Movie star math

In a conversation at the Hamptons International Film Festival a friend posited that Sam Shepard is unique among movie stars in his ability to embody both the poetically suffering sensitive lover and the iconic manly cowboy, all at once. I countered that there is at least one other example — Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain”. My friend agreed, but after thinking about it a bit more, I’m not so sure I was right.

Ledger manages the stretch between lover and cowboy by being winningly boyish, which is something a bit different. His character is really the man-child still in the process of discovering his true nature.

In contrast, Shepard as easily conveys the figure of the fully formed cowboy as Sam Elliott himself — handsomely craggy, quietly authoritative, a man of action in that calmly Zen way of the true loner hero. At the same time, he does indeed embody the sensitive suffering lover, every bit as soulful as Adrien Brody in “The Pianist”, to choose an iconic example. All this while being a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright!

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There are many movie stars who are great at being one or the other of these things, while being merely acceptable at the other. Richard Gere makes a great sensitive lover, but as a cowboy he’s not quite there. And one could argue that Harrison Ford has transitioned gracefully from young lover to old cowboy, but he was never perfectly both at the same time.

Which leaves me wondering: Was my friend correct? Is there really only one living movie star who has simultaneously embodied both of these divergent ideals?

A beautiful couple

Today I watched “A Beautiful Mind” in the company of John and Alicia Nash. The occasion was a celebration of John Nash, as part of a larger celebration by the Hampton’s Film Festival of films that focus on science and scientists.

John and Alicia are fascinating people — both brilliant, both very down to earth, and clearly very emotionally connected with one another. It was interesting to hear them talk quietly to each other during the screening, pointing out places where the film got things particularly right or wrong.

All in all I think they have made their peace with the extremely large liberties that Ron Howard and company took in putting their story on screen. For example, in reality John Nash never saw anything that wasn’t there (his hallucinations were entirely auditory), and the chronology of events in the film is rather screwed up. The screenplay also contains a huge number of other factual errors that it would be pointless to enumerate here.

But the spirit of the film has held up well since I last saw it during its initial release. At the core is the fundamental idea that a schizophrenic, if he has the right emotional support, can eventually use reason and logic to figure out which parts of his perceived reality are true, and which originate inside his mind. As Alicia said when we held a panel discussion after the screening, the film is part of an important discussion about how to deal with mental illness.

This evening a man I’d never met came up to me and thanked me for running the session. He said his sister is schizophrenic, and that he has always been inspired by the story of John Nash. I told the man that I was honored to be able to take part in such an event, with two such extraordinary people. And I very much meant it.

Contract with the audience

Today, at the Hamptons International Film Festival, I saw four feature films, each wildly different in every way from the other three. One was a tongue-in-cheek metaphysical inquiry into narrative, another was a non-fiction thriller based on the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Italy, a third was a revisionist documentary about Marilyn Monroe based on her very thoughtful writings (unearthed only after her death), and the fourth was the Tim Burton stop-motion film Frankenweenie.

I enjoyed all of them, although I found the two serious films to be far more satisfying (think “meal”, as opposed to “dessert”).

But seeing such different movies back to back really brought home to me that a film is, at heart, a contract. In particular, the filmmaker is contracting with the audience to assert and then maintain a very specific alternate reality — a world that has much in common with ours, but with key and well-defined differences.

A good film must bring the audience in on this contract quickly and cleanly. The film can contain mystery, but it cannot contain fuzziness. And a bad film is one in which the initial contract is either not clearly made, or else is betrayed at some point between the start credits and the end credits.

Even if viewers do not consciously know what the contract is, they always know whether it is a good one or a bad one, and whether it has been violated.

This is the reason that a beginning author is often advised to “kill your children”. If you fall too much in love with a particular scene in your story, then you will be tempted to keep that scene in no matter how much it tears the larger narrative out of shape. So you need to be prepared to be ruthless in throwing out good material — even great material.

In fact the only thing that ultimately matters is that contract with the audience. If you make a good contract and stick to it (admittedly not an easy thing to do), your tale will be a success.

Off the grid

A friend of mine is currently traveling completely “off the grid” through Nepal. You can’t communicate with somebody directly while they are disconnected from the info-web, but you can imagine what their journey is like.

I have been doing just that. In the process, I am learning all sorts of things about Nepal. Yesterday I traced an imaginary route from Kakabhitta to Kanchanpur. The more I read about these places, the more fascinating they become.

I may just need to take some time off the grid myself.

Generative StretchText

In 1967 Ted Nelson described the concept of “StretchText” — a body of text that compresses down to successively more compact abstracts in response to space constraints.

I was having a conversation recently with my colleague Noah Wardrip-Fruin in which we realized that he and I share an interest in doing something similar in spirit, but in some ways quite different: Using a generative narrative engine to selectively expand what starts out as a compact abstract, so that it expands to a desired level of detail.

It goes without saying that this is a hard problem. It presupposes some kind of engine for directed narrative generation, such as the research being done in the Expressive Intelligence lab at UC Santa Cruz (run by Noah and Michael Mateas), or the system Emily Short and Richard Evans have been building to tell interactive stories in the style of Jane Austen.

But it also demands that the text that is generated be both dramatically interesting and narratively consistent, no matter how or where one “zooms in”. If Ted Nelson’s original concept is analogous to Google Maps, then this would be analogous to that zoomable procedural planet I created in homage to Richard Voss.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if this constraint were actually to help. The need to generate a consistent narrative at all levels of detail might lead to new approaches to narrative generation — perhaps better in some ways than the current state of the art.

Capital investment

I have a strong capitalist streak.

Which is what motivated me today to donate $1000 to the Obama reelection campaign. Since I live in NY State (definitely not a swing state), my vote won’t do much to sway the election. If you’re reading this from, say, California, the same is true for you. Which means the most useful thing you can probably do is donate money. Today if possible. That is, assuming the outcome of the election matters to you.

I’ve been trying to keep an open mind throughout this thing. But Romney’s “47%” speech — in which he dismisses nearly half the population — frankly horrifies me. It isn’t even so much the distain dripping from such phrases as “…who believe they are victims” and “…who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”.

It’s the astonishing incompetency of the thought behind it.

What chief executive of any corporation throws away his major asset? Romney is pretty much suggesting we toss out a huge percentage of our seed corn — the talented children (born with equal probability into all families) who will grow up to constitute the next generation of innovators in the U.S.

I certainly don’t think Obama is perfect. But at least he is sticking to solid capitalist principles: His administration supports investment in its nation’s number one economic asset. In any nation’s number one economic asset.

Why on earth would Romney want the United States to lose out economically as a nation state? Maybe he is secretly working for China.

Arbitragedy

This weekend I saw “Arbitrage”, the feature directing debut of Nicholas Jarecki (he also wrote the screenplay). It was quite good — with Richard Gere, Tim Roth, Stuart Margolin and Nate Parker much more than merely good — until the final plot twist.

At that point, mere minutes from the end, character coherence and believability were thrown out, all subtlety was sacrificed, and we were asked to believe that one of the principal characters had suddenly transformed into a psychotic villain from a bad B movie.

When this happened, I could feel the audience deflating around me, everyone in the theatre simultaneously saying to themselves “What the F—?!?!”.

From the perspective of “an American commercial movie”, it was clear why this choice was made. The idiotic plot twist conveniently balanced out the “moral scales” in a way that a movie studio would think an audience would like. It made complete sense in terms of formula. Just not in terms of the actual film we had been watching.

I would like to think that Jarecki was not responsible for this betrayal of what had been, up to that point, a well constructed movie. I would like to think that his movie was hijacked by rewrite demands from some clueless suit at Lions Gate Entertainment flushed with arrogance at the recent commercial success of “The Hunger Games”.

At least, that’s what I would like to think. It would be too awful to think that the writer himself simply destroyed his own story.

Orgone Box

This week I went to the Ghosts in the Machine exhibition a the New Museum, which traces the history of the relationship between machines and art. When I walked into the room that contained one of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Boxes, I found myself riveted, but it took me a while to understand why.

Eventually it came to me that the Orgone Box — a therapy tool based upon spending time within a metal-lined wooden box to focus sexual energy as a way toward general well-being — epitomizes to me a peculiar trend in American culture, a trend that peaked around forty years ago.

Until around the mid 60’s, technological progress in the U.S. was seen as an unambiguously good thing. Then Vietnam happened, and advanced technology began to be associated by liberal intellectuals with a larger pattern of brutal and unjustifiable military intervention.

This caused an odd split. Young liberals began to reject actual science and replace it with pseudo-science (some new, and some recycled). Nutty ideas like Toth pyramids, ESP, theories of alien visitors and Orgone Boxes became all the rage. Cause and effect as well as evidence-based reasoning were rejected by many young liberals, replaced by a kind of “Cargo Cult” version of science.

Now, forty years later, things have shifted dramatically. Liberals embrace the scientific community and its careful adherence to evidence-based reasoning, whereas political conservatives take an anti-intellectual stance (or, in the startling case of Rick Santorum, an anti-intelligence stance). The Tea Party rejects the carefully accumulated evidence for climate change, and even the overwhelming evidence for evolution.

So the liberals are now on the side of science, and the conservatives are on the side of anti-science — a complete reversal from forty years ago.

I wonder whether this is a cyclic phenomenon. Perhaps every 80 years or so liberalism coincides with respect for evidence-based science. Just a thought.