Exploring a Maze Sprawling in Space, Composing, 27/04/2017

Taking a break from the super-intense confrontations with the impossibility of our ideals tonight. You know, when I started this blog, I wanted, in part, for it to be a look at my writing process. But the last post felt like I was rehearsing the manuscript for Utopias.

Let me try to explain what I mean. One of the book’s most important arguments will explore the tension between our ideals and their practical impossibility. It’s the central tragedy of all political aspiration.

Anyone who says they want to do something with their life that has a net positive effect on their community feels this bind. That holds no matter what your own ideals are – religious, progressive, conservative, atheist, and even nationalist.

So if an argument leads me to consider one aspect of that bind – reality’s resistance to our ideals – I’ve gained knowledge of another wrinkle in that concept. And given me another point on the map in relation to the others.

• • •
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my idea for a book about Stanley Kubrick. The director as an example of the fearless materialist with a growing conscience. Well, some of the research arrived.

It was a bit of an impulse buy, but I started getting into some commentary from Roger Luckhurst. It’s only a couple of years old, and has plenty of references I can look up on my own later. Since I’m not out to write a book on the ‘current state of Kubrick scholarship’ or anything dry as dirt like that, I’m looking for sources with useful ideas in relation to my own.

He has some ideas about how Kubrick articulates space in his films that I think could be useful. Here’s an example – Luckhurst contrasts how The Shining the book and the film move in space. The book, like traditional gothic literature but set in the late 1970s, has a classical haunted house structure. The secrets and malevolent spirit of the hotel is in the basement – a descent.

But in Kubrick’s movie, the story plays out as a series of mazes. The Overlook Hotel and grounds all play out vertically in the film. Oh, there are multiple floors in the building, there’s an elevator, there’s a staircase. But the camera moves horizontally – Steadicam tracking low to the ground, tracing a path.

Kubrick took a gothic novel and put it on a flat plain. A very violent thing to do to a text, yes. One of the many, interlocking, awkward reasons why Stephen King hated Kubrick’s film. Probably the most subtle.

But the most revealing. A haunted house story has traditionally been a matter of descent into hidden quarters. Most stereotypically, the basement and catacombs under the haunted house (or castle), are where terrible, scandalous family secrets are kept. Quiet corners. Buried as if dead. So as to be mourned and forgotten. Alienated and separated from the living. Now set free.

But Kubrick flattened all that out on one plane. The dead are with us. So is the evil. The evil that we do to each other can never be buried or locked away. To become monstrous is a real human capacity. Even of father to son.

That’s the horror story.

Adventures in Cinema and Film Writing, Composing, 14/02/2017

I’ve got plenty more to say about the classic John Stuart Mill books that I’ve been revisiting. There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in there, but I’ll get back to that tomorrow. Today was an especially busy day, and I didn’t get the time to go over my notes in the detail I want to before I write a good philosophy post.

No, today was a day of progress in my cinema projects. Since the start of this year, I’ve been able to make some real, decisive strides in getting You Were My Friend made. There are multiple people I’ve met in Toronto’s and Hamilton’s arts community who are interested in helping me make it, whether as crew or advisors.

I also haven’t sent any bones to my Patreon donors in a while, which I really should. They haven’t gotten any special projects since my previews of Class reviews. Not only that, but I feel like I let them down with the Class reviews, because it turned out to be kind of a mediocre show by the end.

It would be a very personal writing project for me, since watching
Kubrick's films as a child were almost a religious experience for me.
Not in terms of receiving some kind of dogma, but as a mystical
experience. I knew I wanted to do something creative with my life
after seeing his work.

So here are a few thoughts about a project I’ve been thinking about doing since late last year. You’ll be quite surprised, as no one has ever thought of doing such a thing before – philosophical essays about the films of Stanley Kubrick.

Seriously, though – What would distinguish that from any other set of blog posts written by Ras Trent college intellectuals from a haze of weed smoke at 1.00am? I joke, but it’s a valid question.

It’s not like there already aren’t a healthy amount of film studies books and articles written about philosophical ideas in Kubrick films. It was one of the earliest “Pop Culture Thing and Philosophy” books.

The books like the one I linked above are mostly of the tired format of using a theme, image, or event from his films as an example to illustrate some concept in a philosopher’s work. Usually, those essays are based on bog-standard, boring takes on the concepts, which makes the essay suitably uninteresting.

When I wrote a chapter in one of those books, I at least used a less stereotypical, more interesting take on my philosopher of choice.

But here’s my take. First, the structure. I’d have a few broad concepts in mind, through which I want to read Kubrick’s films, and treat those films themselves as philosophical explorations of the ideas.

I think the first essay I write will be the one on The Shining. The idea
for this book first came to me when I read about how much Stephen King
hated Kubrick's The Shining, even though King's book was actually
kind of terrible, and his own television adaptation was awful. Kubrick
could tell the story of a father trying to kill his family better than King
because Kubrick was actually capable of accepting the horrible truth of
that narrative: that a father could genuinely desire to kill his family.

So I’d write an essay on each feature film in Kubrick’s corpus. And each essay would consider, to a greater or lesser focus depending on its prominence in the film, the same three ideas. 1) Accepting abyss of a godless existence. 2) Kubrick’s vision of humanity and the wider universe as machines. 3) Kubrick’s lurking concern for justice, particularly regarding violence against women.

I also want to touch on the nature of adaptation, a key part of Kubrick’s creative method. I think of it as a collaboration, and Kubrick often did collaborate with the author on the film’s production when they were still alive. But it would also be the story of Kubrick becoming so much better at telling the story he’s adapting than the original creator.

The essays won’t be so straightforward as to deal with each of these in sequence. Each essay will be long – 5-8000 words. It will weave all these elements together into a narrative of each film’s existence. Each film will be an opportunity to see the assemblage of all these parts, from a different perspective.

The goal would be to reveal a vision of Kubrick as an artist and a vision of his art that is more complete and complex than ordinary, sequential essay writing can provide. Like seeing all sides of a building at once.

I think I’ll get started on it soon. I'll offer previews to Patreon sponsors, and possibly start a Kickstarter alongside it to fund an Amazon release.

Really Good Science-Fiction, Composing, 07/12/2014

As I’ve written before, I’ve always been into science-fiction throughout my life. It isn’t really, when you think about it, a big deal because so many popular culture involve sci-fi forms and ideas. But even though sci-fi ideas basically are popular culture now, actually identifying yourself as someone who likes sci-fi per se has, at least until recently, put you pretty solidly in nerd cultures, with everything that entails.

But I’m also a published novelist in sci-fi now. Even though I won’t be able to get fully into promoting Under the Trees, Eaten until the new year (it was always going to be a slow build sort of thing anyway, as I’m trying to get my new career in communications and network science off the ground at the same time), I’m still actually part of the field.

So whenever my friend Philosojaysfan* tweets links about his Stanley Kubrick fandom, I’m usually interested, especially when it’s about 2001, which is one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made. This time, the British Film Institute posted a scan of Kubrick’s original letter to Arthur C. Clarke that started their collaboration on what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

* Yes, that is seriously his Twitter handle. Don’t judge him, because you know it’s actually kind of brilliant.

So many pictures of Kubrick make him look intense or
manic, but I prefer the images of him as amused or
bemused.

Kubrick’s movies were really influential on my thinking when I first started to consider seriously the possibility of creating art as one of the major things I did with my life. My own styles and priorities have since become very different than his, but that formative influence, admiration, and love is still there. As well, there are attempts throughout my work to make what I’d call “really good science-fiction.” 

So I thought this and the next few Sunday/weekend posts would discuss some of my ideas about what makes “really good science-fiction” and how I put these into my work. Right now, my two major projects are Under the Trees, Eaten and the Alice script that I’m developing with Lee Skinner. I’ll discuss an idea I had for a comic series a few years ago, and how that developed in my thinking after meeting a possible collaborator in Toronto this summer. And maybe I’ll talk about some ideas I’ve had about a dream project of mine: what I’d do if my writing career ever gets to the point where the BBC would commission me to write an episode of Doctor Who.

What do I think generally constitutes “really good science-fiction”? A lot of it is in that letter Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. There should be a thoughtfulness to it, considering a question that could (or perhaps should) reorient how we understand the universe and our place in it. I ultimately don’t like what Clarke did with the 2001 concept of extra-terrestrial life in the novels that followed their collaboration. He essentially made them superpowerful gods whose mission was to seed the universe with life of all kinds. 

There was a naïveté in those Clarke novels that depressed me at the time I read them without entirely knowing why. Kubrick and Clarke’s original collaboration didn’t get into the aliens’ motives for what they were doing at all, letting their actions remain mysterious, and our encounters with them taking on an almost mystical character. Aliens would be so different from us that encountering them would require a temporary suspension of your own humanity, an experience that only our religious mystical traditions have come close to preparing us for. When aliens that were once the causes of world-shattering encounters are treated as technical problems to solve and tinker with, a lot of literary and philosophical majesty is lost.

This is a problem that I have with a lot of sci-fi influenced by the Golden Age period anyway, as Clarke’s very much was. The stories were not about character, ethics, or any deeper meaning, but simply puzzle boxes. Culturally, we’ve figured out how to combine puzzle boxes with all that now, and so the quotidian triviality of puzzle box storytelling only becomes more frustrating to encounter.