This is your brain on bits

Your Brain Is An Index. This short – and, I have to say, extremely fuzzy and generalising – essay on the way the internet is changing how we gain and use knowledge seems to somehow accurately describe the difference between my brain at 14 years old (when the internet first began to seriously enter my life as a constant presence) and my brain now, right down to the example: 

Here’s a personal example: As a kid film buff in the early and pre-digital age (early/mid 90s), I studied movie reference books: guides to cult films, to directors, to particular eras and critics. And I didn’t just study them, I soaked up their information. By my mid teens, I could recite actor, director, and writer filmographies, summon obscure facts about little-known cinematographers, and generally dominate in most cinema-related trivia competitions. That was the mark of an (amateur) expert. These days, it seems like I can barely remember who worked on the movie I saw last week. Why? Because I don’t have to. IMDB.com is available from any iPhone or wi-fi hotspot to instantly fulfill my desire for movie-related trivia.

I used to know Leonard Maltin's Film Guide by heart, right down to which Star Wars movies got how many stars (Episode IV and VI got ***½, while The Empire Strikes Back got ****, which never made sense to me, being the least entertaining, most whiny of the three). Now, I only know the filmographies of actors and directors I have a more than average interest in, or have followed for a long time. And I do focus more on cross-reference and making connections than on in-depth knowledge. What about you, kind reader? 

Apo-calypso!

George Saunders has a great piece in the New Yorker in which suddenly people everywhere start developing superpowers. Except, they don't, they just think they do, causing an "apocalypse of ineptitude". This reminded me of the plot in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening in which people start behaving suicidally because of airborne something-or-other (I haven't seen the film).

Which reminded me: I was thinking today about how the Apocalypse, or just a sudden failing of society in the face of catastrophic change, has become a huge theme in US film, post 9-11. Movies like Cloverfield, Signs, The Day After Tomorrow, The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days/Weeks Later (UK film, but still), War of the Worlds, Children of Men, or most recently The Happening . These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are loads more (feel free to leave your least favourite in the comments).

Saunder's piece seems to perfectly capture the sense I sometimes get, watching these films. Apocalyptic fiction gives us great metaphors for little disasters in our own lives (as JJ Abrams, who, by the way, made Cloverfield, says in this clip, "Die Hard" isn't a film about terrorism, it's a film about divorce). Actually, most apocalypse films are about divorce. So is The Happening, from what I can tell (the main character uses the death of millions of people as an opportunity to reconnect with his estranged wife, as do almost anyone in any apocalypse movie evah).

But it always seems to me, now, that after 9-11, people are not seeing the metaphors anymore. After the spectacular, Technicolour, Indepence Day¨-turned-into-reality mayhem of 9-11, people have lost the ability to not see the disaster flick as a rehearsal for an actual threat, or a way of dealing with the psychological strain of actual threats.

That's one of the things that lead to the apocalypse of ineptitude of, say, the current security policy in the west. We've mistaken our stories about small, personal disasters for actual, looming apocalypses. It happened once, right? And then there was the tsunami and Katrina, and oh, look, Cedar Rapids is underwater and anthrax and, and, and... All it took was a few nightmare scenarios to become real. Now suddenly you can't carry hair conditioner onto airplanes, even though this does not make you any safer.

I wonder if this wasn't something that would have happened anyway. I can't help thinking that if it wasn't 9-11, it would have been something else. After the global, mediated interconnectedness was a fact, after our entertainment industry had gone into hyperdrive. It had to happen. Sooner or later, the proliferation of narratives in fiction would meet up with the proliferation of reporting, of connection with other people. Maybe it had to happen eventually that some unlikely apocalyptic scenario became real in some hugely mediated way. Maybe another Tunguska event. Maybe a nuclear bomb in LA out of 24. (I'm thinking up scenarios like this constantly.) 9-11 wasn't a killer that was anything close to, say, world hunger or the war in Iraq. And we seem already to have forgotten that we still live in a world that has enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone. As it turns out, we're the apocalypse.

Zen and the art of nice little details which all directors should put in their motion pictures because they are really rewarding when you see them

Sometimes it's the nice, subtle details that make movies work for me.

Last night, I was watching Charlie Wilson's War and was skeptical about the lack of overview. The movie, a historically mostly accurate pic written by Aaron Sorkin, seemed to be told more or less as a West Wing-style funny/serious romp through the cold war-bureaucracy of Washington and the Middle East, told from within the ethical and ideological framework of the cold war itself. Killing Russians was treated as a joke (granted, the Russians were in the process of killing innocent civilians at the time, but still) and there was very little in the way skepticism about what Charlie Wilson was doing. Which, in case you haven't seen the film, was supplying the Afghan Mujahedin resistance with weapons and training. This actually happened.

Except suddenly, near the end, Wilson is throwing a party in his apartment. The CIA agent Gust Avrakotos and him are standing on the balcony of his apartment, and the agent holds the following little speech:

Gust Avrakotos
There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later The boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everybody in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't, cause his leg's messed up. and everyone in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie Wilson
And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

And just as this line is spoken, the background noise of the scene becomes that of a jetliner crossing the sky.

Earlier in the movie, we have been delicately told that Wilson's apartment overlooks the Pentagon. It's all a nice, subtle wink and nod at 9/11 and the connection between the attacks and the Afhganistan situation and Bin Laden and everything, and it totally made the movie for me.