June 21, 2004
Physics 2: Incompatibility
OK, here's something (only one of many, alas, but a particularly important one) that I don't understand:
The big problem in theoretical physics is the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Both theories seem essentially correct (they have been verified time and time again, to an incredible degree of accuracy); but they are logically incompatible. Most of the time, this incompatibility simply doesn't matter (quantum mechanics works for the microworld, and general relativity for the cosmic macroworld of immense masses).
But when you have both enormous mass AND a subatomic scale of size (basically, in the center of a black hole, and also at the initial instant of the Big Bang), and where you therefore need both theories, the mathematics doesn't work and the equations turn to nonsense (give infinite results). You can't say that either theory has been falsified, exactly; since we cannot access the center of a black hole, or the initial nanosecond of the Big Bang, we haven't actually found any experimental results that either theory has gotten wrong or failed to predict. Indeed, we never actually encounter any of the situations where either of the theories fails.
But theoretical physicists just don't like the fact that there's a point where the theories come into conflict.
I'll leave aside the physicists' entirely ungrounded metaphysical (or aesthetic) assumption that there must be a single theory in which everything fits together. It could well be that things are incompatible, but they exist anyway, and that's the end of it.
What I'm interested in now, however, is the REASON for the incompatibility between the two theories. It's a reason that has been inherited by the theories' current descendants: string theory (the extension of quantum mechanics) and loop quantum gravity (the extension of general relativity).
Brian Greene, in his book about string theory, The Elegant Universe, explains the incompatibility as follows:
"The notion of a smooth spatial geometry, the central principle of general relativity, is destroyed by the violent fluctuations of the quantum world on small distance scales" (p129). On the large scale, the universe follows a Riemannian geometry as Einstein stipulated. But on the quantum microscale, the smooth space that Riemannian (as well as Euclidian) geometry requires simply cannot exist, given the violent quantum fluctuations of even supposedly empty space. So general relativity needs to be modified to fit the picture of quantum uncertainty -- which is what string theory does.
However, Lee Smolin, in his book on loop quantum gravity, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, gives a rather different explanation. He says that the problem with quantum mechanics, as well as with its successor string theory, is that "it does not respect the fundamental lesson of general relativity that spacetime is an evolving series of relationships" (p149). Again, string theory, like quantum mechanics, "replicates the basic mistake of Newtonian physics in treating space and time as a fixed and unchanging background against which things move and interact... the right thing to do is to treat the whole system of relationships that make up space and time as a single dynamical entity, without fixing any of it. This is how general relativity and loop quantum gracity work" (p159). For Smolin, general relativity shows us that space and time have no original existence; they are generated out of relational processes between events. Events do not 'take place' in space and time; rather it is only the relations among events that generates space and time in the first place. (This strikes me as a provocatively Whiteheadian way of looking at things, though Smolin never mentions Whitehead).
Another way to rephrase all of this is to say that string theory approaches the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity from the side of quantum mechanics; while loop quantum gravity approaches the incompatibility from the side of general relativity. Each approach starts by assuming the problem resides in classical assumptions of the other theory. For Greene, general relativity fails to include the radicality of quantum weirdness; for Smolin, quantum mechanics fails to include the radicality of relativity's relational notion of space and time.
I should also note that Smolin's and Greene's positions are not really symmetrical. String theory has much more widespread acceptance than loop quantum gravity. As a result, Smolin's book spends a great deal of time on string theory, trying to reconcile it with loop quantum gravity theory; whereas Greene's book doesn't even condescend to mention loop quantum gravity, apparently considering it too wrong, or too insignificant, to merit even the slightest notice.
In summary: even before we get to the mathematics, there seems to be a fundamental metaphysical disagreement between the two camps. Though Greene and Smolin characterize general relativity so differently, they don't even seem to be talking about the same theory. For Greene, relativity wrongly assumes a stable geometry; for Smolin, it is quantum mechanics and string theory that wrongly assume the existence of space and time as an absolute background, rather than deriving them from quantum-level events.
So, I have no sense of how to adjudicate this disagreement. I do have the sense that the metaphysics needs to be paid attention to, rather than just the mathematical complexities of the theories (which I obviously cannot ever hope to make a judgment about).
Addendum: I also wonder how all this might be related to other considerations about the derivativeness of space and time. Manuel DeLanda, in his book which tries to give a Deleuzian basis to physical theory, mostly talks about thermodynamics and complexity theory (especially citing Ilya Prigogine) in order to show how "metrical" space and time are derived from "intensive" space and time. This would seem to be a rather different project from that of deriving metrical space and time from the quanta of events/relationships, as Smolin proposes (though for Smolin, like De Landa and unlike Greene, thermodynamic considerations are a very big part of the picture).
PS: though Smolin says that both space and time must be quantized (have discrete smallest possible values, rather than being infinitely divisible), he mostly talks about quantum space, and says next to nothing about quantum time. What difference would a focus on quantum temporality make to any of these theories?
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June 19, 2004
Physics 1
I'm reading some books on the latest developments in physics -- something I do every once in a while. I'm interested in learning about the latest developments in string theory, brane theory, etc -- the latest accounts of the "ultimate" structure of the universe; and I'm interested in how the strange anomalies that astronomers continue to make -- about the age and size of the universe, the degree of its expansion, and so on -- can be explained (most recently, in terms of "dark matter," "dark energy," and other such strange concepts). I'm interested, too, or perhaps above all, in the philosophical implications of all this.
There are several points that need to be mentioned, as I begin.
First: although the explanations that pop science books give is never of the same depth as the understandings of the scientists themselves, this is especially true with theoretical physics and cosmology. Because things like quantum mechanics, together with more recent developments like string theory, cannot be understood in "layman's" or intuitive terms. Things like the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and quantum superposition are so profoundly counter-intuitive -- although everything we know tells us that they are true and real -- that they are not graspable at all in words, images, or logical concepts. To put it differently, they are only comprehensible as very high level mathematical abstractions. Since I -- like the overwhelming majority of human beings -- do not understand the math, I am simply not capable of understanding quantum mechanics.
Which means that, to a large extent, I am incapable of judging what's told to me in the books I'm reading on theoretical physics. I accept what I'm told about quantum mechanics, because quantum effects are really experienced in the physical world, just as much as "classical" physical effects (which I can comprehend) are really experienced. But even if I have an idea about how quantum computation might work, I still can't grasp what a quantum superposition (the cat in the box being both alive and dead) actually means.
In particular, when scientists disagree (as major physicists currently do, on many matters) my only grounds for deciding between them are aesthetic or metaphysical ones. I am not able to follow the reasoning on the basis of which the scientists themselves argue out their positions; nor can I understand the criteria which could lead one to concede the argument to the other.
(For what it's worth, the scientists and mathematicians who do understand these matters, do so only at this highly abstract mathematical level; they remain as incapable of grasping it intuitively as anyone else. It's often said that great physicists, like Einstein, somehow have an intuitive grasp of the math and of the concepts they come up with. But Einstein himself is as good an example as any of the fact that it is humanly impossible to "translate" such mathematical/theoretical intuition back into other, more commonplace terms or frames of reference. Einstein had as much trouble as anyone else in grasping the real implications of relativity and (even more) of quantum mechanics.)
That's the first problem. The second one, perhaps equally serious, is that physicists themselves seem to be reaching the point where mathematical consistency and elegance seem to have become more important than empirical verification. This is a point that was made particularly strongly by John Horgan in his 1996 book The End of Science. Horgan says, basically, that theoretical physics has gone into the deep end, or "jumped the shark": it has reached a point where it has become concerned with "speculations [that] cannot be empirically verified" (p65). There is no way that we can ever actually know whether or not the universe is made of 9-dimensional strings, or attached to multidimensional membranes, or whether or not what we call the universe is only one of many, created in innumerable "Big Bangs." String theory and its kin are no longer making verifiable or falsifiable predictions, the way general relativity and quantum mechanics both did. Instead, the claims for such theories are that, if we solve all their equations, then the theories and facts we already know about the universe come out right.
In other words: there will never be any empirical evidence either in favor of, or against, the existence of six tiny folded-up dimensions in addition to the three spatial dimensions we experience on a regular basis. The claim is rather that, if we start from the postulate of those extra dimensions, then we can derive the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity (as we already know them without any recourse to the extra dimensions). This is supposed to be a good thing, because it saves physics from the embarrassment that, as they are currently formulated without string theory, quantum mechanics and general relativity logically contradict one another -- even though they both work, in the sense that they both have been verified, and have measurable consequences in overwhelming numbers of circumstances.
String theory claims to resolve the contradiction; and physicists therefore claim that it describes the ultimate nature of reality. But this is both logically dubious (because it leaves open the possibility that some entirely different theory, making entirely different claims, which nobody has thought of yet, might also resolve the contradiction and mathematically generate the same observed results with regard to gravity and subatomic particles), and metaphysically shaky (since what it claims as "ultimate reality" not only cannot ever be observed, but has no pragmatic consequences whatsoever).
Horgan therefore suggests that what the string and brane theorists are doing is aesthetics, metaphysics, or theology, rather than science.
My feeling about this is that two out of three ain't bad (I have little use for theology). But if theoretical physicists are really engaging in metaphysics and aesthetics, then we need to think about the philosophical assumptions embedded in, and the philosophical consequences of their arguments: something that they themselves are not very good at doing, since they tend to be ignorant of the history of philosophy (the occasional reference to Leibniz or Spinoza notwithstanding), and to assume that their mathematics gives them a philosophical authority, when they talk about such things as space, time, and why things are the way they are. They often tend to be quite philosophically naive.
So even though I don't understand most of what the physicists are saying, I think it's important for us to try to think through these issues, rather than accept their assertions at face value -- since, in certain contexts, the physicists may well not understand the presuppositions and implications of what they are saying, either.
Posted by shaviro at 09:29 PM | TrackBack (0)
June 18, 2004
Science Fiction Museum
Today was the opening day for Seattle's new Science Fiction Museum, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's latest toy. The museum is actually in a corner of the Experience Music Project building designed by Frank Gehry. (They took out a virtual reality ride, called "Journey to the Heart of Funk," or some such, to make room for it. What, George Clinton wasn't science fictional enough for them?).
I missed the opening ceremony, but I got to see the exhibits, such as they are. Basically it's a series of dimly lit rooms, with items Paul Allen must have thought it was cool to collect, such as first editions of famous SF novels, uniforms worn on the starship Enterprise, and so on, together with a bunch of high tech displays (a touch screen allows you to choose among various imagined planets, from Solaris to whatever the planet in Dune was called; information about the chosen planet is given in that generic, slight-upper-class-British-accent voice that is typically used for nature documentaries).
Vaguely "spacy" music is played in the background.
The downstairs exhibit area is arranged like a spaceport, you have ticket areas, waiting areas, and a door (which never opens, of course) to the spaceship on which you would embark. The gift shop, which of course you encounter on the way out, is sadly understocked.
Of course, there are enough simultaneous sources of light and sound that you feel a certain effect of sensory overload; though the main result isn't anything psychedelic, just that it becomes harder to notice how sparse and uninteresting the exhibits actually are.
Photos inside the museum are not allowed; I didn't try to take any, though I probably could have gotten away with it.
To be less snide just for a minute: what makes the Experience Music Project worthwhile is not the silly exhibits, but the spinoff activities that the museum sponsors: such as educational stuff for kids, and the annual Pop Conference, at which I have had a great experience for three years running. It remains to be seen what the Science Fiction Museum will do in a similar vein, but if they offer anything similar it will be quite worthwhile (it would be great if they could sponsor something, emulating the Pop Conference, that was neither a fan convention nor an academic conference, but that nonetheless brought together creators and people who think seriously about the genre).
I didn't really need to go the first day the Museum was open; but since I will be leaving Seattle for good, Real Soon Now, I thought I should take the opportunity.
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June 16, 2004
Cory Doctorow
This evening it was my pleasure to introduce a reading by Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory is in Seattle to visit Microsoft, and try to convince them to scrap Digital Rights Management. He read a segment from a recently-written, and not-yet-published, short story, and answered questions, which were mostly about his work for the EFF. It was a pleasure to hear Cory's wry, yet impassioned, take on digital culture.
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June 12, 2004
Last Life in the Universe
Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe was the last film I managed to see at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. And I'm really glad I caught it: it was one of those rare films that, like the early works of Godard, or certain works by Wong Kar-Wai, made me excited about the potentialities of cinema. Or, to put the point a bit less pompously: not only was it a good film, but it renewed my sense of film in general, by making me feel that all sorts of things are possible, that the form has not exhausted itself, that cinema still needs to be invented, and still can be.
(There's a link to Wong Kar Wai, in that his frequent cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, also did the camerawork for this film. But Ratanaruang's sensibility is very different from Wong's).
The plot, in itself, isn't particularly original or surprising: a nerd meets a voluptuous woman who renews him sexually, and expands his enjoyment of life. But this familiar set-up is barely more than a pretext.
For one thing, the characters are weirdly quirky. The nerd, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) is a Japanese man living in Bangkok and working as a librarian for the Japan Society. He is obsessively neat and tidy, and he is always trying to commit suicide, but never succeeding, because the doorbell rings or the phone rings or people come by and stop him. The woman, Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) is Thai, works as a "hostess" (i.e a prostitute) and is the opposite of neat: her house is a virtual pigsty, with unwashed dishes, stuff all over the floor, etc. They are brought together when siblings of both are killed: Kenji's brother by the yakuza, and Noi's sister in a car accident after they have quarreled.
For another thing, Ratanaruang is more concerned with cinematic action and grace than with naturalistic plausibility in terms of plot. He moves effortlessly between comedy and melodrama, dwelling on instants when nothing dramatic is happening beyond the revelation of the characters, and moving the plot through absurdist twists and turns.
But what makes Last Life in the Universe great goes beyond the quirkiness of the characters and the plot twists; it has to do with the style of the film. Nearly every set-up is surprising and unexpected, in terms of camera placement, framing, or colors. The result is a strange kind of distancing: not any sort of alienation-effect, but an effort to take us outside the characters, so that we can view them, and their world, from an angle we've never experienced before. (Can an "angle" be "experienced"? I may be writing clumsily here, but the film actually convinced me that such a thing is possible). Rather than "identifying" with the characters, we are led to feel affectionately about them from a distance, as if we were friendly visitors from another planet (or as if, I am tempted to say, we were cinema spectators).
Also, continuity is frequently violated, because Ratanaruang is more concerned with emotional expression than with literal narrative coherence. When Noi falls asleep with her head in Kenji's lap, for instance, the clothes she is wearing change from one shot to the next; including one series of shots where she is wearing the clothes her sister had on when she died (a death that Kenji witnessed; and it was this now-dead sister upon whom Kenji had first had a crush).
Other times, the film just takes off into the stratosphere. When Kenji, with his obsessive neatness and cleanliness fetish, insists on cleaning up Noi's house, all of a sudden there's a scene where we don't actually see him cleaning; instead, we see the books and papers and other objects scattered all over the floor magically flying back, en masse, to their places in the cabinets and shelves. Noi first looks startled and uneasy that this is happening; but then she starts dancing, gracefully, in the midst of the flurry. Books and papers flit and twirl around her, as if in a gentle whirlpool. The camera observes, coolly, from a middle distance.
It's unclear whether Noi and Kenji ever actually get it on; it's implied that they do, once, but the camera does not show it. And the end of the film makes it undecidable how much of what we have seen has actually happened, and how much is fantasy (Kenji's probably, but perhaps Noi's as well).
Last Life in the Universe doesn't exhibit either the exhilaration of early Godard, nor the melancholy romanticism of Wong; but it has an affect of its own that is as moving and impressive as either of these. It's a kind of pleasurable coolness and lightness, sometimes flickering with quicksilver rapidity, other times mellowly dwelling on minute details (more for the sheer enjoyment of them than for any further significance they might have). Call it a sort of playful aestheticism, detached enough not to be momentous or anything, but adhesive enough to make you feel glad you are alive.
Posted by shaviro at 07:39 PM | TrackBack (0)
June 09, 2004
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai Ming-liang's most minimalist film. All of Tsai's films chart heartrending emotional disconnections with beautiful, motionless or slow-moving long takes. But Goodbye Dragon Inn pushes this to something of an extreme, as if Tsai were trying to see how much could be said, and felt, out of how little.
The movie chronicles the last screening in a decrepit, soon-to-be-torn-down old-style (big) movie theater. The film being shown is Dragon Inn, a classic King Hu martial arts film from the 1960s.
It's raining hard outside, and part of the theater is flooded: a motif that is repeated in most of Tsai's films.
There are very few patrons, and most of them aren't paying attention to the film. Men cruise one another, moving from seat to seat, or pissing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, or passing one another in narrow corridors somewhere in the theater's innards. But nobody ever connects, nobody picks anybody else up; there just doesn't seem to be any sexual spark.
Other patrons lounge in the seats, feet up on the seats in front of them, loudly chewing nuts or other snacks.
The ticket-taker, who who has a club foot, cooks her dinner in an electric pot, walks through the theater, picks up trash, cleans up the bathrooms, and goes to visit the projectionist, who is absent from his booth. (We presume that she likes him, but that the feeling isn't reciprocated).
There are no more than six or ten lines of dialogue in the entire 81 minutes of the film (aside from the dialogue and narration of Dragon Inn itself, which we hear in snatches). In the absence of talk, there's an extraordinary concentration upon duration, and upon bodies.
Duration: Goodbye Dragon Inn makes us feel the passage of time, the density and weight of its moments, one added to another, while nothing happens, or what happens happens with extreme slowness. There's one shot where the ticket-taker comes to the projection booth, and sits there waiting for him to return (which does not happen). She is motionless, and the shot is also motionless. Lots of cigarettes are heaped in an ashtray, and another cigarette, on the edge of the table, is still burning, the only sign of life. So we know that the projectionist is around somewhere, even though we don't see him. Finally the ticket-taker gets up and leaves, and finally there's a cut to the next shot.
There's also the moment when Dragon Inn ends; the lights in the theater go up, and the few remaining patrons leave, except for (what looks like) one old man who remains in his seat. (I say "looks like" because it's an extreme long shot, showing the whole theater from the stage, and it's hard really to tell). The camera holds on this scene of near-emptiness, the movie theater emptied of cinema, for what seems like a long time, until Tsai finally cuts to some final shots of the ticket-taker and the projectionist separately cleaning up and going home.
These shots are fascinating -- and not in the least boring -- they are filled with a kind of tension, precisely because there is so little to see. Drained of activity and of change, the shots solicit our gaze. Instead of looking at action sequences, such as those that fill Dragon Inn, we find ourselves looking at something that is normally invisible, normally hidden by the very facts of action and movement: the passage of time itself.
But what's truly mesmerizing and intense about Goodbye Dragon Inn is the bodies present in the theater. The men pass each other in an arrested dance, scarcely exchanging a word, making gestures that are withdrawn as soon as they have been sketched out. The club-footed ticket-taker painfully limps her way down corridors and up and down stairs; even when we cannot see her, we hear the clip-clop of her slow passage. These people scarcely seem to have any more life within them than do the celluloid figures in the film they are not watching; their only substantiality comes from the way Tsai's camera dwells on them, projects them in turn to us. (Indeed, two old men, who seem to be the only audience members actually watching the movie, are the very actors who starred in Dragon Inn some forty-odd years previously). Tsai points up both the ghostliness of cinema, and the way that cinema nonetheless substantializes, and physicalizes, what it projects as two-dimensional shadows.
Goodbye Dragon Inn is not without humor (which comes from the incongruity of its characters' non-connections), but mostly it expresses a discreet and poetic melancholy. Film is commonly said to preserve what otherwise dies and vanishes; but film in the classic sense is itself now in decline, as it is increasingly displaced by the new multimedia, as well as by new forms of consumption (multiplexes of small theaters instead of the old movie palaces, not to mention videos and DVDs viewed at home). Tsai seeks to memorialize this decline itself, as if what film most beautifully preserved were its own slow process of decay.
Posted by shaviro at 10:17 PM | TrackBack (0)
June 05, 2004
Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004
No American political figure of the entire twentieth century had a more baleful effect upon America itself than Ronald Reagan. (Though there are others who can contend with him for the dubious honor of having created the most misery for the world in general). Something like 90% of the American people are far worse off economically than they would have been had Reagan not been elected, and economic policy followed some other, less right-wing-extremist course. But worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that Reagan created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for "losers" and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism. Hearing all the nauseating encomia for Reagan that are filling the airwaves tonight, it is important to remember that Ronald Reagan, more than any other human being, was the face of evil of the late twentieth century. I only hope that I live long enough to see his foul legacy effaced, as all legacies must be sooner or later.
Posted by shaviro at 09:20 PM | TrackBack (0)
June 04, 2004
The Forest
The Forest (literal translation of French title: The Silence of the Forest), directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kobhio, is supposedly the first-ever feature film from the Central African Republic. (Bassek ba Kobhio is Camerounian, and made several films there, including an excellent deconstruction of the myth of Albert Schweitzer, Le grand blanc de Lambarene). It's a powerful, but strangely divided movie.
The first half of The Forest works as political satire. Gonaba, the protagonist (played by Eric Ebouaney) has idealistically returned to the CAR after getting an excellent French education, because he wants to help improve his country. But what he has found instead is corruption, stagnation, empty concern with pomp and ceremony, and all the other political ailments of so much of contemporary Africa. He's concerned with injustice -- opposing the racist contempt in which the majority of the CAR regard the Biaka people (the so-called "Pigmies") -- but also pompous, condescending, and colonialist-minded (his girlfriend tells him she likes him because he has "the body of a black man and the mind of a white man").
All this changes in the second half of the film, when Gonaba flees into the jungle and joins a Biaka community. He arrives thinking he will teach them to read and write French, thus raising them up to equality with the rest of the country. But instead of teaching them, he learns from them: he "goes native," joining their group, being initiated into their ways, and marrying (and having a child with) a Biaka woman. In this portion of the film, the satirical knowingness of the first part totally dissolves. Instead we get a Rousseauian vision of "noble savages." All the Biaka roles are played by Biaka people who are not professional actors, and much of this section of the film displays, in almost an "ethnographic film" manner, their customs and rituals.
Eventually, Gonaba is forced to leave and return to "civilization": but we are meant to feel that he learned a more honest and authentic way of life from the Biaka.
The trouble with this is, of course, that the idealized vision of "noble savages" is itself a European racist and colonialist point of view: it's just the flip side of the dismissal of "savages" as primitive, ignorant, and not-quite-human. The "noble savage" view, just as much as the flat-out racist view, effaces the social and individual reality of the people thus characterized. And usually, as in this film, it uses the vision of "noble primitives" merely as an enabler for the "civilized" person's self-discovery.
So it's strange, and more than a little distressing, to see an African film that, after critiquing the Euro-colonialist mindset, ends up adopting that mindset itself. I wish I could convince myself that the filmmakers were self-conscious about this irony; but I can find no evidence that this is the case.
Posted by shaviro at 09:49 PM | TrackBack (0)
June 03, 2004
The Last Train
The Last Train, by Alexei German Jr. (the son of the Alexi German who directed the utterly brilliant and nearly incomprehensible Khroustaliev, My Car), is a sublime film. It takes place during World War II, among German soldiers on the Russian front. The protagonist, a German doctor, arrives at the front in the bitterness of winter, as a blizzard is starting up, and just as the German troops are withdrawing. He is a man without family or friends, and a personality that is massively uningratiating; he is essentially alone. As the German withdrawal proceeds, he's simply forgotten about and left behind. The film has almost no plot, aside from that. It's shot gorgeously, in black and white Cinemascope: sometimes in deep focus, sometimes not, and sometimes with wide-angle or telephoto lenses. Most of the film takes place in the snow, with different shades of white predominating; sometimes snowfall or fog nearly blanks out the picture. Sometimes shots ring out, and people fall down dead. Other times the doctor and other characters engage in grotesque, absurdist dialogues or monologues. In any case, people move slowly in the snow and in the cold. The soundtrack is dominated by nearly ubiquitous coughing: it would seem that all the characters have colds, or incipient pneumonia, or worse (if there is such a thing as worse). Everyone is doomed. There is no redemption or salvation at the end. Sitting in the theater, chilled by what I saw and heard, I entirely forgot that outside it was sunny and 80 degrees.
Posted by shaviro at 11:09 PM | TrackBack (0)
Running on Karma
Running on Karma is the latest Johnny To film I've seen, thanks to SIFF. Like the other To films I've seen, it twists genre in intriguing and unexpected ways.
Here's the premise. A female cop (Cecilia Cheung) encounters a muscleman with supernatural powers (Andy Lau, prosthetically enhanced with a Mr Universe-esque torso) who helps her catch brutal serial killers. A relationship develops between them...
Only what I just wrote doesn't really tell you anything about the film. It takes too many unexpected turns. What starts out as a martial-arts action film turns into something else entirely.
Before I go on, I'd like to praise the film's visuals. Instead of the gunplay in the other To films I've seen, here we have cartoonish special effects for the action sequences. Everything is bigger than life, and lively in ways that recent American superhero films (Spiderman or the Batman franchise, for instance -- I haven't seen Hellboy -- are utterly unable to match). But To doesn't dwell on the special effects, or make them the spectacular center of the film -- they are just there, alongside the usual naturalistic views of Hong Kong streets and Buddhist monasteries, and (towards the end of the film) the mountains of Shanxi. As in other To films, there's an obliqueness of presentation, a fragmenting of the visual field, and a temporal scrambling due to a fluid use of flashbacks. I'm tempted to say that, while this is an extravagant film, the extravagance is understated. And this is a large part of the affective pull of the film, the way it sublimates both melodrama/tragedy and behaviorist comedy into its cool but unironic mood.
Lau's character is a former martial arts monk, who left the monastery after facing personal trauma. Now he mostly performs in male strip clubs and at bodybuilding competitions (when he isn't dodging the Hong Kong police, who keep on deporting him back to the mainland as an illegal immigrant). But besides his skills of strength, he has a gift which is also a curse: he is able to see other people's karma. When he looks at them he sees images of their past lives, which appear as transparent flickers on the movie screen. He knows when they are going to suffer or die as payback for past sins. The initial reason he helps Cheung's cop is because she is so obviously a good person, yet she is threatened with imminent death because in a past life she was a murderous (male) Japanese soldier.
The romantic relationship between these characters is never fully expressed. She adores him, but he refuses all her advances. He feels for her, too, but he's unwilling to let the feeling out. So they never do more in the course of the film than hold hands for a minute. This unfulfilled desire creates a tension: not a swooning, over-the-top melodramatic one, but more like a muted vibration, an unease that is distantly felt, or a distance that itself turns into the film's subject.
The major serial killer is caught halfway through the film. After that, the linear plot more or less dissolves. Instead we have just the characters' relationship, something which cannot "develop" dramatically. A deadlock, which the film expresses and expands by forgoing action for long stretches, in favor of inconclusive meetings between the protagonists.
Cheung's cop ultimately sacrifices herself for Lau's redemption -- after he has been saving her for most of the film. Her death is disturbing, and is repeated several times in the course of the film's final sequence: but always obliquely, through distance and odd angles, through grainy video footage, as well as through flashbacks that explain what led up to it. To at one point uses what might be called the inverse of a shock cut, as he cuts from a brief image of her impaled head to the pastoral images of one of these flashbacks.
The result is that the cartoony action flick has metamorphosed into a poetic meditation on life, death, and karma. I don't know enough about Buddhism or Chinese culture to know if the sentiments expressed are anything more than cliche -- Yomi says they are total crap -- but the concluding sequences worked affectively for me. Whatever sense of peace Lau's character comes to, this sense remains haunted by Cheung's absence. Is this just the old story of the woman being sacrificed in order to redeem the man? If so, then it's one in which the cost of that sacrifice is insistently dwelt upon, instead of being relegated to the background. The entire film is haunted by a sense of missed encounters, as well as by the determination not to accept what nevertheless cannot be averted. So the film is anti-fatalistic in mood (it expresses a determination) at the same time that it depicts a fate which will have its way regardless. How strange and beautiful for this sort of paralysis, this deadlock of will and understanding, to become the overriding mood of an action film.
Posted by shaviro at 02:10 PM | TrackBack (0)