The Pnictogen Wing

To quote Crow T. Robot: "And a proud noble civilization dies out...sometimes. This loser civilization, however, will not be missed!"

I can scarcely be alone in thinking that Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space is a fun movie to watch, not just because it's ineptly made. the film does have some approximation to a genuinely engaging sci-fi, alien-visitation narrative. you can sort of imagine "The Twilight Zone" taking a swing at polishing up the more serious parts of Ed Wood's script and making a decent episode from it.

they'd probably have to ditch the "resurrection of the dead" angle. the aliens don't seem to get a heck of a lot of use from the tiny handful of corpses they resurrect. maybe they should have gone with Plan Eight.

there's no heroes in Plan 9, except maybe for Bunny Breckinridge. the aliens are clumsy authoritarians, and Dudley Manlove's Eros (gawd what a phrase to type) is a petulant bully. sure he says he's trying to save the Universe from "the solarbenite bomb" that he's convinced Earth is about to invent—btw let's be honest here, if some tech CEO thought there was even the tiniest chance of figuring out how to explode sunlight, they'd be working on it right now. but that seems like a convenient pretext for an invasion they're already keen on. but on the other side you've got the humans: a handful of blundering cops, army officers, and Gregory Walcott as an airline pilot and ex-Marine who deals with alien "first contact" by punching the aliens in the face. the brutish, bellicose humans "win" against the bungling alien conquerors, but it scarcely feels like a victory; one gets the sense that Earth isn't exactly worth the trouble of sending a competent alien invader.

one of the most astonishing throwaway lines is a famously stilted one: "Then they attacked a town. A small town, I'll admit, but nevertheless a town of people, people who died." So the aliens actually wiped out a town—and the "higher echelons" suppressed the news! there are so many different flying-saucer incidents mentioned in Plan 9, by the way, as to give the impression that Earth is subjected to a constant rain of saucer visitations.

would that it were true, huh? I went through a period of curiosity about UFOs in my youth, and wishful thinking about the possible frequency of alien visitations, but these days it's difficult to be anything but sceptical. there's so many eyes and cameras pointed skyward at all times these days; we track "near Earth objects" that are mere meters across. it's tough to imagine any significantly-sized alien vessel slipping through that sort of surveillance. oh, you can always postulate sufficiently advanced technology—cloaked ships, maybe, or extradimensional travel. but that's not far different from invoking a miracle.

well, perhaps we need a miracle. Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft—we would like to make a contact with you. baby.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Confessional moods are coming upon me more often; I feel that I've got a lot of sins to own up for (including the sin of excessive preoccupation with the meaning of the word "sin") but I thought I'd start with something easy, something with only a little shame in it. And that's this: there was a span of years, mostly in the mid-1990s, when I thought Stanley Kubrick was the shiznit.

I got better; I watched more movies. For a time, though, it was easy to believe in the idol: Stanley Kubrick, Greatest Filmmaker of All Time, whose films were meticulous and flawlessly constructed realizations of the genius-level intellect of their auteur director. Even ostensible "mistakes" are really clever Kubrickean puzzles that only the smartest of cineastes can hope to understand.

1990s Internet culture was a promising growth medium for the Kubrick cult, which clustered around the Usenet groups alt.fan.kubrick and alt.movies.kubrick for a while before spreading onto the World Wide Web. Internet communities made it very easy to feel happy and fulfilled in such a narrow and limited pursuit as devoting oneself to a small handful of movies from a single film director who hadn't been active for years; you could talk about the same movies over and over again, every day and every week, and still feel like you were getting something new out of that repetitive experience. And for a while, I tried to be part of such a culture. (Then there was my unfortunate Internet infatuation with C. S. Lewis...that's for a different confession.)

These days I don't think so highly of Kubrick. I want more emotional depth and resonance from movies now; the chilly precision and emotional detachment of Kubrick's style now puts me off. There's not enough emotional warmth and depth to distract me from the painstaking artificiality of Kubrick's direction. But I suspect it was just the sort of filmmaking that was likely to appeal to me when I was still trying to make myself behave like a cismale STEM nerd—you could talk about technique with Kubrick, and regard the human players as being like mere props in Kubrick's cynical narratives about human arrogance and human folly.

The lack of emotional complexity to Kubrick's movies made them easier for an unhappy (and maximally dissociated) science geek to talk about. Why discuss how a film made you feel, when you can pretend to be a studious critic of camera angles and symmetrical compositions? Kubrick cult-worship practically invited its fans to speak about films in a bloodless, analytical manner, one that was easy to pass off as "intelligent" and profound, simply because it was pedantic about the minutiae of filmmaking technique. And you could judge all films by the same rule: is this non-Kubrick movie "Kubrickean" enough? "Kubrickean", of course, means "good"; not to be Kubrickean is "bad", for Stanley Kubrick supposedly perfected the art of filmmaking, making it almost like a science, ruled by objectively defined formulae. You know, like chess! And Kubrick was a chess master, too!

(Actor Tony Burton, who appears in one scene of The Shining, reputedly kicked Kubrick's butt over the board, and when I found out about that, I was so happy.)

The idolization of Kubrick as a perfect filmmaker ultimately makes it impossible to critique his movies. The premise is that every single detail of his movies is meticulously chosen and planned, each filmmaking decision a necessary component of Kubrick's grand visions. He's the high-IQ auteur who knows what he's doing; you're only supposed to work out what he meant, not criticize it. Needless to say, this way of regarding Kubrick is tantamount to deification: he's perfect and always right, not merely a god of cinema but a universal philosopher, seeing through everything and everyone. (He especially saw through Stephen King, that hack! at least, that's the Kubrick-fan opinion.)

Anyway! I repent of my former attachment to Kubrick fandom, and I'd love to see his critical reputation take a revisionist turn, i.e. I'd love to see Kubrick's fame take a severe beating.

Does anyone want to talk about just what the everloving fuck he thought he was doing with Lolita?

~Chara of Pnictogen

something astonishing happened to me earlier today: I watched the profoundly problematical M. Night Shyamalan film Glass, one of two films featuring a questionable and gimmicky depiction of DID plurality by James McAvoy—I'd seen the film once before and it was just painful, but this time...I found that I liked the movie. yes, it's still problematical; yes, Shyamalan makes some very poor creative decisions. but the film got my sympathy.

Shyamalan's post-stardom films have a cheap and nasty look about them, but now that seems to me more like the cost of working a "B-movie" sort of career. we don't really have "B-movies" any more because the "double feature" no longer really exists, but Shyamalan now seems to occupy similar territory to a filmmaker like Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher: he's making movies with low budgets and lesser-known actors, putting as much style and messaging as he can into them, and he's at least trying to tell stories with far more emotional rawness then you'll get from a polished top-tier Hollywood film. Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor is an "exploitation" movie about mental illness, much like Shyamalan's Split or Glass, but it's still worth watching.

(Split is maybe more upsetting, though.)

~Chara