The Trichordist (via Matthew) responds to a blog post by Emily White at NPR, in which White grapples with the ethics of file sharing:
“[S]mall” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.
Jonah Lehrer confirms what we all suspected: when it comes to wine, most people are just guessing.
What can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight—and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips—there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best. For instance, both the winning red and white wines in the Princeton tasting were ranked by at least one of the judges as the worst.The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps explain why contextual influences—say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle—can profoundly influence expert judgment.
The Weed writes a post coming out of the closet as a Mormon gay man happily married to a heterosexual woman. The results are surprising and heartfelt:
[W]hen talking to some friends about our situation in preparation for this post, one of them said “It’s almost like we’ve encountered a real live Unicorn!” She was joking of course. She was just saying that they were talking to something that not many encounter. A mythical creature. Someone who is gay, Mormon and married. And then as we told new friends about ourselves in preparation for this post, we told them we were initiating them into “Club Unicorn” because they had now seen something mythical with their very own eyes. I now extend that invitation to every one of you. I am not a myth. I am real.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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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.”
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.