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The wonder-beautiful month of May has swept on by, in a mere blink of the culturological eye. And no wonder, given the steady stream of blockbusters that seeped out of Hollywood’s underclothing every weekend. Watching movies is a bit like watching baseball: after the first month of the season, one is tempted to draw major conclusions and determine how the whole season is going to play out, but must bide ones time as well, as so much is certain to change as the weeks progress. But it was a pretty good month for movies, all things considered (well, not all things… I really only went out to like three movies (I would’ve seen Up, but I was out of town over the weekend, and my friends all went to see it without me, and since I more or less make it a rule to never go to movies by myself, I probably won’t see it until its eventual DVD release)), and to me, the movie the really tied the month together, and gives the best sense of what the summer might hold is Terminator: Salvation.

Star Trek was great, Wolverine pretty much blew (apologies, as usual, to Nick, for my failing to find its stalwart action movie tropes to be as exciting and enjoyable as I should have), and Terminator falls somewhere in the middle. Where I was hesitant to compare Star Trek and Wolverine, I feel the opposite impulse between the latter and Terminator. Mostly ‘cause they’re both more or less straight-up sci-fi/action flicks, and both come from similar pedigrees (having two quite good movies been made in their franchises with questionable third movies—though T-3 was way way better than X-Men 3). Wolverine riding his motorcycle out of an exploding barn? Meh. T-800 jumping off an exploding bridge holding an axe and using that axe to climb onto a giant flying robot? Awesome!

Beyond the explosions-and-leaping comparison, the obvious choice to put against each other are the special effects; it’s very easy to say “Terminator looked much better, and was therefore the better movie.” In fact, it’s one of those arenas where I have the most trouble getting an objective sense of my own taste. Ideally, I wouldn’t really care one way or the other about the look of the movie, and gauge it more for its editing/action/pacing, but its hard to ignore the fact that Wolverine looked so cheap and careless, whereas Terminator (and Star Trek, for the matter) had much bigger budgets (though also, arguably, more of a need for those effects) for the computer graphics. But sci-fi is one of those genres where I think it does matter. Look at Star Wars: what was it that separated those first three Star Wars movies from the pack of all the rest of the sci-fi in the ‘70s? It’s set-design, specifically the darkness of its sets (this isn’t necessarily something that I feel like I can actually fully argue, but it’s been my sense for a long time that the only reason Star Wars was ever popular is because of the darkness of its sets). Terminator 2? The Matrix? Special effects are what cement their place in action/sci-fi movie history. Total Recall sits at the absolute pinnacle of the greatness of pre-CGI special effects. Tron. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain will eventually have massive cult status for its non-computer-generated sci-fi backdrops. Jurassic Park. Even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie which exists in its own special corner of science fiction (I think its one of the best spaceship movies ever made), was recognized for its special effects—it was the “ultimate trip”.

Much rarer is the sci-fi movie known for its awesomeness without its effects. Robo-Cop is the one movie that springs to mind. Maybe Tremors. All the Star Trek movies seem to skirt the issue pretty well (despite whatever amount of mockery of the original TV show). And there are certainly movies that had great effects but sucked so much that it didn’t matter (though I’m drawing a blank here at the moment). So if Wolverine’s claws hadn’t looked so shitty, would it have been a better movie? It might have been—it may well at least have been way more enjoyable. But its main problem lies deeper than its half-assed visual sense: Wolverine utterly lacked ambition in its film making. Not that Terminator: Salvation set any records for mind-blowingly good ideas, but there was at least sense through all of its set-pieces that it knew it was going up against classics of the genre in its forebears, so had to provide some novelty to it. Compared to Terminator, Wolverine seems more like a B-movie than a blockbuster.

Culturology Summer of Booklove Book Club #2: A Scanner Darkly

As soon as I started reading this book, I realized that I should have picked a different Philip K. Dick book than this one. Although it certainly exemplifies a major piece of the PKD puzzle, its way more of a drug novel than real sci-fi. During the passages of the book where its just junkies hanging out and rapping with each other, it might as well be taking place in the mid-70s, rather than the imaginary 1997 of its fictional future. So I apologize for that; but there are still some interesting things to talk about here.

Philip K. Dick is known, of course, for his long-standing popularity as a writer whose books or stories are prime material for movie making. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, and many more were all based on PKD material. Part of the reason I picked A Scanner Darkly was because Linklater made a movie version of it a couple of years ago which I haven’t seen yet, and figured that at some point this summer I can spend some quality blog-time bitching about it (Linklater being about the least interesting (and most annoying) of the current set of young American filmmakers). But after reading the book, I’m not even sure that I would care to defend it against even a crappy film adaptation.

Its basic premise is pretty cool. In the future, drugs will be more powerful and more harmful than what they were, drug manufacturers will be more powerful as well, and the police will be more impotent than ever in stopping the trade. So Fred ends up narcing, and using his fair share of Substance D, which causes his brain to split in half (a trendy idea for a while there, back in the sci-fi day; the other must-read of split brain sci-fi being Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth), and is commanded to narc on himself as Bob Arctor. Bob/Fred is a sad character. And given PKD’s own history of drug abuse (apparently it was something like a massive acid trip/schizophrenic episode which launched him into the last phase of his novel writing, which was massively paranoid and infused with Gnostic religious leanings (see the VALIS trilogy, for instance)), I struggled in reading it to not just associate Bob/Fred with some vision of the actual Philip K. Dick. PKD also, apparently, for a while, had decided that the FBI was watching him, so started mailing them letters where he would narc on himself, so the paranoia that soaks through Scanner perhaps works so effectively because its writer really believed in it.

The idea of the drug manufacturer’s turning addicts into zombies in order to add them to their own numbers is appealing too, though it’s hard to see any kind of real-life analogue to it. It’s interesting to me, since we only get that information at the tail end of the book, but it’s really a scheme worthy of a mastermind criminal’s epic climactic “I did it” speech. I do enjoy paranoid fiction—Pynchon’s novels are all great for it—the sense that the world is built up of these massive schemes that the average person has no control over. The two basic ways to pay off paranoia plots are obvious enough: either someone is pulling all the strings, or no one is. I personally lean towards the no-mastermind plot resolution, but I think A Scanner Darkly’s ties up in a satisfactory way; if the drugs make you paranoid, it probably does work better for there to turn out to actual be a massive, carefully controlled scheme working against you.

Next Week: Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

For July 6th: Sharp Teeth

For August 3rd: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road