Hail to the King: A Tribute to Roger Corman

Roger Corman, whose eight-decade career in Hollywood earned him nicknames like “The King of the B Movies,” died last Thursday at the age of 98.

I cried. Telling my children, I did.

As the resident cult film nerd here, I have written a lot about Roger over the years (he told me to call him “Roger,” so I will), and it is one of the great joys of my life that writing for this site gave me the opportunity to interview him.

As a fan, I get to be an admirer and advocate for his work. It’s commonplace to dismiss b-movies or genre movies as cash-grabs or just dumb, but I will always stand up and say that I unironically think many of the movies that Roger made are capital-G Great, and if you happen to know the circumstances or budget constraints under which they were produced, that makes them even more compelling accomplishments. They are often archly funny, or stunningly atmospheric, or racially progressive, or culturally subversive, or formally experimental. No Roger Corman film will ever be a guilty pleasure for me. I mean, some of the hundreds of films he produced stink — I doubt he’d argue — but most of the films he directed and many of the high points of the ones he produced are take-me-to-my-happy-place films that I will watch forever.

And my kids love them! What a joy it has been to share with my kids the Roger Corman/Edgar Alan Poe films, first at home on video and then more recently on the big screen thanks to Los Angeles' own American Cinematheque repertory screenings. Last month I took two of my daughters to see House of Usher, and a few months ago I took most of my family to see Masque of the Red Death on a newly-struck 35mm print on the big screen. As part of American Cinematheque's ongoing Hail to the King: The Films of Roger Corman series, I kept hoping that Roger might make it out to one of the screenings. That I might be able to say hi again, and introduce my girls. The screenings are ongoing, and we will keep attending, but it makes me sad that the joy of seeing Roger in person again is forever off the table. 

As someone who loves classic films and Hollywood history, I can only sit in awe of the careers he impacted directly. The names of people who worked for Roger are all out there and have been repeated a million times — Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, Dennis Hopper, Bill Paxton, Joe Dante — the legendary writers he relied on, like Richard Matheson, Robert Towne, and Charles Beaumont, and the actors whose careers he resurrected, re-framed, or extended, like Vincent Price and Boris Karloff. I’m not sure any individual in the 97-year history of talking pictures has had a more significant roster of talent (that's right -- Roger Corman was born the year before talking pictures were introduced). These Corman-alumni are largely responsible for independent films existing at all. The landmark book on the rise of independent cinema is called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — and both of those eponymous movies trace their roots to Roger. 

My friend Howard Rodman, past president of the Writers' Guild of America, said when Roger passed that the last of the Founding Fathers was gone. Howard meant “of Cinema.” The last of the Founding Fathers of Cinema. Writ large. In Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award acceptance speech for Oppenheimer, he pointed out that movies are only about 100 years old. Roger Corman helped shape them for almost the entire time we’ve been watching these flickering lights on our various screens.

Now...as a filmmaker, Roger has been a guiding light. When I was in film school, I couldn't afford film stock or processing. I couldn't necessarily get professors to sign off on certain projects I wanted to do. So I just did what I needed to do to Make The Thing. I shot on video, I made the phone calls and got the buy-in and found the collaborators and Made The Thing. And then I submitted The Thing to the film festivals and competitions that featured all of the officially-sanctioned projects...and I beat them. My producing partner had a closet full of Vincent Price VHS tapes he'd grown up on, most of them directed by Roger Corman. When I got the chance to shoot the interview with Roger, I called my friend Mark to help me film it --Mark had worked with me on a number of scripts, Public Service Announcements, and other projects for probably a decade -- and as we were setting up, Mark told me how he had grown up watching Death Race 2000 at his grandmother's house. I found my people by finding people who found the movies through Roger Corman.

How to say this? I'm not being hyperbolic -- I do not think I am the same person in this world without Roger Corman. And I'm not even somebody who he hired! 

Look, Billie Jean King said, "You have to see it to be it." I understand that Billie Jean King didn't mean, "white guy sees white guy do a thing," but making films is tremendously expensive, and our most recent Writers' Guild Strike was explicitly about making it possible for people who aren't independently wealthy to make filmed content. I have four Emmy Awards and a career in making films that literally provides for my family. I have a Hugo Award for writing for this site, which I do largely because of the films Roger Corman opened me up to. I just...I don't think my life exists as it is without Roger Corman. 

And that's a hell of a thing! 

If you have heard any of the news stories, you heard all the names, and you probably thought "wow," or whatever. But what gets lost when you talk about a legend is that it's really...it's just a human being, and they don't walk through their day as A Legend. When I reviewed the documentary Corman's World,  the moment that most struck me was when Jack Nicholson almost broke down in tears at the thought that someone wouldn't respect Roger. He said, "If Roger doesn't know how important he is, I'll go to his house and tell him right now." Utterly Singular Hollywood Legend Jack Nicholson believes that he owes his career to Roger Corman. 

I am very lucky. I got to tell Roger Corman myself that he inspired me as a director.

That interview I did with him — since he was always producing, an off-camera comment that took place after we wrapped our conversation and we were breaking down the cameras led to me coming back to discuss a potential film project with him. Per IMDb, Roger has 491 producing credits. His first was in 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out, and he has a few more coming out still. That averages out to a little over seven movies a year, for seventy years. If Roger hadn’t done it, the idea that anybody ever could have done it would have been utterly unbelievable.

Gale Anne Hurd, whose legendary career as a producer includes the Terminator films, Aliens, and The Walking Dead, got her first job in movies with Roger. In a recent interview with journalist Madeline Brand, she said of Roger’s passing, “There’ll never be another.”

There will never be another. 

I am sad the Roger is gone. But I am so, so grateful that he was here.

Roger Corman
1926-2024

Book Review: Freeset by Sarina Dahlan

The sequel to Reset continues the story of the post-apocalyptic world of the Four Cities

Sarina Dahlan’s Reset and its prequel Preset depict the post-apocalyptic world of the Four Cities, seemingly the only surviving remnant of humanity. Through the eyes of the original founder Eli, the hidden “Crone” Eleanor, and artists/lovers Aris and Metis, humans grew and tried to transcend the “reset” of Tabula Rasa that every four years wipes out the memories of nearly everyone.

Freeset continues and completes the story of Eli, Eleanor, Metis, Aris, and the Four Cities.

The first book, Reset, was at its heart a love story. Not just between Aris and Metis, the main characters caught in the inevitability of the quadrennial cycle of the memory-erasing Tabula Rasa, but also between Eli, the planner and creator of the four cities, and Eleanor, his secret (as far as most people are concerned) co-creator. Eleanor is in a sense the serpent in the dystopian garden, providing and offering methods for people to, if not break free of the cycle, at least have memories of their previous 4-year lives. It’s a story about the testament and power of love.

Preset takes love in a different direction as we see, two centuries earlier, the love of trying to save humanity, itself the driving force in a novel that shows the early life of Eli and Eleanor. We get to see how the Four Cities came to be after the disastrous fall of the old order. It’s a much less hopeful book than the first, a darker tone spread across two timeframes: the fall itself, and the foundation of the cities.

Freeset, this new novel, picks up the story as a true sequel to Reset. Freeset decides to do something different: to its strength, and to its weakness, this third and final novel in the sequence decides to deeply explore its society in a way we didn’t see in Preset (since that is a story of the founding of the cities) or Reset (because of its strong focus on the relationships driving the city more than on the technology). And to an extent, Freeset does try to capture that dynamic by showing the strength and endurance of the bonds between the four characters.

Where Freeset differs is in explaining and showing a fair amount of the underpinnings of the dystopia that we saw built in Preset and saw in full in Reset. I think there is a potential weakness in showing and explaining too much of a dystopia, and I think that this novel shows the perils of doing so. This goes to the whole idea of worldbuilding, the shared delusion, and what is shown and not shown in a story. One cannot completely capture the complexity of a world, for we cannot even understand the complexity of the one we have here, much less one in a novel. And in many ways, depicting a dystopia requires a careful hand to let the reader fill in blanks and details, and so avoid raising obvious questions.

In Freeset, I think, Dahlan doesn’t quite strike that balance. In Reset, we focus on the relationships and in a very general way discuss the mechanics of Tabula Rasa and the superstructure of the repressive state that Eli the Planner has made. Those are all background to the story of Aris and Metis, and between Eli and his longtime partner Eleanor. Here, though, the nitty-gritty of the state is laid bare in two tentpoles that drive the narrative.

First is the police force, and the tactics and people that compose it. This focuses primarily on Scylla (a menacing name, noting that Dahlan is good at names), who is hunting Dreamers (the rebels of the first book) and Eleanor, Eli’s former wife. Scylla starts as a Javert-like character, determined to do his best in his duty. He is in a real sense a viewpoint character for the reader who might be skeptical of the rebellion and those trying to escape Tabula Rasa, but slowly starts to see the injustice in the system, and in his own heart as well.

Apollina, his counterpart, is a much harsher character. As a Dream Interpreter, she is even closer to Eli and his inner circle, an intimate part of how his repressive regime actually works. Even more than Scylla, Apollina’s intimate use of dreams on Metis is central to Eli’s plans, and is insidious and shows the evil that is at the heart of Eli’s world. Eli may have created the Four Cities as a refuge for humanity and guided them over the last 200 years, but he has turned it into a prison, and Apollina is the character who shows that.

The second tentpole is the CDL and the Matres. Focused as I was (thanks to Dahlan’s writing), I did not consider or stop to think in Reset an essential question: Where do children come from in this society? In Freeset, Dahlan decides to answer that by having a separate, nearly autonomous microcity far away from the four, called the CDL. The CDL is a crèche where children are raised under the watchful eyes of a set of clone sisters, the Matres. We get to meet several of the Matres, and some of the students as well, as the repression and plans of Eli reach and change their world, as do unexpected visitors.

And while I found the story of the students of the CDL and the capriciousness of their lives and their attempts to escape their fate compelling, it felt a little like well-trodden ground. I did like Cass and Bastian as a younger pair to the other couples in the story. Theirs is not quite the romance of the older couples, but the impending potential tragedy of them being separated and wanting to fight it is definitely on sharp thematic point with the rest of Dahlan’s oeuvre. There are strong emotional beats here that Dahlan plays quite wonderfully.

The real problem, though, is that the more Dahlan kept adding these elements to her world, the more rickety and less plausible it seemed to become. In order for Matres to be effective, for example, they are not subject to Tabula Rasa, so that they can raise children from birth to the time they are sent into the Four Cities or college (and then the Four Cities) after having their memories wiped. Other aspects of the repressive state are put in stark relief and shown, but the cracks in the worldbuilding began to show for me. This is a world where a lot of species have died (mushrooms are a big part of the diet) and yet there are some oddities that exist, like tea and coffee. Where are they being grown, exactly? And if the wipeout of higher species is that complete, I have questions about the stability of the ecosystem, no matter how controlled by the Planner, Eli. This goes to the showing too much of a dystopia problem that I mentioned before. Food webs and ecosystems are extremely complicated and interdependent and the lack of one is devastating. As much as I have a hard time engaging with the premise, this goes right to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, which shows this problem in stark relief on his generation ship.

And tonally, I think a focus on the repression and the dark tones of the Four Cities vastly changes the look and feel of the first book (and to an extent the prequel) in a way I feel conflicted about. Reset is a very poetic book that focuses on a relationship in a dystopia, an attempt at how love can try and transcend the strongest of boundaries (even if it is not Amor Vincit Omnia). The use of the John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in that first book, for example, gives it a poetic feel that is somewhat lacking here. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first book, although it does try. It tries to reach for that same Amor Vincit Omnia, but doesn't get there.

The presentation of Freeset is a much more practical and less poetic feel to the dystopia that the Four Cities represented, and while that dystopia was always there, in this book, set in sharp relief, it loses some of the magic and uniqueness that made Reset so powerful for me. A totalitarian police force using drugs, dream control, drones, and other equipment? Training of children from birth? Ever tightening security and surveillance? A ruler becoming increasingly obsessed and paranoid? You probably have read this before. The problem is, within the bounds of Freeset itself, there isn’t enough distinction here to really engage me as a reader. The CDL is interesting, certainly, and its location, once revealed, is a landscape I do need to visit with my camera. But the narrower focus on the CDL and on the police takes away the uniqueness of the Four Cities as a location and an idea, and I think that ultimately weakens the book.

However, I will say that, even if the worldbuilding showed problems by overexplaining, and I had issues with the tone, the writing of the book retains the high line-by-line quality of Reset and Preset. Dahlan is an engaging, immersive author whose prose brings the characters’ emotional states firmly into the reader’s mind. I have not listened to the audio versions of this or the other books in the series, but given the publisher (Blackstone) and the emotional quality of Dahlan’s writing, I think this is the kind of book that maybe isn’t suited for a long car trip, but definitely one to listen to once you’ve reached your hotel room and want to get immersed.

In the end, while Reset was extraordinary, and Preset well written, Freeset turns out to be something of a disappointment for me. It is very possible that if you do like dystopias, this is going to be something you enjoy, particularly since this is not entirely the usual “young people in a YA-adjacent dystopia” novel in the model of The Hunger Games. Eli and Eleanor, Aris and Metis, and the other characters outside of the CDL are definitely not in that mold (even if one might argue that the concept of Tabula Rasa might be a way to stunt emotional growth). I don’t think there is quite enough here for me to unabashedly recommend it.

I will, however, be curious, now that the Four Cities are behind Dahlan, what new vistas and ideas she will seek to write about.

Highlights:

• Interesting ideas for a dystopia that is not the usual YA

• Strong emotional beats and themes

• Poetic and emotionally moving writing

Reference: Dahlan, Sarina. Freeset [Blackstone, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

When Germans delve and Britons span, who was then the gentleman?

There is undoubtedly a certain romance to commandos. The very term originally meant not a single individual, but rather a small group of men sent behind enemy lines to cause havoc. It’s a term originally from the Boer War, a war that saw all sorts of horrors brought to the mainstream European and American presses. But the modern archetype doubtlessly comes from World War II, where Allied commandos doubtlessly fought for the good of the world, even if filtered through their own ideologies. Once the domain of a great many pulp stories, magazines, and films, it has come to feel dated in the public’s mind. But Guy Ritchie has decided to serve us another go at this revered old genre in 2024’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, distributed by Lionsgate Films, with a script written by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel.

The film is a not particularly accurate depiction of Operation Postmaster, a British covert operations mission to destroy ships refueling the German submarines that threaten shipping routes in the Atlantic. Those routes carry urgently needed supplies for a Britain that is being pulverized by the Luftwaffe as Hitler tries to starve the country into submission. Even within the halls of Westminster, there are doubts as to whether this war can be won. In an attempt to ease the burden on Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill orders the aforementioned team to the place where these ships are docked: the island of Fernando Po, nowadays Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea. Unfortunately for the British, that island is a colonial possession of officially neutral Spain, run by fascists whom Hitler and Mussolini helped bring to power, and certainly favorable towards the Axis.

One of the things that struck me about this film is the cinematography. I couldn’t help but see the influence of Sam Mendes’ 1917 here, with a simulated long shot that Mendes openly admits was influenced by his son’s video games. There’s nothing quite that ambitious here on display, but there are a number of shots that reminded me of real-time strategy games, with the camera hovering above bloody chaos in a manner that feels almost detached. I found it to be an interesting gambit, and one that I think worked.

As I said, the script is not afraid to take liberties, but those feel appropriate. For example, there is a raid that never happened on a prison in the Canaries (ruled, again, by Spain) that never existed, but I am willing to forgive it because that sequence is just fantastic generally. I’m reminded of a review I read many years ago of the real-time strategy game Company of Heroes, set after the Allied invasion of Normandy, that I cannot find anymore, that talked a lot about the actual correctness of every little detail, every bolt and nut and rivet, and the authenticity of how a work feels, and this film passes that test (and may rivet-counters be ever silenced, and learn why normal people actually engage with fiction to begin with).

Walking out of the theater, I concluded that the film that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare bears the most resemblance to is Inglorious Basterds, albeit without the history-changing ending (the history-changing is instead woven throughout the film, which makes it straight history. I don’t make the rules here). Very much like Sisu, a Finnish film I reviewed on this blog some months ago, this is fundamentally an action movie that happens to be set eighty years ago. There is plenty of humor to go around, mostly of the snarky one-liner variety, but also many moments that arise mainly due to character. There’s a deftness in the script in regards to its characters, many of whom do not conform to the vaunted British stiff upper lip. Some are in prison, and others are fans of making things go boom. Despite all this, there’s that British wryness that pervades their worldview, indeed the film’s worldview, and I’m thankful that the Briton Guy Ritchie got to helm it. I’m not sure an American could have made it as well.

The action here is very good. The historically inaccurate raid on the Canaries has already been mentioned. There’s also a deliciously tense, then gloriously Tarantino-esque shoot-out on a boat that begins the film, which is a masterclass in using the boat’s restricted space to build suspense. There is the Timothy Zahn-esque gambit pileup that builds through the film and erupts in pure chaos in the film’s last act, which involves all sorts of shenanigans with ships, elaborate parties for Germans (with great big band jazz music to boot—and not the boring Nazi-approved stuff), a Jewish secret agent, and a local nightlife impresario who hates fascists.

I do, though, have some unformed thoughts about how this film portrays Africa and Africans. The aforementioned nightlife impresario is a wonderfully sly character, played by Babs Olusanmokun, and is one of the best parts of the film. But I feel like one of the thematic emphases of the film coexists uneasily with its African setting. Much is made of how these commandos are breaking the ‘civilized’ rules of war, and how that is a necessary thing when fighting an enemy as ruthless and loathsome as Hitler. I don’t disagree with that per se, but I know enough about the history of international law to know that there was always a rule of ‘gentlemanly’ warfare between ‘civilized’ white people on the one hand, and unbridled savagery when Europeans fought those whose skin was darker than a lily. It was Hilaire Belloc who described British colonial policy as “whatever happens, we have got / the maxim gun, and they have not.” I am certain the Sudanese who fell at the hideously lopsided Battle of Omdurman, which Churchill witnessed as a war correspondent and soldier, would not have considered British conduct in that engagement ‘gentlemanly.’ Other than a few African characters, the film focuses mostly on the white inhabitants of a colonial society, for better and for worse. I’m not sure what could have been done here, and I don’t really think it’s fair to blame Ritchie and company for it, but I feel like there could have been a better way around it.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is, on the whole, good fun, perfect for those who wanted more like Inglorious Basterds or perhaps the Wolfenstein games, or those who enjoy Ritchie’s filmmaking style, or off-the-hook action in general, or old-fashioned war movies. It has its weak spots, but it makes up for them with good humor, good characters, good cinematography, and just plain old fun. I highly recommend it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui

Political plotting and elaborate shenanigans done right

To quote a certain famous someone: I love mess. I love emotional tangles, and characters who do things that ultimately hurt themselves because they are complex, chaotic and fundamentally human. I love stories where everyone is a little bit broken and terrible, and they're all clawing about at each other to hurt, being nasty and personal and intimate and delicious.

The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui is just such a story. We follow Nez, who used to be a pilot in the military of the aggressive imperial juggernaut that "peacefully" took over their home planet, until a crash and a spinal injury put her out of the game, leaving her to make her own way in tech and begin to rebel against the empire while the people she loved and was closed to simply carried on without her. Now she's been pulled back in, to try to solve the crisis of a war the empire definitely isn't losing, honest, at the behest of one of the most powerful people in the military. But Nez does not want to be there. Nez has her own plans.

And this is a story of imperial aggression and resistance, of politics and action, of the way that different people respond to being under the bootheel of such a hegemonising force. There's no prevaricating the message—empire bad. This is an empire whose heir destroyed whole planets in a fit of spiteful pique. We're not aiming for any sense of balance. But we are aiming for complexity.

Because for all that Nez is someone whose planet was ultimately destroyed by the empire, for all that she is working against them, resisting in what capacity she has before she's taken captive… she did also used to work for them. Her friends —her former lover— still do. They share that history, that lost homeworld, and yet respond to the legacy of it in different ways. They still orbit around a shared event, the crash that damaged Nez's spine and her relationship with both Kaya and the empire at the same time. It's a story about different people coming to different conclusions, different actions, about the same context. The bad choices people make.

And speaking of bad choices, it's also about terrible, problematic people being also quite hot, without that ever excusing their terribleness. That second part is important, and one a lot of stories kind of end up missing.

We'll come back to that shortly, though.

To step back a little: political shenanigans can be hard to get right, especially in shorter books. Politics is, fundamentally, complicated because people are complicated. If you make it a simple X action because of Y reason, it's not going to ring true because it's never that simple in real life, and it's incredibly hard to fill in all the details you'd need to capture factors like class and economics and specific histories of place. There's an art to condensing real-feeling political situations into the sort of space that doesn't involve 15 appendices, and it's one that Sui has absolutely mastered here. The key is about the details—we get them. Little incidentals. Off-hand remarks about whys and whos and whens. The sort of things people actually say in conversations to each other, remarks laden with bias and perspective and emotion. And we get these instead of big, sweeping exposition. No one ever sits down and thinks to themself "ah yes, the root cause of the Maguffin Crisis is due to the prevailing weather conditions in Fakelandia, which have led to an economic situation of unparalleled proportions." Everyone comes in with their own knowledge, their own opinions, and so the way they think about things is always biased, always skewed and framed by knowledge we, as the readers, do not have. And Sui just… lets us not have it. Most of the grand-scale stuff simply does not matter to this story. The exact details of why Nez's home planet was destroyed? Irrelevant. That it was, and by whom, and how Nez feels about it are much, much more critical. Such explanation as we get makes Watsonian sense—the sort of thing someone in such a situation would explain, and would think about.

And honestly? We don't need the broad, sweeping details of exactly what this empire is in order to understand why it's bad. All we need is the core we get, the crux of Nez's radicalisation, because this is Nez's story, not the story of the empire as a whole. Sui has boiled it down to the parts that matter, and filled in the gaps with humans and their thoughts and feelings. In the middle of all the politics, it is a story about four people: Nez and the three people she has these emotional, important ties to, and who are each in turned tied to one another, whether by shared history, love, lust, duty or hatred or a mixture of them all. And this, for me, is where it truly shines. Much of the story feels, on the surface, like Nez rattling around between these three people, reacting and causing reactions, feeling. Every bit of dialogue between them feels vital to the story, to their relationship, to something. It's a series of beautifully crafted moments, of feelings steeped in relatable irrationality, despite the distance and unrelatability of the scenario. How do I know how to feel about an ace pilot and an imperial heir? How on earth is this graspable for me? And yet Sui makes it so. She makes each strange, inexplicable moment feel real and true, makes me believe every word, every breath of it emotionally.

And that is very important, because this is also a story that isn't… quite what it seems at the start. A good deal of its charm, its brilliance, is how well it sells what lies it tells (and the truths it keeps, leaving you to wonder which is which). Everything is delivered with such aplomb, such charisma, that you cannot help but fall for things, even when the story tells you to be wary. You just want to slip into the moment, the dialogue, the natural bounce between these fascinating, terrible people.

The Dragonfly Gambit is a brilliant little novella, full of life and energy and emotions hot enough to burn down buildings. Lust or rage? Why choose! Sui captures people and their big-picture problems with deft clarity and easy grace, meaning you never lose sight of where you're viewing the story from, even as it subsumes you. Its politics are extremely well-managed, as is its surprisingly twisty plot full of plotting, making it easy to consume in a single sitting. If it has any fault —and I'm not sure it does— it is that I could have stood a little more time with the fourth character, the one slightly less closely tied into all the drama, as his moments did seem interesting but never let him quite step to the fore like the others. But when the others are as interesting as the ones we got? Well, it's worth it regardless. An absolute hot mess (complimentary). I loved it.

The Math

Highlights: narrator of dubious reliability; MESS, so much MESS; really good political situation in a really small space

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: A. D. Sui, The Dragonfly Gambit [Neon Hemlock, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

First Contact: Metropolis

A dazzling window through which a century of science fiction can be glimpsed

Economic inequality is bad. It's unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel—there aren't many ways to say this basic fact. This is why it's so difficult to make a science fiction allegory of inequality with anything interesting to say beyond: bad, unfair, cruel. I've become very skeptical of this century's dystopias because, almost every time, the setting turns out to be yet another allegory of inequality that's going to parrot what I already know. As a topic for storytelling, greed doesn't lend itself to much complexity or depth; it's just a bad thing, and it ought to end, and that's pretty much all there is to say on the matter. Call it The Hunger Games or Altered Carbon or Elysium or the Black Mirror episodes "Fifteen Million Merits" and "Nosedive," they tend to replay the same arguments and impassioned pleas and end up sounding like they harbor the alarming suspicion that we need convincing that the sky is blue. Time after time, we're treated to the same fables of decadent leisure for the few and soul-draining toil for the rest like it's some world-shattering discovery. You have to look for the topmost of top-caliber stories, like the Doctor Who episodes "Oxygen" and "Boom," to find fresh creative angles on the age-old problem of human greed.

Despite the difficulty of saying anything new about inequality, science fiction has tried its hand at saying it many times, mainly because our genre is an heir of the Industrial Revolution, which made it a natural vehicle of expression for the dystopian living conditions of factory workers since the earliest science fiction. So it's no surprise that class conflict is the core conflict in Viennese director Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Set in a city divided between luxury and drudgery, it tells the story of a workers' rebellion sparked by an undercover robot with dubious loyalties. Even if you don't follow science fiction, anyone interested in cinema is aware of Metropolis as one of the absolute biggest classics of all time.

My first impression is that this film's revered status is more due to its unparalleled visual inventiveness than to any insight gleanable from its script. The moral stance of Metropolis lands like a blow to the face, with all the shallow preachiness of the average Black Mirror and a textbook case of Madonna-whore complex that I'm sure made Freud yawn. Of course, I say this from the position of a 21st-century viewer who has had his fill of science fiction about rich, overemotional manchildren with mommy issues. By which I mean Ferengi. Surely these themes must have felt audacious and thought-provoking back then. But is it really possible that 1920s Weimar moviegoers didn't know that factory workers had harsh lives, and needed two hours of delirious psychosexual melodrama to open their eyes to the evils of class stratification? The question may sound silly in our hyperliterate 2020s, but let's not forget that there are still pockets of regressive ideology where it's asserted with a straight face that slaves didn't have it so bad. Even such a prominent literary figure (and prominent Fabian socialist) as H. G. Wells called Metropolis implausibly pessimistic in its depiction of the suffering of workers, although it must be noted that his analysis of the movie was so literal that he mistook its striking art design for a genuine attempt at predicting coming trends in industrial engineering.

To be fair to Mr. Wells, there are details in his essay that hint at the possibility that the version of Metropolis he watched must have been Channing Pollock's studio-mandated, intentionally mistranslated recut. But even so, to make such misjudged remarks about the look of the film, Wells must have been unfamiliar with the conventions of German Expressionism, the artistic tradition most in line with the key moviemaking principle that the function of images on a screen is not to be, but to represent.

German Expressionism works so well for the silent black-and-white format that I'm surprised it wasn't independently developed in other countries. When you can't record sound or color, the only tools you have for communicating a character's emotions are lighting and gesture. And when your only tools are lighting and gesture, overdramatic chiaroscuro is your friend.

While watching Metropolis, I was in awe of how few dialogue cards were really needed to tell the story. With the exaggerated way the actors waved their arms and performed their facial reactions, following the plot was effortless. As regards Freder, the young male protagonist, this style of acting hurts the reading of his character. He comes off as too mercurial, too easily influenceable. Actor Gustav Fröhlich was 24 when he worked in Metropolis, and I kept having the impression that his role would have felt more natural if it had been given to a teenager.

On the other hand, Brigitte Helm proved here that she was ONE HELL of an actress. As typical for this era of cinema, she also resorted to big, expressive movements for playing the two characters she had in the movie, but the result never feels like too much. She was in perfect control of exactly how much she needed to twist her neck or contort her face to nail a scene. With the spell she casts on the viewer, she singlehandedly saves Metropolis from the absurdities of its script.

The main antagonists of Metropolis are a businessman and an inventor. Their suitability as villains in a fable of industrial dystopia is clear; their motivations are anything but. The inventor claims to want revenge against the businessman over a decades-old romantic rivalry, but the rebellion his robot incites among the workers is exactly what the businessman wants, to the point that one middle manager is explicitly ordered to let rioting workers destroy the most important machine that keeps the city functioning. The disaster that ensues only lands for the businessman when he's told that his son is in the factory. And yet, somehow, the boss and the workers end up spontaneously willing to listen to each other, in a painfully saccharine scene that lingers for too long.

It is a testament to the movie's artistry that it became a must in any film studies curriculum despite being known primarily in mistranslation. It's hard for a shamelessly sanitized script to detract from the power of these images—the miniature sets depicting the shining city of the future; the iconic accident scene where a wall of machinery is transmuted into a demonic face that devours people; the no less iconic dance scene where the robotic impostor in womanly guise demonstrates its ability to enchant men; the frantic choreography of workers attached to buttons and levers; the secret tunnels buried beneath the city; the imposing architecture that feels oppressive just by looking at it. Even when depicting actions that on paper sound banal and boring, there is no scene that doesn't have a superabundance of emotion. Watching these actors shake and jump all over the screen has an oddly mesmerizing effect that took me by surprise. It's a happy marriage of medium and style.

And then there's the bonus satisfaction of identifying the elements of Metropolis that begat prosperous descendants across the 20th century: the robot design that looks like a great-grandmother to C3PO; the inventor's laboratory that helped codify the aesthetic conventions of mad science; the urban geometry that haunts the night in Batman: The Animated Series; the impostor wearing a human skin like one of Skynet's creations. I felt like I was participating in a reverential pilgrimage to the birthplace of my idols.

Only in one regard will I agree with Mr. Wells's otherwise narrow-minded criticism of Metropolis:

The film’s air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan

A beautifully structured story of duality and Jewish-flavoured mythology

Jews in Inquisition-era Spain are having a bit of a moment this week. Roseanna's review of Leigh Bardugo's The Familiar gave a nice mention to Ariel Kaplan's new book, The Pomegranate Gate, and it gives me great pleasure to flesh out what worked so nicely about it.

Perpetual persecution, expulsion, and pogroms mean that your typical Sephardic Jew in, say, 16th-century Spain can never fully relax. One such person, young Toba Peres, has been raised with this wariness her whole life. Her grandparents, scholars, live in a house full of books, and in her youth she learns geography by poring over maps, while her grandmother plays a game with her, a game that is not a game at all: ‘Of course, we are safe—but if you had to flee, where would you go?’

Naftaly Cresques is the son of a tailor but not terribly good at his inherited profession. Instead, he has inherited a different skill from his father: the ability to travel in dreams. He’ll see his father in his dreams, along with strange people whose pupils are square like goats’ rather than round. His father never speaks to him of their shared adventures, but one night, when some upheaval roils the city of Naftaly’s dreams, he wakes and goes downstairs, where his father tells him, ‘Do not go back to sleep tonight.’

From these two starting incidents, the entire structure of the book is laid out with exquisite skill. The overarching principle at play here is duality and crossover. Toba introduces us to the historical world, of 16th-century Jews facing expulsion from Spain, while Naftaly’s dreams introduce us to a parallel world, occupied by square-pupiled Maziks, types of demons mentioned in the Talmud briefly, but in Kaplan’s imagining fleshed out into a combination of djinn and fae. They are poisoned by salt, bound by their promises and their names, fundamentally reliant on magic to exist. The human and Mazik worlds are intertwined and mirror each other in nebulous ways: the upheaval of the expulsion of the Jews is reflected in a political power struggle in the world of the Maziks, and in the chaos of flight, Toba and Naftaly become separated from the rest of their friends, forming the two poles around which the rest of the plot is built. Following the theme of crossover, Toba stumbles into the world of the Maziks, while Naftaly joins forces with an old woman who refuses to give her name, and must make his way through mortal Spain on his wits. Yet Naftaly continues to visit Maziks in his dreams (and one specific Mazik in particular, if you understand my waggling eyebrows), because, as the Mazik world mirrors the human world, the dream world of the Maziks visits their own world.

This theme of duality and crossover is everywhere. Toba and Naftaly are a pair whose adventures remain mostly separate, but occasionally intersect. The human and Mazik worlds are mostly isolated, but join at the full moon.  At one point, Toba splits into two versions of herself, which share some degree of knowledge and perception about the world but rapidly diverge into two separate characters, Toba and Toba Bet. Even the smallest details of magic are flavored by this unstable, linked duality. Naftaly, in learning to transform cloth into gold, learns that linen will hold the transformation but wool will revert more quickly. Linen paired with wool, fabric paired with gold, transformation and reversion—it’s all part of the broader structure.

Although Kaplan’s research in describing the people and cities and neighbourhoods and politics of 16th-century Spain and Portugal shows clearly, I found myself more engaged with learning about the world of the Maziks. Possibly this is because human history is fixed, while our small band of heroes has a hope of changing things more substantially with the Maziks. And change is needed there: The realm’s political turmoil can be traced back to a catastrophe which swamped the city of Luz beneath the poisonous salt ocean. Luz was also home to the ruling monarch of the whole world, and the ensuing power struggle has led to an unfortunate series of coups, assassins, and lost heirs whose status as next in line is inconveniently manifested by marks on their bodies as each predecessor is assassinated. Things get very lively. There is a certain degree of dismemberment.

Things also get very confusing in places. The reader is well advised to keep an eye on the glossary, as the names of secret societies and political movements do have a habit of being introduced as mysterious allusions, and then referred to later as accepted fact. Somehow the narrative keeps skipping over the bit where they are properly defined. And, since this is the first book in a trilogy, many plot elements are introduced without being resolved. Those secret societies are surely not completely disbanded. Their secret studies that were maybe responsible for the destruction of Luz are surely not completely abandoned. And it cannot be trivial that the old woman who joins Naftaly in his plot arc is never given a name, and is ‘the old woman’ throughout the entire narrative. In a world where knowing someone’s true name binds them to you in a very fae-like manner, the old woman’s reticence about her identity is definitely going to come back in some important way.

I have already had the pleasure of obtaining from Netgalley the second book in this series, The Republic of Salt, which develops some of these plot elements in extremely pleasing ways. But it still plays its cards close to its chest with respect to the old woman’s identity. I have suspicions, though! I can’t wait to see if they’re correct when the third book is released.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention

• Elegantly structured plot
  
• Jewish-norm characters
  
• Binding promises

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Reference:  Kaplan, Ariel. The Pomegranate Gate [Rebellion Publishing, 2023].

Double Feature: What's with all the imaginary friends?

There's a menacing whiff of unprocessed nostalgia in the Zeitgeist

Let's see: during a period of heavy stress and existential uncertainty, a girl who is still not done grieving her late mother meets a being from the realm of prerational imagery, one that is invisible to most people. Said being isn't happy about having once been a precious imaginary friend and then discarded. Fortunately, the girl is so lonely, what with her unstructured schedule and her less-than-consistent father figure, that she'll eagerly listen to its problems and stray far from her comfort zone to help it avoid a fate of eternal oblivion. In the process, she'll visit the land where imaginary friends live and learn the importance of balancing her burgeoning maturation with her whimsical creativity. She completes her arc by saying goodbye to her imaginary friend, but some part of it will always linger at the edge of other children's consciousness.

It's very interesting that 2024 has given us not only two separate movies with this same plot, but two radically different ways to do so: the monster horror film Imaginary, directed by Jeff Wadlow, and the family comedy film IF, directed by John Krasinski. In Imaginary, the creature's reaction to having been forgotten is a lifelong scheme of revenge; in IF, former imaginary friends resort instead to sad resignation and the occasional false hope. In both movies, the execution is messy and without impact. There is much a movie about good old memories could say about our volatile cultural moment, but the opportunity is wasted with lamentable laziness.

Interest in nostalgia comes and goes in waves. Just a few years ago, we had the Christopher Robin movie, which basically replayed the Hook formula. But this era is different. Remember the Netflix film Slumberland, which was nominally about another girl taking refuge in fantasy to cope with a parent's death, but ended up being about an adult's need to reconnect with his inner child. Imaginary and IF grapple with the same shared malaise: an overwhelmed generation's yearning to be tucked into bed, preferably with a light left on.

It's hard to blame them. Every day something shows up in the news that makes us recite, as a mutually validating mantra, "I don't like this timeline." This moment in history is laden with the widespread suspicion that at some point the writers of the show lost the plot and sent us down the wrong road. When did it all go to hell? Was it the pandemic? Was it Trumpism? Was it when Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, David Bowie, Anton Yelchin and Prince all died in the same year? Was it 9/11? Was it Reagan? Was it Nixon? Every living generation can name a key event when history got derailed and nothing has been right since, and now we've reached a saturation state where you only need to *gesture at everything* to describe the multidimensional trainwreck we're living through. So it's understandable that the art produced in our time is intensely backward-looking. This is not only reflected in the obvious nostalgia of remakes and reboots, but even in original stories, like Imaginary and IF, where the core conflict hinges on resolving our relationship with the soothing fantasies we grew up with.

However, the focus on imaginary friends weakens the message somewhat. As an element of Western culture, imaginary friends are rather recent; not enough generations have gone by to solidify these creatures' place in our collective mythology. The creation of an imaginary friend is a process that emerges in response to a need in the child; it's bizarre to ask us to think about the needs of the imaginary friend. Such an approach resembles the enthusiasm in paranormal circles about tulpas, a notion that the West appropriated from Tibetan Buddhism in a very distorted form. Psychological research has found that Western people involved in tulpa creation do so mostly as a way of coping with loneliness and anxiety. Whether or not self-declared tulpamancers are really producing anything distinct from themselves, what can't be disputed is that the subjective experience of believing that they've created a tulpa gives them forms of emotional and relational wellbeing that the rest of us associate with sustaining a close friendship. We're so fundamentally social animals that we'll resort to the most drastic of survival tactics to resist social atomization.

Depending on what generation you're part of, your introduction to the idea that imaginary friends have inner lives and thus deserve moral consideration may have come from the TV show Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends or from the movie Inside Out. Both stories connect the regrettable tragedy of abandoning an imaginary friend with the universal necessity of growing up. This is in line with prevailing Western attitudes toward childhood as a sort of primordial golden age we're eventually expelled from. We can idealize childhood to such an extent that maturation may feel like a tradeoff, with the privileges of adulthood coming at the cost of losing something equally precious. Much like the collective sense that human history took a wrong turn, we may also personally reach the conclusion that growing up wasn't all that good an idea.

The final step of this cultural evolution is the switch from "adulting is a scam" to "therefore, we should not leave childhood." And that's how we end up with a generation (and a mode of storytelling) that can't let go of nostalgia, because the idea of the future is just too scary. Imaginary warns that our childhood resents the passage of time and may resurface without warning to claim possession of us; IF asks why we should have to pay any heed to time at all. Notably, the unstated longing for a dead mother haunts both stories. (In Imaginary, this symbolic element is reaffirmed through the selection of characters who team up to rescue the little girl: a babysitter, an older sister, and a stepmother—the archetypal mother substitutes).

Our disappointment with adulthood thus creates an expectation of disappointment: since today's adults can't shake the suspicion that they grew up wrong, we're anxious that today's children will grow up wrong, and we don't know how to deal with what seems inevitable. We hurry to awkwardly apologize in advance for the horrible world the next generation will meet, but we're also frantically making work of art after work of art that teaches them to look back and find solace in the way things used to be.

This is the clue that explains this peculiar breed of nostalgia: the certainty that the future will judge us. We tell these oversentimental stories about fantasy creatures who fear being left behind, but we're the ones who fear being left behind. We're the ones who dread that the next adults will move on from us before we could finish figuring out what adulthood was. And the unbearable thought of the irreversible has found a creative escape valve in another trend of today's speculative fiction: the secret time-traveling organization that has to reverse the end of the world a dozen times every day. But that's a topic for another essay.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.