Superman's killing Zod in 'Man of Steel' was justified, and other random 'Batman v. Superman' thoughts

Say "Uncle"

My review of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice was thorough, but it left unsaid some random thought fragments I have about Batman, Superman, and Batman vs. Superman. If I didn't have a blog, nobody would ever hear these half-developed thoughts, and they would wait forever in my mind's inner recesses, primed to leap out at the first conversational opportunity. But now I have a blog --which you must know, since you're reading it right now--so I can publish these thoughts and make myself think that they're being read, even if they really aren't. At any rate, here they are, in no specific order:

-As I teased in the title of this blogpost, I didn't really have much of a problem with Superman killing General Zod in Man of Steel, and that's not because I really liked Man of Steel (I didn't). Superman was in a difficult moral situation: Zod was threatening to kill more innocents, and made it clear he wouldn't stop unless he himself were stopped.


I think that scene is actually one of the best moments--maybe the best moment--in what I consider a mediocre (at best) movie overall. Plus, morally speaking, you could make a principle of double effect case that Superman made the best choice in a difficult situation (and was pretty anguished about it). Finally, it's worth remembering that Superman pretty clearly killed Zod the last time they fought in film (the critically-beloved Superman II), in arguably murkier moral circumstances, while smiling:


There are many arguments against Man of Steel, but Superman's killing Zod is not one of them.

-Although my review of Batman v. Superman was pretty scathing, and although I greeted the movie's initial announcement and ongoing production with much skepticism, I tried really hard to like it. And part of me wanted--and maybe still wants--to give it the benefit of the doubt. Alas, Batman v. Superman made that very hard to do. In my review, I included one paragraph of pure positives:

All sorts of convoluted things happen to get us to the point where Batman and Superman actually fight. Some of them are intriguing. The opening scenes of the film, which restage the final battle of Man of Steel from the ground-level perspective of Bruce Wayne, portray a unique helplessness and impotence in the face of catastrophe (although so did The Avengers, really). Bruce Wayne himself, to whom we are introduced in this sequence, is, once again, an interesting character, and does a fine job with the Wayne/Batman the script asks him to play. Every once in a while, Luthor, despite his bizarre characterization, says something mildly clever ("The shortest distance between two points is a straight path...and the straightest path to Superman is a pretty little road called Lois Lane"). These and other elements hint at the good movie that is buried somewhere deep within Batman v. Superman.

I wanted to make this paragraph longer. I thought there must be more justification than that to my somewhat ineffable feeling that Batman v. Superman is better than I thought it was. But there wasn't. Or, at least, I couldn't think of anything else to put in that paragraph.

-It was weird seeing Batman v. Superman in Washington, D.C. It's not a spoiler to reveal that many of its key scenes are set (but I don't believe were actually filmed) there*. It was weird to run by some of these places the very next day**. I had a similar sensation when I watched the similarly-D.C. set Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But by that point, I had only spent two summers in the city, and I saw The Winter Soldier while I was living in California.

-Before I saw Batman v. Superman, I wrote in praise of the first time the two characters met in the DC Animated Universe. You can read that full article here. I'm particularly proud of my close reading of this scene:

You have Batman’s brutality and brooding, matched with its own theme, set against Superman’s gentle, optimistic, yet firm overtures, musical and otherwise. The untrusting loner Batman rebuffs him violently; Superman, miffed, restrains himself but still physically checks Batman, and uses X-Ray vision to discern his secret identity. “I won’t have vigilantism in my city,” Superman protests. But Batman catches Superman off-guard; Superman then fails to notice both Batman’s furtive exit and Batman’s tracking him to his own apartment. When Batman learns Superman’s secret identity through “powers” of his own, Superman can only utter a bitter “Touché” in acknowledgement of an equal.

I also made some predictions about how Batman v. Superman would measure up to the cartoon:

If Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice’s trailers are any indication, Snyder will replace Batman and Superman’s unique, contrasting themes with a leaden darkness. He’ll replace their complex dynamic with heightened asymmetry: an overpowered Superman and a mecha-Batman. He’ll replace a faux-antagonistic friendly rivalry with an actual fight, aspiring to impossible pretensions of realism. We’ll probably not learn more about Batman’s and Superman’s characters from Snyder’s bombastic set piece battle than from the cartoon’s brief initial confrontation.

Each of these predictions proved accurate. I don't have much to add to my own words aside from that, except for more praise of the cartoon. Seriously, it is awesome. Watching it again, well over a decade after I saw it for the first time, I was even more impressed with it than I expected to be (similar to what happened when I rewatched Samurai Jack). I was particularly surprised that the cartoon confrontation had some sequences that live-action films appeared to steal decades later, including:

-A superheroic rescue of the President of the United States in Air Force One (reworked in Iron Man 3)
-The Joker appearing by surprise at a gang meeting, overcoming initial skepticism/the threat of brute force, and taking over the gang (reworked in The Dark Knight)
-The Joker appearing by surprise at a rooftop banquet at which Bruce Wayne is in attendance, and forcing a main character off the roof in an attempted murder (also in The Dark Knight)

The people behind the DCAU not only mastered the basics of storytelling. They also really figured out how to treat those characters seriously while not getting lost in pretentiousness at the same time. I stand by my assertion that they would do a better job with the emerging DC Cinematic Universe than Zack Snyder. Don't believe me? You can watch the whole thing here.

-I really hope that future DC movies aren't all like Batman v. Superman. The outsize role Zack Snyder is playing in building that universe suggests they might be; the fact that DC is hiring very stylistically diverse directors and (supposedly) giving them creative freedom suggests they might not be. We'll see, I suppose.


*It is, however, a spoiler to reveal that the U.S. Capitol Building explodes. My theater was completely silent when that happened.
**Including a funeral scene that rips directly off of the one in the far-superior Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

"Batman v. Superman" vs. Quality

Despite the "v.," this movie is not about a court case.
Though what a court case that would be...

As the world's two most famous superheroes, Batman and Superman have a long history together, both in the comics and outside of them. But these two heroes had frustrated attempts to put them together in film--though there were many attempts*. And one can understand why: probably every kid who knew of the characters growing up imagined them teaming up, fighting, or some combination thereof. And then those kids grew up to become executives in a movie studio that owns the rights to both characters who realize that both Batman and Superman have starred in successful films on their own, so why not throw them together and make even more money? 

That combination of juvenile imagination and crass profiteering has brought us the portentously-titled Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice**. Directed by Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen), who may be stuck making comic book movies for the rest of his life, with a screenplay by David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio, Batman v. Superman is both a direct sequel to Man of Steel (which Snyder also directed, and Goyer also wrote) and the launching pad of a DC "Cinematic Universe" to compete with Marvel's. And that's only one of its problems. For Batman v. Superman, aside from some occasional promise, is undone by both the defective imagination of its creators and the crass profit motive that willed it into existence.

It would be hard to describe the plot of Batman v. Superman. But a clear, compelling plot is not really the reason anyone saw the movie anyway (though many did), nor why the movie came into existence. But I would neglect my duty as a film critic whose opinion nobody is really seeking if I didn't at least try. So here goes: After the events of Man of Steel, in which, if you don't know, Superman saved the day at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, Clark Kent/Superman (Henry Cavill, who looks the part but still doesn't quite get how to act it) is still saving the world. But the world isn't so sure it wants to be saved--at least, not in the way Superman does it***. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck****, whose performance refutes the basic concerns that he was wrong for the role) doesn't believe Superman can be trusted. And Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, strangely cast, and bizarrely portraying Luthor as a seemingly drug-addled college student who just read Nietzsche for the first time) wants to make them fight, because...well, somebody had to make it happen.

All sorts of convoluted things happen to get us to the point where Batman and Superman actually fight. Some of them are intriguing. The opening scenes of the film, which restage the final battle of Man of Steel from the ground-level perspective of Bruce Wayne, portray a unique helplessness and impotence in the face of catastrophe (although so did The Avengers, really). Bruce Wayne himself, to whom we are introduced in this sequence, is, once again, an interesting character, and does a fine job with the Wayne/Batman the script asks him to play. Every once in a while, Luthor, despite his bizarre characterization, says something mildly clever ("The shortest distance between two points is a straight path...and the straightest path to Superman is a pretty little road called Lois Lane"). These and other elements hint at the good movie that is buried somewhere deep within Batman v. Superman.

Yet Batman v. Superman is not itself that movie. Far from it. And it is prevented from becoming that in the first place by its creative course. After the opening scenes replaying Man of Steel, the first third of the movie makes very little sense*****. I, as a bona fide nerd (see, e.g., my entire blog), had trouble following what was going on, and trouble waiting it out once I knew what was. 

As for the characters, I've already briefly mentioned my problems with its three principals, but I'll expand on them here. Superman is no longer an upbeat beacon of hope and light, but a dark, mopey (if Cavill could convey moping, that is) quasi-anti-hero. Ben Affleck is fine as the Batman he has to work with, but that Batman is more of a Rorschach than a Caped Crusader, now fine with killing and ruthless in every way. Snyder tries to have it both ways with his portrayal of Batman, lifting some of the moody iconography of the Nolan films (and, of course, showing the deaths of his parents again), but replacing their moral nuance with a sort of oppressing, overwhelming darkness (and, of course, abandoning Nolan's commitment to technical realism in shooting action scenes, but that was inevitable).

And I could never quite take Eisenberg's seemingly drug-addled, first-time Nietszche-reading Luthor, with his pseudo-pretentious argle-bargle about POWER and ABSOLUTES and KNOWLEDGE seriously. Nor could I believe him an antagonist equal to Superman, a feat previous incarnations of the character mostly achieved. Nor could I understand his motivations--he wants to check Superman and Batman because Communists ruled his father, but his father abused him as a child...? Watching him, I found myself longing for Clancy Brown, or Gene Hackman, or even Kevin Spacey. And I found myself wishing that one of the early casting rumors had come true: Bryan Cranston? Tom Hanks? Either would have been much better. But neither could have saved the movie.

For casting alone did not doom Batman v. Superman. Its superfluous flourishes helped make that happen. If you took out every inscrutable dream sequence, every slow-mo action shot, every voice-over montage, and every heavy-handed attempt, in the form of a montage of news clips of people discussing that very issue, to make Batman v. Superman into the would-be-profound meditation on how mankind would treat gods, you would go a long way to improving the movie from the dour, super-serious, self-indulgent mess it is. You would also cut out about an hour of its running time. But problems would remain******.

For even correcting the excesses of its creators' imagination leaves the dictates of the profit motive, determining what Batman v. Superman can and can't do. Now, I am no idealist about Hollywood. I understand that movies are supposed to make money. But Batman v. Superman shoulders its excess load of franchise-creating responsibility poorly, since DC feels itself so far behind Marvel in building its cinematic universe. Thus does Luthor have a mostly unexplained and unexplored interest in "metahumans" that allows the movie to introduce the entire roster of the soon-to-be Justice League. Thus do many of the movie's incomprehensible dream sequences exist solely to introduce elements of future movies. And thus is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) a major character in this movie, for some reason. She gets some good moments, to be sure, but you know she wouldn't be in the movie if not because the studio overlords demanded it.

Batman v. Superman, in short, has repulsed me more from the commercial logic of the comic book movie than any of the comic book movies I've seen (and adds to my related concern that we are trapped in a clogged toilet bowl pop culture, where the same stuff just keeps swirling around and around). Sure, some of the comic book movies I've seen have been worse. But none of them have been so naked in their sacrificing art for the sake of a franchise. If I told all of this to Snyder, he would surely point to all of the superficial, contrived, "edgy" elements of the movie. And he would have some to point to (as problematic as they are; see above).

But I would then judge him, and Batman v. Superman, on how truly "edgy" those moments appear once the necessities of endless story continuation have ironed them all out. And then I would judge us, the paying audiences, for being responsible. For we are, in the end, the ones who pay for these things. Some $160 million worth of ticket-buyers, many of them probably as intrigued about seeing Batman and Superman together on screen as they were as children, saw Batman v. Superman this weekend. Until we audiences demand better, more self-contained, more compelling movies, with higher dramatic stakes, better writing, better characters, then Batman v. Superman will remain not the comic book movie we need, but the one we deserve*******. They should have just stuck with the cartoon.


*If you saw I Am Legend, you witnessed a bit of this history, even if you didn't realize it.
**Or, as the marquees at the theater at which I saw the movie (correctly) called it: Batman.
***In making Batman v. Superman hinge directly upon the negative effects of events of Man of Steel, Snyder and his team probably unintentionally turn Batman v. Superman into a sort of ironic meta-commentary on Man of Steel itself.
****In short, he has no reason to be sad.
*****At one point, for example, the Capitol building explodes, which is a weird thing to watch happen when you see the movie in Washington, D.C and live in Capitol Hill, as I do.
******Such as an antagonist, in Doomsday, who is literally the incarnation of brute force. And that's it.
*******If you want a super-contrarian take on the movie, see here.

50 years ago, a UFO landed (?) in Hillsdale, Michigan

Newspaper front page from the day after the sighting (via the Hillsdale Collegian).

On March 21, 1966, a UFO appeared on the campus of Hillsdale College. Though it was only one of many sightings to occur around that time in Michigan, it had by far the most witnesses; according to contemporary accounts, at least 87 people on and around Hillsdale's campus got some glimpse of the mysterious object. The sightings gave significant exposure to the UFO phenomenon.

Surprisingly, given my interest in paranormal phenomena, I did not know about the Hillsdale UFO before I chose to attend Hillsdale. If I remember correctly, my first knowledge of it came from an excerpted archive of a past article of Hillsdale College's newspaper, The Hillsdale Collegian. From that fateful moment on, I wanted to know everything that I could about this sighting (and to prove the jokers wrong).

My desire for knowledge finally bore fruit almost exactly one year ago today in the second semester of my senior year at Hillsdale, when I researched, wrote, and published what I then considered the definitive account of the Hillsdale UFO. I drew on material from our newspaper's archive, other research, and, most fascinating to me, interviews with firsthand witnesses who were actually there and saw the UFO. I encourage you to read the whole thing here, but I'll publish some choice excerpts below (I hope the Collegian doesn't get mad at me):

...At about 10:30 p.m. [on March 21, 1966], according to an eye­witness account written by [Hillsdale alumna] Gidget Kohn three days later, dozens of girls and other wit­nesses — 87 total — began to watch an “intense silver-white light.” The event was later described in Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s decades-long inves­ti­gation of UFO sightings nationwide as “football-shaped.”
The room of Josephine Evans ’69 had one of the best views of the object; many girls crowded into it to watch.
“We suddenly spotted what appeared to be this strange light in the [college's] arb[oretum],” Evans said. “It was odd the way the lights were, but it was also weird the way [the UFO] traveled.”
“There was a glow around it and the lights appeared to be pul­sating,” Kohn’s account added. “The glow was gone and there were three lights which were yellow-white…then the middle light turned red and then the one on the left. [We] watched for about 10 minutes and then the object seemed to move up and then to the right and left very slightly.”
...As the girls, trapped in the dorm by curfew, along with dorm moms and Van Horn, kept watching the object, it con­tinued to behave bizarrely, moving unpre­dictably and flashing lights of varying colors, inten­sities, and sequences.
“It is not really nec­essary to describe all the movements,” Kohn wrote. “Let it suffice to say that it moved like nothing earthly and [Hillsdale Civil Defense Director] Mr. [Buck] Van Horn was seeing it too.”
Meanwhile, around the same time, Harold Hess, then a Hillsdale police officer, was on a midnight to 8 p.m. shift with his partner, Jerry Wise, checking lots on Carlton Road, near where today the CVS [correction: Walgreen's] pharmacy stands. But something quickly caught their eyes, even though Hess said it was about a mile away.
“Then, over by the college, we saw a real brilliant light in the sky at a low altitude,” Hess said. “You couldn’t look at it, it was so bright.”
Hess and Wise drove over to the arboretum, where they dis­covered the mys­terious uniden­ti­fiable object that was the source of the blinding light.
“It wasn’t a chopper. There was no humming. I took my weapon out. Jerry told me to put it back,” Hess said. “‘Whatever it is, I don’t think it’ll bother it one bit what you’ve got at your side,’ Jerry told me.”
Then, Hess said, the light split, and went in two dif­ferent directions. The action had physical effects on the object’s surroundings.
“We got into our patrol car and we couldn’t transmit. We just got static,” Hess said.
“It’s one of those things that runs your hair up on the back of your head just thinking about it.”
...“It was the most unusual thing that happened to me in college. And it was very inter­esting,” Evans, who hadn’t even con­sidered the pos­si­bility of UFOs being real before seeing one herself, said. “I didn’t realize how unusual it was or inter­esting until much later. You grow up and look back and say, ‘holy moly, did that really happen?
The incident has also stuck with Hess, despite the inter­vening years.
“It’s just one of those things you never forget even as your memory fails,” he said.

The case received such national prominence that Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a Northwestern University professor, technical consultant on Steven Spielberg's 1977 UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a leading UFO investigator/debunker for the U.S. Air Force, came in to to investigate. Through his investigation, Hynek came up with the explanation that the UFO was actually "swamp gas," the first time that anyone used what remains probably the second-most common explanation for UFO sightings (after weather balloons). But many were, and remain, skeptical of this:

“It was my con­siderate opinion that Dr. Hynek had his mind made up as to what his findings would be before he ever reached the City of Hillsdale,” [former Hillsdale Civil Defense Director Buck] Van Horn said in a May 26, 1966 Col­legian article. “I also observed that his main line of ques­tioning was relative only to that which would fit the Marsh Gas Theory.”
[Hillsdale alumna Gidget] Kohn also said that sub­sequent testing of the arb revealed high levels of radiation, boron, and destruction of micro­scopic plant and animal life.
[Hillsdale alumna Josephine] Evans also remains skeptical of both the swamp gas explanation.
“Dr. Hynek came to Hillsdale and I think he just wanted to get rid of us,” she said. “Hynek was pressured to play it down. Makes you wonder if there’s some kind of cover-up.”
She also doubts it was a prank.
“Some people said it could have been frat guys pulling a prank,” Evans said. “But they were way too busy drinking to do something like that.
“It was a UFO. I’m con­vinced to this day that’s what it was.”
Hess also denies the official explanation.
“I don’t believe it had anything to do with swamp gas. This was just slow, huge. Swamp gas would never be bright. It was like looking into 20 spot­lights,” Hess said. “They’ll never convince me it was swamp gas. I just truly felt it was a UFO. I have no knowledge as to what it was, no spec­u­lation as to what it could have been.”

My story received a lot of attention, both on and off campus. In fact, it got me in touch with a biographer of Hynek, who told me that Hynek himself did not actually believe in or possibly even originate his explanation. The following account I received from Hillsdale College religion and humanities professor Dr. Thomas Burke, a student of Hynek's at Northwestern, lent some credence to this biographer's version of events:

...In class, Hynek told us about his experience. He said the Air Force kept bugging him for an answer so he gave out the most ridiculous answer he could think of hoping just to get them off his back so he could continue to work on it. So he blurted out ‘swamp gas’ as a sort of joke. Immediately they ran with it and closed the investigation down, but he told us one thing he knew: It was not swamp gas.
...Hynek also showed us a graph where he plotted clarity and strength of evidence for being a genuine UFO on one axis and reliability of the witnesses on the other. (He had investigated a great many cases.) Most of the cases fell into a low evidential area of the graph either because the evidence was not strong (poor viewing conditions or capable of natural explanation) or because the witnesses were not very reliable, or both. There were a few cases however where the witnesses and the viewing conditions were very good and the sightings inexplicable enough that he felt they provided good evidence for being a genuine UFO.

As with many of these events, we may never be sure what actually happened, although today the Michigan Mututal UFO Network  is holding a 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1966 string of Michigan UFO sightings of which the Hillsdale UFO was by far the most significant; maybe they'll figure it out there. Whatever the truth of that day was, though, I consider it somewhat preordained that I chose to attend the college at which one of the most famous UFO sightings of all time occurred without even knowing about it before I came there.

It's almost like somebody planned it that way...

By the way, I once had a phone interview with this guy. But that's a story for another day...

 

"10 Cloverfield Lane": Another (pleasant) surprise from J.J. Abrams' mystery box

There sure is a lot of space there. Enough for a monster, perhaps? 

Though I consider myself a J.J. Abrams fan (I love LOST and Fringe, which he created, and do not think he screwed up Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens), it was only recently that I watched his famous TED talk* on his obsession with mystery. I encourage you to watch it below:


If you don't feel like watching it, here's a summary: Abrams likes films as much for what they don't show as for what they do. He considers curiosity and mystery essential aspects--perhaps the essential aspects--of the cinematic experience. To him, the best films expertly balance mystery and exposition, intriguing us with the former, and satisfying our intrigue with well-executed doses of the latter.

Whatever you think of Abrams' storytelling methods, he's used them to considerable success. And somehow, either while still directing The Force Awakens or just after finishing it, he also produced a new film firmly in the Abrams mold: 10 Cloverfield Lane, which came out this weekend. As befits the Abrams' style, news of this movie surprised me: It wasn't even on my radar until a few weeks ago, when a trailer attached to 13 Hours revealed it had "Cloverfield," in the title. I'm a fan of 2008's Cloverfield, which Abrams also produced, so I instantly became interested in seeing what this next object to emerge from the Abrams' mystery box would be (and in whether it would continue the story of Cloverfield).

It didn't disappoint. 10 Cloverfield Lane is about Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a woman who wakes up after a car accident rapped in an underground bunker with Howard (John Goodman, who has the film's best performance), a doomsday prepper who claims both that he saved her life and that the world above the bunker has come to an end (a plot that bears some resemblance to an arc from the second season of LOST). They are joined by Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), a well-meaning young man and neighbor of Howard's whose genuine claim to have fought his way into the bunker--he helped build it and so knew about it--when the world supposedly began to end lends credence to Howard's account.

Michelle, Howard, and Emmett are the only three characters in the movie**, and almost all of it takes place in Howard's bunker. Director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriters Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecker, Damien Chazelle generate an impressively tense and claustrophobic thriller from these strict parameters. Virtually every scene, every object, and every conversation acts in service of an anxiety-inducing trip through the mystery box; I cannot, for example, think of another movie in which one learns so much about the main characters from a single scene of their playing a board game***. The film keeps the answers to the questions of Howard's sanity and the outside world's status thrillingly ambiguous through an undulating, sinusoidal**** introduction of new information that suggests answers in both directions. In good Abrams fashion, we are left guessing to the very end.

As for the end--well, the less I say, the better. Not because it ended poorly, mind you. Or maybe it did. In the spirit of the movie, I will keep that ambiguous in this review. And I'll do that because 10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie best enjoyed with as little prior knowledge as possible. The gradual unfolding of its mystery works incredibly well when you don't know much about it going in.

This does, however, suggest one problem with the movie: Because it is so dependent on ambiguity and mystery, it might not hold up very well to repeat viewings. I wouldn't know, since I haven't seen it twice (yet). But like Cloverfield before it, 10 Cloverfield Lane may be more of an experience than a movie, by which I mean that the sensations of seeing the movie for the first time are inseparable from the movie itself. 

Many movies are that way, to be sure. But a possible over-reliance on mystery has always been one of the potential defects of the Abrams approach. Questions are fun, but most satisfying movies usually answer them (or at least provide possible answers). Most Abrams projects do eventually answer the questions they ask (and feel incomplete if they don't), but the mystery generated from the questions, in some cases, has in the process become so essential to the work at hand that, even if other dramatic elements are not neglected, the work loses its staying power once the mystery gets resolved. The loss of both repeat viewing value and potential timelessness may result.

I'm not sure yet if this is the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. It is, at any rate, a remarkably clever, anxious, and disciplined thriller definitely worth seeing at least once. Abrams has taken yet another engaging mystery out of his box. Yet it remains to be seen how much is left in there, and whether what's pulled out remains good art once the mystery is revealed.

For Abrams, these may be the greatest mysteries of all.

*In part because I hate TED talks.
**There are two other people in the movie, but their appearances amount to cameos.
***Notice I said "a single scene." Thus, Jumanji and Zathura do not count, as technically those entire movies take place inside a board game.
****Credit to Rooney Columbus, with whom I saw the movie, for this word. Because of my poor history with math, it was not the first one that came to my mind to describe this movie's pattern of undulating information.

RIP Keith Emerson, "Lucky Man" (1944-2016)

Keith Emerson, doing his thing

Yesterday, news outlets reported that Keith Emerson, the lucky man who formed one-third of the legendary 1970s progressive rock trio Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (ELP), has died.

I won't pretend that Emerson or ELP left as great a mark on popular culture as, say, David Bowie (whom I memorialized here). But I do love prog rock, a genre ELP helped to define and popularize in the 70s with their eclectic mix of rock, classical music, jazz, and other influences on such albums as Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery.

Tarkus. Yes, that is a mechanized, weaponized armadillo. The 70s were weird.

H.R. Geiger, who designed the alien in Alien, designed Brain Salad Surgery's cover.

And they couldn't have done it without Emerson, who was extremely, ridiculously, flamboyantly talented at synthesizers, keyboards, and other such instruments. See, for example, this live performance of their cover of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown," which could qualify as perhaps the only "progressive country rock" song:



Emerson's skill was also on full display in "Karn Evil 9, Part II," a song that my father and I both love, and that has happened to play on a Cincinnati radio station at the same time of the same day for 5 of the past 8 years without explanation (I've asked the station manager):

I would go so far as to say that Emerson was one of prog rock's best keyboardists--a bold statement, given competition such as Richard Wright of Pink Floyd and Rick Wakeman of Yes.

Though I began this short blogpost downplaying the influence of Emerson and ELP in comparison to, say, David Bowie, the recent deaths of Bowie, Emerson, and Beatles' producer George Martin (about whom I shall have more to say soon) are all a part of the same phenomenon: the slow but steady passing of Baby Boomer culture from the scene. As I wrote upon the passing of Bowie in January:

For since assuming control of the commanding heights of Western culture, [Baby Boomers] have profoundly influenced it; indeed, they have controlled it. That can’t last forever. But what comes after they’re gone? And will subsequent generations be able to move out from under their shadow?

These Baby Boomer deaths--which will accelerate in the coming years--will force us to answer these questions. And likely sooner than we would like.

Confessions of a former Pokémon addict

Raise your hand if you used to be addicted to Pokémon

Pokémon is one hell of a drug.

The popular franchise debuted in Japan 20 years ago last week. It crossed the Pacific shortly thereafter. And a copy of Pokémon Blue found its way into my the purple, translucent Game boy around the time I saw Pokémon: The First Movie for a friend's birthday party when I was in first grade.

It was not the first videogame I played; that honor belongs to LEGO Island. Nor was it even my first Game boy game; that, I believe, was either Paperboy, The Jungle Book, or one of the Mario games, played on my oldest sister's first-edition, giant gray block.

Pictured: the past.

Though it was not my first videogame, or even my first Game boy game, Pokémon Blue was one of my first obsessions, and some of the earliest evidence of my obsessive personality. I played at all hours of the day, and often into the night (especially once my parents foolishly bought me one of those nifty, squiggly purple Game boy lights). My parents sought in vain to control my consumption of the game; when told to stop, I would sneak away without their knowledge and continue, constantly on guard for the possibility--often realized--of one of them bursting in wondering what I was doing. At such moments, I would swiftly hide the Game boy under me and claim to be engaged in some other activity (very junkie-like behavior, I realized later). I'm sure my parents always knew what I was really doing; parents are like that.

I was hardly alone in my Pokémon obsession. The show, the game, and the cards pervaded my childhood experience and social life. We all rushed home to watch the show every day after school (and even, in behavior that would surely shock our high school and our college selves, wake up early just to watch it in the morning as well), and delighted in our ability to identify correctly "who's that Pokémon?"

Well? Who is it?

We all collected cards, though some more assiduously than others (I was, of course, jealous of those with better collections than I; those collections are probably now worth a fortune). We all had Pokémon toys, Pokémon Halloween costumes, Pokémon birthday parties, and went to see Pokémon movies that we all then bought on VHS, of course (unless you were that guy--and there was always one--who liked Digimon for some reason). I even had a Pokémon-style dream once, a dream that I shared with my twin sister (by far the most psychic-twin-style thing that has ever happened to us). We all wanted to be the very best, like no one ever was.



Why were we so obsessed? I can hardly speak for everyone. But for me, it was because of the Game boy games I played most: Pokémon Blue, Gold, and Crystal. I sometimes wish I could recall the initial wonder of my first (and to date only!) playthrough of Blue, when I chose my Squirtle, began wandering from town to town, learned the ropes, captured Pokémon after Pokémon, learned to hate the tall grass, heard through the grapevine rumors ("you know, there's way you can stay on the S.S. Anne after it leaves...") and cheats ("put Rare Candies in the right item slot, go to Cinnabar Island, surf up and down the coast, and soon you'll encounter Missingno...") from friends, take on the Elite Four. You could even gamble, and give stupid names to your nemesis (I'm pretty sure I once named him "Stupid")! It was all so much fun.

The most famous -- useful -- glitch in video game history? 

Gold (and Crystal) were fun, too. The world expanded. Everything was new again: new Pokémon, new towns, new Gym Leaders, new challenges, new items, etc. You can even go to the same "territory" as the old game, and encounter "Red," the character you played as in the original games, who has presumably become the very best, like no one ever was, and decided in his Pokémensch status that humanity was no longer good enough for him and to go into exile in a cave. It would have been hard to recreate the sheer novelty of my first Pokémon game and playthrough, but these next games did a pretty good job.

If I had to identify a single aspect or feature of the games that really appealed to me, however, it would probably be their broader quality of implied mystery: the Cinnabar Island ruins, the Moon rocks, and--of course, Lavender Town of Blue,; the Unown, the forest shrine, and the time machine (!) of Gold and Crystal (can anybody tell me what happened if you solved all those puzzles?).

Oh, but the best aspect of all was the legendary Pokémon. They were by far my favorite aspect of all the games I played--unsurprising, perhaps, given my now-conscious interest in the paranormal (of which this may have been an early sign--or contributor?). I am a long-distance runner, but I don't think any running I've ever done has elevated my heartrate above what it would reach during an encounter with one of the legendary Pokémon, especially when I was trying to catch one. They just had such an epic, mythic, enigmatic quality about them that I am having trouble putting into words even all these years later.

Real fans know what this is, and how cool it was in context.

But whatever it was, I desired to capture their mystery and to put it under my own control. Sometimes I failed; sometimes, I succeeded; always, I saved right before my encounter so that I could start over from there in case I failed. But whatever happened, I always relished the world- and atmosphere-building of those distant caves, high towers, abandoned power stations, and other eerie locales where the legendary Pokémon had hid away, all so suggestive of a world of which we only scratched the surface. And I would search far and wide for the ones who would wander; getting that special battle cutscene when I encountered one in the wild would send my heartrate skyrocketing again.

Although the series continued after Crystal, I did not. I moved onto other things.

With one exception.

Several years after I took out my Pokémon Blue cartridge for the last time, I put it back in one Thanksgiving Break (I believe in 8th grade) and played again, just to see what I had accomplished. It turns out I had made all the money one possibly could in the game, recorded 144 (out of 151 possible) Pokémon on my Pokédex, and had a killer lineup. And I spent the next several days alone, away from family and friends, playing Pokémon. The old obsession--nay, addiction--roared right back up again.

I haven't touched the Pokémon stuff since, although my original Blue cartridge is still somewhere in my bedroom at home. And even though I cherish my memories of the games, I doubt I ever will again, if for no other reason than fear of relapse.

After all, Pokémon is one hell of a drug. 

"The X-Files" Is Still Out There

*Whistle*

Somehow, despite my interest in UFO phenomena, and the fact that my eighth grade class voted me
"best conspiracy theorist" (and "most likely to create a time machine"), I hadn't watched a single episode of The X-Files before the recent premiere of its miniseries revival a few weeks ago.

Out of curiosity about the show, and about whether properties revived after a long absence can appeal to anyone other than their fans, I decided to check out Season 10 of The X-Files. The first episode interested a conspiracy buff like me, but it seemed too defined by what came before: both limited by it, and so obsessed with somehow outdoing the show's past that it could not leave that shadow. As I wrote about the premiere at the time:

In nearly all revivals, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for a show to measure itself by anything other than what came before, as the new X Files shows. Familiar touchstones—the theme song, the appearance of familiar characters, Mulder’s famous “I Want To Believe” UFO poster—are all here. But the show also tries to outdo itself. Whereas the original show’s grand conspiracy was a prospective alien invasion (or so says Wikipedia), this revival, to justify itself, must raise the stakes and promise something new. Thus does Mulder learn—or come to believe—that “all these years we’ve been misled,” and that the conspiracy he sought to uncover is “not an alien conspiracy . . . It’s a conspiracy of men” who threaten a “Final Takeover” in which the ruling elite turns society against the masses to oppress them.

The episodes after the premiere seemed to abandon this overarching "Final Takeover" mythology. But the show returned to it in the season finale, which realized all of the worst fears of Mulder, the "believer": Not only are all the conspiracies true, but the force behind them wants to execute his scheme to the detriment of mankind.

The problem with all of this is that, if The X-Files ever had any sort of tension or dynamic between the skeptic Scully and the believer Mulder, that has vanished because the show now takes Mulder's side. He was right all along; Scully was just getting in the way.

As a result, the show now embodies the Gnostic tendencies of the conspiracy theories from which it draws, which make for a harmful worldview. As I wrote earlier this week:

...Gnosticism, named from the Greek word for “knowledge,” was an early competitor to (and heresy from) Christianity. A multifaceted worldview, its essence was that physical reality is an illusion, a trap created by the evil demiurge, the god of the material world. Only escaping the physical via the inner, spiritual life of the true god of the spirit offered salvation. God and the demiurge were locked in eternal combat. And, naturally, only Gnostics knew how to win. “My Struggle, Part II” fits perfectly into the Gnostic worldview: the Cigarette Smoking Man as the demiurge, hoping refashion the world in his image “instead of God’s,” and controlling culture and society to suppress the truth; Mulder and Scully as holders of the secret knowledge by which the good prevails.
But this is not a healthy worldview. It’s unprovable, relying, as it does, on secret knowledge. As Scully—again, apparently the skeptical one—states in the finale: “The science we were taught takes us but a distance toward the truth.” It demands leaps of faith without actual religion. It sets up a difficult dilemma: find the truth and end the search thereof (which The X-Files does not intend to do), or allow it to remain perpetually hidden. Unhappiness results either way. And it produces inevitable, unending dissatisfaction with reality. If reason and our senses deceive us, and truth is always in tension with what we perceive, then nothing is certain. The truth, as The X-Files says, is out there, but always beyond reach....

 While I find conspiracy theories entertaining, then, they're also unhealthy to the mind. I will probably still go back and watch old episodes of The X-Files (and watch the inevitable new ones), mostly for a project I am working on that someday I hope everyone will get to experience. But I'll continue to resist the siren song of the Gnosticism.

Unless I'm abducted by aliens, of course.