The Ground Wants You Back Sunday, September 21, 2003

Joe Henry playing, and he does not disappoint. More on him later, but for now I'll just give you a verse from the title song, "Tiny Voices":

I can quit this anytime
It's just to help me sleep
It stops the tiny voices
And the strange hours that they keep
Who wants to hear them bleating on
And have to answer too?
Better to be dumb when I'm
falling for you.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a son of a bitch who knows how to write lyrics.

Anyhow. An afternoon with Logan and Jessica and Francis. In many ways "Logan's Run" is a test case for my feelings about science fiction: I love it but for the wrong reasons.

First things first. It is by no conventional measure a good movie. The future it paints is patently ridiculous; it was shot in a mall and looks it, and not even in the wackiest alternative universe would anybody wear those outfits. (Jenny Agutter in her green Kleenex, twenty years before J-Lo; poor dear Farah in a tinfoil miniskirt; funkmeister Michael York in a lounging tunic with sleeves big enough to hide Esquivel and Joe Meek both.)

The story, moreover, is sentimental and dopey and based on the same wrong assumptions all of its contemporaries were. Everything's running out, things are about to crumble, we'll have to create some new Leviathan state to save ourselves. In a review of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Martin Amis noted her reference to the Yeats poem "The Second Coming" (The center does not hold...what rude beach slouches towards Bethlehem to be born etc.) and observed tartly:

It doesn't seem to have occurred to her with necessary force that "The Second Coming" was written half a century ago. The centre hasn't been holding for some time now; actually the centre was never holding, and never will hold. Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fell apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity. It routinely assimilates and domesticates more pressing burdens that Miss Didion's particular share of vivid, ephemeral terrors.

And Saul David's terrors, and Norman Jewison's. In that light, "Logan's Run" and "Rollerball" and "Soylent Green" are fundamentally short-sighted, silly movies.

On the other hand, they've got that certain sci-fi something that makes them exciting. It was there in Jules Verne and "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" and "Forbidden Planet"; it's in every Philip K. Dick novel. The best way I can sum it up is: The tension of presenting something you know is absurd but daring the audience to play along in the joke. Yes, robots are silly; yes, blast pistols are ridiculous; yes, no woman in a million years would wear a vinyl bikini and a flowerpot on her head. But in the best sci-fi somehow that ridiculousness points to a greater truth. e.g., Robby the Robot tells us something about what it means to be human. What vinyl bikinis tell us about is a little murkier, although I think I need to explore the topic in more detail. In five-minute increments...

Your bed is adrift
It's come loose from the floor
The dead float up like dreams
I push them back with my arm like an oar
But your face is alive
Like a nickel cartoon
Shown on the wall
To light up the room

That bastard can write a song. But anyway.

I go into detail on this sci-fi stuff because I've been losing faith in the genre lately. The books seem exceptionally badly written, and I don't know how to approach the task of telling a sci-fi story anymore. Talking through these movies, and why I like them and why I don't, helps me remember what got me attracted in the first place.

In "Logan's Run," it was Jenny Agutter. I remember dragging my mother home early from shopping at Queens Plaza so I could watch it on Channel Five. (This in the days when you could still have an unaffiliated TV station.) Even chopped up for broadcast, the movie was sexy as hell--sexy as, in later years, Heinlein seemed (before I realized how profoundly hateful and death-dealing his philosophy was). Impossible to forget Jenny appearing in her Greek servant-girl outfit (or whatever the hell that was), with that gorgeous little haircut and big bright eyes...then Michael York grabbing her and saying, matter-of-factly, "Let's have sex."

(In the audio commentary, M.Y. reacts to Jenny's wet, spectacular nude scene by saying something like: "Ah. I forgot this was in here. Oh my." That reaction, twenty years after the movie was made, tells us more about the future than anything the director and writer dreamed up.)

To ping-pong a little, I've been trying to pin down the underlying assumptions of these movies. Sex is particularly interesting. As near as I can tell, the idea is that the sexual revolution continued and wore down norms of behavior; so marriages could be broken up by corporate fiat or cease to exist entirely, in the case of "Logan's Run."

But the movies are peculiar and conservative when it comes to imagining women's role in all this. Men are no longer gentlemen; they are pure predators, all want and nothing to domesticate them. (Although the Sandmen veer awfully close to Metrosexuality; check out that sauna scene.) But, in this model, women never got liberated. In other words, they lost the sexual revolution: Anybody can have sex with anybody, but only men can choose their partners.

What's up with that? Plain old Hollywood skeevery, I suspect. An industry run by horny old guys who love the license that liberation allows them, but don't want to extend that license to the other half of the population. Not too philosophical, but there you go. In this light, "Sex and the City" is weirder than Carousel and Soylent Green Tuesday combined. And nobody dies at thirty, either.

(Tangent: Rufus Wainwright, in a new song, just referenced a classic Johnny Mercer lyric:

Get me heaven or hell, Calais or Dover,
I was hoping the train was my big number
Taking the Santa Fe and the Atchison Topeka)

The movies kinda sorta take the line that this view of sex dehumanizes everybody concerned: It makes the men into animals and the women into "furniture," like Charlton Heston says. But there are no proto-Myron Magnets here: The movies don't criticize the overall defects of the sexual revolution, nor do they mind leering at the stuff they're theoretically condeming. (A Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks skit: Mel is a Greek film director, Mercurio Mercurichrome, talking about his new movie, "Rape": "People have to see the immorality...so they know not to do that." Almost as funny is the ending of the movie: "And then the Turkish army comes and rapes them all!")

As for religion, forget it. The corporations have wiped it out entirely in "Rollerball," it's been supplanted by youth culture and the big glass hand in "Logan's Run." It's still kicking around in "Soylent Green," in a way even Dr. Percy might approve of: The church is where you go when you can't go anywhere else, and it's the only place where people tell the truth.

Speaking of which, Father Pineapple this morning. He mentioned Leon Kass (!) in his homily, and had some interesting stuff to say about life and how to live it. I'm still puzzled by something: Why is it that I could go to church for years and years and feel angry and resentful every last minute (the priests stink, the crowd is a bunch of sheep) but as soon as somebody told me "You have faith" I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes? How come I can jump out bed now on Sundays, get dressed up without a fuss, and come out smiling no matter how dopey the sermon? What kind of faith is it that has to be pointed out by a third party?

Which is not to sound depressed. I dig it. Almost as much as Jenny Agutter.

@ 8:03:00 PM,

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