Month: April 2024

How Barbieland Makes Sense

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Barbie. Reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia has ensured that I’m not going to willingly do that. That said, a defense of it has occurred to me which is kind of interesting. (If you haven’t, Barbie (the movie) rejects the idea that the sexes are complementary and meant to work with each other; Barbieland is an idyllic place where women rule and men are subjugated, and the film involves various things where the sexes are antagonistic towards each other, with an uprising of the Kens and their eventual re-subjugation.)

Barbieland is a young girl’s idea of playing with barbies before she’s old enough to know what boys are for.

I mean, even really young children get that to make new children you need a mommy and a daddy, but there is stage in development—frequently around 7 or 8 years old—where children start to figure out sex differences and it’s more than they can handle so they tend to oversimplify to make it manageable. This is an aspect of the classic “girls are annoying/boys are icky” phase.

The Barbie movie’s setting and plot does make a certain sort of sense if it’s meant to be a representation of this childish beginning-of-understanding of the world. It’s not, in general, good to represent childish mistakes in art without at least pointing to what the correction of that mistake is. And it’s a bit concerning that (apparently) many adult women found that this childish misunderstanding of the world resonated with them. That said, I’m not going to draw any conclusions because I haven’t seen the movie or talked in depth with anyone who actually liked it. (The one adult I’ve talked with who watched it said that the first half was very funny and it fell apart in the second half, which isn’t the kind of reaction I would find concerning, if the summary is accurate to the movie.)

Anyway, it’s just a stray thought that occurred to me; I offer it as a possible explanation because it makes the world seem a little less bleak.

The Basil Rathbone Hound of the Baskervilles

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I grew up with Jeremy Brett as the quintessential Sherlock Holmes and I still think that he is—especially his early portrayals of Holmes. In my youth, though, I met people who held that Basil Rathbone was the quintessential Holmes. Eventually this intrigued me enough to look into it.

Basil Rathbone played Holmes fourteen times, though (from what I’ve read) only the first two were big(ish) budget movies which attempted to the faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. The first, and by some accounts, the greatest, of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies was The Hound of the Baskervilles. So I bought a copy and watched it.

I can definitely see the attraction to Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes. It doesn’t have Jeremy Brett’s energy and intensity, but he probably looks the part a little more than Jeremy Brett did and he does portray Holmes’ intelligence and confidence as well as Brett did.

The movie itself was curious. There were a few parts which were more faithful to the original story than in the Jeremy Brett version, but for the most part it was considerably less faithful. I think that the unfaithful parts were primarily about making the movie shorter—it had a running time of only an hour and twenty minutes. (The Jeremy Brett version was a full twenty five minutes longer.)

The section with the escaped convict was shortened; we heard nothing about the escaped convict before we saw him and he was discovered almost immediately, as was the connection between Barryman and the convict. In the novel, this formed a considerable part of the initial mystery which Watson investigated. They also omitted Watson’s investigations of the figure who turned out to be Holmes; they had Holmes show up as a peddler trying to sell odds and ends and then leave a note for Watson to come to his hut. Oh, and they also omitted Laura Lyons and completely left out the question of the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville. (I think that this omission is why they added Stapleton trying to shoot Sir Henry with a revolver in London; it gave Holmes a reason to go to Baskerville Hall that wasn’t investigating Sir Charles’ death.)

Also curious was the choice to turns Stapleton’s “sister” into his actual sister. And they had her marry Sir Henry Baskerville. It’s tempting to think that this was meant to make the story more exciting by introducing an uncomplicated romance into the story, but I think that it may have been more about trying to shorten the story. By making turning the relationship into an uncomplicated romance they needed to spend considerably less time on it.

By contrast, I think that the change from exposing Sir Henry to danger from fog to exposing Sir Henry to danger from a broken carriage wheel (and Holmes and Watson arriving late) was really just about saving money. In 1939, it would have been expensive to create a convincing amount of fog. Not impossible, of course; dry ice was commercially manufactured in the US starting in 1925 and putting dry ice into water is a decent way of producing a fair amount of fog. (There are others, and I couldn’t easily find the history of them to know when they were first produced.)

I suspect that cost savings is also why they didn’t get a particularly large dog nor did they put any kind of glowing material on him. (I actually wonder whether they put glowing material on the dog in the Jeremy Brett version; the effect looks a bit weird and it’s possible that it was applied in post-production.)

I’m at a loss to explain why, after Sir Henry Baskerville was mauled by the hound and Holmes and Watson shot the hound, they then had Holmes get imprisoned in the hound’s cave, Stapleton go to Sir Henry and tell Watson Holmes wanted him, then Stapleton try to poison Sir Henry only for Holmes to show up and knock the glass out of Sir Henry’s hand. The speech that Dr. Mortimer gave about how Sherlock Holmes is the greatest Englishman and every man, woman, and child in England sleeps better knowing that Sherlock Holmes is watching over them—that’s not quite the speech, but it’s of that ilk. Anyway, The reason for that speech also escapes me.

For all that, it’s an enjoyable movie.

The timing of it is interesting to consider. It came out in March of 1939, which places it shortly before the start of World War 2 and almost two years before America would enter the war. The Great Depression was in many ways over (at least by economic metrics) though people did not think of the hard times as having past. It had been thirty-seven years since The Hound of the Baskervilles had been published and twelve years since the final Holmes short story was published (The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place). This, too, may have had an influence on all of the changes. When a thing is sufficiently new, people are more inclined to variation for the sake of it; if you want the original it’s reasonably fresh itself. When enough time passes, faithfulness to the original becomes more valued.

I don’t want to overstate that; true fans of a work will always look for faithfulness in movie adaptations and when things come out of copyright there are always very loose adaptations because that’s easier than writing original stories. For all that, though, I think that there is something to what I said, and the timing of the Basil Rathbone version had some influence on how much of it was changed.

That said, it is interesting to note that—according to Wikipedia—this was the first Holmes film to be set in Victorian times, rather than to be made contemporaneous.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the grand conclusion that I feel like I should have at this point. It’s an interesting film; mostly at this point for historical reasons. I can’t imagine preferring this to the Jeremy Brett version. On the other hand, it probably did help to increase Sherlock Holmes’ popularity; it’s possible for movies to help readership of a book among people who never saw the film. I certainly recommend it if you’re interested in the history of film, detective fiction, or both.

Mystery Novel Cover Iconography

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

The cover art for mystery novels is interesting. Unlike many other popular genres, whose covers feature images depicting the characters in the book doing something which might possibly happen in the book (that part is, admittedly, less common), the covers of mystery novels are frequently iconography. Consider the cover to this Barnes & Noble complete Sherlock Holmes (bought twenty some-odd years ago):

The most prominent is Holmes himself, of course, in his iconic deerstalker cap, inverness coat, and with the curved pipe made iconic for him by William Gillette.

There is also London Bridge, which so far as I know never featured in a Holmes story. Well, not the London Bridge, but a London bridge. That’s actually Tower Bridge. It’s a newer bridge, downstream of London Bridge. It still never featured in a Holmes story, so far as I know, but it is very iconic of London.

There are the buildings of late Victorian London with the smoke coming out of their chimneys and also a street lamp. Also the great Clock Tower (renamed in 2012 to Elizabeth Tower), with the clock popularly known as Big Ben. I don’t believe that it ever featured in a Sherlock Holmes story, either. Like Tower Bridge, though, it is symbolic of London, and Holmes is inextricably bound up with London.

There are also a few symbols of Holmes himself—the curved pipe above the tea pot and the violin. These are quite straight forward.

Then there are symbols of some of the mysteries, or at least of mysteries in general. Starting in the lower left we have an old fashioned key. Certainly keys have fit into Sherlock Holmes stories, though they also work as symbols of detective fiction in general—the detective is always seeking the clue which is the key to the mystery. On the lower right we have a diamond, presumably the blue carbuncle, though it might be a more generic diamond symbolizing the wealth for which people commit crimes.

A little higher we have a silver tea pot—certainly the British in Sherlock Holmes’ time drank a lot of tea. I don’t recall a tea pot being crucial in a Holmes story, though I feel like I might just be forgetful, here. They can easily fit into issues of poisoning, though.

Then we have a smoking gun. What could be more iconic of a murder mystery than a smoking gun? Well, a knife dripping blood, perhaps, but it’s close. There were many Holmes stories featuring guns, though of course the Problem of Thor Bridge comes to mind.

In the top left we have footprints—oh, what can be more iconic of a golden age mystery than footprints? Holmes certainly identified more than his fair share of footprints in the stories.

And then, in the top right, we have Holmes’ powerful magnifying lens. Or, more colloquially, his magnifying glass. What an icon of Sherlock Holmes!

He used a powerful magnifying lens a few times in the stories, of course. Even if he didn’t, it would be such a great symbol, though. A magnifying glass represents sight, as well as focus. One of the great themes of Holmes instructing Watson in his methods is, “you saw, but you did not observe.” There was something similar in a Poirot story, though I can’t find it at the moment. Poirot was remarking that it is not enough to see the facts, you must understand them, or else the pigeons would be the greatest detectives since they see everything that goes on.

The magnifying glass does also symbolize powerful vision, since it makes details greater, but I think that the focus is of greater symbolic importance since the intrinsic tradeoff of the magnifying glass is that you see some things more clearly at the expense of seeing other things not at all. When you look through a magnifying glass, you have a very narrow field of view. It is thus imperative that you look at the right things. And it is that quality of judgement which is really the epitome of the detective, or at least of the most interesting kind of detective. There are the Dr. Thorndykes of the world who do their chemical analyses and present the findings, or even the Encyclopedia Browns of the world who just know an enormous number of facts which occasionally come in handy. But the greatest detectives are those who can see what other men see and understand it where they don’t. And few things represent that as well as does a magnifying glass, since any man can use it, but few know where to look with it.

I Don’t Get the Argument For Agnosticism From Lack of Popularity

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I suspect that this is, in part, an aspect of temperament—I’ve always been fine being alone and unusual—but I really don’t get the argument for agnosticism from lack of popularity. It’s usually a gussied up version of “people don’t all agree and there’s no way to check.” This is, of course, only ever selectively applied.

No one ever says, “there are different ideas of the shape of the world. Some people believe it’s a globe, some that it’s flat, and some that it’s shaped like a velociraptor. The only way to know for sure is to go to space and look, and no one’s flying into space right now and I couldn’t afford the tickets even if they were.”

There are proofs that the earth is a globe available to us here on earth, of course, but there are proofs for God available to us here on earth. The people who apply this kind of argument reject the idea of following arguments because not everyone does, which, if applied consistently, would eliminate quite a lot of knowledge.

Do you believe vaccines work? Guess what, there are people who don’t. Do you think that astrology is bogus? There are people who believe in it. Do you think that the earth orbits the sun? There are people who don’t.

I think that the real answer to this lies in who the person considers part of his society and who he rejects; the people to whom this argument appeals cannot bear of the idea of standing apart from his society, so he falls back on only believing whatever is common to everyone that he considers part of his society.

Which brings me back to temperament; I just don’t get the appeal of that.

Star Trek: Discovery Has Some Bad Writing

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A friend of mine gave me this link for the first episode of the current (and final) season of Star Trek: Discovery. It starts partway into the episode, but I don’t think that matters. It’s also almost irrelevant who all of the characters are to the plot, which you can take as a bad sign but can also be a criteria of writing that an episode allows new viewers to come on without having to do a lot of reading first.

What really struck me about the episode was the degree to which the writers made decisions which moved the plot forward right before they needed it. Very little was set up beforehand, so everything felt contrived. And stupid.

The episode is mostly a chase for a McGuffin and so the bad guys need to get away a lot. I mean, they don’t need to, per say, but the episode wanted to go with the high-tension constant-near-miss type of chase, so the bad guys had to be always within sight so we could have chases and fast-moving CGI on screen. This meant that the bad guys had to get away a lot, and this was never accomplished through good planning on the bad guy’s part, or superior skill on the bad guy’s part, or really much of anything that the bad guys did right or the good guys did wrong. It was always just a random plot contrivance.

When the bad guys roll some kind of explosive at Captain Burnham, does she move? No. Does she have the ship transport her somewhere else (they have instant teleportation since this is set 800 years later than TNG)? No. She just watches until it cuts a hole in the ship straight through to outer space and sucks Burnham out. Which isn’t a problem because her CGI space suit instantly deploys from her uniform. She then rockets over to the bad guys’ ship (it’s small and nearby, there are only two of them), then magnetizes her boots onto the ship’s hull and stands on it as it goes to warp. She calmly starts using her hand phaser to disable the ship’s engines, which are on the outside for some reason, though nothing ever comes of this because another star trek vessel (who was sent to go on the mission with Burnham’s ship) shows up and puts the ship in a tractor beam. While both are at warp speed.

Which is fine, but apparently the warp bubble is in danger of collapsing for some reason and so Burnham spends a minute or so yelling at the captain of the other ship to disengage while she continues to phaser random stuff on the hull of the bad guys’ ship to no discernable effect.

Then she finally yells at the other captain enough and he terminates the tractor beam and everyone comes out of warp for some reason and Captain Burnham gets off of the bad guys’ ship for some reason and the bad guys deploy warp decoys and warp out, and now it will take too long to track them all down so Captain Burnham has to bring in an old smuggler friend because it takes a thief to catch a thief. Fair enough, though it loses some of the punch when he picks out the correct warp signature in about five seconds.

Then they go to Tatoine where they get to have a speeder bike chase with the bad guys who they narrowly missed (by actually plausible timing) and then somehow the bad guys are on their ship which is flying through the atmosphere and the speeder bikes are keeping up. The bad guys are headed for a tunnel system which will allow them to come out someplace else and then they can go to space and warp out without being detected because the star fleet ships (the same two as before) can only track a ship which is in visual range of the camera, I guess. They say it breathlessly so we’re supposed to not notice. Why no more ships have been assigned to this super important mission (which is revealed to be hundreds of years old) is also not explained.

Then someone identifies the tunnel that they’re going to use because there’s an explosive charge on it and Captain Burnham is against shooting it because there’s a 30% chance of it causing an avalanche which would kill lots of innocent people somewhere and the other Captain thinks it’s the only way and orders his ship to do it and things are fine but then the bad guys use a photon torpedo to trigger an avalanche and Burnham blames the other captain, saying, “you gave them an idea” as if the bad guys aren’t the ones who planted an explosive charge on the tunnel.

Then the avalanche happens and for minutes heads over across a flat plain towards the Tatoine settlement that they had been speeder biking away from for the last several minutes and now are speeder biking towards and all of these innocent people will be killed unless both star ships shove their noses into the ground and merge their shields and oh man is it really stupid.

I can’t say for sure whether there’s some possible way for an avalanche (of rocks and dust, not snow) to travel at full speed along a plain to a place so far away that the mountains look small, but it certainly isn’t plausible. Moreover, with the absurdly advanced technology of Burnham’s ship, it’s a bit ridiculous that putting both ships in the way is the only possible way to save the settlement. They don’t even try phasering the avalanche, they just state it won’t work. But, dramatically, it really should work. It really just feels like they need something to happen so damn it, this is the way things work this minute.

And then, after this ridiculous maneuver where both ships slam their noses into the ground for no obvious reason and the merged shields hold and the settlement is saved, as the dust settles the bad guys warp out and oh well, the ships couldn’t track them because… we’re not told.

And then Captain Burnham and her smuggler friend just sit around for a while and talk about old times as if the episode is over and we’re in a post-credits sequence. It makes no sense why there’s zero urgency to do anything about the McGuffin anymore. Including from the guy in charge of the centuries-old super-secret code double-red mission who’s been laser-focused on the galaxy-shattering consequences of getting the McGuffin before the bad guys do and who has emphasized that lethal force is authorized because it’s this damn important.

Characters’ motivations last only as long as the scene they’re in requires, technology only works whenever the plot wants it to, Bad Guys who will blithely kill (or at least endanger) thousands of innocent people set their weapons to stun when shooting our heroes, Captain Burnham has the priorities of a 1980s Sunday morning cartoon super hero, which wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t done with no humility and everyone likes her anyway despite her being basically an anti-social narcissistic egomaniac. And also being a soldier on a mission.

The thing is, 1980s cartoon superheroes had the priorities they did because they were essentially reactive. Life was going on and then a super-villain endangered innocent people and so they went and protected those innocent people. That’s good and morally coherent.

This can be complicated by introducing other factors, like a much bigger threat to far more people that the superhero needs to stop, and so he may not have time to rescue just one person. That can make for painful dilemmas where the hero needs the maturity to recognize that no everything is given to everyone and maybe saving that one person wasn’t given to you even though, if you forsook what was actually given to you, you could have done it. Captain Burnham just ignores the bigger issues whenever she doesn’t feel like paying attention to them, which is extremely immature and irresponsible.

It’s good to stop and smell the flowers, but not when you’re rushing a transplant organ to a recipient and it needs to get there within the hour or the organ will die and then the recipient will too.

It’s weird to me how utterly bad this writing is. It would not have been hard to make the script a thousand fold tighter than the plot-hole-ridden contrived mess it was.

Also, and this is related to the entire series, they’ve cranked the technology level up so high that location barely matters anymore. People hold conversations with other people around the universe in realtime, people can find and bring aboard people from far-off planets in minutes—basically, location barely imposes any restraints anymore. And the result is that nothing feel real. It takes on an almost dreamlike quality to it which is not pleasant. (It’s also responsible for the plot being lace, since without limitations it’s impossible to have logically consistent problems.)

It’s really cool for people to be able to teleport around like Q, but the problem with the rule of cool is that you have to be careful with it or you’ll get frostbite.

Delicate Things Don’t Work Well as Inter-Generational Traditions

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw a story going around about a grandmother who wanted to pass on the sets of fancy plates which she inherited from her parents and her children rejecting them as to her children they were just fancy display items in a case near the dinner table but not actually involved with dinner. There’s a lot of commentary on this, but I think apart from whatever side one wants to take it does highlight the problem that fragile things don’t work well as inter-generational traditions.

I learned this myself with some cherished toys from my childhood which my parents had saved for my children. They were called Construx—they’re somewhere inbetween Legos and Erector Sets but was better than either. The problem, though, is that they’re no longer made—they haven’t been for decades—and so they are irreplaceable. The other problem is that they’re delicate, especially now that the plastic is thirty years older and spent that time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This might not have been a problem if I’d only had one child, or if I had all of my children as triplets, but with them being more spaced out than that, I couldn’t really give them to an older child to play with without them being accessible to the younger ones, and that would have resulted in breaking quite a few pieces.

So the result is that my children barely played with them.

It’s a pity, but I also don’t see what else I could have done. It would have been very sad to have little children accidentally destroy them, and since they’ve got different personalities than I do they probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much as I did, anyway. I’ll probably have more fun pulling them out and playing with them myself after my children are grown.

Fancy dinner plates have the same kind of problem. It’s way too easy to break them by dropping them—sometimes moreso than normal plates because they are often particularly thin—but it’s also way too easy to damage them through simple use. I’ve encountered fancy plates which would easily be scratched by knives and even some whose delicate gilting could be rubbed off by overly vigorous cleaning.

Fancy dinner plates also suffer from the problem of their virtues only being appreciated by generations now gone.

As far as I can tell, fancy plates were a kind of luxury good that became popular among the middle class during the Victorian period, when the newly growing middle class wanted to ape the aristocracy and did so with fancy clothes and fancy plates which were, because of the same economic developments which produced the middle class, now expensive but affordable. Expensive but affordable is a sweet spot as far as signifiers of social status goes. The latter makes them possible and the former keeps them from being so common that they lose all status.

Fancy plates are, of course, pretty in themselves, but they’re actually not great at showing that off since their function is to be covered with food. (Fancy wine glasses do a better job since they can be seen even when filled with wine.) And their function as signifiers of wealth and importance are basically over since economic progress has made similarly pretty things cheap and easily accessible to everyone.

There are things which you can pass onto your children, but if they’re delicate things they need to be replaceable things; things which cannot be broken cannot be used. (There is an exception, of course, for purely decorative things such as paintings, since their use does not put them in jeopardy.) But it’s far more reliable to pass on things which cannot be broken, such as knowledge, skills, and wisdom.

My oldest son ended up reading the Dragonlance Chronicles in different copies than I did, since my omnibus volume had a weak binding and would not easily fit into his backpack to bring to school for reading during free time. It would have been cool if he’d read it from the same physical copy as me, but it’s far more important that he read the same story—which has enabled us to discuss it together.

Ultimately, physical things like plates don’t really last and it’s a mistake to look to them to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and they do, but ultimately things only last when put into a museum and preserved, and not many things are worth of being in a museum. So, pick wisely.

Feelings and Facts Can Be the Same Conversation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.

All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.

Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.

The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.

Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.

When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.

This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)

It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))

The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)

What Should Christians Make of AI?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Missing the Mark, Philosophy, YouTube Channel1 Comment

In this video, I answer a viewer’s question about what Christians should make of AI. (It’s really the same thing that everyone should make of AI.

Basically, there are two senses of AI:

  1. Like us
  2. Something that does what we would do by intelligence.

All AI that exists is AI in sense 2, not in sense 1, though sense 1 wouldn’t be a massive problem if it did exist.

Riding With Death Was a Weird Movie

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the movie Riding With Death. Many of the movies featured on MST3K are weird, but this one was particularly strange. It was a made-for-TV movie created by editing together two unrelated episodes of the short-lived TV show Gemini Man.

Gemini Man was, according to Wikipedia, a replacement show for a previous show called The Invisible Man, except with cheaper special effects. made in 1976, Gemini Man centers around the federal agent Sam Casey, who in an accident while diving to retrieve something or other from a disabled nuclear submarine was cause in the blast of an explosion and turned invisible from the radiation. Fortunately, scientists were able to turn him visible again through the use of a “DNA Stabilizer.” It’s a temporary effect, though, and he can become instantly invisible by turning it off. He can safely do this for up to fifteen minutes per day (cumulative) before being invisible will kill him. Conveniently for him, the writers, and the special effects department, it’s not just his body but anything he’s wearing that turns invisible—I think it’s got to be something he’s touching (except the ground) when he turns invisible, since he can pick up a gun and it remains visible. The government agency he’s working for is a weird kind of high tech general do-goodery kind of government agency called Intersect. It’s reminiscent of the various shadowy government agencies that would be behind Michael Knight in Knight Rider and behind Stringfellow Hawk in Airwolf, except that it seems a bit less shadowy—the main Intersect building has a large “INTERSECT” logo above its doorway.

The studio show ten episodes of Gemini Man but it was canceled after the first five aired. Based on the two I saw, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It looks to be in a similar genre to shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf, or even The Incredible Hulk: highly episodic shows about a mildly super-powered hero who fights bad guys and rights wrongs throughout America. In the case of Airwolf and Knight Rider the mild super-power comes from having a high-tech means of transportation; in The Incredible Hulk it comes from being about twice as strong as a bodybuilder (they really toned down the strength of The Hulk in that show when compared to the comic books). In Casey’s case, it comes from being able to become invisible for short stretches of time. As super-powers go, you could do worse. During one of the host segments Crow’s short time spent as the superhero Turkey Volume Guessing Man—a man who can accurate guess the volume of turkeys which would fill any three-dimensional space—demonstrates this. That said, you could also do a heck of a lot better. Being invisible makes it harder for people to shoot you, lets you sucker-punch people better, and allows you to listen in to other people’s private conversations more conveniently. That’s mostly what Casey uses his powers for, and the action is typically resolved through Casey being above average at throwing a punch despite not having all that much mass behind it. Also, he’s apparently a very skilled driver.

All good things to have in a government agent, of course, but not very interesting in themselves. Invisibility is, by its nature, not visually impressive, and guns floating in the air pretty much have to look corny. So the result is going to depend almost entirely on the charisma of the characters. Ben Murphy, who plays Casey, is charismatic enough, but the character he’s given to work with isn’t. Casey seems to kind of enjoy being able to turn invisible, but that’s about the extent to which his character is affected by nearly dying and gaining a power that makes no sense which could kill him if his wristwatch ever runs out of battery.

I should mention that I don’t mean “a power that makes no sense” as a nit-picky criticism. In a show like this it’s fine to go with “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy.” The characters do need to have a sense of wonder and mystery, though. Also, some apprehension is in order. If you don’t understand a thing and it seems to contradict what you do know, you should be aware that it could have “sharp edges.” Casey, by contrast, is easygoing and unaffected, he barely has a care in the world.

Then we come to the movie, which I really would love to hear an explanation for the existence of. Presumably it was a cynical cash-grab where there was a need for a TV movie for some slot and some entertainment hook where something about it—invisibility or trucking, for example—was hot for a few minutes and it takes a lot less time to edit together a TV movie from two fifty minute TV episodes than it does to cast and shoot something original. But it’s really weird how the two episodes were from opposite ends of the show’s short run. They were episode 1 and 10, in fact, and their plots were unrelated.

In the plot for the first episode, a scientist has supposedly invented a chemical additive to gasoline which can cause cars to get two or three times the miles-per-gallon they get with ordinary gasoline, and the big bad oil companies are trying to steal the formula and destroy it to protect their profits. Except it turns out that the additive is unstable and a powerful explosive which can be set off through fairly mild shock (such as dropping it from a foot or two). The scientist has embezzled the $10M in research money that INTERSECT gave him and has set up a plan to destroy the sample and pretend to be killed in the blast, blaming it on the greedy oil companies. This is supposed to happen while he’s riding with the sample in the back of a large moving van which Casey is driving to transport the two gallons of additive over to the department of transportation for evaluation, which has to happen by the end of the business day for some reason that’s never explained because there’s no possible explanation for it.

The scientist has several henchmen working for him and they smuggle him out while pretending to put some extra lab equipment into the truck at his facility and add a radio to the room in the back of the truck where he supposedly is. Then they get on their way for what should be about a thirty mile trip that takes many hours on highways through the mountains and when the bumps in the road don’t set off the fuel additive the scientist (who’s following by helicopter to stay within radio range so he can keep pretending to be in the truck) has one of his henchmen sabotage Casey’s brakes at a stop that he makes for no apparent reason. Along the way Casey meets another trucker nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” on the CB radio, rescues him from some highjackers, and then gets saved by Buffalo Bill who uses his truck to help Casey to stop as he’s coming down from the mountains. There’s also an “exciting” scene where Casey manages to navigate some hair-pin turns at sixty miles an hour due to his superb driving skills. Then the scientist decides that Casey as figured out that he’s not in the truck (which Casey has) and starts shooting at the truck with a sub machine gun from the helicopter. Casey drives the truck to a nearby empty field and gets out before the truck explodes, then subdues the scientist and his henchmen who landed to examine the wreckage.

If you’re wondering what Casey being able to turn invisible with the press of a button on his wristwatch has to do with any of this, the answer is not very much. Mostly it’s helpful for some fistfights and to prevent the guys with guns shooting him as he approaches. Not nothing, but it would have been very easy to work the plot to accomplish this without being invisible.

The second half of the movie is made up on a condensed version of the tenth episode of the series, where Casey runs into Buffalo Bill during an assignment. It turns out that Buffalo Bill has given up truck driving to try to live out his dream of being a racecar mechanic, and the arch villain of the series owns a race car which he personally works on and Bill just happens to have been hired by him. Bill’s girlfriend, “cupcake,” is a secret agent for the archvillain who was assigned to seduce the mechanic, for some reason never explained, and, well, let’s just say that with Casey’s help INTERSECT manages to capture the arch-villain and Buffalo Bill gets the singing career in a truck stop he’s always wanted. (It turns out that Buffalo Bill was played by a real-life country singer.)

I don’t know that I’ve done justice to how disjoint the two sections of the movie feel, or to how easily you could edit out all of the scenes of invisibility while losing very little. Not nothing, but very little.

Also, much of the first half of the movie is CB radio dialog because Casey (who goes by “Easy Rider”) and Buffalo Bill. I found this weird until I looked it up and found out that the hit novelty song Convoy was big on the charts in 1975.

While the TV series ran in 1976, the movie was edited together and released in 1981, by the way, so I suspect it would have felt a bit dated. And speaking of dates, it was set in the not-too-distant future, specifically 1983. I wonder if that was to make the “DNA stabilizer” seem very slightly more plausible.

Also, it’s incredibly jarring that Casey just happens to run into Buffalo Bill who’s made a career change right after Casey’s vacation. In the original filming, this would have felt so much more natural with eight other episodes coming in between. It’s also very strange to get a long-running arch-villain introduced two thirds of the way through a movie.

TV movies were sometimes quite good; I can only wonder what it would have been like in 1981 to have seen the absurdity that was Riding With Death. It made for a pretty good MST3K episode, though.