When Classic Becomes Camp

Last night I went to see Mysterious Island, one in a series of movies the local art-house theater is showing to honor the achievements of legendary stop-motion artist Ray Harryhausen, who died earlier this year. If you haven't seen it, it's an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, with castaways encountering perils and (this being a Harryhausen film) giant monsters on a remote island. Though not one of the master's best films--the drama is slow and plodding, and some of the effects, particularly the glass paintings and traveling mattes on the island, are poorly executed--Mysterious Island is still an impressive piece of special-effects movie-making.

But you know, every time I go to see one of these older fantasy films, whether it be King Kong or The Valley of Gwangi, I have to sit through the lunkheads in the audience cracking up every time an effects sequence appears on screen. Last night, it was an older couple, probably in their sixties, sitting right behind me, yucking it up over Harryhausen's creations. It ticked me off.

I'm more sensitive to this than most, since Harryhausen was my boyhood hero, one of the main reasons (along with Star Wars) I grew up believing in the power of fantasy. But in a broader sense, the hilarity of last night's audience made me wonder: when did classic become camp?

There are campy movies out there, for sure. Many of them were made in the fifties and sixties, when Harryhausen was at the peak of his form. But his films weren't among them. They were designed as spectacle, perhaps, but not as camp. They were meant to be taken seriously: to inspire awe and wonder, not giggles.

Now, as a literary critic and film scholar, I know that what a creator intends for her or his artwork has nothing to do with how an audience receives it. If, in today's era of soulless but realistic computer effects, a film with stop-motion monsters appears silly, audiences will, perhaps naturally, perceive it as such.

But I can't help thinking you'd have to exist in a historical vacuum not to recognize artistry as artistry, regardless of its relationship to present standards. Cave paintings might look quaint today--but they were pretty damn impressive in their time. The acting in Citizen Kane is over-the-top by today's naturalistic standards--but that's still a pretty darn good film. Harryhausen, working alone and with budgets in the mere thousands, couldn't produce what immense teams of technicians equipped with multi-million dollar machines can produce today--but that doesn't make him a hack.

It's inevitable, perhaps, that a consumer culture such as ours--a culture that can't wait to get its hands on the next technological gizmo, simply because it's the next--will equate past with surpassed. It's perhaps inevitable that such a culture will perceive anything classic as campy.

But I'm going to stick with my convictions. Something that was good in its own time--something that was great in its own time, as all of Harryhausen's films were--can still be meaningful in ours. If we fail to acknowledge this, then we're the ones who have become silly and irrelevant.

Twitter, She Wrote!

As I become more adept at Twitter--at least I think I'm becoming so--I find myself more curious about its properties, its qualities, its vagaries.  I suppose this is the way it is with any new skill: once one masters it to a sufficient extent, some of the energy that was previously expended on the brute act of doing can be diverted into reflection about the doing.

And so I find myself pondering the widespread use among tweeters of a punctuation mark most writers eschew: the exclamation point.

I use exclamation points all the time in my tweets.  So do lots of others.  They're everywhere!

But, like most writers, I use them sparingly in my other forms of writing (including this blog).  In fifteen years of academic writing, I'd be surprised if I used a single exclamation point.  In fiction, I do use them occasionally, though exclusively in quoted dialogue; somehow, the words "Watch out.  A monster is about to eat your face." just don't cut it.

However, I've been taught--and I tend to agree--that over-use of exclamation points is a crutch, a way of manufacturing apparent excitement when the writing itself isn't particularly exciting.  This is the only thing I find problematic about J. K. Rowling's otherwise excellent prose; when you've got dialogue like "'YOU KILLED MY PARENTS, YOU EVIL SNAKE-MONGER!!!!' Harry yelled loudly," you begin to feel the lady doth protest too much.

But okay, if we're so exclamation-point averse in our other writing, why are we so exclamation-point prone in Twitter?

Maybe it's because, constrained by the small size of each tweet, we're desperate for something to give our words punch.

Or maybe it's because we know we're competing with a feed containing thousands if not millions of comparably small, in-themselves-unexciting nuggets.  So we're clamoring to be heard above the racket.

Or maybe it's the relative anonymity of Twitter.  I'm beginning to develop some fun, playful, bantering kinds of relationships with the people I follow and/or who follow me, but still, these relationships are, by definition, mediated and thus not intimate.  So it's no biggie if I engage in exclamation-point-overkill; no one's going to hold it against me.

Or maybe, as a final suggestion, it's because tweeting, like so many of our forms of communication in this virtual age, possesses a certain unreality, a certain artifice, that we resort to the readiest (and stingiest) symbol of emphasis, the exclamation point.  Maybe, by ending every sentence with that familiar vertical-and-dot, what we're really saying is, "Look!  What I have to say is real!"

And if that's what we're doing, maybe we need to go back to the writing-advice manual and recall that we can't manufacture reality typographically.  It needs to be there in the first place.

How 3-D Is Ruining Movies For Me

First, let's get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a 3-D movie.

3-D movies are two dimensional like all movies.  In the case of traditional movies, the flat screen uses certain context cues (scale, overlap, etc.) to trick our brains into perceiving apparent depth.  In the case of 3-D movies, an additional trick is used: two slightly off-kilter images, which our brains, assisted by special lenses, combine to perceive apparent depth.

I was perfectly happy to imagine movies as having depth.  I didn't need to wear funky glasses to aid the deception.  In fact, to me, that additional illusion destroys the illusion: the few elements that jump out of the screen only emphasize how flat everything else truly is.

To me, the 3-D movie craze is absolutely ruining my ability to watch the kind of movies I want to watch.

Case in point: Jurassic Park.  I saw it twenty years ago, and I was excited to see it again on the big screen.

But I can't.  Why?  Because it's in 3-D, and the very few 2-D screenings are in the middle of the day.  When I'm, you know, at work.

Most of the movies I enjoy watching--that is, fantasy and science fiction--are now being presented in 3-D.  Soon, they might only be released in that format.  At which point, I'll probably stop watching movies altogether.

And maybe that won't be such a bad thing.  Because the other, deeper way in which 3-D is ruining movies is by dictating their content.  With our fancy new 3-D technology, we take a perfectly nice story like The Hobbit and add endless chase scenes, dropping-off-cliff sequences, and other completely needless nonsense merely because it looks really cool in 3-D.

The technology, rather than the story or the theme or the character relationships, drives the film.

Now, to a certain extent, technology has always played a determining role in fantasy and sci-fi film.  A main goal of such films is to produce the illusion of the impossible, and technology has kept pace in striving to make that illusion convincing.  By introducing another illusory reality to fantasy and science fiction film, one could argue that 3-D is only extending that tradition.

But 3-D, I believe, is different.  To a far greater extent than any of the technologies that have preceded it--stop-motion animation, blue and green screens, CGI--3-D takes on a life of its own: it becomes the film's reason for existence, over and above its function of enhancing the realism of the film's patently unreal effects. If you want proof of that, the mere fact that these movies are advertised as 3-D should supply it: no one ever said, "I'm going to a CGI movie today," even if (as in the case of the original Jurassic Park) revolutionary advances in CGI modeling greatly added to the film's appeal.  3-D, in other words, is a kind of uber-technology, a technology that calls attention only to itself.

And ultimately, that's why it's ruining movies for me (and seems likely to ruin them for everyone in the long run).

We don't watch movies anymore.  We watch the technology.

Like so much in today's digital age, we've added a (virtual) dimension, while losing the thing itself.

Proper Twitterquette

I'm relatively new to Twitter--only about two months tweeting--so I'm sure there's plenty I don't understand about its uses, its rules, its nuances.

That being said, it's taken me only two months to become thoroughly exasperated by what I see as the abuse of the medium by certain users.

I offer, for what it's worth, two categories of tweeters whom I believe are showing extremely poor twitterquette and generally ticking the rest of us off.

The Trivial Tweeter

I read somewhere (probably on Twitter) that the system allows each user a maximum of 1,000 tweets per day.  That's roughly 40 per hour, or two every three minutes.

But do we really need to reach that limit?

I used to follow a guy who tweeted constantly about his coffee-drinking.  As in, "I'm headed to the coffee shop now."  A minute later: "Just ordered my latte."  Thirty seconds later: "Ah!  First sip.  Delightfully frothy."  A minute later: "Almost done.  Time to order another."

I'm not kidding.

Why, oh why, did this guy believe I wanted to know every excruciating detail of his moment-by-moment love affair with caffeine?  Why, oh why, must everything in our lives be reported to everyone else on the planet?  If you're doing something worthwhile, then by all means let 'er rip.  But if you're drinking coffee, or filing your nails, or picking your nose, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

When I stopped following this guy, he immediately stopped following me.  I assume he has one of those programs that automatically identify unfollowers and unfollow them.

And all I can say to that is: thank God.

The Serial Tweeter

If anything, worse than the Trivial Tweeter, who's merely annoying.  The Serial Tweeter is trying to sell you something--in my case, one of his or her books.  So every hour, ten or twenty times, s/he tweets a link to his/her works on Amazon.

Let's get one thing straight.  I'm a writer too, and yes, I do advertise my works on Twitter.  As I understand the rules, that's one of its uses.

BUT TEN OR TWENTY TIMES AN HOUR?

This does not make me want to run out and buy these books.  Quite the contrary.  It makes me loathe the writer, the same way I loathe the people who come up to my door and try to sell me things I don't want (usually religion), the same way I would loathe anyone who was constantly in my face trying to sell me something when I'm trying to conduct other business.  Thanks to the Serial Tweeters I've had the misfortune to follow cluttering up the Twitter feed with their endless barrage of "look at me, love me, buy me!" tweets, I can hardly find the other business I want to conduct.

So I'm going to be spending the next couple days identifying Trivial and Serial Tweeters on my list, and unfollowing the heck out of them.  I'm sure they'll immediately return the favor.  To which I can only say: thank God.

Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot.  Maybe there'll be a mass exodus away from my tweets.  Maybe I'll drop instantly from my respectable 80 followers to an anemic 5 or 10.

But you know what?  I'd rather have one good and true companion than countless fair-tweeter friends.

Anti-Social Media

Now that I've amassed a fairly full complement of social media accounts--I've got Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, this blog, even Rafflecopter (though I have yet to figure out how to use that one)--I've noticed a disturbing aspect of them: namely, the anti-social use of social media.

On Facebook, for instance, I witnessed one of my friends engaging in a rancorous, obscenity-laden exchange with one of his friends.  What set them off I'm not sure; I believe it was a simple political disagreement, something having to do with wealth and poverty or guns or the government.  But man, did the expletives fly!  Maybe it was all in fun, though it sure didn't sound like it.  I considered stepping in to recommend civility, but I decided I'd be an unwelcome interloper in their mutual tirade.

Then there was the Twitter exchange I recently--and unwillingly--experienced, where one of the people I follow went back and forth for some time with someone else over the question of what he'd originally tweeted.  He said he'd said one thing, and the other guy said he'd said something else, and by the time they were done I wasn't sure who had said what.  It ended with your basic "dude, whatever," but it was pretty nasty to watch as it unfolded.

And then there are the reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, which range from thoughtful and respectful to downright cruel if not barbaric.  I deleted a couple of my Amazon reviews when I got return comments from people I'd never heard of that went something like, "who the **** do you think you are not to like this movie?"  (I actually wrote to complain to Amazon, whom I thought moderated these things, but their only suggestion was to not post reviews if I was worried about how people would respond to them.)  I'm amazed at the ferocity of some reviews on Goodreads, where four-letter words reign and the goal appears to be to come up with ever more extreme ways to insult and demean authors.  I've considered jumping into a couple of those conversations too--with something like, "well, gosh, you know, it's hard to write good books, and if you don't like a particular book, it's not really as if the author is consciously trying to be mean to you or to waste your time"--but I decided, again, to let discretion play the better part of valor.

What to make of this?  Am I just a dinosaur who believes we should try to be kind to each other, in word and deed, whenever possible?  Or is there something about social media that breeds or at least liberates anti-social tendencies?

I think there is.  Social media are relatively anonymous, relatively risk-free (no real chance of an actual fistfight, which as we know from Fight Club most people assiduously avoid), and--perhaps worst--virtually instantaneous, with little opportunity for the internal censor to intervene.  Under such conditions, it's far too easy for small misunderstandings or disagreements to bloom into posturing, rants, and put-downs.

So I'd suggest we develop an app or a widget or whatever to deal with this epidemic of social media unpleasantness.

Or wait, we already have one.  It's called conscience.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

I saw Disney's prequel to The Wizard of Oz today.  My initial reaction was that it had some interesting effects--particularly the well-rendered china doll--and characterizations--particularly the winged monkey who aids the neophyte wizard--but that it didn't pack anywhere near the imaginative punch of the 1939 classic.  Like so much of today's big-budget fantasy fare, Oz, the Great and Powerful seemed more interested in spectacle than story: instead of deepening or extending the Oz mythology in interesting ways, what we got was a lot of green-screen action sequences (many of them looking like bad 1980s video games, and some of them clearly included only for their 3-D possibilities), an overly familiar tale of a scoundrel becoming a fatherly saint (think Real Steel and X-Men: First Class, just to name the two that popped first into my head), and a painfully familiar tale of evil women (wearing black and showing lots of cleavage) duking it out with their angelic counterparts for the love of a man.

In one respect, though, I found the film interesting: its self-referential nature.  When a film culminates with a showman projecting images of himself onto a screen to dominate the masses, one can't help thinking that the film is making only a barely disguised appeal to its own technological and cultural operations.  (The film does, in fact, refer to Edison's early experiments in moving pictures, so the self-referential nature of the effects cannot be chance.)  The 1939 film, as I've shown in my book Framing Monsters, was itself very much interested in the nature of film and film technology, so there's a nice continuity between the two movies there.

The difference, however, is that Oz '39 was quite skeptical about the power of film as a cultural force; set against the backdrop of 1930s Hollywood's attempts to monopolize the technology, bust unions, and force independent producers and exhibitors out of business, the original film was anything but enthusiastic about film's immense cultural power.  (It's the wizard's cinematic exploits, after all, that are revealed as humbugs.)  But Oz '13 represents the deceptive qualities of film as an agency of salvation: the wizard cows and defeats the two witches through the power of the cinema, and the citizens of Emerald City are liberated, not shanghaied, by this power.  I sensed no irony in the wizard's triumphant use of cinematic illusion to ascend the throne; judging by this film, it seems that little compunction remains in today's Hollywood about the industry's cultural dominance.

And really, why should any such compunction remain?  Film is so pervasive as to be all-but-invisible.  It's everywhere, and as such it's nowhere.

Which is about as good a definition of ideology as you're likely to find.

Techno-Humanism

I recently read an essay (which I won't dignify by linking to it here) by a guy who works at Google. This guy delivered a commencement address describing his odyssey from being a "technologist" to being a "humanist" (apparently, he went back to school to earn a Philosophy Ph.D. after earning a bundle in the technology industry). He waxes eloquent about the wonders of humanistic inquiry, how it has enriched him as a thinker and a person. And then he tells us how wonderfully the humanities can serve society: apparently, with his fancy new Philosophy degree, he got the brilliant idea to create a new kind of internet search engine.

Wow.

As someone who believes in the humanities, I'm frankly tired of those who try to argue that humanistic inquiry is "as good as" technological, scientific, material, or economic pursuits. What these arguments typically boil down to is what I've described above: a claim for the ways in which the humanities can get you a good job, help you solve a technological puzzle, or add to the material prosperity of humankind.

What you'll never hear these supposed "supporters" of the humanities say is that the humanities are good in ways that simply are not reducible to dollars earned or techno-gadgets built and improved--that the humanities are, indeed, in some ways antithetical to the values embodied by techno-society.

If anything, these techno-humanists are more dangerous than those who simply vilify, ridicule, or demean the humanities. The latter at least are being honest: they believe that all there is to life is money, material possessions, and technological advance, and they have no time to waste on anything that doesn't contribute to those ends. Techno-humanists, by contrast, act as if they favor the humanities--but really, they merely wish to transform the humanities into another servant of the almighty technological god.

So the next time you hear someone sing the praises of the humanities while telling you how he used his Philosophy degree to dig us deeper into the pit of techno-slavery, ask him this: might he not try using his Philosophy degree to try to start digging us out?

Machine Man

Thanks to the Blockbuster queue (my seven-year-old son calls it the Blockbuster “cube”), I saw a fantasy film last night that brings together many of the issues I’ve been blogging about of late: technology, spirituality, fatherhood. It was, of all things, Iron Man 2, and like its predecessor, it wasn’t half bad (even if, in the end, it was a bit muddled). Still, I’ll take it over The Dark Knight any day.

Iron Man 2 opens with gazillionaire Tony Stark hosting a revived “Stark Expo,” which his deceased father originated a quarter-century earlier. A showcase for his dad’s (and his own) technological utopianism, their belief that technology can make the world not only a better place but a perfect place, the Expo seems to be vindicated by the exploits of Stark’s alter-ego, Iron Man, who in a very short span of time has used his high-tech iron suit to bring about an unprecedented era of world peace. But the film undercuts Stark’s confidence by showing what’s going on behind the scenes: Iran and North Korea are trying (though at the moment failing) to build their own Iron Man weapons, Stark’s competitor for military contracts is creating Iron Man drones, and a rogue Russian physicist, memorably played by Mickey Rourke, has succeeded in reproducing the reactor technology his father co-designed with Stark’s father, enabling him to wear and wield a high-voltage reactor weapon. Meanwhile, the reactor technology built into Stark’s own Iron Man suit, a technology that not only gives him super powers but keeps him alive, is also slowly killing him as its radioactive elements leech into his bloodstream. All is not well, it appears, in the world that technology has built.

But then, with the introduction of a home-movie lecture from Stark’s father, the film shifts, suggesting that technology is indeed not only a panacea but may well be divine. Looking directly at the camera (and at his son, who’s watching the home movie), the absent father, who in life was too busy with his experiments to pay attention to his young son, reveals to his grown heir the sub-atomic secrets he himself was unable to unlock due to technological limitations. Armed with his father’s knowledge and the technological advances of our own day, Tony manages with ridiculous ease to produce a particle accelerator that creates a new element, one capable of keeping his heart beating without destructive side effects. In other words, the Starks, father and son, become gods, creating new matter and new life. Faith in technology--and in fatherhood--seems safe once more.

And yet, in another turn, the Stark demons come home to roost when Iron Man must face an army of the drones his own technology has enabled his competitors and enemies to create. He triumphs, of course, with the help of his trusty African-American sidekick (a racial stereotype the film could well have done without), but only after the drones, as well as the good guys’ efforts to defeat them, have caused untold chaos. So we’re left with a very ambiguous message, wherein advanced technology both saves and destroys, brings both peace and war, serves both God and Satan (not to mention Mammon).

What I like about the Iron Man movies is this ambiguity, or ambivalence, or even (to be less charitable) this confused, have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality. Unlike the Batman movies, which trot out simplistic propositions about life and refuse to challenge or undermine them, the Iron Man films question their own conventional wisdom, their own sacred truths, even their own vested interests. (Let’s not forget, after all, that the cinema itself is a highly advanced technology, and any film that traffics in technological utopianism and/or dystopianism implicitly fingers its own medium. The Iron Man movies make this connection explicit, as everything in Tony Stark’s world--his phone, his coffee table, the interior of his suit, even the air around him--is transformed into the equivalent of a handheld, wireless touch-screen.) So where the Batman films are screaming at the top of their lungs “Life is complicated!”, but doing nothing to visualize or, for that matter, complicate such complexity, the Iron Man films are showing us something of that complexity in the texture of the films themselves. In that respect, these films are heirs to a long and honorable fantasy-film tradition, going back to Metropolis and The Wizard of Oz and forward to Alien, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and others, in which technology becomes both medium and means for reflecting on matters of church and state, machine and man, faith and fantasy--including our culture’s faith in the fantasy of film itself.

This doesn’t make these films masterpieces. But it does make them worth watching--just as the issues they address are worth watching out for.

The Evil That Men Do

The murder of a teenage girl in my hometown has set me on a course of rather gloomy reflections. The person accused of the crime, a teenage boy, is alleged to have convinced her to play hooky from school, then, at her home, perhaps while attempting to rape her, he is accused of shooting her in the chin, a wound that would not in itself have been fatal. He is then, however, alleged to have covered her with a blanket, which he proceeded to set on fire, whether to cover the crime or merely for the thrill of seeing another living creature burn I don't know. She died of smoke inhalation. While she died, the boy is alleged to have looted her house, taking (among other things) that other favorite of a species bent on rapine and destruction: a video game.

Reading between the lines, my wife, a mental health professional, speculates that this girl, who was described as "simple" and "trusting" and who could neither read nor write, was mentally retarded.

So there you have it: a boy who snuffs out the life of a profoundly innocent creature merely because, I suppose, it fulfilled some need of his own. And in that respect, he's pretty much like the rest of us.

Assuming he doesn't get the death penalty--and though he's being tried as an adult, I hope he doesn't, because what's the point of adding more death to the original death?--he'll spend sixty or so years in prison. There, he'll perhaps learn to feel bad about what he's done. But what can he ever feel, what can he ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for this act?

Nothing.

Which brings me to the human species of which he is, sadly, all too representative. We've caused untold chaos on this planet, much of it directed against ourselves, much of it directed against other species and the planet itself. What have we ever done, what can we ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for our acts?

Nothing.

Those seeking to find extrinsic value in human life--that is, value that goes beyond our value to ourselves--can point at a number of accomplishments as evidence that, despite all the bad we've caused, we're still capable of producing good. But I'm not buying any of it.

Art and music? Sure, they're nice to look at and listen to, but all they do in the end is fulfill our own needs. They have no extrinsic value whatsoever.

Technology? Most of it has been bent toward the destruction of human and non-human life and the gutting of the planet. Some of the rest has been dedicated to making us feel good about how smart we are: landing on the moon, for example. And the rest has either helped prolong or enrich human life or attempted to fix some of the planetary messes we ourselves have caused. So again, none of it has value beyond what it produces for us or, in the latter case, what it would not have needed to produce had we never come along in the first place.

Human rights? Well, if there hadn't been human wrongs, there'd have been no need to develop human rights. All the human rights movements throughout history have done little more than move us marginally closer to respecting each other in ways that the simplest caterpillar instinctively respects its fellow caterpillars. And even if we go all the way--that is, even if we arrive at a point where all human life is treated with dignity and care--we'll have done no more than fulfill another intrinsic need, a need to value ourselves.

The human species, in short, is exactly like every other species in this fundamental respect: we seek to fulfill our needs and preserve our lives. There are only two differences between us and everything else. On the one hand, we've needlessly deprived trillions of other organisms--human and non-human--of the same desires; and, on the other, we appear to be the only species capable of recognizing, conceptualizing, and articulating these desires. In consequence, we seem to think that fulfilling them is inherently more significant than the fulfillment of those desires in and by other species.

We even have recourse to God to provide extrinsic justification of our biological needs. All I can say to that argument is, if it's true that the most depraved, destructive species the planet has ever known is God's personal favorite, then God has some serious issues.

Maybe we make the argument for God because otherwise, we couldn't live with ourselves.

In the end, these reflections are not despairing (much less suicidal). I want to live just like everyone else. I enjoy life. I enjoy music, art, certain forms of technology, Nature, my family, my writing, and lots of other things besides. I've done some good to other human beings and non-human beings in my life (and also some bad). I just don't think the things I've done justify my existence.

That teenage girl wanted to live, too. Maybe that's all she wanted. And no matter what the person who did this to her may do in the future, the one thing he most assuredly cannot do is give that back to her.

It Bears Repeating

Much as I hate to repeat myself, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to, shall we say, augment my post of a couple weeks ago concerning our "smarter" planet. Once again, the impetus for this post was a commercial, which might seem a bit trivial; but then, what are commercials if not barometers of cultural desire? Commercials show us what we want, or at least what we think we want, and the fact that so many of them show us thinking we want technological solutions to planetary problems suggests something significant about where we are today.

Enough preamble. The commercial of which I speak was, I think, for GE, and its slogan, after showing lots of people (doctors, salespeople, nuclear plant workers) dancing in some ungodly, earth-spanning conga line, was this: "Technology that makes the world work." My response was: here we go again.

Let's look at this in two possible ways. By "makes the world work," the commercial might be suggesting that technology gives people jobs. (That's the standard corporate and government line, even when they're pushing supposedly "green" technologies: they'll put people to work.) But "makes the world work" could also mean "makes the world function." That is, in the absence of technology, the world would break down, fall to pieces, and ultimately, I guess, cease to exist.

Both of these suggestions are nonsensical. Yes, in a technological society, technology does provide for employment--but it also provides for unemployment. Just ask anyone who's lost a job to a machine whether technology "made them work." My grocery store has trimmed the number of cashiers drastically by installing automated scanners; every time I try to reach someone on the telephone to complain about the breakdown of some piece of technology I purchased, I have to punch fifty-seven keys into the automated system then wait an hour to talk to the one living human being still employed by the company. Unemployment in the U.S. still stands at a whopping 10% (and remember, that figure doesn't include those no longer looking for work, those who are underemployed, or those who are employed in below-subsistence-level occupations). And the U.S. is a lot better off than much of the rest of the world. So much for technology as a panacea for joblessness.

Technology, it would be fairer to say, makes the work that is necessary to sustain itself. In its absence, the work taken up by technology would be taken up elsewhere.

But even more nonsensical is the suggestion that technology makes the world function. The world was functioning just fine before we came along, thank you. Rather, once again, it's a purely circular process: technology creates the conditions under which further technology can be called into action. So technology pollutes rivers and cleans them, sickens people and heals them, trashes the planet and tries to patch it up. If you can name one technology that has solved a problem technology created, I will grant that I'm being hyperbolic. But you can't. You can only name cases (such as the case of CFCs and ozone) in which the removal of an existing technology was necessary to begin to resolve the problem it had introduced.

I am not, in the end, a technophobe, a Luddite, a primitivist. Technologies have achieved some very nice things (such as enabling me to disseminate these words). But let's not kid ourselves about their capacities. Let's not forget that every time I fire up the blog, I expend energy (most of it produced by coal) that dirties the planet and sickens its inhabitants. Nor let us forget that when you read these computer-mediated words, you distance yourself, if only ever so slightly, from primary contact with the physical world.

If we must have technology, then so be it. But let's be prepared to deal with the consequences, and not imagine we can so transform the world through technology that it will, at long last, work.

Droids R Us

The most terrifying commercial I've seen in a long time is an advertisement for the newest "Droid" techno-gizmo. I freely confess that I don't know what "Droid" is, though from what I've seen, I gather it's the latest and raciest in a seemingly endless line of palm-held gadgets designed to lure us away from life into a pseudo-realm of puerile, onanistic fantasy.

Anyway, in the commercial, a young guy, early twenty-ish, sits at a conference table in his office building, surrounded by his co-workers, his boss standing at the head. Our hero whips out his "Droid" and begins fooling with it. As his fingers fly ever faster over the crotch-sized keyboard, a startling, CG-assisted transformation takes place: his hands and forearms turn to shining, chrome-plated cables, and before you know it, man has become part-machine. As he completes his task and rests back in his chair, the voice-over intones: "Turning you into an instrument of efficiency."

What are we to make of this? To begin with, the masturbatory appeal of the pitch is unmistakable, with a presumably pleasurable physical transformation obtained via the agency of one's own hand. At the same time, the voice-over converts erotic pleasure into yet another business protocol: hearkening back to the efficiency system of Frederick Winslow Taylor, this commercial defines the ideal worker as the man who buries his individuality (and sexuality) in the routinized performance of corporate labor. To put it simply: you jerk off, the Company makes a killing. Work, in this commercial, is literally transformed into a fetish; sexual arousal and fulfillment arise not from human contact but from contact with, indeed inseparability from, the machine.

All of this is horrifying enough. But when you add to it the fact that the "Droid" into which our satiated worker turns strongly resembles the soulless killing machines of the Terminator movies, we've left the realm of horror and entered that of absolute, totalitarian nightmare. This commercial implies--and from what I've seen on the street and in the classroom, it's not far off--that people want to be turned into Terminators, want to surrender their humanity in the interest of corporate profit, want to lose their identity, their heart, their spirit. The Terminators are precisely what I've described above: mass-produced slave labor employed by the ultimate faceless corporate entity, the military computer Skynet; their sole reason for existence, their sole source of pleasure (if they can be said to desire or experience pleasure at all) lies in carrying out Skynet's merciless, murderous dictates. The Terminators are out to kill the human race--and they do so with perfect efficiency.

It makes me want to ask: this is what we long to become? This is our evolution as a species? This is the end of human life?

On second thought, I guess it might be.

Talk to the Hand

My latest crusade is to get my students to stop talking to their hands.

And staring at them. And caressing them. And waving their other hand over them.

So far, I've had exactly zero success.

If you don't know what I mean, just take a look around you. There are an awful lot of people talking to their hands. On the streets, in cars, at work, in restaurants, at ball games, at playgrounds, just about everywhere you go, there they are: people talking to their hands.

Apparently, there's something more fascinating about their own hands than the people, places, and things around them. Apparently, their hands contain mystical portals to an alternative realm of experience vastly more captivating and worthwhile than the realm you and I call reality.

In college, most students have the good graces, and the good sense, not to talk to their hands during class. (Some, however, can't resist, and I've had to humiliate them publicly as a result.) But the moment they walk out the classroom door, no matter what we were talking about inside--Descartes or Art Deco, World War II or Timbuktu, Thoreau or Theroux--and no matter what's going on in the wider world around them--a riot, an exhibit, a flower unfolding its petals--they're right back to talking to their hands.

It puzzles me. Never having had (or desired to have) anything in my hand worth talking to, I just can't imagine what they find so intoxicating there.

But I guess there must be something. My students, much less the whole world, certainly couldn't be wrong and I alone be right.

Still, I wonder. If we are to become a society of hand-talkers, what will become of other parts of our bodies (including our brains)? What will become of those places our bodies have traditionally found it convenient to inhabit (such as the planet earth)? What will become of friendship, love, compassion, conviction, intellectual stimulation, art, music, laughter, and poetry if all we want to do is talk to our hands?

Unless, of course, our hands start talking back. Now that would be nirvana.

Time for Some Nonfiction

Recently, my wife's sister bought us a portable GPS, something I'd never dreamed of purchasing for myself. The first time we used it, all sorts of thoughts crowded into my mind: thoughts about space and place, about embodiment, about the human-technological interface. Ultimately, I decided these thoughts had to do with the oldest of human questions: "Who are we, and where are we going?" So I wrote them all down in an essay titled, simply, "Positioning."

That essay has now been published in the online journal Terrain.org. This journal bills itself as an environmental journal, and it is precisely that--if one can overcome the predisposition to think of the environment only as the non-human world. As the writings collected in Terrain.org indicate, the "environment" consists of the intricate and intimate relationships between that which we humans create and that which we don't. "Positioning," I hope, calls attention to that complex interchange linking our bodies and minds, our tools, and our physical world.