Feminists, Freudians, and Fanboys, Unite!: A Review of Prometheus

Your first question is, “Should I go see this movie?” The answer is, Yes.

Your implied question is, “Is it good?” That’s trickier.

Your third question, if you’re a fan of the Alien series to which this is a prequel, is probably something along the lines of, “Is it more like Alien or Aliens?” (If you had to reread that question because you’d forgotten than the sequel to Alien was not Alien II but Aliens, deduct five points for insufficient geekiness.) The answer, I think, is that this movie owes as much to Stanley Kubrick’s vision of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as it does to the original series. It’s certainly faster-paced than that glacial epic, and there are aliens in it (different kinds this time!), but it shares Clarke’s scope, beginning with the invention of the human race by another (dubbed “The Engineers”), and sharing Clarke’s fear that IBM… I mean HAL… I mean evil corporations (“The Weyland Corporation” in this iteration of HAL) will eschew pure science for a quest for power. Only this time the quest for power masquerades as a quest for philosophical answers rather than profit. But, just as profit is a proxy for power, these supposed philosophical questions turn out to be a base quest for immortality. Still, the corporate overlord wants to gain rather than learn, while the hero is on a purer quest for truth. The villain is as two dimensional as you would expect. The hero wants the truth, and love, and children, and to hold onto her faith, and isn't always sure which is which.

One of the advantages Prometheus has over 2001 is that it has a larger cast of characters, so we get to see a spectrum between these poles. Those provide the film with a richness that makes the reflection on the movie more valuable than its ending, which feels reductive. And why wouldn’t it? The body count in this movie is Shakespearean. And in a slightly-too-obvious way, every character’s flaw leads to his or her demise. Still, the way these Achilles heels are woven together (how’s that for a gross image? Something out of H.R. Giger, perhaps? Then it’s perfect) demands some respect. The acting is generally good. Charlize Theron, the only member of the cast to win an Oscar, actually delivers the worst line reading in the whole movie, so that tells you it’s not a Sci-Fi Channel Original. Noomi Rapace holds her own against Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, both as a badass and as an actress projecting a character with a complete internal world. Michael Fassbender’s android David is so pitch perfect you won’t be able to decide if you feel sorry for him or hate him, but you will absolutely be creeped-out by him.

If the characters don’t do it for you, there are the larger themes. The Alien series has been poured over by academics, and Prometheus will not disappoint them. Freudians get excited about all the orifice penetrating, and Prometheus has aliens injecting themselves into mouths and bursting from abdomens, but it also has some climbing in and out of eyes. (Calm down, Freudians. You’re going to make messes of yourselves.) While the original had a lot to say (and a lot to tease) about motherhood, Prometheus has both a father-son relationship and a father-daughter relationship. (And there the Freudians go.) Feminists love the gender power dynamics of the original series. Well, get this: At one point in Prometheus we have a female character demanding an emergency C-Section (an abortion?) from a female-voiced surgeon machine that has already informed her that it is only designed to work on men. (Is that a million Ph.D. theses I smell? Smells sweaty.)


As for the philosophers, the movie glosses over semiotics with the help of a robot who can read alien writing and speak their language (convenient), but it asks enough religious and philosophical questions to keep stoners and Philosophy 101 students saying, “Whoa! Dude!” long into the munchie period.

As is always the case with Ridley Scott films, the questions are better than the answers. When those answers are delivered at all, they are presented as catch phrases, and we have to parse out nuance by evaluating the character providing them because, on their faces, they are too simple to be satisfying. Still, these questions are good, interesting ones, worthy of conversation after the movie, so go see it with some good friends who are willing to talk about more than which of the beautiful cast members they most admired. And don’t be put off by the simplicity of the answers provided in the movie. For good or ill, that’s realistic; the world is full of people who can sum up their beliefs in bumper-stickers, so it stands to reason that some of those people would be included in the crew of any interplanetary space voyage. Luckily, the answers are not all the same, which is why second-guessing Prometheus will be as much fun as the movie itself.


6/26/12 Addendum: I thoroughly enjoyed this, too. It seems about right:

Another Great Spam Message

It's been over a year since I published a couple of the wonderfully bizarre spam messages caught by Blogger's spam filter (the previous ones are here and here). Today I got one that's a winner. This is a great illustration of how syntax tricks our brains into expecting substance where none exists; just try and read it without imagining there's some story here you just can't quite understand. You won't be able to do it. And yet, all the while, you'll know it's gibberish. Enjoy the stupendous absurdity! And thank you foreign spammers with mediocre translation software. Keep up the terrible, terrible work you are doing.

"Even his own falsely accused attackers prepared to have a court around Detroit, typically the 54-year-old priest assured the actual members which he has never been afraid during the harm The following thursday, while some other gentlemen endured within the stop with out going to this assistance. Methods express the woman's seven available perfect hits photos, and a remix selection, can along distribute concerning 20 or so,Thousand to successfully 60,1000 clones with week's conclusion in Wednesday, May possibly 20. (Together with fewer than A single,Thousand last month.) The key dealer of your bunch may just be "The Excursion: The superior involving Donna Summer season," sega's discharged during '03. Moreover performing very well will be your girlfriend for starters best-of, 1979's "On radio stations." Monsignor Bill Hodge mentioned they've happy regarding Hagar's monetary gift, which will be which is used to fatten the particular groceries baggage of your hundreds of individuals that visited the actual church's nutrition pantry twice per full week, many of so, who job low-wage job opportunities but still do not have sufficient to chow down."

What do you make of it? I imagine that, in its native language, it was a story about a priest who got caught supporting a soup kitchen with the proceeds of a dirty website appealing to disco fetishists. It's a gripping tale asking a challenging moral question about the ends justifying the means. Sammy Hagar plays a role by weighing in publicly to support Father Hodge, and even gives a large financial contribution to the priest's defense. Unfortunately, an angry mob is not satisfied by Sammy Hagar's wisdom, and threatens to string up Father Hodge before he can get a fair trial. The mob is so large, it completely encircles all of the city of Detroit. Father Hodge then gives an impassioned explanation, complete with hard data about the sixty-one-thousand clones whose souls were saved by the dirty website. The mob still thirsts for his blood, but he is rescued by none other than your girlfriend, who performs well in the daring escape. Left with no priest to hang and nothing but their low-wage jobs, the angry mob ironically finds solace by sitting down together for a huge meal at the (actual) church pantry, where they all chow down.

That must be what it's about, right? Alternate theories welcomed.

Response to Pastor Sean's Non-Apology

In case you managed to miss the viral video, a pastor in North Carolina named Sean Harris amused his congregation by advocating that they beat their children if they suspect the children of being gay. “Dads, the second you see that son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give them a good punch. OK?" I was one of the folks who sent Sean Harris a letter demanding an apology. To his credit, he responded. He didn’t apologize. Not really. But he replied. He sent me a link to his blogpost on Pastor Sean’s Blog in which he made his non-apology apology. There, he claimed that when he had said, “Can I make it any clearer?” and then proceeded to advocate breaking your child’s wrist and punching him, he was not making it very clear, because, “Clearly, I would like to have been more careful with exactly what I said, but sometimes I say things without enough clarity.” Pastor Sean sure talks a lot about clarity, doesn’t he? He now claims that, immediately after asking if he could make it any clearer, he “misspoke.” He doesn’t want people to do the thing he clearly told them to do. He just “was speaking in a forceful manner to emphasize the degree to which gender distinctions matter to God.” I guess that means these distinctions matter so much to God that He inspires people to misspeak to the degree that, “Parents should not punch babies or children,” becomes “Give them a good punch,” when stated forcefully. It’s so important that God caused Pastor Sean to say the opposite of what he believes? And yet, Pastor Sean continues his apology by writing “Either Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 are true and we should communicate the truth in love for fear of not entering the Kingdom of God or the entire Bible cannot be trusted to be the Word of God.” I would guess that’s pretty important to Pastor Sean. I would think it’s pretty important to his God, too. Is it so important that God might cause Pastor Sean to say the exact opposite when speaking forcefully? Would Pastor Sean misspeak and communicate something other than the truth in love for fear of not entering the Kingdom of God? Would that misspeaking include some hatred instead of love?

Pastor Sean ends his non-apology apology by whining about how he’s been called mean names by the LGTB community, “using ungodly and profane words.” It’s a good thing none of the men of his congregation are around to act on his advice, “Man up,” and whoop Pastor Sean for his whining. It’s also a huge relief to know that, now that his congregation has been made aware that they shouldn’t hit their children, when they abuse their gay kids verbally they will do so using godly and holy words instead of the ungodly and profane ones that have so wounded their pastor. He closes by criticizing the LGTB community for being intolerant. Yeah. Seriously. 

But I’m not in Pastor Sean’s congregation, nor am I a Baptist, nor am I a Christian anymore. When I posted the video, I made some crack about how I refuse to be associated with any religion that included Pastor Sean or his congregation. One of my Christian relatives accused me of dismissing an entire religion because of a “fanatical nut job.” But I hadn’t written that I lost my faith because of people like Pastor Sean. In fact, as a Christian, I tolerated them, even though I resented the association, precisely because I felt it was my obligation as a Christian to look beyond our disagreements and focus on what we agreed upon. I lost my faith for more fundamental, epistemological reasons. This is just a bonus. Now, from the outside, I'm very glad to not be wrestling to justify my belief in any religion which would associate me with people like Pastor Sean.

It’s too easy to point out how obtuse, cowardly, hypocritical, and heartless Pastor Sean is. Plus, it hurts his tender feelings. I'm more upset that his congregation laughed at their pastor telling them to beat their children, and that none of them had the courage to stand up for their own sons and daughters and the sons and daughters of their fellow congregants when he made those “jokes.” I wasn’t raised Baptist, but in our Presbyterian churches, when a child was baptized, we all stood up and made a very solemn promise to that infant and to his parents, saying that we would help raise them in the love of God. As I’m no longer a Christian, I won’t tell those congregants what that should mean to them, but I’ll bet the Baptists, no matter how homophobic, don’t interpret the love of God to include child abuse, and I doubt their rejection of infant baptism is a loophole for allowing it. So if they ever made a similar promise to the children of their congregation, someone (someone more qualified than Pastor Sean) might want to remind them of what that means.

Flash of Insight

I just had a flash of insight. Certain critics of public school teachers (read: Republican politicians) complain that teachers get long vacations in the summers. They also say President Obama shouldn't be re-elected because the unemployment rate is over 8%. During the summer, most teachers want to work but can't, and aren't paid. So, either teachers are not the evil, greedy freeloaders Republicans like to make us out to be, or President Obama has presided over an economy in which more than 8% of the population is spoiled by long vacations.

Which is it, Republicans?

Advice to the Graduating Class of 2012

I've been asked to offer some advice to our grads in our school's newspaper. Teachers usually offer some short quote, but I've never done well with brevity. I asked if I could write something longer, then put out a request for help on Facebook and got some wonderful suggestions from my army of wise friends. Here's my first draft. It should probably be shorter, but let me know what to add, cut, or fix.
 

College, the military, work: They’re all hard work. They’re much harder than high school. Imagine how easy your classes would be if you went back to middle school. That’s how easy high school is compared to the world beyond. Get ready to work a lot harder.

In college, don't worry so much about picking the right major that you avoid taking classes you are curious about. You may miss the thing you'll love to study, and that's more likely to lead to the career you are good at and truly enjoy.

That being said, take money seriously. Tax payers gave you a gift of a public education, and they didn’t expect a thank you card. Sallie Mae will expect your soul. (Your credit card company will be even worse. Avoid those guys.) Whether you get a student loan or a gift from your parents, learn that it’s real money and that you have to pay it back somehow. Hopefully, you’ll even learn that you have to pay society back for that public education, too.

Don't get a tattoo until you're at least 25. Some of you will ignore this advice, and, when you're older, you'll regret it. If you get a tattoo somewhere you can't hide during a job interview... Well, unemployed people have lots of time to think about their bad decisions.

When dating, try to find somebody you would be proud to introduce to your good friends and your parents. Recognize that the thing you will do most with this person, in the long run, is talk. Once you’ve found this person, if you want to keep him/her, keep talking.

Travel. Go to China. Go to Europe. Go camping in eastern Oregon. Go to Ashland, watch some Shakespeare, and travel to ancient Rome or a world filled with magic creatures. Travel by reading a good book. Just go. Traveling doesn't just increase what you know; it expands what you're capable of imagining.

The world can be a very difficult place. In some ways, it's going to get harder during your lifetime. You will have opportunities to make it better, and I hope you take those. But, more than anything, remember that the world is worth it; it’s filled with enough beauty and wonder to justify all the hope you'll need to get through it.

Oh, and keep in touch with your high school teachers. We deserve to hear about your successes, because we’re very proud of you.

Study the Tiger

Study the tiger

Circling its prey

Every sinew curves

Into a winding path

While it’s burning bright.


There’s comfort in its trajectory;

Lives don’t move in straight lines.

Perhaps I too will come round to where I want to be

Through bends between trees in the darkness.


Or is this just a fantasy I choose,

Solace in my own winding path

Before the weight of the world

Lands on my back?

Lessons of Surgery

I've learned so much today!

Lesson #1: Surgery isn't so bad. Shots of anesthetic? Bad.

Lesson #2: Anesthetic wearing off is also bad.

Lesson #3: "You may feel a little pinch." = BS

Lesson #4: You can reply to a text message during surgery. If you tell the person what is going on as you write, you will creep them out.

Lesson #5: If you try to block out the doctor-nurse banter during surgery with an episode of Jordan, Jesse Go!, you have to turn it up to 9.

Lesson #6: Your doctor may allow you to see what he's doing during surgery. It's best to refuse and close your eyes tightly.

Lesson #7: Cauterization after anesthetic does not hurt. You will smell burning meat, though. It’s not a bad smell ...until you remember that you’re the meat.

Lesson #8: When you sit on frozen peas, they conform to your body wonderfully. When you thaw them and refreeze them, they form big, spiky chunks.

Lesson #9: Writers are MORE productive when they can't get out of their chairs.

Lesson #10: The day you have surgery, your wife will be very sweet. She will allow you to avoid all housework. She will not like your idea of playing poker with the guys the next day.

Lesson #11: Even a dull pain can keep you up until 4:30 in the morning. Make that 5:30.

Short Story: Fea's Tenses

I've written this story for a big-deal writing contest, and I want to get some feedback before I send it off. (That's allowed by the contest, don't worry.) The story is long, but if you have fifteen minutes and would be willing to look it over, please let me know what you think in the comments section below before I send it off. Thanks!

[Update 3/30/12: Thanks to all the folks who've given me feedback, here in the comments, on Facebook, and by email, I've made some significant changes to the story. I want to especially thank Megan Geigner, a PhD candidate at Northwestern (bio here), and Wendy Hart Beckman, owner/president of Beckman Communications, a professional writing service. Both of these friends went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am so grateful for their honesty and thoroughness. I hope they're pleased with the changes. I still have time to make more, so keep those suggestions coming!]

[Update 3/17/13: Though the story didn't win that contest a year ago, I've continued to polish it and get feedback from even more friends and students. The story is now available on Kindle, so I have to remove it from this blog, but if you're so inclined, you can still get a copy (less than a buck!) here:

 
 
http://amzn.to/WthJ3m

 Again, thanks to you all!

Ode to the One-Hit Wonder

Tonight I discovered a song used as the background music on a YouTube video, and I liked it so much, I purchased it on iTunes (the song, not the video). This got me thinking about one-hit wonders. I haven’t listened to the rest of this artist’s catalog. I may end up loving more of it. But this song is sufficient. That fact should make us stop and reexamine our relationship to art.

Pundits, recording artists, and cultural critics have weighed-in to lament the decline of the concept album, and I’m not going to argue that. If the album is the complete work, it is a shame that iTunes may kill that form. But if the album is only a collection of isolated works, what’s wrong with buying songs individually? If someone asked me if I were a “fan” of an artist on my MP3 player who only holds a single slot, I’d shrug and say, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I only own one of her songs.” Why am I compelled to distance myself from an artist because I don’t like the majority of her work? Even if I absolutely hated 99% of an artist’s work, if one single piece spoke to me in a profound way, isn’t that enough to create the kind of artist-audience connection every artist and audience seeks? And if the artist sustained that relationship for only three minutes of a single song, during those three minutes, am I not a fan?

Pragmatism dictates that the incalculable mixture of discipline and inborn talent which produce a single work capable of creating a strong artist-audience connection will generally prove repeatable, at least to some degree. Beethoven can write his fifth symphony, and those same skills and talent can also combine to produce the “Ode to Joy.” But I would scream it from the mountaintops: The “Ode to Joy” is enough. It is sufficient. If Beethoven were alive today and only wrote that one song, and you stumbled upon it in iTunes, even if you went through Beethoven’s other listings and found nothing but songs that sounded like amateur covers of songs by Slipknot, you’d be hard-pressed not to admit that, for a brief moment, this Ludwig guy must have been touched by the hand of God himself. The Slipknot fans would hate that weird outlier of a song, but you could listen to it and love it and, despite all the embarrassment caused by the association with his other horrible music, you would be a Beethoven fan.

I find this notion inspiring. I tell my creative writing students that they need to think of their work as art, and that they can compare the process by which they learn the craft to the hours of study that go into learning to compose music, the agony and excitement a painter feels when faced with a stubbornly blank canvas, and the grueling demands embraced eagerly by ballet dancers. Sure, we don’t put on toe-shoes and dance until our feet bleed. Our backache, eye strain, and carpal tunnel may not engender the same sympathy, but if you don’t think the analogy holds, I don’t think you’re writing enough. So this idea of the one-hit wonder should fill us with hope. We don’t have to write the 37 plays of Shakespeare. They weren’t all perfect, anyway. We don’t have to write (and edit) the 500 works of Isaac Asimov. Lots of those were absolute stinkers. We don’t have to write the 49 novels of Stephen King. I think he’d admit he’s not as talented as Shakespeare nor as prolific as Asimov. He’d also admit that not all of his novels are successful. But that’s okay. Because just one is enough. Harper Lee wrote a whopping ONE novel. So far, Arundhati Roy has only written one as well. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird or The God of Small Things, consider them assigned reading and buy yourself copies immediately. They can each prove that one masterpiece is sufficient.

It doesn’t have to be a novel, of course. Write a short story as good as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Write a script as good as Zach Helm’s Stranger Than Fiction. Write a poem as inspiring and heartbreaking as Stephen Crane’s (36 word) “I saw a man pursuing the horizon.” Write lyrics as good as The Indelicates’ “Savages.” Those works were all good enough to make me an instant fan of the artists as soon as I read/watched/listened to their work.

So, whatever it is, just write it. If it’s not good enough, try again. It only takes one.

Conservatives Make a Liberal Argument Against Affirmative Action

I was perplexed by a question after hearing this last week's Slate Political Gabfest.

If you haven't heard, the Supreme Court has decided to hear a case which will challenge affirmative action in college admissions. Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is a case in which a white student is saying she was unfairly denied admission because she was white. I won't get into my disdain for the "Woe is me, I'm a white person in America" ridiculousness, but there's a really interesting double standard that someone (someone much smarter and more informed than I am) should explore.

The University of Texas at Austin has an admissions policy that begins by admitting the top ten percenters from each high school in Texas. Because of the segregation in schools caused by geographic segregation, this produces some diversity on its own. Then the university takes economics into account, and that will produce some ethnic diversity, too. Ultimately, they have some wiggle room allowed by the Supreme Court's decision on Michigan Law School's admissions policy from a few years ago (Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003). It's this last part that the Supreme Court is revisiting, and which it will probably change, especially since Justice Kagan has had to recuse herself. The young woman filing the case claims that she would have been accepted if not for this last bit of racial preference in admissions.

Regardless of where you stand on admissions (for the record, I'm in favor of some racial preference to encourage diversity, because I see racial diversity, like economic diversity, as a valuable part of an education), this argument will hinge on the notion that the system was unfair to this young woman and the government should fix it. I have no problem with that kind of argument. Why? Because I'm a liberal. I believe that, when there is injustice in our society and the government creates, enables, or has the power to correct that injustice, it should. I don't believe the government can create perfect equality of outcomes or solve all social ills. That's a straw man some of my conservative friends have tried to pin to all liberals, as though being a liberal is the same thing as being a Maoist or Soviet, and that's inaccurate and unfair. However, when the government can make a system, especially a system of its own, more fair, it should do so.

My conservative friends do not believe this. They tell me that they believe in personal responsibility. They tell me they believe equality will best be produced by the free market. They detest systems like Affirmative Action because they see it as government intrusion.

Except in this case, the remedy the complainant is proposing is that government should step in (when conservatives disagree with this form of government intrusion they call this "judicial overreach") and make this system more fair. Personal responsibility, it seems to me, would dictate that Abigail Fisher could have earned her way into the University of Texas at Austen by working her way into the top ten percent of her class. Problem solved. Or she could take advantage of the free market and go to school somewhere else, and if enough disgruntled white students did this and the school took too much of a financial hit, they would adjust their admissions policy. Problem solved. But Ms. Fisher is blaming the system and trying to change it. She wants it to conform to the ideals presented by the conservative right, but the mechanism she's employing theoretically belong to the left.

Of course, it doesn't belong to the left. Conservatives are just as willing to go to court as liberals, just as willing to try to sway government to enforce their vision of a more just America. I have no problem with that. What bothers me is that, when people advocates for a more just tax policy, something that is more firmly in the sphere of government than a public university's admissions policy, they are dismissed as dirty hippies who need to get a job and stop expecting the government to solve their problems.

The practical consequence of this double standard is that when poor people and minorities, or even middle class whites struggling against a rigged economic system, go to the government for a redress of a grievance, they are dismissed by conservatives, but when a white person does the exact same thing at the expense of a poorer minority applicant to the same university, that's peachy, and yet the conservatives bristle at being called plutocrats or racists.

Pay close attention to the way this issue gets reported by the conservative media, and to the way Republican candidates comment on it when it gets a bit more attention. If you hear a noticeable absence of condemnation of Abigail Fisher as a communist, a welfare queen, a nanny-state liberal, or any of the other slurs hurled at those participating in Occupy Wall Street, ask yourself, What should we call people who only compromise their principles when it benefits white people?