Ken’s Blog

Yesterday I saw a talk by Scott Ross, who has for many careers helped bring a number of major Hollywood special-effects films to the screen, including two “Back to the Future” films, “Die Hart 2”, “Ghost”, “Strange Days” and “Fight Club”. But in this talk I was alarmed by some conclusions he reached.

Ross was discussing the charmingly quirky Korean 2006 horror/family-dramedy “The Host”, analyzing it from a financial perspective. First he pointed out that the film cost $11M to make ($3M going to out-source the monster effects), while it earned $89M in global box office — a reasonable example of a commercially successful movie.

Then he pointed out that only $2M of the film’s box office was from the U.S. From this statistic, he drew the conclusion that the filmmakers had erred — that they should not have released the film in Korean, but rather should have hired a writer to transpose it to English, and make it more culturally relevant to a U.S. audience. If they had done this, he claimed, they would have made a lot more money.

Now, I know that Ross has had a long and successful career in feature films, and nobody can take that away from him. Yet here he was, making a statement that was so wrongheaded, I thought at first that he was trying to make some kind of ironic joke. Sadly, he wasn’t.

If you actually watch this film (I had caught its initial U.S. release), you realize that its success was due to a unique blending of a very Korean-specific charming domestic family drama with a story that involved a 100 foot long fearsome mutant sea creature gobbling people up for lunch, while those family members fight for their lives.

The reason the film works is that these two stories — a tender and gently humorous tale of an eccentric yet loving family and, well, a monster movie — are balanced and played off each other with great finesse. And there are just too many things about the way the film achieves this balance that are culture-specific, for it to be culturally translatable.

I’ll give just one example of many: One of the central conceits of the film, one of reasons in fact that it works so well, is that the threat is real — any of these people can get eaten by the monster, and over the course of the movie a number of them do, even the occasional plucky and adorable youngster. Within its cultural context, this actually strengthens the family drama (you’d have to watch the movie to see how and why).

Imagine, in an American special effects film, a monster actually killing off an adorable child that the audience has been rooting for and has bonded with. You’d be laughed out of Hollywood just for suggesting such a taboo idea.

For this and for many other reasons, you could not retune “The Host” for an American audience. Rather, you’d need to make a fundamentally different film. You could give your film the same title, and even the same monster, but you’d have to gut the very core ideas that made the original film so appealing in its original cultural context.

Shorn of the delicate magic of the original writing, your film would not make anything like $89M at the box office — more likely it would make less than $1M. Audiences know when they are being snookered.

The fact that this concept is not understood by someone of Ross’s long experience in film is appalling. No wonder there aren’t more great films coming out of Hollywood.

My post yesterday was actually a sonnet in iambic pentameter, with an ABBACDDCEFFEGG rhyme scheme. I didn’t format it as a poem, because I was trying to get into the mindset of someone for whom this was everyday speech.

I wonder whether it would be possible for us mere humans — not a hypothetical super-genius race — to learn to improvise such things in real-time. I’m imagining a recreational activity in which a group of pleasantly fanatical people get together periodically, agreeing to speak to each other only in iambic pentameter.

After enough practice and some time, words might start to blossom into rhyme. A community could form around pursuing it.

Oops, I fear I already am doing it!

I find that I am filled with fascination at the prospect of a world where daily speech was always rhymed and metered, so that each new thought came out like poetry. A nation capable of thinking in these ways might well evolve a culture more creative, with everyone an artist.

If each native always had a lovely turn of phrase, would their population even know it? Would people feel like artists all the time? Just because your words come out in rhyme doesn’t mean you think you are a poet. And not to put too fine a point upon it, what if speech all came out as a sonnet?

Yesterday I wrote about a race
That speaks in rhyming couplets all the time
But then, they might have many forms of rhyme
To satisfy their need for rhythmic order
For X points out that couplets may well border
On dullness rather more than spoken grace.

Her comment focused mainly on the use
Of enjambment as a way to keep the flow
Of thought between one’s verses, even though
I’ve often found, when all is said and done,
Like our fine and fickle friend, the lowly pun,
Enjamb-ed verse is subject to abuse.

I agree that terms français, peut etre latin,
Can make a phrase sound ever so bravura.
And given the occasional caesura
The plainest little thought becomes exotic.
But isn’t such a goal a bit quixotic?
I know I’m just a poor boy from Manhattan,

So who am I to say? It’s really fine
If some might want to break up all their phrasing
In two, although I find it quite amazing
We need a word from way across the ocean,
“Enjambment”, to express a simple notion.
Why can’t we simply say “a run-on line”?

Continuing the theme from yesterday…

In “Idiocracy”, when Luke Wilson, with his IQ of 100 (which in the future makes him a genius) speaks in fully formed sentences, the local populace finds it completely bizarre — in fact they laugh at him, finding him effete. I’ve been thinking about how one might convey the equivalent encounter, should people from an alternate reality where the average IQ is 200+ enter a society where the average IQ is 100.

We’re talking about a race of people who could do the NY Times Saturday crossword puzzle in their heads, or glance at stock market listings and then find it obvious where to invest. So it would make sense that their cultural norm of speech would incorporate linguistic challenges that they would find easy, but which would require much effort on our part to keep up with.

Here’s one possibility: Our visitors, in their native dialect, always speak in perfectly formed iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. Of course when such people encounter us, with our barbarically chaotic speech patterns, they could learn to mimic our grammar, but they would undoubtedly find such speech as distasteful as the grunting of an early human.

Such visitors, on first arriving, might attempt to speak to us in their native dialect. The result might be something like this:

Native:		“Welcome to Burger King. How can I help you?”
Visitor:		“I thank you for your courtesy today. What food is here that we can take away?”
Native:		“Come again?”
Visitor:		“Certainly we’ll come again quite soon. But can’t we order now, it’s nearly noon?”

Things aren’t likely to go well for this visitor. In fact, you can well imagine our bemused native getting a serious case of the giggles.

I just saw Mike Judge’s brilliant 2006 satire “Idiocracy”. The premise is simple: A perfectly average man with an IQ of 100 is inadvertently kept in suspended animation for 500 years. When he awakes, he finds that due to unchecked human devolution (because stupid people have more babies than smart people), he is — by far — the smartest man in the world.

Although the film is wildly funny in places (not surprising, from the writer/director of “Office Space”), the total effect is quite depressing, and I mean that as praise. Every element of Judge’s imagined future dystopia is a pointed and very clever extrapolation from the cultural dumbing down that we see around us every day.

Watching this film, I was struck how confused the future humans became every time our hero spoke in complete grammatically correct sentences, or any time he used common sense reasoning in any non-trivial way. They literally could not follow either his words or his thoughts.

And it occurred to me that it would be interesting to transpose this entire idea — to posit an “average citizen” from a high IQ alternate world, and play out the same sort of scenario as he or she encounters our current reality. What would human speech be like that is perfectly correct, yet too intelligent for us to follow? What would be interesting examples of common sense reasoning beyond our own?

It would be fascinating to follow the story from the perspective of such a character, as our hero attempts to communicate with us by “dumbing down” speech into something we can understand, or negotiates everyday situations through dazzling reasoning, as though writing Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” in real time.

I know there have been attempts to do this in pop-culture, but I’ve never been satisfied, watching Mr. Spock, Q, the Talosians, Dr. Who, Professor X, Jarod, D.A.R.Y.L., or their various fictional cousins, that I was witnessing a believable representation of a truly higher functioning intellect.

Maybe I’m asking for too much.

By the way, what’s up with all the fictional super-intellects being guys?

The idea of a consumer culture is so pervasive in our society that it generally is not seriously questioned in popular debate or political discourse. By “consumer culture” I mean the general notion that a small elite of creators with access to capital (what we in this country generally think of as “corporate America”) creates the innovations and corresponding goods that the rest of us buy, thereby keeping the economy humming along.

But what if this very concept is damaging us? What if it turns out that we are mis-educating millions of citizens from early childhood into a kind of learned helplessness? Advances in information technology are now making available to the individual tools for creation and innovation that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

A feature film with quite impressive special effects can be made on a total budget of $15000 (eg: the recent film Monsters), and a high quality 3D printer costing only a few thousand dollars can be used to prototype at home intricate mechanical parts that would until recently have required a professional machine shop.

It’s a new world out there, but our entire education system is still thinking in terms of churning out little consumers — passive recipients of innovations by the few. Somewhere in the world, people and their governments will soon realize that a revolution is afoot, and that the potential for increase of societal wealth and adaptivity is about to go through the roof.

I sure hope we don’t miss the revolution.

Yesterday on the train I saw a remarkable scene unfold. A young man across the aisle was juggling two Apple Macbook computers, balancing one on his knees while simultaneously using the other one on the fold-out tray.

That in itself wasn’t so unusual. After all, we live in a high-tech world. Two computers at once seems, somehow, par for the course. It’s what happened next that I found surprising.

At some point he closed the computer on his lap, tucked it under the open one on the tray, and took an orange out of his bag. He then proceeded to peel the orange upon the gleaming white surface of the Macbook, eating said fruit piece by piece, while placing the bits of discarded peel on his computer, next to the trackpad.

Now, at this point I must confess that I am very particular about my little Macbook Air. Food doesn’t go near it — in fact, nothing goes anywhere near its keyboard but my fingers. So I was quite taken aback by this forward-thinking young man’s repurposing of his high-tech instrument as a snack tray.

When the man was done, he then proceeded to take out a second orange and go through the identical procedure, forming another pile on the other side of his trackpad. Now his Macbook was supporting two piles of discarded orange peel. I was horrified, yet I could not look away.

Thus things remained for quite a while. Eventually, the young man was ready to leave. He cleared the twin mounds of orange peels off his computer keyboard, closed the computer, placed both computers in his bag, and was gone.

And I was left to ponder the amazing differences between people. Here was a man doing something without hesitation (and probably without any thought) that I could never have brought myself to do. People are so different!

Like apples and oranges.

I find myself wondering whether it was a good idea for our president to dignify the silly “birther” myths by publicly refuting them — and thereby acknowledging their existence.

I am reminded of a time, many years ago, when a false rumor started that MacDonald’s had rats in their food. MacDonald’s was in a tough spot. If they said anything, even to say it wasn’t true, it would only increase the visibility of the rumor.

So instead they ran a series of ads about how clean they were. It was very clever. They were floating a countering meme into the public consciousness, without ever having acknowledged the existence of the false rumors. If you watched carefully, you knew what was going on — but that’s not at all the same thing.

What is the best course of action when one is falsely accused of something completely nonsensical? Does it ever do any good to acknowledge idiocy, even to refute it?

I wonder whether the eternal truths of Zen Buddhism can be applied to our modern, crazy, frenetic lifestyle, with its twitters, texting, iPhones, and constant barrage of multitasked mayhem. Here is my humble attempt to create some appropriate Zen haiku. You might feel the urge to create some as well:

Wisdom for our age,
Timeless yet modern: never
Email in anger

So efficiently
I get three things done at once
Yet, I have no time

In your lover’s eyes
Your cellphone is reflected.
Do not answer it