We’re Just A Bunch of Wild Animals

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.

“Machines That Help Us Stay Human”

TED‘s website is one of those places I only visit when I have a free Sunday afternoon or a few hours before bed. I start with just one video and end up watching nine or ten. Considering I enjoy this as much as I enjoy this (what’s bizarre is the former video explains why I enjoy both videos), you can see where the time goes.

The above video is of Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense technology, which he invented and developed while working with the MIT Media Lab. At the very end of this presentation, the host tells Mistry “You’re among the top two or three inventors currently working today.” I couldn’t agree more. His work in augmented reality is both ingeniously simple and mindbogglingly complex. That he is using off the shelf parts and making the software open source adds a level of practicality and humility to his work that makes it almost too good to be true. It’s all very inspiring and exciting.

What caught me, however, came at the end of Mistry’s speech and demonstration. He said part of his goal was to keep humans from becoming a machine attached to a machine. He wanted to design “machines that help us stay human.” Just after Mistry’s video, I happened to watch Kevin Kelly‘s piece on how technology evolves. Kelly offered definitions of technology that were wonderfully sideways in pointing out how fluid the term really is, including “technology is what was invented after you were born.” I’d like to add Mistry’s “Machines that help us stay human” to that list of definitions. The more repetitive, mundane, and tedious, the less creative, invigorating, and vivifying a process, the more dehumanizing it is. Bartleby, though he might not say it, I think would tend to agree. It’s a shame that his creator, Melville, didn’t live to see the scriveners liberated by carbon paper, typewriters, photocopiers and digital media. The more a needed process makes a person seem like a machine, the more likely it is, I would argue, that a machine will be invented to liberate the human from that process.

Copying a document by hand is a horrendous process. The only time I write by hand is when taking notes for class, and that’s because my notes are jammed with doodles, my own thoughts, spurious information, and are formatted in such a way that I can review with enjoyment and easily remember the lecture. If note taking during a lecture were merely a mechanical dictation of the professor’s words, I would use a voice recorder and voice-to-text translation software for my later perusal. But it’s not, and the benefits of a pencil and paper are, in my opinion, still unparalleled for the specific task of note taking. I find writing by hand in any other situation tedious and frustrating. I’m thankful that machine-assisted writing, by keyboard and word processing software, exists. It lets me write at a speed closer to that at which I think and in a cleaner, more orderly fashion. I also don’t have to worry about running out of eraser or pencil lead. If I want someone to have a copy of what I write, I can email it or print it or publish it to my blog. When dehumanizing jobs are made obsolete by machines, there is a net-gain for humanity. Machines are a means of creating freedom.

The recognition of the freedom inherent in technology, in the humanizing value that comes from outsourcing a dehumanizng behavior to a machine, is at the center of both Mistry’s design and end goal with Sixth Sense. He and his team are trying to take the tedious aspect of technology – the proprietary and inefficient interface – out of the equation. By doing so, he is removing the most recent dehumanizing aspect of technology: a line full of people staring down at their smartphones, typing away furiously and awkwardly with their thumbs. One of the driving engines behind innovation and technology (among many, such as profit, beneficence, and curiosity), as exemplified by Mistry’s work, is the desire to be more human.

Humans use technology to become more human.

Give Thanks

via Flickr: The Commons

I’m of the opinion that every major American holiday, if not just every holiday, is on some level a ritualistic celebration designed to disguise indulging in vice. Fourth of July is pride, Christmas avarice, Valentine’s Day is lust, and Thanksgiving is, of course, gluttony.

The counterpoint is that while enjoying these vices, we tend to be able to reflect on the best of humanity and the best of what’s in our lives. Every stupid movie about a particular holiday (except for Halloween movies, but just bear with me) is about the stress and crap of normal life that all suddenly gets washed away when some cutesy moment occurs and everyone realizes life ain’t so bad after all and we’re all pretty lucky.

In that spirit, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of stuff for which I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the internet, especially Amazon and Google and JSTOR and BitTorrent and Hulu. I’m thankful for cellphones and email and Twitter. I’m thankful for transcontinental flights and ATMs and Lonely Planet guides and the internal combustion engine. I’m thankful for the printing press and the Renaissance and translation scholars.

When I looked back over the list I made, I realized I was thankful for things that connected me to other people. The greatest technologies are the ones that let me spend more time with the people who make my life better. I’m thankful I can live in New York City and fly to my parent’s house in four hours. I’m thankful I can have friends around the country and on the other side of the planet and casually chat with them the same way I did when they were one dorm building away. I’m thankful I can coordinate drinks with a friend in the time it takes the N train to cross the Manhattan Bridge. I’m thankful I can read the best authors from around the world and throughout history with footnotes from the best scholars in my native language.

I am thankful that humanity’s most impressive creations are not weapons of war but technologies that bring us together.