Category: film

culture

Roddenberry

JANUARY 4, 2009Public Memorial Service for the Late “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett Roddenberry

Cast Members and Fans Come Out to Celebrate and Remember Roddenberry’s Life

WHO:
Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, son of Gene & Majel Roddenberry and CEO of Roddenberry Productions, will host cast members, family, friends and fans to celebrate the life of his late mother. Fans are invited to come and pay their respects with the family and share their fondest memories of the late Trek icon.

WHAT:
Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry will hold a public memorial service for his late mother. Family, cast members, friends and fans will have an opportunity to remember the legendary “First Lady of Star Trek.” Fans are encouraged to share their favorite memory of Majel from her numerous roles in Star Trek. Expected to attend include members of Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and many others.

WHERE:
Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills
6300 Forest Lawn Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90068

WHEN:
Sunday, January 4, 2009
9:00 a.m. Press Check-in
10:00 a.m. Memorial to start

CONTACT:
Sean Rossall
BWR Public Relations
310.210.7586
srossall@bwr-la.com

The above is the public announcement from BWR Public Relations.

This is not new news that Majel Barret Roddenberry passed away recently after fighting Leukemia.  Like other icons of my youth, the original Star Trek cast and crew are passing on.  We have a new movie about to premier and after four decades of it, Star Trek has gone from movement to myth to parody to cliche and back again.

I liked the idea of Number One, the original “emotionless” crew member of the Enterprise Majel Barret played in the first pilot, The Cage.  (I thought she looked better as a brunette, too.)  I would have liked to see that.  Television history says the studio told Roddenberry to get rid of her because they couldn’t buy the idea of a woman being second in command of a starship.  Perhaps some of them felt it was too close to home, where undoubtedly many of them found themselves in marriages with women who were not only second in command, but often in charge in fact if not name.  But I don’t buy that story.  The studio after all was DesiLu, which was run by a woman (Lucille Ball) who would very well have known better.  Maybe even she decided that the general public wouldn’t buy it, but I would have bet she’d have taken the chance to try it, especially on a “sci-fi show” that no one was supposed to take seriously anyway.

No, what I believe is that no one could buy the idea of an emotionally in-control, intellectually oriented woman who was suppsoed to have more brains than even the captain.  That I believe the studio execs might have balked at.  Maybe if Gene had suggested that she had a thing for the captain, he could have sold it.

But that would have been a cop-out.

Below is an essay I wrote about Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in the wake of Gene’s death.  I believe it bears repeating, if for no other reason than Majel was integral to the ultimate success of what he started.

The world can be a very off-putting place, especially to a kid who can’t seem to catch on to the rules.  Rules are very important.  We’re impressed with that fact from infancy.  If you don’t follow the rules, bad things happen.  If you can’t because you don’t know what they are…well, as the saying goes, ignorance is no excuse: bad things happen.  Not only that, but it’s all your fault.  Something is wrong with you.  Everybody else seems to know the rules, why don’t you?

For that kid—and there are many more such kids than we’re willing to admit—the world is a baffling, often malignant place.  Sometimes stepping outside of it is the only way to start to make sense of it.  Science fiction is very good at enabling that process.  Through the medium of extrapolatory fictions, future worlds, alien vistas, and an implicit faith that things ought to and can make sense, this world can be made less confusing, brought into some perspective that eluded us before, enabling us to cope a little bit better.

Gene Roddenberry was one of the most visible practitioners of this process.  For millions of kids—of all ages, 3 to 83—he was a sensible voice speaking in the midst of chaos.  Now that he is gone we wait to see if his voice will continue its patient plea for reason and optimism, whether he meant anything more than a source of entertainment for the masses and profits for the corporations.

Millions of words have by now been written about Star Trek—what it is, how it evolved, why it works.  The attention it has elicited seems disproportionate for “mere” entertainment.  What was it, after all, but a clever revamping of television westerns in a science fiction guise?  The Frontier (the final one, we are told), the Federation (law and order), and the marshal and his deputies (Kirk, Spock, McCoy).  What was the big deal?  There were other sf series that never came close to having the impact Star Trek did.  We had Lost In Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Invaders—many of them had longer runs than Star Trek, but not one of them produced the cultural impact Roddenberry’s little “wagon train to the stars” achieved.  Why?

Among the thousands of different reasons, all of which came together in the years since the series aired, there are a few important ones, reasons without which the show would have been just another sci-fi series, like all the rest, assigned to the trash heap of discarded images from our pasts.
Roddenberry designed his show for adults.  Regardless how individual episodes came across, there was an underlying maturity to the concept that came across even through the most turgidly asinine scripts.  If there is any proof to this, look at the success of the new series.  The basic architecture Roddenberry cobbled together originally has not changed, yet it still supports itself admirably.  In fact it works better in support of the more intellectual scripts.  It worked in the original series, it worked in the films, and it is working in the new show.  None of the other television SF shows were so designed.  All of them were fairly standard Hollywood concepts that targeted the seven year old, even though disguised in formats apparently for adults.  The kids weren’t fooled and the adult audiences, while entertained, found nothing of lasting value.  Star Trek was designed to appeal to the adult in all of us, and Roddenberry did not underestimate the intellect of his audience —of any age.

The universe of Star Trek is a functioning model.  You watch the show, you know without being told that somewhere people are getting up, going to work, building homes, carrying on their lives, all in a world that hangs together with the same kind of cohesion as the one we inhabit.  This is art.  This is a level of communication hard to achieve even in shows set in the here and now.  As a result, the series might well have been set anywhere in the Federation, on any ship, on a station, a world, with any array of characters, and it would have worked.  Watching, you knew that.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy did not comprise the universe of Star Trek, they inhabited it.  Compare that to any of the other sci-fi offerings of Hollywood.  The characters comprised the universe, laws unto themselves, with no connection to a larger universe.  Oh, perhaps a line or two referring to such a universe, but all sense of casuistry was utterly ignored.  Such series offered escapism without rationale, with nothing to believe in.  Empty.

Which leads to one of the most significant aspects of the phenomenon.  One of the hallmarks of a truly fine work of art, especially literature and by extension drama, is its ability to take us out of ourselves and transport us elsewhere in such a way that, while we’re on the ride, we do not question the mode of travel.  This is the escapist quality of stories.  Great art does this without severing the connection with the given world.  In fact great art gives us a new perspective to bring back to this world when we’ve finished the ride.  It enables us to see our world in a way we had not or could not before.  The best science fiction does this in a marvelously unique way.  Star Trek does this.  It is this that sets it apart.

I will not argue that any one episode of Star Trek is great art, although a few might be so described.  Several are quite definitely pretty shoddy.  But as a body of work it achieves the status of great art.

None of this was particularly meaningful to me as a boy watching the first voyages of the Enterprise.  I was eleven when the show premiered.  I had an interest in science fiction, but not a passion.  I was as much enamored of cowboys and soldiers as of spacemen.  I liked the collection of sf series then available, but I also liked the westerns and a couple of police shows and the war series.  I was also a boy scout, I took music lessons, and had various other interests.

I was also one of those kids who had an inordinate amount of difficulty making sense of the world around me.  I didn’t know the rules, I didn’t function well within my peer group.  I suppose you might have described me as awkward.  That’s the term used most often about adolescents who, because of hormonal changes and the subsequent shift of social expectations, clumsily stagger through high school to early adulthood.  But there are many who are awkward because they just don’t know what is expected.  They watch those around them and see the ones who learn the rules and acquire the enviable ability to integrate with their social circle with little or no clumsiness and pain and wonder what secret formula is involved, what set of passwords one evokes, and where to go to learn this arcane data.  They have difficulty socializing.  Some manage anyway, eventually achieving an adeptness at it even though they may not quite understand what is actually going on.  Others never quite get the hang of it, but as they grows up it becomes less and less an issue.  Some never fit in.  During these awkward periods, most of them are loners.  I was one of those.

I didn’t like sports.  I didn’t understand much about cars.  In 1967 I didn’t care much for pop music, including the Beatles.  I had trouble talking to other boys my age, it was impossible to talk to girls.  As a result my social interactions were limited and progressively more difficult to understand.  I also didn’t like school, although I was a bookworm.  While I had friends, they were not close and they as often regarded me as alien, the way I regarded them.
To me this was normal.  Confusion was just something you lived with.  Nothing made sense.  It is very difficult to convey the impact something like Star Trek had on someone like me.  I know I had trouble explaining it to anyone.  But Star Trek took hold of my imagination immediately.  Here was a world that made sense.  Things happened here for reasons and the reasons were discoverable and understandable.  It didn’t matter that it was a fantasy, it was the process that was important.  Star Trek ultimately taught me that the world has a rationale.

No big surprise, that conclusion.  But I wasn’t learning it from any other source, not in a way that made any difference.  Not in a way that suggested the future would be better.

And for many people the entire phenomenon must have appeared utterly bizarre.  I know in my case my father never quite understood.  After one season he had a son who was, for all appearances, a cult convert to a tv show.  I was one of those who went door to door in ’68 with a petition to NBC to forestall its cancellation.  I couldn’t explain it to him any better than I could explain it to my peers.  I didn’t understand it myself.

When Star Trek was cancelled I was in high school.  Other things vied for my attention and Star Trek took a back seat to the balance of my adolescence.
Except…

I went to one of the first Trek conventions in St. Louis.  It wasn’t like the present day ones.  It was a few hours in an auditorium listening to Roddenberry and George Takei speak about the show and about the future and an airing of the uncut pilot, The Cage.  I remember Roddenberry telling us that we were impatient for the future, that we were ready for the 23rd Century Now.  I felt that was true.

When the rumors of a film began circulating I tried my hand at a script.  It even went off in the mail.  I never heard back, but I didn’t know how such things worked then.

When the first movie did come out I stood in line in the cold to see it.
My own writing, while not in the Star Trek mold, has certainly been influenced by it.  I think I would have become a science fiction writer anyway, but probably not the same sort.  Because Roddenberry had done such a good job constructing his universe (stealing from the best), Star Trek taught me some very basic concepts of interconnectedness, taught in a way that provided a key to the understanding of how fiction works as examination of the human condition.

In terms of understanding how the world works, well…I still don’t understand it.  But that’s all right now.  I understand why I don’t, and that’s enough to be at peace with myself at least.  I understand more than I did and I credit the difference in perspective sf provides with enabling me to understand and providing me the tool—my writing—to keep exploring.  Star Trek, as a world, as a concept, as a way of hoping and dreaming and planning, gave me that.
That’s a hell of a gift to give someone.

It seems hard to believe sometimes that the original Star Trek was canceled because it simply didn’t have the ratings.  Yes, the networks killed it.  In these days of cable and Tivo, it’s hard to realize how important time slots were back then.  When they moved the series from Thursday night to Friday night, it was a deathknell.  You couldn’t time-shift your viewing then.  Friday nights, everyone knew, were the nights most people went out to dinner or movies or nightclubs or anywhere.  Friday nights were for dating, not watching SF on tv.

So the year ends with another tall ship being set to sail out into the bay, to be torched from arrows shot by those left behind, a Viking funeral at least in imagination for one of those who gave us a future to believe in.  Over the top?  Maybe.  But we build the worlds we dream.  We should have good dreams.  Majel Barret Roddenberry gave us some.

culture

Seekers and Sowhats

I don’t keep abreast of new television very well.  I’ve drifted into a mental space wherein I’m dimly aware of new things.  I hear about them on the radio or from friends or occasionally I see a notice on a website.  But I’ve long since lost the habit of keeping track.

So when I started hearing about this new fantasy show, Legend of the Seeker, it seems that it was already airing and I’d heard nothing about it beforehand.  I didn’t get much in the way detail from anyone, other than short recommendations (“Oh, you should see it, it’s good!”) or facial expressions that were difficult to interpret.

Normally, as I’ve said before, I can watch fantasy.  Movies and television, whatever, I can sit for an hour or two and suspend my disbelief, and just go with it.  I have a very difficult time reading fantasy.  My idea of really good fantasy is basically material that, if it had a more rigorous grounding in the plausible, would be science fiction, but doesn’t make the cut.  I liked the fantasy of The Twilight Zone (both the original series and the 80s remake).  Ray Bradbury comes to mind as a fantasist I can read.  Or Harlan Ellison.  Occasionally Ursula LeGuin.

In terms of epic, sword & sorcery, thud and blunder stuff, I have no patience.  I very much enjoyed Delany’s Neveryona books, but they were more anti-fantasy.  As was, in its way, China Mieville’s excellent Perdido Street Station.  I enjoyed Hal Duncan’s Vellum though I haven’t yet gone out of my way to read the sequel.  I look at my book shelf and see very little in the way of that sort of fantasy.  Mary Gentle’s terrific Ash saga, Avram Davidson’s Phoenix and the Mirror, Jack Vance’s Lyonesse…

It’s a short and elite list.  I receive this sort of stuff in the mail now to review and I give them a few pages.  You can see it pretty quickly, certain conventions of language and character, setting and conceit, that work their way between the cracks of the words to say “here there be no sense or reason, only action and portent.”

As I say, usually I can watch these sorts of things and just go with it.

I watched most of the premier episode of Legend of the Seeker last week online.  (I can do that now that I have dsl!  It’s cool!)

I say I watched most of the premier.  Did not finish.  Too much predictability.  Too much of it based on stupidity.

Let me just take the opening sequence, which is a chase.  We begin in media res with two women fleeing on horseback.  They are not exactly dressed for this, the one wearing a screamingly white gown that billows around her.  This gown is also a swoop neck affair that shows off her chest quite nicely.  Bridget Regan, playing the part of Kahlin, is nothing if not fetching.  More on that later.  I can forgive the wardrobe malfunction under the assumption that they didn’t have time to change clothes—at least until later, when they tell the story of the fall of their order, and you get the distinct notion that there was time not only to change clothes, but to make a better escape, one less fraught with the possibility of imminent capture.

But back to the chase.  Here are these two women—witches of sorts we learn later, but it is implied by their dress and demeanor—who weigh in at about 115 to 125 pounds, riding two fairly good-size horses.  They are being chased by four men in full medieval-style armor.  Assuming they are the best available, they’ll weigh in between 180 and 220.  Add 30 lbs of armor, a bit more if you include the swords and knives.  Their horses are no bigger.

But they’re catching up.  There’s a sequence of a bowman shooting from horseback at the two women.  Not a bad shot either, but at full gallop any accuracy would be pure luck.  Nevertheless, he hits one square in the back.

The wounded one tries to continue, but ends up falling off her horse, rolling down a hill to a stream bed, there to die after the other one—her sister—abandons her horse to minister to her.  The death scene takes a couple of minutes.  A secret book must be gotten to somewhere else.  Leave me, sister, I’m done for.

Meantime, the four soldiers, who weren’t that damn far behind—close enough, in fact, to hit one of these women with a bow shot—are nowhere to be seen.  Finally they appear at the top of the hill.  Pausing to watch.

Convinced to continue on, the surviving sister picks herself and runs.  And the four men on horseback, who had been catching up, can’t catch her now.

At this point I’m thinking, “oh, this isn’t good.”  Not about Kahlin’s plight, but about the story itself.  This is idiot plotting.

But Kahlin’s an eyefull and worth watching.

There’s a barrier, a mystical field of energy, which Kahlin manages to open with some magic.  She enters the rift and escapes her pursuers.  Who then sit and argue about whether or not to pursue, and then decide to.  Meanwhile this barrier has obligingly remained open, waiting for them to finish their ruminations, and as soon as they enter, it closes up.

How come it didn’t close up immediately after Kahlin entered?

Well, if that happened, then the rest of the show could not proceed along it’s absurd path.

We come now to the Seeker, who is a young fellow who doesn’t even know he’s special.  He was brought as an infant into this country to be raised by a good man and his wife, who had no children then, if the tangled thread of his origin story is to be understood.  They vowed to do their best.

They then had another son, who ends up being the guy in charge of the land.  But while dad tells this son that his brother isn’t really his brother, he doesn’t tell him anything else.

Huh?  Why tell the kid anything?  That would guarantee, of course, that sibling in charge couldn’t be tricked into thinking his brother (not) is evil and to be hunted down in league with the men who had been chasing the witch.  Who has come to find the adopted kid, of course, and the wizard who’d brought him here.

These people act like idiots in very specific and annoying ways.  The action carries the story as long as you don’t think too hard about any of this, but since motivation all hinges on what all these people know or don’t know, it becomes difficult to understand why they did or do what they did or do.  Simple things, like KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT THE KID, HE’S IMPORTANT AND SOME BAD MEN WANT TO KILL HIM.

But furthermore, the faithful brother, who ostensibly grew up with this orphan as a brother, turns on him without too much deliberation on the word of a stranger who had come to this land from somewhere it should have been impossible to come from.  Because of the barrier, you see.  Familial feeling, presented as solid in the one instance, decays almost instantly.  Now the circumstances would seem sufficient, but given all the other idiocies to this point…

I said I would come back to the scoopneck gown.  Yes, yes.  Bridget Regan…she’s the stuff of fantasies (sexual in this case, at least in my case), a real beauty, fiery eyes, graceful, fine skin…and a nice bosom.  Would be a shame to hide that bosom.

Sp when everyone who is supposed to be hooked up for the quest finally is, it’s determined that she needs different clothes.  That white gown would stick out like a bonfire under the right conditions.  Better she wear something that would blend with the forest.  We’re in Robin Hood territory now.  So a friend takes them to his home and they get kitted out.  The wife makes an outfit for Kahlin.  She comes out to show it off.  Very woodlandy, now, long sleeves, leather, green and brown—with a scoopneck front, depending from shoulder tip to shoulder tip.

Everyone else, mail or female, is pretty much covered up to the chin.  Not Kahlin.  Can’t hide that cleavage, now, can we?

At this point I turned it off.  I was turned off.  The Seeker acts like a dunce—he’s been told nothing, but that doesn’t forgive his lack of any common sense.  The wizard doesn’t really want to be bothered with all this and thought he’d ducked it by coming to this land on this side of the barrier.  Silly wizard, he knew all about Destiny, which is what the Seeker is caught up in, and should know better.  Things catch up.  And they do.

There are any number of minor quibbles up to this point, but the major one I have is the rather unsubtle co-option of the religious subtext into a second-rate fantasy plotline.

The Seeker is Richard Cypher.  How clever.  A cypher, a code, as if we didn’t realize that this was pure allegory.  The code here, of course, is that poor Dick is Jesus.  Look at the plotline.  The evil lord Darken-Rahl took over the land where Cypher was born and, because of the prophecy that the Seeker would find him and kill him, he orders every firstborn male child slaughtered.  Jesus/Moses/Richard escapes, grows to manhood, and has to come back to fulfill the prophecy.  He’s the chosen one, the one who can read the cryptic language in the Book of Lost Shadows (cryptic = code = cypher) and can weild the sword of power (of course you knew there’s be a special sword).  Swords are always good stand-ins for the Cross, of course.

Richard’s brother is Michael.  I predict at some point in the series Michael will become Richard’s lieutenant—the archangel, avenger, etc.

Kahlin…intriguing spelling for a name whose roots are apparently from Catherine, which means “pure.”  Hence the white gown?  Her title is Confessor.  Well.  And the men who confess to her fall in love with her.  I’m seeing by circuitous paths a road to Mary here.  Mary Magdalene or the Virgin?  Does it matter?  When she touches a man she is able to make him do her bidding.  (I’m thinking, because of the nature of the effect of her Confessor role, she’s more Magdalene than Mom, but I doubt they’ll push it much past the platonic.)

It gets thicker, of course, but the bottom line is that whole Seeker saga is loosely based on Christian mythology.  No surprise, a lot of fantasy is.  But, as is also the case in much fantasy, it is Christian mythology through the lens of a Crusader, ala King Arthur, Percival, the knights, etc.  This is Jesus with a sword set to actually supplant the king and free the country.  Robust, aggressive Christian allegory, no wimpy sermons or anything like that, and Richard’s John the Baptist (the wizard Zed) kicks ass.

And of course, Darken Rahl is just plain evil, much the way Herod the Great was depicted.  He’s easy to hate.  (Darken Rahl…hmm…Darth Raul?  Would they dare?)

Why am I picking on this little tv show?  Because it is clear that a lot of money has been spent on it.  The acting is pretty good, the sets are nice, the special effects are none too shabby, and some effort was made to establish a story arc that has a lot of symbolic meaning.  Lots of money.  For what is essentially substandard fare.  We are to look at it and be awed.  Kahlin’s marvelous chest is to be ever on display and will probably be ever out of reach, so a degree of ongoing sexual tension will be permanently in place.  Likely as not, she’s a virgin, and probably at risk to lose her powers if she sleeps with a man.  That’s a cheap prediction, but so much else is so derivative in this thing that I’d almost be willing to wager real money on it.  So Richard and Kahlin will travel on, probably collecting a band of followers (merry men?  disciples?) along the way, and never consumate the quite evident desire already between them.

As I said at the beginning, normally I can watch this sort of thing with nary a twitch.  I can find all the flaws later, but when it comes to movies and television I’m a bit of a sucker.  I always turn into a ten-year-old and am willing to be amazed and delighted and generally that happens.  But sometimes it just doesn’t work.  It just gets more irritating, beginning with the essential idiocy of the characters.  It is a plot driven by people who seem incapable of simply asking a straight question.  Information is withheld for no good reason and the consequences are always dire.  Sure they are.  If you don’t tell someone that there’s a hidden pit with spikes at the bottom in the field they want to walk across, well how hard is it to predict their surprise, shock and horror at betrayal when they step in it?

This could have been much better.  They have a lot of talent, obviously, but alas no brains.

Oh, and that magic sword?  Didn’t do Richard a lick of good the first time out.  Is it possible that someone actually has to learn how to do something in this world?  He picked it up and the scrollwork along the blade glowed with promise.  But he lost his first fight, which also cost him the book he was supposed to keep out of Darken Rahl’s hands….

It may also do well.  But I think largely because the audience will care not a whit for anything other than how it looks and the allegorical buttons it pushes.  And after all, Richard has—wait for it!—A Destiny!  There is no way he can (a) get killed or (b) fail.  Really.  He can’t fail.  People in fantasies with destinies don’t.  It’s in the contract.  To agree to have a destiny commits the powers that grant such things to ensuring that, no matter how few brains the recipient of said destiny possesses or how little ability is demonstrated in using what brains exist, the recipient will, somehow, succeed.

A neat twist to this would be to discover that Richard is, in fact, Darken Rahl’s son.  That would be interesting when it comes to the final showdown.  Will junior axe dad?  Or will he “save” him?  Stay tuned.  I can’t wait.

But I won’t watch.  No, not even for Kahlin’s marvelous charms.

culture

Rio Bravo

I had to go to Wal-Mart this past weekend.  I know, I know, big box store, destructive of small town America, yadda-yadda.  I hate them, but once a year we do a Wal-Mart run for all kinds of stuff that, frankly, just ain’t as cheap anywhere else—toilet paper, vitamins, tissue paper, day-to-day Stuff.

Usually I go with Donna.  This time she was in Iowa and I did it solo.

Since I was there anyway, I browsed the big stack of remainder DVDs they always have and I went a little bonkers.  I bought the first season of the original Robin Hood with Richard Greene.  I remember the show as a kid and loved it, so for $5.00, why not?  (A real stitch, too, to see all these young actors who later did so much better—a skinny Leo McKern was a real hoot!)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Shane, The Mask of Zorro… I’m filling gaps sort of.  But I came home and immediately watched Rio Bravo.  You know, the movie got made over at least twice, maybe three times.  The best remake was El Dorado, but the original has something about it that the rest lack.  I loved the soundtrack, the overamplified gunshots, the seriously deficient acting of Rickie Nelson.  It’s a real jumbled mess, you know.  Dean Martin’s performance was the best thing in the film and it’s actually really damn good.  Wayne was, well, John Wayne.

There are two John Wayne movies from back then that I think showcased what the man could actually do.  I think he was such an icon that he really couldn’t be seen as anything else, so some of his performances were seriously underappreciated.  Anyone who thinks the man couldn’t act hasn’t seen The Searchers, which is a very disturbing movie and Wayne played a very disturbed character.  The other one was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Wayne isn’t the main character.  Not quite a supporting role, but definitely part of an ensemble, and it really is a rather convincing, sometimes moving performance.  It’s very much about the waining (pardon the pun) of the macho guy of the West.  His character is tough, independent, building his life competently, laying plans, and being, in the larger scheme of things, a Good Man.  But he loses it all to the educated Easterner who shows up in the guise of Jimmy Stewart carrying a stack of law books.  Both men get a lesson in realities, but where the lesson destroys one, it makes the other, and it is anything but a simple formula western.

(I suppose you could throw Red River in there as well, but then we could go down the list of great Wayne westerns that were just…well, pretty fine, actually.)
Rio Bravo, though, is the pure stuff of early western myth.  It’s formula to the core, but Howard Hawks made it work like a well-tuned V-8.  The photography was terrific and this DVD had restored Technicolor print.  When Technicolor was good it was the best.  There were times, though, when it didn’t work very well, but that was the cinematographers’ fault.  Here it works.

One thing, though—Angie Dickinson.  She got better, but she really wasn’t a very good actress.  Nice to look at though, and she actually held her own against Wayne, but…well, she got better.

Wayne became a target in the Sixties and Seventies for people who were intolerant of any kind of unapologetic patriotism, and he did overdo the flagwaving.  It’s a shame, but it was a war of symbols.  When you talk to people who knew him, the public image was somewhat at odds with the man himself.  I spoke once with George Takei about him.  Takei was in The Green Berets with Wayne and, despite their differences politically, he had nothing but nice things to say about Wayne, who labeled him Captain Sulu from day one.  Takei said the rule on the set was No Politics.  It was a smooth, cordial set, and Wayne was responsible for keeping the latent heat at a manageable level, an impressive feat given the subject of the film and time it was being made.

Wayne avoided military service in WWII because he had a family.  I don’t know exactly how that worked—lots of men with families went—but he somehow made the argument that his presence in films would be more beneficial than his presence on a battlefield.  Depending on how you look at it, he was right.  It raises the question of how authentic one needs to be to espouse patriotic feeling.  Did Waynes later flagwaving require that he make the ultimate sacrifice, or could he be a patriot without needing to wear a uniform?  He put on a television special in the late Sixties about America.  It was a bombastic jeremiad about how wonderful the country is.  He did, however, get a lot of interesting people on it, like Robert Culp, who was very much an anti-war protestor at the time.  Thinking back on it now, I realize that at no point in it did he advocate going to Vietnam.  He never said that to be a Good American one had to put on a uniform and pick up a gun.  He just pushed the idea that the country was worth loving.

His last film, The Shootist, was a sad one.  He went out in a blaze of gunfire, taking out a number of old enemies in one last shoot-out.  It can be read as an unapologetic, last hurrah for the way of the gun.  But it was also an admission that times had changed and he was dying, and the fitting end to his life would be to die as he lived.  A little over the top, that, but in its way bravely tragic.  After seeing it, one could go back over a long body of work to see elements of that tragic admission that this was all over.  And probably just as well.  Nathan rescued Lucy from the Indians, brought her home, and then had to leave.  He didn’t belong anymore.

Wayne was one of the first and for a long time the only Big Name Star who allowed himself to be killed on screen.  I don’t know if that was his idea or if he just accepted it as a necessary part of good storytelling.  But there are many Wayne movies wherein the “hero” must leave, because the violence necessary to resolve the conflict makes him unsuitable for the world he has just made safe.  I think that gets overlooked a lot.  Too much.

career

Appearances Etc

I have been remiss.  I ought to be posting the things I’m doing publicly here (among other places) and it’s been just crazy enough that I keep forgetting to do this.  One of the reasons I need a publicist.  But that will have to wait till I have something new to publicize, like a book coming out or something writerly like that.

Meanwhile, I am doing things folks might be interested in.  So.

October 25th I will be at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, for the Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers Guild annual conference. I will be the keynote speaker, plus I will be conducting a session on making the change from science fiction to historical writing.

On November 8th, the Missouri Center for the Book will be relaunching its annual Celebrations.  Again at Stephens College in Columbia.  There will be a link to the event as soon as it information is up on the web.I will be there with the rest of our board to conduct a day-long conference on Truth and Poetry.

Later in November will be a brand new event the MCB is co-sponsoring, which I am very excited about, with Cinema St. Louis and the St. Louis International Film Festival.

This will be a presentation of the film King of the Hill, which was based on the A.E. Hotchener memoir.  We’ll show the film, then have a panel discussion on the translation of book to film.  The producer will be there, people from the Missouri Historical Society, etc.  Go to the link and scroll down for the details (then view the rest of the SLIFF schedule; this is a very cool festival).  Our date is November 22nd.

Anyway, that’s what is happening relative to my schedule.  Still no word on a new book contract or anything like that, but fingers and toes are crossed (and recrossed) and hopefully something will break soon.

Yesterday was my birthday, a day I normally ignore.  Other people remember it for me, however, so I get reminded that I’ve gone through another year without being rich or famous.  But I am not bored.

culture

Sex, Sin, and Secrets

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since.  Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.

What did I think of the movie?  It was entertaining.  It moved well.  One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones.  The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction.  Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.

I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through.  The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation.  It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least.  I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.

No, it is beyond that.  It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women.  Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.

It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for.  Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.

(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy.  If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)

The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness.  Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.

The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus.  I seriously doubt it was.  I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic.  He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals.  Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!

Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device.  The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests.  If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.

Did they do this consciously?  Some probably knew very well what they were doing.  Most just followed orders.  They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust.  After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating.  It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it.  Nonsense.  Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.

But was it based on Jesus’s teachings?  Likely not.  He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal.  The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.

The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it.  All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving.  To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences.  All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.

I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others.  It’s a lengthy topic.  Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.

What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church.  People are gullible, but stubborn.  It would do no such thing.  People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes.  I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise.  Never happens.  Never will.

At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.

Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other.  The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point.  They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir.  But more importantly, they would have lost their icon.  Their center.  They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.

I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper.  Absurd in many ways, though.  While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture.  The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.  It did not fare well.  Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’  It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci.  The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting.  The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork.  It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive).  If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time.  But who can say?  It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.

I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue.  The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people.  The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness.  Capable of wholeness.  Capable, finally, of love.

culture

The Better Parts of ’07

I’ve seen a number of “Best of 2007” posts here and there, so I thought, after my last, rather depressing, post, I’d put something up about what I really jazzed on in 2007.

Top of the list has to be a few books. What else could you expect?

I didn’t read as much science fiction in 2007 as in the past. A great deal of my time is taken up, more and more, with research for whatever project occupies me, so I’ve spent a lot of hours reading early American history. Among a few favorites, that I would have been glad to have read at any time, are Michael Stephenson’s Patriot Battles; William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion; and Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground. The first and last concern periods during the Revolution, the last two overlap for the period just after.

Patriot Battles is an honest, bare bones look at how the Revolutionary War got fought—the tools, the people, what it cost, the logistics, and the endless headaches. War, apart from its violent aspects, is a massive pain to undertake. Expensive, mind-bogglingly complex, frustrating…why anyone would want to bother with it, just for the bureaucratic aspects, is beyond me. But all wars tend to acquire a gloss of glamour and glory over time, our own most of all, and the Revolution probably eclipses only by WWII in flag-waving hagiographic excess of praise. Stephenson did a brave thing stripping away the myth and examining the actualities. It was valuable to me in the details of battle field mechanics and the parts about quartermastering. Plus, well written and occasionally funny.

The Whiskey Rebellion relates the tale of our nation’s first major act of repression. There are one or two aspects of the economics Hogeland seems to have overlooked (for instance, that Western Pennsylvania was denied actual currency by Congress during this period, which made what Hamilton was doing all the more criminal), but by and large he makes sensible the incomprehensible, namely why George Washington saw fit to send a massive army to Pittsburgh to crush a local rebellion that was founded on exactly the principles of unrepresented taxation he had led his country to war nearly two decades earlier.

The Divided Ground is about the process by which the native American nations got royally and thoroughly screwed by the United States. This is an account of the immediate post Revolution period, and concentrates mainly on the Iroquios Confederation in New York and Pennsylvania, and it is worthwhile perhaps to read this just after another book I very thoroughly enjoyed, which is Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, which deals with the very beginnings of this unfortunate process.

(I have to admit that while I deplore what happened to the American Indian, I do not feel personally responsible for any of it, and I do not think anything could have been done to stop it. Nor do I find it remarkable. The conquest and displacement of people from land goes back to prehistory, I’m sure–the Hebrews tossing the poor Canaanites out of the so-called Promised Land is an early example, amounting to one event in an endless line of neighbor pillaging neighbor. It’s what people do. That’s not an excuse, not forgiveness, not, heaven forbid, vindication. But I tire of people indulging self-castigation over something like this as if it were somehow unique and “we” should be thoroughly ashamed in some special way. Nonsense. We shouldn’t have done it. But then, neither should any group do it to any other group. I—me, myself, alone, in this skin—didn’t do it.)

I spent a good deal of time reading Laurie R. King’s really great Mary Russell novels. The conceit here is simple and radical—Mary Russell meets Sherlock Holmes during his semi retirement, becomes his apprentice, and by the end of the second novel is his wife.

Heresy! you say. But she sells it so well and she is such a good writer, they are an immense joy. There are eight of them so far and I have read all but the last one. I’m saving it till I know a ninth is coming out. Anyone who likes Holmes (who isn’t fanatical about canonical purity) will love these.

I also started an ambitious program of reading Thomas Pynchon. The man was such an influence in 20th Century letters, and the only thing I’d ever read before was Gravity’s Rainbow and that at a time when I really couldn’t comprehend it. That is not to say I comprehend it now, but…

Anyway, I started dutifully with V and continued on through The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and just finished Vineland. I’d thought I might make it through Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, but alas I did not. Those two tomes I’ll deal with this year.

But I have read enough now to know that Pynchon’s entire interest is in conspiracy, the nature and permutation thereof. All his books revolve around layers of intersecting, colliding, cross-purposed conspiracy, both real and imagined. He understands that people have the capacity to sense conspiracy, but usually do not have the equipment to figure out what exactly it is—so, people being what they are, they make something up to satisfy their innate need to understand. The result is a new branching of conspiracy.

What we get is what could be termed “conspiracy of effect”, only far more entertaining than such a mundane concept suggests. Pynchon is a comedian as well as a highly literate observer. The tangles may not be to everyone’s taste (I doubt I’ll reread any of these) but just seeing where he goes with them is a Lewis Carrol-on-a-roller-coaster adventure.

I want to recommend again Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree, jr. Superb. Excellent. Amazing, tragic, and extremely well-written and perceptive.

Nicola Griffith published the third Aud Torvingen novel in 2007, Always. She’s a friend, so what? If you can’t brag on your friends, what good is the internet? I’m really liking what Nicola is doing with this character. She has created a unique kind of outsider—Aud is, I have come to realize, a sexy, competent nerd. She does not understand so much of what she passes through effortlessly, but her own profoundly centered Self, instead of stuttering, stumbling, and screwing up like any other nerd/geek, is like a force of nature. People just assume she’s disinterested rather than clueless. And she’s really not clueless. Don’t get me wrong—she understands a lot about human nature, especially the dark side, but she seems utterly innocent of what it means to be “normal.” In this novel, that gap in knowledge and experience leads to some truly amusing, occasionally hilarious moments. Aside from being a first rate thriller, Always is genuinely insightful.

Which leads to the other friend who published this year. Kelley Eskridge wrote one of the best near-future SF novels in the last decade, Solitaire. It’s being developed into a film and I can’t wait. Kelley herself is working on the screenplay.

But Kelley is also a damn good short story writer. Her first collection came out in 2007, Dangerous Space, and I urge you all to go get it. The title novella is one of the best music stories I’ve ever read. I posted a review of it on my blog on MySpace, so go there for more, but I repeat, this is great stuff.

Another friend of mine published a novel in 2007. Allen Steele’s Spindrift is a first-rate SF thriller in the tradition of…

Well, Allen spent a lot of his career being called the Next Heinlein. That’s an overworked comparison and I actually think it’s inaccurate in Allen’s case. He’s much closer to Gordon R. Dickson than Heinlein, but even closer, I think, to Mack Reynolds. (I’d even say he’s closer still to Poul Anderson except he doesn’t indulge Anderson flare for Errol Flynn-type characters and improbable plot twists, but take something like Anderson’s Star Fox or The Enemy Stars or Tales of the Flying Mountains and the comparison makes sense.) People, however, will know who Gordie Dickson was quicker than they will Mack, and I hasten to add that I mean Mack Reynolds at his best.

Spindrift is a slice of his Coyote universe, which is shaping up into a nice body of work for Allen. It’s more faceted with more possibilities, the kind of Swiss Army Knife concept writers envy. It’s a first contact novel and has at its core a couple of variations on the idea that provide a nice fresh sensation.

Music-wise this past year, I’m not sure how to characterize it. My favorite new discovery is the East Village Opera Company. I hate opera. I love this. It is tremendous, over-the-top, pompous, and musically ambitious. But otherwise, it’s hard to say what I found that’s new. I haven’t been buying much new music, and what I’ve gotten has been given to me. There’s a vendor that shows up every year at the local convention who sells small-label electronica. He has the works broken down into comparisons with various periods of Tangerine Dream and I have only ever bought one disc from him I didn’t like, but I use it as wall paper for when I’m working. I can’t write to vocals, so it’s jazz, classical, or this. A smattering of titles includes the artists Roedelius, Navigator, Max van Richter, Under the Dome, Steve Joliffe, Lightwave, and Anon.

Movies, similar problem. We don’t go to the movies anymore. Habit born out of long stretches of poverty. But we’ve been borrowing dvds like crazy. Among the television shows I’m most impressed with, we’ve found Bones, House, Battlestar Galactica and I have fallen in love with the new Doctor Who and especially the spin-off Torchwood. The latter is like MIB meets the X-Files. But it’s like British, y’know, but the star is an American, but the main female lead is…hmm…uh….yes, well, I think she’s just amazing.

What impresses me most about both these shows is the level of writing. It’s rarely less than Good, often Damn Good, and occasionally Great.

Biggest disappointment has to be the SciFi Channel’s lame attempt at retooling Flash Gordon. Look, folks, a word. If you’re gonna do something from the 30s, either take a page from Tim Burton’s playbook, or be bloody faithful to the original. Trying to make it contemporary and current and somehow more “plausible” (in this context I’m not even sure what that means) usually leads to boring if not embarrassing. I feel sorry for the woman playing Dale Arden—she’s got some talent and boy is she hot, but this is not something for her resume.

The biggest surprise movie-wise for me in the past year has been Casino Royale. Yes, the new Bond—Daniel Craig—is very good, and this movie is very good, and it leads me to hope that they will continue in this vein, relying on good storytelling and genuine emotional truth, rather than gimmicks and gadgets. It’s hard to see that this came out of the same production company, it’s so different. (Maybe this movie didn’t come out in ’07, but I didn’t see it till this year.)

I am certainly missing a few things. When I remember them, I’ll mention them. But this is a fairly full list of what I found worth doing in the arts this past year. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2008 has to offer.

Back now to your regularly scheduled programming.

culture

Miss Moneypenny, R.I.P.

Lois Maxwell has died. The parentheses of our eras appear unexpectedly and sometimes painfully. Of the original James Bond cast, who’s left? Connery, I believe. Bernard Lee is gone, as is Desmond Llewelyn, even most of the villains. I believe all the Bond Girls (of which Lois was often exempted) are still alive. Certain things, certain losses, just bother me more than others.

Lois was never seen in a Bond film in a bikini, an evening gown, or anything other than her office attire, and the scene at the end of On Her Majestie’s Secret Service is almost heartbreaking when Moneypenny has to wish Bond and his new bride happiness. At least they did not continue this unfair trope when Samantha Bond took over the part— Moneypenny had a private life, presumably with sex, and gave innuendo for innuendo in her repartee with 007.

She was 80, which is a good long life, but it reminds me how old I am. I saw Dr. No as a first-run release with my parents. I was not old enough to understand any of the sexual tension going on, but I did come of age with James Bond. That could have been disastrous for me if not for the equally important presence of Emma Peel in The Avengers who I credit with providing me a solid feminist notion, if not philosophy.

The new Bond, Daniel Craig, is very different. In fact, he is very much closer to Ian Fleming’s conception than even Sean Connery. Casino Royale had no Moneypenny. It will be interesting to see what they do in future films, now that they had apparently decided to hue closer to the original character.

But I shall miss Miss Moneypenny. She waited valiantly, provided moral support, and was often unfairly left out of most of the fun.