Critique of “End of Eternity”

 I just finished another book; End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. I know, you immediately thought about the movie with the couple rolling around on the beach. That’s From Here to Eternity. They were copying Asimov. Ha ha, I don’t actually know that. I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I have a strong desire to see the movie - except that I kind of want to write a book comparing the movie and the book, which as far as I know have nothing to do with each other except the word “Eternity” in the title. But I would argue very strongly in the book that From Here to Eternity was a subtle ripoff of Asimov’s End of Eternity. I would call the book “Battle of the ‘Eternity’s”.  Note the punctuation. I would begin the book as a Critical Theory Tour de Force. In Chapter One I would discuss my own bodily functions and hang ups, then I’d smoothly transition to whatever similar issues the characters in the movie share with characters in the book. The personal details in Chapter One would jar the casual Reader of Critical Theory, but as  the book transitioned to an actual battle, in my mind, as detailed by its effect on my daily habits, the Reader would begin to realize that in fact I had never intended to write a Critical Theory book.  Those few readers who would ever think to purchase a Critical Theory book with the intent to read it would feel cheated. They would hopefully go online to post vengeful reviews that would explain the execrable dishonesty of the book in detail. 

I’d be willing to bet that the outrage burning in their souls would  flame through the stifling objectivity lashed into their verbal cortex by years of Lit classes, enabling them to compose insulting and mean-spirited and delightfully readable diatribes, all inextricably connected to the book in online searches. 

In the epilogue I would admit that From Here To Eternity came out in 1953, two years prior to the publication of End of Eternity, and that although Asimov might have come up with the central concept of End of Eternity years before, it is extremely doubtful that whoever wrote From Here to Eternity could have known anything about it. 

I would add a postscript to the epilogue with an additional confession for readers who hadn’t ever seen From Here to Eternity, admitting that I haven’t seen it either, and that the scenes referred to earlier in the book and ascribed to From Here to Eternity were not actually in the movie. 

In the same postscript I would admit that while I had read End of Eternity, many if not all of the extracts purported to be taken from the book were as fictional as those I pretended to take from the movie. 

At this point in the blog post I would like to assure the reader that I have no intention to submit “Battle of the Eternities” for publication in book or novel form, and that I have destroyed the proofs and all drafts and that I intend to fully comply with all terms of the settlement. 

“Battle of the Eternities” is of course the title of one of five Star Trek episode scripts submitted to Paramount by Gene Roddenberry for consideration to be produced and aired during the fourth season of the series.  The episode represents one of the primary examples of Roddenberry’s seminal “Crossing the Streams” concept, originating in the hyper cube of his mind some fifteen years before Terminator X popularized the DJ Remix. 

The episode begins with the Captain ruminating on past relationships in the Captain’s Log. Most of the ruminations concern “Yeoman Crantor”, a relatively recent flame that the Captain admits he is reluctant to discuss with Spock. As he speaks, a dreamlike image of a woman’s unsmiling face appears over Kirk’s scowling visage.  The woman possesses the elf-like ears of a Vulcan. Kirk’s reverie is broken by ship’s alarm. Spock’s harshly unpleasant voice chimes in immediately after the alarm, indicating, unnecessarily, that the ship has encountered the object they’ve been searching the quadrant for after the nearest colony’s distress signal about a large anomalous object set on a collision course with their home, and on and on, he won’t stop until Kirk issues a stinging rebuke and a reprimand that seems to finally register on his alien Vulcan mind because that’s the only way to talk to these people. 

The object is a gigantic alien structure spinning slowly through space, a chunk of something much larger, almost planet-sized, with twisted metallic framing covered in ancient ice crystals. Spock is scared and wants to go home, but Kirk has had enough. He leaves the bridge and visits McCoy, delivering a verbal tongue-lashing that leaves McCoy in tears, just weeping, hysterical. Kirk doesn’t slap him because of the recent disciplinary hearings. But he insists that McCoy join them in their exploration of the object. He takes the ship transporter to the floor below McCoy’s office, where he sees the door to Yeoman Crantor’s quarters at the end of the hallway. Kirk wanders around the hallway like an angry chimp. He ignores the calls to his breast logo and keeps an eye on Yeoman Crantor’s door.  He angrily accosts any crew members emerging into the hallway from their quarters, demanding to know their names and rank and proper whereabouts. Then he gets a text from Spock that begins; “Jim, I know you’re scared…” Spock means emotionally scared because he knows about Kirk’s relationship troubles, but Kirk takes it as a provocation. He runs to the elevator. He means to surprise Spock on the bridge with his patented two-fisted thunder punch. The elevator takes too long, so Kirk takes the stairs, taking three steps at a time until he’s bent over, gasping for breath. He’s too late to catch Spock on the bridge, so he hurries to the transporter room. Spock and McCoy and Yeoman Crantor are waiting on the circles. Kirk glares at Spock, but he walks with quiet dignity to his circle. Before they beam down, he informs McCoy that he has been demoted to Yeoman, and that Yeoman Crantor is now the ship’s doctor. “But Captain, I cannot heal,” Doctor Crantor says. 

“Neither can I,” Kirk says softly. 

They find two alien skeletons in one of the rooms in the object, intertwined in what Kirk interprets as a lover’s embrace, but Doctor Crantor deduces is in fact the final stage of a grim struggle to the death. 

Their argument grows heated, with McCoy egging them on until Spock administers a Vulcan grip to the Yeoman’s left eye socket. Kirk lunges at Spock, but Doctor Crantor administers a Vulcan grip to Kirk, removing his shirt in the process. They collapse together, their bodies entwined in a fashion intriguingly similar to the contorted alien skeletons.  Scotty beams them all back at once, humans and Vulcans and alien skeletons together. Back on the enterprise, Kirk commands Crantor to keep the skeletons in her quarters, as a reminder of “what might have been.” 

The last shot is of Crantor lying glamorously in her bed, gazing across her bedroom to a museum style exhibit with a placard reading “love is what you make it”.  The camera pans to a clear shot of the skeletons, their hands at each other’s throats. One of them wears a crumpled black robe. The other has Darth Vader’s helmet on. 

The credits roll to a jazzier version of the Star Wars theme, and end with a special note of thanks and tribute to the guy that played McCoy, making it crystal clear that the character passed away during the episode. The note also makes it clear that he passed away as a Yeoman, not as a doctor

Sequel to previous post of intense critical analysis of Star Wars and CS Lewis now involving superhero movies

Many years ago, in my youth, I read comic books about superheroes. I also watched Star Wars movies. I did not ever read Star Wars comics. I tried a few, but I didn’t find them very interesting in comparison to the overwhelming visual and auditory experience of the movies. I say that, but in my teens I did read the Star Wars original novelization by George Lucas, or so I thought at the time. Now Wikipedia says Alan Dean Foster ghost wrote it. I enjoyed the book, but at the time I read any science fiction I could get from the local library, which meant whatever water warped paperbacks were on the spinning metal rack by the front door and sometimes I’d have to keep spinning and spinning it and all I could see were the same books that I’d already read, actually the exact same copies of the books, with the tears and creases that I recognized from when I’d checked them out before, and so i got desperate and read the Star Wars novelization and as I say I kind of liked it but I liked anything with spaceships by that time and I didn’t find it as imaginative as a lot of other books that I was interested in, which brings me to the theme of this post, the Hagenart 1st and 2nd Rules of Writing for Media

Rule 1: The higher the complexity of the performance medium, the lower the level of creativity and complexity required for it to be interesting to most people. Basically, you don’t need to be as creative to write for a movie with moving visual and sound elements, as you do to write for say a novel. At an intermediate level, writing the lyrics for a song with music accompaniment requires less creativity and excellence than writing a poem to be performed by spoken word only. Basically, a bird must work harder to fly than a fish must work to float. 

Rule 2: The higher the complexity of the medium, the less freedom you have when writing for it. A person writing a prose novel can write with less constraints than a person writing for a movie.  The movie script has to be portrayable on a screen in a certain time. Basically, a bird may fly faster than a fish can swim. 

Rule 3: The rule of Transfers. When you make a movie out of a book, you lose freedom but gain the added dimensions of the new medium. When you make a book out of a movie, you lose the power of the medium and gain freedom. 

3a: The new freedom doesn’t usually help the movie made into a book, because the story is already set. That’s why novelizations fail to be interesting, because something written for a film will suffer from the transfer to a less powerful medium, without gaining enough from the freedom.  It may swim with the fishes but it will not fly with the birds. And it must compete with books written with the freedom enjoyed by Rule 2. 

And that’s why the Star Wars comics weren’t that interesting. 

But what about the movies made from books? They actually work pretty well, in general, because they bring the high caliber imagination and storytelling of a successful novel to the power of the sound and visuals of the cinema. But to move to a new medium, they lose some of the freedom of their original medium, so those annoyingly picky readers like myself may resent or dislike the film version. But we still watch it. Well, I don’t, not any more. They’ve hurt me too many times. Lord of the Rings cut too deep. 

Now I bring in the super hero movies, the supposed point of this post, yes!

The MCU people have managed to take the creativity and storytelling freedom of the comic books to film, while making the most of the cinema’s visual and auditory power.  They’ve also had some good fortune, in that the new special effects technology has enabled them to bring the comic books to the screen with far less constraints in their storytelling freedom - Lessening the impact of Rule 3. 

But there’s a secret advantage to making movies out of comic books as compared to regular novels, that makes all the difference: The comic books are serials, with lots and lots of storylines to choose from. The comic books sometimes retell the same story with minor changes many times. The readers can’t possibly even remember all the plots and alternate versions of each character, so they don’t care if the movies stick with the exact plot of whatever original comic storyline it was based on. So the MCU creators didn’t have to stick to some exact plot like the Harry Potter movies did - ugh, how they did. So the fans didn’t care. 

Except for Origin Stories.  Which the MCU people have wisely avoided, except for Iron Man - but I think that worked because they had Robert Downey Junior, and fun visuals. But that usually doesn’t work - I have come to believe that Origin Stories generally do not work in movies, because they take too long and pretty much depend on the actor - so if you don’t get someone really good, it’s unbearable and uninteresting. 

Actually that’s rule 4: Origin Stories should be left to the Comic Book, unless you have RDJ to do it for you. MCU seems to know this. The DCCU people haven’t quite learned it.  But they’ve still made a lot of money, because of Rule number 5: Anything about superheroes makes money now because we humans love to fantasize about being superheroes because we want to be unique and we have learned from the internet that we are not unique. We are living in gigantic high tech anthills and we are not biologically designed to be ants, we are chest beating monkeys who live in small tribes where everyone knows us and we are important to the group. We dream about joining a special tribe, rising above the ants somehow, having a secret quality, a superiority that transcends our everyday ant struggles and failures. 

So those are some of the Hagenart Rules. There are more of course. I like making these rules. It feels like being an alpha gorilla with big hairy arms, telling the other monkeys about my favorite comics and hogging all the oranges. 

 

Now that I’ve thoroughly dissected HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, we will pivot this high caliber analytic cannon of a blog toward our next target; a comparison of the Star Wars and Marvel Superhero movies. The movies that Martin Scorcese pointedly described as “not cinema”, igniting a firestorm of publicity for the Marvel movies and whatever he was working on at the time, I don’t really remember, but I do remember my appreciation for the sheer snootiness of his comment, and I remember that he and some other directors were concerned about some gloriously worthless and unbelievably snooty cause, something about preserving old movies on original handcrafted plates or something, and someone from Empire magazine interviewed him about it and asked him what he thought of all the superhero movies, probably hoping to get some priceless comment in a comic book store guy voice, and that’s probably the only interview in Empire magazine that people like me will refer to for years to come. 

So are the Marvel movies “cinema”?  I have no idea because I don’t know what that means. Are they artistic? Are they literature? I don’t think so. 

I think the first Star Wars movie is artistic. I think Lucas created a new type of fantasy with it, a re-imagining of the fantasy genre by replacing the medieval outfits with California new age cult robes and replacing the horses with spaceships and laser swords. I don’t think he brought anything new to the sequels, and I think his weird desire to tell an anti-technology parable with movies that glorify a mix of technology and fantasy fatally interfered with his storytelling instincts. He stopped going for the 70’s realism vibe that mixed so interestingly with the fantastic elements in the first Star Wars, maybe I wonder responding to criticism from his pompous film school friends or, worse responding to praise from Joseph Campbell. He needed someone outside his circle to bounce ideas off, maybe. 

Of course I could clear my throat and point at yours truly now, but that would be tacky. We’re here to talk about George and how we could help him, or could have helped him in 1980, after Empire Strikes Back and before the Ewoks. Or maybe the Ewoks existed in his mind at the time and so many beautiful people had called him a genius to his face that he’d already lost it and he wanted to be mentally naked and bare his mind Ewoks and all on the big screen. 

So it’s 1980 and we’ve walked through a time portal with a message for Lucasfilm.  

It just so happens that in a previous post, we had a book, That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis,  from which we had removed the first six chapters or so, and were kind of left hanging there until now by, once again, Yours Truly. 

It’s all coming together now. The first two Star Wars movies - I’m not going to dignify that prequel Roman numeral crap with a turgid discussion of which came first - will take the place, in a multi-media format, in place of the removed chapters of That Hideous Strength. But whenever Obi Wan or Yoda talk about the force, they add a bit about the macrobes and how the leader of the bad macrobes on earth turned Darth Vader to evil. 

But what about Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra? Totally improved with a judicious injection of laser swords and Star destroyers. Ransom visits Mars with an earth colonial battle fleet, and foments an insurrection after connecting with a mystical guerilla leader named Oyarsa Malacandra, who teaches him the force and gifts him a sweet lightsaber to fight the earthling empire. 

It gets better in the new version of Perelandra. Ransom gets word that a new super Jedi lives on Venus, named Perelandra. She’s green skinned but human in form, kind of a mix of a Yoda and a human. She rides around the oceans of Venus on a floating vegetable mat powered by her force-magic at triple digit speeds. Ransom teaches her to channel her energy for righteousness, but the emperor lands on his personal shuttle and tries to woo her to the dark side. Surprise! She joins the Emperor and kills Ransom in a duel, after Ransom wounds the emperor, who falls in a Venusian lava flow. The green lady rescues the Emperor and he becomes Darth Vader. 

Here’s the twist in the third book, the evil green Sith replaces the Princess in the Star Wars chapters. 

Now get ready for awesomeness - in the Empire Strikes back she’s the one who trains Luke in the swamps of Venus, no Yoda, and after the big reveal of Luke’s father, we’re ready for part three with Jabba and the fight between the rebels and the empire on earth. 

We go Meta at that point: Darth Vader turns out to be George Lucas. He’s the president of several film conglomerates, and also President of the US, and Chief Justice and Speaker of the house, and Secretary General of the United Nations. He’s been making movies about his own interstellar empire! The audacity! 

I would wrap up both series with a double wedding of Luke, Han, and the Green Lady, with the audience slash reader still the only ones wise to her big secret. Sequel anyone? Yes, I believe I’ll have another slice -of both streams, please!

PS: I know we never included the superhero movies in our critical discussion - Sequel anyone?

Hagenart comic 08/21/20

 

Crossing the streams, a Hagenart fiction

I’d like to say that we will now resume the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series, but I still have not performed the re-read. A wise man once said “Character is Fate”, and another person, a reasonably intelligent person, has said that character is 98% of any story.
If both statements are true, then Fate is 98% of the story too. Or maybe Fate is the story, and there really there is no 2%. Or maybe the fellow who wrote “character is fate” really meant character is 98% fate, but just rounded up, in which case we’ve identified the missing 2% and it’s whatever of character isn’t Fate, or is it a tiny bit of Fate that isn’t Character?
I believe both are true and as a result this blog is fated to unreliably planned, and I personally won’t ever get to direct “Star Wars / Star Trek: Crossing the Streams”. Which I have already written as the sequel to “Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet”, as written by George Lucas if he were the son of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis and married Gene Roddenberry and they had a son who was me and I grew up rich and got to sleep in all the time.
Crossing the Streams Act 1:
A spaceship glides seductively across a dazzling field of stars. The camera pans in to a huge window on the front of the spaceship, the windshield if you will. A man in a form fitting black suit stands looking thoughtfully at the starscape. It’s actually me, I’m playing the Captain as well as the director. I’m not sure if I’ll be wearing a hat for this scene. We might do a steampunk thing where I’d be wearing a stovepipe hat and a monocle
The scene changes, to inside the spaceship. An alarm goes off, with flashing lights. A crew member in a snazzy uniform turns to the captain and says they’ve detected an ancient radio signal coming from an older quadrant of the galaxy. I indicate in Trekkie that they should play the message on the spaceship’s dope holodeck. I go into the holodeck with my holodeck crew. The Trekkie holodeck actually recreates reality, it’s like stepping into a video game that you can touch and experience with all your senses. The holodeck plays the ancient radio message, which is the whole Star Wars saga, except that I play a taller and better looking version of yoda. In this magisterial role, I recognize the badly written plot elements and use my magic powers to edit them out. My crew members play my acolytes, and they applaud my rewrites. The emperor and I fight a light saber duel. I win, but he tries to cheat with force lightning. He removes his mask. It’s George Lucas. He condemns my rewrite, but I counter that as the original creator of Star Wars he can not exist in this reality and is therefore without power here. Either he exists and it’s all a badly written fantasy, or it’s reality and he cannot exist. He disappears. My acolytes applaud. I declare myself supreme space admiral. They look wary and confused. I mow them down with force lightning.
Well that’s just a taste, I envision the full series will cover several volumes and possibly a plot with characters