read a lot of science fiction during the holidays. Maybe this is because I loved science fiction as a kid, and I had more time to read it during the Christmas break. At any rate, this year I decided to post a list of great literary science fiction novels.

I’m not qualified to give a meaningful explanation of the difference between popular and literary fiction. My old professor, Jonathan Penner has already done that in his fine essay “Literary Fiction Versus Popular Fiction” (which I cannot find on the Internets, alas). But suffice to say that popular fiction is defined by a formula. As Penner states, “Every work of literary fiction seeks to be like none other; every work of genre fiction seeks to be like many others. Genre fiction works for effects on which the reader knows he or she may rely. Literary fiction always tries to see the world freshly.”

The novels I list below certainly fall into the category of popular fiction. They all make use of the common tropes of science fiction stories: space travel, robots, aliens, and the end-of-the-world. So why do I call them literary? Because each one of them, while remaining on a generic level, is centered around a vivid and successfully realized characters. Also, each is written with a emphatic artfulness and grace.

So here’s the list:

The Left Hand of Darkness Strangely enough, I first got interested in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel when I read a review of it by John Updike. It’s about a human envoy who is sent to a distant alien planet called Gethen. Gethen is remarkable not only for its isolation, but also because the locals, although descended from homo sapiens thousands of years of previously, are all hermaphrodites. Specifically, they function as men for certain part of their lives, and as women for the other. It sounds a bit hokey now (the plot was even ripped-off on an episode of Star Trek), but it’s a fine little novel, with some genuinely compelling drama. (It actually develops into a kind of wilderness adventure story when the main character gets entangled in the political intrigue of the Gethen government.)

Lord of Light Roger Zelazny was a hell of a good writer who is best known for his Chronicles of Amber series of fantasy novels. But my favorite is Lord of Light, which is the first novel I ever read that seems, at first, to be one genre (religious fantasy), but then reveals itself—convincingly—to be another (science fiction). Zelazny sets the story on an unnamed, earth-like planet where the gods of the Hindu pantheon (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, etc.) are real and very much alive. These dieties use their Godly powers to rule over a pre-literate culture of peasants (controlling them in ways that are often less-than-divine).

The story centers on Sam—who closely resembles Gautama Buddha but with a Marlowesque twist—who is trying to unseat the vain and profligate Gods from their position of power. Sam, we soon learn, is one of the original crew members of a starship called The Star of India, which crash-landed on the planet eons previously. Apparently, Sam and the other surviving officers used their technology to set themselves up as “gods” to rule over the other castaways, and eventually came to believe their own propaganda. It’s a far-out idea, which Zelazny delivers in a surprisingly subtle, vivid novel that is part epic, part spoof.

Virtual Light I think William Gibson is one of the best writers of his generation, literary or otherwise. He invented the term cyberpunk, and its attending genre, of which Virtual Light is my favorite example. It’s about a young bike messenger, Chevette, who spends her day cycling through the teeming, corporate-ruled streets of a future San Francisco. In a plot twist that is almost Dickensian in its lyricism, Chevette accidentally comes into possession of a very unusual pair of computerized sunglasses, which a villainous corporate hit-man is very anxious to get back. Gibson is a genius at mixing high-tech plots with low-tech heroes, and Chevette soon has to take refuge in an underground, DIY society based on the remnants of the Oakland Bay Bridge.

The Martian Chronicles Okay, it’s a stretch to put this one on the list, not because it isn’t literary, but because it really isn’t science fiction. It’s actually a collection of interlocking fables, all of which are based on Mars during the early phases of its colonization. Unfortunately, the planet is already occupied by an ancient race of Martians. If you substitute Illinois for Mars and the Sioux for the Martians, you get an idea of the feel of this novel, which Bradbury himself said was inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s classic collection, Winesburg, Ohio. Many of the stories are genuinely beautiful and haunting.

The Tripods If you didn’t read Samuel Youd’s trilogy when you were a kid, you should do so now, especially if you have a kid of your own. Earth has been conquered by aliens, and what remains of humanity exists in a servile, pre-industrial society. Young Will and his cousin Fritz escape their village and go on a quest for the fabled “White Mountains” where a human resistance is forming.

A Clockwork Orange The movie has outshone the book for most of my lifetime. But the book is actually better, written in the inimitable voice of Alex, a fourteen-year-old sociopath who is just trying to have a good time in an Orwellian England of the near future.

God Emperor of Dune The original Dune is a really cool adventure story. I always thought of it as Lawrence of Arabia in the 30th Century. But I think Herbert’s fourth novel in the series, God Emperor of Dune, is the best, from both a narrative and stylistic point-of-view. It focuses on just a couple of characters (as opposed to dozens) and it presents Leto Atreides (son of Paul) as genuinely sympathetic character.

Nova Samuel R. Delany could never decide whether he was a physicist or a mythologist or an literary fiction writer. Why limit yourself? Nova, the story of a mad space-captain seeking to fly through the center of an exploding star, is Delany’s tightest and most interesting novel.

Childhood’s End I hesitate to put this one on the list. I loved it as a kid, as I loved all of Arthur C. Clarke’s books. As a writer, he was very, very limited. But in Childhood’s End, he really outdid himself. It’s the first novel I ever read that broached the concept of a technological Singularity.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep I can’t help but think that, in some alternate universe much like those he described in his novels, Phillip K. Dick is alive and well and living as a respected and beloved literary fiction writer. In this universe, however, he wrote mesmerizing, almost hallucinogenic sci-fi novels about good and evil, the definition of “reality”, and what it means to human. His best book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a haunting classic.

Author’s Note: This post first appeared some years ago on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.

Today I Learned a Word: “Precovery”

As part of the work for the Read a Classic Novel…Together channel, I’ve been reading a very old classic indeed, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (almost always abbreviated to just Tristram Shandy). Published by Laurence Sterne in 1767, it’s a very funny, sly book—kind of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but in the 18^th Century—and I found myself imagining George Washington reading it (and laughing his ass off) while holed up in some winter bunker during the dark days of the American Revolutionary War.

The story is told by Shandy himself, a very smart but self-absorbed and neurotic man (again, a lot like Larry David) who tells his life story in wry, sardonic, and occasionally schizophrenic prose. At one point in his rambling narrative, he mentions the “seven planets” in the heavens, which surprised me. Sure, I knew that even the ancient Romans knew about the inner planets, as well as Jupiter and Saturn. But the fact that the unfathomably distant Uranus was known in the 18^th Century struck me as remarkable.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Uranus was not discovered until 1781, over a decade after Sterne wrote his novel (but still much earlier than I thought). Which means that there is no way that either Sterne, the writer, nor Shandy, the character, could have known about the actual seventh planet.

So, what, exactly, is Shandy alluding to in the “seven planets” bit? It seems that he was referring to the astrological planets in their classical (and very unscientific) sense, i.e., the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This context makes sense, in retrospect, because Shandy is obsessed with astrology and its supposed effect on a person’s character. (Yes, he’s a bit of a kook.)

By the time I sorted all this out, however, it was too late; I was already deep down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole. I looked up the history of the outermost planet (not to be confused with the dwarf planets like Pluto and Ceres), Neptune. Neptune was discovered by French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier in 1846. Not only was it the first planet to be discovered entirely by telescope, it was also the first one whose existence was surmised before it was actually observed. That is, Verrier and fellow astronomer John Couch Adams had noticed irregularities in Uranus’s orbit, which, they suspected, might be caused by a seventh, hitherto unseen planet. They then deduced the probable location of this hypothetical planet and hunted it down.

And that’s not all! I also learned that Neptune was actually discovered before it was discovered. As historians found later, Neptune was seen at least three times before, by Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jérôme Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830. Each of these men recorded seeing something in that spot, but none of them realized it was a planet and not just a weird “fixed” star.

Apparently, this sort of thing happens with some frequency in the world of science, to the point that it actually has a name: precovery. In a precovery, someone finds all the information they might need to make a real (and potentially career-making) discovery, but they never put the pieces together. (Or, at least, they never publish a paper about it.)

I think there might be a profound lesson here about the difference between data and knowledge, observation and understanding.

It’s also a lesson about publishing what you’ve got, ASAP. Before some other doofus steals your thunder.

Why Do Movies Get Remakes, but Books Don’t?

If you’re a liberal-arts nerd like me who thinks about culture all the time, you have probably pondered this question: why do people remake movies, but not books?

Yeah, I know. On the surface, this seems like a silly and even naive question. Movies, after all, are a popular medium. They belong primarily in the category of the performing arts, like theater and ballet and classical music. And, as we all understand, no one over ever gives the “final” performance of Hamlet or Don Giovanni or The Jupiter Symphony. Yes, there are certainly “classic” performances of all these works—some of them, made in the past century, have been recorded for the ages—but none is ever the last performance. Each generation must have its own Hamlet, Don Giovanni, etc.

Okay, so we’ve settled that question.

Or have we?

Short Story Alert: “Cerulean”

I’m very happy to announce that my short story, “Cerulean”, has been published by Killer Nashville Magazine! Many thanks to Isabelle Kanning and the rest of the editorial staff for accepting it.

Check it out if you have time. It’s free to read…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “A Clockwork Orange”

The most important novel in the dystopian science fiction sub-genre is George Orwell’s 1984. The second most important is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I would go so far to argue that Burgess’s book has, in some ways, been even more influential and culturally significant than Orwell’s, especially for those generations that grew up in the 1970s and later.

It was in 1971 that Stanley Kubrick adapted the book into a landmark film, which was how I first discovered the novel. By the time I was a teenager, in the early 80s, Kubrick’s movie had taken on cult status—almost as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey. My friends and I all loved the movie. And I, being a particularly bookish kid, decided to check the novel out, too.

The secret to A Clockwork Orange’s success, topping that of almost all other dystopian novels, is that it has a great, exciting twist. Its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old delinquent named Alex, seems more like a villain than a hero. He is, after all, a thug, a thief, a gang-member, a rapist, a drug user, and a lover of all things violent (“ultraviolence,” as he and his gang friends call it). Yet, in comparison to the oppressive, authoritarian, end-stage-Capitalist society in which he lives, he is a kind of hero. Against that iron-grey backdrop, his better, human qualities come to the fore—his intelligence, his ferocious courage, and his absolute dedication to personal pleasure, the state-be-damned.

This twist is one of the greatest, central ironies in modern literature, and it’s the reason teenage boys (and probably a few girls, too) continue to find themselves drawn to the book, just as they have been for sixty years. Conversely, this is also the reason that social conservatives have hated the book for just as long. In fact, as I recently learned from openculture.com, A Clockwork Orange was the most banned book of the 2024-25 school year.

I have no doubt that Burgess would have been very, very proud.

Kubrick’s film version was so powerful that it influenced the cover-design for most subsequent editions of the book. Many of these covers were thinly-veiled riffs on the movie poster or on Malcolm McDowell’s brilliant performance, wearing his singularly perverse, false-eyelash. I really like this cover from 1995 by Robert Longo because it bucked that trend and did something new.

Also, I think it really captures the madness of the book—the ferocity of Alex’s character as he rages against the machine. Yes, he’s an evil character, but that’s sort of the point of the whole book. Alex has a God-given right to be evil, if that’s his choice. Evil is an implied, but not a necessary, product of his free will, and he fights valiantly against being “programmed” by the cold authority figures of the story.

Just like most teenagers. Even the ones that aren’t psychopaths.

What We Talk About When We Talk About “Theme”

As I was working on a recent post about the great sci-fi and fantasy movies of 1982, I re-read the Wikipedia page on one of those films, Conan the Barbarian. It’s a great movie (despite the fact that it’s really just a raunchy, gory, over-the-top B-movie with an A-movie budget), and I loved it when it came out, as did millions of others. It was, in fact, a culturally significant film, in its own way, and the Wiki page reflects this. A lot of passionate, obviously smart people have contributed to the page over the years. (Wikipedia is, imho, the single greatest triumph of the internet, but that’s a subject for another post.)

As such, the page inevitably includes a rather insightful section called “Themes,” in which people have enumerated the topics that the film explores—or at least seems concerned with. These include “The Riddle of Steel,” “Death,” “Wagnerian Opera,” “Individualism,” and “Sex.”

I’m sorry, but “Sex” is not a theme of this movie nor any other. Neither, for that matter, is “Death.” It’s a topic, surely, perhaps even a motif. (Note that I’m using the word “motif” in its strictest, compositional sense, as it is referenced in musicology.) But it’s not a theme.

Yeah, I know. I’m being a bit of an English-major-snob on this one. A word-Nazi. But bear with me, please. If you’re a person who really tries to appreciate literature, either on the page or on film, then the distinction between theme and motif is important. It’s even more important if you’re a fiction writer who struggles to create books that have some meaning and not mere entertainment that is purely disposable. Not that there is anything wrong with fiction that is mere entertainment—entertainment is great—but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the pinnacle that people should aim for.

The film’s Wiki page comes much closer to the idea of a real theme when it discusses “The Riddle of Steel” (although it completely mischaracterizes and misinterprets the real matter at hand). As anyone who has seen the movie knows, The Riddle of Steel is a connundrum—not so much a riddle as a philosophical question—that Conan believes god will ask him when he dies. The question goes something like this: “Which is stronger? The sword, or the hand that wields it?” Or, put another way, “Technology? Or willpower?” “Brute force, or the power of conviction?”

It’s actually a pretty deep question, especially when one considers the fact that film’s original script writer, Oliver Stone (who later went on to direct a few films, too) is a veteran of the Vietnam War, which surely represented one of the greatest struggles of all time between technology, on the American side, versus sheer determination and courage on the North Vietnamese side. (Please don’t write to me and tell me that determination and courage were displayed on both sides of that tragic war. I realize this, and I am over-simplifying the conflict for the sake of argument.)

This posing of a philosophical and moral question, which the hero of the film (and, thus, the viewer) struggles to answer is, to my mind, the real definition of a theme. Perhaps the supreme example of this is Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in which three couples—all in late middle-age, all jaded—discuss the definition of “love” over hard-drinks. It’s a great story, not just because it captures the individual voice and attitude of each character, but also because all of the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with something—a matter of real import that, each one senses, will reveal something about their own lives. As one might expect, each character has their own story to tell about the subject, beginning with this one from a woman named Terri.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terry said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that.”

She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She like necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.

“My god, don’t be silly. That’s not love and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”

The story continues around the table, with each character telling their own story about the general subject of “love.” In Carver’s supremely able hands, each of these stories is shocking, yet rings true. Completely, brutally true. Some of them are also funny as hell, in a gallows-humor sort of way. One of the greatest things about the story, though, is the way it never gives us a definitive answer to the question it asks. To the contrary, the story raises even more questions—deeper meta-questions that the characters, themselves, are unaware of but which we, as readers, are. Is there a single definition for love? Is that question even meaningful? Does love even exist, really, in the cosmic sense? Does it matter?

In the same way, Conan the Barbarian presents its hero with several possible answers to its central thematic question. The first is given by Conan’s father (played by the great character actor William Smith) in the opening scene, where he tells the young Conan that the one thing he can ever depend on. “Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This,” he says, gesturing to a sword he has just made. Of course, he is not talking about that particular sword, or even swords in general. He is, we sense, talking about all the intangible things for which the sword is a symbol—discipline, training, courage. The martial ideal.

Later in the film, the villainous Thulsa Doom presents Conan with another answer. In that famous (and surprisingly shocking, even now) scene when he beckons one of his followers to literally jump off a cliff, he suggests that control over the human mind—through dogma, religion, and all the other tools of tyrants—is far more powerful than strength of arms, either literal or metaphorical.

So, which of these answers does Conan accept. Neither! In fact, his tale seems to suggest a third answer, one which is never articulated—never explicitly told—to either Conan or the viewer, but is rather born out by the action of the narrative. The answer, simply, is love. It’s Conan’s love for his murdered parents that sustains him through the ordeal of slavery and drives his desire for revenge. He loves his friend, Subotai, after rescuing him from death, and he comes to love Valeria even though she is, initially, a rival. Later, it’s Valeria’s love of Conan (along with some help from Subotai) that saves his life after they rescue him from the Tree of Woe. And it’s Conan’s grief over the death of Valeria that causes him to go on his final (foolhardy) confrontation with Thulsa Doom, where he uses his father’s broken sword (note the symbolism, there; steel really isn’t that strong, after all) to behead the man.

I think it is important to note that even in a “silly” genre movie like Conan the Barbarian—a friggin sword-and-sandal movie, for Pete’s sake—good writing can add a level of thematic resonance to any work of fiction. That is, it can turn a potentially crappy movie into a good movie, and a good movie into a great movie. It’s this complexity that separates the vast majority of films (and books, for that matter) from the few we remember years later—that tiny minority that we deem “classics” after the fact.

Another thing to consider is how Conan the Barbarian, like Carver’s short story, doesn’t fully answer its own thematic question. At least, not completely. The ending is ambiguous. Yes, Conan kills the bad guy, and (we are told) ends up a king himself, but he “sits on his throne with a troubled brow.” In others, the verdict is still out on what the real answer to The Riddle of Steel is, after all.This kind of ambiguity is, of course, a hallmark of all good fiction. We, as viewers and readers, don’t get a definitive answer—mainly because the kinds of questions that good fiction asks are, ultimately, unanswerable in any objective sense. They are always about choices. Priorities. Does honor matter more, or friendship? Revenge, or love?

Yes, the Marvel Movies Are “Real” Cinema

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, 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. And—again, at their best—they also 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—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.

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Sherlock Holmes and George Eliot

It’s time for another entry in my ongoing series Synchronicity for Bookworms. In this episode, I will describe the incredibly tenuous and yet undeniable connection I found between the great stage and film actor Jeremy Brett and George Eliot’s classic Victorian novel Middlemarch.

As you might recall, I recently did a blog post on Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic mystery novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In that post, I mentioned that my favorite actor to ever play the role of Sherlock Holmes was Jeremy Brett. While I was writing the post, I browsed various Internet pages pertaining to Brett. Brett was primarily a brilliant and prolific stage actor, appearing in everything from Shakespearean Tragedy (check out his performance as Macbeth on YouTube) to comic theater.

On one page, I found a photo of Brett standing in front of a billboard advertising a play in which he was appearing. As I looked closer at the image, I saw that Rex Harrison was also in the play. (As I later discovered, the production was a revival of Frederick Lonsdale’s “Aren’t We All?” that ran on Broadway in 1985.) This revelation made me smile because I am also a fan of Rex Harrison, ever since I read a biography of him a decade ago.

Naturally, I immediately went to the Wikipedia page for Rex Harrison and browsed through his biography. This included his great filmography. One of the more famous films he starred in was Blithe Spirit, a supernatural comedy based on a play by Noël Coward. I clicked on the link to the Wikipedia page for Blythe Spirit (the play) and discovered that Coward took the title from a poem by the great British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Naturally, I then clicked on the link to Shelly’s Wikipedia page and browse through his biography. Reaching the bottom of the page, I saw to my amazement that George Eliott had based the character of Will Ladislaw from her great novel Middlemarch on Shelley.

And there you have it, a cosmic filament connecting two of my recent topics—Sherlock Holmes and George Eliot. When my eyes settled on this last reference to Middlemarch, a little spark of amazement ran down my spine. That’s the sensation one gets when stumbling upon the sublime, hiding in the common-place.

Note that this was not some Six Degrees of Seven Bacon thing. That is, I was not looking for any connection. In fact, Middlemarch wasn’t on my mind at all when I started Googling Jeremy Brett. And yet, there the connection was.

I don’t know if it means anything or not. But it made my day.