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Mash-Ups Mix the Old and the Now to Make Art for Today

April 6th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Mash-Up As Metaphor for Something - Jtneill


People no longer expect to believe what they see and hear. With scant regard for truth, fusion technology dupes everyone in the name of fascinating art.

Mash-ups of films, books and songs have been around for awhile. The same principles create a new form of visual art, too. Photographs that span time zones put people together who were not alive contemporaneously.

Mash-up basically means creating a new art form from fusing existing works such as photos, video clips, graphics, text or animation. Computer manipulation technology makes it relatively easy, but there are some inventive, innovative and unusual new art works being born.

Visual Image As Propaganda

Jane Tallim, Media Awareness Network’s education specialist cited the city of Ottawa’s promotional brochure in 2001, which used a digitally-enhanced photo, a blended creation to convey a more symmetrical image to attract tourists. Controversy ensued over the fact that the image was presented as a real view.

Audiences are used to seeing enhancements on film (like Jurassic park, Forrest Gump, Star Wars), and in TV ads routinely manipulating images to sell products. People may no longer expect the visual truth. After 9/11, a photo circulated of a tourist captured seconds before the attack, allegedly from a camera found in the rubble.

In fact, it was from a website that specialised in placing an imaginary tourist in historical, geographical and even humorous places. Airbrushing and doctoring of photos has been widely used for political purposes from Stalin down to small-town campaigns in democracies.

Tallim demonstrated how the techniques are also employed in satire. President George W Bush and Osama Bin Laden have been the butt of many internet-circulated parodies, on magazine covers, opening hospitals, helping children over the street, landing on the moon. In digital worlds, nothing is impossible and everything is probable.

New Films and Songs From Old

A monster mash-up of the 270 films released in 2010 was just one of many sites making an art form of satire, new perceptions and very clever data-twisting. Video mash-ups are multiple sources of visual material, frequently producing movie trailer parodies, which are very popular. They are transformative, so avoid too many problems with copyright laws.

According to MTV Movie Blog, Inception (2010) was particularly popular in movie trailer mash-ups, including clever mergers with Toy Story 3, The Simpsons and The Dark Knight. Sci-fi is often a target for mash-up, as it is itself a kind of hybrid-mash. There is comical sci-fi, dramatic sci-fi or special-effects sci-fi.

As Huffington Post put it in April 2010: ‘Movie trailer mash-ups are awesome – not just because they mess with the structured format of trailers, but because they do so in many ways. Sometimes a light-hearted kid’s movie becomes a drug-infested thriller (Toy Story 2 never looked so hardcore)’.

Reservoir Dogs meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Brokeback to the Future, Pocahontas vs Avatar, Big Lebowski vs MacGyver, Wizard of Oz meets You Got Served, Up meets Gran Torino, Snatch Wars vs Star Wars, Apocalypse Pooh, and A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead, are some examples from top mash trailers that Huffington identified.

Many songs have been hijacked into unlikely mixes, and some resulting creations have become hits, such as: Bruised Water (from Natasha Bedingfield’s I Bruise Easily and Chicane’s Saltwater); Don’t Wanna Lose This Groove (from Dannii Minogue’s Don’t Wanna Lose This Feeling and Madonna’s Into the Groove); Freak Like Me (from Sugababes’ Freak Like Me and Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric?, and The Billie-Jean of the End (from Billie Jean by Michael Jackson and Nine Inch Nail’s Beginning of the End).

The Blitz Spirit Today

People stand on a busy street that has survived for decades and wonder what it was like, 20, 40, 100 years ago. Old photos or newsreels can show it. But to merge those old views into a modern visual capture can be an unsettling experience. Nick Stone released 45 mash-ups of what he called Blitz Ghost pictures to the internet.

In the heart of Britain’s East Anglia, Norwich was bombed by the German Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1943. Over 300 were killed; over a thousand injured. There was widespread damage to property. Much of it was recorded by Eastern Daily Press and Evening News photographers, including George Swain, Cliff Temple and George Plunkett.

Graphic designer Stone took their wartime photos, found the locations and retook the scenes. He then merged, blended or mashed/meshed the then and the now. He was inspired by Sergey Larenkov, a Russian photographer who first merged contemporary pictures of cities like Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Leningrad with wartime shots.

Their appeal today lies in the concept of different eras sharing the same spaces, yet unable to touch. Time stands still, and the observer realises how much has changed, yet how little. It is a stunning artistic concept made commonplace by technology.

What is Reality?

The question it raises is: how reliable is historical accuracy? Will future historians look at now and say: ‘there was a truth, a veracity, a standard of observation?’ Clearly not. If a photograph of, say, every Prime Minister since 1918 appeared, in which they were all together in Downing Street at once, people would know that was a physical, historical and factual impossibility. Mash-ups make those kinds of bold statements.

In his book, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism and Picture Editing (1978), British journalist Harold Evans said: ‘The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth’. He argued every photo is but a small, flat series of tones, its depth an illusion, its animation symbolic. He said the photo has a mysterious richness transcending limitations, so ‘our impressions of major and complex events may be permanently fashioned by a single news photo’.

The editing/cropping, enlargement or manipulation of photographic images has long been accepted in news coverage. Now it’s art in its own right; art accessible to virtually anyone with a computer. Sites like MashUpPhotos contain links to dozens of places where people can fabricate their own, for fun and/or profit. In literature fact met fiction to become faction; now it’s the case in visual art, too.

First published on Suite 101, 8 March 2011.

Photo: Mash-Up As Metaphor for Something – Jtneill

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There’s No Success Like Failure in Musical Theatre

April 3rd, 2012 | 1 Comment

Spider-Man Musical: Biggest Flop in a Decade? - HOWI


Musicals can flop with critics, but hit at box offices, or vice versa. Happy is the show that appeals to both. Yet neither guarantees longevity in showbiz.

In Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965), Bob Dylan sang: ‘She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all’. But in the mixed-up world of musical theatre, failure can mean success; success can be fleeting. A critical panning often makes audiences flood in, to disagree.

The musical The Producers (2001) from a 1968 film, featured two producers who deliberately sold shares in a Broadway flop, but it became a hit. That’s the musical world, often topsy-turvy.

No Success Formula

Musical theatre is an art form integrating dance, drama, song and music to tell a story. Lighter tales or heavier sagas, they can be comic or tragic (or both). Themes range from love, jealousy, betrayal to murder. One test is that a musical should stand alone as a play if the music were removed.

The story, (book, libretto), dancing, music, dialogue and song lyrics make ingredients for musical theatre, and increasingly, modern technological effects are part of the showbiz razzmatazz audiences expect. Any single part from plot, characters, instrumental or songs, advances the story. Sometimes the songs are poetry set to music. So, given the number of elements in a musical, only one needs to fail, for a musical not to triumph.

Through the past three hundred years more musicals have failed and/or disappeared into obscurity than remain as gold standards, fondly revived by professionals and amateurs alike. Showboat, Oklahoma, Carousel, My Fair Lady, Chicago, Annie, Porgy & Bess, West Side Story, South Pacific, Chess, Evita, Starlight Express, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera are household works.

How many know enough to rate Song of Norway, Sons of Ham, Allegro, La Belle Paree, Keep Off the Grass, Darktown Follies, Do I Hear a Waltz? The Gay Hussars and One Touch of Venus? Even a success first time round may flop in revival. The Wiz was a four year hit onstage and touring in the US from 1975; but revivals in America and London in 1984-85 lasted merely two weeks.

Taste Has to do With Success

When Imagine This closed, Matt Wolf blogged on The Guardian Dec 08 that the wonder was that the production set in the Warsaw ghetto among a ‘Jewish community apparently willing to put on bad Vegas-style floor shows on their way to extermination, lasted as long as it did’. He felt if it had opened on Broadway rather than London, it wouldn’t have lasted a week. and Flops

Imagine That producer Beth Trachtenberg felt narrow-minded critics shouldn’t make moral judgements on subject matter (the Holocaust) or believe: ‘musicals are limited in emotional impact and meaningful subject matter’. In this case, the paying public didn’t like it either. It closed after a fortnight of previews and a month of shows, shortly after the start of 2008’s global economic downturn.

The fact is that Nazis in musicals: The Sound of Music, Cabaret or Springtime for Hitler did not put critics or audiences off. Female convicts singing prior to hanging in Chicago, again, failed to dampen enthusiasm for that long-running classic. So, it must be to do with taste.

Having said that, the successful Thalidomide the Musical in Britain worked by starring actual victims of thalidomide. Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim’s celebration of the macabre Victorian melodrama-bloodfest, ran only 157 performances in London after a longer run Stateside in 1979-80.

Only when the musical was transposed to film by Tim Burton in 2007 starring Johnny Depp, did it find the success that musically/dramatically it deserved. The high count of butchered bodies and cannibalism inherent in Mrs Lovett’s pies, did not stop it being a hit. Taste is indefinable, then.

Some Stinkers

Marguerite, from Dumas’ novel La Dame aux Camelias, updated the Nazi occupation of Paris with a 40-year old woman, mistress of a Nazi officer and in an affair with a young resistance fighter. Michel Legrand’s music, book by Alain Boublil, Schonberg and Kent, lyrics by Boubil & Kretzmer weren’t enough. It previewed in London May 2008; closed in September.

In theory, putting Margaret Mitchell’s US Civil War classic novel (and movie) Gone With the Wind on stage as a musical, was a winner. But 2008’s London production was slammed by critics: ‘is a small well-placed tornado in the vicinity of the theatre too much to hope for?’ (Standard); ‘the show is neither as bad as one feared nor as good as one has a right to expect’ (Independent); ‘there is something extravagantly pointless about the whole enterprise’ (Guardian). It ran two months.

Although The Drowsy Chaperone lasted longer on Broadway, it survived less than three months in London, in the summer of 2007. The public just didn’t take to it, despite some critical approval and American success.

Cartoons and Pulp Musicals

Zorro was based on a pulp fiction hero from a 1919 novella, following 1998’s film The Mask of Zorro. The first few 2008 London opening shows were cancelled through technical problems, although it did run for 9 months. Technical problems seem to be the curse of cartoon-based ideas.

Spider-Man was 2010-11’s most expensive flop. Ben Brantley, NY Times critic wrote: ‘so grievously broken in every respect that it’s beyond repair’. Advertised as lavish spectacle with dazzling special effects, its budget tripled from $25m. And still, by March 2011, it hadn’t opened, despite first previews being November 2010.

Music by Bono and the Edge and directed by Julie Taymor who staged The Lion King (9th longest running in West End musical history): the backers thought it a winning combination. But they got repeatedly delayed openings, major cast changes, technical disasters and cast injuries from high-wire stunts that went wrong.

Critics went to see it anyway in order to slam it, satirical papers and TV programmes had a field day. It may never open, and seemed unlikely to transfer anywhere. However, the ironic effect of delays and negative publicity was massive public interest. In January 2011, it was Broadway’s highest grossing show.

It was tweaked, not revamped. Safety was tightened. The story line remained as flimsy as at the start; no new songs appeared. The fact is that delays and a ghoulish media interest in failure, made tickets hot desirables. All part of the perversity of theatre, and musical theatre in particular.

And when word of mouth dries up, interest moves on to something recreated, revisited and remade for different times.

First published on Suite 101, 6 March 2011.

Image: Spider-Man Musical: Biggest Flop in a Decade? – HOWI

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Political Movies Tell the Truth Some of the Time About Politics

April 1st, 2012 | 1 Comment

Presidents Nixon & Johnson: Movie Makers' Dream Subjects? - LBJ Library


If life reflects art reflects life, does political movie-making reflect politics? Does political cinema reveal truth? Does it matter, if they’re good films?

Film is a medium that lends itself to dramatising conflict, espousing causes, harnessing opinion and satirising opponents. Political movies need that material.

It’s been utilised in TV series, such as The West Wing from the U.S.; In the Thick of It, which spun into In the Loop (2009), a movie; and House of Cards and Yes Minister /Yes Prime Minister, classics of civil service/politician tensions. The British mini-series State of Play became an American movie (2009) about investigative reporters and government corruption.

It’s a broad category, political film. Citizen Kane (1941) was a thinly disguised biopic about publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst who had an unsuccessful run for New York governor. It’s about ruthless power, wealth and fame within American life. Politics and media are natural bedfellows.

Media Power, Political Power

The Front Page (1974) from Ben Hecht’s 1928 comic play, examined the newspaper world, juxtaposing the death penalty and crime. That made it political. His Girl Friday (1940) was an earlier retelling of the same play about newspapers and the pursuit of crooked government officials.

Network (1976) portrayed power-concentrated media ownership and the fickleness of audiences. Broadcast News (1987) exposed the newsroom environment – or the politics of media, really. Shattered Glass (2003) was described by Internet Movie Database (IMDB) as “the true story of a young journalist who fell from grace when it was found he’d fabricated over half of his articles.”

All the President’s Men (1976) was the first dramatisation of the U.S. Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters, secret informers and cover-ups that went to the White House itself, leading to Nixon’s resignation. Dramatic and suspenseful, the film both set standards in political expose and inspired a generation of political journalists.

Nixon himself, arguably one of America’s more interesting Presidents, inspired Nixon (1995), which revealed the contradictory nature of the man who overcame defeats to become a popular, shrewd political operator before ending in failure and lies. Frost/Nixon (2008) dramatised the post-Watergate interview that Nixon gave British TV journalist, David Frost, in a battle of wits three years after the scandal.

The Political Process

Advise and Consent (1962) told the saga of a President’s nominee for Secretary of State, skeletons in cupboards and what ensued when somebody tried to undermine the choice. Acknowledged as the first mainstream movie to show a gay bar and a black male and white female senator, it was political drama.

The press’ freedom and journalistic refusal to reveal sources (and in extremis facing jail), the U.S. court system and and the constitution were themes of Nothing But the Truth (2008). All the King’s Men (1949 and 2006) fictionalised the rise of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, as he began building roads, schools, hospitals and his empire. The film studied the man caught between public service and corruption of power.

Getting elected is fascinating. The Candidate (1972) showed Robert Redford as an idealistic wannabe and the cost of power, hoops, obstacles and hostages to future fortune that politicians make. The War Room (1993) was a documentary about Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign and the people who ran it. A Perfect Candidate (1996) followed Oliver North’s doomed bid for a Senate seat.

Born Yesterday (1950 and 1993) was described by Ten Classic Political Movies as a “sweetly funny story of a gangster’s girlfriend who comes with him to Washington to bribe a congressman and learns about ‘the finer things of life’ from a journalist.” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) had a political innocent arriving in the capital full of ideals but encountering systematic corruption.

Tense Times, Intense Drama

Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) and The Hurt Locker (2008) were recent conflicts with political/military angles. But the Cold War was the background for political thrillers galore. The 40-year tension between the Soviet Union and the West made another world war a distinct possibility. Dr. Strangelove (1964) was a black comedy about it with Peter Sellers playing three separate roles.

Fail Safe (1964) was a serious version, with the “what-if” notion of nuclear weapons being dropped. Global annihilation was imminent. Seven Days in May was also a make-believe of possibilities, in a tense political thriller about military and civilian mindsets. From the novel, The Manchurian Candidate (1962 and 2004) was about brainwashing, political idealism and theories wrapped in a thrilling tale.

The second world war was the environment of The Gathering Storm (2002), depicting British wartime leader Winston Churchill’s “idiosyncrasies, moods and mercurial disposition,” according to Joseph Planta of thecommentary.ca. Among others, Young Winston (1972), Das Boot (1981) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) dealt with the politics of war.

JFK (1991) was one of many movies about the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy, the aftermath and the conspiracies that have continued ever since. A Face in the Crowd (1957) charted the rise of a hobo to political kingmaker. Political thriller The Contender (2000) focused on becoming Vice-President.

Comedy, the Last Resort

Nobody should go into politics without a sense of humour. Wag the Dog (1997) humorously showed a spin-doctor and Hollywood producer covering up a presidential sex scandal. The Front (1976) was a comedy drama about the 1950s communist blacklist period. The American President (1995) was a funny movie about a widowed President and a lobbyist.

Election (1999) took on high school student elections in an amusing way. Bob Roberts (1992) offended some Republicans, as it was a comedy about a corrupt, right-wing folksinger running a crooked election campaign. Yet another comedy drama was Primary Colors (1998) about the political campaign of a smooth operator.

Dave (1993) was an ordinary guy who bore an uncanny resemblance to the U.S. President and was hired to take on some of his duties, until it became for real. It was comedy, but like much humour, it shed new light on serious topics, in this case, the role and power of one elected human being.

That’s what political movies do. They give audiences fresh insights into government machines, temptations befalling elected representatives and systems put into place to regulate life. Such movies may be enjoyable, informative, challenging or objectionable – or all of the above. Politics is one way into some people’s dark side.

First published on Suite 101, 5 March 2011.

Photo: Presidents Nixon & Johnson: Movie Makers’ Dream Subjects? – LBJ Library

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The UK’s Parliamentary Lobby is an Arcane Ritual but it Works

March 31st, 2012 | 1 Comment

Every Citizen's Right to Lobby Parliament - Maurice


Selected ‘Lobby’ journalists are allowed access to Westminster’s inner sanctum, close to the Chamber and MPs. It’s changing, like much in political life.

A lobby has various meanings: a large room or entranceway into a building like a hotel or public office. In the US it can apply to a domestic house, in the UK’s Staffordshire it’s a thick edible stew, while in Parliament and politics, it has other meanings.

To lobby Parliament is to seek to influence or persuade either one or both Houses or MPs themselves to take or avoid particular action. It’s a campaigning word, and applies to both well-organised, professional businesses, or one or two citizens asserting their rights/objections/pleas.

The Right to Lobby

Every citizen has right of access to Parliament to speak with his/her elected Member. That is, of course, subject to security constraints and the willingness/availability of the Member to emerge from the Palace to see them. It’s not unknown for people to queue, get into Central Lobby, which is as far as they can unaccompanied, send in a request via the Badge Messengers and wait. Wait until a message comes back that the Member is unavailable.

Sometimes groups of people demonstrate outside, while selected individuals go inside and talk to MPs. Teachers, students, nurses, farmers, public sector employees, pensioners, carers, the disabled, immigrants, environmental campaigners: there is any number of interest groups who may exercise visiting rights in any given year.

It‘s part of the same assumed right in the unwritten British constitution that there is a free press, able and willing to report facts, abuse, deviousness, incompetence, lies, personal affairs and the spending of public money in government in particular and the wider political community in general. The exposure of MPs’ expense abuses by The Daily Telegraph in 2009 was a case in point.

The Press Gallery

In a ramshackle Westminster turret room high above the Thames, sits the Parliamentary press/media in their secret lobby. Started in 1884 when a ‘gentleman’ was permitted to stand in the Lobby (the area leading to the Chamber most frequented by MPs) and talk to them off-the-record.

Newspapers used to carry reports from ‘lobby correspondents’. TV political reporters often quote indirectly from sources they have questioned, to give unattributable but usually accurate opinions, plans, ideas and counter-views to inform the public to a degree. ‘Lobby terms’ are unattributable briefings a journalist has received.

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, his media supremo Alastair Campbell put press briefings officially on-the-record, and cameras were allowed to watch as Blair took questions from informed journalists. That practice continues. What is not usually seen, is how government ‘spin-doctors’ work with media to focus stories as ministers would like.

Accredited journalists from national and regional media work in their gallery, and when a name comes up on the monitor of an MP speaking they are interested in, or a debate is announced they want to follow, they rush through to the cramped gallery above the Speaker’s Chair, and record what is said and any other information relevant to their stories.

The Journalistic Cartel

When the current Speaker was to be elected, former minister Tom Watson, writing in The Independent (June 2009) argued that it was time to crack open the lobby cartel and create a new era of accountability. He said that the Parliamentary Lobby was a ‘closed shop, a club, a bizarre petri dish of rivalry, personal enmity and the occasional fistfight’, and it needed major reform.

He could have been talking about MPs themselves, as far as many people were concerned, rather than reporters. His point was that important debates on local, national and international issues were ignored by a self-serving, arrogant Lobby if not considered important or sexy enough for their own news agendas.

MPs with comprehensive specialisms in uncommon issues remained anonymous to the public; reporting justice was not seen to be done. There is no outlet for minor stories which impact on thousands with long term concerns, unplanned repercussions. Watson said the 238 pass-holding lobby journalists therefore end up, ‘pack-like, chasing the same one or two stories each day’.

As Wikileaks and other internet revelations have revealed, secrecy is becoming all but impossible in the digital age. Unattributable lobby briefings may have to end. People may become more careful in what they say, even if they think they are off-air.

Lobbies Within

Either side of the Chamber stretch two parallel, narrow corridors. On the Speaker’s right hand is the ‘Aye’ lobby, and on the left, ‘No’. When a division of the House is called, the occupant of the Chair cries: ‘Clear the lobbies’, meaning all staff and press correspondents must exit Members’ Lobby, the large area adjacent to the Chamber to allow MPs to flood in to vote.

After eight minutes (to allow MPs to get in from outbuildings, bars, restaurants), the doors are locked. MPs file out of their chosen lobby, their names tallied off by clerks, so that after a few minutes, the result is announced, and the Commons proceeds to the next business.

There are always calls to reform voting, reporting, debating in and out of Parliament. Modernising accountability and increasing transparency are clearly necessary as society changes and media evolves. It has already moved a long way since Labour Chancellor High Dalton stopped to talk to a Lobby correspondent as he entered the Chamber to deliver his 1947 Budget.

The journalist got the details into his paper’s late edition before Dalton reached the point in his speech. It cost Dalton his job. Nowadays people expect the media to be informed, to follow every nuance of Westminster life as if it’s reality, fly-on-the-wall documentary. While the lobby structure needs updating, it perhaps doesn’t need wholesale rebuilding.

First published on Suite 101, 4 March 2011.

Image: Every Citizen’s Right to Lobby Parliament – Maurice

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Concept Albums That Defined Their Eras and Inspired Generations

March 30th, 2012 | 1 Comment

The Moody Blues Created Many Concept Albums - Chris Lester
The concept/themed musical collection has been around for decades. Some of them are known classics; many still have profound musical and cultural impacts.

A concept album is broadly a collection of musical and/or narrative material which is unified by some theme. There is debate over whether the genre subdivides into ‘theme’ and concept’, but that may be merely semantics.

In commercial and artistic justification, the concept becomes a major part of the culture of the band or artiste. Many albums have defined an era, for commentators, music buyers and performers themselves, living on in music collections, frequently adopted by children of the original fans.

Early Claimants to the Title

In Feb 2011 radio station WNYC raised one of its weekly music debates, started with two people from prog-rock band Porcupine Tree, asking: ‘are concept albums ingenious or just indulgent?’ It was claimed that Frank Sinatra’s early records of The Voice of Frank Sinatra (1946), four 78 rpm records (8 songs) in a single package, and In The Wee Small Hours (1955) was a collection of themed torch songs, late-night introspection: “when I’m gloomy, you gotta listen to me’.

About the same time, WCVE public radio’s The Electric Croude programme nominated two for ‘all-time great concepts’. Miles Davis’ 1969 In a Silent Way marked his fusion and electronic period incorporating jazz and guitar with classical sonata form in two extended tracks. It was heavily reliant on editing and arranging by Teo Macero.

Use of such producing techniques was a hallmark of not just albums, but most pop-rock from the late 60s on. They also highlighted Jethro Tull’s 1973, Thick As A Brick, as a classic ‘concept’, different in musical style from Davis, a continuous track, divided in two only to fit both sides of the record itself.

Group leader Ian Anderson created early experimental progressive-rock with elements of folk, classical and jazz, on the tail end of the hippie 60s. Other Tull concept albums included Aqualung (1971), with character sketches, autobiographical songs and religious references. Anderson denied this was ‘a concept’, though A Passion Play (1973), about a man’s journey in the afterlife, definitely was.

Big Names, Big Albums

The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) is most often rated the top concept creation for originality of music and lyrics, for being a crucial turning point in the Beatles’ evolution and for being a flagship work for the hippie 60s. George Martin’s production called in orchestra, music hall, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, classical and Indian music.

High selling, chart topping, it was much admired; even the album cover was an original collage. They used modular effects such as the fuzzbox, wah-wah pedal and automatic double tracking in recording. The concept that bound all the different stylistic contrasts was a show performed to a live audience, except it was all studio made.

Released before it, in 1966, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, was another fusion of styles. The feature of this one, among all the praise, was the ‘influential‘ nature of the work. Elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, bells, organs, many expected/unexpected instruments and strange things like cans and dogs.

It heralded the psychedelic era, and George Martin felt that without it, Sgt Pepper’s would not have happened. The Beach Boys’ follow up, Smile, was started in 1966/67 but unreleased. The project was revisited in 2003 and re-recorded and released the next year. Even so many years on, it met the concept/great/influential album criteria.

Original Narratives

The first ‘rock opera’ album was Tommy, by The Who (1969). It told the story of a ‘deaf, dumb and blind kid’ who survived abuse and handicap to become a ‘pinball wizard’ and eventually a cult leader of a quasi-religious movement. Fellow Brits The Moody Blues were also credited with making the concept idea their own.

Days of Future Past (1967), a ‘song cycle’ occurring in a single day mixed orchestral arrangements with rock instrumentation and poems, relied on complex, talented arranging. Poetry linked to the songs was the concept repeated for In Search of the Lost Chord (1968), less in On the Threshold of a Dream (1969) while the American moon landing inspired 1969’s To Our Children’s Children’s Children.

Scott Thill wrote on Wired Magazine that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) ‘eclipses concept album classics, hop-scotching themes of life, death, violence and mental illness’. He thought it beat both Sgt Pepper’s and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s double Freak Out (1966), the first rock concept album.

He also included Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975), philosophical meditations on mental illness and capitalism; Animals (1977) about politics, media and conformity, and The Wall, ‘interrogation of stardom, solitude and fascism’. The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1974) was a concept by Genesis, about a juvenile delinquent who went underground to face nightmares searching for his brother.

The Kinks produced a brace: Arthur, Or Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969) and The Village Green Preservation Society (1968). Clearly, the concept is here to stay. More than just a collection of linked songs and marketing ploy, it is an artistic statement, the musical equivalent of the novel or collection of poems or short stories.

First published on Suite 101, 4 March 2011.

Photo: The Moody Blues Created Many Concept Albums – Chris Lester

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The Godfather Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

March 29th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Scorsese: Inspired Director of The Godfather - David Shankbone
A novel and film 40 years old still thrills, chills and excites imitators. This seminal work set the benchmark for crime family drama. People love it.

On his American Movie Classics (AMC) website, Senior Editor and Film Historian Tim Dirks composed a fulsome commentary of 1972’s masterpiece, The Godfather, in three parts, portraying the mafia as integral part of the fabric of 20th century American society. In a sense, their business became part of the ‘American Dream.’

Dirks styled it: “superb, a mythic, tragic film which contributed to resurgence in the American film industry.” Part 1 was the era’s highest grossing movie. Director Francis Coppola collaborated with Mario Puzo, author of the best-selling novel (1969) about a Cosa Nostra dynasty. The catchphrase “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” (i.e., with a gun to his head) became a classic, with “never tell anyone outside the Family what you’re thinking,” a close second.

Taking his family name from his central Sicilian birth town, ‘Don’ Corleone established a hierarchy of irresistible, strangely empathetic family and anti-heroes. The movie was showered with three Oscars (Best Actor, Adapted Screenplay and Picture), and seven nominations for Best Supporting Actor, Director, Sound, Film Editing and Costume Design.

Totally Believable Plot and Character

Dirks contended that the depth of character study was remarkable, the photography beautiful, with authentic period recreation, rich score and a bittersweet romantic subplot. The actors were of high quality and included Marlon Brando in the title role (he refused his Oscar), Al Pacino, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, Richard Castellano, Al Martino and Lee Strasberg.

At a meeting of New York clans, the aging Don, upholding his view of an ‘honorable’ crime family (prostitution, protection and gambling), felt threatened by rising modern criminal activity, the ‘dirty drug trade.’ His refusal to assist others with that led to his attempted assassination, war among the Five New York Families and the death of his hot-headed son, Sonny, trapped by his weakness for women. Family loyalties were strained; bloodletting, revenge and power-mongering were major strengths in the story.

Part II (1974) was sequel and prequel. It won eleven Academy nominations, regarded as the better work. Featuring Robert De Niro as the young Don Corleone fleeing Sicily, it showed him gradually setting up his Family (as a kind of Robin Hood figure) in New York. It was the back story, but in the Director’s Cut version (1990), Coppola put his epic into chronological order, 1901-1959.

Crime Family Values

He also said he’d always thought of The Godfather as “the story of a great king with three sons, like Shakespeare’s King Lear. The oldest was given his sweet nature and childlike qualities; the second his passion and aggressiveness; and the third, his cunning and coolness.” There was also a long-suffering, loyal sister.

It was the youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), who was drawn semi-reluctantly into the family business, becoming the new Don with a ruthlessness that was clinical, chilling and credible, as he legitimized his crime kingship. In so doing, he paid the price with his humanity (soul) as he cut off the mother of his children and had his own weak, easily led brother, Freddie, murdered.

Part III, set about 20 years later, didn’t arrive till 1990 and saw Michael Corleone buying his way to respectability (while continuing to murder to uphold his position). He died of an ironically peaceful heart attack, but not before seeing his precious daughter butchered and his illegitimate nephew ‘making his bones’ to take over the family business. This was not the strongest in the trilogy.

Insightful Sociological Study

Dirks’ view was that above so much more, it was a study of violence, power, police corruption, honour and obligation. The terms mafia and Cosa Nostra were not used; ‘The Family’ was the understood euphemism. Even the lowliest foot soldier on the criminal ladder who was part of a given crime syndicate belonged to that family, owing loyalty unto death and silence, the unspoken omerta.

He pointed at romanticised domestic life scenes at home, eating and drinking, a family wedding, shopping, a baptism, a funeral, juxtaposed with acts of brutal violence and death. The severed head of his $600,000 prize racehorse placed in the bed of the sleeping movie mogul who refused to assist a Corleone protege was one of the most memorable.

It was about repaying debts. Partly, these were acts of revenge, a son for a son, like the Biblical ‘eye for an eye.’ Equally, debts were material. The undertaker who asked the Don for revenge against thugs who nearly raped his daughter was later told to repay what Corleone’s men did by cleaning up Sonny’s body before his mother saw it. It was all couched in terms of ‘asking a favour, for a friend.’ The Sicilian way.

The Mafia Genre

There were more strands, issues and ideas: the rise of Las Vegas and gambling; the U.S. Grand Committee system; husband-wife trust in a marriage of Italian-American to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP); white historic ‘superiority’ over Italian immigrants; the Roman Catholic Church; tradition versus modernity and the depth of integration of old mafia into American society.

Other movies in the same game as The Godfather include: Goodfellas (1990) by Scorsese, based on a real mobster called Henry Hill; the same director’s Casino (1995) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984), another epic spanning generations of New York’s organised criminal underworld, showcasing friendship, love, loss, greed and, of course, violence.

Donnie Brasco (1997) was also based on truth about infiltrating a crime family. The Departed (2006) and Carlito’s Way (1993) were crime thrillers, while Scarface (1983) revealed Miami’s ‘wise guys.’ Some have it that movies like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), Pulp Fiction (1994), The Boondock Saints (2000), Analyze This (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002) were mafia genre films.

They also included Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), The Usual Suspects (1995), Chinatown (1974), Snatch (2000), Kill Bill (2003), Fight Club (1999), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Eastern Promises (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008). Even The Shawshank Redemption (1994) should be included.

The violence, the codes of honour, the distortions caused by misplaced loyalties, were symptomatic of mafiosi movies. The Sopranos (1999-2006) put the genre onto television. Whether directly or indirectly about Sicilian Mafia in American, Russian, Mexican, Eastern European, Oriental, South American versions, people enjoy getting involved. It’s getting in touch with the dark side. That’s what movie makers offer audiences. Few can refuse.

First published on Suite 101, 27 February 2011.

Photo: Scorsese: Inspired Director of The Godfather – David Shankbone

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Forever Young: The Cursed Quest of the Performer

March 28th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Jimi Hendrix: Forever Young - Staszek Szybki Jest
While no one wants to be old, performers chase any elusive butterfly to stay forever young. Technology may answer their prayer, but is it curse or blessing?

Pete Townshend of The Who stuttered in “My Generation”, “hope I die before I get old.” Many did just that: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Karen Carpenter, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Tammi Terrell and Marc Bolan.

Those who didn’t and lived into this century found themselves with renewed careers in their old age, touring the nostalgia circuit, reliving the memories, retelling the songs they sang in their teens like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Eric Burden, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Eric Burden, Van Morrison, Paul McCartney and Ray Davies.

In a sense, and as their audiences have grown old with them yet attracted younger generations too, they have lived Bob Dylan’s prayer in his “Forever Young”(1974), “May God bless and keep you always/May your wishes all come true/May you always do for others/ And let others do for you/May you build a ladder to the stars/And climb on every rung/May you stay forever young.”

Holding Back the Years

This was addressed as much to those rock stars who died young, as to those who lived on. Nowadays the post-war baby boomer generation refusing to grow old gracefully take the lead in cosmetic surgery, drugs and unguents. Bodies are tattooed and ornamented, while breasts/faces/eyes/teeth/stomachs are nipped and tucked by people of all ages now.

It’s as if collectively and individually only youth is valued; old age is disregarded, as court cases and arguments over “ageism” at the BBC, for example, showed in 2010-2011. However, the ideal of eternal youth, physical immortality without aging, has been around for centuries. Waters, seas and mud have been popular regeneratives at times. Ancient Egyptians used creams for the skin. Even their dead were embalmed, forever.

In traditions, mythologies and religions, continuous youth has featured, from Abrahamic to the Hindu, Islamic, Greek and Roman to the Norse legends. The elixir of life or philosopher’s stone, the alchemy of existence was the mythical liquid potion that granted such eternal life.

One sip from the Fountain of Youth was sufficient to restore those halycon but unspecified periods of life. It survives as a metaphor for anything that prolongs longevity, and has long been of obvious appeal to writers and film makers. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr Heideggers’ Experiment (1837), Tim Powers‘ On Stranger Tides (1987) and Disney’s Don’s Fountain of Youth (1953) are just some of the works inspired by the notion.

The Arts Are Ageless

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Dorian Gray (2009) are but two movies from the catalogue of the mystery of perpetual youth and its consequences. Gray was from the Oscar Wilde Story, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), about a painting of an impossibly beautiful young man which grew older as he stayed young. It is a Faustian-soul-to-the-devil plot, in essence. Matthew Bourne worked a major choreographic piece from it, too.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) employed life suspension, but not eternal life for humans. Forever Young (1992) was a cryogenics experiment movie set in 1939 and 1992. Stephen Holden, NY Times film critic, reviewed Italian movie, The Last Kiss (2001), later remade as American in 2006, as “contemporary seriocomic bedroom farce,” while dealing with the sense of aging brought on by impending parenthood and grandparenthood. Clearly, neither states can be prevented, but a nostalgic wish in people to stay young is in the poignant line many say “But I’m too young to be a grandparent!”

Immortality in the arts touches on man’s fears for his future beyond the mortal world. Sci-fi and fantasy genres have tapped this with success. In Britain’s TV series Dr Who, the central character transformed/regenerated his body periodically (to coincide with a new actor taking over the role) and continued his eternal life as a Time Lord of the Galaxy. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, the Harry Potter world of immortal witches and wizards, and movies like Highlander exploited the idea.

The Child Is Father to the Man

In his Daily Telegraph (Feb 2011) review of the National Theatre’s Frankenstein, Harry de Quetteville, wrote about the responsibilities of creation, underlining the reflective relationship, vanity and megalomania, reinforced by having two actors who alternated roles of creator and created “I will unfold to the world the mysteries of creation.”

It is man’s driving force to procreate, to reproduce himself down through generations he will never see, but will be in his image. It is God creating man in His image, and giving him offspring more numerous than grains of sand on a shore. It is poetry and drama.

The wonders of modern technology mean that the performer can now be immortal too. Early sound recordings of singers, early surviving film give actors, directors and writers of forgotten material an eternity denied before. Plays have been made into films, or a few simply recorded for future generations.

Now, cloud computer digital technology and whatever comes next means that when the curtain comes down, it’s no longer the end. The pleasures of live theatre (sharing something unique, spellbound suspension of disbelief) and the displeasures (transport, expense, visibility of stage, people coughing/talking, poor sound quality of theatre) may now to be consigned to niche marketing.

Digital downloading gives the home viewer the best seat in the house, enhanced with camera shots unavailable from the distance of a theatre seat. Film and theatre are merging; new art forms are evolving from the fusions, as they do in music, movie, effects and sounds all the time.

In that sense, the holy grail of eternity for performers will be realized. Not all the cryogenics, Botox, potions, soul-selling in the world will do it. Medical science may slow the advance of the years in future, but on live/recorded sound/light fusion shows, performers will be truly forever young.

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First published on Suite 101, 26 February 2011.

Image: Jimi Hendrix: Forever Young – Staszek Szybki Jest

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Oxymorons, Verbosity and Tautology: Mangling the Language

March 22nd, 2012 | 1 Comment

 

A Lovely Day: Statement of the Obvious - David
English is a living language, constantly adapting, changing, absorbing. When some people mangle it too far, senses of perspective, poetry and humour help.

‘Oh the games people play now/never meaning what they say now/never saying what they mean’. Lyrics from the song Games People Play (1968) by Joe South sum up the fact that few people say what they mean. Ever.

According to net language course provider, Word Power, in the days of Shakespeare/Milton (say 16th and 17th centuries), the English vocabulary contained about 60,000 words. Today, it’s well over a million and growing. If words are the building blocks of thinking, then accurate language is vital.

Statements of the Obvious

On a day with particularly strong weather, people will invariably point out to somebody else things like: ‘What a lovely day!’ or ‘A bit cold today!’ This, as if the person receiving these pearls of wisdom was completely unaware of the same weather. ‘Drive carefully!’ is another equally unnecessary remark.

When something or somebody comes into view or something happens, attention is drawn with things like: ‘Just look at that! Did you see that?’ Again, as if the other person missed it when they didn’t or couldn’t. This is particularly annoying to many, when both parties are watching the same thing, as at a show or in the cinema.

People ask obvious questions. ‘Can I borrow a piece of paper?’ Will it be given back after use? Or to somebody sitting by a clearly unoccupied chair: ‘Is this seat taken?’ They make definitive statements if a thing is lost: ‘Well, where did you last see it?’ Clearly, if the other one knew that, it wouldn’t be lost. The crowning touch on this is: ‘It’s always in the last place you look’. Of course it is!

Sometimes the obvious is couched in terms of wisdom or folklore: ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’. Most people would demand, ‘why not?’.

Oxymorons

People speak in oxymorons: contradictions, mixing impossible opposites. ‘Near-miss’, ‘friendly fire’ and ‘perfect storm’ are more recent additions to this infamous lexicon. Clearly, ‘near-hit’ would be more accurate, fire from enemy or ally guns still kills and a perfect storm actually means a conjunction of bad events, implying imperfection.

How many products are relaunched under the banner ‘New and Improved’? Either they are one or the other, not both simultaneously. ‘Posted to your door’ is meaningless, since where else would it be posted? ‘Victimless crime’ is just an excuse to justify some act, and ‘unknown identity’ cannot be.

Sometimes they are created for political, training or poetical reasons. Eyes Wide Shut and Rebel Without a Cause made good film titles. ‘Expect the Unexpected’ is a useful one to warn people. ‘Clear as mud’, ‘calculated error’, ‘climb down’ and ‘cold sweat’ are understood, but ultimately inaccurate. Others include: ‘among the first’, ‘almost exactly’, ‘authentic replica’, ‘crisis management’, ‘countless numbers’, ‘fresh dried fruit’, ‘more time’, ‘flurry of inactivity’, ‘fighting for peace’ and ‘going nowhere’.

‘Militant pacifist’, ‘gunboat diplomacy’, ‘removable sticker’, ‘unsolved mystery’, ‘unbiased opinion’, ‘small fortune’, ‘silent testimony’, ‘staged accident’ and ‘zero deficit’ are everyday phrases. Only when they are thought about, do they become technically ridiculous. Equally, ‘ill fortune’, ‘hopelessly optimistic’, ‘instant classic’, ‘increasingly little’ and ‘numbing sensation’ share the same contradictions.

‘Oven fried’, ‘old news’, ‘preliminary conclusion’, ‘moving target’, ‘loud whisper’ and ‘Loners’ Club’ are in the same league. Others are created tongue-in-cheek for amusement: ‘convenience store’, ‘customer service’, ‘government efficiency’, ‘political promises’, ‘express train’, ‘gourmet hamburger’, ‘private email’, ‘non-working mother’ and ‘weather forecaster’.

Verbosity and Tautology

Furthermore, some people say what they mean to such an extent, copiously and fully, that virtually all point is lost in saying it. Verbosity is an expression of needlessly excessive words, in what is also described as verbiage, long-windedness, prolixity, pleonasm and verbal diarrhea.

It can be used as a characterisation in literature, play or film, or even as a rhetorical device, but in spoken everyday English, it can be hard work to follow. Examples include: ‘at this moment in time’ (now); ‘a tiny little young child’; ‘to infinity and beyond’ and ‘the long and the short of it’. Some use the term ‘to cut a long story short‘ when that is the last thing they do. It’s rarely clear whether they mean it in a postmodern ironic way. (And postmodern itself is an oxymoron).

Dictionary.com summarises tautology as needless repetition of an idea through additional words that add little, such as ‘widow woman’, ‘free gift’ or ‘this candidate will win, or not win’, and which repeat elements of meaning already conveyed, as in ‘will these supplies be adequate enough?’ Adequate is itself, neither enough nor not.

A version of Murphy’s Law has it: ‘Yes or no? The eternal tautology’. Having said all that and in fairness, oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes and other tortuous distortions of language occur to great effect in literature. Word Power claimed these devices as old but common in poetry especially. The ‘deafening silence’ is a profound image explored in Paul Simon’s song The Sound of Silence. Language would be poorer if people couldn’t tinker with it.

First published on Suite 101, 25 February 2011.

Image: A Lovely Day: Statement of the Obvious – David

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Sunday Trading Laws Are Dilemma Now Facing UK Government

March 19th, 2012 | Add a Comment

UK Shopping: Restricted Sunday Hours - Ian Shortman

Under the guise of Olympic Games needs, Britain is set to ‘try’ unrestricted Sunday shop opening as an experiment. It may become permanent.

Shortly after the 2010 General Election, I wrote the following article, to raise awareness of how Sunday Trading laws would become a real problem for the then new Government. The 2012 Budget is likely to lead to a dry-run of abandoning laws for the summer, to enable Britain’s trading doors to be open 24/7,

Understandably, churches and campaigners for Sunday respite from relentless commercialism are opposed. It will be a hotly contested issue during 2012. The arguments rehearsed below are still relevant to the debate.

The April 2010 Article:

Britain’s new government will have competing priorities, from fiscal restraint and taxes to Afghanistan and immigration. However, there is another issue: should the UK have unlimited Sunday shopping hours, or should there be restrictions closing large outlets for part of the traditional day of rest?

The political problem is that people have conflicting roles and feelings. Virtually everybody is a consumer/purchaser in some form or other, nobody wants to work constantly, but some want a quieter day on Sundays, some want small shops, others want bigger, others just the Internet. How can legislation be framed to keep the majority happy?

A Nation of Shopkeepers

Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have dismissed the English as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, meaning buying and selling was more important than preparing for war. He may have taken that from Adam Smith’s economic treatise The Wealth of Nations (1776), which described raising up a government influenced by shopkeepers.

Nowadays, he might describe the British as a nation of shoppers. It’s a favourite pastime, and supplies jobs, drives the economy. It’s jobs in manufacturing things to sell; it’s jobs dependent on selling, marketing and advertising, building and maintaining outlets, transporting goods and customers, that makes shopping so economically important.

The British Retail Consortium estimates consumers make 60 billion annual shopping visits, one in eight households has a retail worker, and over 40% of the adult population has worked in the sector. It also argues that retailing is at the forefront of tax-and-spend policies, in-town and out-of-town planning issues, cutting waste, reducing carbon emissions and responding to public demands for food, fashion, lifestyles and essentials. The retail workforce is diverse: 62% women, 13% disabled workers, 12% ethnic minority staff, and 20% are under 21 and frequently in their first employment.

Almost Everything Is A Retail Opportunity

Today’s shopping experience has come about in response to a changing world and technology. People crave shopping opportunities in towns, railway stations, motorway services, garages, hospital foyers and fields, farms and 24-hour supermarkets. Consumers demand convenience, flexibility and choice undreamed of a generation ago. High street shopping reinvents itself to take advantage of people’s disposable time and money, advances in marketing and display, the online revolution and the rise of the 24-hour society. The same is true in the USA where 24/7 spending is easier without shopping restrictions enshrined in British Sunday Trading laws.

Globalisation of communications and trading, rapid and constant flow of data means that every aspect of retailing from commodity prices, wars and natural disasters, accidents, medical break-throughs, fashions and trends, customer satisfaction, are all available without break, beamed around the world. Computer-generated personalised shopping taken from previous purchasing history and individualised guided suggestions are becoming normal.

Keep Sunday Special

In 1985 a campaign group, Keep Sunday Special, was established in Britain to oppose plans to give unrestricted Sunday trading the green light, although Scotland has no Sunday-specific curbs. It grew out of The Lord’s Day Observance Society, set up to protect Sunday as a day of Christian worship. Latterly, religion has not been the focus, but is now rather about protecting family life and workers.

Prior to the most recent law change in 1994, only small shops could open, all large outlets had to close, and anomalies were rife. People could buy a pornographic magazine but not a Bible. After long hours debating in Parliament, a new Act was framed that allowed large shops (over 3000 square feet, or 280m2) to open for 6 hours on a Sunday, and most do so between 10am and 4pm. Smaller shops can stay open longer.

Assurances are in place between employers and trades unions that no shop worker can be forced to work on Sundays. Recently, USDAW, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, with 320,000 members, have launched their own campaign to keep Sundays different.

They and other groups delight in a new poll by the Association of Convenience Stores which found only 5% of the public favouring longer Sunday shopping hours, while 89% actually oppose changing the status quo. Some garden centres defied the law with longer Easter Sunday opening, and with Boxing Day falling on a Sunday in 2010, other outlets could be tempted to challenge the regulations.

So, MPs and ministers responsible must strike a balance between employers, jobs, taxes and investment against public opinion, campaign groups and citizens who want to have one day a week free from 24/7 retailing. The government may keep things as they are, arguing that if people want to buy, they can do so on line or in the corner shop. It’s a tough call, but so is everything in politics.

First published on Suite 101, 24 April 2010.

Image: UK Shopping: Restricted Sunday Hours – Ian Shortman

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2001: A Space Odyssey Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

March 18th, 2012 | Comments Off on 2001: A Space Odyssey Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

The All Seeing Eye of HAL9000 - Cryteria
Visionary, profound, astounding, a visual experience and epic, the movie was a cinematic special effects landmark with messages that speak still.

Tim Dirks, senior editor and film historian at American Movie Classics (AMC) wrote an extensive commentary on the structure, meanings, purpose and parallels of Kubrick’s 1968 film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film has entertained, intrigued and mystified audiences ever since it came out; today, astonishingly, it has much to teach the world.

Dirks described it as “a landmark classic, probably the best science-fiction film of all time about exploration of the unknown.” Coincidentally released at the height of the US-USSR space race, it “prophetically showed the enduring influence computers would have on our daily lives” and how man is dwarfed by technology and space.

It broke conventions – no spoken dialogue for 40 minutes, long periods of deadly silence, all scenes with dialogue or music/silence; never both together. Orchestral music from Richard and Johann Strauss, Ligeti and Khatchaturian were in symphonic movements. It won four Academy nominations, took one Oscar, was initially panned by critics, but embraced by psychedelic hippies.

The First Mysteries

Space conjunctions of Earth, Moon and Sun heralded the planting of an eerily humming monolith, smooth obelisk on the Moon. The Dawn of Man was the first episode, timed to Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra, from Nietzsche, as primeval ape man discovered weapons from animal bones as the sun rose in front of the monolith. The tribe was attacked by a leopard and forced to defend a waterhole from other ape tribes.

“Man” thus became carnivore and killer. One reached out cautiously to touch the monolith, representing the mystery of religious experience. Dirks likened it to Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in Eden. The use of the bone weapon gave the tribe power/authority over others.

Symbolically, the bone transformed into a space ship. Countless thousands of years later, a similar monolith was seen on the Moon signalling to Jupiter that man had reached another milestone in his evolution, triggering an official cover up to avoid panic among people. Astronauts seeing the object for the first time felt a religious experience as deeply as the apes did four million years earlier.

Later, in 2001, there was a futuristic (but realistic) 18-month mission to Jupiter to find the alien source of the monolith, across space’s vast universe, revealing the boredom of the travellers and the complexities of the onboard HAL computer. This machine could reproduce or mimic almost all human functions. The name was derived from Heuristic and Algorithmic learning types, and it alone knew the true purpose of the mission.

The Wonder of the Computer

A neutral voice of calm reason was given to the computer, and a scene showing it playing chess with an astronaut to while away the time, flagged later conflict when HAL had to be destroyed by slowly removing its functions from within its brain. Diagnosis, prediction of failure of a unit, and cross checking with a sister HAL on Earth were all part of the deadly game HAL played to preserve the mission, including lip-reading humans discussing it secretly.

Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite was the final section, a mystical experience in an unspecified time and dimension. Symbolically, HAL’s demise represented the failure of technology, as the sole survivor entered Jupiter’s outer limits in search of the life-source, only to be caught in a light-show caused by a third monolith. He was sent racing through a vortex or corridor of light/time warps, a maelstrom.

Dirk described the ending as a new realm of physical reality, in surroundings created from his own subconscious memories, a cosmic bedroom, where the astronaut saw reincarnations of himself as his original aged rapidly. In his death throes, he reached out a hand to another monolith, before entering new birth as a “star child,” watched by aliens.

Dirk viewed the end result of the space odyssey was “not a greater and more infallible machine, but a greater, more fully-realized being produced in a second childhood.” It completed the cyclical evolution from ape to man to angel/starchild/superman. And the next step? Not given.

Interpretations and Influences

This movie had elements of postmodernism, with the juxtaposition of ideas/eras, and people could take what they wanted from it. Parts were close to surrealistic and other parts stemmed directly from influences of the late 1960s. It was, and remains, a film that stays in the mind for ages afterwards (for many people, years afterwards).

There was religion, psychology, sociology and sheer creativity in there. Was Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote the story) mad, or was Kubrick insane who put it onto film? No, but the differences may be thin; they worked the screenplay together. Some observers found the novel easier to follow, more intimate and less complex than the movie.

George M. DeMet published an edited version of his honors thesis at Northwestern University, 1997-1998. He did not search a single meaning for the film, but studied how it has been interpreted in so many ways, and how the Information Revolution of the past 30 years influenced our reading of the movie now.

2001 was marketed as “The Ultimate Trip,” aimed at the youth/college audience, changed from “an epic drama of adventure and exploration.” He connected it to the “Space Race and the Decline of Hollywood”, and “1960s Counterculture”. He acknowledged that some people saw it as a satire on future living with an influence on later films.

Possibly a commentary on humanity’s arrogance, like other Kubrick movies (Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange), DeMet identified how prior to 2001, sci-fi movies were low budget, poorly written, laughable affairs. Post 2001 and the US moon landing in 1969, science fiction stories became more down to earth, like Planet of the Apes (and sequels).

He showed how THX-1138, Soylent Green and Logan’s Run depicted bleak, dystopian futures . Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) reignited interest in big budget sci-fi blockbusters, followed by ET, Alien, Blade Runner, Contact and Back to the Future. His point was that these serious movies were only feasible in the light of the opening that 2001 gave the industry. That people have watched and wondered, enjoyed and talked about it for over 40 years, is tribute indeed.

First published on Suite 101, 24 February 2011.

Image: The All Seeing Eye of HAL9000 – Cryteria

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