CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

A Farewell to Cities and Civilization on Battlestar Galactica

An occupying force trying to mould an alien society in its own image. A government co-opted to act as a puppet regime for the occupying army. Civilians recruited to serve on behalf of the occupiers to hunt down terrorists and saboteurs. Resistance fighters striking back and recruiting suicide bombers to kill their fellow citizens en masse in punishment for collaborating.

An uninitiated television viewer tuning in to see this war unfold, and to watch hand-held camera footage of armed soldiers wearing night-vision goggles and kicking in doors to search for terrorists, would be surprised indeed to learn they were not watching a documentary about the American occupation of Iraq, but rather an episode from the third season of the remarkable science fiction series Battlestar Galactica.

Except of course that American audiences were now required to sympathize with the terrorists, to recognize the cynical justifications of an occupation force, and to understand – if not condone – the motivations of the suicide bomber. None of which would likely have been possible for most audience members had it been a show about the war in Iraq. But as cast in the fictional universe of a civilization adrift in space pursued by robots and synthetic humans of its own making, it became fascinating and compelling television. 

On March 20^th the series came to a spectacular yet downbeat conclusion -- as it turns out, one day after the 6^th anniversary of the launching of the “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq. 

When it debuted in 2003 the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (BSG to its fans) faced a skeptical world, one half-incredulous that anyone would bother to remake that cheesy warmed-over Star Wars clone from the late ‘70s.

What a shock it was, then, to see the new series emerge as a deliberate and uncompromising attempt to confront the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks and the “war on terror.” From its inception as a mini-series in which humanity is all but wiped out in a sneak attack by a seemingly inhuman enemy, to its almost unrelievedly bleak portrait of a civilization trying to retain its fundamental values in the face of an ongoing threat – and often failing spectacularly – Battlestar Galactica has acted as nothing less than a kind of immersive therapy for post-9/11 America.

Over the past four seasons (spread out over six years) BSG has been widely praised for its outstanding writing and its willingness to tackle – in a fashion almost unheard of on American television – almost every imaginable contemporary controversy you can name. As C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter note in their book Cylons in America,

"Indeed, one can almost make a checklist of contemporary issues that the series explores. Plots turn on abortion and reproductive rights, torture and prisoner rights, unions and worker rights, racial division, suicide bombing and terrorism, prostitution, drugs, election fraud, the separation of church and state, the underground economy, police violence and genocide" (p.6)¹

Perhaps one of the few issues not tackled by the show was homosexuality, which was refreshingly treated as completely unremarkable and non-controversial.

The identification of the show with these and other important issues is so widely recognized that the day before the series finale several members of the BSG cast and production crew were invited to speak at the United Nations Creative Community Outreach Initiative, at which delegates watched clips from the show and discussed their moral implications. Craig Mokhiber from the U.N.’s office of the high commissioner for human rights was quoted as saying, "We are all Cylons, every one of us is a Cylon, every one of us is a colonial. And you have to get rid of the idea of good guys and bad guys, because the truth is today I may be victimized and tomorrow I may be a victimizer."

BSG gained this impressive reputation for its refusal to moralize or instruct the audience how to feel about these issues. The deeply flawed and troubled crew of Galactica as led by Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the civilian president of its fleet President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) must face a morally ambiguous universe and make their own choices. Just like us.

That these characters are just like us is driven home by the series’ naturalism and realism. They are not from Earth but come from ‘12 Colonies’ including the oft-seen planet Caprica, which is depicted by location shooting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Apart from a few establishing shots of some futuristic buildings and the occasional spaceship in the sky, almost no effort is made to have their culture appear in any way alien from ours or futuristic. Their clothes, homes, cars, technology, food and interior decorating are wholly familiar to us. 

So when we see this society destroyed, its loss is all the more real; further, when we see the grieving survivors of the colonies setting up a makeshift shrine in the hallways of Galactica using photos and other mementos of their loved ones, the audience’s own memories of similar shrines on the streets of Manhattan is instantly evoked. Over the course of the series the characters return there repeatedly, reminding us both of their losses and ours.  

It is this continual and courageous confrontation with the impacts of war, terrorism and torture that has made BSG such essential viewing. While many conservatives latched on to the show early on for its depiction of a civilization under attack by a fanatical, monotheistic enemy, any attempt to identify “good guys” in the Galactica universe was quickly scotched. The show’s main characters have at one time or another plotted to steal elections, tortured, killed civilians, committed acts of terrorism and betrayed one another and their government. Indeed, most of the “humans” we have identified with were revealed to be artificial humanoid Cylon sleeper agents, yet fully retain our sympathies. BSG has constantly challenged the audience to question what it means to be human, to reflect on how easy it is to dehumanize others in a time of war, and to understand how war itself dehumanizes us.

This was particularly true at the end of the show’s second season, in which the fleet had settled on a world they called “New Caprica,” only to be discovered by the Cylons, who swiftly invaded, imposed total control over the humans and co-opted the weak and selfish then-President Gaius Baltar (James Callis) to be their Vichy leader. In the third season, most of the main characters formed a secret resistance force while the Cylons, publicly stating their intention to create a unified, peaceful New Caprica, recruited humans to serve in the civilian police force, and used them to hunt down the resistance fighters and imprison them. Later it turns out that the characters leading the resistance were, in fact, all (unknowingly) Cylons themselves.

This continual upturning of expectations, destruction of moral certitudes and identification with the “other” only intensified in the fourth season when the long-sought planet Earth – the mythical “13^th Colony” – was finally discovered, only to be revealed to be a blackened ruin from a 2,000 year old nuclear war. With the loss of this final myth – the one thing that had held Galactica and the fleet together through their desperate flight though space – human society began to unravel badly. Morale cratered, people turned on one another violently, and a mutiny and coup erupted. Even the very structure of Galactica itself started to give way, and the ship is largely evacuated for a rebel Cylon base ship.

In last week’s finale, however, it was revealed that this irradiated “Earth” was not the one we live on, but rather a completely different world known to the Colonials by that name. Our planet shows up in the final hour – inhabited by spear-carrying hominids – and is dubbed “Earth” in memory of the lost, destroyed colony.

But by this time the humans and Cylons alike have apparently lost any faith in the project of civilization. Convinced that rebuilding their cities and returning to their former social structures will lead once again to self-destruction, both peoples scatter in small groups across Earth. Sadly, the show’s main characters even decline to remain part of any community at all but go off on alone or in pairs to live as hunter-gatherers or farmers.

Flash forward 150,000 years later and the series closes with images of our own gigantic cities and the latest advances in robotics. Despite the Colonists’ chosen isolation many millennia ago, civilization has returned, with all its glories and injustices. True to the series’ spirit producer Ron Moore and his writers leave open to interpretation whether or not we will avert the fate of the 13 Colonies. What is less clear is if they share their characters’ cynical fatalism about civilization – that all attempts at forming human societies are necessarily doomed, and should therefore be avoided.

For four seasons we have heard the Colonists’ religious precept that “all this has happened before and will happen again.” In this portrait of cyclical histories, appeals to the supernatural to explain events and leaving open the hope that something will emerge to prevent history from repeating itself, BSG (perhaps unwittingly) adopted a highly Toynbeean view of its universe. As such, it’s worth reminding ourselves what the great Arnold J. Toynbee wrote on this theme in his classic A Study of History, which was written at the close of World War II but seems equally applicable now:

 “A civilization is not like an animal organism, condemned by an inexorable destiny to die after traversing a pre-determined life course. [A] succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient inevitably inspires a dark doubt about our future, and this doubt threatens to undermine our faith and hope at a critical 11^th hour which calls for the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challenge that we cannot evade, and our destiny depends on our response.”²

In this light, the entire four-year run of Battlestar Galactica may be read as a meditation on Toynbee’s assertion that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Following years of technological hubris, near-genocide, tyranny, competing attempts at theocracies and civil war, Colonial and Cylon civilizations were quietly allowed to expire, in the belief that civilization itself was at the root of their suffering. As we face our own calamities of crashing economies, deepening wars, decaying democracies and a planet becoming ever-less forgiving of our excesses, we would be well advised to heed Toynbee, who, to the contrary, would argue that it is when a society faces its most severe crises that our “faith and hope” in the project of civilization are needed most.

 

1. Marshall , C.W. and Potter, Tiffany. (2007). Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Contiuum.

2. Toynbee, Arnold. (1987). A Study of History. (Abridged). New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 553-4.

 

 

Site Counter

Kalokairi Calling: Mama Mia! and 'Redesigning the American Dream'

Nowhere does the aphorism that "all politics are personal" apply more potently than to America's so-called "culture wars", where anything seen to be remotely touching on conceptions of the family becomes not just the stuff of political campaigns, but the difference between personal fulfillment and a lifetime of frustration and unhappiness. Whether one is talking about childcare, employment equity, reproductive rights, sexual diversity or gender relations we're not concerned strictly speaking with the family as such, but with all those structures on which men, women and their families must depend, be they based in public policy or how we design our cities.

So when the popular culture appears to be staking out new territory in this debate -- and having a great deal of fun at the same time -- it's worth paying attention.

The recently-released ABBA musical Mama Mia! is gloriously set on the fictional Greek Island of Kalokairi where taverna owner Donna (Meryl Streep) is preparing for the wedding of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). While Donna has invited her two long-time friends and bandmates Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), Sophie has secretly invited three men, each of whom she suspects might be her biological father.

Mama Mia! stands out not only for its sunny lightheartedness (many reviewers are saying silliness) but also for what others see as its unabashed feminism. The leading characters -- all women -- drive the action, deal with the world on their own terms and leave the men in the film mostly scratching their heads. Significantly (and unusually for Hollywood) the most sexual of the characters are the three women in their 50s, who cavort unself-consciously about the island singing and raising temperatures. At one point they even inspire an entire village of women and girls to dance their way to the beach to the tune of "Dancing Queen."

The strength and independence of the film's female characters, as well as the nonchalance with which the film deals with Donna's sexual history, have gained the attention of feminist writers, who see in the film a wonderfully subversive social critique as Sarah Seltzer explains:

"It's hard to imagine a movie that's come out recently that is, at its core, as offensive to the right wing's so-called family values. The film's women -- including a mother and daughter -- accept each other as sexual beings. Donna isn't punished for her earlier promiscuity, and Amanda isn't forced to get married despite her clear sexual maturity. The concept of three men revolving around a matriarchal family core is celebrated."

While the power of the women in the film is indeed refreshing, I think what is more remarkable still is something larger: that these women have a community with whom to be empowered, and a physical setting that helps to make such empowerment possible.

Let me first admit that I realize looking for cues to social behavior in a musical is a dodgy proposition. Furthermore, this is an adaptation of a stage musical, so its conventions are particularly theatrical. Indeed, the film comes very close to meeting Aristotle's famous "Three Unities" of time (it takes place over approximately 24 hours) place (one island) and action (one plot). The Greek villagers also act very much like a chorus, commenting on the inner lives of the main characters.

Even granting all these things, what we see in the taverna and village on Kalokairi is to most North Americans quite foreign: an extremely dense social environment where families live in close proximity, where everyone knows each other, and the visual and auditory permeability of the village means that everyone also knows each other's business (which of course is being sung at full volume, but still). Donna has many local people who either work for her or are there to help her, and would have surely been there to assist her in raising Sophie. The public realm is plentiful and attractive, offering several venues for ritual and celebration. And of course, there are no cars, save for three in the opening scenes that deliver the characters on site. Indeed, the entire feel of the film is so pre-industrial that, given a few changes in costume and music the essential story could be told in almost any historical period.

But the essential element that lends such joie de vivre to the film is that it is ultimately about a community of people, one that nonjudgmentally accepts one another and is there to celebrate life's passages and transitions together.

The contrast to the urban loneliness in that other big "chick flick" of the summer, Sex and the City, is striking, as Jane Becker notes:

"The women in 'SATC' are a good 20 years younger than their counterparts in 'Mama', but they seem infinitely less happy. They sit around coffee shops and trendy restaurants discussing their unhappiness. The women in 'Mama' sing and dance. Christine Baranski kicks ass on the dance floor, Julie Walters chews through the scenery and Meryl…well, Meryl does a split in the air after bouncing off a bed. When I grow up, I want to be them."

The sadder contrast still of course is not to other another movie, but to what many of us actually experience: increasingly isolated lives, raising families as islands unto themselves in larger islands of subdivisions, cut off from any semblance of actual community. Parents (often unaided mothers) are expected to meet all the needs that were once met by community, and institutionalized social supports that might make a huge difference for millions of families -- such as affordable and accessible childcare -- are unhelpfully fraught with controversy.

Kalokairi may as well be on another planet.

But there are alternatives. In 1980, architect and historian Dolores Hayden asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesigning the American Dream share much in common with Kalokairi: closely-set multifamily housing sharing common facilities such as kitchens and child care, locally employed and equitably paid on-site staff to help out, attractive social gathering and play spaces, and a community of families to assist in looking after children.

The other term for this of course is the village -- how we once all lived before industrialism and bloated urban expansion scattered us apart. The irony is that the conservative agenda behind the "family values" debate is promoting a "traditional" family model that is in fact an historical aberration. For the past half-century, through a combination of social policy and urban planning decisions guided more by myth than reality families have been forced into unprecedented, community-eroding isolation. As Hayden and other feminist architects, planners and geographers have been pointing out for years, these patterns have served the needs of women and families very poorly.

Now, however, this social experiment appears to be reaching a terminal phase. Between the devastation brought about by the current foreclosure epidemic and surging gasoline prices, many are predicting that the suburbs will be the slums of the future. The need for us to reconsider how we live with and among one another is becoming ever more acute, and economic and resource considerations are going to require us to move past the pointlessness of debating what constitutes a "real" family, or the proper values by which to raise one.

The good news is that our need for community is built into our social DNA. What may be attracting audiences to the world of Mama Mia! is not so much the message that women can have identities independent of a particular man, but that all of us can be a part of something larger than ourselves.

Batman and the "End of 9/11": Overcoming America's Dark Night in Gotham City

One of the "biggest" ideas of the year, according to James Fallows writing in the Atlantic Magazine, is the End of 9/11 as a metanarrative for American politics. For a growing domestic and international constituency, it is no longer tolerable for the very invocation of those events to warrant overriding every principle of American democracy. That moment of thoughtless panic has passed, and appears now to have been a dream of madness. Casting aside principles in the name of the "war on terror" -- to "work...the dark side, if you will", as Dick Cheney put it -- is now being recognized as the path to becoming the very evil we feared.

One of the most potent confirmations of this maturing zeitgeist is the overwhelmingly positive critical and public reception of Christopher Nolan's stunning new Batman film The Dark Knight , which, in its careful use of 9/11 visual tropes takes the viewer on a sometimes traumatic but ultimately redemptive and humanistic journey towards a truly post-9/11 ethic.

Many reviewers have already noted that the film is commenting on the "war on terror," and audiences were surely meant to revisit their own painful memories of 9/11 by the chilling advance posters for the film, which feature Batman standing before a skyscraper in which a gigantic flaming gash in the shape of a bat has been blasted. Cues evoking 9/11 build from the opening frames, which propel the viewer into a dark swirling cloud of smoke and then to an aerial shot flying us towards a glass building, through to a series of escalating depictions of urban chaos and destruction. Buildings implode, thousands of people flee Gotham city on foot, and at one point Batman broods in the foreground while firefighters struggle to contain fires amid twisted steel columns. Unlike any other superhero film ever made, The Dark Knight is set in a world of realism we -- sadly -- know only too well.

This realism is significantly owed to the actual urban locations of the film. Previous incarnations of Gotham City were either fascistic sets improbably dominated by statues or fanciful computer-generated creations that never succeeded in convincing us; here, the on-location shooting in downtown Chicago and Hong Kong goes a long way to grounding viewers and thereby preparing them for the moral arguments to come.

The morality play of The Dark Knight is driven by Heath Ledger's astonishing performance as the Joker, who is not so much a character as he is a force of unknowable, abstract evil. By positioning the villain this way, screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan have made the Joker the very incarnation of a Manichean view of morality: he is not an evil set apart from oneself that can be destroyed, but rather as a potentiality within oneself that must be resisted by one's predisposition for good.

What makes The Dark Knight so remarkable is that it frames this resistance to evil with nuanced debates about the natures of human moral agency and decision-making.

In an early scene, when Batman's alter-ego Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), discuss the merits of having one strong man take responsibility for defending society against evil, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) reminds them that when Rome made that choice, it resulted in a dictatorship. For all his wistful temptation for Roman absolutism, however, Dent is a morally principled man who doggedly works within the legal system to put criminals behind bars. So certain is he of his own moral compass that he makes a show of flipping a coin to make crucial decisions -- a coin which is later revealed to have two faces. Wayne admires Dent for his principled, public and fully legal stand and is himself tempted to forsake the lawless vigilantism of Batman and make Dent alone the public face of justice in Gotham.

Between the unaccountability of the Batman and the deontological morality of Dent lies the consequentialism of Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), a veteran cop whose situational judgments and actions in a corrupt, complex and dangerous environment are criticized by Dent, who once ran an Internal Affairs investigation against Gordon's precinct.

With this moral triad at its core, the film then proceeds to metaphorically -- and not so metaphorically -- demolish the methods, moral vacuity and false ontology of the "war on terror."

First, Batman practices some "enhanced interrogation techniques" on the Joker, only to learn that he was being manipulated by the Joker all along, with fatal results. Then when Bruce uses an advanced and secret project at Wayne Industries to turn every cell phone in Gotham into sonar-based surveillance devices, his partner in Bat-tech, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is appalled, swearing to resign if the machine isn't destroyed. While they agree to use the mass "unwarranted wiretap" just once, successfully pinpointing the Joker and what appear to be his henchmen in a skyscraper on the waterfront, when Batman arrives in advance of the S.W.A.T. team he is horrified to discover that despite its sophistication his technology was incapable of distinguishing hostages from terrorists, something of which only human presence and judgment is capable.

Next, we see the abandonment of Dent's "constitution." The Joker destroys Harvey Dent by disfiguring him and killing Rachel. Traumatized, grieving and seeking revenge, the formerly principled Dent kills five people, including two corrupt cops, but not before flipping his lucky coin -- which by now is as burnt on one side as he is, thus surrendering all his moral choices to an external force: sheer chance.

But it is in the film's gut-wrenching climax that reveals the supposed existential crisis of the "war on terror" for the cruel and dehumanizing proposition it is.

Fleeing the chaos of Gotham city, two crowded ferries break down in the harbor: one filled with ordinary citizens, the other with convicts clad in Guantanomo-esque orange suits. Each ship's crew discovers the boats are filled with explosives, as well as provided with a gift-wrapped detonator. Over the intercom, the Joker reveals the nature of his "social experiment": the detonators are for the other ship's bombs. If the passengers don't blow up the other ship, he'll blow up both of them at midnight.

For 15 agonizing minutes, the passengers argue amongst themselves and the ship's authorities, who are themselves paralyzed but increasingly tempted to destroy their sister ships. The prison ship is held in particular contempt by some of the passengers, who argue that the men on that boat "made their choice" of lawlessness and may therefore be sacrificed -- in other words, it is best to kill them over there before they kill us over here. Unable to make the final fatal decision, the authorities on both boats abdicate responsibility and turn the detonators over to their passengers -- who ultimately refuse to kill out of fear. In the end, the simple recognition of shared humanity and the insistence on retaining one's own moral agency are shown to be the most heroic acts of all.

At the same time, however, Gotham City's moral leaders are undone. Dent is killed by Batman, who then convinces Gordon that, to preserve Gotham's "constitution" -- the public image of Dent and all he stood for -- Batman and all he stands for must instead accept culpability for Dent's crimes. Unilateral, lawless and unaccountable vigilantism are now publicly discredited. The final scenes of the film show Fox turning his back on and walking away from the machinery of surveillance while Batman flees into the night, chased by police and dogs. Gordon, surrounded by press and members of the public then grimly takes an axe to the bat-beacon, cutting off the state's recourse to vigilantism.

Without either Dent or Batman to intervene on their behalf, Gordon and all of Gotham -- and by extension, the audience -- are left to face a complex, dangerous and interconnected world as a community of individual moral agents, guided by Dent's principles of law, fairness and justice -- as well as their own reclaimed humanism. Even in the face of incomprehensible, implacable evil, The Dark Knight reminds us that these are our only anchors, for without them we betray both them and ourselves.

America may still have that chance. At the moment, however, its Constitution has been mauled, and politicians of both parties long ago surrendered their capacities to stop an illegal war and the looting of the nation's wealth. Now, however, The Dark Knight warns against both abandoning our principles out of fear, grief and hatred, as well as abdicating our moral agency to external authorities -- both of which comprised the hallmark moral syndrome of the years following 9/11.

That audiences and critics have embraced this film gives one hope that the days of uncritically turning to leaders promising to save us from our fears are at an end. As James Fallows says, the 9/11 era is over.

We are all Gothamites now.

WALL-E in the "World Without Us"

Alan Weisman's recent book "The World Without Us" carries out a fascinating thought experiment, absenting us from the planet and then taking us through decades and centuries into the far future to see what befalls the works of humans. We watch as our cities and infrastructure crumble before the forces of insects, microbes, plants and rust and discover that our most lasting legacies are not our great works of art and literature, but our trash, our chemical and radioactive pollution and our television and radio broadcasts. The reader is left both humbled and awed at the uncontainable power of nature.

In Disney/Pixar's latest outing, WALL-E, the viewer is also treated to a vision of the far future, but is left instead with an unjustified faith in humanity but no real appreciation for or understanding of the natural world.

When the film starts the world has been without us for over 700 years, and all that remains are desolate cities and a planet covered in unimaginably massive piles of trash. The only activity we see is that of a lone robot named WALL-E (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-Class), the last of an army left behind by the Buy 'n Large corporation to clean up the planet while humanity vacations on its corporate cruise starships far off in space.

The opening sequences of the film are breathtakingly ghastly, like no post-apocalyptic vision ever put on film. The cityscape is not just deserted, it is disappearing under a cancerous envelope of debris, and even orbital space is a cloud of satellites and junk. And everywhere we see the entity responsible for most of the despoliation: the Buy 'n Large Corporation, which appears, in the final stages of humanity's days on Earth, to have owned and run absolutely everything, making Wal-Mart look like a dime store operation in comparison.

Amid this ravaged world, WALL-E fills his days compacting and piling trash, but also collecting and relishing objects that delight and mystify him: egg beaters, Rubik's cubes and a television with which he watches Hello Dolly! over and over again.

His centuries of routine are disrupted when he finds a tiny green plant. Then a gigantic spaceship deposits the egg-shaped EVE (or the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) robot, which proceeds to scan the city -- and when things surprise or annoy her, blow them up. WALL-E is smitten by her lethal charms, and when he shows her the plant, she immediately scoops it into herself and shuts down, awaiting recovery and return.

EVE's mission, it turns out, was at the command of the Buy 'n Large corporation, and the ship that picks her up (and to which WALL-E clings in a bid to rescue her) delivers them to the Axiom, one of the gigantic cruise ships launched centuries before.

Unsurprisingly, given that Buy 'n Large (BnL) is still our dominant institution, humans have learned absolutely nothing from their experience as environmental refugees. The Axiom is populated by identically-dressed and morbidly obese humans carried about on multi-media hoverchairs, their every desire met by a fleet of robots and the omnipresent BnL, which exhorts them to continue to consume every waking hour. And of course, the unceasing consumption continues to produce vast amounts of trash, which is regularly compacted and expunged from the ship.

But through his efforts to rescue EVE, WALL-E gradually disrupts the consumerist and media-soaked ecology of the Axiom. Deprived of their non-stop multimedia two of the humans begin responding to their environment as if for the first time -- appreciating beauty, taking physical enjoyment from a previously neglected pool and actually conversing with each other.

In the end, the humans land on Earth and stumble into the light, determined to farm and support themselves, with no apparent role for the Buy 'n Large Corporation. They have liberated themselves from the corporation and from compulsions of the marketplace.

As satisfying as this anti-corporate and anti-consumerist theme is, it's hard to take too seriously.

After all, Disney is the world's premier vertically-integrated entertainment and merchandising machine. Already the market is crowded with WALL-E toys and other crap, much of which will eventually wind up in landfills. And speaking of irony, what exactly are we to make of the "credit cookie"? Following the closing credits and the Pixar and Disney logos, we once more see the Buy 'n Large logo while its jingle echoes in our ears. It's clever but a bit too cynical by half.

But writer-director Andrew Stanton's most serious difficulty in articulating a theme the audience can actually identify is that the animators are so loving in their attention to details on robots and spaceships that -- unlike his earlier Pixar film Finding Nemo -- they appear to have spent little effort trying to incorporate natural processes.

It's annoying but forgivable that WALL-E finds the plant in a closed refrigerator, apparently sprouting without benefit of sunlight, or that he holds the plant out to show to EVA while they are floating in deep space, presumably at temperatures near absolute zero, with no ill effects.

But this lack of understanding of how nature actually functions makes the conflict driving the climax of the movie ultimately without purpose. The humans return to Earth, but the viewer can't help but wish that they'd just stayed away.

The Axiom's captain sees footage of Earth and becomes taken with the idea of farming, believing they need to return to Earth to "help it out." Except -- that's exactly what they don't do: the closing credits feature a nifty bit of animation employing artistic styles ranging from cave paintings to impressionism, showing the familiar arc of civilization - from fishing to farming to the construction of new cities, except this time we have robots doing a lot of the work for us. But at no point is there a hint of humans actually "helping" nature - we're just helping ourselves again.

In other words, as far as we can see and Pixar can show us, humans will do exactly what we always have done. But if we do, the results will not be what we see here: the streams will not magically fill with fish, or fields with verdant flowers, trees and plants.

If the humans had instead never returned, however, the planet Earth of WALL-E might have had a chance. As Alan Weisman shows us, at that point when the world is actually "without us," nature will in fact eventually break through the insults we've laid over her and finally disguise all our works beneath green foliage. She will recover -- but of course not replace -- much of what was destroyed, and through cycles of glaciation crush every last trace of us.

But I guess that wouldn't make a very good movie. Or sell any merchandise.

CBC's False Populism Leaves Rural Canada Behind

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is set to embark this fall on a radically sweeping set of programming changes to Radio 2. The most significant of these is that classical music will be dramatically de-emphasized. As well, long-time hosts -- with all their years of experience and expertise -- will be discarded in favour of younger, "edgier" ones. The Globe and Mail's Russell Smith was one of the first to condemn the changes in March, and the response from readers was such that a week later, he wrote again, describing how furious Canadians were with the CBC over the proposals. Smith stressed that what he was hearing from readers ran quite counter to official arguments:

"There are two common criticisms of a government-funded classical-music station: one, that it is elitist because it appeals only to the educated or privileged, and two, that it is irrelevant in the modern world because it can appeal only to the old. My readers, and the complainants to the CBC's own website, prove both these conjectures wrong. My correspondents included a fair number of university professors and trained classical musicians, yes (as does the listenership of the CBC). But they were far outnumbered by the people who work in car dealerships or in boring offices, and who love serious music just as much as any bespectacled Torontonian."

There is one other very serious problem with the changes that Smith identifies: that gutting the CBC of classical music introduces a profound spatial inequity for millions of Canadians: those living in small towns and rural areas will be denied access to a significant cultural asset only available to those who live in larger cities:

"Those who were the most passionate in their lamentations for this lifeline to challenging culture were those who lived in small towns or in the country. Over and over, they reminded me that, without public radio and in the absence of any regular music-appreciation classes in the public-school system, there was nowhere, absolutely nowhere, for them to ever hear symphonic, opera, choral or chamber music (or any discussions thereof)."

This morning, Smith has reported that the federal government, after conducting some obligatory and perfunctory hearings, has declined to intervene. As a result,

"we are now on schedule for a dramatic dismantling of the last public national resource for access to a musical education - particularly for those in small towns, and for those without privileged access to an educated milieu. Once this point of entry to an educated world is gone, that world will wither."

Ironically, that loss will all be for naught, thanks to ubiquitous personal electronics. The "edgier" youth audience they hope to attract already has a world of music loaded onto their iPods and won't even notice the new Radio 2. But those formerly loyal listeners, once lost, won't likely be back.

This unheeding rush to undo decades' worth of CBC tradition as a national platform for cultural expression by adopting a seemingly slavish nod to hypertextual youth culture is akin to burning down a library because you have an internet connection. It is as if the broadcaster has been taken over by the most popular clique in the high school and it is out to stick it to the nerds. It may be assuming an anti-elitist veneer, but it is a false populism.

It is also anti-rural. The CBC has adopted a course of action that assumes that only "elitists" enjoy classical music, and that such people are presumably urban anyways and will therefore be able to find classical music concerts on their own where they live. Rural people are small town, down-home, regular hard-workin' folks who don't care for that kind of music anyways and won't miss it. And can't they just go online and download classical music if they want it?

It is the CBC brass, not the devoted fans of classical music, that is guilty of elitism. Housed in their downtown Toronto offices they are dismissing the needs of anyone not part of their urban world and their "edgy" world view. They are apparently unable to conceive of a Canada where the radio is the glue that attaches dispersed people to the rest of a vast country and to the world beyond.

Site Counter

Indiana Jones and the Fridge of Doom

The newest Indiana Jones movie "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is generating a lot of derision for an early scene in which Jones finds himself in a mock-up of a 1950s subdivision populated with mannequins. He quickly realizes that this is a nuclear test site, and as a countdown echoes over a loudspeaker he seeks the only refuge he can: a refrigerator that turns out to be lined with lead. The blast hurls the fridge what appears to be several kilometers across the desert, where it crashes into the sizzling sand and tumbles repeatedly before coming to a steaming stop in front of a (CGI) gopher. Jones pushes the door open, and walks away with no apparent injury, watching as an enormous mushroom cloud rolls into the sky.

The scene is admittedly spectacular, and in its sunny evocation of all the requisite 50s suburban stereotypes in the shadow of a nuclear bomb tower (a mannequin family is seen watching Howdy Doody), rather creepy.

But Indy's survival of the nuclear blast has so strained the audience's otherwise willing suspension of disbelief that it has already generated a new buzz-phrase -- "Nuke the Fridge" as a successor to "Jump the Shark" -- meaning, that moment when a film series has gotten so ridiculous that it marks a new low in quality.

To show just how rapidly our culture can gorge on itself, the phrase has, in two short weeks taken on a life of its own. Nuke the Fridge has its own website and FaceBook Page. There are also a number of creative YouTube videos mocking the sequence.

I too was annoyed by the scene, but not just for its extreme unbelievability. It marks a new low in American cinema for its disturbingly casual use of nuclear weapons as a narrative device.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have turned the most horrifying technology ever devised and made it into a minor plot juncture, as if it were just another fight scene. Worse: it's actually monumentally unnecessary to the film's plot. It's completely irrelevant, a total non-sequitur. It could be entirely removed from the film with no loss of coherence. We interrupt this film to bring you a scene from the end of the world.

The result is in my opinion is a total mind f**k for the audience.

While it's true that this is a fantasy film, and not supposed to be taken too seriously, watching a nuclear apocalypse go off around Indy does irreparable damage to the fantasy universe these films have set up. It's true, too, that the Bomb has driven the plots of any number of adventure films (Thunderball etc), but actually setting one off a few thousand yards from the film's hero is a whole order of horror beyond anything the viewer of a fantasy film should expect or tolerate. It's too terrible a thing to make light entertainment out of -- kind of like having Spielberg and Lucas come up with a clever and amusing way for Indy to escape from a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

As a result, a beloved film character is put through an experience the audience knows he couldn't have possibly survived, and for no good reason. It's not just that it's unbelievable; the audience simply *cannot believe* he's still alive. I don't know about you, but I kept waiting for his hair to fall out. Not the kind of thinking you want to be doing at an Indiana Jones film!

The real mind f**k is that the set-up of the scene is so horrifying, so realistic and apocalyptic in its execution that its corny, jokey denouement (the aforementioned gopher stares at Indy and then jumps back into its hole) creates a jarring psychological rupture in the mind of the viewer.

I personally found the cognitive dissonance of the scene very disturbing, and it affected my experience of the rest of the film. It was kind of like watching Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which Jimmy Stewart's character is in the opening scenes suspended off a building with no hope of survival, so that all subsequent action in the movie, too, is 'suspended' over an abyss.

In this case, I doubt very much that this was the intention. But intended or not, the "nuke the fridge" scene suggests a more serious psychological consequence for the viewer, owing not only to the dissonance it evokes, but to the particular juncture in history when this film was released.

The rhetoric coming from the governments of the United States and Israel threatening Iran with attack are getting more frequent and more bellicose. Whether through the direct use of nuclear weapons on Iran's nuclear facilities, or simply through the destruction of such facilities by "conventional" means, we are probably closer to seeing a nuclear war than at any time since the end of the Soviet Union. It has become politically mainstream to threaten Iran with destruction (John McCain went so far as to sing about it) and none of the major political candidates running for U.S. president have stated that nuclear weapons are 'off the table.'

So to my mind Spielberg's and Lucas' narrative use of the Bomb is rather tone-deaf. While Crystal Skull isn't without its political commentary (it makes Indy the subject of a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt and has a character mutter, "I don't recognize this country anymore"), its attempt to bring the series into the 1950s fails, chiefly because of this sequence.

In the 1950s, the specter of nuclear destruction was so recent, so possible and so widely feared that it could not be treated this casually at the movies. In fact, a filmed depiction of nuclear destruction this realistic (minus the fridge, of course) would probably have panicked an audience in 1957 and retained a chilling reputation for decades. Yet 50 years on, it's little more than an inconvenience for Indiana Jones.

While nobody is going to be going out to buy lead-lined refrigerators after seeing the movie, I do worry that, like the actual nuclear tests of the 1950s, Crystal Skull will serve to desensitize audiences to nuclear war, normalizing atomic destruction at an historical moment when we should be most aroused against it.

The Last Man on Earth is Not Alone...

...he's just wandering through an early 1970s urban landscape , the zoning of which just screams "single use".

The City in Film I

Cities can often be one of the main characters in a film. Whether iconic or familiar, or both, we have become increasingly aware of their celluloid presence. Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself , an examination of the city of angels in film, will be screened from March 11-16 at 7pm at Cinematheque.

If you want to read more on this theme, the Institute of Urban Studies library has a book called "The Cinematic City".

Do you have a favourite film set in Los Angeles? Please post your comments!