Why Memory Is Malleable

Turns out there’s a benefit for memory being so pliable: imagination. Claudia Hammond explores:

If memories were fixed like videotape recordings, then imagining a new situation would be challenging. For instance, you can picture yourself arriving by double-decker bus at a tropical beach for the wedding of Johnny Depp to your best friend next week. To do so you need to do the equivalent of finding your personally recorded memories of sitting on buses and visiting your best friend, before ordering clips from the mind’s archive of films starring Johnny Depp and TV programmes featuring tropical beach weddings — memories which could be decades apart. Then you splice all these elements together to create the scene. Cognitively it sounds like hard work, but the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy to meld these memories together to invent a scene that we’ve never witnessed before.

Greece’s Dilemma

A moving piece by Nikos Konstandaras on the terrible position Greece has found itself in:

We hear that about 80 billion euros has been pulled from bank accounts and that 500 million to 800 million euros is being withdrawn each day. Some of this goes toward paying bills, while the rest is being hidden or moved abroad. And yet, last month there was still about 170 billion euros in Greek banks, despite the growing chorus of economists declaring that Greece will leave the euro. Why? Maybe when the volcano rumbles, when the thugs come for our neighbor, when a society gives up the fight for progress, the familiarity of our routines numbs us to the dust and roar of the coming stampede. Maybe we do not think bad things will happen to us.

Happy Father’s Day

Here is a photo my father taken in January 2011. My brother and I would often try to help my parents to shovel/snowblow the snow out of our massive driveway whenever we could. Sometimes dad just did it himself, though.

I like this photo because I think it conveys the desolation of New England winter. Those who have encountered it know how brutal and alienating it can be. But it also conveys the indomitable spirit of my father, who has triumphed over many, many odds in his lifetime to carve out a life for the Chen family in America.

Hope y’all have a happy Father’s Day today.

But What If It Just Doesn’t Make Sense?

On the /Filmcast, we recently recorded our Prometheus review episode. It was a lively discussion and I enjoyed it a great deal, but it’s prompted a wave of e-mail and feedback that has only rarely occurred during our podcast’s entire run (one other memorable instance: Inception). I love all the e-mails we receive and I’m incredibly grateful that people are engaging with our show and with films in such an enthusiastic fashion. I love stuff like these 15 insane theories about film and TV that will blow your mind, ideas that re-orient and re-cast everything you’ve come to know and believe about how a film unfolds. But when it comes to Prometheus, I tire of the vastly divergent interpretations of what actually happened in the movie.

Drew Mcweeny’s spoiler-y Q&A about the film is enjoyable on its own (make sure you check out all the other articles I list in our review too), but it also highlights a potential issue that Prometheus raises: isn’t it entirely possible that this movie just makes no damn sense? In light of all the glaring plot errors highlighted in Drew’s post, isn’t it entirely possible that the screenwriters/director just had no idea what they were doing when it came to constructing an internally cohesive and satisfying narrative?

And if that’s the case, does Prometheus really deserve hours and hours of pondering and writing and theory-espousing?

Of course, there are plenty of movies that don’t explain themselves at all, movies where the viewer struggles mightily to make sense of the events on screen, yet they are movies still widely regarded as masterpieces. I think invoking David Lynch at this point in the conversation is appropriate. /Filmcast listener John from The Fifth Wall writes the following [SPOILERS for Prometheus]:

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First, what is the last David Lynch film you saw? I hate to pull the “it’s notsupposed to make sense” card, yet I do believe the film works on a meditative level that belies (and, in many ways, renders moot) the plot. “Lost Highway”, for example, is an exercise in meaningless if you demand an explanation as to why Fred Madison suddenly becomes Pete Dayton in terms of conventional plotting. However, if you catch the deceptively nonsensical line from Madison near the beginning of the film, that he “likes to remember things [his] own way,” the film opens up and the pieces fall into place. (I can back that argument up, I swear, but you don’t check your inbox for 10,000 word treatises on movies from 1990s.) David in Prometheus also has a line that I’d argue functions as a cypher to unlocking the real meaning underlying this film — a line you didn’t touch on, which says to me that you had a different viewing experience than I did:

David: Why do you think your people made me?
Charlie Holloway: We made ya ’cause we could.
David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?

In other words, what if you tracked down God and, to quote Fight Club, “He never wanted you”? In fact, “In all probability, he hates you”?

I’m a Lynch apologist. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I’m sure most Lynch fans out there will want to tar and feather me for making this comparison. But I’ll also say that, somehow, I walked out of Mulholland Drive without caring that The Cowboy is never explained or given “Script Writing 101” character motivations. (I’ll go even further and say that I can re-watch Blue Velvet a dozen times more before I die and never care that the script is atrociously stupid in ways that far surpass anything in Prometheus. And, ho boy, does Prometheus have some atrociously stupid moments) And with that, I’ll put the Lynch references away.

Looking at Prometheus on those terms, I’ll only add that I just didn’t see the problem with a lot of plot “problems” you raised. You thought it was problematic that the Engineers that created humanity eons ago now apparently want to destroy us. Or that the “black goo” that sparks life on Earth would result in the xenomorphs in the future. To that, I say that it’s more bizarre to assume that a sentient race would have consistent motivations over millions of years, or that we’d be able to understand the motivations (or the technology) of a truly “alien” race. That probably sounds like a cop out (“so again, we’re not supposed to understand it, great”), but I don’t think so. This was, for me, a movie about the perils of human exploration into areas we can’t possibly hope to understand, any more than Europeans could understand the Americas and all the strange diseases and natives that handed them their asses for centuries thereafter. Turning that analogy inside-out, the experience of David getting beaten up by the Engineer may be akin to the Aztecs learning that Hernan Cortes was no Quetzalcoatl, that this supposed “god” came to bring their destruction for reasons the Aztecs couldn’t possibly have understood at the time. This is Solaris as bio-horror sci-fi.

I’d argue that the film tells us all about the Engineers that we need to know for purposes of this entry in the series. As far as the humans (and the audience) are concerned, it’s because they “can”, and humanity is right to feel as disappointed as David was by that discovery. If this email generates any reaction on your podcast, I can already hear the laugh line, “Great, the movie wanted me to feel disappointment, and it succeeded at that.” But there’s profundity to be had in that disappointment, at least for me.

After that, the emergence of a “xenomorph” was perhaps the cheapest bit of unnecessary “fan service” in the whole movie. First off, I don’t buy that it was a xenomorph — they were not on LV-426, the giant squid was at most a distant cousin of a facehugger (as if a possum and a grizzly bear were the same animal), and (come on) Ridley Scott knows what a xenomorph looks like and he would have give us one if he wanted to go there. But he was presumably going “somewhere” with that scene, unless it was a sign of sheer studio meddling. Short of that unlikelihood, I hope that, much like Ridley very deliberately highlighted that they were going to LV-223 and not LV-426, he was also deliberately showing us something not a xenomorph to signal that there was more story to be told in future installments before we circle back around to the opening of Alien.

***

John’s e-mail gives you an idea of the types of e-mails we’ve been receiving (all of which offer totally different interpretations of the events of the film), but I think the Lynch comparison is somewhat apt. The issue I have with this argument is that I feel it’s completely belied by the movie’s fairly effective opening setup, as well as its positioning as a summer blockbuster. There’s no better way for me to say it but this doesn’t “feel” like a movie where people are supposed to disagree on the fundamentals of the plot itself. Sure, we may have differing interpretations on what the meaning of life is, and what motivates Dr. Shaw, and what makes us human. But are we really supposed to disagree as to what the hell the Engineers were doing in the first place, why they were trying to kill all humans, etc.?

I’d like to bastardize a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, if I may: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here’s a corollary: “Any sufficiently non-sensical film lacking explanation, cohesion, or logic is indistinguishable from a masterpiece.”

Why We Cheat

Dan Ariely shares some insights on why we cheat:

Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Aaron Sorkin’s Self-Delusional NYTimes Interview

David Itzkoff recently conducted an interview with Aaron Sorkin about his upcoming new HBO series The Newsroom. I’m super-psyched about the show and hope it’s a return to form for Sorkin, who’s been on a roll after winning a Best Screenwriting Oscar for The Social Network.

Itzkoff does a good job at getting at some of the issues that Sorkin faces in creating a television show, but it struck me from reading the interview that Sorkin is either a skilled deceiver or he’s deluding himself when he makes some of his statements. Here he is discussing The West Wing:

I have no political background, and I have no political agenda. All of my experience has been in theater and writing. But I just thought it would be fun to write about a hypercompetent group of people.

Riiiight, so it’s just a total coincidence that Sorkin’s band of flawed but ridiculously noble political figures was Democratic? To be fair, Sorkin also had solid Republican figures on the show too (e.g. Ainsley Hayes, Glen Walken), but I could never shake the feeling that they were perfunctory characters, put in there to demonstrate how “balanced” Sorkin was. “Alright, so Democrats are the unquestioned heroes in this show, but we also have this super attractive and intelligent blond woman, see?!” I’m not saying that there aren’t any super attractive and intelligent blond female Republicans out there (in fact, I think their existence is well-proven by now), but taken in this context, these characters almost feel condescending through their very existence.

These issues are easily encapsulated in the promo for The Newsroom:

Linda Holmes has already brilliantly deconstructed this trailer:

Gender dynamics are a serious problem in nearly all of Sorkin’s writing, and here, we open with a condescending lecture from a wise man to a stupid woman who says something (“Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?”) that represents a real phenomenon he’s trying to get at, but which is an utter straw man in that it’s not typically expressed in that sort of “hit me, I’m a pinata” kind of way.

Sorkin seems to have trouble finding a balance between “extremely smart” and “extremely dumb” on his shows, and to use one or the other is to inevitably condescend to one side or the other.

Here’s Sorkin again:

It’s funny that you brought up “Studio 60” because Matthew Perry once said, “I think that if you wrote this under a pseudonym it would still be on the air.” With “Studio 60,” there was a thought that I was writing autobiographically when I wasn’t.

Riiiight, so it’s just a total coincidence that that show’s protagonist, Matt Albie is a flawed but ridiculously noble writer dead set on changing the world through his writing? Nathan Rabin has a great piece on Studio 60 where he delves into this very issue:

In premise and execution, Studio 60 was a work of unbearable, overweening arrogance. It began with making the lead character of Matt Albie both a clear Sorkin surrogate and a writer so ridiculously romanticized even M. Night Shyamalan might say, “Get over yourself, dude. You’re a fucking writer, not Jesus’ younger brother, the one God really likes.”

I could go on but I think you get the point. Aaron, you are one of my heroes and one of the most gifted writers on the planet. OWN IT. Own your own opinions. And maybe understand that sometimes your point of view might leak out into the world through your work. We’ll forgive you for it.

Before You Use Airbnb, Check Your Lease

Chris Dannen writes how he was living the high-life, making $20,000 renting his place out via Airbnb. Then his landlord found out…

On Monday, June 4, about 10 days before my cofounders and I planned to push our first product into the iTunes App Store, a stranger in a blue blazer served me with a restraining order filed by my landlord. There was language requiring me to kick out my guests (a German couple) immediately after being served, but the judge had crossed out that section and initialed in the margin; I guess he found that part punitive. My lawyer later told me I would probably be forbidden to have roommates again, which in the pricey New York rental market is tantamount to eviction.

Is the TV Business Collapsing?

Here are two competing points of view about how quickly the TV industry is collapsing. The first comes from Henry Blodget over at Business Insider, who argues that TV industry trends mirror the collapse of the newspaper industry:

[L]ots of newspaper companies went broke or almost went broke. And the stock of The New York Times Company, the country’s premier newspaper, fell from $50 to $6. In other words, newspapers were screwed. It just took a while for changing user behavior to really hammer the business. The same is almost certainly true for television.

Former Blodget employee (and all-around great writer) Dan Frommer points out that market forces in the TV industry are drastically different:

The reality is that, yes, the TV industry will change over time. Some of today’s winners will become tomorrow’s losers, and new entrants may grow to dominate. But barring some unforeseen technical or creative revolution, it’s going to happen a lot slower than you think. It is easy to complain that the cable/telco/satellite-dominated TV distribution system is inefficient, too expensive, or “ripe for disruption”, and many do. But that model is actually still very strong.

I tend to agree with Frommer here. Yes, the way we watch TV will soon change forever. But the entrenched forces are so intense that they aren’t going to go away nearly as quickly. Just look at how HBO has recently had to fight off willing payers with a stick. It will more likely be a slow and painful decline. Look forward to it.