A while ago the medical definition of obesity became a certain Body Mass Index (BMI). Thirty or higher, to be specific. And the body mass index is a remarkably crude formula. It’s just the mass (in kilograms) divided by the height (in meters) squared. Since I’m six feet tall (that’s 1.8288 meters), the cutoff for a BMI of 30 is (depending on how you round the inputs) 100 kilograms even. This morning, when I woke up, I weighted 99.9kg, classifying me as “overweight.” Then I drank a glass of water and was 100.1kg, classifying me as obese. The moral of the story is, of course: don’t drink water because it will make you fat.
If You Have To Believe It, Maybe It’s Not False
A video in which I look at the relationship of pragmatism to truth as inspired by an exchange between Chris Williamson and Jordan Peterson on the Modern Wisdom podcast. I emphasize it in the video, but to be clear: this is a reflection on something that Chris Williamson said and something that Jordan Peterson did NOT say, but might have. Their discussion was just a springing-off point, and this is not any kind of criticism of either man.
Psycho-Analysis Began in Hypnosis
In my (low-key) quest to understand how on earth Freud’s theories were ever respected, I’ve recently read Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It’s definitely been interesting. (If you don’t know, this is the transcript of five lectures he gave on five consecutive days at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909 which were meant to give a concise summary of Psycho-Analysis.)
Something I did not realize, but which makes perfect sense in retrospect, is that Psycho-Analysis began in hypnosis. A tiny bit of background is necessary, here: In the 1800s and early 1900s, the term “hysteria” seems to refer to any idiopathic problem in women with severe physical symptoms. Basically, when a woman developed bad symptoms and called in a doctor and he could find no physical cause, the diagnosis was “hysteria,” which basically meant “I don’t know, in a woman.” At this point, since the symptoms don’t have physical causes it is assumed that they must have mental causes and so doctors of the mind would step in to try to help, supposing, of course, that the patient or her family could afford it.
Freud begins with an interesting story about a patient that a colleague of his, Dr. Breuer, was treating. It was a young woman under great stress (nursing her dying father) who started developing a bunch of really bad symptoms that sound, to my ear, like a series of small strokes. She couldn’t use her right arm or leg for a while, sometimes she couldn’t use her left side, she forgot her native language (German) and could only speak English, etc. She also developed a severe inability to drink water and survived fro several weeks on melons and other high-water foods. And here’s where it gets interesting. Dr. Breuer hypnotized her and in a hypnotic state she related the story of having gone into a companion’s room and seen the woman’s dog drinking from a glass. This disgusted her terribly but she gave no indication of it because she didn’t want to offend the woman. He then gave the young woman a glass of water, brought her out of hypnosis, and she was able to drink normally from then on.
Freud moved away from hypnosis for several reasons, but the big one seems to be that most people can’t be hypnotized, which makes it a therapeutic tool of dubious value. The particulars of how he moved away is interesting, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Before that, I want to focus on the hypnosis.
The history of hypnosis is interesting in itself, but a bit complex, and the relevant part is really how it was more popularly perceived than by what it was intended as. In its early stages, hypnosis was seem as something very different from normal waking life and, as a result, excited an enormous amount of interest from people who desired secret knowledge of the universe’s inner secrets. There were plenty of people who wanted to believe in a hidden world that they could access if only they had the key (spurred on, I suspect, by the many discoveries of the microscope in the late 1600s and the continued discoveries as a result of better and better microscopes). Hypnotism, where a man’s mind seemed to alter to a completely different state, and in particular where it could receive commands that it would obey without remembering in a subsequent waking state, was perfect for just such a belief. Here there seemed to be another behind, behind the mind we observe, which seemed to govern the observable mind’s operation. This is the sort of stuff out of which real power is based—if you can control the real source of the mind, you can control the mind!
This context really makes Pysho-Analysis’s model of the compartmentalized mind and further its insistence on the power of the sub-conscious mind make sense.
As I said, Freud abandoned hypnotism, and the means by which he did it really should have been a tip-off to his whole theory being wrong. What led him to discard hypnotism were some experiments he became aware of in which a person who could not remember what he did under hypnosis could be induced, without any further hypnosis, to remember. Freud only took this instrumentally rather than considering that it undermined the whole idea of the powerful subconscious and went about bringing up the “repressed” memories which were (putatively) causing physical symptoms by talking with the patient without hypnotism. I suppose that the idea of this secret knowledge was too attractive to give up.
The Other Sciences Aren’t Based In Physics
In this I talk about how physics—its equations and methods—is really its own thing and the other sciences are not “based in physics” in the sense of being “just applied physics.” This is about how the limitations of applying physics and how each science really is its own thing and not any kind of criticism of physics or any of the other sciences.
How to Balance Gratitude With Ambition
I was watching a Chris Williamson Q&A video recently and a question he was asked was how to balance gratitude with ambition (or aspiration for improvement, if you dislike the term ambition). The exact phrasing of the question was:
How do I manage the dichotomy between being grateful for how far I’ve come and wanting to become more? The dichotomy between working for my future and being present in the moment.
There are several answer to this, and the thing is, they’re all primarily religious. It’s actually kind of interesting how often hard-won, top-level secular wisdom is beginning religious education. The Jewish sabbath is exactly this. God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, so human beings will work for six days and rest on the seventh. (Bear in mind that rest implies contemplation, not merely sleeping.) There you go, there’s your management of the dichotomy between working and gratitude. (The Christian moving of the day of rest to Sunday is an interesting and rich topic, but all of that rich symbolism doesn’t materially affect the current subject.) To put this in secular terms, a regular 6-to-1 balance of time dedicated to work with time dedicated to contemplation will keep your balance. If you keep it regular (that is, according to a rule), it will ensure that the effects of contemplation do not wear off. And guess what: you need to impose rules on yourself to make yourself do it because human beings don’t perfectly auto-regulate. (Just don’t make the rules so rigid you can’t live; the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.)
Another answer, here, is to keep God always in mind. This will make you strive to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and also make you grateful for all that He’s already given you.
Here’s where Jordan Peterson’s language of “God is the highest good” falls a bit short, since keeping the highest good in mind will stimulate ambition, but it doesn’t tend nearly so much to gratitude. For gratitude you need to keep in mind the nothingness from which you came and which you could, apart from the positive action of The Good, become again. This requires a leap of faith that the world is not evil, though. If you can do this, you’re not going to be secular for long, and the whole exercise of trying to put this into secular language will be unnecessary. If you can’t take this leap of faith that the world exists because of good, then you’ll never actually be grateful anyway. People try to use “grateful” as an intransitive verb, but it’s not. It’s a transitive verb. You don’t have to conceive of God as a person to be grateful to Him, though it helps. But if the world is just a cruel joke with no punchline which no one told, gratitude is nonsensical. But here’s the thing: if you aren’t sure whether life is a cruel joke with no punchline that no one has told, that is equally paralyzing.
To see why, consider this thought experiment: you receive a text message from a friend which says something complementary about you, but there are enough odd word choices that you think it might just be his phone unlocked in his pocket interacting with auto-correct. Try to feel grateful for this message which you think might be a real compliment and might just be random noise that accidentally looks like a message. You will find that you can’t do it.
Nevertheless, it can still be interesting to say what is true, even if it will do no one any good: the way you keep perspective is by comparing, not to one thing, but to two things. If you want to keep perspective on your achievements, you must compare them both to the fullness of what you can achieve as well as to the nothing which is the least you could have achieved. Comparing to only one will not give you a proper perspective, because neither, on its own, is the full picture. Only by looking at the full picture will you have a correct perspective on where your achievements are within it. This is as true of metaphorical photographs as it is of literal photographs.
Socially Awkward Women Have a Really Hard Time
I came across the subject of how women interact with each other socially when studying female bullying, originally with the books Queen Bees and Wannabes and Odd Girl Out. (They’re both very interesting books and I recommend them.) I’ve studied more about it since then and one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that socially awkward women have an incredibly hard time. (This probably includes, but certainly is not limited to, women on the autism spectrum.)
The background you need to know (and will probably know better than I am if you are female, in which case please bear with me) is that women tend to prefer, within social interactions, subtle interactions to explicit ones. You can tell Just So evopsych stories about women being more vulnerable and needing to not offend people to explain it if you like, but the preference for more subtle nudging than direct confrontation means that women are (as a rule) highly attuned to subtle signals. (None of this comes with any value judgement attached; like all natural substrates it is the canvas upon which moral virtues are painted—in other words, it can be used well or badly.) In general this works out, in much the same way that if you have a quiet speaker and a sensitive microphone, you get a recording at a normal volume. Or to vary the metaphor, if you have a dim light and a wide-open pupil, your eye sees clearly.
By contrast—and of course I’m painting with a broad brush—men tend to dislike subtlety in social interactions. We value openness and directness. It does need to be said that that’s not the same thing as being a bull in a china shop. You can be direct, quiet, and precise—hence Teddy Roosevelt’s famous advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.
Now, it’s fairly obvious that these two strategies don’t mesh perfectly; when the male is trying to communicate to the female this can be like shouting into a sensitive microphone, and when the female is trying to communicate to the male this can be like whispering into a mic with the gain turned really low. This often causes problems to males and females who are just starting to communicate with each other (i.e. teenagers) but women pretty quickly learn to stop looking for subtle queues from men, often with the explanation that “men are simple” or “men are dumb.” A similar phenomenon happens when a woman is first married—she’ll often be trying to figure out what’s wrong all the time until she figures out that if something’s wrong the man will say, and most of the time she can’t figure out what’s going on with him, it’s not that he’s being too subtle or she not sensitive enough, it’s that nothing (relevant) is going on. This is the classic case of the woman wondering why the man is staring off into space and trying to guess why he’s angry at her while he’s just trying to figure out whether he thinks it’s actually plausible that batman could be superman in a fight. I mean, superman has super-speed, so even if batman has cryptonite…
And, again, after a while most young wives figure out that a husband staring off into space probably doesn’t mean anything, and “men are just weird/simple/stupid/big children/different”.
All well and good for women interacting with males.
But for the most part, it seems that women can’t learn to make these allowances for other women.
And this causes enormous problems for women who need them.
I’m speaking, of course, of socially awkward women. They don’t give off appropriate subtle queues, especially the positive ones, which often causes other women to take offense. This probably needs some explanation.
Often, the way women communicate that they have been offended is to somewhat reduce the amount of positive signals they’re giving, or to still give them but to make them less enthusiastic. Since the other woman is hyper-vigilant and analyzes her behavior in great detail to see where she might have given offense, she’ll probably figure this out and take action to repair the relationship. If the woman does not do this analysis and take that action, this communicates her disinclination to a close relationship, i.e. is an insult. Hence the offense.
A socially awkward woman may or may not notice the subtle variations in the other woman’s positive signals, but if she does she’ll have no idea how to respond and so the other woman is highly likely to take offense when she gets it wrong.
There’s also a pretty good chance that the socially awkward woman will have no idea how to respond properly to when her female friends try to do collaborative emotional processing with her, making the experience unsatisfying for them if they don’t interpret her actions as being judgmental or all negative and taking offense when this doesn’t seem right.
All of this will cause female friendships to be very stressful for the socially awkward woman, and in all likelihood, short-lived.
None of these problems apply to friendships with males, though, so there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll find socially awkward women having mostly male friends. This has its own pitfalls, of course, because a woman who shares a man’s interests and likes talking to him about them is extraordinarily attractive to males who are looking for a wife. There’s the further issue that women of marriageable age usually won’t talk (extensively) to males of marriageable age unless they’re open to romantic interest because they’re very sensitive to whether there’s interest and careful to not encourage it. Again, I’m painting with a very broad brush and there are tons of exceptions to that—especially in contexts which are not purely social, such as workplaces. But the point is, there’s a real danger in her friendships with males that the male will develop romantic interest in the socially awkward woman and if she’s not interested that will kill the friendship.
So we come back to the title of this post. Life is really hard for socially awkward women, and I think they deserve more sympathy than they often get.
Testing Computer Programs
My oldest son, who does yet know how to program, told me a great joke about programmers testing the programs they’ve written:
A programmer writes the implementation of a bartender. He then goes into the bar and orders one beer. He then orders two beers. He orders 256 beers. He order 257 beers. He order 9,999 beers. He orders 0.1 beers. He orders zero beers. He orders -1 beers. Everything works properly.
A customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar catches fire.
It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
It’s easy, when you design a tool, to test that it works for the purpose the tool exists for. What it’s very easy to miss is all of the other possible uses of the tool. To take a simple example: when you’re making a screwdriver, it’s obvious to test the thing for driving screws. It’s less obvious to test it as a pry bar, a chisel, an awl, or a tape dispenser.
This disparity is inherent in the nature of making tools versus using them. Tools are made by tool-makers. The best tool makers use their own tools, but they are only one person. Each person has his way of solving a problem, and he tends to stick to that way because he’s gotten good at it. When he goes to make a tool, he makes it work well for how he will use it, and often adds features for variations on how he can think to use it to solve the problems he’s making the tool to solve. If he’s fortunate enough to have the resources to talk to other people who will use the tool, he’ll ask them and probably get some good ideas on alternative ways to use it. But he can’t talk to everyone, and he especially can’t talk to the people who haven’t even considered using the tool he hasn’t made yet.
That last group is especially difficult, since there’s no way to know what they will need. But they will come, because once the tool exists, people who have problems where this new tool will at least partially solve their problem will start using it to do so, since they’re better off with it than they were before, even though the tool was never meant to do that.
This isn’t much of a problem with simple tools like a screwdriver, since it doesn’t really have any subtleties to it. This can be a big problem with complex tools, and especially with software. When it comes to software design, you can talk to a bunch of people, but mostly you have to deal with this through trial-and-error, with people reporting “bugs” and you going, “why on earth would you do that?” and then you figure it out and (probably) make changes to make that use case work.
The flip side is a big more generally practical, though: when considering tools, you will usually have the most success with them if you use them for what they were designed to do. The more you are using the tool for some other purpose, the more likely you are to run into problems with it and discover bugs.
For me this comes up a lot when picking software libraries. Naive programmers will look at a library and ask, “can I use this to do what I want?” With more experience, you learn to ask, “was this library designed to do what I want to do?” Code re-use is a great thing, as is not re-inventing the wheel, but this needs to be balanced out against whether the tool was designed for the use for which you want to use it, or whether you’re going to be constantly fighting it. You can use the fact that a car’s differential means that its drive wheels will spin in the mud to dig holes, but that will stop working when car manufacturers come out with limited-slip differentials because they’re making cars for transportation, not digging holes.
That’s not to say that one should never be creative in one’s use of a tool. Certainly there are books which work better for propping up a table than they do for being read. Just be careful with it.
Mary Sues Aren’t Always Bad Characters
In this video I look at Mary Sue characters in action and science fiction stories and look at how they don’t have to be bad characters (though, of course, they mostly are).
I’ve got a few posts on this topic, too, such as When Mary Met Sue and The First Mary Sue.
Murder, She Wrote: Hooray for Homicide
On the twenty eighth day in October of the year of our Lord 1984, the third episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Hooray for Homicide, it is mostly set in Los Angeles but begins in Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was Birds of a Feather.)
After a few scenes of waves breaking on the rocks and an establishing shot of Jessica’s house, we then see a figure rocking in a rocking chair, looking out the window. A stealthy figure holding a rope in its hands creeps up behind the rocking chair and the music turns ominous.
Suddenly, the figure throws the rope around the neck of the figure and begins to strangle it. The music hits hard and then the camera angle shifts so we can see who the murder is, and it’s Jessica! The figure is only a few pillows, a sheet, and a hat.
She considers for a moment, then is disappointed and shake’s her head. Walking back to her kitchen, she calls out that she’s decided to go back to the bayonet because it’s cleaner. The camera pans enough and reveals Ethan working on the pipes under Jessica’s sink. Jessica then sits down at her table and types on her typewriter. She’s not at it long before the phone rings. It’s someone named Agnes, who tells her that one of her books is being talked about on television. Jessica, accordingly, turns the TV on and watches. A producer is being interviewed about his newest movie, a film adaptation of Jessica’s book The Corpse Danced at Midnight. When asked if this will be another hit, the producer says that the movie will have everything that young audiences want: music, sex, and violence. When asked if it’s too much violence—he names a scene where a psychotic killer uses a flame thrower on a group of brake dancers—Jessica can take no more and rushes to the phone to call her publisher, saying that she’s going to put a stop to this nonsense even if she has to fly out to Hollywood. We jump cut, of course, to an airplane landing on a runway.
This is an interesting approach to starting the episode. It takes about three minutes and gives us a bit of Jessica in Cabot Cove and also Jessica as a mystery writer. We didn’t get any of that in last week’s episode, so it’s nice to refresh it, even though we’re going to spend the remaining 44 minutes in Hollywood. I also suspect it was necessary because the main thrust of the episode is Jessica’s old fashioned small-town values vs. the modern world. It’s a nice theme, even if in most episodes Jessica doesn’t have old fashioned or small-town values.
Jessica’s first stop in Hollywood is at her lawyer’s office. They are Carr, Strindberg & Roth. The lawyer to whom she’s speaking is Mr. Strindberg and he tells her that the film is box office magic.
It’s a combination of Porky’s, Halloween, and Flashdance. His advice is that she should follow it up quickly. She’s not very receptive to this advice and just wants to know what her legal rights to stop the producer are. He’s got no idea because he only makes deals, he doesn’t remember what deals he made in the past, so he’ll assign someone to dig up her contract and they’ll be in touch.
I love the idea that their filing system is so bad that they cannot readily find active contracts.
Jessica accepts this flimsy excuse to move the plot along and goes to the movie studio itself. As she’s arguing with the guard at the gate who won’t let her in without a pass, a Miss Marta Quintessa, who is coming into the lot, overhears the argument and tells the guard to put Mrs. Fletcher down as her guest. Amidst Jessica’s thanks we find out that Marta is the costume designer for The Corpse Danced at Midnight.
The scene then shifts to the dressing room of the lead actress.
Her name is Eve Crystal. The producer, Jerry Lydecker, is there to confront her about lying to him and not telling him that she canceled her lessons with her drama coach. She meant to tell him, honest. He tells her that he knows that she’s seeing some guy, and he wants her to stop. He lays great emphasis on how important he is to her career and how she’ll have no time for anyone else when she’s a big star.
Then we go to Marta Quintessa telling Jessica how much she loved her book…
…and how little she loved the screenplay. When Jessica said that she never saw it, Marta gives her a spare copy which she has in her large purse.
Then the scene shifts to introduce the screenwriter.
He asks why Jerry doesn’t return his calls and Jerry replies that it’s nothing personal, he doesn’t return anyone’s calls. After appreciating that line, the screenwriter gets to why he’s there: the contract came through and the points that he was supposed to get for writing the screenplay on the cheap weren’t in it. (Points are a percentage of profits.) What happened?
Lydecker explains how he wasn’t worth the points because of his backstory: he had an oscar nomination when he was twenty five but is an aging wunderkind who burned out on booze and pills by the time he was thirty. The screenwriter admits to being a recovering alcoholic, but he’s also a damn good screenwriter. Lydecker counters that he had to do a page-one rewrite, and the screenwriter counters that it was to remove every line that required acting talent so he could cast his playmate as the star. At this, Lydecker tells him to get off studio grounds. As he leaves, the screenwriter tells him “Remember: the picture’s not over till the credits roll.”
At this point I think that we can tell that Lydecker is going to get killed as we’ve already got two potential suspects set up. The scene with the screenwriter is a bit… weird. Normally, a screenwriter doesn’t write a screenplay before he has a contract. It is possible to write a spec script, of course—”spec” is short for “speculation” and means that the screenwriter writes it and then tries to sell it. But the key part, there, is that they sell it. Before the movie company does anything with it. A movie company never starts filming before they have a contract which secures the right to use a screenplay. They need this to protect themselves. It would not be hard for a screenwriter to find a lawyer to take on the copyright infringement lawsuit that would result from filming a movie based on someone’s screenplay without an agreement to let them do it. It would be trivial to register the copyright ahead of time, too, in which case there are presumptive triple damages. Trying to use copyrighted material without an agreement which permits this is so dumb no one in Hollywood even considers trying to do it. So yeah, the screenwriter has a grievance, but it makes no sense. And it’s not like it would have been hard to come up with a real grievance. People get shafted all the time in Hollywood.
Anyway, Marta and Jessica walk onto the tail end of the scene and after some painfully insincere pleasantries from Marta to Lydecker, she introduces Jessica. Jessica asks to talk to him and they make an appointment for after lunch.
Jessica then sneaks into the sound stage where filming is going to happen and sees the director coaching Eve about the scene they’re about to do.
She’s not sure why her character’s boyfriend wants to have sex in a cemetery. The director explains that it’s an act of defiance. His friends have just been brutally murdered and he wants to defy death with an act of joy. As far as people pretending that smut is art goes, that’s top notch.
Also, yes, that is John Astin who played Gomez in The Adams Family.
The male lead comes in, also in a bathrobe. Unlike Eve, he has no questions so they clear the set for the nude scene and start filming.
Jessica leaves, incredulous, and we go to her meeting with Lydecker, who is arguing that nudity is necessary for the story. It reveals Jenny’s character. Jessica objects that in her story, “Jenny” was “Johnny,” the ten year old son of a Presbyterian minister.
Some arguing later, Lydecker reveals that he bought the rights to the book, not for the book itself or because it was a best-seller, but just for the title. To be fair to him, it’s a great title. A much better title to a murder mystery than to a horror film, I think it needs to be said, but a great title. Anyway, Lydecker points out that he bought all of the rights and can do whatever he wants. Jessica then tells him she’ll do whatever she has to do in order to stop the picture from being made, though of course her phrasing is such that the police will take it to have been a threat to kill him.
Incidentally, Jessica uses an interesting phrase to say that she doesn’t accept the situation: “Just because the Almighty gave people a taste for lobsters doesn’t mean that He gave lobsters a taste for being boiled alive.” It almost sounds like an old Downeast (a slang term for Maine) saying, but it’s just too wordy. Angela Lansbury does yeoman’s work making it sound natural, but let’s just say that when you google this phrase, the only things which turn up are quotations from this episode.
In the next scene, the low-level person from Carr, Strindberg & Roth shows up.
He’s Norman Lester, a junior member with the firm. He’s brought a copy of the contract with the publisher. Jessica reads it, in spite of Norman’s protests that it’s in legalese, and is chagrined to learn that Mr. Lydecker was right and she signed away all rights to interfere with the film. Jessica concludes that there’s nothing to do but to give Lydecker an apology.
There’s no explanation given as to why Jessica signed this contract. All they do is hang a lampshade on it by having Jessica say, “I can’t believe I signed this.” Yeah, that makes two of us. I suppose that’s the screenwriter asking us for a gimme, and what else are we going to do?
So Jessica goes to see Mr. Lydecker, but he’s not in. The secretary tells her to call Lydecker tomorrow, but Jessica replies, ominously, “What I must do cannot be done on the telephone.” I wonder who they’re going to suspect when Lydecker turns up dead?
Jessica goes looking for Lydecker on the sound stage and it looks interesting.
Other than light through a blue filter I don’t know what could be casting that blue light in and the ominous fog is just as unlikely. Also, I’m unclear on why she’s continuing to look around here since it’s obviously deserted. She wasn’t told that Lydecker was here and normally when you’re looking for a live person and come into a place that obviously doesn’t contain a living soul you look elsewhere rather than investigate every nook and cranny.
Fortunately for the plot, though, Jessica looks around to see if Lydecker is hiding.
When she gets near the “cemetery,” she finds him:
TK insert picture
And we go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica spots a clue…
…then runs into a security guard as she’s going for help. Literally. She bounces off a bit. He then asks her what she’s doing and she says, in the most guiltily unconvincing voice possible, that she was going to try to find the police because there’s been a dreadful accident on the stage.
The security guard, understandably, doesn’t believe her—I think he suspects her of being a thief—and brings her by the arm to go investigate the accident. Jessica points out Lydecker’s body and tells the guard that she thinks Lydecker was hit on the head with a heavy urn right next to him. The security guard uses his radio to call in the murder, then grabs Jessica and adds that he thinks he’s got the killer.
In the next scene police Lt. Mike Hernandez is examining the body. I guess the guard let her go when the police arrived without actually putting her in their custody, because after a few moments Jessica walks in and begins examining the crime scene.
The music is appropriately comedic. Lt Hernandez asks her whether she’s lost something and she tells him about the gold button. It’s not there now, though. Jessica doesn’t understand it because she was only gone for thirty seconds. She speculates that the killer was hiding behind the set, saw her find it, then retrieved it while she was going for help.
When Lt Hernandez asks who she is and she introduces herself, he recognized her name from the book the movie is based on, though he had mistakenly thought that J.B. Fletcher was a man. Jessica explains that the ‘B’ is for ‘Beatrice.’
Just as an aside, while male authors sometimes don’t like their first names and use initials, such as Clive Staples Lewis or Gilbert Keith Chesterton, when it comes to murder mysteries I’ve gotten the impression that women are more likely to go with initials than men are. In her autobiography, Agatha Christie mentions that she wanted to do that (or use a pseudonym, I forget which) because she didn’t think the books would sell with a woman’s name on them. Her publisher (A) thought that they would and (B) thought that “Agatha Christie” was a great name for an author. In retrospect, she admitted that the publisher was right and she was wrong.
Anyway, it turns out that Lt. Hernandez is thrilled to meet her—he’s a writer himself, though he hasn’t sold anything yet, but there is interest in his screenplay for a TV movie—and he asks her if she has any theories. Jessica then says that she leaves theories to the experts and she’s only a mystery writer, not a detective.
This is basically a bald-faced lie that she contradicted with looking for the button and will soon be contradicting again, so I’ve no idea why she said it. I guess the idea is to try to reluctantly draw her into the investigation, but that’s a bit silly after the previous two episodes we’ve seen. I’d say that it might be early days and they haven’t figured the character out, but they will occasionally, if rarely, do this throughout the rest of the show.
Anyway, Marta and the director come in. They had been in the women’s wardrobe discussing costumes and don’t know what happened—which they find out fairly directly. Marta is very affected and nearly faints. When Lt. Hernandez asks if either of them would know of someone with a motive to kill Lydecker, the director replies, “Anyone? Try everyone. Would the suspects please form a double line.”
The director then asks whether Eve shouldn’t be told. She left right after filming wrapped. He’d tell her but he has to talk to the studio executives. Marta says that there was no love lost between her and Eve, so it would probably be worse if she told Eve. Lt. Hernandez assigns the task to Jessica, which seems ludicrous, but she agrees.
Eve lives at Jerry’s beach house and the police give Jessica a ride there.
When she gets there, Jessica finds Eve drunk. After Jessica explains who she is and turns down several offers of alcohol and various kinds of recreational drugs, she asks where Jerry is and Jessica almost breaks the news to her but then decides that Eve needs to sober up first so she’ll understand. So she gives Eve a cold shower and some coffee, then breaks the news of Lydecker’s death. Eve is reluctant to believe it and takes it hard. She finally asks what happened, an accident or what, and Jessica tells her that somebody killed him. She’s devastated and hugs Jessica, who holds her as we fade to commercial break.
When we come back, Jessica is mobbed by reporters as she’s going back to her hotel room. Lt. Hernandez is with her and comes into her hotel room. He remarks on how nice it is, and she concurs.
As well she should; this is palatial. That said, I think it’s best to let this one go because small sets are very difficult to light without casting harsh shadows. It’s doable, but it requires effort, which is expensive. It’s the sort of thing that’s more worth it on movies.
He has some questions, one of which is whether she touched the urn. Someone went to the trouble of wiping the finger prints off of it, which an ordinary killer in a hurry wouldn’t think to do, but a mystery writer might. This isn’t his idea, mind. His Captain doesn’t have his writer’s mind and keen insight. He just sees that she had motive, means, and was caught leaving the scene of the crime. Jessica admits that when it’s put this way, she does sound like a suspect. He tells her that if she has any ideas, now is the time to share them.
She tells him, quite firmly, that she has no intention of trying to help him solve this murder. Quite a tone change from the previous two episodes, and again, this is basically a bald-faced lie. I don’t see how she expects him to believe it since she met Lt. Hernandez while she was trying to help solve the murder by finding an important clue (the button). Anyway, she is leaving tomorrow on the noon flight, unless that’s no longer an option.
Lt. Hernandez doesn’t directly answer that but instead said that he thought she’d want to stick around to see what Ross (the director, now also the new producer) does with the movie. That plus a look with a lot of subtext convinces Jessica to stick around.
The next day she is on the studio lot and meets the writer. He loved her book and is sorry he couldn’t have put more of it into his screenplay. (Ross invited the writer back, which is why he’s here.) The writer dishes on Ross; he’d spent a long time with no project until this one and he was originally the producer. Then Lydecker horned in, installed Eve, and forced Ross to withdraw as producer.
Lydecker’s death was a stroke of good luck for everyone. With this movie, they can now make it big. He takes her into the sound stage to show her.
Oh my. (Some pop/rock and roll music is playing, and there’s dancing.)
I looked it up and the music video to Michael Jackson’s Thriller was shown for the first time on MTV in December of 1983, less than a year before this episode aired. It seems a stretch to suggest it, I know, but it might have been an influence.
If you’ve never seen it, btw, it’s a bit long but definitely part of the cultural landscape which influenced this episode:
Anyway, Jessica runs into Marta, who remarks that Jessica looks bewildered. Jessica merely remarks that she thought that there was supposed to be a high school marching band parade and Marta says that the schedule has been changed since Eve said that her costume wasn’t ready. There was nothing actually wrong with it, though, she just likes to make Marta’s life difficult. The implication is that Eve is a prima donna, though it is also possible that the real reason she complained was that her uniform was missing a gold button. They are the sort of thing you find on high school marching band uniforms.
Jessica remarks that Marta said that there was no love lost between Marta and Eve, and Eve starts to give examples. On the first day of shooting, in a scene in which she was supposed to be drinking, someone put real vodka into her glass. Eve turned bright red and accused Marta of doing it. Why her? Because, before Eve wiggled her way into Lydecker’s heart, Marta used to live at Lydecker’s beach house. Jessica is enlightened.
Lt. Hernandez then comes in with Lydecker’s secretary and asks her to point out who threatened Lydecker in front of her and she identifies Jessica. She then repeats both of Jessica’s incriminating lines (about doing whatever needs to be done, and how what she needs to do cannot be done over the telephone). Lt. Hernandez then arrests Jessica, who is very surprised.
At the station he reveals that he isn’t actually arresting her, this was just a charade to throw off the real killer and give Jessica a chance to “do her thing.” Well, not a charade, exactly. On the secretary’s testimony she’s been upgraded to the prime suspect by the DA, but Lt. Hernandez still has faith that she’ll find the real killer and clear herself. This finally convinces Jessica to start solving the murder.
In the next scene, Norman the lawyer shows up at Jessica’s hotel and she puts him to work doing research on Eve’s medical history, the screenwriter’s alcoholism, the director’s financial status, and Marta’s relationship with Jerry Lydecker. While he does that research, Jessica has some stuff to do at the studio.
Since Norman mentioned that she’s been banned from the studio lot as a disruptive influence, she sneaks in on a tour bus, wearing a big hat. She finds Norman’s uncle who happens to be a camera operator in one of the small private theaters on the studio (people do have odd connections all over the place in Hollywood) and she watches what Mr. Lydecker was watching shortly before he was killed. It contains a scene with Eve in it where she is making out the lead actor. The scene is called (for some reason, with a snap board, which is only used for sound synchronization) and they continue to make out. Even after someone walks up asking them to stop because they need to move on.
Jessica has what she needs and leaves. She finds the male lead on the movie, which I think may be the same guy that Eve was making out with in the footage that Jessica just watched. Jessica tells him that she was just watching some rushes and he was wonderful. The buttering up works wonderfully and he offers to give Jessica a signed picture of himself to take back to Vermont with her. Jessica gratefully accepts. She then probes and finds out that he and Eve are, indeed, an item.
Jessica then goes to the wardrobe department.
She runs into a plump middle-aged woman named Eleanor, who is working on a costume. A little gossip later, she finds out that Marta and the director left the wardrobe department, on the day of the murder, before the police sirens. Also, Marta left first, they didn’t leave together. Jessica then gets a look at the old costumes and notes that there’s no drum majorette’s costume. Eleanor knows who took it and didn’t bring it back. (She may tell Jessica but if so it’s not on camera.)
We next see Jessica investigating Eve’s trailer when her repeated knock doesn’t bring anyone to the door. As she’s snooping around, the director bursts out of some of the clothes, knocks Jessica down as he rushes past her, and runs away. As Jessica gets out of the trailer and calls out, “Stop that man!” we go to commercial.
When we get back, Norman happens to round a corner in front of the director, hears Jessica’s call, and tackles him. Lt. Hernandez and another police officer arrive on the scene. They search the director and find the gold button in the director’s pocket. Lt. Hernandez takes this to mean that Ross was planting the gold button in Eve’s trailer. He arrests Ross and takes him away.
Norman congratulates Jessica on finding the real killer and clearing herself, but she still wants the information she sent him to find. He did find it, so he gives it to her. Ross was over-extended including a mortgage on his house. The screenwriter successfully kicked drugs but still has an alcohol problem. Eve has diabetis mellitus and takes oral medication. Marta used to be Lydecker’s mistress and once threatened to turn him into shish kabob for fooling around with younger women.
Norman suggests that they have a party for her solving the case and Jessica says that a party is a great idea. The next scene is at the beach house with all of the suspects (except for Ross, of course, who is in police custody).
I can’t imagine how they’d all agree to come to this party, so it’s probably a good thing that they didn’t try to explain. Various people propose toasts, and Jessica’s toast is to Ross, who was wrongfully accused of murder. Marta and the screenwriter then excuse themselves. Next Scott (the male lead) makes his excuses and leaves, insincerely saying that he’ll call her.
That leaves just Jessica and Eve.
Jessica tells her that (according to his confession) while Jessica was busy with the guard, Ross came onto the scene by another entrance, knew at once who killed Lydecker, took the button, polished the urn, and left as he came in.
Jessica tells Eve that there’s still time to tell her story to Lt Hernandez. Lydecker caught on that she was having an affair with her co-star, right before he went to the set to discuss the costumes she didn’t like, which was why she was wearing the drum majorette costume at the time.
Eve starts talking.
Lydecker wanted to drop Scott from the movie. Moreover, he was going to try to ruin Scott’s career by spreading it around that he was fired for not learning his lines, not showing up on time, etc. So she had to do something; she hit him with the urn. She didn’t know she’d lost a button, she drove to the beach house in the costume.
Jessica says that this was why Ross couldn’t find the costume in her dressing room. He was trying to put the button back on it when Jessica walked in on him. It wasn’t to protect Eve so much as to protect the picture. He desperately needed a success and couldn’t afford to have his star arrested for murder.
Jessica admits that Eve’s pretending to be drunk fooled Jessica. She adds that people don’t give Eve enough credit as an actress. She only thought about it later and realized that real drinkers don’t mix scotch whiskey with diet cola. And then there was the story about her turning red from vodka—there’s a diabetic medication which will do that. Jessica realized Eve was just faking being drunk to give herself an alibi.
When Jessica asks if Eve wants to make the phone call to the police or wants Jessica to do it, Eve gets pensive and replies, “It’s funny. I never wanted to be a movie star. That was Jerry’s idea. I’d have done anything for him. Jerry. Scott. I sure know how to pick ’em, don’t I, Mrs. Fletcher?”
And with that, we go to credits.
It’s often the case that the writers of a TV show don’t really know what the show wants to be at first and Murder, She Wrote certainly seems to be no exception to that. This episode is quite at odds with the previous two as far as Jessica wanting to investigate the murder. Frankly, I can’t imagine why the writers ever thought it would be interesting to have the main character keep wanting to not do what we want to see her do. It’s not like in an action film where there are moral reasons for the hero to try everything else before using violence.
The episode is also quite comedic in nature, almost to the point where you can’t take it seriously. Approximately everything about the movie is satire that pushes well past the point of plausibility. In the 1980s, slasher films were low budget films. They could be popular enough and certainly could be profitable—Halloween grossed $70M on a budget of $300K—but they weren’t prestigious and generally weren’t shot on sound stages or had hundreds of custom-made costumes by workers in a costume department. (In Halloween, many of the actors wore their own clothes.)
I’m not sure how much the things the episode gets wrong about movies would impact its satire/plausible balance among the average viewer. For example, the interview with Lydecker that gets Jessica onto a plane makes no sense. The interviewer asks Lydecker about the scene in which the psychopath uses a flame thrower on a gang of break dancers. There was no way for him to know that since it wasn’t in the book and movies don’t hand their scripts out to the public and B-movie producers don’t give national TV interviews about specific scenes in a movie which is only partway through principal photography. The scene is funny, but so detached from reality that to me it only registers as parody.
Now, it may well have been meant as parody. I kind of think that it was. But that’s a bit strange coming after the previous two episodes, which certainly had moments of humor but were serious. And then, given how much of this episode was a parody, it ended on a serious note rather than with a joke.
It’s also curious to see that when we get to something that the writers (presumably) know a lot about—Hollywood—the episode is no more realistic than it’s about things that they almost certainly know nothing about. Big business, for example. And it’s not just a case of sacrificing realism for the demands of the plot. They just don’t care. There are all sorts of things which would have been no harder to make realistic. To give an example: Lydecker could have broken promises he assured the screenwriter didn’t need to be in the contract, rather than a contract coming through after principle photography already started and it being talked about as if the screenwriter had no choice about whether to accept it.
The mystery was also a little bit thin in this episode. There was a single clue—the button—and it was never explained how this clue got where it was. Yes, they established it was from the costume that Eve was wearing, but how did it come off? There was no struggle and Eve just hit Lydecker with the nearest object to hand and he went down immediately. Nothing there would have ripped a button off of her costume. And the thing is, a clue like a button should have some relationship to the crime. This is just an artistic thing—buttons do sometimes randomly fall off for no observable reason—but random events are far less satisfying. A button randomly falling off is better than the murderer accidentally leaving his wallet at the scene of the crime, but they’re both towards the bottom of the barrel.
Actually, I’m being a bit unfair when I say that was the only clue—there was also the clue that Eve never drunk alcohol. And, I suppose, there was the clue that Eve was having an affair with her co-star. That last one came quite late, though.
I’m not sure what to make of Norman reporting that Eve has diabetes. On the one hand, diabetics shouldn’t drink a lot of alcohol, but on the other hand plenty of diabetics do things which aren’t great for their health. And either way, how on earth did Norman find this out? Even in the 1980s doctors didn’t just give out medical information on their patients to random strangers. And how was he supposed to get that information? Call up every doctor in the county and ask if she’s their patient? This isn’t an insuperable problem, but it does feel more than a little far-fetched.
Eve’s character is a bit weird in this episode, too. She seems to want to be a good actress, but then at the end she says that she never wanted to be an actress—that was Lydecker’s idea. She would have done anything for him. Except for not publicly cheat on him with her co-star, apparently. Be that last part as it may, why on earth did Lydecker take a non-actress girlfriend and turn her into an actress? And in films with sex scenes? For a jealous man, this is an obviously counter-productive thing to do. I find his speech about how, when she’s a big star, she won’t have time for anyone but him. Why did he get her into acting? Had she just been his wife, she’d have had a lot more time to be around him and be put into the arms of younger men quite a bit less.
I also can’t help but comment on her motive for murder. I usually don’t do this in Murder, She Wrote because limiting murder mysteries to to realistic motives for murder would tend to make them monotonous and predictable (at least if by “realistic” we mean “common”). However, hearing that her lover intended to ruin the career of her other lover has a much safer solution than murder: she could have threatened to leave Lydecker if he spread rumors about Scott. On any realistic appraisal, being fired from a low budget slasher film wouldn’t hurt anyone’s career if Lydecker left it at that. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t have Lydecker attack her in a rage and she strike him in fear. That would be more common for later Murder, She Wrote episodes and would explain the button better.
Oh well.
Looking at things that worked, I do think that the humor worked as humor, if not always as the setup for a murder mystery.
I enjoyed the character of Lt. Hernandez. I’m conflicted over whether he was a simple character or a Colombo-style clever man pretending to be simple. I’d far prefer him to be the latter, though the way that he needed Jessica to point out his grounds for searching the director makes me fear it might be the former. All the talk about what his Captain and the DA think would have worked very well as a Colombo-style ruse. The way he answered Jessica asking if she was free to go home with his sly answer of thinking she’d want to see what was going on which worked some intriguing clues into his reasoning felt Colombo-like. The problem with my preferred theory was that it had no payoff—no moment where the mask was dropped. I think that’s a real pity.
It might be objected that if the police are smart there’s nothing for Jessica to do and it’s Murder, She Wrote not Murder, Somebody Else Solved. While the point about the titles is correct, it’s not actually a problem to have an intelligent police officer as long as Jessica has access to some clues which he doesn’t have. It would also give Jessica an opportunity to have an intelligent conversation with someone, which would be a nice change of pace.
Another strong point of the episode are the characters of Marta Quintessa and the screenwriter. They were both likable. They had personalities which felt real. I appreciated that they got good send-offs which made them feel like characters with a future.
I also liked the beginning of the episode. It was nice to have Jessica start out at home. I appreciate the grounding that provides. I also appreciated the episode showing her working on the plot to one of her books. A big part of the fun of murder mysteries is thinking about them and it was nice to see Jessica thinking about her plot and not merely typing away at her typewriter.
Next week’s episode brings us to the south for It’s a Dog’s Life.
Tzvi Reading The Lantern Bearers
My friend Tzvi put up a video in which he gave a reading of the Robert Louis Stevenson essay, The Lantern Bearers. You can watch it on his substack.
It’s an interesting essay and Tzvi reads it well. I especially like the part where Stevenson discusses the interior life of the miser, though it’s only next to the main point of the essay. The main point, or at least what I take to be the main point, is that the makers of art are too apt to think themselves full, because they know themselves, and to think other men empty because they do not know them. (Admittedly, Part 1 of the essay is a little slow, though it was appropriate to the style of the day, which was necessary to make the point it made in the time in which it was written. It very much rewards bearing with it.)
This is a bit of a tangent, but the essay calls to mind this section out of G.K. Chesterton’s book The Well and the Shallows:
It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious. A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing. A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing. Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not. And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty. Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not. It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed. And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility. The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.
Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which
…. tempering pious zeal
Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”And though I have much of such courtesy to be thankful for, both in conversation and criticism, I must do justice to the more dogmatic type, where I feel it to be right. And I will say firmly that it is the author who says, “One does feel,” who is really an egoist; and the author who says, “I believe,” who is not an egoist. We all know what is meant by a truly beautiful essay; and how it is generally written in the light or delicate tone of, “One does feel.” I am perfectly well aware that all my articles are articles, and that none of my articles are essays. An essay is often written in a really graceful and exquisitely balanced style, which I doubt if I could imitate, though I might try. Anyhow, it generally deals with experiences of a certain unprovocative sort in a certain unattached fashion; it begins with something like. . . .
“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion. Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’. The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky. Nor indeed inaptly: it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”
I think I might learn to do it some day; though not by a commercial correspondence course; but the truth is that I am very much occupied. I confess to thinking that the things which occupy me are more important; but I am disposed to deny that the thing I think important is myself. And in justice not only to myself but to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Mencken and many another man in the same line of business, I am moved to protest that the other literary method, the method of, “One does feel,” is much more really arrogant than ours. The man in Mr. Shaw’s play remarks that who says artist says duellist. Perhaps, nevertheless, Mr. Shaw is too much of a duellist to be quite an artist. But anyhow, I will affirm, on the same model, that who says essayist says egoist. I am sorry if it is an alliteration, almost a rhyme and something approaching to a pun. Like a great many such things, it is also a fact.
Even in the fancy example I have given, and in a hundred far better and more beautiful extracts from the real essayists, the point could be shown. If I go out of my way to tell the reader that I smoke Virginian cigarettes, it can only be because I assume the reader to be interested in me. Nobody can be interested in Virginian cigarettes. But if I shout at the reader that I believe in the Virginian cause in the American Civil War, as does the author of The American Heresy, if I thunder as he does that all America is now a ruin and an anarchy because in that great battle the good cause went down — then I am not an egoist. I am only a dogmatist; which seems to be much more generally disliked. The fact that I believe in God may be, in all modesty, of some human interest; because any man believing in God may affect any other man believing in God. But the fact that I do not believe in gold-fish, as ornaments in a garden pond, cannot be of the slightest interest to anybody on earth, unless I assume that some people are interested in anything whatever that is connected with me. And that is exactly what the true elegant essayist does assume. I do not say he is wrong; I do not deny that he also in another way represents humanity and uses a sort of artistic fiction or symbol in order to do so. I only say that, if it comes to a quarrel about being conceited, he is far the more conceited of the two. The one sort of man deals with big things noisily and the other with small things quietly. But there is much more of the note of superiority in the man who always treats of things smaller than himself than the man who always treats of things greater than himself.
Dogmatists, being fallen creatures, have faults. But I think it worth saying that among their faults, one does not find that they assume other men’s interior lives to be empty merely because they do not know them. Dogmatists are the great democrats of life, in the Chestertonian sense of the word “democrat”—they believe all men equal before the Law. Quite annoyingly to their neighbors, they also have a tendency to believe that all men are equally interested in the law. This may annoy their neighbors, but at least it does not insult them.
Jessica Fletcher’s Family Tree
After a bit of googling, I found an interesting post on a blog called Murder, She Watched. (As a side note: female fans of Murder, She Wrote have a definite leg up when it comes to naming their writing about it.) It contains Jessica’s family tree as portrayed on all the episodes.
(Out of respect, I’m only posting a thumbnail. You have to go to her blog for a legible version, which she clearly put a lot of work into.)
Some of the notes on it confirm a suspicion I have about this project: a lot of the episodes are very vague about Jessica’s connection to her relatives. Many of them we don’t get last names or maiden names on, so there are a lot of possible family trees which would match.
Another interesting thing which I learned from the chart and should have known but never thought of is that Grady Fletcher, Jessica’s favorite nephew and far-and-away most often shown relative, is actually Frank’s nephew and only related to Jessica by marriage.
One other thought on this is that Jessica actually had a lot fewer nieces than one gets the impression she has. Murder, She Watched counted twenty relatives seen on screen, of whom only eleven are adult nieces or nephews (I’m not counting the two young children of one of Jessica’s nieces). That’s actually less than one per season.
Murder She Wrote: Birds of a Feather
On the fourteenth day of October in the year of our Lord 1984 the second episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Birds of a Feather, it features one of Jessica’s nieces and takes place in San Francisco. (Last week’s episode was Deadly Lady.)
We open with a man in an ugly track suit jogging on a road next to the sea. A man in a white suit gets out of his small car and starts jogging next to the man in the track suit, saying that they need to talk.
The man in the white suit needs his money, and the man in the track suit says that the man in the white suit will get it when he’s finished. We learn that the man in the white suit is named Howard, and that he won’t get a time unless he is “there” tonight. Howard is unhappy but accepts this answer and the man in the track suit runs off.
When he gets to his car, it turns out that another man in a white suit is waiting for him.
Well, a man in a white jacket, at least. His name is Mike. He calls the guy in the brown track suit Al. Mike thought that they had a deal, and Al says that they do, Mike just needs to be patient. Mike says that he’s been patient for six months and he thinks that Al is just pulling his chain. Al asks if he got the money, and Mike replies that that’s his problem. Al then tells him to be careful. Things have been going real good, but he can live without Mike. Mike pokes Al in the chest for emphasis as he replies that anybody can live without anybody. Mike then leaves.
The dialog is intentionally vague to stir up the audience’s curiosity. If we want to learn what this is all about we won’t change the channel or go to bed early. Ironically, though, it’s actually far more realistic than the exposition one normally finds at the beginning of episodes. A typical show might begin with, “Well, if it isn’t Al Drake, manager of my favorite night club.” “Hi there Mike Dupont. Still hoping to buy out the contract of my lead act?” No one actually talks like that, though through exposure we come to accept it. I find it amusing that the realism is an accidental byproduct.
The scene then cuts to a young woman named Victoria who’s talking to a priest about her upcoming wedding.
It’s going to be a very simple wedding. Intimate. The priest says that they can still make it festive, with flowers on both sides of the alter, but Victoria says that she’s allergic to flowers.
When the priest asks exactly how intimate this wedding will be, she says that she just arrived from NY, her Aunt just arrived from Maine, and then just Howard and maybe a few of his friends.
Yes. That Howard.
He comes in a minute later and apologizes for being late, saying that traffic was terrible when he came from the office. Victoria tells him about dinner reservations she made and a minor fight ensues as he says that he can’t make it. In the fight we get a little backstory that he’s been busy every night for the last five nights.
The scene then shifts to Victoria and Jessica at the restaurant, where a small joke about the lobsters being Maine lobsters is made before they’re shown to their table. (The lobsters aren’t active; when Jessica asks if he’s sure that they’re Maine lobsters he says that they’re flown in fresh every day. Jessica says that perhaps the lobsters have jet lag.)
It’s an interesting restaurant.
Not very crowded, despite this being, in theory, a dinner engagement. That’s cheaper to film, of course. It’s very fancy in a dimly lit, hard-to-see-the-details kind of way. There were real restaurants like that back in the 1980s and for all I know, still are. It’s cheaper to look fancy if people can’t look to closely at the fancy stuff, both in TV and in real life.
Over dinner, Victoria tells Jessica about her history with Howard—she met him about a year ago in New York City. He was acting in an off-broadway show. He works in insurance (as his latest job—he had been a cab driver in New York), but aspires to be an actor. Then she breaks down and tells Jessica about her worries. She’s been in town five days but they haven’t gone out at night even once. And she went to Howard’s office the day before to surprise him and they told her that Howard hadn’t worked there for a month. Jessica says, knowingly, “Oh,” and takes a drink of wine.
She drinks it as if she wants the alcohol in it. I know I’m skipping ahead a bit, but this is very unusual for Jessica. (She rarely drinks except to comment on how fine the extremely rare wine which requires a refined palate to enjoy is.) I guess they’re still feeling the character out at this point.
Anyway, yesterday, Howard had circles under his eyes and smelled like perfume. And today he lent her a handkerchief and the lipstick on it was not her shade. And matches from a nightclub were all over his apartment. She’s considered going to the nightclub, but if she loves Howard, how can she justify spying on him?
Jessica replies, “For your own peace of mind, I think you have to.” Her tone suggests that this is sage advice, but it really isn’t. She could have said, “You can do it for Howard’s sake. If there’s something he’s afraid to tell you about, you can have the courage for him.” Or, “For the sake of the children you may have with Howard, you owe it to them to make sure you can both go through with the marriage.” Or “marriage shouldn’t be entered into with secrets and if he’s not strong enough to tell you his secrets, you should do it for him in case it’s something you can accept.” All of these actually address Victoria’s concern. Jessica’s reply that Victoria just needs to be more selfish is… bad advice.
The scene cuts to the night club, which is a relatively classy place.
Before long the camera goes to Al, who is filling in for the host, and a well-dressed man named Patterson walks in.
It turns out that he’s the agent for Freddy, a comedian with a four-year contract at the club. Al’s interpretation of their contract is that Freddy can’t do anything else, while Patterson’s interpretation is that Freddy is free to do other stuff on the side. Patterson recently got Freddy on a talk show and now he’s hot. Al, however, is unmoved, except in the sense that he says “this is what we have courts for” and walks off.
Jessica and Victoria come in. They ask for a table for two but the host says that he can seat them next Thursday. Victoria then identifies Al as being in charge from some posters on the wall and walks up to him, explains that she and her Aunt want a table, and then explains how famous Jessica is. Al sees to it that they’re seated immediately.
I’d like to pause to take note of what she actually says. Assuming that she’s telling the truth—and I suspect that she is—Jessica has six best-seller books, was on a talk show this morning, and will meet the mayor the next day. Since the pilot episode depicts Jessica’s first book being published, obviously a lot of time has passed between the pilot and the main series.
The first act we see is Freddy York, the performer whose agent showed up and talked with Al a few minutes ago.
His shtick is that he plays the drums as his own backup and does the rim-shots for his own jokes. His outfit is really amazing; I believe it’s intended to be sincere. The episode was shot in 1984, which was only four years after the 1970s when collars like this were hot stuff. I suspect it’s meant to indicate that he’s a little stuck in the past, but not very much. His jokes, incidentally, aren’t terrible, though they are neither very witty nor very classy. After a few of them, we cut to a glamorous older woman walking in.
It turns out that this is Al’s wife. Since Al’s last name is Drake, she’s Mrs. Drake. The host greets her very politely, but there’s a bit of ice in the air. When he asks if Al is expecting her, she replies she very much doubts it. She’s shown to her table immediately, of course. Once she’s on her way to her table, the host grabs a bus boy and tells him to go find Al and tell him that his wife is here.
As the busboy is looking for Al back stage, he runs into a woman who asks him what he’s doing back stage.
We actually saw her before and it seemed so minor an interaction I didn’t think it worth mentioning. She had some banter with Al before Freddy’s agent came in. Since she may play a bigger role than I anticipated: her name is Barbara. Anyway, she tells the busboy to go back to the front and she’ll tell Al.
The moderately funny comedian who does his own rim shots tells a final joke—which Mrs. Drake applauds vigorously—then he profusely tells the crowd that they’re beautiful, wonderful, and every good thing, then takes his leave. Jessica then asks Victoria if she’s noticed that there’s something a little off about this club. Victoria doesn’t know what Jessica means. Frankly, neither do I.
Somebody in a silver dinner jacket then introduced the “chanteuse” they’ve all been waiting for.
After a few introductory bars and the length of time it takes to sing “There’s a somebody I’m longin’ to see. I hope that he turns out—” we hear a scream. Then a female figure in a fancy dress runs off the stage and through the crowd, towards the front door. Right behind it, Barbara runs onto the stage and calls out, “Stop him! He’s a murderer!”
A police officer shows up at the front door cutting off that exit, so the figure then tries several other avenues of escape before crashing into Jessica and Victoria’s table. His wig falls off and we get to see who it is.
It’s a surprise, though it shouldn’t be. This is exactly the kind of twist that TV shows of the 1980s loved, all the more, right before a commercial break. Which is what happens after some shocked recognition between Howard and Victoria and Jessica being surprised that this is Howard.
We come in from commercial to an establishing shot of a police car driving with its sirens on, followed by an interior of the club in confusion. Amidst the confusion we do learn that Al was shot.
Howard is being kept locked in a room with a security guard keeping watch on the door. Victoria comes up and persuades the guard to let her in. She’s so happy that it turns out the thing he was hiding was just a job that most of what they do is kiss until Lt. Novak shows up and is surprised to see them passionately embracing. He takes it in stride, however, and merely asks the security guard which one is the suspect (“the tall one”) then directs that he be taken down to the station and booked.
The scene then shifts to the scene of the murder, with Lt. Novak entering and taking charge.
His manner is very matter-of-fact. Interviewing the assembled crowd of people, he asks who saw the murder and Barbara answers that she did, or, rather, she walked past the open door and saw Howard standing over Al holding the gun. The Lt. looks at the ground and sees a gun. Picking it up with a pencil he remarks that, having a smooth grip, they may get some fingerprints from it.
This musing is interrupted by the sound of a bird—a white cockatoo—cawing and then Jessica interrupts to ask if Lt. Novak noticed a small white feather on Al’s jacket. Instead of answering, the Lt. asks her to leave. The manner is curious; he asks if she’ll do him a big favor and she eagerly replies that she’ll do anything at all to help. He then asks her to get out of here and she is crestfallen. Apparently, by now, Jessica is used to joining the police on murder investigations.
The scene changes to the next day, at the police station, in Lt. Novak’s office, with Lt. Novak finishing interviewing Freddy York (in the same clothes as he was wearing on the night before). After signing his statement, Freddy express his lack of sympathy and leaves. Right after, Jessica knocks on the door and enters. Novak doesn’t want to talk with her but she uses her clout and fame to bully him into cooperating.
He relents and gives her a brief infodump. The suspect was seen standing over the body holding the gun. The only fingerprints on the gun belong to the suspect. It was common knowledge that he’d been arguing with Al Drake about money. The gun was stolen from a pawn shop about six months ago, in New York city, where Howard lived at the time.
She asks if he conducted a nitric acid test to determine whether Howard fired the gun. He replies that they haven’t gotten to it yet, and she tells him that he’d better get to it soon because after a few hours the test is meaningless. (According to Wikipedia, this is accurate. Gunshot residue tends to only last on living hands for 4-6 hours since it is easily wiped off by incidental contact with objects.) Since the murder took place the previous night and it is now past sunrise, the crucial window has already expired, so it’s a bit weird that Jessica is telling the Lt. to get to the gunshot residue test soon. (A nitric acid solution is used to swab the area to be tested as the first step, which is, I believe, why she’s referring to it as a nitric acid test.)
She then demands to see Howard and doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
Howard is brought to the Lt.’s office, who gives them privacy for some reason. Howard is confused since he’s never met Jessica before, but she takes charge. Jessica directly asks him if he killed Al Drake and he says he did not, Al was dead when he walked into the room. He had just finished his act and went into Al’s office to get his money and quit. This is a bit odd because we saw the act right before Al was found dead and it was Freddy’s comedy routine. (I suspect that this is just a plot hole and not a hole in his story.) We get a flashback which seems plausible enough with Howard having a one-sided conversation with Al for a bit, since Al was facing the wall, and he only realized that Al was dead when he turned Al’s chair around to make him talk to him. Since this may be important later (someone may have thought Al was alive when he was actually dead), let’s look at how the chair was when Howard entered the room:
You can’t see anything that indicates that Al is dead, but on the other hand this is a very weird thing for a living man to do. If you came into a room and saw a man sitting in a chair motionless staring at a dark wall, I think you’d be a lot more likely to check on him than to just assume he’s lost in thought. That said, there’s a good chance that this indicates a significantly earlier time of death.
Anyway, after finally turning the chair around when he got tired of Mr. Blake “ignoring” him, he staggers around in shock for a bit, notices it’s incriminating that he’s holding the gun that probably shot Mr. Blake, then Barbara comes in the door, sees the scene, and screams, at which point Howard panics and bolts.
Jessica says that she’s quite relieved because there’s only been one killer in the family, in 1777, and the red coat shot first. She then pivots to wondering what Barbara was doing in the office and Howard bowdlerizes to “Everyone knew that she and Mr. Drake worked late. A lot. Together.”
Jessica knowingly says, “I get the idea.”
She then says that she’s got the name of a very good lawyer and asks if there’s anything else he needs, to which he sheepishly replies, “pants.”
The scene then shifts to Jessica on the phone with Lt. Novak, presumably some time later. He lets her know that they’ve narrowed the time of the murder down to between 9:50 and 10:05. Jessica asks if that isn’t a bit precise for a medical examiner and he replies that it didn’t come from the medical examiner, it’s when York was performing and the banging of his drums covered the sound of the shot.
There’s an interesting exchange which follows the end of their conversation. Lt. Novak asks his assistant, “What is it about that woman that makes me nervous?” The assistant replies, “I think she’s kind of cute.”
I find it interesting because it’s explicitly framing Jessica’s investigations. The police are officially not thrilled with Jessica investigating, but we—the audience—know that this is a mistake on their part. The assistant thus provides some ambiguity here. It certainly makes more sense than Amos Tupper taking both roles, as he did in Deadly Lady.
The scene changes to Jessica at the club during the day. She runs into Freddy’s agent for some reason. He asks if she has an agent on the west coast, but she does. He directs her to where she can find Barbara (she asked), and then takes a moment to look suspicious for the camera.
I think that the equivalent of this, in a novel, is to give us a glimpse into the characters thoughts which is highly misleading if taken out of context, which is how we get it. “‘I hope she doesn’t find out,’ he thought.” Then later we discover it was a different ‘she’ and the thing to not find out was something completely unrelated—if the book is halfway decently constructed, a red herring that the detective uncovers and this explains “why you were acting so funny when I spoke about [name].” It’s a bit of a cheap trick, but it does make the viewer/reader feel like they need to keep on their toes, which they want to feel like.
We then see Mrs. Blake talking to two men—the host and someone I don’t recognize. The upshot is that she’s intending to run things now that Al is gone. She also picks a fight with their leading female impersonator, who storms off to his dressing room. She yells at him to never turn his back on her and follows. Once they’re in his dressing room and close the door their manner changes entirely, they embrace, and passionately kiss. And on that bombshell, we go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica walks into Freddy’s dressing room by mistake, where he’s sitting at his mirror for some reason. He says that it’s too bad about Howard, the kid’s got talent and not just at wearing dresses. He makes some jokes about how his own talent is wasted in a dump like this; in Las Vegas a llama who’s part of an act has a better dressing room that he does. Jessica says that it’s not so bad and at least he’s got a window with a great view. He jokes that it’s his manager, Patterson: he couldn’t get Freddy any more money so he got him a window. When he asks if Jessica wanted to see him about something she excuses herself for intruding and leaves.
When Jessica finally finds Barbara, Mrs. Drake is firing her.
Jessica catches her carrying a box full of her stuff out of the office and offers to give her a lift in the taxi she’s in. Barbara accepts.
Jessica reads Barbara as a gossipy sort of woman and so plays a gossip herself. She shares the news that Al was already dead when Howard got there and Barbara accepts it without question. She goes on to say that she wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Drake did it. She also is aware of the affair she’s having with the female impersonator (his name is Mike). He was actually trying to buy the club. She also could believe that Mr. Patterson killed him because Freddy was under a seven year contract.
She gets out at her apartment and the scene shifts to Mike waiting near the ocean for Mrs. Drake. I’ve just realized that Mike was the second guy who talked to Al at the very beginning of the episode. Asking Mike if he raised the money was probably a reference to buying the club.
Anyway, he complains that Mrs. Drake kept him waiting and asks if this is a sign of things to come. She’s apologetic and gets to the point: she wants to know if he killed Al (which, she professes, wouldn’t make any difference to her if he did). Funnily enough, he had the same question for her, and it also wouldn’t make any difference to him if she did. After some closeups in which the actors try to look as suspicious as humanly possible, the scene ends.
This sort of scene will become a staple of Murder, She Wrote episodes, especially towards the middle. Once you notice them it becomes way easier to figure out who the murderer is: whoever doesn’t get a closeup of them looking suspicious.
In the next scene Jessica catches up with Lt. Novak at the club. She inquires about the nitric acid test and it came back negative. The Lt. says that Howard could have been wearing gloves when he shot Al and Jessica points out that if he was, there wouldn’t have been finger prints all over the gun and he can’t have it both ways.
Jessica then questions Lt. Novak’s theory about the gunshot being masked by Freddy’s drum act, so they do some experimentation with the assistant firing a gun in the murder room and Jessica and Lt. Novak in front of the stage with various amounts of noise being produced, and no matter how much noise, they still hear the shot. Lt. Novak takes that to mean that the only possible explanation is it being covered by the sound of Freddy’s drums. Why they tested every other source of noise except for Freddy’s drums isn’t explained.
Anyway, Freddy comes out and demands to know what’s going on—is Mrs. Fletcher suggesting that one of them killed Al? At that moment a string of heavy stage lights falls down almost killing Jessica and Freddy.
Freddy dives in front of the lights, Jessica steps back to avoid them. When the camera finds Freddy he’s on the ground holding his neck in great pain, probably from the dive and landing on the ground.
The scene then shifts to Jessica knocking on the door of Lt. Novak’s apartment the next morning. She woke him up but is only very slightly concerned at this given that Lt. Novak has been working all night again. She needs to talk to him about Howard.
He’s friendlier than normal, explaining that his hates-everyone approach is just his office persona. They go over the list of possible suspects, but for some reason he’s convinced that Howard is guilty. I don’t really get this because it’s at odds with his theory that the drums covered the sound of the gun—unless he’s willing to postulate that, after shooting Al, Howard just stood around holding the gun for up to a quarter of an hour.
Anyway, after Jessica goes over some facts which incriminate other suspects including the affair between Mrs. Drake and Mike—which Lt. Novak didn’t know—he tells her that she’d have made a great cop but asks her to leave the policing to the police. She responds that she wouldn’t dream of interfering, which is odd because she’s very clearly happy to interfere, for example demanding that Lt. Novak do a nitric acid test and demanding that he take time out of the investigation to talk to her or she’ll badmouth him on television.
Anyway, he clarifies that her interfering isn’t what he’s worried about. Lab results indicate that the lights falling wasn’t an accident. The rope was eaten through with acid. Jessica’s interpretation was that someone was trying to kill Freddy York. Lt. Novak’s interpretation was that she was the target. We get a wide-eyed reaction shot from Jessica then switch scenes to a courtroom where Howard is bailed out. Jessica apparently posted bail for him, since she tells him that if he jumps bail the state of California has an option on her next four books.
In the hallway as they are leaving, Jessica asks Howard if he saw Mrs. Drake backstage during Freddy’s performance and he’s sure that he didn’t, but he did see her come in the stage door just before he went on. This isn’t very helpful to us because we never saw him on stage and there wasn’t really a time for him to have been on stage, but it helps Jessica because she isn’t deterred by plot holes in the same way that the audience is.
Accordingly, she goes and visits Mrs. Drake, who is playing golf. In between insincere condolences Jessica asks if Mrs. Drake saw her husband shortly before he died and she said that she didn’t, she came in during Freddy’s set. Jessica replies that it’s strange, then, that someone said they saw her come in before Freddy’s set. Mrs. Drake takes offense at this and says that she didn’t kill her husband, and if Jessica insists on sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, she should look into Freddy York. His contract was a personal services contract with Al, not with the club, and when she brought Freddy flowers in the hospital, Freddy gave her notice that he was quitting.
I do need to partially take back what I said about us never seeing Howard on stage. Just in case I missed something I went back and it looks like Howard actually was on stage a little before Jessica and Victoria came in. If you look closely during the opening shot at the club, you can see Howard on the stage:
You never see him clearly and almost immediately the camera pulls back and focuses on other things. And we’re looking at this in DVD quality. In broadcast quality back in 1984, it would have been extremely hard to make that out as Howard. Anyway, this introduces a timing problem. Howard confronted Al Drake after Freddy York’s set was over, but according to Howard, also, “I finished my act, then I went back to his office to quit and get my money.” In the flashback he was wearing his stage costume. This means he spent the entire length of Freddy’s performance doing nothing before he went to confront Al.
Anyway, Jessica takes Mrs. Drake’s story about visiting Freddy in the hospital to mean that Freddy is well enough to receive visitors and decides to pay a visit to Freddy herself. Accordingly, the scene shifts to the hospital, where Freddy and his agent are drinking champagne and celebrating all of the great things they’re going to do now that Freddy is free. Jessica walks in and Bill Paterson (the agent) basically yells at her to stop investigating, since neither he nor Freddy killed Al, and Freddy was not only on stage when it happened, someone later tried to kill him with the lights. Jessica replies that that’s a bit of a puzzler, since Mike thinks the lights were an attempt to kill him, Lt. Novak thinks that they were an attempt to kill Jessica, and Bill thinks that they were an attempt to kill Freddy. And on that… bang snap… we go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica is walking to her hotel room while Howard and Vicki argue over whether they should postpone the wedding (Howard says yes until he’s cleared, Vicki says no, they should get married right away). They ask Jessica what she thinks and what she thinks is that she needs a nap. Vicki asks if the builders working away in the room next to Jessica’s won’t keep her awake.
Jessica replies that right now she could sleep through Armageddon. She then tells them that she promises that they will get to the bottom of this. She’s sure she’s overlooking something, and it will come to her if she get some sleep.
Jessica goes and lies down, but contrary to her imagined ability to sleep through Armageddon, all of the power tools do keep her up. She then holds the pillow over her ears…
…and comes to a realization of what she had been overlooking.
She then shows up in Lt. Novak’s apartment. What she had forgot was the small white feather on Al Drake. Drake wasn’t shot during Freddy’s performance because the killer used a silencer! When Lt. Novak objects that they don’t make a silencer for that kind of gun, Jessica says that it wasn’t a metal silencer. It was a pillow. That explains the small white feather, which didn’t come from the cockatoo in Drake’s office. (It was an office pet.)
They then go to the scene of the murder and Lt. Novak picks up the pillow in the office and it has no bullet hole. But, Jessica points out, the pillow wasn’t there on the night of the murder. Don’t take her word for it, look at these police photos. When asked how she got police photos, Jessica says that his assistant, Charlie, gave them to her. He really is a very nice man.
Anyway, this shows that the pillow that’s there now was placed there after the investigation, presumably because the one that was there had to be removed because it was damaged when it was used to muffle the sound of the shot.
Jessica then asks Lt. Novak to take part in an experiment. They go to the stage and she has Lt. Novak stand in a precise location on the stage, then goes backstage and drops some sandbags on him. Or would have, had Lt. Novak not stepped out of the way when he heard the sandbags descending. She points out that he heard it, and he replies that of course he did, he’s not deaf. Jessica replies, “and neither was Freddy York.”
At this, Freddy steps out from back stage, applauding. He tells Jessica that she’s quite a performer. She says that it was quite a performance that he put on, diving off the stage when he didn’t have to.
Freddy counters that all she’s proved is that he could have staged the falling lights.
I’m not sure how she’s supposed to have proved that. All she proved—to the degree that she proved anything—was that Freddy was able to get out of the way of the lights because he would have heard them. But that was never at issue. He did get out of the way of the lights, so he got out of the way somehow, and hearing them just as Lt. Novak did is as good a way as anything else. Weirdly, though, it required no proof that he could have staged the lights because the rope was eaten through with acid, which he could have put on the rope before coming out on stage, because anybody could have put the acid on the rope before Freddy came out on stage.
Anyway, he goes on to say that this doesn’t prove that he had anything to do with what happened to Al Drake and while Freddy would love to stick around, he’s got to fly to Vegas—he hopes his arms don’t get tired. He then tells them that they’re beautiful and leaves.
Jessica motions to Lt. Novak to follow, and they do.
In Freddy’s dressing room Jessica points out that the pillow which was used to replace Al’s pillow was from Freddy’s dressing room because it is sun-faded, just like his settee, and it’s the only one that is because Freddy’s is the only dressing room in the building with a window. (The pillow does have a lighter side, though until Jessica said that it was sun-faded I thought it was just two-toned.)
Somehow it being the pillow from Freddy’s dressing room which was used to replace Al Drake’s pillow in the days following the murder means, conclusively, that Freddy is the murderer. Luckily for Jessica Freddy can’t see any way out of this logic and admits it. “It’s my luck. It’s my dumb luck. Half the people in this club wanted Drake dead, and your niece’s boyfriend’s gotta get tagged for it. I knew you were trouble as soon as I saw you. What was I gonna do? Spend the rest of my life working in this rinky-dink club? You ever try to tell jokes when someone’s got their hand on your throat?”
Jessica shakes her head and says, “Surely, murder isn’t the answer.”
This prompts Freddy into a monologue.
You call it murder. I call it a career move. Look at me. What do you see? I’m not just another comedian. I’m Freddy York. I’m the first guy who did his own rim shots. I’m like the Edison of Comedy. I’m Robert Fulton on the drums. So Al Drake sees me one Sunday night. He says, “Kid, you’re good. Here’s a long-term contract. It’s your shot. Your big break.” He broke my spirit. That man broke my heart. I couldn’t let him do that. I’m a creative genius. Fair is fair. He gave me a shot. I gave him a shot. Ba dum bum. Should’ve shoved you under that stage light.
When Lt. Novak asks him why he rigged the lights, he merely replies that Novak should ask Jessica. She says the obvious, that he thought the charges against Howard would get dropped and a murder attempt on him would point suspicion elsewhere. Freddy then says, “Boy, you are good. I mean, you are really, really good. You ever think of taking your act on the road? You should play Vegas. That reminds me, I better cancel my tickets. Doesn’t look like I’m going. It’s too bad. I could’ve knocked ’em dead.”
Jessica nods and says, gently, “I’m sure you would have.”
We then cut to the wedding ceremony for Howard and Victoria. There are a few curious things about it; one is that we come in on “by the power vested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you man and wife.” But this is in a church and it’s a priest who’s performing the ceremony. Those are the words spoken by a justice of the peace at a state ceremony. It’s interesting that here in 1984 they’re so hard-core secular.
The other interesting thing is the guest list:
It’s just the people from the episode, none of whom had a connection to Howard or Victoria. A cynical man might think that this was mostly done just to save money on casting.
I might be that man.
Anyway, after the vows are over and the guests congratulate the couple, Bill Patterson comes up the isle and tells Howard that he’s been on the phone for an hour and got him a job on a soap opera for two days a week. It starts on Monday.
Victoria is all for it but Howard is ambivalent because it means canceling the honeymoon in Hawaii which Jessica had given them as a wedding present. Howard asks Jessica what they should do and she replies that she usually doesn’t give advice (which causes Lt. Novak to shake his head in disbelief behind her), but she thinks they should go for it.
Then everyone cheers and we go to credits.
This was a very interesting episode. Quite different from Deadly Lady. It was far less of a classic mystery and perhaps a bit closer to a typical Murder, She Wrote episode. Jessica is nosy more than clever, most of the investigation was of red herrings, and Jessica solves it at the end in a moment of inspiration which gives the audience time to figure it out first.
It also had some really big plot holes. Bigger than I’m used to seeing on Murder, She Wrote.
Right at the very beginning, the intended wedding between Victoria and Howard makes no sense. Somehow Victoria and Howard are getting married in a day or two and she’s discussing basic initial planning with the priest. He’s literally never met the groom and doesn’t care; his only concern is interior decoration and some brief rehearsal. Very brief, in fact, because he has to get to chorus rehearsal in five minutes. There is literally only one person from her side of the family coming, and that’s Jessica. No parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, or friends—just Jessica. Howard also has no family, though for all she knows he could have a few friends he’s made in the last six months. None of this bothers Victoria because she’s head-over-heels in love with Howard and would do anything, absolutely anything, for him. Howard’s lying to her about his job and having various indications that he’s having an affair with another woman only very slightly ruffles her, though it in no way deters her from going through with the wedding.
And somehow, this doesn’t bother Jessica in the slightest.
The timing of Howard’s performance is basically irreconcilable with the presented facts. He seems to have waited around, in the dress he didn’t like wearing, for the entire length of Freddy York’s performance doing absolutely nothing before he angrily went into Al Drake’s office to demand his money and quit.
Howard’s certainty at seeing Mrs. Drake come in right before his performance also goes nowhere, which is probably because it couldn’t have gone anywhere. What could Mrs. Drake have done, back stage, for however long it took Howard to perform, before leaving and re-entering through the front door? If we’re to believe that Howard was right, then presumably it was to visit Mike. Which seems more than a little far-fetched. She could hardly have hoped to be unobserved during such a busy time. And since this is a night club, they had plenty of time for hanky panky during the day.
Speaking of timing, there’s kind of a plot hole with how they filmed the episode. Al is alive and well in front of the club when he directs the host to give Victoria and Jessica a table. They walk directly to their table and Freddy York is introduced and starts his act within ten seconds of them sitting down (in a continuous shot). Al would have had to have sprinted to his office in time for Freddy to shoot him, and then Freddy would have had to sprint on stage, and I doubt that even that would have worked. Timing it, it’s twenty four seconds from when we last saw Al alive to when the curtain parted as the announcer came out to introduce Freddy and we catch a glimpse of Freddy behind the curtain. (The announcer would have seen if Freddy was absent and wouldn’t have announced him if he didn’t see him before stepping out through the curtain, but seeing Freddy is even more certain.) Granted, there were two cuts, but they were very clearly meant to cover continuous time. Twenty four seconds is not much time to sprint to his office in order to get murdered in his chair. (There was even less time for Freddy to have murdered Al after his set, though it’s clearly established that’s not what he did.) So there’s no way that Freddy could have done it. Which is great. I don’t think that there can be a bigger plot hole than “the murderer couldn’t have done it.”
Oh well.
Moving on, what was the whole thing about Barbara telling Mr. Blake that his wife is at the club, then not doing that? I suppose she’s meant to and this is the reason why she went to his office, but it was over a minute of screen time between when that happened and when we hear the scream. Also—and I had to go back and double check to remember this—she isn’t in a hurry to go find Al. In fact, she watches the bus boy leave then peers to make sure that he’s gone.
I can think of no reason whatever that she could want to get rid of the bus boy. Yet she was more concerned with that than with telling Al his wife was here. What was that about? I doubt that the writers knew, either. And the whole thing where Jessica wanted to find out why Barbara was at Al’s office and so saw Howard with the gun? Completely dropped. Jessica never found out that Barbara was carrying a message for the bus boy.
When Jessica meets Lt. Novak, her manner suggests that she expects him to know who she is and to want her help. It’s meant to set up her being disappointed when Lt. Novak tells her to get lost, but it feels weird. She’s old enough to know that it requires some introduction to put yourself into someone else’s business, and that the police don’t do murder investigations for fun.
It’s not a plot hole, just a bit of sloppy writing, but nothing ever comes of Al’s corpse having been facing the wall. He couldn’t have been shot in that position. Freddy had to have turned him around after shooting him. The only reason to have turned him around was to make it look like he was alive when he was already dead. Yet absolutely nothing comes of it. (This is the sort of thing I mean when I say that Jessica isn’t as clever as in Deadly Lady. An observation like that would have been an obvious point in her favor with Lt. Novak.)
Then there’s the “scientific testing” of the hypothesis that the sound of the gun shot was masked by Freddy’s drum playing, which didn’t involve testing that hypothesis. I suppose that they were testing the related hypothesis that other things could have covered the sound, but why did they never test whether Freddy’s playing would have covered it? Especially for the people back stage, where the gun would have been closer to them than Freddy’s drums? Guns are very, very loud. Far louder than drums.
I guess it was OK that Freddy staged the thing with the lights nearly falling on him and Jessica, but why on earth did Lt. Novak remain convinced that Howard did it after that? Howard was in police custody at the time. Why did Jessica not point this out?
And why was the stuff with the pillow supposed to be remotely convincing? The pillow being sun-faded in a way that exactly matches the settee in Freddy’s dressing room and in no other room works to prove that the pillow came from Freddy’s dressing room, but how on earth does that prove that Freddy murdered Al Drake? The pillow was placed there after the police investigation was over, which means that anyone could have done it. You can make an argument that the murderer would have had to use his own pillow in some sort of exigent circumstance, but not when the murderer was replacing a pillow at his leisure. The murderer would have had to be an idiot to use his own dressing room’s pillow. (Unless he was going for a double-bluff by trying to make it look like someone was trying to frame him.) If I were making a list of the top ten airtight cases, I doubt that I would include: “Somehow, long after the victim was dead, your office pillow wound up on the victim’s couch. How do you explain that, if you didn’t kill him!”
This is an especially big problem when you consider what they don’t have: a pillow with a bullet hole in it. They don’t even have anyone testifying that Al’s settee definitely had a pillow on it shortly before he was killed. In short, there’s no evidence that a pillow was involved in the murder.
And this is leaving out the fact that a pillow only makes a gun very slightly quieter. I’ve seen people test it and a gun with a pillow in front of it is is perceptibly less loud. You could definitely pick it out in blinded A/B testing. But that’s about it. It’s still around the threshold for causing hearing damage. But this is just a subset of TV silencers, which work about 1000 times better than real silencers—part of why people who know what they’re talking about tend to call them “sound suppressors” rather than “silencers”. To get an actually quiet gun which only goes “ffft” you need a specially designed silencers with multiple rubber wipers the bullet shoots through (making it require replacement after a few shots). And that only works if you use specially loaded sub-sonic bullets. Ordinary bullets, which travel much faster than the speed of sound, make a loud bang because all hypersonic objects do. Only sub-sonic bullets have the possibility of being quiet and the trade-off is that they have far less power in them. That is, they’re less likely to be lethal. This is just part of TV fantasy, though, so there really isn’t a point in complaining that TV silencers are magic, and if we’re allowing TV silencers, I suppose we need to be forgiving of TV pillows, too.
It’s really lucky that Al didn’t think of any of this and just confessed.
The importance of that confession in Murder, She Wrote is often overlooked, I think. It’s nice when the evidence is clear, but it’s absolutely crucial when it’s not. When the evidence is as flimsy as it often is, the only thing that makes Jessica look smart is the proof that she’s right which a confession offers. Otherwise she’d seem over-confident in wild guesses.
Incidentally, this is one major reason it bugs me so much when people suggest, as if it’s clever, that Jessica was wrong about who did it or committed the murders herself. The murder always confesses. Always. This is like suggesting the clever twist in Harry Potter that Harry was deathly afraid of brooms which is why you never saw him touch one! It’s brilliant! Except for the part where he did touch them, prominently, so this is stupid. Or imagine this wonderful idea where in Star Trek Kirk is really Spock, in disguise. That’s why you never see them in the same room together! Except that you see them together in the same room in every episode.
It’s really easy to be clever if you don’t let facts get in the way.
Anyway, with all that said, and not taking any of it back: it was still fun to watch this episode. A lot of that comes down to the acting. Some of it is the pacing, though. Even when not much is happening, you always feel like something is about to happen, which keeps your interest. And I think it does a decent job of making you forget all of the stuff that was never paid off or flat-out contradicted the conclusion. I also suspect that ending on a happy note for Howard and Victoria helps that. A murder investigation produces a liminal space in which normal life can’t happen. That liminal state also allows us to look into things we normally would not be able to see, which is where most of the fun of a murder mystery comes from. The resumption of normal life with something like a wedding definitively closes that liminal state—it brings us over the threshold and back into normality. It’s not required, but I suspect that it greatly helps the story to feel satisfactory. Even when it shouldn’t.
Next week we move south along the coast to Los Angeles in Hooray for Homicide.
The Rise of Skywalker: Initial Thoughts
My oldest son is hoping that, having finally seen Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, I will write a review of it that is similarly long and humorously criticial as my review of episode 8: The Least Jedi. (He’s had me read it to him several times now, as he enjoys my performance of it.) I’m not sure that I can, though.
The reason why is that I’m not sure that TRoS was serious. And there’s no humor in pointing out the way that a joke doesn’t work as a serious story: that’s just not getting the joke.
TRoS was in an essentially impossible position, coming, as it did, after The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi was not merely a bad movie, but it was a mean-spirited and evil movie. It tried hard to sell the viewer that nobility and virtue are bad, that nothing means anything, and that life isn’t worth living. It ended with the resistance being down to a few dozen people and it being authoritatively established that the entire galaxy is now hopeless and unwilling to fight the First Order. There’s nowhere good to go from there.
I am reminded of an episode in the TV show Sports Night where the main characters (who are sports commentators on a small sports TV show) won the right to cover a very popular and much-anticipated boxing match, and had hours of coverage blocked out. Then one fighter knocks the other out with one lucky punch seven seconds into the first round. A bit later as they’re joking about how they’re going to cover the match nanosecond by nanosecond, the director complains to the producer that they’re turning it into a joke, and he replies, “Where else are they going to go with it?”
That same question applies to TRoS, and it feels like J.J. Abrams knew it and decided to embrace it. Yes, there was no plausible way that Palpatine could have come back, but there was no plausible way that anything interesting would happen, so he didn’t bother trying to make it plausible. Was Palpatine being back good? Hell no. But J.J. established it in the first few minutes, hung a lampshade on it, and at that point, I guess you might as well go with it. Did it make sense that planet Spaceball wanted to steal Druidia’s air rather than install some air filters? No, but they established it in the first few minutes and it’s not like suspension of disbelief was ever a goal. President Skroob breathed Perry-air from a can. You knew where you stood with Space Balls. And when Palpatine uses the force to lift thousands of star destroyers with death star canons on their bellies out of the ground and into the air, you basically know where you stand, here, too. And if you didn’t, you sure do when Kylo Ren has his mask rebuilt and the actor playing the guy doing the welding is a chimpanzee.
So, yes, the plot is filled with plot holes. Nothing is ever justified (unless you want to count “Palpatine did it for his own complex and sinister reasons”). But at some point, when there are enough plot holes, it’s time to consider the thing as lace. And, as a lace doily under the lamp to keep it from scratching the table, it kind of works.
And here’s where we get to possibly the biggest reason I don’t know if I can make fun of it: its heart was mostly in the right place. Sure, the adventures made no sense, Rey got even more force powers for no reason, most of the time death is now a minor inconvenience, as are things that should cause death, and characters become loyal to our main characters just because they’re there. But all of this nonsense is in service of giving the main characters heroic adventures, personalities, and character arcs. With the exception of General Hux, all of the long-term characters are given good send-offs, including Luke. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t consider the sequel trilogy as being actually related to the original trilogy. But J.J. Abrams seems to have considered them related and he tried to do good by them. That’s not something I want to make fun of.
People Confuse Liking Scenes With Liking a Story
Something I’ve come across is that there are people who like some of the scenes from a movie who confuse that with liking the whole movie. This is understandable in a movie like Dr. Strangelove, where people simply forget all of the dull parts where nothing happens. It’s much weirder when it comes to a profoundly stupid movie like Legion.
If you haven’t seen it, I have a review of Legion up on my YouTube channel called Legion: World’s Stupidest Movie?
It probably is, by the way. It’s a horror movie in which Jesus is about to be born a second time to save humanity (again?) and God “got tired of all the bullshit” so he sends a legion of angeliac zombies (demoniacs, but they’re angels, and mostly behave like zombies) to try to kill the Christ-child before he can be born so that humanity won’t be saved and God can kill everyone. Only the renegade angel Michael (who cut off his literal wings when he rebelled against the order to go murder the Son of God in utero, because humanity is worth saving) and seven random people in a diner in the middle of the desert stand against the army of angeliac zombies who are attacking them. Oh, and this time it’s not a virgin birth, the waitress carrying the second coming of Jesus just got knocked up during a one-night stand almost nine months ago. (In a special feature on the DVD, the writer/director says that this is actually a retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac.)
I published that video eight years ago, and, as of the writing of this post in the year of our Lord 2024, I still occasionally get comments on that video from people telling me that they like that movie or I’m missing the point.
Movies are complex things, as are all stories. They involve many parts and due to human fallibility the parts often don’t all fit together. Movies add several layers on top of this because there are the actors, the costumes, the sets, the performances, and the music which all can have their own virtues and capture the audience’s attention. You can have a terrible movie with great acting, or awful acting done on beautiful sets, or awful sets with magnificent music. Now, it’s often the case that quality tends to go together, but it doesn’t always, and in movies it’s especially the case that someone can have far better visual taste than they do narrative taste.
You can see that same thing, though it’s more subtle, in novels. You can have a novel where the dialog is excellent even though the characters’ actions aren’t consistent, or are taken more from tropes than the characters themselves, or aren’t what human beings would do but are only driven by the plot. There are authors who can paint fabulous scenes which are vivid and compelling even though there’s no way that they come from what happened before.
To give an analogy, consider a baseball triple-play. The batter takes a mighty swing and hits the ball deep into the outfield, so deep it will surely be a home run, then in a breathtaking move the outfielder leaps up, kicks off of the back wall, and manages to catch the ball a full ten feet off the ground. It’s an amazing out. Then, without throwing it, the first basement suddenly has the ball and is midway between first and second base, tags out the guy who was running back to first base, then throws the ball into the dugout where it pops out of the opposite dugout and into into the glove of the third basement who tags out the runner who thought he’d gotten a home run but instead had to run back to third base, just a half inch away from the plate as he’s dramatically sliding. Is this a great scene in total? No, because baseballs don’t suddenly teleport and that’s integral to the plot. On the other hand, you can enjoy the descriptions of each play as long as you don’t pay any attention to what connected them.
I don’t know why, but a lot of people have trouble admitting that what they like in a story isn’t the story, but just some of the scenes, or something common to the scenes such as the dialog or narration.
Get Woke, Go Broke?
I was recently discussing the idea of “Get Woke, Go Broke” with a friend, and as so often happens my best insights in the conversation came after it was over. For those who don’t know, the phrase refers to entertainment franchises that change to become ideologically “Woke” (which is, long story short, basically academic Marxism mutated to be about race rather than economics) and then are greatly disliked by their fans, often resulting in poor sales.
The claims about the economic performance of entertainment franchises which become Woke are just a matter of statistics and not something I find very interesting. That these things are frequently hated by the fans of the franchise, I do find interesting. Why that is, I’m going to discuss.
Before I get into it, something I want to put on the side is the very real phenomenon of people who make bad movies blaming audiences thinking they’re bad not because they’re bad, but because the audience is un-woke. Hence the incompetents who made Star Wars Episodes 7-9 claiming that fans disliked Rey because they are misogynists rather than because she’s a badly written character. This is common enough, but people clutching at straws to excuse their incompetence isn’t very complex and requires no explanation. (There is also a tribal element; “they hate me because I’m part of our tribe” will rally the tribe to one’s defense, while “they had me because I did a truly terrible job” won’t.) So yes, this happens a lot, and for any given movie where its poor performance is being blamed on its fans being bigots of some kind or other, this is probably the horses in “when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” However, what I’m interesting in talking about, today, is the zebras.
The much more interesting aspect to “Get Woke, Go Broke” is the indirect causal relationship between a franchise going woke and its fans starting to hate it. This relates to what Jonathan Pageau often calls “one’s hierarchy of values”. What is most important? The answer to that question will dictate what sorts of trade-offs one will make. Once the most important value is satisfied, what is next most important? That, too, will dictate what sorts of trade-offs one will make. This world is one in which we never get exactly what we want and must always choose between alternatives; one’s hierarchy of values will dictate what choices we make. And this is the key to explaining “Get Woke, Go Broke”: if the top of one’s hierarchy of values is making a good movie, every decision one makes will be oriented toward that goal. If at the top of one’s hierarchy of values is making a woke movie, then making a good movie is not at the top of that hierarchy, and one’s choices will follow from what is at the top. One will make a good movie only by accident—if the stars line up and what makes a maximally woke movie just happens to also make a good movie.
You can see the same thing in a lot of “Christian” movies, by which I mean low budget movies which are about everything in the movie being culturally Christian according to a particular Christian culture. These are notoriously bad, and for good reason: at the top of the hierarchy of values of the people making them is not making a good movie.
(I should pause for a moment to explain that the nature of a hierarchy is that everything on the hierarchy is at the top of what is below it, thus we can consider only a portion of the hierarchy and refer to what’s at the top of that portion. Obviously if what truly mattered most to a human being in all of life was making a good movie, he might lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, burn, pillage, defraud and do all manner of evil in order to make the best movie he could. In short, a man with the wrong thing at the top of his entire hierarchy of values will be an evil man. (That said, evil men may, of course, do good by accident.) When I refer to what is at the top of the hierarchy of values of the people making a movie, I mean that sub-set of their hierarchy of values which is particular to making a movie. Obviously such people should of course have God at the top of their hierarchy and loving their neighbor in the same manner that they love themselves just below that. Making a good movie should come further down in their hierarchy. That said, it is not convenient to talk about the very top of the hierarchy when talking about particular actions because the things at the top apply to literally everything that one does, meaning that talking about them conveys no information which a person should not have already known. That is, they’re obvious. It is sometimes useful to occasionally point out the obvious, but it is never useful to always point out the obvious.)
The idea of a movie “going woke” is somewhat often described in relationship to the races of the actors relative to the races of previous actors for a role. While woke movies will frequently feature “race swapping,” this on its own in no way makes a movie woke, and certainly doesn’t make it bad.
A good example of the actor’s race not lining up with the character’s race which was both excellent and not-woke is Kenneth Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing. In it, Denzel Washington played Don Pedro, who was the prince of Aragon (an area in northern Spain). In the late 1500s (which is around when the play was set) it would have been fairly strange for a prince of Aragon to have sub-saharan African features, but Denzel Washington is an extremely talented actor, and in watching the movie we (the audience) are playing pretend anyway, so this is one more thing to pretend in exchange for getting to watch a fabulous performance. Truth be told, the mostly English cast looked English, not like Spaniards or Italians, either. One always has to make allowances for movies, and it only takes a few seconds to figure out that this is just one more such allowance to make, rather than it being a change to the thing we’re all pretending is going on.
And this is really the key to the whole difference between it being fine that actors don’t match their parts, and things going woke and fans hating it.
Denzel Washington wore the exact same historical costumes that everyone else in the film did (who knows how historically accurate they actually were?). He spoke the exact same lines written by Shakespeare that any other actor in the part would speak. He had the same sort of mannerisms (body language, cadence of voice, etc) as everyone else in the cast, which they used to convey to the audience that they were in Messina in the 1500s. In short, he played the part, he didn’t change the part. And being an excellent actor, he played the part excellently, and we the audience benefited.
When movies (and other entertainment) go woke, they don’t merely make different casting decisions. They change the part. This is because, being racists, to a woke person the race of the actor is more important than the character they’re playing. When a movie goes woke, it is not merely the race of the actor that changes, but also the race of the character. But you must remember that race, in this sense, is—as it always is to racists—far more than skin deep. To a woke person, being a racist, it must influence what the character does, and how people interact with the character. This often involves the inclusion of to-a-woke-person cathartic moments where some characters acts non-woke and the woke character rebukes them. This is where wokeness being at the top of their hierarchy of values instead of making a good movie being at the top of their hierarchy of values shows itself.
A good thought experiment, by the way, which will make much of this clear is to consider a Nigerian movie of Murder on the Orient Express which casts entirely Nigerians with sub-Saharan African features (as, currently, most Nigerians have). Suppose further that it is extremely faithful to the Agatha Christie novel, making only those changes necessary in adapting a book into a movie. It would be set on the Orient Express in 1934 starting in Istanbul and heading to London. It would feature Hercule Poirot, speaking English in as good a Belgian-French accent as the actor can do. The other characters would be Russian, American, English, and so-forth as they were in the novels, again featuring the appropriate period clothing and with the actors doing the best accents they can (English actors cannot always do good American accents; it’s not easy to do accents in different languages, so Nigerian actors may fair no better than English actors, on average). Such a thing would be excellent or terrible or anywhere in between according to the skill of the actors and the many other people working on it, from makeup artists and costumers to set designers and photographers. For the sake of this thought experiment, let us suppose that they’re all quite skilled, and everyone does their job extremely well.
Now, consider people’s reactions to it.
Ordinary fans of Agatha Christie would, except those very few with very weak imaginations, enjoy it. The novelty of the thing might be talked about, but on the whole, its faithfulness to the original would be appreciated.
By contrast, one would expect woke people to not like it at all. They would find the way that the black people (it’s unlikely they’d deign to distinguish Nigerians from any other people with sub-Saharan African features) took on European attributes to be “problematic”. They would complain about how it didn’t “challenge” anything but instead reinforced “white supremacy”. In short, they would complain about how it was not woke.
Now, all that is required to see why “Get Woke, Go Broke” has a causal connection to fans hating woke movies is to consider that the artistic taste of the artist matters as much as his talent does to the quality of the art he makes. If he thinks it bad, according to his taste, he will keep working on it until he thinks that it’s good, according to his taste. If the thing at the top of his hierarchy of values is not artistic quality, he can only make an artistically good movie by accident.
There’s nothing unique to Wokeness about this; as I noted it applies just as much to “Christian” movies which are basically trying to be Sunday School lessons. It also applies to patriotic movies whose goal is to beat patriotism into the thick skulls of the people watching. It applied to the anti-drug commercials of the 1980s whose makers had “don’t use drugs” higher up on their hierarchy of values than “be truthful”.
It’s not that people always violate what is lower down on their hierarchy of values. That’s why it’s a hierarchy; if the top is satisfied one can work to satisfy the things of lower importance, too. It’s just that it’s rare that we get to satisfy them all at once, and the hierarchy tells us what goes when they’re in conflict.
Cutting Edge Detective Fiction Has Grown Dull
A topic I keep coming back to is the changing focus of detective fiction. Murders on the Rue Morgue (generally held to be the start of the genre) was, in the original sense of the term, empirical. That is, Dupin reasoned to the solution only from the direct evidence of his senses. By the time of Sherlock Holmes, though, when the genre really comes alive, Holmes uses all manner of scientific investigation to supplement the evidence of his senses.
Starting only fifteen years later and still very much in the early days of the golden age of detective stories, Dr. Thorndyke barely looks at things except through a microscope or camera. Most of his analyses are chemical analyses. He was wildly popular and his whole shtick was being on the cutting edge of technology.
Even where this was pushed back against, as it would start to be in the 1910s, the alternatives were still presented as something new. Father Brown did not use a microscope, but he used human psychology in a way no one had before. Poirot did not get down on all fours with a magnifying glass, but he emphasized order and method as no one had yet done.
I’ve heard the claim often enough I’m willing to believe it that part of the detective craze of the late 1800s was a series of highly publicized failures by the police in the early and mid-1800s. Scotland Yard was founded in 1829. (More accurately, the Metropolitan Police were; they only expanded their buildings to address on Scotland Yard and thus gained the name later on.) While they, like the Sûreté they were based on, reduced crime, they far from got rid of it. Being organized for that purpose, their failures would be all the more noticeable. Another possible factor is the rise of newspapers. Already popular in the 1700s, in the 1800s technological progress made them cheaper and easier to run than ever, as well as cheaper to distribute. I don’t have hard facts, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that newspapers proliferated and became more popular throughout the 1800s. Newspapers hungered for news, the more sensational the better, and were not shy of publicizing police failures.
A history of prominent police failure produced an appetite for stories of people with greater abilities. This worked together with the improvements of technology (in which I include greater availability) such as magnifying lenses and refined chemicals for chemical analysis to produce a hope for improvements.
In this environment, detective stories emerged with fictional accounts of people who used new methods of logic and deduction as well as the latest advances in forensic science. This makes sense; it also makes sense of how little interest there seems to be at present for fictional depictions of people using the latest technology to catch criminals. Thrill as the police detective sends a sample off to the lab for the latest and most advanced test and waits for a month for the results to come back!
I do not know who could thrill to that.
Which puts us, now, in the curious position of the art of detection being something of a throwback, or even an anti-technological genre. In the twenty first century, what is interesting about detection is what anyone can do with the resources of an ordinary person. This does not exclude technology, but if a modern detective takes a photograph and zooms in on it to show a detail, the interesting part is the detail that they noticed, not the photograph itself. In the days of Dr. Thorndyke, the photograph fascinated readers and the loving care with which he set up the apparatus and took the photographs was the focus of the tale. In court, he provided transparent photographs of footprints to be super-imposed over each other to show that they could not match; this was described in detail. He then mentioned off-handedly that the number of nails in the two footprints was different, though the patterns of the nail was indeed similar. In a modern detective story, this kind of attention to detail is far more interesting than the fact of photographs.
I don’t think that this is primarily about relatability, though. The most interesting part of the detective story is not the clues, but the investigation. A detective solving a puzzle in complete isolation would really just be the story of a lab technician doing his job, even if he does it creatively. The investigation involves the people principally concerned in the crime. For these people, the crime, until it is solved, creates a strange, liminal state. The investigation takes advantage of this liminal state and exposes it, allowing the revelation of character and human nature that would stay veiled under normal circumstances. Modern technology can be used to create this, though only by its conclusions. It is not interesting to discuss a detective taking dozens of samples with q-tips and carefully putting them into sterile plastic bags. It is not interesting to discuss a lab technician unsealing the plastic bags and swirling the q-tip in a solvent, adding reagents, then putting it on a shelf with a label for the next day to look at it, or placing it in a PCR machine and hitting the “start” button. But it is interesting when the results come back and it shows that the DNA of someone descended from the victim was found at the scene of the crime. (As long as there’s more than one person descended from the victim, or the only person who is has an unbreakable alibi, or the detective is convinced that the only person known to be descended from the victim is innocent.) They’re interesting because they create a liminal space where things can’t go on as they had (someone is going to get hanged or go to jail) but we don’t know what’s on the other side of that threshold and it’s important to find out.
There is, however, a genre, or perhaps a sub-genre, or perhaps it would be better to say a thread, of detective fiction which is definitely anti-technological. I think that this is mostly accidental, but one of the great sins of modern technology, or more accurately modern man’s use of modern technology, is hubris. Modern forensic technology is claimed to be infallible, or at least is generally regarded as infallible. Modern science is often spelled with a capital ‘S’ and claims unquestioning authority. More often, people who are not scientists and who are doing no science spell it with the capital ‘S’, say that it must be unquestioningly believed, and also state firmly that it says whatever it is they want it to say. Against this hubris, sane people have an instinct to rebel and one such outlet is in detective stories. Teams of experts come in with their fancy machines and high tech laboratories an a human being using nothing but the eyes and wits God gave him is able to figure out what they missed. It’s only one kind of detective story, but if you want to see the proud humbled, detective fiction is eminently fit for the purpose.
Don’t Optimize the Fun Out of Life
There’s a very interesting game called Hypixel Skyblock. It’s a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) built on top of the game Minecraft, which is a block-based building and slightly RPG game which is as much a game engine as an actual game itself. MMORPGs, if you don’t know, are games where tens of thousands of people play in the same virtual world and can interact with each other. The ability for players to trade items and in-game currency means that virtual economies will arise, and Hypixel has leaned into this hard with Skyblock.
In addition to the usual NPCs who will buy and sell items, Skyblock features two marketplaces that intermediate transactions between players. The first is the bazaar, which is a commodities marketplace where people put up buy and sell offers (with money or items in escrow, as appropriate) and the ability to immediately sell or buy by fulfilling these standing offers (automatically taking advantage of the most advantageous offers). Supply and demand work themselves out in realtime as the prices fluctuate based on how many sell offers are put up vs. how many of them are fulfilled; if offers exceed purchases then sellers drive down the price in an attempt to get their items sold first. If demand exceeds supply, then the cheap sell offers get used up and prices go up as buyers move on to more expensive sell-offers. (It also works in reverse for sellers who want quick cash and will take less money for it.) The bazaar allows large amounts of trading, so one way that players can make money is by taking advantage of price fluctuations to buy low and sell high. This can make and lose people a lot of money, and as in the real world, it adds liquidity to the market.
The other major marketplace is basically a clone of Ebay called, simply enough, The Auction House. It allows ebay-style non-realtime auctions, as well as ebay-style buy-it-now offers. Prices fluctuate here, too, based on supply and demand, though it is often complicated by the items themselves. Armor with good enchantments on it will sell for more money than the same armor with no enchantments, but it scales with how difficult the relevant enchantments are to get and apply.
It’s a topic for another day, but my children learned some extremely valuable macro-economics lessons from playing skyblock, including the nature of price being governed by supply-and-demand, the time-value of money (e.g. it can be worth it to take a lower price for something because you want the money now), the fact that a lot of people really want to cheat you if you will let them, that day-trading is highly volatile and you can lose a lot of money on it as well as make money, that in order to sell something you need people who actually want to buy it; the list could go on. Playing skyblock, for people who pay attention, would be a pretty reasonable Economics 101 course. That’s not the point of this post, though.
The other half of the economy of Skyblock is the activities which actually fuel the economy—the acquisition of items. Skyblock has a variety of ways of doing this. The main ones are fighting monsters in dungeons, fishing, forestry, farming, mining, and to a limited extent running factories. (The factories are called “minions.” They’re upgradable enchanted automatons who slowly produce resources. This method of producing resources is fairly limited, though, as you can have a maximum of 35 minions. While their effect on an individual player is limited, they add up over the scale of the entire economy, though.) My children’s preference is doing dungeons, and they got me involved in the game because they needed an extra player but also, later on, because, as they discovered, I’ve got a lot more patience for making money in skyblock than they do.
Part of this is just being at a different stage of life. I’ve got a full time job and three children; I don’t long for adventure anymore because I have it. Granted, being a programmer and a father isn’t the kind of adventure they put in movies, but real things ride on my performance and there are constant challenges coming my way, so I sure don’t need to fantasize about having even bigger problems or more stress. What I want in a game is relaxation, and mining in Skyblock provides that. There are very few split-second decisions in mining, but there are plenty of small decision points as you decide which way you’re going to mine. The pretend accomplishments come quickly, helping me to remember the real-life connection between effort and effect. (This is one of the great uses of video games—in real life it’s a three hour project to put a carpet in your daughter’s bedroom, and that only if you spent hours preparing first. In a video game, you can build things in a few seconds, and it reminds you that there does come a payoff at the end of work.) So I progressed in mining and now can make, in terms of in-game currency, ten or twenty times, per hour, what my children can make. So I end up buying them swords and armor to use in the dungeons. It’s satisfying and also a lot cheaper than buying them real swords and I don’t even know where to find real zombies for them to really kill. Or, er, re-kill.)
But as I’ve done this, I’ve noticed discussions people have about making money in Skyblock (people put up a lot of guides, talk to each other in the game, and there are a lot of forums) and there’s a very common theme: people complaining that Skyblock is not fun. I’ve looked into it, and I’ve discovered that they’ve pulled a reverse Mary Poppins: they’ve turned the game into a job. In their quest to make the most money per hour it’s possible to make, they’ve optimized out the fun. This is structurally necessary in the question to maximize coin-per-hour. Fun—when you’re not talking about the pleasure of movement in sports-type games—comes from making decisions. Decisions, however, take time, and time in which you’re not doing the thing you’re deciding to do. That is, the decisions from which the fun comes don’t make you money, and if maximizing the amount of money you make is all that matters, the decisions which produce the fun need to go.
This is almost certainly the wrong way to play a game, since the purpose of the game is to have fun. This is far more defensible in a job, since you do a job because things like feeding your family and putting a roof over their heads is far more satisfying than the fun you’re missing out on by being more efficient.
But.
Even in a job, no one is ever 100% efficient. Often the biggest gains in efficiency don’t even come at the expense of what fun there is to be found in them. When I was making bowstrings (admittedly, as a hobby) I massively improved my productivity by making a small tool out of a dowel to hold the two halves of the string far enough apart that I could wrap serving much faster. This actually improved my enjoyment of making bowstrings because pulling the strings apart over and over was just annoying. This will not always be the case, but it is often enough that it’s worth taking a look at the parts of a job one wants to optimize and seeing if it’s getting rid of what fun there is in the job, and if it is, seeing if there’s someplace else to optimize. Every job requires periods of rest within it, both short periods of rest more frequently and longer ones less frequently. It is often the case that small but fun decisions which are not 100% efficient can be used as the short periods of rest.
The same thing can apply to chores around the house, like sweeping or doing dishes. Mary Poppins’ “You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game” is an exaggeration, but it does have an element of truth to it. While it is possible to throw everything into the trash as if it were a basketball game, I suspect that would actually get tedious quickly because it’s nowhere near as good as real basketball and makes the job takes many times how long it would take normally. The basketball laundry hampers—if they still make them—are probably more on the mark, since it adds very little time to the chore of putting dirty clothes into the laundry basket. At least for people with good aim. Less gimmicky, though, is looking for the decision points which are actually within the task at hand. To take the example of sweeping, each time you place the broom involves the act of aiming, and how you choose to divide the area up into strokes of the broom can be done with creativity so as to minimize the number of strokes. Or to maximize the effectiveness of each stroke. Or to make the dirt collected uniform. These variations may make the job very slightly less efficient, but not much less efficient, and by creating decision points—or just paying attention to the decision points that exist and making them consciously—they do introduce an element of fun. Not great fun, of course, but chores don’t need to be great fun. Making them just a little fun can make them far more endurable.
If you’re in something for the long run, there will always be periods of rest and inactivity. Judiciously and thoughtfully spreading a little bit of them into the practical labor to be done can turn drudgery into simple work.
In conclusion: by all means optimize the work that you’re doing, but don’t do it so much that you optimize the fun out.
The Validity of Prayer
The third in my series on prayer in response to a request by a viewer. This one is about the validity of prayer: what prayers are valid and what aren’t. The simplest of the three topics, it’s the shortest video in the series (it’s only 24 minutes long!).
The Brilliance of the Song Saint Christopher by Devil Doll
Saint Christopher, by Devil Doll, is a really fun song to swing dance to (Lindy Hop, particularly) and it’s got some really brilliant lyrics if you pay attention to them. In this video, I take a look at them.
Distractions During Prayer
A look at distractions during prayer, whether they’re bad, and how to handle them. Also some discussion of how to pray always, and what it means to make your life a prayer.
The Universe Can’t Have Always Existed
One of the stranger things that one comes upon from atheists is the idea that the universe always existed. This is obviously impossible because it’s a simple contradiction in terms because simple observation shows that things happen because of causal linkage. Though it is more common for people to describe this model as “a causal chain that never started”, it would be more accurate to describe this model as “an infinite series that terminated.” I’m referring to the mathematical concept of an infinite series, so I think it might make sense to pause for a moment to explain what little you need to know about the mathematics of infinite series because most people don’t study higher mathematics.
Speaking a little loosely, an infinite series consists of two things:
- A starting value (optional)
- A way to generate the next value from its index in the list, the previous values, or both
One example of an infinite series, N, is: N1=1, Ni+1=Ni+1. That is, the first element in the series is 1 and each successive element is the element before it, plus one.
That’s it. That’s all infinite series are. They can be defined any way you want; you can reference more than one element, such as in the famous Fibonacci sequence where (starting with the third element) each element is the sum of the previous two. You can define them without reference to the previous element, such as a series of numbers where each is the index squared (1, 4, 9, 25, 36…). But in each case, what you have is a rule for how to generate all of the elements. What you don’t have is the elements. Yet.
This gets us to the famous mathematical fact that “infinity is not a number.” Infinity isn’t a thing, it’s rather the concept of, “you never stop.” If you ever stop, it’s not infinity. And as you can see in how we defined the infinite series above, it never stops. That’s what makes it an infinite series.
Now, the moments of time clearly form a series; they are ordered not merely by the passage of time but also by causal connections. If I push a glass off of the table, it falls after I pushed it and not before.
Now, the thing is, the set of all moments leading up to the present moment forms a sequence with a final element. A sequence with a final element, by definition, is a finite sequence. However, by the hypothesis of the world always having existed, this would be a finite sequence with infinitely many elements. That’s a contradiction, and since it is indisputable that the sequence of moments leading up to the present moment has a final element, the number of elements in that set cannot be infinite. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Uncowed by mere logic and obvious truth, the atheists who hold this kind of thing will then say that there’s no reason you have to stop when counting backwards. It could be infinite in that direction! Whether or not that’s true, it’s irrelevant, because time doesn’t go that way. Time moves forwards, not backwards. God, or the laws of physics, or brute facts, or a drunken elf named Fred, or something clearly already picked a direction for time to flow, and we’re all stuck with it. All manner of things might be true if we lived in a completely different universe than the one we live in, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club if tautology club has rules and they’re well ordered. (Mathematically, a well-ordered set is an ordered set which has a first element. Not all ordered sets do. The rational numbers greater than zero under the standard ordering are not well-ordered, for example, because for any hypothetical first element, simply divide it in half an you have a rational number which comes before it.)
Interestingly, it has been a common theme in arguments for God to simply side-step the problem and give arguments which do not rely on the universe having started. The argument from motion (change) and the the argument from contingency and necessity are the two most obvious examples. Plenty of others don’t require it, either. (The Kalam cosmological argument is the obvious exception, of course.) I can see the appeal of simply side-stepping the problem since it’s irrelevant, but I do somewhat wonder at the wisdom of it. It may be falling on the wrong side of answering a fool according to his folly; by allowing people to persist in holding as true something that’s obviously wrong, it has allowed the fools to be wise in their own eyes.
Then again, they’d do that anyway. Most of them are clearly not seriously thinking through their own ideas. But for the few of them who are, I think it’s worth at least pointing out that the universe can’t have existed forever before explaining why it doesn’t matter anyway.
You Can Tell Whether an (Older) Actor Has Died By His Profile Picture
Something I’ve noticed, when looking up the biographies of actors who are in movies or TV shows I’m researching, is that you can instantly tell whether an older actor has died by their profile picture. If their profile picture is often them looking old, they’re still alive. If they look young, they’ve died. This can be really fast, too. I confirmed that Angela Lansbury had died on the day I heard the news by going to her Wikipedia page and seeing that her profile pictures was of her when she was twenty five.
This makes a certain amount of sense, I think. So long as a person is alive, what they look like right now (for which what they looked like within the last few years will suffice) is what’s most important. But once they die, it makes sense that what was most characteristically them is what’s most important. But that does raise a question as to what is most characteristically that person. In Angela Lansbury’s case, her picture at twenty five certainly is more beautiful, in the sense of having smoother skin and looking far more fertile, than her at fifty nine (the age she was when Murder, She Wrote first aired). I’m not sure that she looked better (if sex appeal is not the sole criteria of beauty) at twenty five, and I think she was far more recognizable at fifty nine.
There are broader philosophical questions that this raises, of course, which the sort of people who choose profile pictures are probably not interested in, but it is curious to ask what picture is most representative of a person’s whole life. Naively one might answer them at the end of it, however old or young that was, because that is the summation of it. That’s not really true, though. Life has phases, and as we age we leave behind phases. If we lived well, we leave them behind completed, but if we survive long enough we will inevitably leave them behind. And then at some point we’re done with all of our phases and leave this life behind entirely. This is the point of memento mori: to remember that we’re in the prologue to life, not in the real story. It is not a tragedy that we leave phases of our life behind because we were only ever getting them ready for eternity. It would be a tragedy to prepare without end and never truly live with what has been prepared. (What this consummation in eternity of what is merely prepared in time will look like we cannot imagine, of course, since all we can imagine comes from our experience and this is unlike our experience.) But to return to the main subject: perhaps, then, the picture which most represents a person is a picture of them at the height of their powers.
It’s not a very practical question for people who do not select profile pictures for the dead, but it is none the less an interesting question.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Was a Strange Movie
I first saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when I was not yet a teenager and it made a deep impression on me. For some reason I was thinking about the movie recently and I realized that it’s a strange movie.
Part of this is that, these days, I tend to look at movies through the lens of “do I want to show this to my children?” It’s a question that brings a lot of things into focus. Children grow up (relatively) quickly and we only have so much time with them; how one wants to spend it is an important question. Some movies are absolutely worth it. The Errol Flynn movie The Adventures of Robin Hood is an unquestionable yes (already have with the oldest).
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a modern twist on an ancient tale. To paraphrase Nietzsche: that is to say, it’s a bad twist. The basic premise is that Robin Hood was a spoiled rich kid who got captured in the crusades and was forced to grow up while in prison, escaped, made his way back to England, and then assembled a ragtag band of misfits to overthrow the tyranny which had taken over England. It’s a joyless retelling, where everyone is dirty and unhappy. No one has faith in what they’re doing, they’re just desperate and have no other real options. Maid Marrion is pretty in a technical sense, but completely unappealing, while Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood was heavy and plodding. The two had a sort of anti-chemistry where it made no sense for them to be together.
I know a lot of bad movies get made in Hollywood, including a lot of big budget bad movies. It remains perplexing every time why people would make such obviously bad choices. (I don’t mean all of the bad choices; some things—both good and bad—only become obvious in final cuts, after all of the color-correction and with the music.)
One good thing did come from this movie, though. Because of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mel Brooks made Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Despite being a Mel Brooks slapstick parody, it’s actually a better Robin Hood movie than Prince of Thieves and even a better adventure movie. Plus, this was the only time that Carry Elwes played Robin Hood, which was a role he was clearly born to play.
Oldie But Goodie: The Onion TV News
(Warning: the following contains some colorful language, though it is moderately appropriate.)
In the year of our Lord 2024 this video is thirteen years old, but it is still so extremely recognizable.
Eugène François Vidocq, Founder of the Sûreté and the First Private Detective
I recently ran into mention of Vidocq, would was the founder of France’s equivalent of Scotland Yard, the Sûreté nationale. I only know what I read in his biography on Wikipedia, but he’s an interesting character. He is possibly the first private detective, though perhaps more likely to be the first documented private detective. Interestingly, his being a detective predated the word detective as a noun by quite a few years—not that it would matter, since Vidocq was French.
He had a strange life, spending much of the first third of his life a scoundrel on the wrong side of the law. He eventually decided to turn his life around and so became an informant to the police. After providing them with a fair amount of help, he became employed by them, the Sûreté being founded with his hiring and him put in charge of it. This was during the time of Emperor Napoleon I, and Vidocq would work (on and off) for several French governments before his death. He also supplemented his income with private detection as well as running a private detective agency, though it doesn’t seem to have gone uniformly well.
The Sûreté became the model for many detective police forces in the world, including Scotland Yard. Also Vidocq published an autobiography, which may have even been partially true, which in turn spawned a fair number of entirely fictional stories based upon him or his life; this may well have influenced Edgar Allen Poe when he created the character of C. Auguste Dupin, and with him the genre of detective fiction.
Twitter Trending Is One of the Worst Ideas Ever
I’ve talked before about how bad social media is (in its current forms) in Social Media is Doomed and talked about some ways to deal with it (in its current forms) in Staying Sane on Social Media. Today I want to talk a little bit about how Twitter Trending is either designed or might as well be designed to amplify the worst aspects of social media. (If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter Trending shows you a realtime-updated list of hot topics that a lot of people are discussing this minute.
Twitter Trending, since it is a snapshot of what is being discussed in high volumes, necessarily captures what people are not taking the time to think about. When people take time to think about a subject, they do not all take the same amount of time to think, and so they will not post at the same time. To post the same time, people must be posting almost immediately upon hearing about the subject. (There is some complex stochastic mathematics I’m oversimplifying, but the conclusion is the same.) To post upon hearing something, one must either be a subject matter expert who can instantly recognize context people will need in order to understand the hot topic, or else one must fool enough to think that one’s immediate, unthinking reaction is worth other people’s time. The latter will naturally predominate among the people posting immediately, for the simple reason that subject matter experts are rare.
So we have a collection of posts, mostly by fools. How to make this work? How about not using a criteria for what to show people which has nothing to do with quality. Most recent, most viewed, and most responded-to would all do well to give the highest likelihood of not getting the best tweets (or are they called xits, now?) without having to laboriously rate all of the tweets for quality then pick the lowest.
Now that we’ve selected what may well be the worst of the worst, and is at best the average of the worst, Twitter Trending now adds one more layer of awful: importance. The very act of showing people these randomly (with respect to quality) selected tweets makes them important. Since they’re likely to be the dumbest comments of fools, this will naturally spark outrage, because it is particularly bad when the worst fools have to offer is elevated within society. Worse still, Twitter Trending presents this, not as a window into the dregs of what humanity has to offer, but as something neutral. Since, among non-psychopaths, the default reason to call someone’s attention to something is because their life will be better for it, Twitter Trending implicitly calls this garbage, good.
Some day Twitter will be able to use AI to show people a curated feed of the worst things ever tweeted, but until then, Twitter Trending is about the closest humanity can currently come.
There is, however, some good news. At least if you use Chrome, or one of its derivatives, like Brave (which is what I use): Twitter Control Panel. It removes a bunch of the worst features of Twitter, as well as doing some other stuff I don’t much care about (mostly changing the rebranding of Twitter to X). It’s still social media, but it helps to limit the worst excesses of present-day social media.
(Note, because internet: so far as I know Twitter Control Panel is not a commercial enterprise and I have no affiliation with whoever it is who makes it.)
Looking Up MST3K Callouts Can Be Interesting
Mystery Science Theater 3000 callouts often involved references to movies, television shows, commercials, and other things in popular culture which the writers expected people to recognize. Since MST3K ran (scripted) from AD 1989 through 1999, and since people tend to assume that most people recognize things they experienced as universal, and since the writers were adults at the time MST3K started, and since people remember things since they were about five years old, this means that the writers tended to reference things from, roughly, 1965 through 1999. That’s not quite accurate, though, since in the 1970s and 1980s re-runs of television shows were quite common. So the references tended to be of things, roughly, 1960-1999. Since I grew up in the 1980s, I get a lot of these references, but there are also plenty I don’t get. And it can be very interesting to look these up.
For example, in Manhunt in Space there was the callout:
“Hazel, will you cook up something for dinner?”
“OK, Mr. B.”
Each was done in a voice that was not the host’s, especially the “OK, Mr. B,” so it was clearly a reference. I threw “Hazel OK Mr. B” into google and discovered that there was a TV show called Hazel which ran from 1961-1966. It was based on a single-panel comic strip of the same name and starred Shirley Booth as the eponymous Hazel. She was a live-in maid for the Baxter family and referred to Mr. Baxter as “Mr. B.” The comic strip upon which it was based was created by a man by the name of Ted Key in 1943. The strip finally ended in 2018. (Key was born in 1912 and died in 2008.)
Looking it up on YouTube, it looks like it was a funny show:
Sometimes Superstition is About Laziness
As I said in Naturalistic Superstition, superstition—whether supernatural or natural—is frequently aimed at trying to achieve control over the world that one does not actually have. It is obvious why someone would do this when they have no control. No one likes to feel helpless. Oddly, though, people will also try to use superstitious means to exert control over the world even when they do have control, but don’t like the kind of control that they have.
An example I used of naturalistic superstition is the attribution to vitamins of powers that they don’t actually have. Vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases, but they (or at least the known vitamins) are building blocks for processes that go on in the body, not regulatory hormones. Once we have enough, further intake of them doesn’t do anything. (Unlike, for example, anabolic steroids.) Take vitamin C for example. If you don’t have enough, your body doesn’t have all of the building blocks it needs for your immune system to function well, and you get sick easily. Once you get enough vitamin C, that part of your immune system can be built to full capacity and it will function as well as it can. However, there are other things that go into one’s immune system, one of the big ones being getting enough sleep. But getting enough sleep is hard, while taking extra vitamin C is easy. By putting enough superstitious weight onto the power of vitamin C to boost their immune system a person can fool himself into believing that he’s compensating for a chronic lack of sleep. The person does have the control that he wants. The problem is that he doesn’t want it that way. So they he invents another way to (pretend to) have that control so that he can feel like he’s exercising control without the hard work of actually doing it.
Another common place I’ve seen this is organic food. Organic food may be more dense in micro-nutrients than conventionally grown food is. (I suspect it depends greatly on the particular organic farm vs. the particular conventional farm.) But if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that organic food is more micro-nutrient dense than conventional food, and is therefore healthier, the difference may be measurable, but it is not huge. Moreover, while there may be a difference in micro-nutrient content, what no one disputes is that there is no significant difference in macro-nutrient content. That is, organic cane sugar may or may not have more zinc, copper, iron, and manganese than conventional cane sugar. (Neither, in any event, has a ton of them.) What it most certainly does not have, and what no one suggests that it has, is less sugar. If you are eating a fixed amount of cane sugar, it may well be a little healthier to make it organic cane sugar. But that pales in comparison to the health benefits of eating less sugar (unless you already only eat very little sugar except for special occasions, which by definition are rare). But sugar tastes very, very good, so eating less sugar is hard.
So when you make lemonade you use organic cane sugar instead of conventional cane sugar, or coconut sugar instead of cane sugar, or use honey instead of coconut sugar, or use honey with pollen in it instead of filtered honey. There are natural explanations you can put forward for why those are better than the alternative sugar, and that’s not identical with the supernatural explanation for why using holy water to make your lemonade will protect you from all of the sugar in it, but in both cases you’re using some means you have no reason to suppose will achieve the effect you want in order to avoid achieving the effect by means you know are reliable—in this case, not drinking the lemonade.
Once you start looking for this pattern, you’ll notice it’s all over the place. People frequently prefer easy means that don’t actually work to difficult means that do—when the effect is uncertain or won’t happen for a while. People are a lot less superstitious about what prevents one from slipping on ice while they’re walking on ice. People are almost never superstitious about what will slake their thirst when they’re thirsty. I’ve never yet heard of a man who was superstitious about what will keep his hands from getting burned while he’s taking a pan out of the oven.
But when there’s any plausibility that the easier means will work—well, human beings are often lazy.
Naturalistic Superstition
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are four species of superstition:
- improper worship of the true God (indebitus veri Dei cultus);
- idolatry;
- divination;
- vain observances, which include magic and occult arts.
What most, or possibly all, of these have is the desire to control things beyond one’s power. Creating idols, for example, is the attempt to localize God (or some minor power) into a place where one can interact with it on one’s own terms, so one can convince it to do what one wants through worship. (Interestingly; this is the purpose of the golden calf—it is not supposed to be a strange god. Once it is cast the people said, “This is your God1, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.” The whole point is that they want to be able to worship it directly, rather than having to wait for Moses to come back down from the mountain.)
I will not waste your time, dear reader, pointing out how divination and vain observances are attempts to go beyond one’s power.
The exact same thing—the vain attempt to go beyond one’s own power—can be done in entirely naturalistic ways. From my observations, it behaves in exactly the same ways superstition. But we don’t have a word for it.
I suspect that we’ve all seen this sort of thing. Vitamins and other supplements are a very common form of it. Vitamins are real, of course, as are all manner of nutrients. But people attribute all sorts of powers to these things which they have no reason to believe that the things have, and with no curiosity whatever to find out what their real powers are.
People go from the fact that vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases to holding that the vitamins have unlimited powers to confer their effects. They ignore that the vitamins work by doing something, and that the body does not need an unlimited amount of that thing. For example, vitamin C is used by the body in the process of making collagen (it’s just one of many things, but it’s noticeable here for our body not being able to make it). If you have no vitamin C, you stop being able to make collagen, and the parts of your body that need to make new collagen start to greatly suffer from not being able to make it. But contained in this is the natural limit to the effects of vitamin C: once your body has made all of the collagen it wants to make, more vitamin C does no good. (I’m oversimplifying, of course, because vitamin C is used elsewhere in the body, too, but to the best of human knowledge it’s the same story all over—once you have enough, your body can do what it needs to and more does nothing.) It’s like building a house. If you don’t have enough wood, you will build a rickety and drafty house. If you have twice as much wood as you need, you will have a well built house and a big pile of wood. If you have three times as much wood as you need, you will have an equally well built house and a pile of wood that’s twice as big.
Taking large amounts of vitamins as if their effect scales with their dose is directly analogous to superstition, especially to the improper worship of God (such as holding that if one says a prayer in a particular way it will automatically be granted exactly the way you ask for it). Then we come to other ways which are more analogous to divination and vain observances: attributing vague positive benefits to things.
Example of this sort of thing are saying that garlic is “anti-cancer” or that 5G makes chickens lay fewer eggs. Cancer isn’t even one thing, and there’s no reason to suppose that a somewhat improved packetization scheme for data in the radio transmissions used to transmit data to and from cellular phones could have any effect whatever on the way that chickens lay eggs. (I suspect that the fear of 5G was actually about millimeter-wave cell bands, but those are deployed in very few places because they’re so high frequency that they penetrate approximately nothing; on millimeter-wave bands standing in front of your cell phone is enough to have no reception. So far as I’m aware they’ve only been deployed in a few cities and in a few sports stadiums. Most phones don’t even bother incurring the expense of supporting millimeter-wave radio.)
The world is a strange place, we know very little about it, and all sorts of things have effects that we do not know that they have. The problem is not the supposition that effects we do not understand are occurring. The problem is the wild mismatch of certainty to evidence. This is selectively believing in our ignorance; it is believing in it only where one wants to. Is it possible that despite us having no idea how, garlic can cure all forms of cancer? Yes. But there’s just as much reason to believe that garlic causes cancer, or that garlic causes cancer if you take more than twice as much garlic as you eat olive oil, or that garlic causes strokes if you eat more of it than you eat oregano. Lots of things are possible. When one has moved from possible to probable or certain only out of the desire to achieve the effect, this is the naturalistic analog to superstition.
And I really wish we had a word for it.
1. Technically the Greek is plural and many English translations render it as “These are your gods,” but I suspect the translations which take this to be a plural of respect are the more likely to be correct. (An example of the plural of respect is a king saying “we” instead of “I”.) The Jews were certainly not monotheistic at this point, but it makes no sense for them to attribute the bringing them out of Egypt to multiple gods, and still less sense to call one calf multiple gods. No matter how you take it with respect to “theoi”, you certainly have the problem of the plural being used to refer to one thing in the calf.
I Can Believe It’s Not Butter
Margarine, which was originally named oleomargarine, was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès. Butter was in short supply and Napoleon offered a prize for anyone who could create a butter substitute. Hippolyte’s “oleomargarine” was made with beef tallow and skimmed milk (and a somewhat involved process) but produced something very similar to butter that was cheaper and more readily available, helping to lessen the impact of the butter shortage.
As time wore on, processes became more advanced and cheap vegetable oils (for a long time, partially hydrogenated, produce trans fats) were used to make margarine instead of animal fats. This was especially exacerbated by the various shortages of the second World War. However, once butter became widely available again, the attraction of margarine waned.
Then Science came to the rescue with the utterly incorrect and now-discredited but then-widely-believed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease . Butter has plenty of cholesterol, but margarines made from plant oils don’t. Talk about a marketing win for margarine!
The only problem was that it didn’t taste nearly as good as butter. Then in 1979 the J.H. Filbert company came to the rescue with a margarine that actually tasted like butter and one of the greatest product names that ever named a product. Here’s the ad I remember seeing as a child when this was new:
I think it’s a great pity that more products aren’t named this way. Imagine how well Hydrox might have sold if, instead of something that sounding like a villain that G.I. Joe defeated on a regular basis they had been called “I Can’t Believe They’re Not Oreos.”
I Really Prefer Later MST3K
I’ve been watching a fair amount of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lately. I should say, re-watching it, as I’ve been watching episodes I’ve already seen before, often several times before. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I really prefer later seasons of MST3K. I used to think that I had preferred Mike to Joel as the host, but I’ve discovered that’s a bit of an artifact of how I saw MST3K.
I began watching MST3K in college. I would watch it in the common room of the dormitory I was in, which was how I was introduced to it (someone had put it on the TV in the common room and it caught my attention). This was towards the end of season 8. Later on I started collecting MST3K DVD box sets and that’s where I ran into Joel episodes. With a few exceptions (most notably Cave Dwellers and Manhunt in Space) I didn’t like them nearly as much as I enjoyed the Mike episodes I had seen back in college. I concluded, naturally enough, that I just preferred Mike to Joel.
Then I got even more boxed sets and watched some of the Mike episodes from seasons five and six.
While it is still true that I do generally prefer Mike to Joel, I’ve come to realize that the biggest factor is that the writers just got better over the years. Having watched some special features, they put more time and effort into the jokes as the years went on, which certainly improved the quality. More than anything else, though, the writers learned to work with the movies, rather than working against them.
In the early years, it was not uncommon for Joel or the bots to talk over important parts of the movie, making the movie hard to follow. This made the entire experience less fun, since you didn’t get a chance to enjoy any of the movie, but worse was that it eliminated the possibility for jokes about plot holes. You can’t make jokes about plot holes if no one knows what the plot is.
Allowing the audience to hear the movie had a second benefit, which was that it encouraged the jokes to be about the movie. Obviously, they weren’t always about the movie, and there were plenty of good jokes which were tangential to the movie or just based on visual coincidences or whatever. Still, a lot of the really enjoyable jokes were about the movie that we were watching, and that was a lot more fun.
I don’t want to make too much of this. Cave Dwellers is one of my favorite episodes and it’s from the third season. I also really enjoyed King Dinosaur, which was from the second season. Still, I find that the pattern holds that later seasons tended to be better, and it’s not really surprising that the MST3K crew got better at what they did when they had more practice.
Throwing Out Food is Hard
My mother’s side of the family is all Greek (my maternal grandparents were a Greek immigrant and a first generation American whose parents were both Greek immigrants). From that side of the family I inherited the idea that it is a sin to waste food. (Well, that it is especially sinful, since all waste is, technically speaking, imperfect and in that sense sinful.) Part of this is that Greece has always been poor; as someone put it—I don’t know who—there’s little in Greece besides goats, olives, rocks, and philosophy. However, I’ve been coming to learn that it’s not just that.
Greece had been oppressed by Turkey for hundreds of years, which certainly did nothing to make food plentiful. Then the first World War made food scarce throughout Europe because war is always destructive, and of food in particular it is destructive in a variety of ways. Then there was the Great Depression and the various food scarcities that that introduced. So the idea that food is very precious and never to be wasted certainly came from somewhere.
But that’s the thing—I know where it came from. My Greek relatives thought it terrible to waste food because food was scarce and it was important to eat every Calorie you could because you might have to rely on them for days, weeks, or more. During the second World War, starvation was a real problem in Greece. One German administrator (the Nazis had conquered Greece during WW2) famously wired his superiors in Germany, “send wheat or coffins.”
Starvation is not a problem in modern America. Apart from the way that obesity is the major health concern of our times, this was really brought home to me by an African grad student I knew when I was in grad school, who asked me the simple question: “what’s the longest you ever went without eating involuntarily?” I had never considered the question before and was shocked that my best guess was six hours, perhaps eight. (This was radically different from his own experience in Africa, despite being the son of a chief, if not the first son and not of the chief’s first wife.)
This is not to say that food cannot become scarce in America. Disasters can happen. Times can change. But we live in the times in which we live, not in times that may come. And while it can be wise to prepare for bad times, it’s not really practical to lay in five+ decades worth of multi-decade-shelf-life food stores and in any event that’s not the food we buy to eat on a daily basis, anyway.
(There is also no point in bringing up places which don’t have the abundance of food that America does, because their main problem is not the inability to grow food but poor logistics (roads, economic & political stability, etc.) which means we can’t, realistically, ship them our excess food no matter what we do.)
In our current environment and for the foreseeable future, we can grow quite a bit more food than we can eat. And what’s more, we should. In an uncertain world it would be madness to try to grow exactly the amount of food that people will eat. That would mean that anything going wrong, anywhere, would result in people starving. We absolutely should aim to grow more food than we can eat so that even when things go wrong—and they certainly will—we still have plenty of food. Which means that the only open question is whether we waste that food at the individual level or whether we are individually efficient and waste the food as part of government programs where we pay people to collect the uneaten food and destroy it (once it’s too old to be eaten). Between those two, the former is more efficient, especially at the edges of individual uncertainty, such as suddenly needing more food or mice getting into one’s pantry and needing to lean more heavily on the food in the fridge.
Despite all that, I still find it very hard to throw out food. A part of me really wants to hoard it and let it choke up my shelves until I finally get around to using it—even though I’ve no interest in eating it anymore and it is probably six months past tasting good. That would certainly make sense if the Turks or the Germans were making starvation a reality, but in America , right now, that does no one any good, and does everyone who lives here very minor harm (it’s harder to find the things that people do want because the shelves are too clogged).
It’s curious how this sort of thing works. Sometimes it’s very hard to accept what one knows to be true.
(These thoughts were occasioned by me developing the willpower to actually throw a bunch of stuff out and clean out a bunch of the shelves, so don’t fear for me. I’m in no danger of being crushed by seven foot tall piles of stuff.)
Chris Lansdown 
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