THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/13/03 -- Vol. 21, No. 50
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Reproductive Fears (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE SWEATBOX (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Reproductive Fears (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I recently saw within a week of each other two films that make an
interesting pairing. The first of these was ALRAUNE, a 1952
German film retitled UNNATURAL for the American release. This was
the latest version of a novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers that had been
filmed no less than six times going back to 1918. It is the story
of a woman who had, in a vainglorious scientific experiment, been
created in an unnatural way that was quite literally an offense to
God. Because of the perverted way she came into being she is
literally soulless and goes around ruining many men's lives and
murdering before she is killed. And what is the unnatural way she
was created? At the time the novel was written it was science
fiction, but she was the result of what we now call (gasp!) in
vitro fertilization! As they pointed out in the film, intending
to shock, her mother had never even seen her father!!! Horrors.
The ghastly creature that resulted from this sinful process was
God's Vengeance for science usurping His power. That premise is
more interesting than the resulting film was. The assumption is
that God WANTS people to reproduce through intercourse and is
offended if any other process is used. Only genuine sexual
intercourse has God's Seal of Approval as a process for
reproduction. In fact, I think even at this time artificial
insemination was used for cattle. I don't know if they thought
that there were soulless cows running around ruining the lives of
bulls. Actually I think the assumption is that no cow has a soul
so all cows are soulless, immoral monsters, examples of the sort
of depraved beings we all could become without God's grace.
These days in vitro fertilization is fairly commonplace and there
are not a lot of soulless people running around that anybody can
tell (or at least prove). But this technique was a new idea at
the time and people watching the film were told that there was
something innately blasphemous about Petri dish insemination. It
was something that they were afraid of and as people are so often
wont to do, they projected those fears onto their God. I believe
the logic is that if they were righteous people and they are
spooked by this new technique, it follows God must not like the
idea Himself. Regardless of the fact that the Bible could not
possibly say anything specifically about this method of
reproduction, somehow God now has a bunch over-eager advocates
running in to protect what they see as His interests. Somehow
over the years it since ALAURNE was filmed 1952 it seems that God
has decided He is more comfortable with in vitro fertilization.
His advocates are no longer running around trying to say it goes
against His plan.
Shortly after seeing that film I saw a sci-fi movie on cable. It
was THE 6TH DAY with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here was another
hokey film about people creating people through non-traditional
means. This time it is human cloning. What interested me the
most is that this film seemed to be more recent but it was no less
a work of fear mongering about science intruding on reproduction
than was ALRAUNE. Every technical inaccuracy and common
misunderstanding about human cloning that I knew of showed up in
the film. Arnold found himself with an identical copy of himself,
a technological doppelganger, running around. It had his looks
and even his memories. Even his family could not detect a
difference. The process used might have even been to use a matter
duplicator like the one used in THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, filmed in
1953 (a time very paranoid about human reproduction, apparently).
What is wrong with all this? Well, cloning is a process to create
an embryo genetically identical to a donor. A person created by
the cloning procedure would be a genetically equivalent identical
twin, but one much younger than the donor. How much younger?
Measure the time between the two fertilizations.
A clone will be much less like the original that an identical twin
would be. And the brain of a clone would start out empty. There
would be no memories that the clone would inherit from the donor.
Since environment does a lot to form the individual's mentality
almost certainly a clone would have a very different personality
from the original. In addition experience makes people look
different. Even with identical twins someone who knows them well
can usually tell them apart.
The film paints the picture of a society that has sold it soul for
the immoral practice of cloning humans. Remember in the old
western movies where the dance hall girl has been lewdly cavorting
with any cowhand that comes along. Someone asks her doesn't she
have a husband. She looks up extremely blase and says something
like "Three of 'em. But I don't know where they are." The
subtext is this is a person to whom shocking sin means nothing.
An almost identical character is in THE 6TH DAY. They ask her,
"How many times have you been cloned?" Same blase expression.
"Six times." We are supposed to have the same shocked reaction.
This is formula writing. Somehow it just does not work this time.
Once the modern equivalent of the dance hall girl has made the
contribution of donor eggs she no longer need be involved with the
process. It is hard to be shocked at her for something that could
be done without even her knowledge.
If you want to know what fears people have at a given point of
time, one good source of information might be the horror stories
that people in that society tell themselves. In the case of
ALRAUNE and THE 6TH DAY obviously the fears have little relation
to reality.
If as a society we do get involved in cloning humans, I think that
we will find that the humans created by this process are fully
human and fully people as much as identical twins are and as much
as people who are the product of in vitro fertilization. Right
now there seem to be a large number of self-appointed advocates
for God projecting their fears onto Him and saying that he has
policies that one has really to stretch to claim they are covered
by the Bible.
I think in time the process of cloning will be accepted as just
one more technique for creating a human and not a disaster that
will bring about the fall of civilization. We will probably even
find the whole subject of cloning a little dry and unexciting. I
expect the fears we currently see expressed in films like THE
SIXTH DAY will seem as exaggerated and absurd as those expressed
in ALRAUNE. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE SWEATBOX (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The singer Sting was hired to write songs for the film
THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE. It was a contract he later had reason
to regret as he found the demands of the job particularly taxing.
This documentary shows what he went through and also shows the
chaos that the process of making a film can be. The film is
similar to, but not as good as, LOST IN LA MANCHA. Rating: 6 (0
to 10), +1 (-4 to +4)
This is the documentary about production problems making the film
THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE. It is directed by John-Paul Davidson
and Trudie Styler. The latter is the wife of Sting who was
intimately connected with the project. I suspect the documentary
started as a "The Making of..." sort of featurette and when the
production had problems it was re-packaged as a document of
production nightmare. Also at this festival (the 2002 Toronto
International Film Festival) we saw the similar documentary LOST
IN LA MANCHA, about the problems Terry Gilliam had making his Don
Quixote film. That film is probably more downbeat since Gilliam's
film never got made and production was canceled. The obstacles
encountered making THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE were light by
comparison. So this film might have been better out of that
context. However, the problems faced in this production were more
prosaic and much less memorable. Much more of THE SWEATBOX is
filled with accounts of more ordinary sorts of troubles.
The problem was that the company had not settled on even so much
as what the story would be about when the various sub-departments
of Disney animation were turned loose. Changes late in the
creation process are far more expensive than are ones early in the
process. The film had serious script problems and well into the
production the plot was changed from being a sort of Andean THE
PRINCE AND THE PAUPER into the plot that was eventually released,
in which the young emperor is turned by evil magic into a llama
and has to rely on an older man (voiced by John Goodman) as a
friend. This meant that a great deal of the work that was done
had to be thrown out and redone.
In the case of this film large changes were made far into the
production and the resulting expenses turned into what some
consider a fiasco. I have a different perspective. I worked most
of my career for Bell Laboratories. I saw in and out of Bell many
projects suffering from very analogous sorts of problems and in
some cases the results were considerably more expensive. The
lessons hard-learned at Disney were the same ones we learned many
times over at Bell Laboratories. Those same lessons have been
learned many times over in other companies in the entertainment
industry, that have be learned many time over in many other
industries, and I would bet money that they have even been learned
many times over on previous Disney projects. The problem is
remembering the lessons learned the next time around. The foibles
of making THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE were probably common to most
large projects. On the other hand many of Gilliam's problems on
his Don Quixote project were probably fairly unique to Gilliam.
Particularly aggrieved at the changes was the singer Sting who
wrote half a dozen songs for the original film plot and thought he
was done. When the plot changed under him all of a sudden his
songs no longer made sense. There was a new story and a new
context. He had new songs that he had to write that fit the new
storyline. This was not a total loss to him. The documentary
made clear in other interviews that when work is thrown out and
has to be re-done, it is Disney that pays for both the old and the
new work. Sting was paid for every song he wrote. His grievance
was the loss of audience for the songs he had written and as well
as the loss of the freedom to be able to go on to other projects.
The documentary shows him, not entirely sympathetically
surprisingly, being called back to the project from vacations in
places like Tuscany and the Himalayas. He seems to have been
caught unaware that writing six songs for a film is a considerably
bigger and more demanding project than writing six songs to please
himself. Given that one director of THE SWEATBOX was his wife and
another was a friend, his treatment by the film is surprisingly
even-handed.
The move of the home market to DVDs probably has increased the
demand for "The Making of ..." sorts of featurettes made along
side of major film productions. Some of these film productions
will be failures or will simply run into major problems. The
logical thing to do at that point is to turn the side featurette
into a document of production problems. That is probably why
there were two such similar films at the Toronto festival. We
will probably see more of this sort of film until the filmmakers
sense that the market has been glutted. In this meantime this is
a reasonably entertaining film, though not as much so as LOST IN
LA MANCHA. I rate THE SWEATBOX a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 1
on the -4 to +4 scale. Note: The title has a double meaning. It
is the nickname of the screening room, but the title also
represents the unfair treatment that Sting feels he suffered at
the hands of the Disney people. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I plan to read all of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past"
(or "In Search of Lost Time", as it's now called), and have read
the first book (SWANN'S WAY) already. So when I heard about Alain
De Botton's book HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, I thought,
"Well, that should be helpful as a study guide." Eventually, I
found a copy in a library, and what I discovered was that it was
full of "pop philosophy" (which is at least a level above pop
psychology) on ideas that could be found in a lot of other books
besides Proust as well. While I don't discount it completely as
an annotation to Proust, it isn't really about how Proust is so
different from any other author. (It also assumes that the
details of Proust's life are valuable in understanding the book,
which is a theory I subscribe to, but not universal.) Also on my
stack is Phyllis Rose's A YEAR OF READING PROUST, so I'll have to
read that and compare it. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Sex is God's joke on human beings.
-- Bette Davis
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