INTERSTELLAR - II My previous status message kicked up some dust (appropriately perhaps, vide Nolan?). I could have let things rest, but on reflection I thought an elucidation, an expansion of my stated views was in order. While I admit that the viewing of all art is largely a subjective experience, I do believe in the existence of an objective essence independent of subjective response. Someone compared Nolan with Kubrick, to the formers advantage: I differ, and here are my reasons. So where does Nolan fall short, and where does Kubrick score? The greatest weakness of Nolan’s film is its verbosity, its severely annoying loquacity, its sententiousness, its irritating ‘cuteness’, its ‘message for mankind’ slammed into your face, its egregious moralising. And poor Dylan Thomas dragged in for no apparent reason whatsoever save perhaps to show the director’s literacy. As if that wasn’t sufficient unto the day, a doddering Michael Caine is rudely shaken out of retirement to provide the de rigueur plummy English physicist mouthing plummy platitudes - some kind of Anglo-American entente cordiale maybe. In all, there’s altogether too much of speech, speech, and more speech. The plot itself, the disaster scenario, creaks under the weight of banality. I doubt if the pulpiest of the sci-fi rags of the ‘30s and ‘40s would have touched this. All that science - gravitation, quantum mechanics, black holes, event horizons, wormholes and what have you are no doubt a credit to Dr. Kip Thorne (familiar to all readers of Michio Kaku, Brian Greene and others), but are no more than a padding for the vast cosmic holes in Nolan’s imagination. His film is a worthy advertisement for the adage, “Don’t talk. Show!” Let’s step over now to Kubrick. Kubrick is Nolan’s complete antithesis: the one overwhelming feature of “2001” is the silence of space - as indeed it should be for any space drama - against which, Kubrick knew, all speech or words were futile and cosmically irrelevant. The only sounds you hear are machine noises, and the heavy breathing of the astronauts when they step out for their EVA. There is precious little dialogue in the whole film, and what there is is sparse, functional, confined to technical necessity, and most importantly, leached of all emotional content. A space mission of supreme significance, viz. the investigation of extraterrestrial intelligence has no place for considerations of or reflections on worldly human concerns like parental love, or any kind of love for that matter. Much less thinly disguised tracts, or laboured ellipses through poetry. The crew of “Discovery” are taciturn, focused scientist-technicians who doubtless share a friendship, but an understated one which is just barely suggested in their little chat in the EVA pod when they contemplate HAL’s disconnection. The only two ‘personal’ or ‘intimate’ moments in the film - Dr. Heywood Floyd’s video chat with his daughter, and Frank Poole’s birthday celebration - are exercises in ruthless economy, without a trace of sentimentality. In fact, in the latter scene, Frank Poole is a study in impassivity, an almost inanimate inertness: at the end of the birthday telecast he merely asks HAL to lower his headrest and goes back to his sleep or relaxation. And HAL. Here you have a voice-synthesised supercomputer who is virtually the mission controller, whose relationship with the crew is a precisely calibrated one: there is just enough informality to address them by first names and for the odd pleasantry exchanged, no more. The ones in hibernation are scrupulously referred to by their honorifics (Dr. Hunter, Dr. Kaminsky…). No chattiness (except for the one slightly disconcerting scene where HAL briefly opens his mind to Dave Bowman to express his concerns about the mission, only to be told that he was working up a psychology report). And no silly wisecracks. Certainly no suggestion of assumed social equality with the crew, no grating familiarity, even though HAL is a vital partner in the mission. You respect HAL as someone formidable, quietly and unerringly efficient, just as the crew does. The equations are professional to a fault. And when HAL turns rogue - as in elephant, not scoundrel - Kubrick’s dialogue control is exquisite. No shouting or screaming, no outbursts of temper: just the cold suppressed fury of Bowman, all other emotions masked, and HAL’s measured, indeed civilised responses to the former’s orders. “Open the pod bay doors HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave.” And the final chilling sign-off, “Goodbye Dave. This conversation can serve no useful purpose.” Nolan subverts this sequence - the inspiration is obvious - by substituting a human interface, but the results are pathetic. Dr. Mann is a far cry from HAL, whose Mephistophelean élan is a treat to watch even in the moment of cold calculated murder. You can never bring yourself to dislike HAL at his worst (and he was only acting by his lights), and during the lobotomy you actually feel sorry for him. Dr. Mann on the other hand is a sad spectacle. HAL would have held him in contempt - something he could never contemplate doing to either Poole whom he killed (after killing the ones in hibernation), or Bowman to whom he had no compunction in assigning the same fate. Perhaps the most moving, and far seeing, set of sequences in “2001” is the one which shows the famous monolith in its first two appearances, first to the ape-men on Earth and four million years later on the Moon. Look closely at the reactions. The ape-men chatter, jabber excitedly and run their prehensile fingers on its smooth featureless surfaces in wonder: four million years later, little has changed, except that the ape-men are now in titanium spacesuits. Dr. Floyd exactly replicates his simian ancestors’ actions, running his fingers on the same surfaces, the wonder in his mind still unsoiled in the long interim. If the films spectacular jump cut - the greatest editorial moment in cinema - encapsulated four million years of human evolution in a few stunning seconds, Kubrick also showed that the unknown was still unchipped, spaceships and colonisation notwithstanding. There is the larger subtext of the man vs. machine conundrum. In the standoff between astronaut Bowman and the nearly omnipotent HAL, it is finally man who triumphs. And Bowman’s transport into the unknown by some supremely sentient force, for a cosmic human destiny of which he is apparently the chosen agent, is again Darwinian natural selection: human ingenuity prevailing over machine intelligence, creator over creature. (For the sci-fi buff this has echoes of a short story by the writer Frederic Brown called “Arena” where an actual fight to the finish between a solitary human specimen and a member of another race is refereed and decided by some external agency in favour of the human). The last few sequences of “2001” are not so much visual surrealism as a flip-flop of a spatial-temporal Rubik’s cube: the viewer’s mind is expected to somersault in incomprehension, because comprehension - if that, and again only to the evolved - is not vouchsafed until the embryonic Star Child, coasting over the Earth’s stratosphere to the strains of Richard Strauss’s “Zarathustra”. Genius? Perhaps. In any case a rather small word, just about adequate to serve a poignantly human purpose. I think Kubrick transcended the limits of language, cognition, of thought itself. He - no hyperbole here - tried on God’s glasses to give us, dreary earth-bound mortals, a brief dazzling glimpse of Eternity. Nolan merely lays bare his severely circumscribed vision, paralysed in parts at that. *** JJ. 8/12/14
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:56:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015