1408: Horror and Structuralism

This may be a bit of a jumbled post, but I will try to keep it clean and orderly.

First, this fits into my theories on horror as social criticism. More particularly it fits into criticism of societal structures. My thoughts on Paranormal Activity and Constantine had to do more with criticism of particular things within society: antagonism and influence peddling (and the treatment of those who can see it). This one is a bit more abstract in that it is a critique of society itself. By abstract, I mean that it is not a critique of a particular society, but rather the  inherent possibility of evil in society as a structure, the fact that it is possible to make constructs that, in essence, do the evil for one so that one can keep one's hands "clean."

The actual evil itself is not specified, other than that it drives people to madness and suicide. The point is that whatever the evil is, it has been done through a structure called society. Society is basically a construct ... a constructed concept of group identity.

The basic device here is that it is a room, and in literature rooms can often stand in for the idea of structure, and thus societal constructs. Now, one could accuse me of "eisogesis" here, of reading this in. But I would argue that there is a focus on the fact that it is particularly a room, an emphasis on it. When Cusack is getting the key, he makes a crack about whether or not he will be scared by their phantom/spirit/specter (all words are used). Jackson's character particularly latches on to this comment to make an emphatic clarification of his own that he NEVER said anything about a specter or a ghost etc. He then offers a most emphatic (all the more for the clandestine delivery) definition: "It's an evil fucking room." (22:30 ff). The point is too emphatic to be casual - the filmmaker is saying that we are not here dealing with traditional personalist singularities such as ghosts of individual people (or even impersonal singularities like a poltergeist). We are dealing with a structure. The emphasis is set off even more clearly at one point elsewhere by Cusack's own contradictory comment, "it's just a room" (circa 29:00). It may contain or trap ghosts, but it, the actual antagonist, is, ironically, just a room (although a very different kind of room than Cusack thought).

It is clear here that were are examining a structure, not, to put it in Cusack's words, "Ghoulies, and Ghosties, and Long-Legged Beasties" (or, in the vein of literature, individual persons or types of individual persons they might symbolize).

The fact that it is in a hotel is another structural element. This is brought into focus by Cusack's tape recorder commentary when he first enters the room. He does some esoteric commentary on the purpose of hotels, playing off of Jackson's comment that the appeal of hotels was fertile creature comforts, but he thinks they are really for "reassuring platitudes, a prosaic sense of the familiar" (29:50 ff). I will touch on the aspect of comforts, or "coping," as I will call them, again later, but for here the salient point is that the film-maker is here emphasizing the societal role of a hotel room ... keeping members of society comfortable or reassured.

A further consideration, if we are talking here about evil/violence done (a key subject in social criticism), is that rooms are made of walls. This might sound a simplistic or condescending (to the reader) observation, except that in this film specific things happen to the walls and with the walls, and thus the issue of walls specifically becomes a justified investigation. I will examine the instance of the post office walls below under a different heading, but for the outset here, the most direct and pertinent image is the blood coming through the walls (54:30 ff). This is an image of violence, one which the basic components of a room (societal structure) try to keep hidden, but eventually cannot contain it.

(In my post on Paranormal Activity I discussed horror, or at least horror done well, as apocalyptic in the technical sense, that is, revelatory)

One final note for this intro section: this is literature and it knows that ... it knows it is a structured story. When Cusack starts to hear his daughter's voice again and wig out, he says "you're losing the plot ... you're losing the whole structure." (47:15 ff). One thing that many people often don't think about is how the way we actually think is not static, no matter how much we try to tell ourselves it is. When we conceptualize our society, we don't think of a static picture, we think of something with a history (not to play with words too much, because this really isn't a pun, the connection is much more natural, although we're often too "scientific" to understand that ... but what we "conceptualize" is something that was born, that had a conception in the copulative sense). "Story" is the backbone of societal structure. Of course, one of our earliest childhood tendencies is to internalize so we don't have to suffer experiencing the existential angst of having to doubt the structures of protection: if Daddy is weak enough to succumb to mean thoughts, too weak to protect either of us from himself, then he must not be strong enough to protect me from "ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties" outside ... ergo, it must not be his fault that he gets mad, it must be mine. Cusack starts to tell himself this very kind of thing at this point ... he explains all of the phenomena he is experiencing in psychological and psychosomatic terms ("psyhco-kinetic fibrulations" and "hallucinations"). He tells himself it's just his own personal plot unraveling, not the plot of society (the room).

The Bed: The Foundation of Society

So, that's a pretty big claim about beds ... that they are the foundation of society. But the claim is not without its own foundation in the Western canon of literature. The primary place is the bed of Odysseus in the Odyssey. It is made with a living olive tree as one of its four posts, and it is commonly agreed upon by scholars down the ages that it is the symbol of the "home" and safety that Odysseus yearns and works so hard to return to. The olive tree is the anchor of the bed and the bed is the anchor of the home and the home is the base of society.

So, what about the bed in 1408. First there is what I call a tip-off line. Cusack is wandering around the room narrating his comments the way he wants to write them for his review, and one of the first things he says is "how many people have slept in that bed before you?" "How man of them lost their minds?" (35:35 ff). Notably, this monologue section starts of with a renewed focus on room-ness, "hotel rooms are a naturally creepy places, don't you think?" and even a grave reference in the "sarcophagal chambers" line. Later on in the film, of course, where do his and his daughters graves seem to be? Where the bed was (under the painting "The Hunt", 1:20:25).

When the room is examined with the UV light, the bed reveals the highest concentration of blood. But the most telling thing, for me, is that when Cusack decides to take the room down, to fight back, he takes only two actions: he Molotov cocktails the bed and then, once the blaze is going and has depleted a lot of oxygen, he throws the ashtray through the window for a backdraft to finish it off. the bed is the first to be attacked. The more something is a symbol of stability in a society, the more damage it will do if abused. Thus his first line of attack to combat the room, is to attack the particular bed in it.

Communication and Technology

As I demonstrated above, I have no qualms with arguing from the way certain words are related, flowing from the same root even when most of us think it is obvious that the various forms have parted company enough that there is no point in looking at the common origin. Here the words I am thinking of are community and communication. The first can often be a synonym for society. The second is not only what goes on between two people, it is, in some ways, the basis for society. Community has the ability to communicate with each other, not only linguistically but physically (as in communicable diseases).

And there are a number of communication images in 1408. The webcam call to his wife is important, because it is the only thing where we know something made it outside the room (unless you count the adapted ending where Katie's voice makes it out in the recording, but that's not the original ending, and, as I will discuss below, I think is actually more depressing than the original ... there is a third combo ending in which the manuscript he sent the publisher while "out" of the room actually made it to the editor, but I can figure no coherent way for that to hang together; I think it was just a clumsy attempt to see if another ending suited both their own and an audience's needs).

And this is a very telling scene, because in the act of communication the room distorts the communication in a clearly evil way. It tries to suck his wife in too. Notice that the self-picture window in the IM interface is blurry until the room takes over, then it enlarges and give him the evil grin and wink. Communication gets twisted. Even communication with self gets twisted: he remembers recording himself while looking out the windows, but when they become bricked over and he listens to his recorder again, he hears himself saying, "strangely the room has no windows" (59:50 ff)

As a sort of subsidiary image under this, we have the phone towards the end (1:31:00 ff). It tells him that his wife will be sent up when she gets there. Then the voice slows and warps as it says "we have killed your friends; every friend is now dead." Phones are a very common symbol for communication in literature written after their invention.

Along these lines, somewhere between 67 and 73 mins (1:07:00 and 1:13:00) he receives his daughter's dress via fax.

I mentioned above, and promised to mention again (IE here) the scene in which the hotel walls are demolished and it is revealed that he is still in the room (1:21:20 ff). Here the PO is not only a symbol of actual communication, but also of the hope of communication. In fact, it is more a symbol of the latter than the first. It is not where our letters are read (although it is where we get the letters from others, but we read them elsewhere usually) ... it is where we send them in the hopes of them being read, in hopes of actually communicating. And it gets demolished, and it is revealed that he is really still in the room trapped, with only twisted communication possible when the room wants to use him as bait to snare others, such as his wife.

Finally, while the TV is not usually device of real-time two-way communication, it does play a role here in memory, and sort of falls near these others as "telecommunication" (and right now I have a few good observations but not sure where to put them and not enough time to work that out, so this seems like the easiest place, with the other technologies ... you would be surprised how many stores us this "it sort of looks like" logic). The TV has two important scenes. The first is when he sifts through channels, and while he doesn't watch anything, the only thing he really checks out titles on is the porn (circa 29:00). Oddly, the porn item in the menu is right next to the family item. The other item the TV gives is precisely that ... the video of him and his wife with their daughter. And here I would argue that some communication is at least hinted at, with the daughter actually in the TV. They don't do it for long, but I think it is there. This happens another time, when he speaks her name when seeing her in the hospital bed, she looks up. (circa 1:00:00). Below I will discuss what the room might be beyond just a symbol for societal structure gone awry, and it has to do with the daughter.

But for right now, the issue of porn provides a nice segue to what I want to examine next, which is ...


Coping Mechanisms

What do people do when down on their luck or abused in a society? Or even just alienated or only temporarily homeless? As I mentioned above, the hotel and hotel room are for creature comfort, whether physical or emotional. And what are these? In this movie the pointed ones are alcohol and tobacco.  Notice how many times throughout the film he picks up the bottle of scotch Jackson gave him at the beginning. Cusack even suspects the booze of being spiked at one point. When he gets back from the expedition in the air ducts, after he dusts himself off, he says one word "Alcohol" and goes for the fridge (1:06:00 ff). After thrashing  the fridge, ironically asking his own creature comforts what they want from him, he answers Jackson's last question: "I want my drink." As for tobacco, notice when we catch glimpses of the past with his family, his "go to" for handling stress is "I'm going to get cigarettes" before the door slams.

But, as above with what is attacked when he fights back (the bed), I think the how of the attack is equally import - the room does certain things and reveals certain scenes that show us concerns of the author, but what Cusack does in return is also revealing. It is important the he uses the booze as a Molotov cocktail. And then look at what the final blow is (literally, bringing in the backdraft) ... the ashtray as symbolic of tobacco, thrown through the window. Cusack's retaliation against the room, and the only one that works, is to throw back in its face the things that are offered as consolation.

Religion

Some (particularly Karl Marx) would say religion is a coping mechanism. I'm not sure I would say that the film-makers agree that that is all religion is, but I think that they do agree that it can be used badly that way. And when it is, it will fail one, and so Cusack, after saying "ok, you win," finally opens the Gideon's Bible, only to find every page blank. Within the realm of societal construct and criticism, this reminds me of William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. For Faulkner, there is a valid religious experience, but it cannot be reached by those stuck in the antebellum southern mentality. Only Dispy and her family, the black servants, can really have Easter Sunday. Benjy, the 33-year old (Christ figure) can only visit with them, and then when the sermon and service gets loud, all he can do is wail. As a 33 yr old gelding I do not think Faulkner meant him to represent all of Christianity as impotent, but I do think he meant him to symbolize the impotency of a Christianity that allows itself to be trapped in the white antebellum southern mentality. I think the empty Bible works in a similar fashion here.

Interestingly, the Bible was full earlier (29:20). It's interesting because the passage he opened it to "randomly" (and nothing is random when crafted by a film maker) was 2 Samuel chapter 11 ... the story of David and Bathsheba. Contrary to popular belief, that story was not originally meant to be mainly about lust (although that is involved). It begins, "In the spring of the year, when kings go out to war ... David was walking on the roof of his palace." In other words, he was not going out to war ... but his men were. If he had been in the battle camp as he should have been, he never would have seen her. This is a story of abuse of societal structure (the power of kingship).

Real Referent or Symbol

So, I have been talking all along about the room as basically a metaphor for structural societal evil. But I do think there is also a possible "real" referent. I should open this last section by noting that some of the reason I see it as able to do both roles is that I think there may be a connection, and not just thematically. It may be possible that a metaphor is more than just what we think of as a metaphor. We usually tend to think only of the analogy principle in metaphor. When metaphor is reduced to only this aspect it is an allegory, which has a legitimate use in literature, but a limited one. JRR Tolkien was known to some as being at least very cautious about using allegory too much. A French philosopher whom I have studied, Paul Ricoeur, has an entire 400 page, very dense, book dedicated to metaphor. His basic premise is to take metaphor beyond the basic analogical principle, because stripping metaphor down to just the analogical principle cheapens our understanding of it and thus what we can gain by studying or experiencing any particular metaphor. I can't really describe all of that here, but I will say that I think that what I am about to discuss does not have to be a competing interpretation to what I have discussed above. I don't think it necessarily even has to be simply an unrelated alternative. I think it is possible for the two to be intimately connected, but I don't have the time or space to develop that here (meaning that it's not only a matter of formulating it in writing ... I would have to work through it for myself even before that). So, I will settle for just outlining this possible "real" referent/s here.

There are two basic alternative endings to the movie, and my theory uses the original one, which is the ones the producers intended and I think makes the most of the movie. The original ending is used for the director's cut version on the second disc of the 2 disc release.

The key difference between the original and the changed endings is whether Cusack dies in the fire or not. In the original, he dies. The alternate ending that got substituted in the main version at least maintains that something real happened in the room. When he and his wife are later packing some stuff, they find the recorder and he listens to it. It is mostly garbled but at one point becomes clear, and they both hear Katie's voice from the scene with her in the room. So, since the wife hears it (dropping the boxes she is carrying when she does) we know Katie was really there.

(there is another ending where the wife does not hear it, and therefore we have no assurance that Katie was really there ... which, to me, makes it a completely inconsequential ending .... you don't know if he is just crazy hallucinating or not).

The official included ending (where the wife hears) depresses me. It means that Katie is trapped somewhere bad. We know this because in the scene we saw, she said the room won't let her stay, and she wants to stay. In addition, we have her voice other times in the room, and we have to assume that if the part that made it onto the recording was real, the other parts were real too. And in those other parts she basically says "Daddy, help me" (1:01:00 ff, for example). She is someplace bad. If this were all completely psychological analogy and we could say that her voice is his sense of guilt saying that he should have helped her more to be consoled when she was dying, rather than fighting with his wife, that would be one thing. Or if we could say it is kind of her memory saying "help me from being a bad memory for you, let me be a good memory," I'm not sure I would think that is a great ending, but it would not be depressing like the current re-done ending. In that ending, we know she was/is really there, because the wife hears the voice on the recording, and we know it is bad. Cusack got to make it out alive: great, hoorah and all that happy horse shit. The little girl is still suffering.

(Side note: the Katie voice progresses from playful to sad throughout ... at 46:30 ff it is playful in saying "Daddy, Daddy, where are you")

The original ending is, to me, much richer. First of all, we have a definitive statement that he did some good int he world of the living. He closed the room (as related by Jackson to the wife at the funeral). But we have more beyond that. The very last scene is Cusack's ghost walking to the window of the burnt out room and lighting a cigarette, sort of gazing out over that part of Lexington Ave. And then he hears the daughter's voice calling and says "ah ... yes" as if remembering something, and then turns around and fades as he walks into the room. Given the reality of her presence even in the main alternate ending (and we have to take it as real in this ending too, as he is a ghost figure appearing after a funeral), I take it as being that he not only closed the door of the room for the living, he also joined his daughter in the after life to protect her in whatever the dark place is she is in.

Along these lines, and I am not sure whether this goes on the metaphorical level or the real or both, but I think the room is also a prison for the ghosts. They are trapped there, re-enacting their suicides over and over again, unable to go on. I'm not sure how tightly this could be pulled on the level of the real, but on the metaphorical level it could be said that the ghosts represent the memories of those dead and that they need to be set free from being remembered only as suicides. Maybe that is part of the social criticism ... the morbid fascination with everybody being able to know everything through news media. In truth, the news media can only capture so much - it can't relate the truth of who a person was, the happy moments they also experienced and how they uniquely experienced them. But the news media does last. And so, for the world to see, as Cusack sees in the micro-fiche of newspapers, the people are recorded forever, in a sense trapped, in their worst moment of despair, their gruesome suicide ... this point is emphasized when Jackson surprises Cusack with the details of the 22 natural deaths, which he did not know because "the newspapers don't print anything about them" (19:20 ff). Shortly after, Cusack says that his readers expect the truth, and Jackson retorts that they expect "grotesqueries and cheap thrills" ... that definitely has potential for criticism of media pandering to morbid fascination.

There may also be something of the ghosts, all ghosts, being saved from servitude to the living. When Jackson speaks from the fridge he states that the living believe in ghosts mainly to have hope themselves that there is something after death (1:07:00 ff). Maybe it should be the other way round, that the living seek to help the ghosts (prayers for the souls in purgatory and such), rather than simply being helped by the ghosts in the form of belief in them helping us cope with mortality. I would have to think about that one a lot more.

And there is also the possibility of some connection with Hell. a Number of references are made to Dante's circles. When Cusack is describing the paintings, he mentions somebody's comment on the banality of evil, saying " if that's true, then we're in the seventh circle of hell" (30:45 ff). He returns to the motif of the circles of hell as he lays freezing, burning the history file of the room for warmth (1:11:10 ff). I'm not sure who the "smart-ass" is he is referring to, who spoke of the banality of evil, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that he is referring to the epilogue to CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, a toast proposed by Screwtape, the senior devil at a graduation of new tempters (many film-makers are far more educated than the common movie-goer gives credit for, and very well may have read the book, or at least listened to the audio recording of it done by no less popular a voice than John Cleese).

Of course, the movie is also a character study. As Jackson notes from the fridge, after his daughter's death, Cusack's Enslin character spent his efforts debunking ghost stories, stealing hope. And the movie really is a tale of him coming to grips with his own past in his daughter's death. As he says in his voiceover as he prepares to fire the room, "I have lived the life of a selfish man, but I don't have to die that way" (1:31:50 ff)

And Cusack does the drama very well. His face as he realizes what is starting on the TV, and how he watches it, and touches the screen, is very moving. The scene with her in the ruins of the room, as he at first is suspicious of her as another trick of the room and then goes to her and holds her, and then she crumbles, ripped my heart out. The manic energy he has is good too. In the commentaries Jackson and the director talk about how they needed a strong actor to carry the film because it is so much monologue/solo scenes, and they're right that Cusack pulled it off.

A Riddle

Finally, I'm not sure what to do with the fact that the room gave Cusack the answer. At various points once windows and walls are bricked in, you catch a glimpse of a scrawl on bricks that says "burn me alive." But I don't remember seeing any reports of any of the suicides being by burning. A little emphasis is added to the mystery when Cusack sits in the chair as he prepares the Molotov cocktail, he says, "This may all not be real; and I may not even be real; but this fire ... that's gotta be real " (1:32:05 ff) ... and it is - in all version endings.

Afterthought

What is a hotel room most symbolic of? It is a room, yes. But there are rooms in family houses too (with their own symbolic value). What is unique about hotel rooms? this comes from a thought on the comments of hotel as comfort above. They are comfort for the traveler, for the transient, in a way. We all are transient at least sometimes. We are traveling, and that is when we stay in those rooms. Maybe we want those comforts so we don't feel too transient. Otherwise we might start to think too much about how transient life really is, even when you own a house etc.

Terry Pratchett, TS Eliot, and the Dance

Ever since reading Wintersmith, the third book in the Tiffany Aching sub-series in the Discworld series, I have had a theory on a literary referent Pratchett may be using. There are a couple related refrains throughout T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and the best summation of the theme I have heard is the slight mash-up/condensation I heard a professor once give (or at least I think he did the mash-up, but it is possible it is my own mash-up of his condensation ...never can be sure).

"At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance, and there is only the dance"

Eliot was a bit of a mystic, especially in The Four Quartets. I had to study it some in a college class (although taught by a different professor than the one I just cited), and it is dense. I would simply note here the structure of paradox: a spinning world with a still point at the center, but that still point is not still; it is a dance, yet still thought of as ... still (wordplay intentional).

But, my main idea for this post is that I think Pratchett uses this refrain as a conceptual model for what he does with his characters and events, especially in later books. I think it captures his imagination, and has captured mine

As I said, I first started to think it, as best as I can remember, in reading Wintersmith. It may have started to form a little bit in the first two Tiffany Aching books (Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky), but Wintersmith is the natural place for it to come full force. First of all, the book begins with the "Dark Morris Dance" (which, according to TP, is his own invention as a spin on the traditional Morris Dance, cf the notes either at the beginning or end of the book), at the shift from winter to summer. In her sneaking watching of the dance, Tiffany's trouble begins when she gets into the middle of the dance, at which point she catches the attention of the wintersmith, since he is really at the center of the dance, and the confusion and his preoccupation with the human girl is that, in her rashness she has stepped into the place of lady summer, who is also supposed to be at the center of the dance.

I will come back in a bit to the concept of a human couple at the center of the dance, when I address the other major instance in the Discworld, which is Going Postal. But for here I want to note the other reason Wintersmith is the most natural place for this toconcept to come in, which is that TP is there using the Winter-Summer interplay. I have looked up what I can on The Four Quartets (I took the class in which I studied it close to 20 years ago, so that learning is a bit rusty, so I looked up some stuff again), and it seems that the agreed central motif in Eliot's 4-part poem is the 4-elements cosmology from antiquity (water-air-earth-fire). BUT it is also somewhat agreed that the 4-seasons structure is a secondary, albeit more latent, motif. So, it makes the most sense for Pratchett's use of the 4-Quartets dancing refrain to be most evident in the book in which he deals most directly with the seasons.


Going Postal

Ok, First things first: I never thought another book in the series could even begin to challenge Night Watch's place as my personal favorite. I also put off reading Going Postal because it was sort of a government in Ank Morpork book and the blurb didn't sound too exciting to me. Then I read it and really liked it. Then I recently re-read it again and realized that, while it probably did not unseat Night Watch from it's place at the top of my list, it did really challenge it. There is one theme that I may make a post on someday, namely the portrayal of linesmen on the clacks as a class of people, which TP gets inside of incredibly, much the way he got inside coppers in the Vimes series.

But what really blew me away, and what is the thing that I am going to examine here for looking at TP using Eliot's concept of the dance, is the Moist and Adora Belle arc. I simply loved it.

Ok, so, there are, it seems to me, two key scenes paired together via an image reversal. The first is when they dance in the aftermath of the burning of the post office. The basic image is that they dance as the post office burns and the hubbub of the rescue goes on around them (I love that word, hubbub, for the purpose of this discussion, because it has the word "hub" in it - a center of activity). In a sense they are at the center of it, dancing.

"He was back in the game. But, for now, by the light of the burning yesterdays, he waltzed with Miss Dearheart, while the scratch band scratched away."
(Going Postal, p. 273. trade paperback)

But, in this passage, it is not just that image that makes the theme jump off the page. It is also, alongside it, introspective verbage from Moist that puts the "stillness" aspect front and center too and wedded to the aspect of movement, particularly spinning.

"It was the thrill not of the chase but of the standing still, of remaining so calm, composed, and genuine that, for just long enough, you could fool the world and spin it on your finger."
(Ibid.)

Now, on to the second scene, and really, to me, the central one. It is the scene in which Moist comes clean with Adora Belle, tells her the whole truth. That's what makes this such an important scene, and thus raises this motif of dancing to a place of prominence in the work ... it is the scene where the relationship really happens: he is honest and she accepts him.
The description of the scene is simple, but is another very loaded tableau, like that at the post office fire:

"Around them, the city happened. Between them, the ashtray filled up with ash."
(Going Postal, p. 325, trade paperback)

This is what I meant by an image reversal, and what puts "the dance" here, even though one might at first object that there is no dancing involved on the page. The reversal is too clear not to have this connected with the first scene, and thus be involved with the dancing theme. Here, at the center is a picture of a still place, but one that is, rather, a dance of communication. The reversal is of the image of burning. In the post office scene the burning went on around them. In this scene it goes on between them (the ashtray filling up with ash ... note for those not familiar here: Adora Belle is the chain smoker).

The connection is made even more clear on the next page when the post office fire is directly mentioned (including a logic for the burning). Adora Belle suggests that he go to the roof of the PO and pray for his answer on how to beat the clacks (and I LOVE the comment on prayer here):

"Get yourself a little closer to heaven. And get down on your knees and pray. You know how to pray, don't you? You just put your hands together - and hope."
(Going Postal, p. 326, trade paperback)


(Sidenote: the logic for the PO fire is that now he can get to the roof; he could not do it before because the old mail was blocking the stairs)

Dancing and the Rhythm of Survival: Snuff and Raising Steam

For TP, dancing is sort of a symbol of coping with particular kinds of things in life, difficulties that have their own distinct rhythms. The first case I'll list is the bumps from landing after being momentarily airborne on the rough water that precedes the "Damn Slam," as the Wonderful Fanny does on the Quirm river (nicknamed "Old Treachery") in Snuff. It is Mrs Sillitoe, wife of the captain, who sums it up when telling Vimes about it and how to jump when you feel the boat lift:

"... and that's when you have to know enough to dance to the rhythm! Because if you don't dance to the rhythm of the slam, you'll dance with the devil soon enough!"
 (Snuff, p. 304, first release hardback)

The second instance I will note is in Raising Steam, when Moist climbs up and dances on top of the moving train:

" ... throwing caution to the winds, Moist danced on the top of the train, leaping from carriage to carriage, listening to the train's rhythm, moving his body to accommodate it and feeling the engine and the moods of the railway until it seemed he understood it."
(Raising Steam, p. 283, first release hardback)


Dancing and Social Justice

I think that one of the reason's TP has said he thinks Snuff may be his best book yet, despite the fact that many critics, including myself originally, think it's a bit lackluster compared to other books in the series, is that he brings out his social justice and humanitarian concerns so strongly, more front and center ... especially in the case of the goblins. The overall discussion of that theme is way too big to have here, and even too big to fill in material plot details for anyone who has not read the book. So, I won't even attempt ... if you have not read it ... do.

What I want to look at is the fact that here TP likes dancing here as well for his exposition. Basically he contrasts the goblins with the Nac Mac Feegle. Both live on the edge of society (the academic catchword for this is "marginalization"). But the Feegle have one advantage .. they can dance.

"They lived on the edge too, but they -- they danced on the edge, they jumped up and down on it, made faces at it, thumbed their snotty noses at it, refused to see the peril of their situation and, in general, seemed to have a huge appetite for life, alcohol, adventure and alcohol."
(Snuff, P. 200, first release hardback)


It is not a criticism of the goblins for not being like the Feegle. It is a searing condemnation of those who take advantage of the fact that they have not yet learned to dance like the Feegle.

Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam ... the last Discoworl Book?

I just finished reading Raising Steam, which came out on March 18. It is the 40th book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Before I get started, I must make clear that this post contains no insider information - I have neither read nor heard anything in interviews or news stories etc etc about it being the last book in the series. This is simply my pondering on its possibility.

I am also not saying that I am guessing that it will be the last. I have not checked on Pratchett's condition or any other comments he has made about the impact it might have on future work (other than that his condition is not as much of a blockade to work as it was was thought it might be, and that he has new dictation methods that help).

Nor am I even saying that I think that it should be the last. I am simply exploring it's possibility as a capstone book along certain lines that I have thought about in the series. So this post is really I guess about examining an idea of the series as a whole and what it is.

So, what am I thinking about here? First of all, it is the 40th book ... that's not only a nice round number, it has also had numerological significance in some classical materials, most especially the Bible. I am not sure that would play in Pratchett's thoughts, even though I personally like a 40 book series alot. But who knows, Pratchett might like the whole 40 thing, but I'm not sure it's that consequential either way, at least for the purposes of this post.

But the thought of the series ending at book 40 was what sort of started me pondering as I read the book. What came out of the pondering eventually didn't have that much to do with the 40 thing. It had more to do with the relationship of a fictional, magical, allegorical world to the real world. Obviously some things can be analogical. And Pratchett also does a LOT of social parody and commentary. But I think there is more and I'm trying to give some shape to those thoughts.

The Characters (main protagonist series)

Before I get to that larger "relationship of the magical/fictional to the real" thing, I want to put some ideas out there about characters (after all, fiction is really always about the characters), meaning the major protagonists who have sub-series (Rincewind/Wizards, the Witches, Tiffany Aching, Death/Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes/City Watch, and Moist Von Lipwig).

One thing that makes me think along the line of capstone conclusions is that I think he has wrapped some major protagonist sub-series up rather nicely in the latter books of the series. Again, nothing has been said and it is entirely possible that he will write another witches book, or another Vimes book, or another Rincewind book, or another death book. But several of these have seem to come to ideal conclusions as far as literature goes. In Snuff, he brought Vimes to a very nice place for a conclusion. Actually I think he did it in Thud, but Snuff could be emblematic of the whole of the ongoing Vimes as father and figure outside AM. I thought Thud wound up being the wrap up to what, maybe unintentionally at first, could be called a Vimes trilogy. It starts with Fifth Elephant, which is Vimes the husband. Night Watch, as the center book to that trilogy, digs deep into his character and his concept of his future: He becomes his own father figure in the past as he is on the verge of becoming a real father (this is still possibly my favorite discworld book ... I love the song and the role it plays, I love the secret brotherhood that includes the opposite poles of Dibbler and Vetinari ... I love the deep humanity in it). Thud is then him being a father of his newborn, a very primal protective role, translating his protector-of-the-city role into his protector-of-the-family role. Snuff then sort of glimpses the whole development down the line by showing the inception (Vimes' relation to young Sam as he begins developing his own personality).

Like I said, TP very well may write more, but I think if he doesn't then Snuff could be viewed as a very satisfactory capstone. (the fact that there is one element beyond a core structure - here, another book beyond a trilogy - is not completely unheard of in Western tradition: in Judaism the 7th day is the day of completion, and Christianity holds onto this strongly, but develops Sunday as the 8th day, Sunday, the Ogdoad, beyond this in the way eschatology transcends natural history ... and TP seems to really like that number 8 too, so maybe he is familiar with this strand in the tradition ... but mainly I am saying that I can see a core wrapped-up trilogy AND and culminating book beyond that without the two being contradictory). ... SO, that is Vimes potentially wrapped up.

[RECAP NOTE/CLARIFACATION: Vimes has the most books of anybody in the whole 40-book series ... to be precise, he has 8 books ... TP really likes him; I really love him]

The Rincewind/Wizard's series was always sort of rambling to begin with, but I think that with Unseen Academicals we might have seen as far as it can go ... it's hard to top the heavy character and psychological themes in it. The running Rincewind again would be a regression (although I love those books in their place in the series), and besides, the silver horde bought the farm in Last Hero.

Death and Susan Sto Helit ... well, Death could go on forever, but I think that that is precisely why he needed a human protagonist to make Death work as a protagonist. Mort and Isabella ran their course as human protagonist in one book (Mort ... and I loved her giving him the sandwiches while flying on Binky, great scene), and then TP hit stride with the development of Susan. And notice Susan has a trilogy too. And I would argue that it brings her to a pretty well-rounded conclusion. It starts with her as a student (Soul Music), then as a Nanny (Hogfather) and ends with her in a more permanent profession as a school teacher (Thief of Time).

As far as the Witches and Tiffany Aching, Pratchett said he can't do any more TA books as YA (young adult) books. She has grown up (LOVE the last lines of I Shall Wear Midnight), and so any further books for her would have to be part of the Witches series. But I also sort of wonder if, in doing the Tiffany Aching YA series, he didn't also bring the witches series to a suitable conclusion. In the role that Granny Wetherwax plays in those books, she is really kind of passing a torch, or at least I think so, at least in a loose sort of way.

NOW, back to what I said about Vimes wrapped up in Snuff, because the fact that there is a lot of Vimes in Raising Steam might seem to contradict this. But, at least as far as I can remember, we only get introspection on one Character in RS, and that is Moist. We hear Vimes say a lot, but we don't hear him think. The character (or several sometimes) that you hear think is/are the main character/s. RS is decidedly a Moist book because he is really the only one that I can remember hearing think. And it is MVL's third book, which would make a nice trilogy ... particularly as we now have him and Adora Belle married (note, the dinner scene at Harry King's gives a glimpse into TP's conception of roles in AM ... 3 couples attending the "world stage" players: Sam and Sybil, Moist and Ador Belle, Harry and Effie ... actually sort of reminded me a little of the decent of the Edilla in CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, at least that positioning of the couples attending the power players).

But the question of Vimes' presence in RS did contribute somewhat to my thinking of this as a last book. As I read I was trying to discern how much of an ensemble cast book it might be, which is always a nice thing in wrap-ups: Vetinari, Vimes, Moist, Ridcully, and some cameos by supporting actors from other books like Sallie the vampire (but Susan Sto Helit or Tiffany Aching would be a bit difficult to include).

So that is all of the major protagonist series: Rincewind/Wizards and their rambling tales brought to a very powerful character book in Unseen Academicals; The Witches culminating in the Tiffany Aching series (which TP has said can't continue as YA books); Death's necessary human protagonist, Susan, completing a trilogy in which we find her in what seems to be a culminating profession for her; Vimes' final trilogy capped with the one-beyond book Snuff; and Moist Von Lipwig with a trilogy ending in showing him and ABD married.

The Discworld "Project"

The other avenue along which I think of RS as a possible culmination is a bit harder to describe, and so I have to try to keep it brief, because it could contain a lot of rabbit holes and go on forever. First there is the consideration of the relation of the fictional/magical to the real. All of the "technology" in the discworld usually has magical, or at least mechanical, versions of real-world technology. The iconograph is imps doing basically what cameras do in real life (including traffic cams ... very nice). On the mechanical side, the clacks runs on plain old semaphore, but is pretty much the telegraph, telecommunications, and pretty much the internet (including "cracking" which is pretty much hacking), and HEX (a computer, and even, in Hogfather, an AI) is an ant farm (although this is a bit more on the "mysticism" and "soul" side, rather than strictly magical or mechanical).

BUT, and this is VERY important ... there is no electricity. There can't be electricity in a world with magic. I don't know where this trope starts, but I have observed it in at least two other authors. Both of those authors have an electrical world and a magical one overlaying each other, with magic always playing havoc on electrical technology. These two are Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series (very much looking forward to Skin Game coming out in May) and, of course, JK Rowling's Harry Potter series.

I don't think Pratchett can get into internal combustion engines, I just don't think it meshes, but that would be a whole different discussion (rabbit hole).

BUT here is the interesting thing to me about RS. The mechanics are pretty much exactly the same as they were in the real world. In a series where so many aspects of real science/physicality are transferred to other things representing them (imps, ants, semiphore etc) for the purpose of examining the workings of human life through parody and analogy, it seems to me like crossing over the actual real-world mechanics into the fictional/magical world brings it to a place where the fictional has come as close to the factual as it is going to get, and that seems like a possible closing point to me.

But that discussion must go a little further (hopefully without falling down any rabbit holes). I have never taken TP's discworld to be typical fantasy, at least not in the way the genre seems to define itself these days. It's much more parody in the vein of Jonathan Swift. BUT there is something to it being a magical world, just as there is something to it having its own mythological reality (the gods, the disc on the back of the elephants on the back of Atuin the turtle). Take the idea of the discworld, for instance. There is a point to it that brings out something in the way Pratchett looks at the real human world, brought out in how he constructs the mythological one. A disc is both flat and round. In the history of our real world, these concepts conflicted. The real world concept of a flat earth, in ancient times, had four corners ... it was square. The scientific theory that developed as the globe concept was usually called "round earth." TP's disc is both round and flat. In the real world concepts/theories, those two qualities butted heads as contradictory; so the magical/fictional world keeping of both in one image (the disc) is technically a paradox (CK Chesterton LOVED to talk about paradoxes as avenues to truth ... and TP, for all his metaphysical and religious differences with Chesterton's worldview, IE traditional Catholic Christianity, LOVES Chesterton on literature and fairy stories)

The same is true for the magic elements/tropes in discworld. I can't pin out all of them, for many of the ways they parody parodoxes in the real world are pretty loose. But I CAN say this ... they tend to be taken from phases in thinking that are properly called magical.

For understanding this I need to give a little background. Before "magic" was "magic" it was called physics, literally ... some of Aristotle's main works were his Physics, his Metaphysics, his Poetics, and his Rhetoric. The big one here is his Physics. Actually the name used in the middle ages was "natural philosophy," in a very literal sense, a philosophical exposition of the natural world. A lot of the magic tropes used by TP and other fantasy writers come from a much later period, late-Medieval and Renaissance, at a time when "magic" had become thought of as "magic" as we now think of it, almost in contradiction with "physics" as a "science."

But back before that time, science and philosophy had not be separated out. BUT we do have in those more ancient materials, particularly on physics, the inception of the "magical"  (as distinct from the scientific) in the idea of the "occult." This is not yet the "occult" of Satanism and "black magic" we know now. It is the original meaning of the word "occult," which is "hidden" (the same word that is the base for "Occlumency" in Harry Potter). Natural physics has to do with causes and effects of force and mass/weight that we can observe. But those thinkers, in trying to examine all of physics, had to ponder those things that are inexplicable by these means. The one that stood as the symbol for all was the lodestone, a magnet. I can see when my hand pushes something and calculate from the weight of the thing that a certain amount of force must be applied, or observe that it sits on a rough or smooth surface and thus friction impacts the amount of force necessary. But I cannot directly observe how a magnet moves metal. Therefore, these ancient thinkers thought, there must be hidden qualities ... probably governed by laws similar to what I can see, but just not observable - hidden qualities governed by hidden principles. From this ancient form of philosophy about physical nature came the ideas, eventually, of "magic."

(Side Note: St Thomas Aquinas believed in such "occult properties" ... including in connection with influence by astral bodies, stars. But he only agreed with one side of that thinking. He agreed that there are qualities that cannot be observed with the naked eye that CAN be impacted by the position of stars at the time of inception of the thing, be it a made thing or a human being etc ... but he disagreed with what is called the "semiological" side. Semeia means "signs." In language and linguistics it is used for discussing language as a systems of signs, words standing for things. But here, in this "natural philosophy" realm, it meant astrological phenomena as "signs of the future, basically what we now call astrology and horoscopes ... for Aquinas, that side of astrology was right out)

The reason I bring all of this in is that there is another part of that ancient system of thought, which I am going to call "pre-magical."In that system of thinking, sort of the base of it actually, there is the 4 elements cosmology. All physical matter was thought to be some composite or other of the 4 elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Air. You find this in The Last Air Bender in an explicit form. You find it in Harry Potter in a thinly veiled way, but one that JKR openly stated about the 4-house system: Slytherin = Water, Gryffindor = Fire, Hufflepuff = Earth, Ravenclaw = Air/wind.

AND ... you find it in Rasing Steam, explicitly stated. Numerous times he states steam as containing or representing in an ideal way the combination of all four elements.

My main goal is in my calling that "pre-magical" and what TP does with it in RS.  The 4-elements cosmology is some of the most ancient thinking: pre-magical, but also the sources of "magical" thinking. And he brings in the 4-element cosmology in the same novel in which his magical world is closest to the real word (what I mentioned about about steam technology in RS being basically real steam technology, rather than imps or ants etc).

What I am saying is that he brings together the most ancient (steam as perfect icon of the 4 elements) and the closest contact of his magical world with the real world, especially in the modern/industrial period (steam as the actual steam locomotive of our history) ... in the same book.

My Main Point

I'm not trying to say, "Wow! this makes this the most comprehensive and amazing book in the history of the world! Why can't everybody see that ?!?!?!?" My main interest is just to say that such a book-ends quality (the ancient and modern as bookends around the time periods in which "magical" thinking develops) might make it a nice capstone for the series overall.

But like I said, he may write more. and if he writes more, I will read it (at least more discworld novels, I haven't really gotten into the Science of Discworld stuff. I think it sounds like fascinating ideas, but I don't have the same motivation for it; I am more into the narrative fiction). He may write more stand alones (like Moving Pictures, or Pyramids, or Small Gods, or Monstrous Regiment ... or maybe even a sequel to MR; I really loved the Polly Perks character), and I won't consider it some "betrayal" or "cheapening" of any of the current protagonists if he writes more of their books. Even if they aren't as stellar as what has gone before, I'll still like them for being TP and his wit.

BUT, for now, with the series in its present shape and at 40 books (a nice round number I like for numerological reasons), I kind of enjoy pondering the shape of that body of literature as having protagonist character arcs that have come to completion and a whole arc of the mythological world itself that has come to completion as a unique parody examination of the modern world through a fantasy lens.

I just like doing that. I like the shape the series and sub-series have. They may not stay in their present forms, but while they are in them, I enjoy thinking about that shape ... and I enjoy the shape itself. I think that it's great if he writes more, but I also think that if he does not write any more discworld novels, the series will still stand as a very well-shaped complete literary corpus to be proud of.

AI: It's Role in Fiction (Person of Interest)

What is its the "referent" of AI in science fiction? By that I mean, what is it actually saying something about? One possibility, the "literalist" (rather than the literary), is that it claims that AI is possible in the real world, that it is possible for a machine's logical program to evolve into a living being capable of full human thought. This would be an interesting concept for which to use the word "evolution," because it is the same basic movement as is meant by the extreme form of the usual meaning of the term, only from the opposite direction. The usual usage of the term most often refers to the evolution of the physical, organic human body from lower animals. The more extreme form would say that everything about humans, including all aspects of psychology (even rational thought and "free will"), developed solely from animal psychology. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, this would he distinctly hetrodox, as it denies a spiritual component and nature in humans (spirit being a whole other order of reality than the physical and biological). AI, on the other hand would be the evolution of pure logic (unfettered by animal body) into life on the same level as humanity. And it would be equally heterodox (replacing the mystery of the Incarnation with evolution, denying the former altogether, at least at some inevitable point).

But the question is whether or not this is what AI fiction, or any fiction, is doing (making metaphysical assertions). I would offer an alternative, which is that it can be doing analogy. All good literature deals with issues of human persons. Here the computer represents the rational side of humanity. The question is what the rational side of humanity does with the larger reality that is human nature.

Pure rationality can do cost analysis. This ultimately ends in a Jeremy Bentham utilitarianism. The thing that I like about the Person of Interest consideration of AI is what I mentioned in a previous post, Finch's statement that it was only when he taught the machine to value human life (sympathy) that it was able to understand human behavior enough to predict threats. The purely rational cannot, on its own, comprehend human nature without valuing it. Reason needs pathos in order even to do its own job of understanding human life and action. I am not sure if I would go all the way to saying that this pathos arises directly from the animal psychological drive for self preservation (I'm not sure, but that might violate my principles of avoiding any solely evolutionary explanations), but I do think that in the human condition (being both animal and spiritual) that animal self-preservation does play a role in the development of the necessary pathos.

An even more speculative move would be to include the other role that I usually assign to AI in good science fiction. Artificial Intelligence often, I believe, stands in for Artificial Identity. I would argue this is most often seen in the group identity, the whole that becomes more than the sum of its parts through human construction of the concept of that identity (sometimes conscious, but often collectively unconscious). The machine taking on a life of its own beyond the original program would be an analogy of the group identity taking on a life of its own, now defining the members, rather than the individual members defining the group.

I am not entirely sure how I would tie this together with the first concept of AI I started this post with; these are more just raw thoughts.  But it does seem to me like the conjunction of (1) AI being reason contending with human nature as including the biological and (2) AI being collective constructed identity provides a more interesting starting point for the question of the "greater good" vs the individual good (the tension between PoI's relevant list and irrelevant list) than does a purely rationalistic utilitarianism that gives no consideration at all to the question of valuing human life in the first place, and then simply tries to perform calculus on the value.

Paranormal Activity and Constantine: Do the producers believe in demons, and does it matter?

The question of this post is whether or not the producers of the "Paranormal Activity" series believe in the existence of demons, or more accurately, is stating such a belief what they are doing in the films. The real question at the heart of this is that of what it is that fictive art does.

As background, starting off, I thought the first three PA movies were well done, but that the fourth really fell apart.

So, by the end of the first movie it is obvious that within the framework of the story, this is a real, traditional demon: an entity that is malicious and purely spiritual in nature, but able to manipulate the physical world. It's not a ghost story, and it's not a story about the tension between spiritual explanations and psychiatric ones. An example of the former done well would be "The Others," with Nicole Kidman. The prime example, for me, of the latter would be "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." But "Paranormal Activity" is a straight-up traditional demon story.

So, the question I have is whether the point of the movie is to make the metaphysical/ontological claim of the existence of demons/angels and explore the different facets or questions of that matter (can they manipulate some types of things but not others? or other like questions). My answer is that this is not the point that can be taken from the movie (JRR Tolkien did not believe that Middle Earth historically existed, but this does not make the Lord of the Rings pointless). Furthermore, I will say that I do not think that it matters as far as the film doing what it does as art. I will also note here, however, that I do not think that the fact (if I am right) that this is not what the movie is doing means that the producers definitely do not believe in demons, NOR that what I am about to discuss cannot have any relevance in a world in which demons are real. It is simply not the question that the movie poses as art.

So, What does the movie do? The key concept for me here is analogy. Take the qualities of the demon in the movie and ask if there are any things in our real world that have these same qualities. Then ask how characters in the film interact with those qualities, and how do those interactions play out.

Whatever the demon's name or origin etc are is inconsequential. Some of these are guessed at throughout the four movies, but they are not, I would submit, the core of what the demon is about. Likewise, the specifics of what the demon wishes to do with those it takes are, relative to this discussion, inconsequential. We are looking for more general characteristics.

We find several things about the demon. The first is that its true nature and mode of action (how it impacts the material world) are unobservable (we can see the effect, but not the means). The second is that it is malicious. The issue of whether this is malicious intent would only muddy the waters for the analogs I will offer, so I will confine this quality to saying that it has a decidedly negative impact. A third quality is that it seeks some kind of control.We do also have a fourth quality hinted at in the first movie and confirmed in the third, which is that it is aided by figures who are elders to those affected (this is present both in the impact of the choices of the older women on the younger women and in the role of parents/adults in the sought after control of the child, Hunter).

I would offer two real world things that could be analogous to these qualities of the demon (there are probably many more that would work; these are just the two most prominent ones I have thought of). The first is psychological and/or psychiatric malady. The second is socio-economic factors and/or higher-up actors with negative impact. Regarding the first, the ambiguity between psychology proper (behavioral based) and psychiatry (with a stronger emphasis on the bio-chemical) is actually a good starting point. The difficulty of distinguishing between the two (behavioral causation and chemical causation) relates well to the aspect of the demon being unobservable in its core nature, because the ambiguity stems from the difficulties in observing those factors directly. It is nowhere near as easy as in the science of physics or chemistry in inanimate material. The same is true for socio-economic forces and actors. The web of possible causality and determining factors is very complex.

The point for the movie, however, is that the things are real (if my analogies hold), just as it is clear that the demon is real, although equally as mysterious, which is part of the point.

The real point is the reaction to it and interaction with it by others. In the first movie the main person under consideration is the boyfriend, Micah. He is not only flippant and calloused; at points he is downright antagonistic towards Katie. In the second movie it is the husband, who ardently and arrogantly refuses to believe in the existence and action of something beyond his comprehension, disbelieves his daughter's testimony, and even "playfully" antagonizes wife's and daughter's fraying nerves with the trick with the pool cleaner ... that is, until what is really happening is undeniable, at which point he does a deal with the devil, completely selling out the sister-in-law, Katie.

To understand the analogy, let's substitute the analogs I have suggested in for the demon. If Katie were to suffer from psychological or psychiatric malady that the male character (whether Micah or the husband in the second movie) does not understand, and thus dismisses them and perhaps even acts antagonistically towards her, rather than trying to understand and find some way of being helpful (other than flippantly trying a ouija board or diabolically making a devil's deal), the root causes go untreated. Perhaps it would be very difficult to even diagnose, let alone effectively treat, the actual causes, but the other person has not even tried, and has even made things worse through antagonism. The same can be true of socio-economic forces. The point is that, whether it be psychiatric, socio-economic, or actually spiritual (demonic), the other person has only made it worse.

Of course, in the case of the grandmother and other women in the third movie, the older generation has actually sold out the younger, knowing full-well what the effects will be. There are human beings who do this to other human beings as well.

In my assessment on the literary level, all horror, when done well, is apocalyptic in the original sense of the word - revelatory. Through analogy, it reveals things to us about the real world we live in.

Constantine

So, let's turn to another film that uses imagery and subject matter that is more properly "apocalyptic," "Constantine," with it's Revelations themes. Here, again, we have the presence of actual demons and angels stated in the fictional reality of the film. Here the term Constantine uses for them is very telling about the concern of the film; he calls them "the influence peddlers." "No direct contact," but they can, in a sense, whisper in the ear ... and their slightest whisper can give great hope or can turn your favorite creature comfort into your worst nightmare. The analogy is that there are human beings who fit this description very well: never working in direct statements, but always (in the negative cases) tearing down through subtle whispering.

Of course, subtle whisperings don't always have to be verbal or made to just one person. The Catholic Church, in her teachings on social justice (in the set of papal encyclicals grouped together as the social justice encyclicals) speaks of "structures of sin." As the old saying goes, "no man is an island," or to quote Aristotle (Aquinas' "the philosopher"), humanity is a political animal by nature. It is possible to use structures to achieve desired ends. And it is possible for intermediaries to willfully look the other way when they have the capability to at least be cognizant of more than they choose to.

Here, the film "Constantine" offers a bit further commentary on the role of other humans, other than the ones actually peddling influence ... the ones who can either help or hurt (even if through negligence) those impacted by the whispering, particularly those who see it for what it is. As a boy Constantine had this sight (represented by the faces on the bus), and for it was treated as if crazy.

Again, the commentary (via analogy) is primarily on human action when confronted with things that we cannot completely grasp, but also know that a possible explanation exists that is not a comfortable one for us to accept.

Constantine carries an extra complication for those (like myself) accepting the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which is the issue of suicide. I would offer only these few considerations (NOT from the analogical interpretation). The Church teaches that suicide is a mortal sin, but it also teaches that mortal sin requires adequate understanding and consent. I will not say, as some might, that it is impossible for those to be had in the case of suicide, but I will say that it is all too easy to jump to hasty judgments in cases of suicide, neglecting very real psychological and psychiatric factors that could be mitigating. Further, in the case of the second attempt, the goal actually seems to be (at least in the minds of the film-makers) self-sacrifice. The action is done to trick the Satan character into appearing as a way to stop the diabolical action.

But there is also another role of both this suicide attempt and the first one, a role that I must admit, as a smoker, I hesitate to bring up ... the connection between smoking and suicide (which some might state as the slow way and the fast way of the same thing). But, if I am to be honest about reading the film, I have to bring it up. I also bring it up because it broadens out this treatment of film-art beyond the merely analogical. The connection is not done through analogy, but rather through merely close proximity in dialogue and through visual imagery. The first instance, the one done with dialog, comes in the conversation between Constantine and Gabriel in the library: she tells him, "you're going to die because you have smoked 30 cigarettes a day since you were 15; and you're going to hell because of the life you took [meaning the first suicide attempt]." In art, unlike real life, dialog is never random (truth-be-told, many things in real life conversations are not as "accidental" as we like to think they are either). If the two are in that close conjunction in the constructed dialog, the authors probably did it for a reason. The second instance of the conjunction, though, provides a development in the theme, and it is part of the reason that I say that the second attempt is not the same as the first. It's an easy thing not to catch, but Constantine actually douses his last cigarette in the blood from his wrists.

So there are my main thoughts on those two supernatural horror/thriller films and on the relevant issues of what fictional art does that is different than making metaphysical "scientific"claims.

Person of Interest: "Root Path" Aired 3/18/2014

First note of interest, the title for this episode, "Root Path," pairs off against the title of the episode first introducing Root in season 1, "Root Cause."

Many points of philosophical interest are possible in this episode especially, such as providence in a chaotic world (chaos theory), and the "greater good" vs the good of the single life etc. But the one that caught my interest the most is when Root states her take on the machine continually telling her to protect the janitor as Finch having to have broken the machine so badly for it to care so much about people. Finch states that it was only when he taught the machine to care about people that it was able to understand people enough to be able to see what it needed to see to analyze threats.

This reminds me of something Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger said, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, in regards to Biblical Studies. He spoke of "sympatheia," having sympathy with the subject. His basic point was that in order to understand something like the Biblical text, a scholar must be exercise sympathy with it ... meaning it cannot be treated simply in a completely cold and "objective" scientific fashion. I liked seeing the same theme here.

No great big further thoughts on that one yet, just cataloging it for now.

Person of Interest: The Machine as Golem

Jonathan Nolan is a pretty smart guy. Guy's like him usually know A LOT about the particulars of Western literary tradition. They also are usually fairly in touch with current literature. If Terry Pratchett is using the Golem motif in the discworld series, and mentions are even being made to "making a golem" in something like the Sopranos (or so a student once told me in a class when I asked if anybody knew what a golem is), I would find it shocking if Jon Nolan was not decently well versed in at least the concept, and maybe even a good bit of the actual literature.

A Primer on Golems

This is what I can remember from a talk given at Lumos (Harry Potter conference) in Vegas in 2006. The earliest literature we have is from somewhere around 11th century in Prague. The basic storyline is that a holy Rabbi needs to save his town from impending danger. He molds a man out of clay and brings it to life by placing one of the names of God on its forehead. This golem then saves the city. Once that purpose has been fulfilled, the Rabbi takes the name back off and the golem becomes inanimate clay once again.

The danger (and reason that it must be a particularly holy rabbi doing it) is that the golem will become self-aware and not want to be decommissioned. The golem is pretty powerful, so this could be a real problem.

Person of Interest's Adaptation

I think it is a pretty easy case to make that the machine is a golem. It was made to protect humans, and, as we see in season 2, it becomes self-aware.

What I think is interesting is that in this case the self-awareness comes from the directive to protect. In order to better protect humans, the machine must know about the great dangers to humans. It thus has to know about itself as a great power that, in the wrong hands, could be massively abused, and thus is a potential danger. Thus, it MUST protect itself in order to protect humans. It is designed to be self-upgrading and all that because any human having access even for repair could be a potential means to control the machine and use it for great harm to humans. This is the seed of the self-awareness of this golem. It has to be aware of itself as a thing in order to protect itself as a thing, and it must protect itself as a thing in order to protect humans.

I don't know if this is a unique adaption of the golem motif by Nolan and co, or if it has a precedent in golem-lore, but I would love to know.

(By the way, it could be a unique adaptation of the motif by JN without JN being conscious of it.  He may be consciously using, or at least aware of the connection with, the golem motif in general, AND be adapting it, without really thinking about adapting it ... artist's don't always sit down and think things out logically before creating; in fact, a lot of times their art is better if they don't pin it all out logically before-hand)

Pi as Life the Universe and Everything: Darren Arnofsky and Person of Interest

As a warning, this post has no discussion at all of the Douglas Adams book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I simply like that phrase for what I have to say about the connections I am about to discuss.

Here is the progression of thought-events as they have presented themselves in my brain over the years:

1. Watching Darren Arnofsky's Pi, leading to many, many, many musings about the 216 digit number as power (to know the true name of God would be great religious power, to understand humanity well enough to predict the stockmarket would be great economic power).

2. Watching Person of Interest: The season 2 episode called 2PiR has some interesting comments on Pi.

3. My own thought that those qualities of Pi makes sense (for me) as why Arnofsky's choice of Pi as a key to the 216 digit number is appropriate.

Pi

So, first up in this list is the 216 digit number in Arnofsky's movie, Pi. The number is presented as 3 things: The true name of God embedded in the Torah; the key to predicting the stockmarket; and the expression of the silicon identity/nature of the computer (which could be taken as an emergent AI, but could also be taken as symbolic of human rational capacity unfettered by bio-psychological connections and taken to its full potential).

The main point of the movie is, it seems to me, relatively straightforward: no matter which of these 3 you focus on with the number, there are two dangers. The first is injustice from abuse of the power. The second, and more the focus of the film, is that it will break the human mind. Whatever it is, it is too big for the human mind and will thus undo it (and it may be all 3 combined together, which makes it an even heavier weight - this, btw, is the root meaning of the word for the "glory" of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible/OT, the root verb from which the noun comes means basically "to be heavy"). Max is happiest at the end when he can no longer figure out the answers to the Chinese girl's math questions (and this was a nice human touch too: as a child, she never really wanted to test his math skills, she just wanted to play).

Person of Interest

So, in the episode 2PiR (sorry, can't find the symbols in here) in the second season of Person of Interest, Reese is in jail being interrogated and Finch goes undercover as a highschool substitute math teacher to get close to the kid who winds up being an amazing computer programmer.

The pertinent thing for my thoughts here is what Finch says about Pi in his class lecture. Because it is non repeating, Pi contains every possible combination: every social security number, every birthdate, every name (if you transpose numbers to letters), every phone number ... everything in the world of humans.

My Thoughts

From the PoI observation, Pi contains ALL human particularities. It contains the whole human world by containing all of its particulars in every aspect or facet (each person, but represented by all expressions of them: name, SSN, birthdate, and on and on). In Arnofsky's Pi, the 216 digit is the name of God and the expression of pure rationality. Just as Sol's bug in Pi is the path to the number, so Pi as humanity is the path to knowing God (Please bear with me and read to the end of this post to avoid confusions about what I mean by this). What fascinates me the most is the fact that it has to be the whole sea of particulars (Pi containing every possible combination). The alchemical whole is more than the sum of its parts, but it has to have all the parts to be the sum. I'm not sure where I go with this, but the thought fascinates me.

Disclaimer

To avoid blasphemy here, which is pretty much what I would take it to be if I said that God (the 216 digit name) is contained inside humanity (Pi). If Sol's bug is the 216-digit number, and the bug is in Pi, and the number is the true name of God, then basically God is just a by-product of human being, or human evolution, or however you want to describe the totality of humanity contained in Pi.

This is definitely NOT what I believe.

Look at it this way though: the 216digit name is still only the true name of God as spoken by human beings in human language (even numbers and math are still only human expression - that is why you can have math that is unstable at advanced levels, as mentioned in the film A Beautiful Mind). It is not the true name of God as God is in and of himself, eternally. However, and I do think this is part of what is in Arnofsky's film (or at least uniquely possible from what is there), that human expression is not simply produced by humanity. Somewhere in the sea of data in Pi is the expression of a belief in transcendent deity, but that doesn't mean the idea came from humanity. But that would jump off into a whole new, long discussion of concepts of Inspiration of Scripture etc, which I don't have time for here.

Here I would include only two brief related concepts from my own credal background and studies. The first is just the basic formulation of Inspiration in Catholic magisterial teaching: the Word of God in the words of humans. The second is that this idea of "only as spoken in human language" is found in some Rabbis. Rabbinic thought is VERY different from modern western thought. They think in lines of logic like, the beginning always begins with the beginning - the first word of a text should logically begin with the first letter of the alphabet (and thus you have acrostic psalms). SO, the question arises for the legendary Rabbis of the Classical and Middle Ages, why does the first word of the Torah (Bereshith = "in the beginning") begin with the SECOND letter of the alphabet, the bet, rather than the first letter of the alphabet, the aleph? One answer that one Rabbi gives is that, as Holy as the Torah is, it is still only text in human language; it is not The Holy One, Blessed be He, or the completeness of his actual utterances to Moses (for Rabbinic thought the written Torah is never complete without the "Oral Torah" that was also given to Moses). So, beginning with the second letter rather than the first is a reminder of this fact.

Further Thought:The Incarnation

Where this would go for me if I had time etc, is Pi as an expression of the Incarnation. It would not be just taking on "human nature" as some sort of singular abstract. The whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts, but it needs all the parts, and human mind cannot encompass it because it is infinite (which is different than being eternal). In regards to what I said above about "humanity is the path to knowing God," for me as a Catholic Christian, this can only take place fully in the context of the Incarnation (the path of the noble pagan, such as Plato or Aristotle, is valid, but can only go so far).  The number is infinite, so the grasping of the meaning, in theological terms, must be an eschatological event.  Then there is the area to explore of how this fits with a concept of divine Inspiration of human text, the Word of God in the words of humans.