In the second set of six Miss Marple short stories which (together with a special extra story) comprise The Thirteen Problems, we get introduced to the character of Jane Helier. She is a beautiful and intelligent, though vapid, actress. I should say, stage actress. The stories she was in were published in late 1929 and early 1930; talkies had only just started dominating movies in 1929 and the superior experience of seeing color and hearing sound in plays probably made them preferable over silent films for people who could easily afford to pay to see plays.
She’s an interesting character, especially because she is played mostly for laughs until the final story of the six, The Affair At the Bungalow. When I said that she is beautiful, I don’t mean merely that she is above average. She is described as having been argued as the most beautiful woman in England. She has that kind of beauty which makes all of the men around her gallant even where they have no romantic interest in her. I think Agatha Christie plays this part as much just for realism as for laughs. And I say this even though Jane Helier is mostly played for laughs, especially how much she doesn’t understand. That said, there is an interesting dynamic between her and Miss Marple—who, at the beginning of the evening, Jane doesn’t know from Eve.
Miss Marple was invited to dinner to round out the places at table. She was recommended by Sir Henry Clithering, former commissioner of Scotland Yard, because Dolly Bantry (the hostess) needed an extra guest to round out the dinner table and asked Sir Henry who she should invite. Sir Henry remembered Miss Marple vividly from the year before when he’d attended the dinner party of Miss Marple’s famous writer nephew, i.e. from the first run of six Miss Marple stories, in which each guest told a story of a crime they had learned about personally and the rest were to guess the solution. (Only Miss Marple could, for every story, of course). This second six stories features the same dinner game, though with different guests. Until the very end of the dinner party, Jane underestimates Miss Marple. Miss Marple, of course, does not underestimate Jane.
During the course of the evening, there were a great many things that Jane didn’t know, but she did have one insight which Miss Marple praised. That was in the second-to-last story, and it it we also learn that she has had grief in her life, related to being betrayed by a man. In the second-to-last story, she had somewhat more intelligent things to say about who might have been the murderer, though only Miss Marple figured it out. Then, finally, we come to Jane’s story.
I will have to discuss the solution to discuss the story, so if it is necessary: consider this, dear reader, your spoiler warning.
Jane begins by telling her story about “a friend” who happens to also be a famous actress. Everyone guesses—correctly—that this friend is really her, and in only a few sentences she trips up and says “I” instead of “she”, and a moment later quotes someone as saying “Miss Helier” instead of “Miss Helman.” She is embarassed and says that it’s so difficult to do it, and everyone is very sympathetic, so she goes on telling the story about herself.
It’s an elaborate story about a young man getting drugged at a bungalow and a theft being committed, and he identifies the woman who drugged him as Jane but she had an alibi. At the end of it, there are various solutions offered, except by Miss Marple, who says that it seems to have a personal element in it and a deliberate attempt to get the young man into trouble, though it’s not really a satisfactory explanation. A little later she remembers Mrs. Pebmarsh, who was a laundress that stole an opal pin from one woman and put it on the blouse of another woman. Instead of offering a solution, she says that she has none and that the real moral of the story is that in a crisis, women must stick together. Jane explains that she doesn’t know the solution and hoped that the people assembled would, since they’re so clever. They’re annoyed at her since this explicitly went against the rules, but there’s nothing anyone can do. The time is late and Miss Marple departs, but before she does she whispers something in Jane Helier’s ear which causes her to exclaim.
A little later, Dolly Bantry accompanies Jane Helier to her bedroom (she’s staying with them) and Jane asks if there are many people like Miss Marple, and Dolly says that she supposes every village has one. Jane is disappointed by this. It comes out that Miss Marple did in fact guess the real solution but wouldn’t say it in front of the men. Jane had, in fact, committed the crime in the story, with her understudy as her accomplice. She had played the parlor maid and her understudy played her.
Except that this never actually happened. Jane was planning to do it in a few months and was “trying it on the dog.” She was very encouraged that no one had come up with the solution except for Miss Marple, but was discouraged to hear that there probably was a Miss Marple in every village. And then there was the advice which Miss Marple whispered in her ear right before she left.
I shouldn’t do it if I were you, my dear. Never put yourself too much in another woman’s power, even if you do think she’s your friend at the moment.
What’s really interesting about the way that Jane Helier reveals that she was not as dumb as everyone thought:
Mrs. Bantry sat down and groaned.
“Oh! my poor head. And all the time—Jane Helier, you deceitful girl! Telling us that story the way you did!”
“I am a good actress,” said Jane complacently. “I always have been, whatever people choose to say. I didn’t give myself away once, did I?”
It’s an interesting twist on the character. She is still not brilliant, to be sure, but she is not nearly the airhead that she seemed to be. This is an interesting commentary on the nature of extreme beauty, especially when coupled with narcissism, or at least selfishness. She does not bother herself to be interested in things which do not grab her, which is why there are so many things she doesn’t catch. She doesn’t pay much attention to the people around her because she doesn’t need to—they will treat her well regardless of how she treats them. If she smiles and speaks nicely, people will assume her lack of interest and attention were inability, rather than self-absorption. Indeed, beauty will help out in this regard in another way, too, which is that people tend to assume that a beautiful face means a beautiful soul. That is, a face which shows little trace of the fall of man often fools people into thinking that the soul is as unfallen as the face, and so people are unlikely to suspect moral defects.
It is interesting that making her smarter than she seems also makes her worse than she seems, and indeed this is born out by the scheme of revenge which she was contemplating and testing out. It had none of the sweetness of her manner.
Agatha Christie is often given credit for the cleverness of her plots, but not often given credit for her understanding of human nature. I think she is not often given this credit because her writing is plain and not literary. It certainly was not nearly so literary as another of the Queens of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet I think, in this, she is underrated. Her characters did not leap off the page. They did not dazzle the reader with their complex psychology. But the truth is that human psychology is almost never as complex as it likes to pretend it is when it is defending itself from realizing its own faults and Agatha Christie’s writing was far more concerned with the psychological truth than with peering into the veil of lies a person tells themselves.
Jane Helier is an interesting character study, if you pay attention.
On the sixth day of November in the year of our Lord 1988, the episode Mr. Penroy’s Vacation aired. It was the third episode of the fifth season of Murder, She Wrote. (Last week’s episode was A Little Night Work.)
Jessica is back in Cabot Cove.
The episode opens with the perpetually re-election-minded mayor of Cabot Cove, Sam Booth, walking his bulldog, Winston.
As he’s walking Winston along the coast he notices Mr. Penroy and strikes up a conversation with him. Not surprisingly, for those who know Sam, the subject of the conversation is about voting. Specifically, he couldn’t help but notice that Mr. Penroy hadn’t yet registered to vote.
Mr. Penroy thanks the mayor for reminding him, saying that a man needs to put down roots. Sam pretends to reluctance at running again, and Mr. Penroy is sufficiently complementary that Sam feels confident of Mr. Penroy’s vote, so he takes his leave.
Mr. Penroy only gets about thirty feet along the path when a young man named Daryl jumps over the short wall. They emphasize his thuggish nature by having him pull out a switch blade.
He then uses it to clean his fingernail, but the point, as it were, was made.
Evidently the two know each other; Daryl was not supposed to show up for another two days. There is some oblique reference to something valuable made which seems to be in Mr. Penroy’s safekeeping. Daryl showed up early to make sure that it was safe, though the subtext seems to be that he showed up early to make sure that Mr. Penroy wasn’t going to skip town with whatever the valuable thing is.
Darrel says something solicitous but insincere about Mr. Penroy’s health, then Mr. Penroy dismissively tells him to keep out of sight and walks off.
While this happens, some guy looks on.
The scene then shifts to Jessica’s house. She’s wrapping presents on her kitchen table when Seth Hazlitt knocks on the door. He’s there because Jessica said she would help him wrap his present for Morris Penroy’s birthday party.
Jessica asks where on earth Seth bought it and he replies that he didn’t buy it. Amos Tupper gave it to him last Christmas. This causes Jessica to start reminiscing about Amos, who has retired. He’s been gone for a month, and went back to Kentucky where his family is.
I’m not sure that we ever knew that Amos was from Kentucky. (It’s possible we did learn it in the episode where his family came to visit him but I don’t recall it being mentioned.) He seemed to me to be played much more as a Cabot Cove native. To be fair, he didn’t have a Maine accent, but then the accents on the show were all over the place. Sometimes it’s suggested that this is because many of the residents moved in decades ago but often times no explanation is given. About the only two (recurring) characters who had Maine accents were Seth Hazlitt and Sam Booth.
Be that as it may, this is an interesting way to introduce the fact that Tom Bosley left the show. (He left in order to take the starring role in Father Dowling Mysteries.) This is a problem that all long-running shows face and they deal with it in a variety of ways. I like that they sent the character off to a peaceful retirement rather than killing him off. They never brought him back, but it was nice that there was the possibility, and in any event it’s good that the character got a nice ending to his story. One becomes fond of characters. Amos never appeared in the fifth season; over the four seasons he did appear he showed up in nineteen episodes. That gives us a decent approximation of the number of Cabot Cove episodes: roughly five per season.
The conversation shifts to the new sheriff, Mort Metzger. He took early retirement from the police force of New York City. Jessica remarks that, paying what they do, they’re lucky to have gotten someone with police experience. Seth then brings up Mort’s wife, Adele. Adele will form something of a running joke in the series. She will never show up in an episode, with Mort often making excuses for her not being present, and other people being relieved because she is extremely talkative. (She is a retired Marine.) The joke is introduced, here, with Seth remarking that Adele was in to see him with a sore throat, which didn’t surprise Seth because he’d never heard someone talk so much before.
The scene then shifts to Mr. Penroy going home to the room he rents in the house of the Appletree sisters. Before he can get in the gate, he’s accosted by someone by the name of Cliff.
Whatever scheme Mr. Penroy and Darrel are in on, Cliff is in on it as well. Mr. Penroy is as short with Cliff as he was with Darrel, and tells him to make himself very scarce.
The scene changes to the center of the market district of Cabot Cove, where a bus stops. A woman gets off of it and a man who is waiting there asks her if he can help her with her bag.
She’s uninterested, so he says that he’s new in town but thought he could recommend a place to stay as he’s found a place which is inexpensive but clean. She tells him to go there, get a cold shower, then call his wife. She walks off without further words, and he looks after her pensively.
The scene shifts to later in the day when we finally meet the Appletree sisters.
Helen is on the left and Lilian is on the right. If they were in a marvel comic book, they would be described as living embodiments of spinsterhood. More accurately, though, they’re doing their best impression of Abby and Martha Brewster from the 1944 Cary Grant film, Arsenic and Old Lace.
As you can tell from the shovel in Helen’s hand, she’s digging and Lilian is bringing her some lemonade to refresh herself. They bicker and Lilian goes inside to make a cake. Later on, she’s almost done when Helen comes in. Lilian says that she’s frosting it with chocolate, which is Mr. Penroy’s favorite. Helen dismisses this, saying, “What difference does it make?” and asks Lilian to give her a hand. We find out with what in a moment:
The camera pans down and confirms that it is, in fact, Mr. Penroy’s body which they are dragging.
They put him in the shallow grave which Helen had dug during the day, then cover him with their best tablecloth which Helen embroidered herself, and bury him. Lilian excuses herself to bring up some cider for Mr. Penroy’s party the next day.
The scene shifts to the party the next day with Jessica and Seth arriving. There is small talk, and the Appletree sisters explain that Mr. Penroy isn’t present because he got a phone call for a sick friend in Peoria—Helen corrects Lilian that it was Phoenix—and had to rush off to be with him.
Amid small talk and Seth discussing the gossip about Mr. Penroy having romantic interest in one of the Appletree sisters and possibly having left because he got cold feet, the Mail Man arrives and delivers the mail to Helen, carefully announcing each piece of mail to everyone around, including the fact that her electric bill is a second notice. Handy for us the audience, but I would expect a postman to be more discrete than this.
As an interesting tidbit, Jessica thanks him for covering her postage due the other day—she was three cents short. The smallest coin she has on hand is a nickel, so he replies that he’ll put two cents into her mailbox the next day, with a receipt. Inflation certainly has had an effect—my recollection was that in the late 1980s a letter stamp cost $0.25 while at the time I’m writing this they cost $0.63. That said, it’s not that huge a jump. If we do a rough adjustment for inflation, it would be as if Jessica were short nine cents, gave him fifteen cents, and he promised to leave six cents in her mailbox with a receipt. To modern ears it’s weird that either of them are expending any energy over this trivial an amount of money, but I think it is a cultural thing—both characters would have grown up during the Great Depression and it was deeply ingrained in them to never waste anything, no matter how trivial.
Next Cliff shows up, but dressed as a clergyman.
This is just a disguise so I don’t expect accuracy, but I wonder what kind of minister he’s pretending to be. Lutheran, perhaps?
He introduces himself as Reverend Wilford Smythe, an old friend of Mr. Penroy, from Albany. He says that Mr. Penroy had written to him and invited him to stop by if ever he was in town. They explain, to his consternation, that Mr. Penroy has left to visit a sick friend and won’t be back for some time. He gives them a blessing and leaves.
That night the sisters are discussing their overdue bills and decide to endorse Mr. Penroy’s pension check over to themselves since he won’t be needing it. They then hear a rattle upstairs and decide to deal with it because they don’t trust the new Sheriff.
The scene cuts over to Sheriff Metzger paying a visit to Jessica. The last thing that Amos Tupper told her before he left was that if he ever needed help he should ask Jessica, so here he is. Amos left him the parking plans for the Founder’s Day picnic, but he can’t read Amos’ handwriting. Jessica admits that she was never very good at reading Amos’ handwriting either, but between the two of them they’ll try. They then fall to small talk in which we get some character building for Mort. His wife, Adele, who is very talkative, had spent two years in the Marine Corps and he is very happy to be away from New York City in which he was constantly worried about being caught in the middle of a gang war on his way home on the subway. His closing remark, in the scene, is that in a quiet little town like this he practically feels like he’s stealing his paycheck (i.e. that he has no work to do to earn it).
Back at the Appletree sisters’ house, Helen is digging another grave, this time for Cliff, who is lying dead on their lawn with a pitchfork stuck in his chest.
The scene shifts to the next day where the Appletree sisters are discussing the events of the night before. They agree that they did the right thing and couldn’t have turned to the new Sheriff. They then go inside the bank to cash Mr. Penroy’s pension check, and run into Jessica. They make some smalltalk, but mostly this scene exists to have Jessica witness them cashing Mr. Penroy’s pension check.
Right after the Appletree sisters leave, Jessica notices the guy who was hiding behind the tree at the beginning of the episode (he still doesn’t have a name) lurking in the bank, watching the Appletree sisters and her. When he notices her noticing him, he leaves.
Jessica then runs into Sam Booth who is trying to train his bulldog, Winston, to heel. When given the command, Winston runs off. Sam shrugs and says that they’re just getting started, then starts to ask Jessica to serve on the town council, but she’s already served three terms and with all of the traveling that she does, she doesn’t want to serve another term. Sam says that that’s what he wanted to discuss. He was thinking that Morris Penroy would be an ideal candidate. He’s only been here a year, but people like him and he’s retired so he has time to attend the meetings.
At this point Winston runs off to the Appletree sisters yard and digs up Mr. Penroy’s hand.
Finally, things can get started.
The scene shifts to later when the police have arrived and dug up the body. Doc Hazlitt estimates that Morris has been dead for about forty eight hours, but there are no obvious signs of the cause of death. He refuses to speculate as to the cause of death, saying that they’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report. He did, however, find a key on a thin chain hanging around Mr. Penroy’s neck.
Sheriff Metzger tells Doc Hazlitt that he wants the coroner’s report “code blue,” whatever that’s supposed to mean and for whatever reason he thinks that Doc Hazlitt will be involved in the coroner’s report coming to him.
Sheriff Metzger then interrogates the Appletree sisters, but they get upset and go to their house to get the Sheriff refreshment. After they leave, Jessica counsels the Sheriff to be more gentle and he gratefully accepts her advice, then wanders off to talk to someone (it’s unclear who). Jessica follows the Appletree sisters, but on her way notices the tablecloth that Penroy was buried in (it’s bagged as evidence, and sitting in plain sight).
Inside, Jessica gently interrogates the sisters. She’s more subtle than she usually is—she doesn’t make a single thinly veiled accusation—and the Sisters decide to confide in her.
Outside, Sheriff Metzger is talking to the Mayor, who advises him that if he has any difficulty in clearing up the murder that he should go to Jessica for help. Metzger remarks that he’s not the first person to say that. He then goes inside and starts bullying the Appletree sisters again despite having been grateful to Jessica for her advice to be more gentle.
His bullying of them is interrupted by Floyd coming in and announcing the discovery of the other body the Appletree sisters burried (Winston has been a busy little bulldog). The Sheriff looks at Jessica, Jessica looks at the Appletree sisters, the Appletree sisters look at each other, and we go to commercial break.
When we come back, Seth is on the phone. It’s with Sheriff Metzger, who is impatient for the coroner’s report, which apparently would go to Seth because… I don’t know. Doctors stick together?
Anyway, he’s got the Appletree sisters in his office and after putting down the phone, demands answers. They deny everything. Metzger confronts them with the fact that Penroy never took the bus and their house never received a long distance phone call all that week. Lilian says that if he’s going to raise his voice, they’re not interested in continuing the conversation and he has them locked up.
He then gives Jessica a lift somewhere and they drive there in glorious rear projection.
Jessica explains to Mort that she’s known the Appletree sisters since she was a young woman and she can’t believe that they just turned into a pair of serial killers, though she agrees that they are lying. She brings up their cashing of the pension check at the bank, which is suspicious given that the check was delivered yesterday during the party and Penroy was already dead by then. Metzger says that he will look into this right after they’re done searching the Appletree sisters’ house.
At the house they find Penroy’s luggage, which contradicts the Appletree sisters saying that Penroy had packed his bags. They wisely don’t dwell on this, though, because there’s no need to belabor the reasoning behind what the audience already knows because we were shown it.
Downstairs on the main floor, Jessica notices something suspicious in the fireplace.
I know I’m a bit of a stickler for details, but I’m really curious how the sisters managed to build a fire that entirely consumed the wooden handle of the pitchfork that was standing up but left two logs at the bottom unburnt and covered in ash. It must have been a roaring fire indeed to burn a stick several feet up in the air, and it’s curious to use fireproof logs at the base of it. (You do want something fireproof to keep the combustible material off of the ground so oxygen can more easily get to it, but that’s what the iron grate that the unburnt logs are on top of is for.) Also, my hat is off to them for building a fire that burnt so completely that everything (except the fireproof logs) burnt completely to ash and there are no charred bits of wood that fell off as the fire consumed the wood. When I build fires I always get little black cinders that burned incompletely and went out before turning to ash.
Sheriff Metzger recalls that Doc Hazlitt said that the corpse had four stab wounds in the chest, and says, “looks like we just found ourselves a murder weapon.” Jessica has an interesting reaction to that:
This feels a little out of character for Jessica. Normally when evidence surfaces against someone she likes, she is quick with indignation and alternate interpretations.
Someone knocks at the door and it’s the woman who got off of the bus and was given advice by the strange guy on a good motel to stay at. She asks if this is the residence of Morris Penroy, and when she’s told that he’s not at home she says that she’ll come in to wait for him.
She introduces herself as Marilee Penroy, Mr. Penroy’s wife. She says that they were married a little over a year ago, before he came to Cabot Cove. They then break the news that Morris is dead. She faints and Sheriff Metzger catches her.
Back in the Sheriff’s office, they discuss the pitchfork end a bit, then the guy who met Marilee at the bus stop and offered her advice on hotels comes in. He introduces himself as Bart Clapper, special investigator for the Boston & Western Railroad.
Apparently, five million dollars were stolen about a year ago. Three armed men overpowered the baggage clerk and took the money. Mr. Penroy was that clerk. Clapper knows who the three men were—he hands out photographs and gives their names. They were the three men who showed up to talk to Mr. Penroy the day before his party. Clapper figures that there must have been a falling out among thieves and they murdered Penroy and Cliff and burried them in Penroy’s back yard.
Seth interrupts this—he got the call from the Coroner’s office—and gives the news that it turns out that Penroy died of a massive heart attack and wasn’t murdered at all.
Jessica objects that many things don’t make sense, including why Mr. Penroy concealed that he was married. Clapper says that Penroy wasn’t married, and after receiving a description of “Mrs. Penroy” identifies her as Cliff’s wife. The Appletree sisters ask if they’re free to go, and the Sheriff says that they are. Jessica follows them.
At home they decide to tell Jessica the truth. Mr. Penroy came back from his walk in a good mood, told the sisters that he was expecting to come into some money, and asked Helen to marry him. She set him straight that her kindness had no romantic aspect—in the flashback she beat him with a hand towel when he grabbed her to kiss her—and that’s when he had the heart attack.
Jessica asked why they buried him in the back yard. It turns out that they got used to having the rent money, but after what happened, they didn’t want to rent to another bachelor. And it would have all turned out OK if that fake minister hand’t come poking around.
Jessica says that she shutters to ask what happened to the minister, but the Appletree sisters don’t really know. They heard someone bumbling around int he room upstairs and threatened him through the door that they would call the police. He went out the window, then they heard Cliff shout “Holy!” (Helen thinks it was calling out the name “Foley”.) When they found him outside, dead, with their pitchfork in his chest, they figured it would be better to cover it up.
When they straightened up the ransacked room, they did find that Mr. Penroy’s baggage claim check collection was missing. Jessica surmises it has something to do with the missing money, then says that she has to run along.
Sheriff Metzger finds Daryl Croft and Ole Korshack talking and arrests them. (They had a brief conversation before the arrest where each wondered if the other had the money.) Back at the police station, Jessica comes in and hears the news of the arrest. She doesn’t think that they know anything, and figures that he doesn’t have much to hold them on without the money. (It’s not obvious what they could be charged with even if Jessica and the police do find the money. Merely being in Cabot Cove is not a crime.)
Sheriff Metzger calls the railroad company and asks about a reward, and learns that they’re offering a 10% reward for the return of the money—half a million dollars. He also finds out that Bart Clapper doesn’t work for them anymore.
Jessica then notices the key that had been around Morris Penroy’s neck. “This may be a bit obvious, but, uh, you know, this key looks like one I have for an old trunk.” Metzger replies that it’s obvious, but worth checking out.
The scene shifts to the Appletree sisters’ house, where they’re looking in their basement for the old trunk which they had stored there for Mr. Penroy. They break it open and find the money. Their discussion of whether they need to mention it to Jessica is interrupted by Bart Clapper, who had been watching their house all afternoon. He has an interesting line when, after some discussion, Helen asks if he means that he’s going to steal the money: “It’s an imperfect world, Ladies. We all have our weaknesses.”
They try to dissuade him by saying that they’ll tell Sheriff Metzger, but he merely indicates he’s going to murder them to prevent that. As he threateningly approaches them Sheriff Metzger, standing at the top of the basement stairs, orders him, at gun point, to stop where he is.
The scene shifts to Jessica catching up with Marilee next to the bus stop. She gossips about the recent goings-on and in passing asks if it’s OK for her to call her “Lee.” Marilee says that all her friends call her “Lee.” Jessica says that as soon as Sheriff Metzger finds the checks which Cliff stole from Mr. Penroy’s room that will be the final evidence needed for a conviction. Marilee responds that she doubts that Sheriff Metzger will find the baggage claim checks, Clapper would probably have burned them.
Having thus revealed her guilt, Jessica pounces. She expects that Cliff had run out on Marilee and she followed him because she’d found out about the intended money split. It was her name he called out when he came down the stairs with the briefcase full of baggage claim checks. More specifically, he said, “Oh! Lee!” Jessica then observes that it must have taken a great deal of frustration and rage for Marilee to do what she did.
The red strap shows how big the shoulder pads are. Ah, the 80s.
“Being married to Cliff was like being on a burning roller coaster… He was always in trouble with the law and when he finally made his one big beautiful score, he left me. You understand, don’t you?”
Of course Jessica doesn’t. She only has unlimited understanding for sexual sins no matter how bad; she can never comprehend how someone could stoop so low as murder.
The final scene is back at her house, playing chess with Seth. Jessica tells him that they returned the money from Mr. Penroy’s pension check and the Sheriff was kind enough to not press charges. Seth remarks that it’s only saving the taxpayer money, as any good lawyer could have gotten them off due to diminished mental capacity. Jessica replies that she suspects that there’s not much wrong with the Appletree sisters’ mental capacity, and Seth answers that he was talking about Metzger.
And with that, we go to credits.
Like most gimmick episodes, this one wasn’t great as a mystery. The first half of the episode is either an homage to Arsenic and Old Lace or uses Arsenic and Old Lace as a huge red herring, or possibly both. (At the date of first airing, Arsenic and Old Lace was forty four years old, so similar to, in 2023, making reference to Alien, Moonraker, The Life of Brian, Rocky II or Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) The result is that we only get about half an episode to have a mystery in, and in fact we get less because we waste about ten minutes of it not knowing that Morris Penroy died of a heart attack.
Once we learn that Penroy died of a heart attack and shortly after that the Appletree sisters didn’t kill Cliff, the suspects that we’re left with are all barely characters. Daryl, Ole, Marilee, and Bart Clapper had about three minutes of screen time between them.
I think that—based on Marilee and Jessica’s conversation at the end—it’s supposed to be a red herring that Bart Clapper announced his intention to murder the Appletree sisters in order to steal the railroad money. If it was, I didn’t catch any indication that he was involved with any other murder. No one brought it up and he said nothing that would have suggested it. It’s not that it would be a plot hole if he did it—the story didn’t really point to anyone—but since Jessica in no way figured anything out that pointed at Clapper, it didn’t feel like the reveal in a Murder, She Wrote, and consequently felt like eliminating the character from suspicion. (Not that Jessica couldn’t have visited him in jail and showed the evidence that he committed the murder, but that would require a separate scene.)
You can do the same basic thing with some of the other possible suspects—idneitify some scene that contained a scrap of a hint that they were the murderer—but no one’s actions had any consistency to them. All of Mr. Penroy’s co-conspirators showed up two days before the distribution of the money because, ostensibly, they feared that Penroy would flee, taking all the money with him. But why on earth, if he was going to flee, would he wait for two days before the distribution? He even points this out himself when talking with Cliff. “If I was going to run out on you, I’d have done it months ago.”
This really applies to everything that the suspects did. How did Marilee know to come to Cabot Cove? No idea. Why did Burt Clapper offer to suggest a hotel to her? No idea. Why was the getaway driver (Daryl) aggressive while the muscle (Ole) was timid and fearful? No idea. Why did Cliff show up to the birthday party dressed as a minister when it was still a day before he was supposed to show up and Penroy had told him to make himself scarce? No idea. Why did Cliff search Mr. Penroy’s room when he believed Penroy had skipped town with the money? No idea. How did Marilee know to wait for Cliff at the bottom of the ladder outside the Appletree sisters’ house with a pitch fork? No idea. Why did she resolve to murder him but didn’t bring a weapon? No idea.
Also, while the pitch fork wasn’t quite as bad a murder weapon as the tuning fork in Murder in a Minor Key, it still seems more than a little unlikely that a small woman in her forties who looks like she’d need help to open a jar of peanut butter could plunge a pitchfork deep enough into a man’s chest to cause instant death. What I’ve been calling a pitchfork was actually, technically, a garden fork. Its tines are thicker, flatter, and more blunt than a pitchfork because it’s meant to be plunged into the ground and used to break up the soil. This is usually done by pushing with one’s foot, using one’s weight on top to drive the fork into the ground because it requires a lot of force. To do that standing, sideways, with just one’s arms, and through clothing and skin, would require quite a lot of power. There are women who have that size and power, but Marilee did not look like she would be one of them.
So, if this episode wasn’t much of a mystery, how was it as an homage to Arsenic and Old Lace? I don’t think that I can fairly judge that. I’ve only seen clips from Arsenic and Old Lace and I do not have the nostalgic attachment to it that many people watching this episode in 1988 would have had. Some episodes of Murder, She Wrote transcend their time period and some do not. I think that Mr. Penroy’s Vacation is firmly in the latter category.
As a detail, the title is wrong. Mr. Penroy never went on vacation, even according to the cover story from the Appletree sisters. Mr. Penroy’s Sudden Departure would have been a more accurate title, as well as being a better one because of the double-meaning.
Next week Jessica takes to the slopes in one of my favorite episodes: Snow White, Blood Red.
I’ve written before about how murder mysteries with a clever twist are less popular than they were during the golden age (see Ingenious Murders, Alibi By Recording, and Dorothy L. Sayers and Clever Murders.) There is a variant of the clever twist which I would like to consider more specifically: the trap. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll consider traps any method of murder where the murderer does not need to be (immediately) present at the time of the murder.
The first thing to get out of the way is that there is one kind of trap which remains as popular as ever: poison. We don’t tend to think of poison as a trap because it doesn’t have any mechanical parts but it functions exactly in the same manner as a shotgun in a closet whose trigger was on a string to the door. It’s just smaller and you have to trick the victim into eating it, which is rarely necessary with a shotgun.
The main problem that traps have, from the perspective of the murderer, is that they make most alibis useless. Unless the time the trap was set up is very tightly constrained, it requires a very long alibi to ensure one could not have set it up. It’s difficult to both be a character in the story and to have an alibi for several days straight. (People can, of course, lie about when they arrived in the country, but it’s too easy to check the dates on their passport.)
There is a solution to this, though, which is to disguise the trap so that it appears that a murderer was present at the time of the death. One very popular method is for the murderer to be the first on the scene and remove critical evidence of the trap, e.g. to remove the shotgun and the string. This is very risky, though, since the police tend to take strong notice of the person who discovers the body, especially if he has any real connection to the victim.
This is a solvable problem, though. One approach to not having to be the first on the scene was done in the Sherlock Holmes story The Problem of Thor Bridge, where a simple machine hides the murder weapon. This approach has the downside of working best for disguising suicide, so it’s only available to a fairly small number of murderers.
Another solution to the problem of not having to be the first on the scene can be found in a Dr. Thorndyke story: the construction of a highly atypical weapon. In the story I’m thinking of, somebody fixed up a chassepot (a french rifle from the 1860s) to shoot a small dagger. The murderer then shot his victim from across the street. When the police looked for a man who entered the building to stab the victim—since knives or normally close-quarters weapons—various people in the building could swear that no one had entered the building since before the actual murderer was last seen in public, giving him a cast-iron alibi. This works, though its solution could easily be too technical to be widely enjoyed. The other problem with this kind of solution is that the murderer must either be very lucky and trust to his extreme luck, or else he’ll have to spend a lot of time, in private, perfecting his weapon for it to be reliable enough to be accurate at twenty or thirty yards. Accurately launching projectiles is simply not easy. If the first approach is taken, the story will lack plausibility. If the second is taken, the murderer will need access to a lot of private space for a decent amount of time, meaning he must have a fair amount of resources at his disposal. This reduces his possible motives for murder, since it can’t simply be money (it could still be money in a complex way) and whatever the motive, it must be a very long-lived one for him, not only to go to so much trouble, but to consider murder a viable solution to his problems for so long a period of time.
Of course, if all this seems too complicated to the murderer, a trap which is undisguised can be paired with framing someone else for setting the trap.
I suppose I should mention the other possibility, which is to attempt to hide the trap. This is viable so long as the trap causes death in a way that can look like something else. An example of this would be a trap that hits someone on the head at the top of the stairs, causing him to fall down the stairs. The blow to the head could easily look, post-mortem, like an injury sustained during the fall. The murderer will need to construct the trap very carefully to not be obvious, at least for a time. It’s a great risk to permanently leave the trap in place, but if it can pass without notice for a few days, that would give the murderer an opportunity to retrieve the incriminating bits later, after attention has faded from the murder scene. (Alternatively, the trap can be made with biodegradable pieces and put someplace that water or wind will eliminate the evidence.) This last part can be fun because the bits that don’t quickly pass away can catch the eye of the detective while looking like not much of anything to people with less imagination.
Considering it all, I think that, for all their difficulties, traps are still workable in a modern mystery. A fair amount of care will need to go into the construction of the murderer who employs a trap. It can easily seem unjustified. This is, to some degree, a result of murder mysteries being primarily novels rather than short stories; in short stories you can leave enough of the character up to the imagination of the reader that he can simply trust that the character’s backstory makes sense for doing murder with great self-control and resourcefulness. (This last part can be ameliorated somewhat by having the murderer copying something he read about rather than coming up with the idea himself.) Novels require greater consistency in their characters since there is more of the character in a novel than in a short story. Still, I think it can be done.
If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.
(This is often rendered a little more euphonically in English as “man would have invented him” or “man would have invented him anyway.”)
This is one of those statements which is often quoted as if it is profound, and not merely profoundly stupid. To show why, I will give a parallel”
If the Sun did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.
You see, if there was no sun, some explanation would be necessary for why there is light during the day, why you can get sunburned during the day but not the night, and as our understanding of astronomy increased, why the planets orbit around a central point as if there was some enormous mass there.
Of course, if the village atheist walked by he’d remark that if the Sun didn’t exist there wouldn’t be light during the day, you wouldn’t be able to get sunburned during the day rather than the night, the planets wouldn’t orbit around a central mass, and if he was especially clever, we wouldn’t even be here to “invent” the sun to explain these things that wouldn’t need an explanation because they wouldn’t happen.
And, if this hypothetical village atheist came by, he wouldn’t realize that he’s merely stated the point. Village atheists are strange people.
(He’s probably reply, “but I can see the Sun” and wouldn’t understand at all if you explained that this is why you chose that analogy, because in general they don’t understand analogies since analogies rely on the ability to apply logic. He will also completely misunderstand if you point out that he believes in the gravity of the Sun despite not being able to see (touch, taste, feel, etc) gravity. It would be utterly lost on him if you pointed out that you can’t actually see the Sun, you can only see the light coming from the Sun, and infer the Sun that produces this light.)
A problem that has come up recently in movies that are sequels to beloved movies, but also in more long-running books, is the problem of how to write the heroes now that they’re older and have already gone through a character arc. The standard Hollywood approach is to just reset the character so they can go through the same arc again, since (approximately) the only thing Hollywood writers know how to write is the coming-of-age story which is sometimes called the Hero’s Journey, loosely modeled after Joseph Campbell. This sort of mistake is not limited to Hollywood writers, though.
The problem that all of these writers have is that they don’t understand that human beings have life stages. (As an aside, this is also why they tend toward stupid political philosophies that would work great if everyone was born, lived, and died in their twenties.) The Hero’s Journey as it is usually described is by no means a universal story for heroes, but it is an archetypal story in that it is (very approximately) the adolescent maturation process. This is why the call to adventure has supernatural aid to overcome threshold guardians and find a mentor; people must be called to adulthood by someone other than their parents, who erect a barrier (a minor barrier, if they’re doing it right) to ensure that the child only starts when they’re ready. Once they cross this, they must then find a figure who can teach them how to be an adult (using the preparation which their parents gave them). The descent to the underworld/death & rebirth is something everyone does when they are finally acting like an adult and try and fail and pick themselves up and learn to deal with real failure. Etc.
All of this is proper to the maturation process of an adolescent. That is where it stops, though, because the point of it is that at the end of it the adolescent is now an adult. This makes any attempt to do this with an older hero fundamentally wrong. (The desire to do this also explains why so many older heroes are portrayed as broken and dispirited old men; it’s putting them in the position to go on this kind of maturation process again.)
This is not to say that an older hero can’t learn and improve. They can. What they learn and improve at are things appropriate to what they already know. There are several possible areas for this, but they all involve a focus on others. The short version is that an older hero can learn to be a leader, a mentor, or a parent. He is someone who has learned to achieve what he sets out to do; now he must pass this on and help other people become people who can achieve things worth achieving.
In all of these variations of passing on what one has learned there are two key features to development as a teacher. The first is what would properly be called condescension, from its etymological root of “coming down to be with”. That is, he must learn how little an inexperienced person knows. You can view this in high theological terms of being an image of God taking the form of a slave, if you like, but even if you don’t, it is a truism of teachers that they must learn to (imaginatively) put themselves in the position of someone who is ignorant. That is, to teach someone, they need to be able to squint and see the subject they have mastered only dimly, as through a mirror, darkly. That is, they need to be able to imagine being someone who knows so little that he needs to be taught, while still remembering what he knows about the subject so he can teach it. In some metaphorical sense, if he is to save his pupil from ignorance, he must unite two natures in one person: the lower nature able to reach the pupil, the higher nature able to lift him up.
The second key feature in a master becoming a teacher is that he must love his student. I mean love in the sense of ἀγάπη (agape; Latin: charitas)—willing the good of the other for his sake. Condescension is a challenge of skill that the master faces; loving is what makes him vulnerable, and thus interesting in the story. Loving his student is also what will make the relationship between master and student complex. Since the master wills the good of his student for his student’s sake, this necessarily means that his actions are beyond the student’s understanding. It is exactly his mastery of the thing he’s teaching which means that he can see goods his student cannot see, and so his actions must be mysterious to the student. This creates work for both sides; the master must win the trust of the student while the student must have faith in his teacher. The student must act in faith because his teacher must do some teaching as well as winning of his trust. (I’m using “faith” in the ordinary sense, that is, believing what one knows to be true when the evidence for it is no longer present.) If all the teacher ever did was win the pupil’s trust, the pupil wouldn’t learn anything†.
As I alluded to above, all of this holds whether the older hero is a leader, a mentor, or a parent. The exact responsibilities of each will vary, but all of them have these two overarching characteristics that will form the main points of interest in the story. A parent changing diapers is not interesting; neither is a mentor setting up the targets before the student practices aiming and neither is a leader doing paperwork so that everyone clearly knows what his orders are. Getting his child to be on time may well be the greatest challenge a parent faces, just as completing his paperwork done may be the lion’s share of labor for a leader. None the less, they are not interesting, and they are not interesting because they are easy for a human being to remember. It is the truths that we have difficulty holding onto that we enjoy being reminded of.
This, then, is how older heroes should be written. It is far more difficult to write than it is to write a coming-of-age story, for the simple reason that it is far more difficult to be a good teacher than it is to come of age. It’s not impossible, however, and if you want to write older characters well, it’s the only option‡. All of the other options consist of writing characters who never grew up. They’re not interesting, they’re just sad. And people don’t really want flawed characters.
†This, incidentally, is what makes parts of The Karate Kid so great. Is doing household chores actually a good way to learn how to fight? Of course not. But it is symbolically perfect. Daniel does things whose relationship to his goals are completely unintelligible to him—except for seeming to be selfishness on the part of his teacher—and it is only through acting in faith and patience that he receives the benefit of Mr. Miagi’s knowledge. It would have been far more realistic had Mr. Miagi made Daniel strong through having him lift and carry heavy things which Daniel didn’t see the point in, but it would not have been nearly as symbolically intelligible. And The Karate Kid was a movie, not an instructional manual. The job of movies is to teach big truths in a short time, not to teach a large number of small truths in a long time. If you want to know how to actually get good at fighting, you’ll need to hire a teacher and spend years.
‡ I am assuming that the character is too old to still be a hero in the more direct sense. If that is not the case and he can still best opponents in direct combat—or whatever version of that is appropriate to the kind of hero he is—then it is also quite viable to tell the simple story of one of his adventures. Indeed, this can be quite fun, especially with people assuming he can’t do what he is perfectly capable of doing. An excellent example of this is the Miss Marple stories. People assume, because of her age, that Miss Marple has no idea what’s going on. In reality her wits are still sharp and she’s a better detective than any of the younger people around her, and her constant besting of them is quite amusing. The same thing could easily work for a wizard who only comes out of retirement when younger mages can’t get the job done. You can probably stretch this for a sword master, but only up to a point. I would trust a fifty year old fencing master to carve up a thirty year old swordsman, and I don’t think it’s stretching credibility too much for an especially talented sixty year old master of the blade who has kept in practice to beat a thirty year old mere proficient. I think this begins to lose credibility once the old hero is pushing seventy. That said, it is widely reported that Jack Dempsey, at the age of 74, knocked down two young guys who tried to mug him as he was getting into a cab, so you never know.
I was recently watching some commentary on movies in which someone trotted out the complaint that none of the main characters in poorly written movies are flawed, and therefore they are boring. If I recall correctly, Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy was an example. I know I’ve heard this complaint many times about the main characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too. I’ve heard it about many boring movies and TV shows, and it’s wrong.
The first and most illustrative problem with this critique, though not the greatest problem, is that all of the characters invoked are flawed. On first meeting Finn, Rey chases him rather than trying to talk to him, hits him with a staff rather than using the minimal amount of force necessary to get him to stop fleeing, and consents to BB-8 electrically torturing Finn in order to get him to talk when he hadn’t even refused to talk. The TNG cast would be too detailed to go into, so just to use Picard as an example, the man was extraordinarily arrogant, treating a vastly superior being (Q) as a mere annoyance and trying to bully him into doing what Picard wanted. (This directly led to Q introducing Star Fleet to the Borg, and in consequence getting an extraordinary number of people killed when the Borg came to invade.)
These are not flawless characters. They’re deeply flawed characters.
What they are is uninvolved characters.
They don’t care about anything, they just do whatever is necessary in order to move the plot forward. This is to say, they are not vulnerable. Rey is a boring character because nothing is at stake for her. She will do whatever the plot requires because she’s just a puppet dancing on the writer’s strings. Picard and crew were, likewise, uninvolved, acting only for the sake of moving the plot along.
Oddly, but very interestingly, the one exception to that in TNG which I can think of is Lt. Commander Data. He did, occasionally, want things. The two examples which come to mind are The Ensigns of Command in which Data struggled to figure out how to convince primitive settlers to abandon an outpost before it was wiped out by advanced aliens in a few days, and Deja Q, where Q becomes human and Data tries to teach him how to exist as a human based on what Data has learned so far. These examples are important precisely because they are not vulnerabilities within Data, but in his love for others. (I use love, here, in the sense of the Greek ἀγάπη (agape)—willing the good of the other for his sake.) Data is not vulnerable because he will, personally, be diminished if he does not achieve his goals. He is vulnerable because the object of his love may be diminished if he does not succeed. This is also why Data is far and away the most interesting character on all of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
What was true in TNG is true elsewhere. Where you find boring characters, you don’t find flawless characters. If nothing else, writers who can’t write interesting characters sure as hell can’t write perfect ones. No, where you find boring characters, you find invulnerable characters. They are invulnerable because there is nothing that they want which they are not sure of getting. Mostly, all they want is to do whatever it is the writer needs them to do in order to move the plot forward, though there are some variants. For example, some characters only want whatever is necessary in order to set up the current joke.
In short, boring characters are boring because they are not, properly speaking, characters. They are lifeless puppets, a mere locus of dialog with a convenient label. They are boring because they have no will of their own. There is no breath of life in them. But it is important not to mistake this; having a will of one’s own does not mean being selfish. Indeed, the most interesting characters are those who love—who will the good of those who can receive good from them. They are the most interesting because they have the most at stake. Fools who are being selfish are not nearly so interesting because—painting with a broad brush—they would usually be better off if they don’t get what they want.
So can we please stop with this nonsense about flawed characters? We don’t want flawed characters. We want vulnerable characters.
In this video I discuss the philosophical problem that all things are temporary and how one can usefully classify all philosophical systems and religions based on their answer to this philosophical problem.
I recently watched the David Suchet version of the Poirot story, The Clocks, and was reminded of a staple of golden-age† detective fiction: the overseas fortune as motive for murder. In some ways it’s not that different from any other fortune as a motive for murder, but it does have a few special features that I think are worth considering.
One of the great things about an overseas fortune that some character inherits is how mysterious the thing intrinsically is. The family structure and how people fit into it is something no one is very likely to know. This is a bit more true in golden age detective fiction when people in different countries rarely visited each other unless they were rich, long distance phone calls were either non-existent or prohibitively expensive (depending on exactly what year we’re talking about) and camera portraiture was was rare and special. Yet it is still true even in our age. For example, I have various (second, third, etc) cousins in Greece, one of whom I’ve even corresponded with on occasion and even seen pictures of on Facebook (years ago, before I stopped using it), but I could be fooled by nearly any Greek of the correct sex and age if they were to come over here. How much more true this is of my cousins I’ve never spoken to or seen pictures of!
The inheritance of overseas fortunes also, of necessity, involves execution of the will by people who only need to be fooled for a short time. Frequently this is done because the rich decedent had no (surviving) issue and so the will must be executed by lawyers as a final act for their client. This works well, but even if some cousin or nephew or some such were made executor of the will, they would have had little enough contact before the connection (the recently deceased relative) died, so they are likely to have even less afterwards. The decease of their relative and the naming of them as executor has placed a burden on them which has no compensatory convenience, so they will likely want to get it over with as quickly as possible. Common honesty will make them want some evidence that the person to whom they are giving the money is the correct person, but this is easily dealt with by an author since, after all, it doesn’t really make any difference to the executor exactly where the money which isn’t going to them goes.
This discussion of the execution of wills makes me wonder, now, what the mechanism of enforcement is for the executor. In the normal case, I believe that the principal beneficiary tends to be named the executor, and people who receive some portion can achieve enforcement through suing the executor. This does not really apply to the case of an overseas fortune, especially to someone who has no idea that they stand to inherit anything. The executor would take possession of the money or property or what-have-you, and there would not really be anyone who would know to object. Wills are relatively private things, after all. I need to research this further, but I suspect that there is some fertile ground for finding a motive for murder that consists of the executor of a will not bothering to find the overseas inheritor, and then coming across them and murdering them in order to avoid having to give up the inheritance (especially if a large portion of it that they could not repay is already gone).
There is another advantage which golden age mysteries had, which is the simplification of the laws of inheritance which has in some places happened after the golden age has limited the pool of suspects. I actually must confess that I have no idea how intestate inheritance works in the United States; the advice I’ve generally heard is that if you have anything to leave people, one should draw up a will. Neither, come to think of it, do I know how intestate inheritance works in the present-day United Kingdom. I do, however, know that in England the Administration of Estates Act of 1925 directed that aside from a few relatively close classes of relatives, the estate of someone who died intestate would go to the Crown (this formed a major plot point of the novel Unnatural Death). Still, it’s easy enough, I should think, to have some rich person write in their will that failing the main intention, all of their money should go to their closest living relative, and provide some funds for the finding of this relative.
The most obvious way to produce a motive for murder with overseas inheritance is for someone to pretend to be the inheritor; they will have a fairly good motive for killing anyone who would recognize the deceit. The other fairly obvious motive this can produce is a more distance relative whose relationship is unknown killing a closer relative, preferably before the knowledge of the inheritance comes in (potentially when the rich overseas relative is in his last months or on his death bed, rather than after his death). Something that can combine the two is killing the actual inheritor in order to pretend to be the person who will inherit. (This was done in Peril at End House, where the will only specified the inheritor by first name, and someone of the same first name killed the actual inheritor in order to pretend that she was the person named in the will. With the relationship having been kept secret, there was no one to say otherwise.)
Less obvious, but still viable, is a person committing murder in order to clear the way to marry the person who will inherit a fortune before it is known that they will. People are less on their guard against gold diggers when they believe they don’t have any gold.
If you’re willing to have the murderer be mistaken and kill without gain under the misapprehension that they would gain, then the overseas fortune is fertile ground for a thing. A person who believes a nearer relative to already be dead might kill the only remaining closer relative, only to be surprised that it was for nothing when the closer relative shows up alive. This can be great at disguising the motive since the person’s potential for inheritance will have been forgotten about, especially if all of this happened before the rich person actually died.
Speaking of the long-lost relative who is supposed to be dead, overseas fortunes are also great for this since if the family is already spread over two countries, spreading them over three or four is no great stretch of the imagination. Golden age mysteries also benefited from being written around the height of the British Empire, when it would be normal for people to go off to dangerous places to seek fortunes and never be heard from again, presumably dead. Still, this sort of thing is not too hard to do in modern times, especially if one only needs family members to think a relative dead and not to have an actual death certificate.
This possibility could also go in the interesting direction of a person lying and saying that a nearer relative died years ago in another country when they hadn’t, only for the nearer relative to turn up years later. There certainly would be motive to kill this nearer relative when they show up, before anyone can find out that the wrong person inherited. Years later, few people would think of a connection between the money and the dead man.
The details of finance are boring to most people, which is a huge boon to murder mystery writers.
† I should explain that I include The Clocks as a golden-age story despite it being published in 1963 both because I think we can grandmother Agatha Christie’s later stories into the golden age and also because the Davis Suchet version re-set the story into the 1930s and it worked very well.
It is surprisingly hard to get children to believe that the ice cream rhyme is:
I speak softly. You speak softly. We all speak softly For ice cream.
If you are ever inclined to believe the rumors that children are gullible or trusting, just try to get them to believe that this is the rhyme. You’ll soon discover that they can make donkeys seem tractable and compliant by comparison.
A Mighty Wind, directed by Christopher Guest and written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, is an interesting movie. Generally described as a “mockumentary” and in some days a direct descendant of This is Spin̈al Tap, it’s a fun and light-hearted movie which lovingly pokes fun at folk music.
I say lovingly because, while many of the songs are intentionally bad, they’re bad primarily in an over-the-top way and include a lot of good elements that make them fun. And there are actually some genuinely good songs, too. (When You’re Next To Me being my favorite.)
If you haven’t seen it, the basic plot is that in tribute to the death of a man who had been a major producer of folk music back in the day, his children decide to put on a tribute concert featuring three of the major bands which he had produced. Those three bands are The Folksmen, The Main Street Singers, and Mitch & Mickey. The Main Street Singers are made up of nine people and aren’t available anymore, but there is a group called The New Main Street Singers which currently plays (primarily on cruises and similar small venues) and is only too willing to take the place of their predecessors. The Folksmen happily re-form, not having seen each other in decades, but have little trouble getting back together. And then there’s Mitch & Mickey, whose relationship became explosive and eventually separated acrimoniously. Somehow they are talked into re-forming for the performance, and do. (Mitch & Mickey have the best songs of the three groups, btw.)
The concert goes off, and is fun, though there are all sorts of back-stage issues which are the material for a lot of gags. This culminates in all three groups, after the main performance is over, taking the stage and singing what is obviously an old standard, A Mighty Wind.
The people and groups are not simple copies of any real folk singers, though you can certainly see elements of this or that group in them. For example, Mitch & Mickey certainly have some elements of Simon & Garfunkel, for example, but they’re also very much their own thing, both in having had a romantic past and also in singing mostly in counterpoint rather than in harmony.
The songs, also, though strongly representative of their genres, are not merely versions of some other songs. For example, the song A Mighty Wind seems to occupy the space of Blowin’ In the Wind, but it’s a very different sort of song. While Blowin’ In the Wind was a lament, if sometimes sung as a partially hopeful lament, A Mighty Wind is triumphant.
It is interesting how much the movie is about one brief, unsustainable moment. All performances are temporary, of course, but this one is even more temporary since it can never be again: it is a tribute to a past which has gone. The musicians work hard for it—most of them even care deeply about it, because these sorts of moments were what their lives were once about and they’re desperate for one last taste of that feeling. And yet, somewhat ironically, it is all blowing in the wind.
That the world is temporary is in many ways the primary philosophical problem faced by humanity. If everything is temporary, how can anything be real? There are only a few solutions to that question, and the ones that answer it positively generally look like either Platonism, Christianity, or Hinduism. However, even people who do not know the answer to the question can experience the fact that things are real, even if it is a mystery how they are real in spite of their temporary nature. This is what the climax of A Might Wind is about. Within the pretend world of the movie, the people are genuinely happy for a few moments, even if they soon won’t be, again, and in spite of all rational calculation, that happiness is real.
(I probably don’t need to add this, but it would be a disaster for any of the people involved to try to cling to that reality as the source of reality; to try to live in it or for it. This is the sort of mistake a great many people make. If one is wandering in the desert and finds a canteen filled with water it is an amazing gift to be given, but if one then sets up camp and tries to live off of the canteen forever, one will surely die, and quickly.)
A type of evidence which came up, not infrequently, in murder mysteries from the golden age of detective fiction was the identification of typed notes to the typewriter they came from. Sometimes this was unimportant and often it was misleading, but the evidence was always strong and, moreover, was the sort of evidence which could link things that would have been hard, otherwise, to link. The advent of printers (which could not be identified in this way) was a real blow to detective stories.
That said, I do not know how uniquely identifiable typewriters actually were. It was stated in books from more than one author that each typewriter’s writing was as unique as a fingerprint, and though on one level it makes sense, it does also seem a bit implausible. On the other hand, manufacturing standards were not as strict and the output not as uniform in the early 1900s as they are today. It is plausible that there was a fair amount of variety in the exact shape of the letters, and with fifty two of them (including capitals) and ten numbers, there was a reasonable scope for individual variation.
That said, manufacturing standards weren’t abysmal, and there were an awful lot of typewriters sold. This may be why authors would sometimes give typewriters some more uniquely identifying characteristics, such as a character consistently out of alignment or another which was chipped. Chips, like scars, are fairly unique.
Be that as it may, the thing was certainly accepted in detective stories from the golden age and served their authors well. It could be very handy indeed to find out that a document could not have existed before a certain date because that’s when the typewriter which wrote it was purchased; it could be even more handy to find out that a threatening note was typed on the machine in a particular office to which—in theory—only a few people had access. It’s much harder to do that, these days.
Having said that, it does just occur to me that printers do occasionally leave unique imperfections in the documents that they print. It’s not common, but sometimes when they are failing they will start leaving streaks of various kinds that look the same on every page. I doubt I’d be likely to use this in any of my stories, though, since it’s far more obvious to the person writing the incriminating note than the minor variations used to identify typewriters. Still, it’s worth keeping in one’s back pocket.
If you’ve never seen the movie Clue (based on the board game of the same name), stop reading this post and go watch it. It’s a great comedy and a beautiful visual portrayal of a classic murder mystery setting.
Just as in the board game, there are six guests at a dinner party: Mr. Green, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, and Mrs. White. Before long, Mr. Body is killed and the guests need to figure out who killed him.
While that’s enough for a board game, the movie does have a bit more setup and that’s what I’d like to discuss.
The movie is set in New England in 1954, and introduces several new characters. There is Wadsworth the butler, Yvette the maid, a cook, a motorist, a policeman, and a singing telegram girl. All of these except for Wadsworth eventually end up murdered as well.
While the board game doesn’t need to specify why the dinner party is happening or how well the guests know each other, the movie can’t be so threadbare. The guests are all strangers to each other and were invited to the dinner party because they were all being blackmailed by Mr. Body.
This setup solves several problems caused by the decision to make the guests strangers to each other. The first is why they’re all here; it is very rare to give a dinner party to complete strangers. True, it is also not the most common for everyone at a dinner party to know each other, but the reverse is even more unusual. Furthermore, if all of the people are strangers they will probably have some connection such as all being in the same profession, or all physicists working on the same problem, or something like that.
The other problem it solves brought up by everyone being strangers is that it provides a motive for murder. Strangers do not, as a rule, have a reason for murdering each other. Blackmail victims have, almost by definition, a compelling reason for murder.
The movie does not manage to incorporate the element of the board game of determining the room and murder weapon. While the former could be a bit defensible, so long as you have the body it would be almost impossible to not be able to tell whether someone was shot, stabbed, strangled, or hit by a blunt instrument. (It could be possible to be in some doubt as to whether the blunt instrument was a wrench, a candlestick, or a lead pipe.) The location of the murder is a bit more workable as an unknown, though even that requires a fair amount of creativity. Unfortunately, the movie setup, which keeps all of the suspects together until Mr. Body is found (definitely) dead, doesn’t really permit this ambiguity. A setup in which the guests mingled in different rooms and moved about would have lent itself far better to making it a question of in which room Mr. Body was killed.
All this taken into account, Clue did an admirable job of making a go of a premise that was designed for a board game. It’s silly, of course, but it leans into this silliness to make a movie which is a great deal of fun, while putting in a decent amount of effort to come as close as possible to taking its premise seriously. It has plot holes, to be sure, but they’re not gaping plot holes. And that’s a lot better than most attempts at this movie would have come.
This weekend I took part in my first Weightlifting competition. More commonly known as “Olympic Weightlifting,” it’s the sport which is comprised of the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. I made all six of my attempts, below are my best snatch, then clean-and-jerk:
The obvious question to ask is how did I do, and that’s a rather interesting question because there are so many different ways of taking it.
One question to ask is how I did relative to other people, but even that requires clarification. How did I do relative to other people in my weight class? I was in the 109kg weight class (it’s from 102-109), and I totaled more than 100kg behind the next 109 and less than half of what the top 109 lifted. That said, I’ve only been doing Olympic Weightlifting for about two months while they’ve almost certainly been doing it quite a bit longer, so that’s not a very interesting comparison.
I lifted more than the other people in my session (the sessions are broken up by entry total, the session I was in being the one for people with small totals), but that mostly means that I lifted more than some children and a 64 year old man who weighed about three fourths of what I did.
How did I do for someone my size and age who has only been Olympic Weightlifting for two months? I don’t know. I haven’t seen any statistics on weightlifters in the 109kg, 40-45 age group who have only been lifting for two months. And I’ve done powerlifting for years, so I started with a decent (but not amazing) strength base. Are there any statistics for males in my exact situation, or even one similar? Who knows? Who cares?
The problem with trying to answer this question is that when you really dig into it, it either doesn’t matter, or matters but is known to God alone. (That latter one being the moral question of did I apply myself appropriately, given the gifts I have and the relative importance of this task compared to other tasks I’ve been given.)
Some people deal with this issue by saying that in a weightlifting meet like this, when you’re not one of the people who (speaking realistically) might win the cash prize1, you are just competing against yourself. In which case I established a baseline, which is all that I could have done. So, on this metric, I did as well as I could have.
That doesn’t seem quite right to me, though.
It does seem to me that those of us who were never going to win the cash prize were still competing, but not against other people or ourselves. The feeling I got at the meet was that we were all on the same team competing against the weights. When a lifter made a lift, he scored a victory against our common foe.
We didn’t merely cheer for each other and try to encourage each other; that might be mere good sportsmanship. When someone made an attempt, we knew what he was going through and it felt good when he made it, and bad when he missed. The weights he is struggling against are the same weights we struggled against, or would soon struggle against.
We were competing, but it was against the weights. Our opponents were not flesh and blood, but rubber and steel.
There actually was a cash prize in this meet, btw, computed on the basis of Sinclair Score, which is the weightlifting equivalent of the Wilks Coefficient.
Something that’s been on my mind for a while since my YouTube channel was found by a few atheist channels for low-intelligence atheists is how it’s possible for people to be as stupid as many of the commenters who showed up are. I don’t mean low-intelligence. Most of them aren’t very bright, but I’ve met plenty of people who aren’t very bright who aren’t stupid. What I mean by stupid is something like, aggressively unable to understand anything. And I don’t mean that they’re stupid because they’ve failed to see that I’m correct—that just makes them wrong—I mean that they don’t even have any idea what I or anyone else is saying. And they’re aggressive about how much they don’t understand it. And I don’t just mean on the subject of contention—I’ve run into idiots who don’t understand what you mean when you say that the sky is blue.
This perplexes me. How is it possible for a human being to get into this condition?
One possibility, of course, is that they’re just trolling me. On the internet where we only have text and not the clues of facial expression, etc.—which are much harder to fake consistently—it’s much easier to troll people. And where the interactions are one-offs, I’m pretty willing to believe that they’re just trolls. But I’ve also had consistent interactions with people over time where this seems less plausible.
In some cases it seems like they’ve imprinted on the Christopher Hitchens debates, where they want someone to try to prove something to them so they can feel smart saying variations of, “I don’t believe you.” It’s curious to watch how often these people don’t even know what they’re saying when they imitate the atheist-Christian debates that they’ve watched. For example, they’ve imprinted on the idea that the atheist position is one of pure negation (the unthinking man’s version of Anthony Flew’s The Presumption of Atheism), and so they always deny that they have made any claims, even right after they’ve made claims. They do this so often it is obvious that they don’t know what a claim is.
I think it’s related that they are also, generally, raging narcissists. They will intrude into discussions of the nature of reality to tell you all about themselves, then demand that you do things for them such as try to convince them of things even when you clearly state you don’t care what they believe.
It’s very strange because their use of language—which is intrinsically rational; it’s no accident that logos meant both “word” and “rationality” and “argument”—makes them seem rational even when everything they say is irrational.
One thing which comes to mind is that perhaps they’re some sort of weird birth defect that never received a human soul; not really human but merely some form of highly clever simian. While theoretically not impossible, this is a dangerous idea and probably should be considered last.
Another possibility is that they are human, but very damaged by anger. Anger is well known for making it difficult for people to think and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that these idiots always seem angry. This isn’t really a better possibility, though, because it does not leave open any greater possibility for helping them than if they’re merely a clever simian. People can choose to be less than human; that is one of the meanings of Hell. You can’t make a person think, if he wills to not think. So what can we do?
I suppose that this is one of those cases where there is nothing to do but be patient and pray. Perhaps, for the people who seem this way, helping them is given to someone else and not to me, and all I can do is pray to strengthen the person to whom helping them has been given.
Dorothy L. Sayers, with her famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is best known for writing literary detective novels, while Agatha Christie is known for writing clever detective novels. Until we come to Gaudy Night, however, Dorothy L. Sayers writing more literary than clever novels was not really for lack of trying. As she said in her chapter of Titles To Fame:
When in a light-hearted manner I set out, fifteen years ago, to write the forst “lord Peter” book, it was with the avowed intention of producing something “less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel.” Re-reading Whose Body? at this distance of time I observe, with regret, that it is conventional to the last degree…
Whose Body? was conventional not merely in the form of its dialog and the actions of its hero—the best example that comes to mind is that Lord Peter took measurements and examined all manner of things carefully with a magnifying glass. Whose Body? was also conventional in that the mystery had, at its heart, a clever twist. As I alluded to before, she would keep this up for most of the Lord Peter novels until she got to Gaudy Night. The thing I find curious is that, unlike Agatha Christie, the twists mostly wouldn’t have worked. (If it’s not obvious, spoilers will follow.)
Whose Body? Is the main exception to the twists not actually working, because I think it would have worked. A surgeon with access to cadavers for dissection could probably have made the switch and done the relevant dissection work well enough to get the head to look like it fit on the wrong body.
In Unnatural Death, the murder weapon—injecting air into the veins—would not be much of a problem at all unless the syringe was comically large. One estimate I saw was that it would need to be the size of a bicycle pump. Since the victim was drugged at the time of the injection, this is not an entirely insurmountable problem as the murderer had time to pump air in with many strokes, but that would be exceedingly difficult to do without making the injection site obvious, which it needed to not be.
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club put the twist in the domain of human relations rather than in the method of murder itself, which meant that the murder would have worked. That said, I am dubious that forensic science in 1928 could measure the amount of digitalis in a person’s blood post-mortem, especially since according to Wikipedia digitalis was first isolated in 1930.
Strong Poison relied on the murderer being able to develop a tolerance to lethal doses of arsenic and thus to give himself a lethal dose at the same time as his victim, by poisoning a shared meal. While this was believed to be possible in the 1920s and 1930s, it turns out to not be possible at all. (The evidence that had been used at the time was the “arsenic eaters” who would eat large lumps of arsenic. It turns out that the thing that saved them was not tolerance but rather the lack of bio-availability of arsenic eaten in lump form. While they were consuming large doses of arsenic, they were also excreting virtually all of it in their solid waste. This does not apply to arsenic dissolved into liquid and put in an omelette, which would have been as fatal to them as to anyone else.)
The Five Red Herrings has as its twist the forging of a railway ticket which, in some strange way, provided an alibi. This one might work out, for all I know; it depends upon the details of the working of the Scottish railway system in 1929 or 1930, which is a thing I doubt is knowable with certainty in the year of our Lord 2023. I couldn’t stand anything about this book, and I still don’t know how I feel about the twist ending making the unbearable time-tables pointless. That said, “he forged the railway ticket” isn’t really a clever twist. Anyone could do it. It’s just in the category of “This obvious thing was surprising because I thought it was against the rules.”
Have His Carcase is a brilliant book and quite possibly my third favorite Lord Peter novel (after Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon.) The twists and turns are done extremely well, with evidence of suicide and evidence of murder alternating masterfully. The solution of hemophilia is both not-obvious and well-laid. The problem, though, is that I don’t think that blood behaves the way that it was described in the book. Granted, I’ve never slashed a healthy man’s throat on a hot rock in the sun but I’ve butchered deer and not cleaned up until the next day and the blood looked liquid enough. Even if human blood behaves differently, the timing doesn’t work out. Harriet took about twenty minutes to take pictures and collect things from the body such as a shoe. It was stated that for the blood to be in the condition described the man could have been killed ten minutes before at the outside. Thus either Harriet should have noticed the blood clotting as expected before she left twenty minutes after finding the body, or else blood doesn’t actually clot that way, or else Harriet mistook what clotted blood looked like, or else something was wrong with the blood. Whichever alternative you prefer, the characters should really have known that the timing was not as tight as they thought. That said, it was great to watch the characters deal with the problem of contradictory evidence and persevere.
Murder Must Advertise doesn’t really have a twist, so it’s an exception to the rule. It does have a massive drug-gang and action which is almost more in the realm of the spy-thriller than the detective story, which I suspect take the place of the twist. That said, using a slingshot to hit someone in the head with a stone scarab in order to knock them unconscious so they die by falling down the stairs is… an uncertain way to commit murder. It could certainly work—blows to the head can be surprisingly fatal. That said, if I wanted to commit murder, hitting a moving target in the head with an irregularly shaped rock using someone else’s slingshot would not be high on my list of methods. It would be too easy to miss the vital few square inches and then there would be a lot of explaining to do.
The Nine Tailors is, perhaps, my second-least favorite of the Lord Peter stories, so I’m probably not the best person to do it justice. That said, the twist in it was that the death was accidental, not intentional. The victim had been left tied-up in a belltower and couldn’t be retreived before an hours-long bellringing event and the loud noise killed him. The problem is that a bell, even close by, isn’t nearly loud enough to kill. To rupture the eardrums, maybe. To cause long-term hearing loss, sure. But to kill with sound requires sound energy approximately on par with explosions—or being way too close to a jet engine. (Sounds with this enormous amount of energy cause air embolisms in the lungs; it does not kill through the ears.)
Then we come to Gaudy Night, which had no twist at all, and I think was also the greatest of the Lord Peter novels. It’s not perfect, but it is a masterpiece.
In fairness, I should mention that Busman’s Honeymoon did have a twist, or at least a very clever trap used to commit the murder. While it would have worked to kill the victim, I am a bit dubious that it could have been set up quite as described without the victim noticing, despite his age and it being dark. This is a minor quibble, though, since the basic premise was sound, and it would not have been too hard to have made the trap less obtrusive.
I don’t really know what to make of all of this, other than the clever mystery seems to have been been very much in the water during the golden age, so much so that even writers who set out to not write them still ended up including elements of them. I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the clever mystery, either—Agatha Christie did them brilliantly. To some degree I’m just “thinking out loud” as I find it curious that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote them even though it was not really her thing.
I don’t know why there are so many people who think that suggesting that it would somehow be clever if Murder, She Wrote ended by revealing that Jessica actually killed all of the people and framed all of the people who supposedly did it in each episode. Not only is this an obvious joke, it would be a truly terrible ending.
It is a comparatively minor objection, but this would require contradicting many of the episodes; it’s probably more than half in which the murderer confesses in the end. I suppose you could get around that by making it a science fiction show and giving Jessica mind control powers.
Which brings me to the real problem with this: it’s completely wrong for the genre. If the writers did this, it would just make Murder, She Wrote a comedy, or perhaps some sort of psychological horror show or something. What it would not be is a mystery show.
In this spirit, I’d like to propose a few similarly terrible final episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Picard wakes up from surgery after being stabbed by the Tuskan Raider Nausicaan. He’s still a young ensign. He goes back to the bar and all of the main cast are patrons or servers. (Guinan is a dance hall girl wearing mostly huge pink feathers.)
Picard wakes up from taking magic mushrooms in a native american ceremony and the rest of the cast are his fellow shamans. All of the dialog is in Navajo, with subtitles.
Instead of the poker game, we then flash to a bunch of kids playing in the back yard of a late 1960s house, with the suggestion that they just watched an episode of the original and TNG has all been them playing pretend. One of the kids is named Beaver. Another is named Dennis.
It is revealed that the entire show was actually the Star Trek fanfic of a prematurely balding teenager who looks kind of like Patrick Stewart, which he just finished reading to a hot girl who then flat-out rejects him the moment he’s done, and he commits suicide by drinking a mixture of crushed glass and wine.
In the final episode, it is revealed that the main cast are all patients in a lunatic asylum in the 1980s, and Q is actually one of the nurses.
We pull back from the final episode to see Lee Harvey Oswald in a chair with one of those things on his face holding his eyes open. It turns out that TNG was actually a torture device people wearing grey robes used to break down his will and make him complacent. We hear him saying, over and over, “I will kill President Kennedy.” This fades to black and Leonard Nemoy walks out and says, “And perhaps this was how the Illuminati killed JFK.”
Aren’t those all brilliant? Wouldn’t it have been so cool if they’d done those instead of what they actually did? Can there be a better way to end a long-running TV show than with a giant out-of-genre F.U. to the fans?
Yes, actually. There can be.
Admittedly, though, this still isn’t as bad as the people who blame superheroes for the actions of supervillains.
I asked a friend to have GPT4 (the successor to chatGPT) write a prompt for itself to write a movie script. Here’s the prompt it came up with:
Craft an engaging and original movie script that revolves around an enigmatic object with mysterious powers. The story should include a diverse and dynamic ensemble of characters, each with their own unique backstory, who must come together to uncover the truth behind the object. The plot should feature unexpected twists and turns, with a focus on character development and emotional depth, while incorporating elements of suspense, action, and heartwarming moments. Please provide a complete script, including character dialogues, scene descriptions, and visual details.
I love how generic this description is. To a great degree that’s what chatGPT/GPT4 specializes in; it’s an engine for generating the most probable text that the people who wrote what it was trained on would say. That is, it is a cliché engine.
I should also note, in fairness, that chatGPT/GPT4 is woefully underpowered to generate a full movie script. Those are usually about 100 pages long (the rule of thumb is 1 minute per page for a competently written script), while chatGPT/GPT4 is limited to 4096 “words” (where “word” is defined a bit weirdly, almost more like “syllable”, though not quite). That said, it’s interesting to take a look at what little it can do.
So, here’s the script generated from the prompt:
Title: The Enigma of the Eon Orb
INT. MUSEUM – NIGHT
A dimly lit room is filled with ancient artifacts. We focus on a particular exhibit: a small, glowing ORB, encased in glass. This is the EON ORB.
Right off the bat, this is not right for a movie script. A movie script describes what the audience sees and hears, it does not give exposition to the reader as if it’s a narrator in a novel. Movie scripts are essentially the blueprints for creating a movie; you can’t do anything with “This is the EON ORB.” You could probably get away with “The camera focuses in on the exhibit with the EON ORB, though it’s only labeled ‘mysterious artifact'” That lets the prop department know which prop to use.
EXT. MUSEUM – NIGHT
Establishing shot of the museum. A heist is taking place; masked THIEVES break in and steal the Eon Orb.
Again, this is not how movie scripts work. In a movie script you have to say things like how many people we see, vaguely what they look like, and it needs to describe in detail what they do. This is more like the prompt you might give to an improv group.
Further, how are we supposed to see that they steal the EON ORB from outside the museum? There is a lot of detail available in HD movies these days, especially if you spring for the 4K version, but showing a heist inside a museum from the outside of the museum is asking a lot even of 4K.
CUT TO:
INT. CIA HEADQUARTERS – DAY
AGENT JAMES PARKER (40s, experienced, determined) is briefed about the theft. He learns about the Eon Orb’s mysterious powers and its ability to manipulate time.
Again, not how movie scripts work.
Also, if people knew about the Eon Orb’s mysterious powers and its ability to manipulate time, why was it just left in a museum, rather than in a securely guarded vault?
PARKER (serious) We need to assemble a team to retrieve this artifact before it falls into the wrong hands.
Who is he talking to? Why does he believe that it has not already fallen into the wrong hands?
CUT TO:
INT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS – DAY
That’s not how movie scripts work! You can’t cut to several different places. Or is this meant to be split-screened like the Ang Lee hulk movie which I never saw but I heard was unwatchable because he show several scenes simultaneously in split-screen?
Parker recruits a diverse group of experts for his team:
This is more like a summary than a script, and barely even that.
DR. OLIVIA MARTINEZ (30s, intelligent, strong-willed), an archaeologist with knowledge about the Eon Orb LENA JONES (late 20s, athletic, tech-savvy), a skilled thief with a troubled past RAYMOND “RAY” SMITH (40s, charismatic, mysterious), a history professor with expertise in ancient artifacts RUBY ZHANG (early 20s, quiet, empathetic), a gifted artist who can recreate any object she sees
OK, the archaeologist with knowledge about the Eon Orb I get. A history professor expertise in ancient artifacts… I guess is defensible. Why is the CIA recruiting a tech-savvy skilled thief with a troubled past? Don’t they have tech-savvy people with thief-like skills but without the troubled past in the CIA already? And what on earth could the point be of recruiting an artist who can recreate any object she sees? Is she supposed to make commemorative figurines to help them remember their adventures once it’s over?
INT. CIA HEADQUARTERS – DAY
The team gathers, and Parker briefs them on the mission.
Yeah, this isn’t how you write a movie script, but it’s also pointless because it’s summarizing one of the few lines of dialog that comes immediately after.
PARKER We have intel that a powerful criminal organization is behind the theft. Our mission is to retrieve the Eon Orb before they discover its true power.
The team agrees to work together, despite their differences.
GPT4 really believes in “tell, don’t show.” That said, why does having different jobs mean that they have to agree to work together “despite their differences”? Also, isn’t that what they did when they were recruited? Were they only recruited to hear the briefing and then they’d decide on what they were committing to?
EXT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS – DAY
The team travels to different parts of the world, following clues and leads. Along the way, they encounter dangerous situations and form strong bonds.
This is impressively generic, even by chatGPT standards. Also, it’s not a movie script. I need a macro for that…
INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE – NIGHT
The team discovers the ORGANIZATION’s hideout. They devise a plan to retrieve the Eon Orb.
The place where they discover the hideout of the ORGANIZATION (what a creative name for a criminal organization!) is outside of an abandoned warehouse? This is also where they devise their plan? They walked up to it planless and only when they were sitting around outside did they devise a plan???
Also, why is the team who is going to infiltrate a hideout in an abandoned warehouse a CIA agent, an archaeologist, a history professor, a thief with a troubled past, and an artist? Remember, these weren’t thrown together by coincidence, they were recruited by the CIA agent. When it comes to sneaking into a criminal organization’s hideout, there’s no one he’d rather have by his side than these people with (possibly aside from the thief) no relevant skills?
INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE – NIGHT
The team infiltrates the hideout in an intense action sequence. They succeed in retrieving the Orb, but they accidentally activate its powers.
CUT TO:
EXT. ANCIENT CITY – DAY
The team is transported back in time to an ancient civilization, where they meet the original GUARDIANS of the Eon Orb. They learn about the Orb’s true purpose: to maintain balance between the past, present, and future.
GUARDIAN You must return the Orb to its rightful place in your time. The balance of the world depends on it.
Wow. What a plot. So the Eon Orb’s purpose is to maintain the balance of past, present, and future. It does this by being in the time where it’s supposed to be. So why does it have a user interface which you can accidentally trigger that sends it to the wrong time? Seriously. The thing’s function is best accomplished by not doing anything with it. Why does it have the ability to allow people to screw that up when literally nothing good can come of it. That would be like putting a self destruct button on a sandbag used for holding floodwaters back. That’s not helpful.
The team faces moral dilemmas and confronts their personal pasts. They grow and learn from their experiences.
Man did this follow the prompt to “feature twists and turns with an emphasis on character development”.
INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE – NIGHT
They return to the present, but are discovered by the Organization. A thrilling chase ensues.
I guess we’re supposed to take the script’s word for it that the chase was thrilling.
EXT. CITY STREETS – NIGHT
The team is cornered, but they use their individual skills to outsmart the Organization and escape.
I really want to know which skill the history professor used to outsmart the Organization and escape. No, scratch that, I want to know which object the soft-spoken artist copied perfectly during a thrilling chase which allowed her to escape.
INT. MUSEUM – NIGHT
The team returns the Eon Orb to its rightful place, restoring balance to the world.
The script never actually mentioned anything bad happening because the Eon Orb was gone, but OK.
EXT. MUSEUM – DAY
The team says their goodbyes, having formed lifelong bonds.
MARTINEZ We’ve come a long way. I’m proud to call you all my friends.
RAY Our paths crossed for a reason. I’ll never forget our journey together.
LENA Who knows? Maybe we’ll cross paths again someday.
RUBY (softly) I hope so.
PARKER Until then
Oh wow is that dialog original!
GPT4 suggests that the title of the movie should be “The Enigma of the Eon Orb,” but I suspect “Action Team Cliché: Origins” would be a better title.
I guess this wasn’t an entirely fair request. It’s not easy to write an original, engaging, heart-warming movie that focuses on character development. Let’s give it something easier.
Here’s GPT4’s attempt at a script for a sequel to Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens:
Title: Star Wars Episode VIII: Shadows of the Past
INT. RESISTANCE BASE – DAY
Commander POE DAMERON is briefing a group of pilots, including REY and FINN.
POE We’ve discovered an old Imperial outpost on the distant planet, Tython. Our intel indicates that there might be valuable information on the whereabouts of other potential Force-sensitive individuals.
REY We can’t let the First Order get their hands on that information.
FINN Agreed. We have to get there first.
EXT. SPACE – DAY
The Millennium Falcon and several X-wing fighters blast off towards Tython.
EXT. TYTHON – DAY
The Resistance team arrives on Tython and enters the ancient outpost.
INT. IMPERIAL OUTPOST – DAY
The team explores the outpost, uncovering hidden rooms and ancient artifacts.
REY (sensing something) There’s a strong presence of the Force here.
FINN Let’s find that information and get out of here. [4:26 PM] As they continue to search, they discover a holocron with the data they need. However, they also awaken an ancient DARK SIDE ENTITY, which attacks them.
INT. IMPERIAL OUTPOST – BATTLE
The team fights the dark side entity. Rey’s powers are tested as she struggles to protect her friends.
EXT. TYTHON – DAY
The team escapes the outpost, but the entity follows them. A massive battle ensues between the Resistance and the dark side entity.
REY We can’t defeat it alone. We need help.
POE Rey, you have the power within you. Trust the Force.
Rey takes a deep breath and focuses her energy. She harnesses the power of the Force and defeats the entity.
EXT. RESISTANCE BASE – DAY
The team returns with the information and is greeted by General Leia Organa.
LEIA Well done. With this information, we can find and train others like you, Rey.
FINN The First Order won’t know what hit them.
REY We’ll be ready.
The movie ends with the promise of a new generation of Jedi and the hope of defeating the First Order once and for all.
Yup. It was better than the one Rian Johnson wrote. (If you’re curious, here’s my twenty seven thousand word review of Star Wars Episode VIII: The Least Jedi.)
Of course, that’s a very low bar to clear. You have to dig in order to find it.
I’m going out on a limb a little, but, Miss Marple is perhaps as iconic a character as Hercule Poirot is. At least most of everyone who has heard of Poirot will have heard of Miss Marple. And while I think Poirot has been adapted into movies more often, Miss Marple might have been more influential. I can’t think of any other detectives who exist because of Poirot, but Murder, She Wrote would not have happened without Miss Marple.
Having said that, there can be no question of which one Agatha Christie wrote more of. There are something like three times as many Poirot stories as Miss Marple stories. Part of this, of course, is that Poirot had a seven year head-start. Those were seven very productive years for Agatha Christie, too—in addition to several Poirot novels, she wrote a great many short stories.
The subject of short stories is interesting, here, for while Poirot first appeared in a novel, Miss Marple first appeared in a short story. Most of the Miss Marple short stories were gathered together into the book The Thirteen Problems, and in the introduction to it—written years after most of the short stories themselves—Agatha Christie opines that Miss Marple is at her best in short stories, while Poirot demands novels. This is curious because she only wrote a few more Miss Marple short stories, while she had yet to write eleven of the twelve Miss Marple novels that she would ever write. This may, perhaps, be attributed to the changing economics of fiction. In the twenties and thirties the real money was in short stories; this was much less the case in the 1950s and 1960s. (I’m not sure how things were in the 1940s; television had not yet taken over from short stories as popular short entertainment but magazines and newspapers were hit hard by the war, especially since paper was in short supply.)
She also remarked in that introduction that Miss Marple was as popular as Poirot—she got about an equal number of letters requesting that she drop Poirot in favor of Miss Marple as requested that she drop Miss Marple in favor of Poirot. And here we come to one of the things that intrigues me about Miss Marple: it was twelve years between the first Miss Marple novel (The Body in the Vicarage, 1930) and the second (The Body in the Library, 1942). While the stories themselves were written (and published) between 1927 and 1930, the foreward to The Thirteen Problems was written in 1932. After declaring Miss Marple to be as popular as Poirot, it would be ten more years before she published another Miss Marple novel. And so far as I can tell looking at original publication dates, she only wrote three Miss Marple short stories in that time, one in 1939 (commissioned by the BBC as a radio play) and two in 1941. Two more would appear in 1942 after the publication of The Body in the Library, another in 1954, and the final Miss Marple short story in 1956.
I can’t help but wonder why it is that Agatha Christie thought that Miss Marple was better in short stories but after the first collection wrote her mostly in novels, and thought her as popular as Poirot but waited twelve years to write more of her.
That said, the wait did her no great harm. Miss Marple was always a creature from a previous age so she did not suffer greatly from how the world changed during and after the second world war—if anything, she felt less out of place after the war than before it. Young people in the 1920s and 1930s were concerned with being Modern in a way that only the hippies of the 1960s came close to. By the 1950s, people simply didn’t look down on their elders as they once did and Miss Marple’s Victorian girlhood was not the object of (indulgent) ridicule that it once was.
Which reminds me: I wonder if Agatha Christie, in writing Miss Marple, was at all inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Certainly not entirely; she mentions inspiration from her own grandmother who had a sheltered Victorian upbringing and thought the worst of everyone. That said, the indulgent way that people assumed that Miss Marple knew nothing of the world is very reminiscent of the indulgent way that people assumed that Father Brown knew nothing of the world—and they had been assuming that of Father Brown for seventeen years by the time Miss Marple came on the scene. If so, she was inspired well.
But getting back to my main question, I wonder if it was merely that it was harder to come up with plots for Miss Marple stories than it was for Poirot stories. Miss Marple was a very different kind of sleuth and her stories (almost) always involved a great deal more investigation by people other than Miss Marple herself. It would be an exaggeration, but not too much of an exaggeration, to say that until the last few novels Miss Marple didn’t appear in the novels more than she did in the short stories, there was just a lot more of other people in the novels padding them out to full length. This means that the stories for Miss Marple require a setting in which amateurs (or ordinary policemen) can do the investigating and find the clues, but not understand them. This is not so easy to do. It is much more convenient for the author, especially of a novel, to have a detective who can look for clues that most people would not. Often this is unraveling the mystery of a red herring so that it can be set aside and further clues looked for, but it in any event helps.
This is also, I think, why Agatha Christie said that Miss Marple is at her best in short stories. Short stories allow there to be a summarizing of the evidence without much time to think about it, then Miss Marple can give her brilliant interpretation. If this is to be done in a novel, it’s trickier both to come up with a mystery which will last without anyone figuring it out, and also to come up with red herrings that don’t need to be cleared away for the right evidence to be discovered.
This is only speculation and I have little confidence that this is correct. Unfortunately, Agatha Christie says nothing on the subject in her autobiography, so I doubt that I’ll be able to advance much beyond speculation.
In this video (with a surprise appearance by my superdwarf reticulated python, Aristotle) I talked about why it is that some women are attracted to “bad boys”.
One of the characteristics I’ve noticed quite a bit in detective stories from the golden age of mysteries (roughly, From 1890 until the start of World War 2) is how many detectives had a theory of detection which they discussed.
In the very early days, the detectives differentiated themselves from the police through their use of forensic investigation. In the 1890s, Sherlock Holmes performed chemical analysis to prove a stain was blood and wrote a monograph on how to identify cigar ash. In the early 1900s, Dr. Thorndyke looked at everything he could under a microscope, and what he couldn’t he would look at with enlarged photographs.
Sherlock Holmes did not long predate real forensics, though. By 1901 Scotland Yard was using fingerprints to identify people and in 1902 the first conviction was obtained with the use of fingerprint evidence. (See Fingerprints And Forensic Evidence.) It did not take the police long to make use of this kind of forensic evidence, and private detectives began to shift their methods. G.K. Chesterton would revolutionize the field of private detection in 1910 with Father Brown’s psychological approach to solving crimes, and to varying degrees this has been the primary tool of detectives ever since, so no advances in forensic technology can make psychology obsolete.
Through all of these changes, there remained an air of novelty. The brilliant detective during the golden age was not merely brilliant; he had a method. He got his results because he brilliantly followed his method while others either followed the wrong method or else had no method.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies this as well as the unjustly neglected second Poirot novel, Murder On the Links. Poirot’s method is contrasted very strongly with that of the indomitably forensic M. Giraud. Giraud examines the crime scene with the utmost care and uncovers impressively small clues. Yet Giraud dismisses a section of pipe as being of no importance because it’s not the kind of clue he’s looking for. As Poirot remarks to Hastings, “Mon Ami, a clue of two feet long is every bit as valuable as one measuring two millimetres! But it is the romantic idea that all important clues must be infinitesimal!”
Poirot considers all clues because his method is to adjust his theory until nothing is out of place; Giraud’s method is to ignore whatever does not fit his preferred kind of evidence. The point, here, is not the specifics of the contrast, but that the contrast is so important.
Another, though less important, example that comes to mind is in The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner. In it the detective, Malcolm Sage, delivers a lecture on how the Police misunderstand the evidentiary value of photographs and fingerprints. They think that photographs are for identification while fingerprints are evidence; in reality fingerprints are for identification and photographs are evidence. He took a series of photographs of the crime scene and announces that they will be the principle evidence at trial, and then uses fingerprint evidence to show that the butler is actually a wanted criminal. I don’t know that the police ever ignored the identificative value of fingerprints or the evidentiary value of photographs, but that’s not the point. In a short story written for entertainment value, the writer and editor thought that the audience of the newspaper would be entertained by a lecture on how the police don’t understand the proper use of evidence.
I’m not sure exactly when this aspect of detective fiction died off. Certainly you can’t find it in the Cadfael series, which started in the 1970s. I can’t think of any detective fiction I’ve read from the 1940s through the 1960s except for Miss Marple. I haven’t read any of the Poirot stories written after 1947 (yet). I don’t remember this in the Miss Marple stories from that time period, but then I don’t recall it in the Miss Marple stories from the golden age, either. (To be fair, that’s only one novel, though it is also most of the short stories.) Miss Marple was never really a detective, though. People told her things and then she would give them the solution. With the exception of Nemesis, and to a lesser extent A Caribbean Mystery, she never went looking for clues of any kind. On the other hand, there were her typical reminiscences of people who committed similar sins in Saint Mary Meade, which was certainly a unique style of detection.
By the time we get to television detectives like Columbo in 1971, the aspect of a unique method is missing. While it might be objected that Columbo is a policeman and therefore cannot contrast with policemen, he is still a contrast with the other officers who do not get nearly the same results.
There is similarly no trace of in the 1980s’ Murder, She Wrote.
So, what happened?
Alternatively, what was special about the golden age?
I’m really not sure which of these questions we should be asking. It is tempting to think that there was something special about the time that the golden age happened. To some degree it was the first time police forces were getting organized and police detectives were becoming a real thing. Advances in technology also made various kinds of detection newly possible, or at least newly practical, and so the whole thing had an air of novelty to it.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that there was simply a fundamental split in the mystery genre, with mysteries taking the psychological and logical aspects of detection and police procedurals taking the forensic aspects of detection.
On the third hand, it may just be that all of the possible theories of detection have been expostulated and all that remains is to do one of them well.
Somehow Instagram (a social media site for looking at pictures of reptiles, though I believe some people look at it for photos of other things) recommended a video to me of a guy who was talking about the thief on the cross. Specifically, the one that upbraided the one who was abusing Jesus, and who asked Jesus to remember him when He came into His kingdom, and Jesus said, “this night you will be with me in paradise.” The guy asked, “how does this square with your theology? He wasn’t baptised, didn’t receive communion or confirmation, didn’t give anything to the poor, Jesus didn’t take away his suffering, he didn’t speak in tongues, etc.”
It’s a fairly obvious point, though one worth making from time to time that the ordinary ways that God gives to us to live are not the only ways he gives to people, and while he works through his sacraments he is not bound by them, etc. etc. etc. This is certainly a doctrine of orthodox theology, and you can see it in things like the baptism of blood, the baptism of desire, and so forth. But this guy is making a really big deal of it like he’s the first one to think of it, and also like it’s revolutionary. Somehow he doesn’t seem to take into account that the good thief was nailed to a cross. People tend to focus on the death in excruciating agony part of dying on a cross—reasonably enough—but it’s also a feature of the cross that a person nailed to it can’t do anything. The good thief didn’t do anything for the poor, but he also couldn’t. You can’t extrapolate from that to people who can do things for the poor. It’s just possible that Jesus’ words about the importance of caring for the poor might have some applicability. In short, just because it’s possible to be saved while nailed to a cross doesn’t mean that no one should bother with anything other than what a person nailed to a cross can do.
Then he went full-heretic (never go full-heretic). He said that the only thing that the thief had to offer Jesus was his belief.
This is dead wrong.
It is true that people can’t buy salvation with their good works. It is equally true that people can’t buy salvation with their belief. People simply can’t buy salvation.
Salvation is a gift from God freely given to us. The thing is, we have to accept it. And this is where we come to the part where Jesus said, “It is not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ who enters the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my Father.” Good works are the content of faith. It is possible for one to have faith without works where those works are prevented, but for most of us this is academic. Most of us are not nailed to a cross. Most of us have the opportunity to live according to the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection.
I find it really weird that there are people who are still trying to peddle the idea that salvation is a matter of pledging allegiance to Team God or having some sort of emotional experience of “belief”. I get why Martin Luther tried to redefine faith so as try to get rid of the need to trust God without having to get out of having the word; it made sense in the context in which he found himself. These days, there are much easier ways of not being Christian.
Something I hear a lot when it comes to the recent AI stuff like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, chatGPT, etc. etc. etc. is some version of “this technology is just in its infancy, imagine what it will be able to do in a few years!” I’m not saying that these AI technologies won’t improve, but the thing is, it’s just not true that these technologies are in their infancy. These technologies are all developments of technologies which have been worked on for decades.
At their core, these approaches are various ways of doing massive quantities of massive matrix multiplications in order to encode the relationships between data. The T in chatGPT stands for “Transformer,” which is a variant of the previous types which had generally had some form of “neural” in the their name, such as Convolutional Neural Networks or Recurrent Neural Networks. In particular, Transformers (which were first mentioned publicly by a team at Google in 2017) replaced RNNs as the model of choice in natural language processing by being simpler and having the feature of being able to do the pre-training in parallel, which made vastly larger training data sets feasible.
Transformers were not a radically new idea that created a field which didn’t exist before; they were a new approach which was created because a large number of well funded smart people had been working in the field for a long time on relatively similar approaches. It’s an innovation which yielded noticeably better results, it might even be a breakthrough. What it’s not is the first dipping of humanity’s toe into something no one had ever done before. It may be the first supersonic flight; it is not the first flight at Kitty Hawk.
Moreover, the hardware to execute these things has been under development for a very long time. A huge breakthrough in performance came when the AI algorithms were adapted to run on GPUs (graphics processing units, the things that do all of the calculations for 3D graphics). This provided a relatively inexpensive source of incredibly high performance in number crunching that made the massive amount of processing involved in AI far more accessible. The thing is, this was like a decade ago. Since then special-purpose GPUs have been created to do the work even more cost-effectively (One I know of in the current generation of them is the nVidia A100 which costs around $10,000). But wait, there’s more!
Cerebras developed the Wafer Scale Engine—an AI processing chip the size of an entire silicon wafer—back in 2019. It’s an impressive piece of technology; it consumes about 22kW of electricity in a silicon wafer that’s 300mm in diameter (basically, 1 foot wide). It’s quite a technical achievement, but it went on sale back in 2019. There will be newer and better ones, to be sure, but it’s not a new idea with completely untapped potential.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that this is the end of technological development, or that AI won’t get any better. It would be outright shocking if there were no further improvements. My point is that the improvements that we’re going to see are most likely to be much slower than the people who don’t know anything about the history of AI development think it will be. We’re not at the very beginning of an exponential curve.
I do strongly suspect that generative AI is going to be useful, just as classificational AI has proven useful. The thing is, classificational AI has been with us for a while—it’s things like face unlock on phones and de-noising of video and audio and actually usable speech-to-text. It’s gotten better, and it continues to get better, but speaking as someone who develops technology: a technology becomes viable when it works all of the times for a use, not merely when it can do an impressive demo under favorable circumstances. And in the real world, edge cases are often 99% of the work and not being able to handle them often means that a tool is more work than it saves. The result is frequently a limited-use tool for cases which the new technology is good at, and it’s one more tool in the toolbox of a human being who can handle all the edge cases.
That’s why the result of all of the labor-saving devices is people being so busy all the time.
Something curious about the ITV version of Poirot is that (with the exception of The Mysterious Affair at Styles) all of its episodes were set in the 1920s. Not literally the 1920s, per se; I’m sure that plenty of the technology or fashions were from the 1930s, but neither the Great Depression nor the looming war due to the military buildup of Germany ever feature.
This is not true at all of the novels.
The Poirot novels are always set contemporaneously to when they were written and current events, or at least current conditions, play into the plot. The only anachronism is Poirot himself; when Agatha Christie first wrote him, she presented him as being at least in his sixties. In her autobiography she mentioned that this was an unfortunate choice on her part, but she had no idea how popular he would be or how long he would last, and as of the time of her writing about it he had to have been over 100 by then. She simply ignored this problem and made Poirot always an old man of unspecified age.
When ITV made its version of the stories with David Suchet, they chose to set all of the stories in the same few years, though rarely with anything that would date them. There were practical reasons for this, of course. For example, it would be difficult to age the actors appropriately by decades in order to follow the real stories. Wardrobe and set decoration would be far more difficult if they kept track of the changing styles. Moreover, a series of episodes (or short movies) would be far more jarring if they skipped forward by years every few weeks or months, while the books always skipped ahead by however long it had been since the last one.
However many practical reasons to set Poirot in the span of a few years, though, I suspect that the biggest reason was that the 1920s are simply far more interesting, and far prettier, than later decades. This isn’t the totality of the 1920s, of course. Poirot was a celebrity and tended to deal with clients of means. Accordingly, the stories are set largely among the prettier parts of the 1920s. This is as it should be. Detective stories are stories for the common man, and so they should deal with things that he will not normally come across. Fiction about the lower classes is the domain of the upper classes, who need to read about drudgery and difficulty to find variety from their lives.
There are complex reasons why this should be, but the one thing I think it isn’t is rose-colored glasses from anyone’s past. By the 1990s when ITV was making the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series, the 1920s were seventy years before. No one remembered them. Instead, if we look to the specifics, we will find a decent answer. The 1930s were an interesting time but heavily influenced by the world-wide Great Depression and in the later portion by the looming war on the European continent. The 1940s were dominated by the second World War, to the point where no one ever talks about the events of 1946-1950. The 1950s had a primarily industrial aesthetic, as people took refuge in the post-war plenty which was so different from the great depression and the war years. In more rarified circles, architects and designers were greatly attracted to anything which was not beautiful. This was the era of the Helvetica font and the beginning of the era of buildings which no one likes. The 1960s spiraled off into kaleidescopic colors that meant nothing but were fun and new. The 1970s were, of course, varied, but let us leave it with two words: shag carpet. That takes us to the end of when Poirot stories were written, but for completeness: the 1980s were the era of big shoulder pads and bigger hair with leather jackets and denim jackets, while the 1990s… I wonder what the style of the 1990s even was? T-shirts and jeans or shorts? It’s been thirty years since 1993, and has anyone figured out anything to be nostalgic for? Classic video games are the only thing that I can think of.
Anyway, I think that I’ve made the point. The 1920s are an era with a fascinating aesthetic that’s pleasing to look at, and it was the last time to have that for quite some time. (Portions of the 1930s were more-or-less continuous with the 1920s, but I’m counting them as part of it since they were, aesthetically, a continuation of them.) There will be others, of course. At some point our fascination with trying to see how little clothing people can wear will be over, and people will try to make their clothing interesting rather than revealing, again.
This is not the same thing as nostalgia for the 1920s, by the way. I don’t think that it being fun for Poirot to be set in the 1920s is nearly the same thing as wishing to live in the 1920s. It’s merely a recognition that the interesting parts of the 1920s were very interesting, while the interesting parts of later decades weren’t nearly so interesting.
There is also the argument to be made that the 1920s (and 30s) were the last real era of the private detective. After World War 2 we live much more in the era of the spy thriller. In the spy thriller people kill and are killed for governments and large organizations; we don’t care nearly so much for the concerns of the individual. There may be some truth to this, though for all that people still go on murdering people for their own reasons even in the 2020s, and people even still care when people are murdered. It may be fewer than in former times, but detective stories were always about unusual people.
In which I discuss that referring to myself as a sinner is simply true and not rhetorical, as well as draw some lessons to when others (such as Bishop Barron) refer to themselves as sinners and how that should be taken seriously (but without speculating as to the specifics).
The title of the video is a reference to one of my favorite prayers, the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” (This prayer is, itself, a reference to the publican in the story of the pharisee and the publican.)
A while back I looked into a paper that described the actual mathematics/programming behind chatGPT (really, behind GPT3, which is basically the same thing but with a less sophisticated front-end). I find it interesting how often the thing is misunderstood.
ChatGPT is, as it will candidly tell you, a Large Language Model. That language part is very important. It does not model facts, or concepts; it has no understanding of anything. It does not try to have an understanding of anything. What it does is model language, but not in the way that grammarians model language. It models how language is used in practice. That is, it is a model of the sort of things that people actually say.
Without getting into the details of how the model works, it is enough to know that it was trained by taking in the appearance and order of words within approximately everything that the people at openAI were able to scrape off of the internet about two years before going public with chatGPT.
(This, btw, is the big improvement in chatGPT over previous large language models; the T stands for “transformer” and is a particular kind of use of matrices which allows the model to be “trained” in parallel, which allows for massively larger training sets than had previously been used in large language models. That said, its interesting to note that you can’t increase the training size to much larger than “approximately all of the text that has ever been written”, so on this basis alone we’d expect to see improvements in large language models slowing down after chatGPT because improved training is no longer an option. By contrast, this is not a problem for image-generating AI training. Generating massively larger numbers of images is quite straight forward.)
The output of chatGPT can loosely but accurately be described as “the words that the people who wrote the text chatGPT was trained on would probably say following whatever you said to it.” It doesn’t understand subjects and has no concept of what it is saying or the truth or falsity of what it is saying, it only has a concept of the probability of words appearing in an order on the basis of what words came earlier.
Like all modern “AI” stuff, the “AI” part takes input and produces output that a human being would not recognize as related to what the AI is being used for. Translating from a use case into the input of the AI model, and translating from its output back to the use case, is the work of programs written in normal programming languages that the programmers understand quite well. This front-end software is responsible for things like chatGPT being able to use references to previous subjects, or handle special cases like refusing to tell people how to commit crimes or adding a disclaimer to everything it says that is fitness-related that you should consult a doctor. They seem to be constantly adding more to this front-end, such as the ability to take instructions like, “write a sentence that ends in the word apple.” A language model only produces a set of words in order that are probable based on its training set; following directions is not related to this. Thus any amount of following directions is entirely in the front-end and consists of programmers looking at what kinds of instructions it’s been given and writing front-end code to handle those cases.
I’ve heard people say things like, “if they add the ability for it to check whether the things it is saying are true,” but no one has developed an AI which can identify what parts of a sentence constitute facts that could be checked. Consider a simple sentence like, “Mary, Queen of Scotts, once placed a bet on a game of tennis.”
What even are the facts that the sentence asserts? Let’s list them:
A person named Mary exists (or perhaps is a fictional character in a published work)
She was queen of the Scotts
The Scotts are a people, specially who live in Scottland
Scottland exists (or existed)
There was at least one event at which this Mary made a bet
That bet was on a game of tennis (anywhere)
A game of tennis was played during the lifetime of Mary, Queen of Scotts
Some of these facts do imply others. For example: if Mary did in fact bet on a game of tennis, then it must be the case that a game of tennis was played during Mary’s lifetime. That is not necessarily the order you want to check them, though; it is common when fact checking to start with the easy-to-check facts.
There are complications, though. When we say “tennis” do we mean the medieval game played in an indoor court in which the walls (and some roofs) were in play, or do we mean “lawn tennis” which is the modern use of “tennis.” Is the sentence asserting something about Mary relating to the modern game of tennis, or only to the game which was more popularly played in her day and from which the modern game called “tennis” (more properly, “lawn tennis”) is derived?
ChatGPT doesn’t even begin to have anything within its model relevant to answering any of these questions.
In the novel The A.B.C. Murders, Hercule Poirot asks an interesting question about a murder victim. There are two versions of it I’m aware of; one is the version that Agatha Christie wrote and the other the version in the ITV version starring David Suchet. I’m going to quote both versions because they’re interesting to compare.
First, the original:
“Pas ga. I wondered — if she were pretty?”
“As to that I’ve no information ,” said Inspector Crome with a hint of withdrawal. His manner said: “Really — these foreigners! All the same!”
A final look of amusement came into Poirot’s eyes.
“It does not seem to you important, that? Yet, pour une femme, it is of the first importance. Often it decides her destiny!”
Then, the ITV version (which replaced Inspector Crome with Chief Inspector Japp):
Poirot: Was she pretty? Inspector Japp: There he goes again. Poirot: That does not seem to be important? Mais pour un femme, it is of the first importance. It often decides her destiny.
Curiously, that’s rather different than how I remembered it, and much closer to the book. I remembered the exchange in the ITV version as something like:
Poirot: Was she pretty? Japp: What does that matter? Poirot: Poor girl, it mattered a great deal to her. It decided the whole course of her life.
It is interesting to me that I misremembered the ITV version so much, though to be fair to me I like my version better. Since you, dear reader, are not me, I presume that Agatha Christie’s version is the most interesting, here, and quite rightly so.
A great deal of detective fiction might be written by a male or female author, but occasionally one comes across a passage that seems like it could only have been written by one or the other. This is one such passage. I can only imagine a woman writing this. It’s not that only a woman would know it; we all know that physical beauty affects the lives of both sexes. Perhaps the best way I can describe what I mean is another example of this, from the Hamish MacBeth story Death of a Gossip.
I had mentioned to a female friend of mine that the story was very markedly written by a woman and she jokingly asked, “what, did it have no descriptions of women’s breasts?”
“Oh, no, it’s got plenty of descriptions of women’s breasts,” I replied. “Just never in admiration.”
In the exchange above, whether the woman was pretty was quite relevant to the detection. She was strangled with her own belt and it takes an unusual kind of man to charm the belt off of a pretty woman for the simple reason that she will be used to getting attention from men and so to charm her he will need to be above average. Or as Poirot puts it:
Betty Barnard was a flirt. She liked attention from a personable male. Therefore A.B.C., to persuade her to come out with him, must have had a certain amount of attraction — of le sex appeal! He must be able, as you English say, to ‘get off.’ He must be capable of the click!
Since it is directly relevant to the solving of the murder, any author might have thought of it or mentioned it. There is just something about how it was mentioned which seems distinctly feminine to me, even though it is put in the mouth of a male character. It’s hard to articulate what, since it’s subtle.
I think it’s the sympathy involved.
Males are tempted to treat beautiful women better than plain women and so it is a mark of virtue to a male to treat plain women as well as he treats beautiful women. A male recognizes the temptation otherwise, but (a virtuous one) regrets it as the effect of a fallen world. Since women are affected by this temptation but are not actually tempted by it, their primary concern is on its effects, not on avoiding it. When Poirot says that whether a woman is pretty many decide her whole destiny, it only speaks to concern with the effect.
However that goes, it is a relatively subtle point that Agatha Christie handled very deftly. Her writing tended toward the plain side, but her psychology and her plots were masterful. This may well be why she is one of the best selling authors of all time; the plain style of her writing makes it extremely accessible, while at the same time the brilliance of the plot is easy to see.
Last Sunday’s reading at Mass was from the Gospel of John, and was the story about Jesus giving sight to the man born blind. Towards the end of the story, after the man born blind is questioned by the pharisees, he runs into Jesus, who asks the man whether he believes in the Son of Man. The man born blind asks a very interesting question: “Who is he, Sir, that I may believe in him?” (emphasis mine.)
It is interesting to contrast this with Pontius Pilate when Jesus said, “For this I was born and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth. And those who are of the truth hear my voice.” Pilate’s response was, “Truth? What is truth?”
Jesus answered only one of these men, though they were, in a sense, asking the same question.
It’s interesting to contemplate why.
They were asking essentially the same question, but for opposite reasons. The man born blind was asking so that he may believe. A man cannot believe in something he does not know; faith is not the opposite of knowledge, but actually impossible without knowledge. The man who was born blind was willing to have faith, but he did not yet have the knowledge which would let him have faith, so he asked for it.
Pontius Pilate asked for knowledge in order to avoid believing in it. His question was not the seeking of truth but rather the denial of the possibility of attaining truth.
Despite what internet trolls will tell you, questions are not neutral things. We do not encounter questions floating in a vacuum. Questions always come from questioners, and questioners always have a goal in asking their questions.
As G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, motives matter:
But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, “I am sorry to say we are ruined,” and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.
Back during the pandemic I did a number of posts looking at all-cause mortality in the USA. As a reminder, all-cause mortality is worth looking at because of the clarity of its definition. To give an example, if somebody has COPD and gets COVID-19 and dies, but probably wouldn’t have died if they only had one (then; COPD is eventually fatal), do you classify that as a COVID-19 death or a COPD death? Or as both? Different medical systems will reasonably differ on this question. (Then there are far less reasonable diagnostic criteria, like recording all deaths where a person had COVID-19 regardless of the cause of death.) This stuff can vary from hospital to hospital and state to state.
All-cause mortality data gets around these problems because, while it can be hard to agree on why a person died, it’s easy to agree on whether they died. Eventually. There is still the problem that it can take months for a death to actually be reported to the CDC. So much so that the CDC doesn’t even bother publishing all-cause mortality data for the most recently two weeks, and there’s very little point in looking at the last 3-6 weeks of data that they do publish. (They have algorithms that try to predict how many deaths will be reported eventually based on the data that has been reported so far, but it has a tendency to under-count what eventually gets reported.)
As I said, I put up several posts looking at this during the pandemic, and I recently became curious to look at it again now that the pandemic is in retrospect. So, here’s the data from the CDC as of February 20, 2023:
Let’s look at it a bit closer. To make the time frame of the data a little easier to follow, I’ve marked the approximate location of January 1 with yellow lines and the approximate location of July 1 with green lines:
If you’re curious, the Pfizer vaccine received emergency use authorization in December of 2020. The more infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 was named in March of 2021. The Delta variant had mutations in the spike protein which is how the virus enters cells as well as the thing that the vaccine gives the immune system to detect. This simultaneously made it better at entering cells, and also reduced the efficacy of the immune response acquired through vaccination or infection with the original variant.
Because I sometimes would look at Sweden’s data, here’s their COVID-19 deaths/day as reported by the Swedish government:
I’m told by a Swedish friend that “avlidna” literally means something like “release from suffering.”
This data is in no way directly comparable to the all-cause mortality data above, but it is none-the-less interesting to note how, with the exception of Summer 2020, the spikes like up pretty well. It is widely theorized that the US’s summer spikes correspond to air-conditioning season in the southern united states, when people stay indoors during waking hours. To the best of my knowledge, Swedish summers are far more mild than are the summers in the American south, so one would expect them to be absent.
That hypothesis brings up an interesting question looking at the USA data, though: why was there no summer spike in 2021? There was a spike in deaths in the fall of 2021, not the summer. One explanation is that COVID-19 deaths started taking longer since the onset of infection to kill people (or at least to contribute to their death). If that is the case we would expect all subsequent spikes in deaths to also come later and, indeed, they do. The winter spike in deaths (in early 2022) also came later than the spike in the winter of 2020/ 2021.
If that is the case, why should it be? One hypothesis which covers these facts—though is in no way certain—is that later mutations of SARS-CoV-2 took much longer to kill people than the original ones did. Another hypothesis which would explain the delay is that the most vulnerable people were killed off in the first waves, and everyone who is left are less susceptible. (Though they are less susceptible, it can still contribute to their deaths when they are weakened by other diseases.) These are just two hypotheses; the truth could involve some version of either, both, or neither.
Of course, another explanation which covers this data is that the response to the increases in prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, or very technically, the response to increasing numbers of positive SARS-CoV-2 tests, was responsible for the increase in deaths. This will, of course, vary among the states as they had very different responses to COVID; some states like California were known for draconian measures, while other states imposed very few restrictions, and many were inbetween. It is reasonable to suppose that the extra stress of lockdowns, closure of businesses, etc. would have some negative effect. There are no actions without consequences and it would be absurd to suppose that drastic actions like the ones taken in response to COVID-19 are free.
For reasons relating to other data I’ve looked into but don’t have time to get into here, I am skeptical that this explains all of the increase in mortality over the years before COVID, but I haven’t seen any data to conclusively rule that possibility out. I am also a bit resistant to this explanation because it would be too convenient; I think that the responses to COVID-19, after the first few months, were wildly overblown and a massive overreach of government power. Lockdowns could be justified in the face of a pandemic of the magnitude of the Black Death—something that could kill off a third of the population in a short time. During the very early rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 there were reasons to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was an escaped bio-weapon that could have been that kind of threat—the kind of threat which could potentially justify temporarily suspending all of the normal rules of society. After a few months it was obvious that SARS-CoV-2, escaped bio-weapon or not, was in no way another Black Death. Since I think that what ensued as an unjustified massive overreaction, it would be very convenient if SARS-CoV-2 was barely worse than a normal flu and most of the bad consequences of it were actually due to what I consider to be an overreaction.
I like to be careful of convenient conclusions, especially when conclusive evidence is intrinsically hard to come by.
Whatever the cause and whatever exactly happened, it does seem very clear that it’s over. A few people still wear masks, but few enough that they might all be immuno-compromised people for whom trying to filter the air that they breathe in public places makes sense anyway. We still have some lingering excess mortality, though only slightly. It was never all that high—this is more clear when you look on a multi-year timescale rather than zooming in—and it is very possible that the last few years were a perfect example of Alexander Pope’s line, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
We had tests to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but we didn’t know how it spread, how bad it was, or how bad it would be. Thirty years before, without the tests to detect the virus, the entire experience might have been radically different. The absolute worst weeks had increases in mortality of about 40%, but a 40% increase in a small number is still small. Throughout everything, there were only a few cases of hospitals becoming so over-full that they had to send patients elsewhere and there were no (or at least statistically no) instances of people dying because of a lack of treatment because the hospitals were full. Without the PCR tests that could detect the virus without symptoms (or with symptoms that could be a cold or the flu), and thus allow us to map out its spread, we might not have done much more than think that there was a nasty flu for a few years.
I recently came across this interesting video on a quasi-scandal involving Samsung smartphone cameras taking better pictures of the moon than the physical camera elements actually allows:
The video brings up an interesting question about what the pictures that smartphones take actually are. In the video Marques proposes that the images that the smartphone generates are something along the lines of an image which is what the smartphone “thinks” you want the slice of reality you were trying to capture to look like.
It’s no secret that smartphones these days do massive amounts of processing on the photos that they take and that this goes way beyond removing noise and compensating for camera shake; for years now they’ve been actively recognizing the subject in front of them and adjusting focus, faking bokeh (the way in which subjects behind the focal plane are blurred), punching up colors, adjusting contrast in only some parts of the picture, etc. etc. etc.
There is a problem with this when it comes to taking pictures of the moon, though, because there is only one moon, we only ever see one part of it because it’s tidally locked to the earth, and we’re so far away from it that there is effectively only one angle to take the pictures from. In short, except for haze in the atmosphere or objects in front, there’s only one picture you can take of the moon.
Using AI to improve pictures of the moon is thus not easily distinguished from just replacing your picture with a better picture of the moon. It is different; the approach Samsung uses preserves whatever color in the moon you see due to haze in the atmosphere (a honey moon, a red moon, etc) and won’t override a cloud or bird in front of the moon when you take the picture. But if you’re not capturing weird lighting or something in front of the moon, a cleared-up version of your picture of the moon isn’t really different from just using a better picture instead.
Smartphones have been clearing up the pictures that they take for a long time now, and for the most part people don’t really object. (Every now and then when posting pictures of my superdwarf reticulated python to Instagram I have to note that the camera punched up the color, though it’s not a big deal because it’s what he looks like outdoors in sunlight, so it’s only a slight inaccuracy.)
It’s just weird that there happens to be a subject where you can only take one picture and so the AI image enhancement doesn’t need your original photo to present a clearer version of the photo you took. From what we can tell it does use your photo and doesn’t improve every photo of the moon to a pixel-perfect photo of the moon, but in some sense that’s just an implementation detail and imperfect photo enhancement, respectively.
Of course, the same thing that makes this a problem makes it purely academic; there’s no important reason to take photos of the moon because at best they look exactly like photos you can easily look up. And if you’re doing it for fun, you’re going to use a real camera not a smartphone camera.
Chris Lansdown 
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