Author: Liam Page 9 of 11

Review: Altered Carbon

On April 16, 2011

(Post originally published on my other blog, GrogMonkey, back on Jan. 27, 2011. Still trying to figure out how to divide the work between the two blogs. I only have a couple more to cross-post in a batch after this one.)

Well, I’m on a roll now, I just finished Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon this week, making it two books in a month! *sigh* Yeah, I’m not impressed either. Back in the good ol’ days of jr. and high school and undergrad, it was nothing for me to read three novels every two weeks. I guess I shouldn’t feel completely lame; the last few years of grad school I was reading non-fiction maybe four a month, or two and three plus handfuls of articles. No, I still feel lame.

Anyway, enough pity, the first month of my New Year’s Resolution to read more fiction, on a daily basis, is going well! After all, Altered Carbon is a rather longish novel. And a good one to boot! Though… somewhat flawed. Well, let’s get to it!

(As usual, I’ll try to keep it non-spoilery to begin with, and then if I have to talk about spoilery things, I’ll keep that for the end and with decent warning.)

I don’t like to recap novels, you can go read what it’s about somewhere else. But the short of it is it’s a noir mystery novel set a few hundred years in the future, and told by the protagonist “detective,” Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a reconditioned ex-special forces-esque soldier with a shadowy past, skeletons in closets, grudges tightly held, and a pencahant for losing his temper and killing people. But that’s OK, sorta, because in the future, death is rarely permanent. Most everyone has a “stack,” a computer chip in the brain that holds their identity, memory, personailty, and should you die (and not be a Catholic), you can be re-sleeved in a new body. (So long as your stack remains undamaged. However, Kovacs ocassionally finds the need to damage stacks.) He’s been given an offer he can’t refuse, literally, to solve the suicide of a wealthy “Meth,” or a Methuselah — a person who’s been around for a couple hundred years or so. Hired, of course, by the victim who doesn’t believe his own death was a suicide.

And so begins Kovacs’ tale of pavement-beating detective work while being gunned for by crazy assassins, tortured by people he gets in the way of, and involved in love affairs (or just pheromone-enhanced sexcapades) with girlfriends of the man whose body he’s wearing and wives (singular, actually) of clients (also, singular). Yeah, it gets pretty crazy, plot-wise. But one of the great things about Altered Carbon is how it keeps the twists and turns well-organized, easy to follow (with some furrowed eyebrows), and more or less within the realm of internal consistency. Very impressive for a first novel, by the way!

(Pause for scene cut…) Yikes! Since I started this review, I’ve read and finished another novel and started another! If I’m going to have any hope of getting reviews out the door, I need to keep them quick and superficial.

So, general thoughts: Basically, Altered Carbon is like a marriage of a Charles Stross novel with early 80s William Gibson. Morgan creates a future world where, because of the ability to re-sleeve your mind, life has become cheap and the commodification of the human has reached an apex. Or at least a crisis moment. The plot is superficially a noir in which the hero is a reluctant near-anti-hero who, thanks to becoming a target of the “bad guys,” takes the case personally, and jumps from femme fatale to femme fatale to get closer to his goals.

The writing was extremely compelling, expertly balancing descriptive and utilitarian. Morgan writes so you can easily picture the people and places, almost smell and touch it. The pacing was excellent with even the “slow parts” situated and developed within the narrative so as to remain compelling. While it’s a relatively thick novel, I read through it and a good clip, and never found myself lost or confused as to what was going on.

The posthuman elements and the depiction of future technology was quite convincing and believable, although we only see a very narrow slice of this future world, depicting both the lifestyles of the ultra-rich and the seedy underbelly of the dispossessed and terminally exploited. Nothing of the in-between classes.

And, for that matter, neither did the early cyberpunk of Gibson. His goal was to show the machinations and motivations of the corporate capitalists which controlled humanity, and the lower-class of people who were the only ones with the relative freedom to fight the system. Altered Carbon inhabits the same essential world.

In closing, I had dog-eared a few pages where something that resonated with my Marxist-materialist Critical Theory outlook jumped out at me. Granted, the entire novel is a critique of postmodern capitalism (again, just as cyberpunk in general is), but here are a few passages that really stood out. Instead of commenting on them, I present them as-is:

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anenome, cut up on a surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be re-sleeved; Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months; Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung-heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay. (437)

“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.” (491-92)

“Kristin, nothing ever does change.” I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. “You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll always have people like Kawahara and the Bancrofts to push their buttons and cash in on the program. People like you to make sure the game runs smoothly and the rules don’t get broken too often. And when the Meths want to break the rules themselves, they’ll send people like Trepp and me to do it. That’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago and from what I read in the history books, it’s never been any different. Better get used to it.” (524)

Clickity-clack!

By Liam

On April 16, 2011

In Personal, Writing

One of my English Masters program classmates posted on Facebook that he recently bought an electric typewriter, and posted pictures. My initial knee-jerk reaction was, “Heh, cool.”Then my first reasoned mental response was, “Wait, what the heck is a typewriter for? Why in the world have a typewriter? Would he actually use it? Do they still make ribbon??”

But in the back of my mind that “Heh, cool” was still echoing around. There’s just something romantic, to a writer, about a typewriter — the tactile sensation of physical objects (keys, be they on swinging arms, daisy-wheels, or IBM character balls), changing the physical world (ink on paper with the barest impression of the letter pressed into the surface of the paper). Much in the same way guns are romantic and carry a mystique, being able to physically affect the world from a distance with an object commanded by your hand. (OK, does the gun metaphor make sense to only me?) Anyway, to someone who all but worships at the alter of the written word, having a machine that manipulates reality to force words into the material world is powerful, heady, and visceral.

Needless to say, I really like this typewriter idea.

It’s not the same with a computer. Sure, you press buttons and words appear on a screen, and that’s powerful in its own way. And knowing that those words, heck, these words, can instantly be seen by someone mrs away or even by millions of people (heh, ok, not these words by millions, but you get my point), is awesome and sublimely powerful! But in a very abstract way. A higher-order way that requires a certain amount of sophisticated thought to really appreciate the power of kinetic force translated into 1s and 0s and retranslated into understandable language by a remote viewer. The typewriter affects a more immediate, primal connection in the mid-brain, in the right-brain, and in the “gut.”

OK, enough babbling — typewriters to a writer is just freakin’ cool!

Naturally, I’ve started looking for one. 🙂 eBay, of course, has many for very cheap prices! Craig’s List has a few listed, for a little more ($50 to $100), but has the benefit of locality so I can see and try before I buy. I’ve looked, and people still make ribbon for a great many machines, and cheaply priced, too!

The problem is, of course, besides the unnecessary cost when I could spend that money on a week’s groceries, is space — we have no space in the house for unnecessary luxuries like that. And it is an unnecessary luxury, sadly. After all, after I typed a story on it, I’d still scan it in to an OCR program so I could edit it on the PC; no way I’m retyping something line that. I hate retyping stuff! With a passion. But, that experience of putting thought and imagination, fresh from the brain and never before exposed to the light of day, tattooed into the surface of the page, is a cathartic, almost shamanistic experience! Well worth the time to scan the result, page by page, into a doc file.

I didn’t always have this feeling about typewriters, back when I had no choice but to use them, in high school. Ugh! Writing on them was miserable! I always wrote everything, both fiction and school papers, longhand (something my pasty and soft hands actually can’t do for more than a minute any more). I’d erase and edit and erase and edit, and then have my proficient mother type the school papers for me. The fiction tended to stay in many lost notebooks.

I had a HS typing class, which I was miserable at. Miserable both in skill and mood. Much to my current chagrin! Twenty years later of obsessive computer use both for business and pleasure, I can type more than 60 w.p.m., and with little error, but in such a way that would make a touch-typist roll with laughter.

Perhaps the years of being disconnected from the physicality of creating words has turned my hate for the machine into a nostalgic adoration. Truly, Baudrillard-ian nostalgia for a thing that never existed. But, I feel it none the less. And I do hope I can find the space and money to get my own typewriter so I can feel that connection and embody that stereotype of the classic 20th century portrait of the earnest writer. But I think I owe my wife a scrapbooking table first….

Review: The Crying of Lot 49

By Liam

On April 16, 2011

In Books, Criticism and Reviews

(Post originally published on my other blog, GrogMonkey, back on Jan. 13, 2011. Still trying to figure out how to divide the work between the two blogs. I only have a couple more to cross-post in a batch after this one.)

I recently read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Finally. Pynchon is a paragon of postmodern fiction, often named in the same breath as Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, and Don DeLillo. In fact, reading ‘Lot 49, I was heavily reminded of Breakfast of Champions (which I read back during High School, so the memory may be tenuous).

This brief review — more like simply a response — will be minorly spoilery, but I’ll have more spoiler content toward the end, preceded by a warning.

In short, it’s about educated, bored, and possibly a little delusional to begin with, housewife, Oedipa Maas, who gets pulled into a conspiracy involving secret organizations and rival postal services. As I read it, I also was heavily reminded of Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In fact, I’m convinced ‘Lot 49, as much as The Principia Discordia, was primary inspiration and influence. In both books you have a protagonist who accidentally stumbles upon conspiracies and shadow organizations that begun centuries ago. The clues about the conspiracies are revealed in lost versions of literature (a play, in ‘Lot 49), and can be found as signs and signifiers all over the place in the most incongruous locations and ways.

And like Illuminatus!, the evidence for the conspiracy itself being a conspiracy to fake a conspiracy, is also evident. So by the end of the novel, you’re just as confused about what is real and what may be a giant ruse, as the protagonist is.

Ironically, while I love postmodern and surreal conspiracy novels, what makes them so compelling is also what frustrates me to no end. The conclusion, such as it is, of ‘Lot 49, left me incredibly unfulfilled. The buildup of events and clues and danger Pynchon crafts hits a brick wall and leaves the reader standing on the side of the road, while the story continues you in such a way as it’s certain much will be revealed and explained if only the book held four more pages.

This is what separates the good, early postmodern surreal conspiracy novels like ‘Lot 49, from the banal, late postmodern realism conspiracy novels like Dan Brown’s The daVinci Code. Pynchon is writing fully aware of how he’s toying with, manipulating, side-swiping the reader. He does it without maliciousness, perhaps, but he’s forcing the reader to look away from the details and instead focus on the Big Picture — not just in the story, but in the socio-cultural conditions in which a story like this can even take place (and its audience can live in). Pynchon, like Ballard and Vonnegut and DeLillo, and Philip K. Dick (who was a pre-postmodern master at crafting the uncomfortable conspiracy tale), is using his story to get the reader to start paying attention not to the ephemera of material existence where details have no significance outside themselves, but to look at the way they themselves, like the protagonist in the story, are manipulated and deceived by the “conspiracy” of capitalism and the culture of commodities. How nothing today has inherent significance because we no longer have any awareness of an object’s history, its creation, its conditions of creation, its provenance.

This last is pointed up in ‘Lot 49 by the theme of the stamps. Actual postage stamps in which, with the help of an expert philatelist, Oedipa learns about the lost importance of provenance (a theme heavily interlaced in P.K. Dick’s amazing The Man in the High Castle. Pynchon is commenting on the banality of modern culture.

While on the other hand, books like Dan Brown’s have fully embraced the banality and are inseparable, both in form an content, from postmodern commodification. The tropes and elements of conspiracy and shadow organizations are not used, like Pynchon, to illustrate cultural conditions with tongue firmly in cheek, but rather embraces the elements with an attempt to represent them as part of the “real” in earnest sincerity. The daVinci Code truly takes pastiche and becomes unaware parody; The Crying of Lot 49is self-aware from beginning to end.

Spoilery from here on:
Is the conspiracy real or not? Did Oedipa’s deceased former uber-rich boyfriend set the whole thing up as an elaborate practical joke? The answer is it doesn’t matter, Pynchon himself probably doesn’t know, and that’s what make the themes of the book more effective, but at the same time, the abrupt end more unfulfilling to the mind that’s used to and expecting resolution and denouement. The rich boyfriend manipulating people, exploiting labor, setting up the conditions of what people accept as “reality,” literally crafting the dominant culture from buildings to artwork all around the protagonist — if this isn’t a comment on modern capitalism and its cultural logic, I (nor Fredric Jameson) don’t know what is! Whether the conspiracies are real or a joke, either way, the absolute constant underlying everything that happens in the story is the effect that those who own the capital control what people do and believe, sometimes overtly, usually with the subtlety of a shadow organization.

When Metzger, the lawyer hired to co-execute the millionaire’s will, tells Oedipa at the beginning of the novel (after they’d had sex), that her dead former boyfriend told him she “wouldn’t be easy,” naturally we assume he’s talking about getting her in bed. But by the end of the story, when we’re left to wonder what’s real and what’s scam and what’s the result of pure paranoia and delusion, that line at the beginning of the novel carries more meaning. Was it a comment on her ability to be fooled or not?

Questions like this, the reader’s search for clues and meaning in the same way the characters are, should reveal to us that there’s only three choices — we’re surrounded by conspiracy so deep it’s endemic in the culture around us, we’re surrounded by conspiracy that turns the mundane into unintended signifiers, or we’re paranoid and delusional.

(Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek would surely say the “truth” is all three.)

I gots books!

By Liam

On April 16, 2011

In Books, Criticism and Reviews, Personal

(Post originally published on my other blog, GrogMonkey, back on Jan. 8, 2011. Still trying to figure out how to divide the work between the two blogs.)

Hooray for books! Hooray for holiday gift cards!

Thanks to family members’ generosity with Barnes & Noble gift cards, I recently acquired a stack of books I’ve been pining for for months, and in some cases, years. Every once in a while I’d visit them on my Amazon Wish List and coo, “one day, my pretties, one day.” Now, I gots ’em! And, thanks to my continued adherence to my New Year’s Resolution (which, in part, includes mandatory reading of a new short story or novel chapter daily), it looks good that I’ll be able to actually read them.

Without further ado, I present, the new residents in my library which I shall soon get to know better:

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I’ve heard of this book for some time, and has the endorsement of my brother. (But then, he also like The Wheel of Time series, so, pfft! *wink*) Published in 2002, it catches the post-cyberpunk wave and is considered a groundbreaker in the current wave of post-/transhuman fiction. All qualities which appeal both to my entertainment and my scholarly research interests.

Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez
The sequel to Suarez’s outstanding page-turner, Daemon. That’s the story of a computer genius and online game mogul who programmed a massive network of computer systems and programs to start the process of taking over the world the moment his obituary is detected. The scary-cool thing is that nearly 100% of all the tech and processes that are used in the book, are real and available to the consumer.

The Wee Free Men: The Beginning by Terry Pratchett
Big fan of Sir Terry Pratchett (what SF/fantasy fan isn’t!?) But I’ve only read a few of his books. He has so many, and so many refer to each other and are part of mini-series within series, that I generally have no idea where to really dive in. Well, is latest book, I Shall Wear Midnight came out not long ago, and it’s gotten huge raves on many of the SF podcasts I listen to and blogs I read. It’s the fourth and I believe final book of the “Tiffany Aching series” of his. It’s a part of his Discworld . . . world, but it’s a stand-alone series, described as a funnier (and occasionally, better) Harry Potter with a female protagonist. Intended as a “young adult” series (just like Harry Potter), but adults are loving them.

Anyway, The Wee Free Men: The Beginning is the first two books in the series. Interestingly, the Amazon reviews for those first two books, Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, both rank 4.5 out of 5 stars, but this compilation only has 2.5 stars. When you read the reviews, you find it’s entirely because people bought the book thinking it was a new book in the series. Idiots. Sorry, but c’mon. It’s your dumbarse mistake you bought the book thinking it was something it wasn’t not even bothering to, I dunno, read the description of it where it says “Contains the complete text of Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky,” and you give the book a bad review for that? As if it’s the book’s fault? Idiots.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
This one has universal praise from those SF podcasts and blogs as a great epic fantasy. I also heard about this one about a year ago and stuck it on my Wishlist, this at the end of the year the bloggers and podcasters started up singing its praises again.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
And finally, this near-future dystopian, and extremely realistic, vision of a world where peak oil has been passed and calories are used like money. Also heard of this one nearly two years ago, recommended by Cory Doctorow. Since then it’s won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and now finally I can read it!

Rothfuss coolness

By Liam

On April 16, 2011

In Personal

The last couple of days has hit me with a couple of instances of coolness regarding a writer I like… whom I’ve not actually read yet! Patrick Rothfuss, author of the fantasy bestseller, The Name of the Wind, and its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. These are his only two published novels so far, and I’ve not actually read either yet — although, The Name of the Wind happens to be sitting atop my stack of books-to-read. (Link to my other blog I’m still migrating posts over from.)

If I haven’t read any of his fiction, how can I like him? Well, for nearly two years now, I’ve been reading about him, and especially lately, have been hearing him on a lot of podcasts and reading his interviews. I like the guy. I’m looking forward to liking his writing, as well, soon.

Anyway, one of those podcasts, I listened to this last week: Adventures in SciFi Publishing, number 118. As the interview guest, he spoke a lot about various topics, about writing and getting published, and his trials and tribulations with editing — very inspiring. But one thing he said that really got my attention, was his revelation that he didn’t know a simile from a metaphor, and has to think about the difference between an adjective and an adverb. This was shocking to me because, well, personally, I love grammar. 🙂 But apart from that, it seems to me that every writer I’m familiar with appears to know more about grammar than I do. How is it this acclaimed, best-selling, beloved writer by intelligent and educated fantasy readers, could possibly not know 5th-grade grammar concepts? Me knee-jerk reaction was of shock and disappointment.

But, after a moment, I realized: Who flippin’ cares if he doesn’t know the mechanics. He can obviously write extremely well from instinct, from natural talent, from the experience of reading other peoples’ writing, from (as he described) listening to his own words and how they feel, if they simply sound well put together. In a way, I envy that.

Though, he also teaches creative writing. And I have to wonder, surely he has to know basic “stuff” in order to at least help teach basic skills and what to avoid. I mean, how can you teach new writers to avoid adverbs, especially “-ly” adverbs, if you have a hard time remembering what an adverb is? For example. And I wonder, was he being intentionality overly self-deprecating in the interview? Oh well, not really important.

The second piece of interesting coolness was his latest blog posting describing his experience trying to book a last-minute book signing in Iowa City. It’s an amusing tale just in general. But what amused me more, was that the store that finally booked him, and quite happily, was The Haunted Bookshop — a primarily used book store. I lived in Iowa City for a year, about a decade ago, and I used to shop at that store all the time. I remember going in there right before each of my twice-a-month 8-hour drives to Missouri to pick up a new audiobook.

Really, it’s kind of silly, but the fact that he talked about this store, and posted a very familiar picture of the place, made me smile and chuckle for a couple of days. Ah, nostalgia-from-serendipity!

Berries! Why, flappers are the bee’s knees!

By Liam

On April 10, 2011

In Language, Writing

Just saw on BoingBoing, that site for all things wonderful, a link to a page detailing a Flapper’s Dictionary compiled in 1922.

First thing I thought was how fascinating this is from a linguistic point of view! To have slang of the day compiled and explained is an amazing source for those of us interested in language and vernacular and how it comes about and changes. I was intrigued by what slang has survived to today, both ironically (“cat’s pajamas”) and sincerely (a party “crasher”).

But then, what also came to mind was how even then someone was quick to jump on a trend, catalog it, condense it, and commercialize it and sell it back to the supposed participants in the subculture. Usually, today, when that happens, the subculture has already peaked and the original participants are moving on while the masses start buying the “Guide to…” and “Dictionary of…” and “How to be a…”

As a writer, it’s still an amazing and wonderful source! I’m reminded of the Coen brothers’ film, Miller’s Crossing. As usual for the Coens, a stunning film that has an ability to make language, usually some subculture of language, come alive! In the case of Miller’s Crossing, they took the vernacular of the 20s (though, I see, not too much of this dictionary was in it, though a lot of words that have come out of use, like, “What’s the rumpus?” “That twist!”) and carefully avoided what could have been comical and made the dialog become real.

Farm-grown Spam

By Liam

On April 4, 2011

In Books, Personal, Writing

SF novelist Jim Macdonald has an article, “Fence Your Stolen Content at Amazon.com“. He discusses the threat of e-books as becoming the new breeding-ground fir spammers and search engine scammers:

“With the cost of self-publishing approaching zero thanks to e-publishing, and with content-farms being depreciated by Google, it seems that spammers have taken to e-publishing.”

As someone seeking to start a career with e-publishing as a significant cornerstone in the foundation, this bothers me a lot. As a user of the Internet since around 1995, I’ve seen the war against spam and pernicious Web advertisers get messy. As someone who has worked in IT in some way since 1998, I’ve been on frontlines fighting spam and blocking advertising. And, as a Web designer, I’ve had to fight hard to get sites as high as legitimately possible on search results while competing with unscrupulous content farms.

As someone who has spent his entire adult life, both personally and professionally, fighting with spammers and scammers, the prospect of having to continue the fight as a writer, wearies me greatly.

On the glass-half-full side, I have seen a great deal of improvement in the last 15 years in the war over e-mail spam. There was a time, before client spam filters and ubiquitous e-mail server filters, when I considered giving up e-mail altogether as the ratio of spam to ham in my inbox was 75/25. Now, the amount of spam I get barely annoys me.

The current hated weapon is the content farm. Do a search on Google for nearly anything and many of the hits you’ll get back will be to About.com or Suite101 or similar pages that have simply copy-and-pasted a page of generic info about your desired topic, and then filled it with product links and ads. Sadly, the war against these isn’t going too well.

And that’s the threat Macdonald sees in e-publishing — do a book search on Amazon.com for a particular topic, and find several cheap e-books… that have the same generic, boilerplate content as seen in similar pointless works across the ‘net. The legitimate author becomes a squeak in a sea of static.

Things change, and e-mail spam is a surprising example of things changing for the better. I have hope. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll improve until it gets much worse — and I have the impeccable timing to jump right into the fray.

Stories for sale!

By Liam

On April 3, 2011

In Commerce, Personal, Prose, Writing

Now, for your e-book reading enjoyment, I’ve put some of my stories (both previously published and new) up for sale on this site!

Maybe it’s an experiment to see if it goes anywhere, maybe I’ll be able to pay rent. Maybe my hopes and spirit will be dashed upon the barren rocks of disinterest. We’ll see.

But if you’re someone who like to support artists directly (especially poor, struggling artists) instead of corporate stock holders for media conglomerates, consider buying a couple stories — or the low low priced five-story collection! They work great on iPhone/iPad’s iBook reader, Kindle, Nook, and other readers.

So, check the story page out and take a look at samples of the tales, won’t you? Your patronage will be appreciated!

“Sucker Punch”; the perfect postmodern flick

By Liam

On March 31, 2011

In Criticism and Reviews, Film, Philosophy

Now, don’t get me wrong: when I say “perfect,” I don’t mean Sucker Punch is a perfect film in general. On the contrary. It’s a bad film! The script is spare, uninspired, and tedious, and the acting (with the slight exception of supporting actors Oscar Isaac as “Blue” and Carla Gugino as “Dr. Vera,” and the pathos-saturated sad face from lead Emily Browning as “Baby Doll”) is equally tedious and as thin as tissue. Fortunately, this isn’t exactly a review of the film but a critique.

Now, don’t get me wrong. . . again. While I declare the film as bad, I also loved it. I had fun time watching it and would willingly see it again in the theater a couple more times. The action sequences are as amazing audio-visually as they are the epitome of sound and fury signifying nothing. And pardon me if I prevaricate about the shrubbery and mention the 800-pound gorilla only so much as to say I can’t really discuss the 800-pound gorilla. (By which I mean the 800-pound gorilla that’s the object of 15-year-old boys’ dreams dressed up in fetish costumes not lacking in stockings and garters. How’s that for a disturbing image).

I don’t want to discuss the over-saturation of objectified female sexuality in the film (which is difficult as that’s basically what a solid half of this film consists of), because while I count myself as a feminist and constantly aware of the use and effect of themale gaze, I do happen to be a privileged male and the owner of a male gaze. On top of that, while I don’t accept all (or most) of what evolutionary psychology claims, I also don’t dismiss the concept and some of its hypotheses out of hand. So, if I try critiquing the blitzkrieg use of sexuality in the film, I’ll likely get accused of being too sympathetic to its use or unqualified to critique (even to criticize) it since I am a target consumer of the cinematic male gaze. (A criticism I often hear about many subjects and ideologies. Which I, obviously, don’t believe. I think it is indeed possible to critique a thing even while existing within its sphere of effect. If that were true that it weren’t possible, then, for example, since all of western culture operates within the contradictions of postmodern capitalism, any kind of Marxist criticism would have to be impossible. Sorry, Fredric Jameson — you need to find a new career!) So, end of topic right there. (Except to mention this amusing and sadly accurate comic I read just today, by feminist blogger Jen McCreight.)

What I do want to discuss is how Sucker Punch exists as the distilled and purified essence of postmodern production. And to do so, I’m afraid I’m going to need to be spoilery. So, if you’ve not seen the film and want to remain surprised (it would be much too easy to insert a joke there), read this after viewing.

The film exists in three realms or reality: layer one is the “real world” which lands somewhere in the 1950s, best I can tell from the brief view of automobiles, layer two is the fantasy-world brothel inside Baby Doll’s head as she tries to cope with being institutionalized by her abusive stepfather and an impending lobotomy back in the real world, and layer three is the action vignettes that represent the fantasy world of fantasy world’s Baby Doll. Now, I have to give writer/director Zack Snyder a bit of credit here for not trying to trick the audience into thinking layer two or three is the Real World or that layer one is actually layer two and there’s a unrevealed layer one to be pulled out as a shock ending. However, this doesn’t get him off the hook for making layer one just as fantastically impossible as the other layers — and that complete disregard for any semblance of reality within the real is one of the primary reasons for the film being perfect postmodernism.

The movie opens with a slow-motion montage of scenes showing Baby Doll’s mother’s death, funeral, establishing threat of violence from stepfather, accidental death of Baby Doll’s younger sister as she tries to protect the younger sibling from their evil stepfather, and then her being institutionalized. The only sound on top of this establishing background setup, is a cover of The Eurythmic’s “Sweet Dreams” with the lyrics “Some of them want to abuse you” placed like a delicate sledgehammer on top of the scene of stepfather entering the bedroom, like an auditory Lord Privy Seal. And it’s from this opening segment that the dislocation, the crisis of historicity and sincere schizoidness, that mark late postmodern artistic production is established. We, the viewer, are given clues to the setting being some olden day of curvy cars and men wearing hats, but the sound places us in modernity. (Not to mention the fact that the song is a remake which adds yet another layer of separation from any idea of the original, or the authentic.) The film situates us in a simulacrum of an historical moment with no interest in actually representing authentic history. The quasi-1950s setting of the movie essentially becomes nothing more than style — not setting, not placement.

The dizzying, disorienting confusion of time and place only increases from there. In the layer two world, in which we spend most of our time (actually, that may be debatable; the wall-to-wall action scenes of world layer three seem like interruptions, but actually may account for half the film or more), Baby Doll, as the “new girl” trapped in the brothel, is compelled to dance as part of her job to entertain the sleaze the establishment caters to. We never see layer two Baby Doll dance, as that is when she enters her head and we’re transported to various war/fantasy/sci-fi battle sequences, but we do get to hear the music that gets played on the 50-year-old reel-to-real or radio. And that music includes such classics as a souped-up remix of Björk’s “Army of Me,” a remake of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a hip-hopped mashup-remix of Queen’s “I Want it All” and “We Will Rock You,” and a cover of the Beatle’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” (which, ironically, sounds in its original 1960s form like a 2000s Chemical Brothers’ techo-rave track. Weird, that).

Now, as I admitted already, I’m a wall-of-sound mindless-action-flick fan (to an extent; Jurassic Park 2 was the worst film I’ve ever seen and I have no interest in the current Transformers CGI porn), so a significant part of me really loved the music, it’s grab-your-eardrums-and-feed-them-to-you-with-gunpowder sonic brutality. But the cognitive dissonance of hearing the thumping indie-industrial music of “Army of Me” played by a Slavic-ish choreographer on a reel-to-reel in a mid-20th century dance studio in a brothel-prison, was enough to actually short-circuit my thinking for a moment and leave me literally disoriented. That kind of guerrilla attack on the senses, leaving one’s thinking disconnected and susceptible to better apprehending Lacan’s Real, was an intentional tool of “theatre of cruelty.” (The 60s attempt to use the technique of Artaud and surrealism ended up being just a late modernism parody of surrealism, by the way.) Sucker Punch’s use of sensual-shock-treatment is, I believe, entirely unintentional and without any greater purpose than an exercise in style. Thus, exhibiting, no, embodying, one of the arch-typical qualities of postmodern art — that of pastiche.

What Zack Snyder intended by the title, Sucker Punch, can only be guessed at. The film implies that Baby Doll’s dancing, unseen by the film’s audience, leaves all who view it stunned and bewildered — sucker punched by a performance only they are exposed to. Though, that might be too subtle for Snyder. Maybe he’s referring to the beatdown the various baddies in the layer three fantasy worlds get (giant samurai, steampunk Nazis, orcs ripped right from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, terrorist robots…). Perhaps he’s being meta-aware enough to be commenting, tongue in cheek, on what the movie delivers to the audience: The mismatched and cobbled elements that make this Frankenstein’s monster of a film hits the viewer from beginning to end with a relentless barrage of simulacrum, washing over the viewer and pulling them into a riptide of hyperreality. At best, maybe he is self-aware enough to consider that he’s hitting the audience with an audio-visual shock to the senses — after all, the poster tagline is “You will be unprepared.” But this only supports the contention that Snyder’s only goal with this film is to have no goal, only to affect. Only to create sensation disconnected from anything concrete, anything with a veneer of tangibility. Snyder wants to blind-side pummel the audience and then disappear without a trace before the viewer knows what hit them. When your only interest is in stylized effect, there’s no reason not to use re-makes of music without connection to the setting, which is itself a carnival mirror reflection of an attempted setting, punctuated by completely unreal collages of literally pointless action (albeit exciting and expertly crafted) appropriating and blending elements from across multiple genre.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I sat for the ending credits, how much of any of this analysis could apply or appeal to the younger members of the audience. I wonder if filmgoers who don’t know what a reel-to-reel is, couldn’t tell a 1950s car from a 1920s from a 1980s, feel an iota of the disorientation I felt watching it. Do younger viewers, who have entirely grown up in a culture inherently of pastiche and ahistoricity, feel the least bit of anxiety when exposed to cultural production which seeks to simulate, blithely unironically, a reality that doesn’t exist? Does the obvious fantastical elements counteract the fact that the movie, apart from the fantasy, exists in crisis? Or does all of it exist to the viewer on the same plane of blatant unreality? I compare this film to last year’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That movie was skillful on many levels and entirely fun while managing to have a solid storyline and characters one can feel something for. But from the beginning of that film, which is solidly set in contemporary Toronto-area, the viewer is asked to accept that the world of the film exists in a different reality from our own as videogame elements co-exist with the presumed real. What makes Scott Pilgrim simply a postmodern production while Sucker Punch is postmodernism itself? I think it comes down to how while both films attempt to anchor time and place to our own reality, we can recognize reality in Scott Pilgrim even though it’s superseded by the impossible. Sucker Punch presents us, from the opening seconds, with a lie. It promises to be rooted, at least on one layer, in reality, and it (the gestalt of the filmakers) may even believe it’s sincere in doing so — but the fact that the reality it believes it’s anchored to is as fantastical as the 40-foot, machine gun-totin’ samurai it presents, we’re fed the very antithesis of what science fiction provides: discognitive estrangement. And this mirrors the very condition we live in, in late postmodern cultural logic.

Be it resolved…

By Liam

On December 29, 2010

In Metablog, Personal

So I was reading back in my oh so many blog posts this year</sarcasm>, and recalled this one: io9 suggested reading list. My best laid plans of reading this year. And I realized, this year was a really, really bad year. Aside from finally jumping through the right hoops to get my English Masters Degree, this year was full of fail.

I have new best laid plans, now, though. For a full accounting, check out my general blog’s entry, CelticBear: Be it resolved…. In it I discuss the drek that was 2010, and what I plan to do about it in regards to writing and readjusting my life in the right direction.

Then, if all goes well, I should have some more blog posts over here more often.

Happy New Year.

Author: Liam Page 9 of 11

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