All Come True Friday, February 06, 2004

A crummy morning, but it brings a theory. In his essay on Fairy Stories, Tolkien argues that staged presentations of fairy tales don't work for a number of reasons: you're concentrating on the illusion, not what it means (i.e., you care more about Peter Pan flying over the crowd than the metaphor of flight); and you can't give things any depth. You can show a rock on stage, but you can't show all the connotations that the word rock summons up when you read it on the page.

I think this fills in, sort of, my feelings about sci-fi these days. I hate reading it, it seems underwritten and overwritten at the same time, pallid and limp and ridiculous. But a good movie can still transport me. I wouldn't read "Voyage of the Space Beagle" again if you paid me, but I'd watch the movie it inspired, "Alien," again and again. (Even if a certain Lithuanian friend thinks all of Ridley Scott's movies look like L'Oreal commercials.)

Why is that? Here's my theory: Some sci-fi works better on screen because you don't have to worry about the words. You don't have to explain why this machine works, or why there's water on Mars, or why that guy's green. Relieving the story of that burden gives it much more direction and energy. I don't need to know how the androids work in "Blade Runner" to believe in them; knowing how they work would make the story even more "meditative" (i.e., slow and occasionally dull) than it already is.

So there you go.

@ 8:56:00 AM,

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