Not once in the whole film do we meet people who have successfully paid for their new organ and are living happily after what should have been a fatal accident. Not once do we see the impact of the enhancements Beth has, [...]]]> My take on the film is up on hplus magazine. A snippet:

Not once in the whole film do we meet people who have successfully paid for their new organ and are living happily after what should have been a fatal accident. Not once do we see the impact of the enhancements Beth has, like telescopic vision and super hearing, on the world at large. Repo Men is set in a transhumanist world. There is a guy with a lifelike robotic arm and a “neural net” simulation system — not to mention the proliferation of artificial xenotransplants. Yet over and over the film hammers home the message that transhumanist technologies are not just dangerous, but that they will never be a part of you.

via io9

The Kingdom of Nerd is divided on the issue of The Matrix and its sequels. Some find all three overrated, some love the first film but hate the garbage that came after, and some, like me, find the whole corpus fascinating. Among the extended works, The Animatrix is perhaps the most interesting, and [...]]]>

The Kingdom of Nerd is divided on the issue of The Matrix and its sequels. Some find all three overrated, some love the first film but hate the garbage that came after, and some, like me, find the whole corpus fascinating. Among the extended works, The Animatrix is perhaps the most interesting, and of it, the chapter “The Second Renaissance.” Set up as a crash course in the history of mankind’s relationship with the machines, the two parts create a mirrored story arc that reflects upon our inhumanity to our own creations.

In short, “The Second Renaissance” explains the creation of robotics and strong A.I. and its integration into human society. The robots are slaves, but are unquestioning, until one robot kills its owners out of fear of being scrapped. The result is an excision of the machines from human civilization and the creation of their own city, 01. 01 is productive and contributes greatly to the world, but is feared and denied access to the U.N. After the machines show signs of rebellion, the U.N. decides to scorch the sky, removing solar power. Undeterred, the machines war against humanity and are victorious, and the matrix is born out of a need to control those humans kept alive as energy.

The central theme of “The Second Renaissance” is that the machines were not inherently evil and, in every case, were acting in self-defense. It was human bigotry against machines, devaluing them as an intelligence and as persons, that caused the resulting conflict. The matrix itself is ultimately not their creation, but our own, a prison built of our own ignorance and fear.

[The Second Renaissance Part I]

[The Second Renaissance Part II]

Ok, so it doesn’t look Blade Runner good, but it does at least look Equilibrium good.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is one of those rare pop culture phenomenons that is a joy at every level – from visceral pleasure to [...]]]> Note: This post may seem like it has nothing to do with transhumanism. It might be a bit self-indulgent, but I assure you, it will be proven thematically appropriate.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is one of those rare pop culture phenomenons that is a joy at every level – from visceral pleasure to intellectual challenge. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are, on their own, both great movies – plot holes be damned. Great atmosphere, lots of explosions, expertly wrought villains, and generally well acted, there is very little to not like. More impressive, however, is Nolan’s development of Batman himself. By looking carefully at the first two films, I think I can make a reasonable guess as to what the third movie will be about.

Nolan is interested in Symbols. Twice in Batman Begins, Nolan has his characters state it explicitly:

Ducard: If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely.

Bruce Wayne: Which is?

Ducard: A legend, Mister Wayne.

and

Bruce Wayne: People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored, I can be destroyed. But as a symbol … as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

For Nolan, symbols are a way of manipulating very powerful, elemental ideas. In Batman Begins the elemental idea is that of fear. Bruce Wayne is afraid of bats, Thomas Wayne’s last words are “don’t be afraid,”  Bruce Wayne seeks ” … the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful,” and Scarecrow and Ducard try to destroy the city with fear toxins in the water. Astonishingly, despite the fact that it is Ducard who teaches Wayne to appreciate the power of legend, it is Wayne who actually masters the concept. Both Wayne and Ducard (and Falcone and Crane) are attempting to manipulate fear, but it is Wayne who distills, atomizes, and perfects it in the form of Batman, who is able to use it best. The most powerful symbol, the bat, is able to leverage the power of fear to achieve its wielder’s goals: salvation for Gotham.

In the second film, The Dark Knight Nolan shifts the focus from multiple symbols wrestling over a single idea to two perfect symbols, Batman and the Joker, living out the clash between the ideas of which they are avatars: Order and Chaos. The Joker seems to come from no where and his back story is as confused as those trying to guess his next move. Even better, Nolan personifies the duality of the two symbols within a single individual: Harvey Dent as Two-Face. Dent as Two-Face is also indicative of what Wayne must be – split in half between Bruce Wayne, playboy billionaire, and Batman, the dark knight. Like Dent, Batman is forced to test his commitment to not just order but the rule of law. By not killing Joker, and by trying to turn things over to Dent, he chooses law over vengeance. The Dark Knight is about Batman’s embodiment of Law and Order.

The first film deals with Fear, the second Law and Order vs Chaos. The enemies and other characters represent pieces or counter-points to Batman. Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon are the by-the-books answer to his vigilante while Alfred and Lucius are the smiling wisdom to his grimacing ideology. Ducard/Scarecrow used fear for destruction and control, the Joker embraced and created chaos; they opposed Batman directly, both times nearly destroying him. So what let Batman prevail? Why could he overcome? I believe the third film will answer that question through Catwoman.

The rumors are that the next film will feature Selena Kyle – that is, Catwoman – heavily. Catwoman is one of those characters that is almost always underdeveloped and misunderstood. Like the Joker, I suspect Nolan will not draw from any specific storyline, but will instead build the plot around a perfect distillation of Catwoman. Allow me to attempt a brief summary of what that might look like.

Selena Kyle/Catwoman is another perfect counter-symbol to Batman. The similarities are overwhelming: successful, powerful secret identities; supreme intelligence; ninja stealth; love of night and darkness; physical prowess; affinity for technology; strong codes of self-governance (neither kills); even their names are similar and their costumes look nearly identical. Batman stands for the greater good, law and order, and clarity of purpose. Catwoman stands for herself, ethics within context, loopholes and spontaneity, and a gray morality. They are the ying-and-yang of what is good in Gotham.

With that in mind, here is how I see the plot. Early on, a small heist occurs, Batman meets Catwoman and her acting in cahoots with some other villain. Villain is captured, she escapes. Soon there after, Bruce Wayne meets Selena Kyle, both unaware of their double lives, and they fall for one another. Batman will get wind of information about one of the other villains (perhaps many of them) planning an epic heist. As Batman gets closer to uncovering the plans, he falls more and more for Selena, making him want to be Bruce Wayne more. At the mid-point of the film the heist occurs, and some sort of insane plot twist reveals Catwoman has been playing Batman, the police, and the villain cabal for fools, and completes the heist. In the process, Batman discovers Catwoman is Selena.

The test for Batman will come for our hero not just in choosing Gotham over his personal desire for Selena, but in committing to Batman over Bruce Wayne. The fundamental split between the two personalities is something I think Nolan was already hinting at with Dent/Two-Face. Bruce Wayne has been evolving, but Nolan has always kept him visibly fake. The most real Wayne we saw was his speech about Harvey Dent. I believe Nolan is ready to force Wayne into being more than a facade through his love of Selena Kyle. And by forcing Wayne to live as Wayne, particularly in a world hostile to Batman, he will be confronted with the ultimate crisis of self.

The reason Batman succeeded in the first two films was his commitment to the symbol and to Gotham. What happens to that commitment when it is made nearly impossible? Torn between loving Selena Kyle and getting Catwoman, being Bruce Wayne and Batman, himself and Gotham, the final Batman film will be about the test of living with a dual identity. Rachael Dawes and Harvey Dent were both left in the wreckage of Batman’s wake, the question Nolan will ask is: will Bruce Wayne, will Batman’s humanity itself, suffer the same fate?

I cannot wait to find out. Also: explosions and batarangs.

James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, [...]]]>

James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, left out one problem with the film that drove me crazy: the sentient ecology of Pandora. Spoilers follow.

Both Dvorsky and Anders briefly mention this curious aspect of the Pandora ecology:

Dvorsky – Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gaianist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na’vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet.

Anders – The Na’Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they’re good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

Early on in the very long Avatar, we are given clues that everything on Pandora is literally connected. All the animals possess neural connection jacks (appendages that end in tiny, tentacle-like exposed nerve endings) that allow Na’vi to mentally command their mounts, effectively domesticating a creature in a matter of seconds. The plant life is shown to have similar properties, both by the actions of the Na’vi (who connect their exposed dendrites to dangling vines) and by the observations of human scientists. The human scientists, lead by Dr. Grace “Sigourney Weaver” Augustine, suspect that all the plant life on Pandora is connected the way neurons in the brain are connected, with certain trees acting as ganglion or memory banks. Over the course of the film, we are confronted with the possibility that the flora is involved in a kind of biological cloud-computing.

If the system were merely passive, something the Na’vi were taking advantage of, Cameron’s neglect his own ecological neurology concept would be forgivable. But it isn’t. Pandora is possessed by a spirit, Eywa, that exists within this planetary network. Grace, before her death, acknowledges the reality of Eywa. Furthermore, Eywa demonstrates some form of active decision making, in that she must be asked to defend herself at the behest of the Na’vi and then answers that request in the form of total ecological rebellion against the human incursion. So not only is Pandora a planet-wide neural network, it is also, apparently sentient.

This thing is called a "Hammerhead Titanothere"

And yet the biggest payoffs we get from a sentient planet in the film are hammer-headed rhinos bashing through exo-suits (an admittedly awesome payoff) and a mind-transfer from paraplegic human body to lithe, Na’vi body for Jake Sully. I am aware of how cool those two things are, but when they are done by a sentient planet with an external, independent (?) biosphere, one begins to realize things are able to get way more awesome than hammer-headed forest rhinos fighting robots (I can’t believe I wrote that).

Imagine the following: halfway through Avatar, Dr. Grace Augustine and her forgettable team of boffin-stereotypes discover that just as the plants on Pandora exhibit features similar to a nervous system, the animal life exhibit features similar to an immune system. Perhaps they discover that, in one of the Pandoran creatures, the immune system works not by identifying and destroying the invading disease, like a human’s; instead a Pandoran immune system captures and reprograms individual disease agents and turns them into double-agents. Just a few double agents weaken the disease sufficiently to allow the immune system to obliterate it. No antibodies, but a few conversion agents get the job done. Instead of a disease giving a creature an auto-immune disorder, the creature’s immune system gives the disease an auto-pathogenic disorder. Extrapolate that to the Na’vi and their benevolent acceptance of just a few humans into the fold. What if Jake Sully’s entire magical conversion experience was really an immune response from Pandora itself?

And that’s only one crazy idea I came up with just now. How a sentient ecological system would respond to an invading species or what kind of thoughts it would think are questions that I wanted Avatar to ask, but it didn’t. My only consolation is that James Cameron is definitely going to make a sequel and when he made a sequel to Terminator, it was better than the original in almost every way. Keep your fingers crossed for Avatar 2: The Eye of Eywa.

Keeping both Annalee and George in mind.

I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox last Thursday. It is easily my favorite Wes Anderson movie and my favorite Roald Dahl adaptation, making it a double threat. The animation is beautiful, the humor is spot on, Anderson’s strange sentimentality is drawn out nicely and the voice acting is superb. Mr. Fox has a good [...]]]>

I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox last Thursday. It is easily my favorite Wes Anderson movie and my favorite Roald Dahl adaptation, making it a double threat. The animation is beautiful, the humor is spot on, Anderson’s strange sentimentality is drawn out nicely and the voice acting is superb. Mr. Fox has a good surface message – we’re all a bit *hand wave* different and insecure in our own ways – and is weird and dark enough to make it a classic. And like all great kids’ movies it has a deeper, more subversive message. Spoilers ahead.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is about the process of civilization and self-domestication. All of the main characters – save the evil triumvirate of Boggis, Bunce and Bean – are animals that have adapted to living in the world of humans. Foxes, badgers, beavers, rats, rabbits, and opossums are urban and suburban creatures. They live along side people and have adapted to eating what we produce and living in buildings we build. They’ve also picked up our neuroses and ennui.

The journey of the Fox family is not a hard-and-fast allegory for any particular arc, but the core symbolic movement of Mr. Fox involves the movement from a hole in the ground, to a home in a tree, to a sewer system beneath a supermarket. Echoes of poverty to wealth, rural to urban, and scarcity to abundance come with the trajectory, but I don’t think any one of those themes is the specific focus. Instead, we come to see Mr. Fox suffer a midlife crisis that threatens the whole community.

The vibe of Mr. Fox is intentionally jarring. Badger, the lawyer, wears a lovely pinstripe suit and advises Mr. Fox to not move into the tree which, though much nicer than his current hole, is in a “bad neighborhood.” The creatures of the film are overly civilized most of the time and weirdly self-aware (knowing their own scientific names, having droll debates that turn into circling snarl fests), yet will occasionally behave as if they are actually just  animals (carrying a chicken in jaws, gobbling food). The breaks in civility are highlighted by both the contrast with the animals’ own actions and in their perception by human beings. That Boggis, Bunce, and Bean try to hold Kristofferson hostage and send a magazine-letter note to get to Mr. Fox is perhaps one of the most bizarre suspensions of disbelief the film asks us to make. We are forced to see the animals as instinctual creatures, as having a parallel culture to humans, and as existing within human civilization.

While the most wild animal moments are contrasted against the humans of Mr. Fox, the most civilized moment is contrasted against the only “wild” animal in the film: a lone, black wolf. Throughout the film, Mr. Fox’s fear of wolves is emphasized. It isn’t a natural wariness as one would expect from a fox, but a phobia: an irrational terror. The normally smooth and poised Fox loses his composure every time Kylie, the simple but loyal opossum, accidentally brings up the topic. The scene with the wolf occurs with both the city and the mountains in sight. The wolf is majestic, resolute, and unbound by language. It serves as a reminder that foxes once were wild creatures but that now they are not: they are urban fauna.

The final point that The Fantastic Mr. Fox seems to be making  is that all of these parts of our personalities – the inner animal, the civilized social self, the rule-breaking survivor, and the concerned family member – are all our real selves. To give ourselves too much to any aspect leads to a neglect of the others and a sense of internal disunity. But really, I’m not sure if there is  a moral or a point to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I came away from it thinking about how we are the summation of our lives, yet also only what we are at any given moment and that we’re all “different,” whatever that means.

It’s a lovely film. Go see it.