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| date | 2000-12-11:10:36 |
| Movies |
The director's cut of Blade Runner is a much better film than the theatrical release. The hints that Deckard is himself a replicant are more overt, the relationship between Deckard and Rachael is better-developed and most importantly the ending is implied rather than dropped on your head. I remember seeing the film the first time and thinking the closing scene of the two of them driving off through sunshine must be setting us up for something dreadful--it seemed fake, completely out of tune with the character of the film. The lack of voice-over I feel less sure about. The film has a lot of holes in it that the voice-over helped paper over. As it stands, trying to follow the logic of the action causes you to wonder about too many things that don't make sense, that don't add up. How many replicants have come back to Earth? What are they doing here? What does Deckard think he's doing while he's analyzing those photographs (which on a small screen were almost indecipherable even after processing.) The theme of the film is the desire to live, to create, and the responsibility of the creators to the created. The toxic Earth is a subtle reference to the responsibility we have to our children to give them a world fit to live in. The little replicas that Gaff makes are a nice realization of the theme as well--here is a killer, who still feels the need to create, and to create in the forms of the living. The post-mortem kinesis of Pris expresses the power of the will to live--there is so much life and energy and longing in her that it has to come out, even in death. The final scene between Deckard and Roy Batty brings out the theme beautifully--the value of life, regardless of circumstances. Rutger Hauer brings an otherwise unsuspected acting talent to the fore as Batty tells Deckard:
Batty's subsequent actions re-inforce the theme of the desire to live: even if he can't live himself, he can help Deckard. The film still depicts a poisonous world, dark and malevolent, although I think that has clear thematic justification. And I think there's more hope in it that might at first meet the eye. But maybe that's just me. My tendency is to approach things for the value I can find in them, to be slow to condemn and fast to praise. For me, if a film has one or two good moments in it I'm willing to say it's a good film. Con Air for instance is redeemed by "Put the bunny back in the box" and "On any other day, that would be really unusual." Two lines out of two hours, yet they both gave me great amusement, despite the overall mediocrity of the film. There are very few really good films out there, but there's a lot of value in the ones that are only mediocre. And Blade Runner is definitely better than that; I've always taken Gaff's farwell to Deckard, "Too bad she won't live--then again, who does?" to mean nothing more or less than "Carpe Deim", which is surely hopeful and good. |
| Play |
Snow is one of the basic media of play. We had four or five inches last week, and made good use of it this weekend. Alex, Tim and I fought the first snowball fight of the year, and Alex and I did some tobboganning in the back yard. The slope isn't tremendously steep, but we can get a run of thirty or forty meters, and at least it isn't too hard to climb back up. It still isn't cold enough to freeze the XYZ or whatever it is in the skating rink. I ran some more in anyway, in the fond hope that the snow accumulated there would speed the freezing process, but no luck so far. We're supposed to get thirty centimeters (12 inches) tonight, and I'll run some more liquid in after that, as the temperature is supposed to fall to -14 C. Water in all its forms is basically playful stuff. Frozen as snow it's good for skiing, toboganning, snowshoeing and the like. Frozen as ice it's good for skating. As liquid it's good for swimming, which we also did this weekend, at a local community pool. We haven't been for a while, but the kids mentioned it last week and I'm never one to let an opportunity to get them into the water go by. Neither of them are very good swimmers yet, although as I didn't get into swimming in a serious way until I was at least ten I'm not too worried about it. So long as they get lots of time in the water, the skills will come. The lessons they've taken so far have been middling-useful, but I'm less worried that they learn the right strokes than that they get comfortable in the water. The ocean is my personal friend, and that fact has saved me from more trouble than the finest swimming skills could, because it has meant that even in very bad places--like a mile off shore against a growing swell and ebbing tide--I've felt comfortable and capable of taking my time and making considered choices. |
| Reading |
I'm still taking a rest from Homer, although I get the feeling I'll be back to it later this week. I've started reading Tom Jones, and have to say that my feelings about 18th century English literature have not been given a great boost by the experience. Almost a century before Dumas, one feels that Henry Fielding has discovered the sovreign principle of the writer who is paid by the word. I don't think he was paid by the word--I just think that an age that produced Robinson Crusoe, Pamela and Fielding's two parodies of it (how many books are outnumbered by their paradoies?) and the like was just enamoured of extremely long books. It's a little odd when you look at the history of "great names" in English literature, of which the following is a hardly comprehensive sampling, but still the ones that come to first to mind: the 14th century had Chaucer, the 15th Mallory, the 16th Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson, the 17th Milton the 19th Austen and Dickens and Kipling and Hardy, the 20th Kipling and Orwell and Eliot, to name just a few (Kipling gets included twice because his early poetry in the vernacular of the lower classes was brilliantly innovative, and his later short stories were deeply moving and lyrical in a quite different way.) So who did the 18th century have? I guess you could argue Pope, but I'm loathe to put him in the same category with any of the above (one might say the same about Mallory, but his influence has been so large that there really isn't any getting around him.) My sense is that the English literary community in the 18th century was drained of vitality, possibly by the outward-looking, empire-building phase England was in at the time. Ambitious young men were to busy doing to be writing, and the literary community were largely out of touch with the pace of global expansion, preferring to focus on a small circle of people in London and a few more on the Continent. My sense of 18th century English literature is that it is far more inbred than at any time before or since, and it's signficant that one of the more outward-looking authors of the time, Defoe, has been reduced primarily to a source of children's stories, so far out of touch was he from the "serious" literature of his period. Another possible cause of this inward-looking aspect is that England's press was freer than it had ever been before, so whereas earlier authors had to wrap up their commentaries on local concerns in nominally universal or allusive themes that are still accessible today, in the 18th century authors found for the first time that they could speak their minds plainly, and ruined themselves in so doing. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with a literature that is local to it's own time, except that it robs me of some of the pleasure I'd have in reading it had been more universal in orientation. And I am sure that freedom of the press is not the enemy of good literature--the press has been freer and freer in the past two centuries, and we have seen an enormous outpouring of good work. But it may be that the authors of the 18th century took some time to learn how to use their new freedom well, which would hardly be surprising at all. |