The film, not the holiday

From the first time I watched it when it hit the theaters back in '93, Groundhog Day has held a special place in my mind. It isn't that it's based on a clever idea (Bill Murray stuck in a time warp forced to relive one of America's silliest holidays over and over). Lots of movies have clever ideas. It isn't even that it executes this idea flawlessly from start to finish--which is almost unheard of for a high-concept comedy. It's that it does all that, and then manages to tell a smart, perceptive tale about the human condition.

It's one of those movies where you're not even sure the filmmakers understood how good it was, because it has the trappings of a more frivolous endeavor. It belongs to a tradition of farces I call Cursed Schlub movies, which revolve around a character who becomes victim to some otherworldly fate with its own bizarre rules. Examples include The Nutty Professor, All of Me, Liar Liar, and Shallow Hal. Typically they're not much more than comic exercises, with plots that function as clotheslines for a string of elaborate gags.

While just as funny as the best of those pictures, Groundhog Day transcends the genre, fleshing out the story and supplying character development that doesn't feel the least bit contrived. It was something of a transitional role for Murray, who up to that point had been known merely as a brilliant comedian. His performance, where he uses subtle facial mannerisms to great effect, paved the road for his more serious turn in movies like Rushmore and Lost in Translation.

Even its style of humor is uncommon for this type of film. It mostly avoids slapstick in favor of witty dialogue that showcases Murray's gift for understatement, as when he laconically remarks, "My years are not advancing as fast as you might think." Not only does his deadpanning make it easier for us to believe in the character of Phil, it enhances the laughs. (Part of the hilarity of the early scenes comes from seeing the mounting panic on a man who keeps his emotions so tightly bottled up.) I have my doubts that a broader approach, like one Jim Carrey might have given, would have worked as well on any level.

The film also wisely never reveals the cause of the time loop. It's customary in Cursed Schlub movies to invent some harebrained rationale for the central plot device (the birthday wish in Liar Liar, the hypnotic suggestion in Shallow Hal, the cartoon mysticism in countless body-swap comedies). An early version of the script did just that, explaining Phil's predicament as--I kid you not--a voodoo spell cast by a former lover. Viewers tend to assume it is something more along the lines of a trial from God, and the movie acquires a certain poetic and even spiritual quality normally absent from this sort of material.

Its biggest divergence from other movies in the genre lies in its plot construction. Instead of the usual strategy of cobbling together a series of comic sketches and gluing on a formula ending, the plot develops as the step-by-step process by which Phil comes to terms with his strange condition. There's a surprisingly smooth progression to the story that never gets thrown off course by the jokes. In the entire movie only the Jeopardy scene feels like a skit that could have appeared just about anywhere in the proceedings (though its placement in the section where Phil becomes lethargic and depressed makes sense). The rest of the time the events fit together like clockwork, the end flowing naturally from the beginning, all of it focused on Phil's growth as a person. Along the way, it does a splendid job exploring a universal human trait.

Everyone on the planet, I'm convinced, sometimes imagines redoing past experiences. This can range from thinking up a snappy retort hours after an argument ended to harboring deep regrets over a life decision. Yet if you were somehow given the ability to go back in time and alter past events until you got them exactly as you wanted, you'd eventually go mad, because you'd be depriving yourself of the unpredictability that makes life worthwhile.

That's one of the movie's insights. I think of the sequence where Phil uses trial-and-error to determine Rita's likes and dislikes so that after she's forgotten divulging all that information he'll present himself to her as Mr. Right. From his perspective the project could be taking weeks or months or longer (the movie never says), but to her it's always their first date, and he is never able to seduce her on what to him is a day with no end. She always feels he is pushing too hard on their relationship, and even though she doesn't know the supernatural part, she senses he's manipulating the situation and concealing his true self from her.

In one crucial bit of dialogue after he thinks he has gotten through with her, she tells him, "It's a perfect day. You couldn't plan a day like this." He replies, "Well, you can. It just takes an awful lot of work"--once again making an honest observation secure in the knowledge she won't possibly take it literally. Yet one of their most romantic moments, where they fall on the snow together, is unplanned. We see that he is unable to repeat that moment in later iterations of Groundhog Day: his words get increasingly stilted, his movements increasingly clumsy. Even for a man given thousands of do-overs, the moment is gone forever, and only he will remember it. Our lives are filled with moments like that, but some of us lose sight of their significance when we're overwhelmed by the things we almost got right.

Anti-smurfite

Last month HuffPost ran an article about a newly published book by a French author which argues that the original Smurf cartoons were works of racist, anti-Semitic, and socialist propaganda. A few weeks later, an article in The Forward elaborated on this theory without mentioning either the HuffPost article or the French book. According to this theory, Gargamel looks like an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew, down to his hooked nose, and this suspicion is heightened by the fact that the goal of his nefarious plans is money. As the Forward article puts it, "All that Gargamel lacks is a yarmulke."

This theory isn't new. Back in 2007, JewOrNotJew.com did a half-joking piece on the matter, concluding that "someone out there is really bigoted--the creator of the cartoon or the creator of the theory. Probably a little of both really." I myself never noticed any of this as a kid, apart from wondering why Gargamel's cat, Azrael, had a Hebrew name.

I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the Smurfs' creator Peyo could have been an anti-Semite. But I'm hesitant to endorse this theory, not because it will spoil my childhood, but because it's all speculative. I know nothing about Peyo's life, and he isn't around to defend himself against these charges. (A son of his, however, has dismissed the accusations as "between the grotesque and the not serious.") None of the articles I've seen have provided any new information, just interpretations of what I already know.

Actually, let me qualify that a little. The HuffPost article did mention one fact that I admit was pretty damning with regard to another prejudice. Apparently the very first Smurf cartoon was called "The Black Smurf" and was about a disease that turns smurfs black, where they become dimwitted and say "nyap nyap." US publishers refused to print this cartoon, and later they made the infected smurfs purple. (I remember reading a strip concerning a green smurf that bites other smurfs to turn them green--but my memory could be failing me as to the exact color. I just assumed it was the smurf equivalent of vampires or zombies.) That does sound racist, and quite similar to things on our side of the pond from Disney and Warner Bros. (many of which, such as the black centaurs in Fantasia, have been censored).

As for Gargamel's alleged Jewishness, I have much the same reaction as JewOrNotJew.com: it makes me uncomfortable, but there's no conclusive evidence to prove this theory correct. Gargamel is never identified as a Jew. He doesn't have a Jewish-sounding name or speak any Yiddish. The evidence, such as it is, apparently escaped the notice of American producers of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I watched as a kid through a VCR, an invention of great use to observant Jews in the '80s). It's also possible that the element of anti-Semitic stereotyping was subconscious, rather than part of an agenda, on Peyo's part.

I'm reminded of when The Phantom Menace came out and some critics suggested that some of the alien creatures were thinly disguised racial and ethnic stereotypes. What provoked the most ire were the inaptly (or ineptly) named Gungans, especially Jar Jar, a flop-eared, blubbering creature whom Newsweek's David Ansen described as "a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit." Getting only slightly less attention were the "Asian" Neimodians and the slaveowner Watto, a winged creature with a hooked beak, a strange accent, and more than a dollop of greed. Slate's Bruce Gottleib reacted indignantly to Richard Corliss's suggestion that Watto's accent was "Turkish":

Turkish? Even without the visual clue of the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "No"; listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?

Personally I don't think either writer is crazy, but I didn't pick up what Gottlieb was hearing in Watto's voice, even after downloading that sound clip. I'm no expert on Turkish accents, but Watto's accent did not strike me as Yiddish. And I should know, given that my maternal grandfather had one.

Part of the problem is that Lucas made a choice in the prequels to have some of his aliens speak English in made-up accents, rather than totally made-up languages like in the original trilogy. This wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. In an intergalactic society, I imagine there would be diverse accents and not just diverse languages. But I think that whenever people hear an accent they can't immediately identify, their instinct is to compare it to accents they know. JewOrNotJew.com dismisses the theory about Watto before you can say "smurfin' awesome":

If a character is designated as Jewish and is portrayed as loving money, having a big nose, being henpecked by women, whatever, that's a negative Jewish stereotype and the creator should be called to task.

But if a character has a big nose and loves money and the anti-defamation league or whoever says that makes him/her Jewish, well, that's not the creator of the character spreading negative stereotypes. That's the Jews themselves.

But then why did this same site suggest that Gargamel is "probably" the creation of a bigot? He has a big nose and loves money and is no more identified as a Jew than Watto is. Is it because Gargamel is a human on Earth while Watto is an alien in a galaxy far, far away? Or is it because whoever runs this site has a harder time ascribing anti-Semitic motives to George Lucas than to a mid-20th-century Belgian whose life story isn't well-known?

That's part of the way I look at it, I admit. I highly doubt Lucas is consciously racist or anti-Semitic. I think it's possible the echo of ethnic stereotypes could find its way into Star Wars, a potpourri of myths, legends, and old movies. There are elements of it in the original trilogy, though mostly too vague to seem offensive: Yoda seems modeled on an Asian master, the ewoks are rather like a stereotypical African or Amazonian tribe, and the Tusken Raiders bear a clear imprint of desert nomads on earth such as Bedouins. I'm sure Lucas would be the first to admit all this. But he has consistently gotten defensive at any suggestion of racial insensitivity on his part. He did so when the 1977 film came out and some critics complained about the all-white cast (except for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader). He did so when critics of The Phantom Menace complained about Jar Jar and co.

While I'm not ready to let Lucas totally off the hook about Jar Jar, I never noticed the stuff about Watto until others pointed it out. And I ought to have enough Jewdar to pick it up, if it was there. I don't hope to convince anyone who did see it, however. There's a heavy amount of subjectivity in these interpretations, and yet you can't totally dismiss the idea of veiled racism in a children's fantasy, because it's a fact that there's a long tradition of it. All I can do is try to distinguish those who have ill intent from those who stumble into these images by accident.

The headrooming of society

From my childhood to the present, I watched the world grow increasingly science fictiony. But it happened differently than most science fiction stories imagined. Intelligent androids and intergalactic space travel are, at the very least, a long way off, regardless of how many computerized Jeopardy contestants and Mars colonization plans we encounter. Yet the rise of the Internet and cellphones has made our society much more tech-centered than before. I enjoy looking back at old sci-fi that takes place now and seeing what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it didn't even consider.

I kept all this in mind as I viewed the DVD of Max Headroom, the 1987 TV show. Given my vivid memories of the show and its frequent references in popular culture at the time (remember Doonesbury's Reagan parody, Ron Headrest?), I was surprised to learn it ran for barely two seasons of just 14 episodes. The pilot, based on a 1985 British telefilm I still haven't seen, concerns a muckraking TV journalist named Edison Carter who gets into a motorcycle accident after uncovering a scandal at his own network. A young hacker named Bryce, hoping to find out what Edison knows, unloads Edison's mind into a computer, resulting in an artificial version of the reporter. The program's first words, "max headroom," the last words Edison saw before his head collided with a parking garage barrier, become the program's name.

After Edison regains consciousness, Max develops as an independent mind who can travel anywhere on the network at will and can even jump to other networks if given the opportunity. Both he and Edison are played by Matt Frewer, a tall skinny actor with a voice like Kermit the Frog. In his dual role he gives the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde performance that later made Jim Carrey a star, playing both a withdrawn nerd and a manic, uninhibited personality. Watching the show as an adult, I discovered that I found Max's loud talk-show-host shtick rather grating. As a kid, I think I enjoyed the series mostly for its techno-thriller plots and paid little attention to its not-too-subtle anticorporate satire.

What is the show's vision of the early 21st century? (The time frame is never identified directly, but the pilot gives one big clue, when Bryce, played by an actor of about 16, is said to have been born in 1988--suggesting it takes place around 2004 or so.) It depicts a society literally run by TV networks. In place of an apparently absent government, the networks have their own politicians elected through online voting. Money is measured in "creds" rather than dollars. A subculture of "blanks," people who have escaped registration on the central database, has emerged.

As a single-minded pursuer of truth in a society buried under propaganda, Edison traverses the city carrying around a large wireless camera connected directly to his network, allowing him two-way conversations with operators who can tell him instantly about the dimensions of whatever building he's in and where people in it are located. When conventional technology fails, his electronic alter-ego pops up on computer screens around the city, ready to help out.


I'm always amused at how futuristic speculations turn out to overestimate technological advancement in certain areas and underestimate it in others. In 1989's Back to the Future Part II, for example, we learn that by 2015 we will have flying cars, hoverboards, self-fitting clothes, convincing holograms, etc., etc.--yet the characters still use fax machines. I've come across two early-'90s novels about advanced VR games--Piers Anthony's Killobyte and Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly--in which the gamers still use telephone modems. There's a tendency for futurists to be overconfident about the most exciting developments while failing to predict the obsolescence of everyday objects.

Max Headroom has some of those qualities. The title character is an intelligent, sentient being whose creation depends on advances in A.I. and mind-reading way beyond anything we have today. Yet most of the computer technology on the show looks hopelessly primitive to any real resident of the 21st century. The characters still use floppy disks--no CD-ROMs or flash drives in sight. There are no computer mice and there's no Windows, despite the fact that both existed, if obscurely, in 1987. The hackers communicate with the computers using just a keyboard, hooked to a TV screen displaying block print on a black background. There are lots of vidphones but no cellphones.

Looking at the big picture, though, the series was pretty ahead of its time. Without ever using the word "Internet," it envisioned a society that has gone almost entirely online, with signals transported through air rather than just through wires, with instant communication over long distances even while outdoors, and with a total integration of TV, video, and computers. Topics covered on the show include identity theft, cyberterrorism, video editing, and medically harmful commercials--among other things. Then there is the aforementioned GPS-like navigation tool in buildings, and, perhaps most eerily, bar graphs that get updated in real time.


In its social vision, the show follows the cyberpunk tradition of extreme paranoia about loss of individual rights in a future dominated by big corporations. In one episode, a blank faces execution for a nonlethal computer prank, and he's linked to the crime based on statistical analysis without any direct evidence of his guilt. Another episode has one of the network "politicians" placing blanks in detention camps. Privacy in this universe is almost nonexistent because there are cameras everywhere, even inside people's homes. This all looks a tad less fantastical in today's world of satellite cams, increased surveillance, and "unlawful combatants."

For all its hyperbole, Max Headroom is one of the more realistic projections of the future I've seen. Part of its secret, I believe, is that it starts from a base of real knowledge about computing. I had the sense that the writers understood the subject and weren't faking it with meaningless technobabble. Even when the show dips into outlandish territory (as in one episode in which a network is literally stealing people's dreams), it stays grounded in a way that many other sci-fi productions do not. Its most important insight was that the talking-head approach to TV journalism, with its concern for ratings over truth, would naturally worsen as the technology grew more centralized.

What the series most failed to anticipate was how the Internet would begin to replace traditional media. The fact that I'm writing all this on a blog, making my thoughts available to just about anyone on the planet, even though I'm not a journalist or politician or celebrity, illustrates how regular citizens today have the power to make their voice heard in ways that weren't possible twenty years ago. While the image of corporate takeover in Max Headroom and similar sci-fi works seems prescient in many ways, what they didn't foresee is the tool we'd have for exerting our personal identity against those who aim to suppress it.

Take me to your leader

If there is one scientific topic that provokes strong opinions in the absence of any direct knowledge whatsoever, it is life on other planets. Some scientists feel certain Earth is the only place in the universe where life resides; others insist the question is not whether life exists in other places, but where. You will find sane, rational people with full command of the facts coming out on either side of this debate.

I lean toward the second possibility. The notion that in the entire universe, the only planet with living things just happens to be the only one we've ever seen up close, seems a stretch to me. But I admit I have no proof. It's just a hunch.

"Just a hunch" is the best we can do when it comes to these arguments, which never stand up to logical scrutiny. Some scientists point to evidence that life arose on Earth quite soon after the planet's initial formation (say, only several hundred million years), and if it can happen that quickly, it must have happened in other parts of the universe. The problem with this argument (aside from a rather fluid definition of "quickly") is that we still don't know how life arose here, or even whether it did--one theory holds that it came from Mars via meteorite. If we don't know what happened to cause life to exist, then we have no way of knowing whether it could have happened elsewhere.

Other scientists believe the origin of life on Earth was a rare, freakish occurrence in the universe's history, because it depended on a huge number of factors in combination, including Earth's exact composition, temperature, rotation, orbit, and so on. If any one of these factors had been slightly different, so the argument goes, life on Earth either would not have started or would have perished long before it had a chance to evolve into more complex creatures like ourselves.

The answer to this objection is twofold. First, extraterrestrial life could differ from Earth life in ways we have trouble imagining. Second, the universe is just really big. What scientists call the observable universe, or the portion we have the capacity to detect because the light has had enough time to reach us since the beginning, is estimated to have over one hundred billion galaxies. Our own galaxy alone, which remains virtually unexplored, contains hundreds of billions of stars. However unlikely the conditions necessary for life may seem, there is a great deal of space out there for those conditions to be repeated.

In the movie Contact, a scientist played by Jodie Foster argues that there must be life beyond Earth, for otherwise there would be "an awful waste of space." You could interpret this statement different ways. For religious believers, the question is why God would have created all those countless galaxies when only one planet of one star would be inhabited. Perhaps it is so that people in the future will have places to go after Earth is used up or on the brink of destruction. Still, that's an awful lot of space....

A more secular version of the same argument might go something like this: In the vastness of outer space, our solar system is a mere speck in a sea of galaxies that all look more or less like ours. Given the relative uniformity of everything from afar, our default assumption should be that the basic conditions of our vicinity are not unique. This reasoning might not convince those of us who suspect the origin of life was miraculous, but it ought to be good enough for those of a more secular mindset.

One comparison is instructive. Most people have long assumed that there are planets beyond our solar system. Yet until the 1990s, with the discovery of a star that wobbled (suggesting it was being orbited by a large object), there was no concrete evidence that any of these so-called extrasolar planets existed. For all scientists knew, our sun could have been the only star in the entire universe that harbored planets. That possibility runs contrary to intuition for much the same reason the idea that we are alone does. It proved to be incorrect, and I suspect the second idea will also.

Some people will say, "Okay, maybe there's life in other places. Perhaps things on the level of bacteria or even plants have sprouted elsewhere in the universe. But intelligent life? Advanced civilizations? How likely is that?" Skeptical scientists point to some discouraging facts. Although bacteria appear fairly early in the Earth's fossil record, there was nothing but bacteria for the next three billion years--complex, multicellular life doesn't appear until the last billion. Furthermore, current scientific consensus holds that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and if not for that fortuitous event, brainy mammals would never have come to dominate the planet.

Science fiction movies always assume that alien life must look more or less similar to us. In the real world there are creatures as weird as sea anemones living right here on Earth, but movie aliens invariably have a more standard appearance. Take the recent Avatar. In that film, a crew of Earthlings is investigating the exotic life forms that we're supposed to believe evolved independently in an entirely different solar system. And just how exotic are these creatures? Other than their possessing tails, blue skin, a ten-foot stature, and a few other odd features, they basically look human, sound human, and act human, right down to the mating rituals. The movie's plot is sort of an amped-up Dances with Wolves, only instead of a white man becoming part of a tribe of Lakota Sioux Indians, it has a white man becoming part of a tribe of giant alien smurfs.

I shouldn't make fun. The director, James Cameron, has said he intended the film as "science fantasy" rather than science fiction, and that they'd first designed the aliens as less human-looking before worrying it would turn off audiences. At least the film is a touch more plausible than a lot of older sci-fi like Star Trek, where aliens are shown as humans with pointy ears or ridged skin. But it's striking that more recent flicks like Independence Day and Signs continue to fall back on the most worn cliches about extraterrestrials, depicting them all as green and warty and malevolent.

The most versatile aliens depicted on screen are still probably those in Star Wars. I never fully appreciated that fact until I read Jeanne Cavelos's The Science of Star Wars (1999). Herself an astrophysicist (who also wrote The Science of The X-Files), Cavelos makes a noble effort to find scientific basis for all the major components of the series, including the ships, the weapons, the planets, the aliens, the droids, and even the Force. She doesn't always succeed--but she does explore much of the current research on subjects ranging from A.I. to quantum mechanics. (For a broader discussion about how far along we are toward inventing the technologies of science fiction, I highly recommend the 2008 book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, one of my favorite science writers, and one of the scientists Cavelos interviews.) Her chapter on aliens begins with the following observation about the films: "Almost anywhere you go in 'a galaxy far, far away,' alien life is there. You'll either land in it, step on it, or get eaten by it.... Even in environments as inhospitable as Tatooine, Hoth, or an asteroid, life finds a way to survive."

Of course Star Wars has always been one of the more unabashedly unscientific sci-fi franchises. There are serious difficulties in explaining certain things such as how all the creatures breathe comfortably no matter what planet they're on, which seems unlikely unless they're using some sort of technological aid we never see. Cavelos points out that planetary atmospheres may be unique like fingerprints, which would mean that no life form from one planet can breathe naturally on another. Avatar gets this detail right, having the human explorers only able to breathe with gas masks or in air-tight buildings or inside their Avatar bodies.

Still, the sheer diversity of the aliens in Star Wars is impressive, especially compared to earlier films. As Dr. Kaku explains, "the aliens don't look like us anymore. They tried to have aliens with different architectures. In that sense, Star Wars is more realistic than some of the stuff I've seen." And yet many of these aliens are simply analogues of Earth animals: dogs (Wookiees), slugs (Hutts), pigs (Gamorreans), bats (mynocks), and buffalo (banthas). Some of the organisms even look identical to what's on Earth, as in Endor's redwoods or Dagobah's snakes. Most of the invented creatures are humanoid, and those that aren't, like Jabba, are still anthropomorphic. How likely is it that aliens would look that similar to what we see around us?

The book quotes one scientist who argues that most of the visible features that humans possess, such as five-digit hands, are intrinsically efficient characteristics that evolution would tend to produce even on other planets, similar to the way aquatic mammals like dolphins acquired a fish form. Most scientists disagree. As Dr. Jack Cohen puts it, "Finding another planet with our kind of dinosaurs or people is more unlikely than finding a remote Pacific island on which the natives speak perfect German."

Science fiction literature has had the opportunity to envision alien life more broadly than the movies do. Strange life forms appear in hard sci-fi novels such as Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg, which speculates about what the intelligent inhabitants of a neutron star would look like. Part of the reason why movies aren't as daring is budgetary constraints. Commercial films have the most resources for showing aliens. The problem, as James Cameron tells us, is that mass audiences aren't interested in seeing anything truly weird.

Life as we understand it can mean different things, from simple bacteria to advanced civilizations. But since our only frame of reference is what we see around us, we have trouble visualizing aliens without comparing them to familiar creatures. If aliens exist, they might be more bizarre than anything we've ever thought of, much less seen. We can't possibly be certain what lies beyond our immediate knowledge.

Harry Potter, the jock

I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed, but quidditch, the imaginary sport from the Harry Potter books, probably wouldn't work very well in the real world even if you had all the technology needed to make the game physically possible--including flying broomsticks, and a ball with a mind of its own.

In this game, each team has a group of players called Chasers who try to get a ball through the other team's goalpost. Of course every team has a goalie. This would all sound like soccer on broomsticks were it not for a couple of really exotic elements. First, there's a heavy, enchanted object called a bludger which tries to knock players off their broomsticks. To protect the players, each team has special players called Beaters, armed with a club for batting away bludgers.

The trouble is, nothing the Chasers, the Beaters, or the goalies do has any effect in moving the game toward its conclusion. A team could go on scoring goals forever, and the game wouldn't end even if the score was 440-0. A team's ultimate fate rests entirely with one player, the Seeker, whose task is to catch a tiny enchanted object called the Golden Snitch which only appears on occasion and tries to elude the Seeker's grasp. Once the Seeker catches the Snitch, his or her team earns 150 extra points and the game ends. Usually his or her team then wins the game. Only if that team is more than 150 points behind at the moment the Snitch is caught does the team lose. One of the later Harry Potter books (I can't remember which) depicts such a game.

Quidditch therefore has one fundamental flaw: the Chasers, who make up the majority of the players and whose actions dominate most of what happens, have a very weak incentive for scoring goals. As long as they manage to remain within 150 points of the other team, they are in little danger of losing. The score could be 140-0, and the team that hasn't scored could still easily win. Most likely, a typical quidditch team would hardly score at all, focusing its energy simply on preventing the other team from scoring.

To compensate for this all-too-obvious flaw, teams get ranked according to points scored rather than number of games won. But that makes it heavily dependent on record-keeping between games. You'd have to commit yourself in advance to playing many games for it to have any impact. It's not the type of sport that lends itself to casual play in the backyard.

In our world, most team sports revolve around one very simple formula: one team tries to relocate a small object (a ball, a puck, etc.), and the other team tries to stop it. That's it. Right there you have the basic description of soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Soccer and hockey are almost moronically simple games. Baseball and American football have intricate rules of progression, and baseball (along with its cousins such as cricket) is slightly unconventional in that a team's ultimate objective involves the movement of players rather than the movement of the ball. None of these games, however, allow more than one ball on the field at a time, much less more than one type of ball. And a game where regular scoring doesn't count for anything more than a team's record is hard to imagine. In sports, complexity is not necessarily a virtue.

The Potter books, nonetheless, make quidditch out to be the most dazzlingly exciting sport in the history of mankind, far surpassing any of the familiar earth-bound ballgames. No other wizard sport ever gets mentioned, suggesting the wizarding world is quite satisfied with this one. Most readers consider it one of the charms of the series, an example of J.K. Rowling's enduring creativity. Somehow it's fun to read about, even if the rules are probably too unwieldy for it to work in the real world.

Whether it's fun to watch is less clear. Only the first two movies show the game in detail, and the fourth and fifth movie don't show the game at all. The novelty of seeing the magical sport on screen makes it interesting at first. After that, there's little suspense to be generated, apart from hoping Harry doesn't get hit by a bludger. As a Seeker, most of what he does during any game is sit around waiting for the Snitch to appear. As for the other players, since they do not determine the game's ultimate fate, what's the point in watching them play? (It's no wonder the films so often show cheating and other disturbances; they aren't confident the game will be interesting on its own terms.)

Had Rowling eliminated the business with the Seeker and the Snitch, quidditch would be more believable. It would be like soccer in three dimensions rather than two, similar to what Orson Scott Card envisioned in his novel Ender's Game, in which child soldiers conduct simulated space battles in a null-G environment. But the Golden Snitch is just enough to put quidditch over the top as something truly otherworldly. If all the game consisted of was players trying to score goals, it would quickly begin to sound mundane once the novelty of their flying on broomsticks wore off. The bludgers add a level of danger you don't associate with high school athletics, and the Snitch makes the game unlike anything you've heard of.

Quidditch is really part of the whole mystique of the Harry Potter series. In a world where magic dominates and where broken limbs can be mended within seconds, physical prowess is a lot less valued than in our "muggle" world. That's why a kid who looks to us like a class-A dork can get to be the star of his school's sports team. That's why girls can play along with the boys, without anyone turning their head. That's why even the school bully is a pint-sized kid. But considering that the magic in these books is a lot like advanced technology, one must ask: isn't this where our own society is headed?

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.

Different routes to the same destination

Back to the Future Part II has one of the more bewildering plots of any movie I count among my favorites, and a wild theory about it occurred to me a few years ago. I've never heard anyone else propose this theory, but it resolves several plot holes and makes sense on its own terms, once you think it through. My theory is that Doc's true motive in taking Marty to 2015 isn't to help Marty's son as he claims, but to teach Marty a lesson that will help prevent the accident that destroys Marty's musical aspirations.

The scene at the end of the first film, replayed at the beginning of the second, raises a number of questions. In this scene, Doc assures Marty that "you and Jennifer turn out fine," and that the problem is that "something has got to be done about your kids." After he takes Marty and Jennifer to visit the future, however, these statements don't match up with what we see. The middle-aged Marty from 2015 hasn't exactly turned out fine, and only one of Marty's kids needs help. Why did Doc mischaracterize the situation?

It should be noted that the filmmakers have stated in interviews that they created this final scene before they had any real plans for sequels. As such, Doc's statements were probably just throwaway lines they found amusing at the time. But that doesn't explain why, when working on the second and third film, they chose to contradict Doc's statements.

The entire scene was re-shot for the second film, ostensibly because the actress who played Jennifer in the first film--Claudia Wells--had been replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Somebody on a message board pointed out to me a subtle difference between the two versions of the scene, which are otherwise quite identical. In the Claudia Wells version, Doc's line "you and Jennifer turn out fine" is spoken smoothly and confidently. In the Elisabeth Shue version, Doc visibly hesitates before saying the line, and he utters it a bit too rapidly to sound convincing. (You can examine the difference with this video. Pay particular attention to 1:25-1:38.)

Still, Doc's behavior in either version doesn't make much sense. Why is he interrupting Marty's life only hours after Marty returned from the first adventure just so they can rectify something decades in the future? Why doesn't he let days, or weeks, or months pass before asking Marty to come with him? Since they have a time machine, what's the rush? If my theory is correct, Doc is trying to keep Marty away from the present. That makes sense given what we learn in the third film: the pivotal car accident is supposed to occur later the same day.

You might ask why Doc doesn't just tell Marty straight out about the accident. He could say, "You know, Marty, later today you'll be involved in a car accident that permanently injures your hand and destroys your musical aspirations, all because you took a guy's dare." The reason for Doc's silence is explained during a brief exchange in the third film, when Doc blurts out the truth:

Doc: Marty, you can't go losing your judgment every time someone calls you a name! That's exactly what causes you to get into that accident in the future.

Marty: [Suddenly stops and turns toward Doc.] What? What about my future?

Doc: [Realizes what he just said.] I can't tell you. It might make things worse.

Marty: Wait a minute, Doc...what is wrong with my future?!

Doc: Marty...we all have to make decisions that affect the course of our lives. You've gotta do what you've gotta do. And I've gotta do what I've gotta do.

Doc realizes that if he interferes directly with Marty's future by warning him about the accident, Marty might manage to avoid that particular catastrophe, but he'd retain his habit of acting foolishly whenever somebody calls him "chicken." Then, with his future thrown into flux, something even worse might one day occur as a result of that habit. The only safe way for Doc to improve Marty's future is by inspiring him to grow out of the habit. And what better way to do that than to show him the consequences of his son's acquiescence to peer pressure?

In other words, taking Marty to 2015 to help Marty's son was basically a ruse. Ordinarily, Doc wouldn't concern himself with a matter so remote from their current lives. He hopes that Marty, by seeing what happens to his son, will begin to reflect on his own weaknesses.

Of course, Doc thinks they'll go straight home after dealing with the son. He doesn't anticipate the chain of events that lead them to 1885. But by the time Marty gets back home at the end of the third film, he has in fact matured enough to avoid the accident on his own, as Doc had hoped, though influenced by different experiences than what Doc originally had in mind--a different route to the same destination.

Design creating the designer

Given the achievements of theoretical physics in the last century, it can come as a shock to realize the amount of unbridled speculation in the field. The way Paul Davies presents the topic in his book The Goldilocks Enigma occasionally gives it the aura of classical mythology. For example, tell me the following account of the early universe doesn't sound like some primordial battle between a good and bad deity:

Whenever matter and antimatter mingle, they quickly annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.... So that presents a puzzle: how did the big bang make 10⁵⁰ tons of matter without also making 10⁵⁰ tons of antimatter?.... however it is done, the story of the origin of matter would go something like this. The heat radiation released after the big bang created copious quantities of both matter and antimatter, all mixed together, but containing a slight excess of matter. As the universe cooled, the antimatter would be totally destroyed by virtue of its being in intimate contact with matter, leaving unscathed the small residue of excess matter--about one part in a billion. (p. 105)

The coincidence of my coming upon this book just a few weeks after I wrote my post about pantheism, which covers similar ground, wasn't lost on me. Both deal with the question of why the dead universe around us seems uniquely suited for life. To rephrase the old conundrum, how come anyone's around to hear the tree make a sound?

Physicists over the past few decades have discovered that many of the physical laws of the universe seem "just right" for the development of life. If the numbers had been slightly lower, or slightly higher, life as we know it could not have come to exist. I will mention just a few examples, because the topic is vast and has been covered thoroughly in numerous books:

1. If the neutron were slightly lighter, the proton would be unstable and atoms probably could not have formed. If it were slightly heavier, nuclear fusion would not be possible and stars could not have formed.

2. If gravity were slightly stronger, all stars would be giants with relatively brief lives. If it were slightly weaker, heavy elements necessary for planet formation would not have been produced.

3. If the nuclear resonance level of carbon were any different, our sun could not have produced high quantities of the element.

One must exercise caution when examining these apparent facts. Perhaps a very different sort of life, or lifelike phenomenon, would have emerged under other conditions. Perhaps we aren't exercising our imaginations enough. But examples like these have piled up, and so far they haven't gone away.

Like me, Davies isn't satisfied with the standard copout, "That's just the way the laws are, and if they weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to discuss it." To illustrate the flaw in this argument, he takes off from an idea in Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The number pi consists of decimal digits going on into infinity. The digits are completely arbitrary except for the fact that the number is derived from nature. Let's say you created a computer program displaying the number in binary, where a light pixel would represent one, and a dark pixel zero. Most likely, the screen would be flooded with meaningless "snow." You wouldn't expect to see a coherent image, such as a circle, much less a smiley face. But what if one did appear after just two minutes? Assuming the program wasn't rigged, the only conclusion most scientists would permit would be that it's just a freakish coincidence.

Davies explores several possible solutions to this dilemma. (I will deal with only a few of them here.) The most popular is the hypothesis of multiple universes. In an infinity of universes, some are bound to produce life. Those that don't will obviously go unnoticed. We're here simply because our universe is one that happened to have the right set of laws needed for our existence.

The multiverse hypothesis isn't purely ad hoc; it seems to follow from certain versions of the Big Bang theory, as well as from certain versions of quantum mechanics. But there are major problems with the hypothesis, as Davies explains. For starters, it is borderline untestable. It also seems to violate Occam's razor, the principle that theories should be as simple as possible. And it leaves unanswered the question of where the universe-generating mechanism came from.

One bizarre twist on this hypothesis bears mentioning. Davies quotes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying, "There is a significant probability that you are living in [a] computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation."

That's just a modern variation on an age-old philosophical idea, but Bostrom makes a case for it based on the multiverse hypothesis. See if you can follow this. If countless universes exist, there are likely to be ones containing civilizations that have reached the point of creating simulated universes. Any civilization with that capacity is likely to exercise it numerous times. Therefore, there are likely to be more fake universes than real ones, and so, by the laws of probability, we are more likely to inhabit one of the fakes.

Davies has fun with this idea. If we're in a simulation, who is to say we aren't in a simulation-within-a-simulation? "Logically there is no end to this nested sequence.... The real universe could be lost amid an infinite regress of nested fakes. Or it may not even exist at all. Reality might consist of an infinite sequence of simulations, period" (p. 185).

As the saying goes, that way lies madness. Bostrom's argument has many holes, but the most basic is that the conclusion undermines the premises. If we live in a fake universe, how do we know the physical laws we have discovered--on which the multiverse hypothesis rests--accurately describe the reality outside the simulation?

Davies, in any case, prefers a one-universe model, but he still suspects that the seemingly life-friendly laws cannot be due to chance. He proposes that there must be something leading our universe in the direction of producing conscious, thinking beings like ourselves. What that something is, he leaves open, but he puts forward a series of related theories that he maintains are compatible with modern physics.

While I'm not sure I understood all the details, his basic idea is that conscious life itself, in the far future, somehow influences the early universe to produce life in the first place. The laws create life, and life creates the laws, in a sort of circular time-loop with no ultimate origin. I couldn't help thinking of the following Escher drawing:


Davies contrasts this idea with the classic grandfather paradox, where a time traveler kills an ancestor. He says it is more like a time traveler saving the life of a girl who will one day become the time traveler's mother. Davies insists that this scenario, while strange, does not create a paradox.

Actually, the scenario is called an "ontological paradox." One notable example I discussed on this blog is from the movie Somewhere in Time. A man receives an antique watch from an old lady. He later goes back in time and gives it to a young woman, who will become the old lady who gives it to his younger self--and so on, ad infinitum. The paradox is that the watch was never built by anyone, at any time. It just eternally exists, fully formed. Since Davies is as bothered as I am by the question of why anything exists, I would think he'd stay far away from such scenarios, which only compound the question.

Considering the difficulties with all these theories, why not accept the traditional idea of a creator God? Davies thinks this answer presents at least as many difficulties as the others. For one thing, did God choose to create the universe, or was it a necessary act that flowed from His very nature? Either possibility leads to additional questions. Also notice the problem with describing creation as an event in time--God exists outside of time, at least according to traditional religions.

I think that such questions miss the point. God by definition is where rational inquiry ends. To believers, the purpose of belief is to transcend the rational in order to connect with the unfathomable. The usual response by scientists is that God, then, should remain forever outside of scientific discussions. To some extent, I agree. But when scientists are reduced to positing fake worlds within fake worlds, or self-created entities from an unexplainable time-loop, we are justified in wondering if the end has already been reached.

My reading preferences

Around the time The Da Vinci Code came out, people kept telling me, "The writing isn't very good, but it's got a great plot!" That is not an effective selling point for someone like me. It's like saying, "The singer has a bad voice, and the instruments are out of tune, but the song is catchy as hell!" I'd rather read a book with vibrant prose and a boring plot than the other way around.

I don't claim my outlook is the only valid one. It's just a personal prejudice. You may feel differently. I have always been drawn to books with vivid sensory prose that pulls me right into the page. One of my favorite authors as a teenager was Ray Bradbury, whose prose sparkled with possibilities. Here is a quote from The Martian Chronicles:

A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.

In this story, explorers from Earth enter a Martian colony, whose inhabitants proceed to lock them in a Martian asylum. Since Martians are telepathic, the hallucinations of the mad and deranged are visible to everyone. Therefore, the fact that the Earthlings have a spaceship doesn't convince the Martians that the men come from Earth. The Martians simply assume that the spaceship in front of them is a figment of the men's diseased minds. The problem, of course, comes when one of the Martians touches the ship and discovers that it is a bit more substantial than vapor.

The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.

"Now do you believe!" shouted the captain, as if he were deaf.

The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. "This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"

He shook the captain's hand. "May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most, visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!"

You'd think fiction this clever would work on screen. But so far I've never seen a movie do justice to any of Bradbury's works. Even when the ideas are there, there's something missing, and that something is the prose. Taking the prose out of Bradbury is like taking the dough out of bread.

I had a somewhat different experience recently as I read Elsewhere, a 1991 novel by Will Shetterly. It is part of a series by several authors about a place called Bordertown, existing between the human world and the land of Faerie. The extreme prose minimalism of this book surprised me, because I associate the urban fantasy genre with Charles De Lint, whose prose swirls and engulfs the reader.

Elsewhere is told in first person, for reasons that escape me. The narrator does little more than describe what happens, with only occasional entries into his inner thoughts. His attitudes, his feelings, his personality are seen mostly through his actions. A third-person approach would have worked better, but even then, I would have trouble picturing the events. The story concerns a teenage runaway who flees to Bordertown. After being thrown off the train, he is met by two half-elves, who are described as follows:

Two people in dusty black leather straddled dustier black bikes on a road maybe two hundred feet uphill. In the shadow of an ancient oak tree, they'd been invisible until one of them clapped. Their skin was almost as dark as their hair, which rose from their heads like raven's wings. Their ears came to perfect points.... A small difference in pitch and attitude told me that she was female, and the other, male. From where I stood, they looked identical.... They were both lean and strong and bigger than me.

It isn't until well into the story that the narrator hints that he's attracted to the female. I found this rather odd, considering her initial description. There was nothing that made me picture her as a beautiful woman, though she is finally described that way--on p. 183! As I read the book, I repeatedly felt I was getting a less-than-complete picture of what was happening.

Though I have a clear preference for lavish prose, I am able to appreciate other styles. I have no problem with Hemingway's famously terse prose. It's still good writing. It still gives a complete picture of what's happening. (It reminds me of Einstein's remark, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.") What I don't like is bad writing, whatever the style, and even if the work has other good qualities.

Lions and tigers and bears

A book I was reading a while back referred offhandedly to Frank Baum's conception of Oz as a dream. The writer must not have read Baum's book, where Dorothy's journey to Oz is never suggested to be a dream. That idea came from the 1939 film. It's striking that so many people remember The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of the most beloved stories of the twentieth century, through the famously interpretive screen adaptation.

Ironically, Baum disliked the "it was all a dream" convention in literature. (He must have turned in his grave in 1939.) I agree with him. It's a much overused device that has the smell of copout. I can understand its use in Alice in Wonderland, which deals with absurdity. But Oz, beyond being magical and impossible, is hardly absurd. Dorothy's adventures seem far too coherent to plausibly represent a dream. Therefore, why did the 1939 film work so well?

My theory is that it worked by largely ignoring the dream motif. Sure, it linked several characters in Oz to people Dorothy knew back in Kansas, none of them from the book. But once the movie reached Oz, it portrayed the book's events more or less faithfully.

Had the movie been made today, I don't think they'd have gotten it right. Modern movies--from the 1970s onward--are much more naturalistic than old ones. It's a prime reason for the decline of musicals. In recent musicals like Dreamgirls, there's a certain awkward, pretentious quality that didn't exist back in the 1930s, when audiences found nothing strange about seeing characters burst into song. That kind of casual surrealism doesn't jibe with the style of modern movies, which aim to evoke a feeling of reality. Acting is more understated, scenes more slow-paced. In this climate, movies about dreams try to approximate what dreams actually feel like, which is to say, fleeting and bizarre. This approach limits the possibilities in some ways while broadening them in others.

Many sitcoms have featured at least one episode in which a character is dreaming. The classic example is the "Twilo" episode of Dick Van Dyke, where Rob dreams of going to work and discovering that all his friends have turned into pod people, in a hilarious sendup of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But what works in a twenty-minute sitcom doesn't necessarily work in a feature-length film. The conceit of having a story take place almost entirely in a character's head has inspired some dreadful films. Two that come to mind are Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) and Delirious (1991). The first is more or less an extended music video by Paul McCartney. The second is a spoof in which John Candy plays a soap writer who dreams he finds himself trapped inside a real-life version of his own show. In both films, the story becomes increasingly jumbled as it progresses, and the protagonist wakes up before he completes his mission. That's just what dreams are like, but what fun is there in watching a movie with those qualities?

The problem with using dreams as a basis for comedy is that comedy requires rules, and dreams have no rules. You can get a quick laugh out of the absurdity of a dream, but dwell too long on the conceit and it starts to become more strange than funny.

Nowadays, the more ambitious films about dreams tend to embrace the weird factor. Three that come to mind are the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes (remade in the U.S. as Vanilla Sky), the David Lynch drama Mulholland Drive, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life. In all these films, we're led to suspect that a significant amount of what we see is a character's dream, but the extent of it is left tantalizingly ambiguous. These films greatly exploit the old philosophical conundrum that it's impossible to know for sure at any moment in our lives whether we're dreaming or not.

Exploring that kind of dilemma would have tanked The Wizard of Oz. Unlike modern movies on dreams, it retained a straightforward approach to the storytelling. Because it wasn't bound by the belief that a movie about dreaming must display dreamlike qualities, it didn't try to alter the story to fit a preconceived idea of what dreams are like. This kept the essence of the story intact even as the dream motif gave the story an added psychological dimension, a balancing act that today's movies have forgotten how to achieve.

Lucasbert, evil SW director*

There are Star Wars fans who hate the prequel trilogy far more than I do, but few seem to question why it was made in the first place. Years before The Phantom Menace, I wondered why Lucas wanted to make prequels instead of sequels. I would have preferred to see the continued adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han.

Would that have resulted in better films? It's hard to say. The series was already showing signs of wear and tear by Return of the Jedi. But at least we would have been in the company of characters we had come to know and love. The prequel trilogy failed to create any new, engaging characters, and even familiar characters like Yoda and Obi-Wan seemed curiously flat.

There's no obvious reason why Lucas needed to make movies about the events before A New Hope. Put differently, there's a good reason why he began the series at the point he did: that's when all the interesting stuff starts to happen. If the prequels fail to come alive, it's because he conceived them more as history than narrative.

That's why you can practically hear the crankings of the plot. Padme and Anakin must fall in love, whether or not they have chemistry. Anakin must turn bad, whether or not his transition will be believable. The story cannot progress on its own terms; it is weighted down by inevitability.

I don't mean to imply the films could never have worked. There simply needed to be more effort to give the events and characters the spark of life. This challenge, however, goes a long way in explaining why prequels are so rare. Lucas himself helped popularize the term as well as the concept. Temple of Doom takes place a year before Raiders, but its prequel status is a technicality. There's no story arc, not even a single reference in one film to events from the other.

The Star Wars prequels are better described by an older term, coming from comic books: the origin story. They don't merely depict events from before the first trilogy. They aim to explain how the situation from the first trilogy came to be.

That required skills that I don't believe Lucas ever possessed. Vader was a convincing character as long as Lucas kept him mysterious. Many of the Star Wars novels, written by authors with more depth than Lucas, portray Vader as morally ambiguous. But on the evidence of the films, he seems almost purely evil, an unrepentant mass murderer. Despite Luke's repeated claim that "there is good in him," what turns Vader against the emperor is simply love for his son--hardly a sign of true goodness.

The first trilogy gives no information on how Vader turned evil. It doesn't need to. The Star Wars films have always worked best when they've stayed at a basic, archetypal level. Explaining complex moral transformations is not their strong suit.

Film critic Stephen Hunter disagrees. In his review of Revenge of the Sith, he writes that Lucas successfully "answers The Question," which was previously addressed by "Melville and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare," who "could never agree on the answer." That question is, "What makes man evil?" According to Hunter, the depiction of Anakin's fall from grace "explains how you could fly a plane full of mothers and babies into a skyscraper and think you were going on a date with 72 virgins, or how you could goose-step your way toward conquest and genocide while singing schmaltzy oompah music."

I agree with Hunter that the film attempts to answer this age-old question, but I cannot imagine what makes him think it succeeds. Beyond its solid understanding of the seductive qualities of fascism, the film provides little insight into the nature of evil.

In a previous post, I pointed out that real-life killers usually perceive themselves as the good guys, whereas fictional villains tend to know they're evil. (This tendency was satirized in the Star Wars parody Spaceballs when Dark Helmet says, "Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.") The Sith don't so much think of themselves as evil as think that darkness is good--sort of like Satanists.

That's about the extent of Lucas's insight into the subject. So it's no wonder that Anakin's turn to the Dark Side proceeds as if a light switch gets flicked off. One moment he's a conflicted individual unsure where his loyalties lie; the next he's slaughtering children without breaking a sweat. Not exactly the most profound explanation for Al Qaeda or the Nazis.

We shouldn't be too surprised. Back in the early '70s when Lucas began work on his Buck Rogers-inspired screenplay, I doubt he had any idea he'd one day have to deal with these issues. He was seduced by the power of his unforeseen success.

^{*Dilbert reference. See "Catbert, evil HR director."}

Entertainment about entertainment

Vivian Vande Velde's science fiction novels User Unfriendly and Heir Apparent brought back memories of the computer adventure games I used to play as a kid. I enjoyed even pure text adventures better than arcade-style action games, because of the unique mixture of creativity and logic required to win them. I will briefly discuss these games before reviewing Vande Velde's two books.

When I first began playing Infocom's text adventures at age nine, I felt hopeless without the clue books that came with the software. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, Mr. Prosser would have his bulldozer in front of my house, and no matter what I typed into the command prompt, he would demolish the house. So I consulted the clue book, which told me the solution: "Lie down in front of the bulldozer." It makes sense, if you think about it. Prosser won't kill to get his job done. But I simply didn't consider that possibility--partly because I lacked experience or cleverness, partly because I had never read the Douglas Adams novel on which the game was based.

Beyond Infocom, most text adventures did not come with clue books. But they helped prepare me for games like The Legend of Zelda that are part arcade-style action, part strategic adventure. With or without graphics, computer adventures all have the same basic setup. They can have any storyline, though they are traditionally magic tales featuring kings and castles and wizards and dragons. You always make your way through some kind of complex setting and collect various objects in your path. Figuring out the solutions to problems usually involves trial and error. Find a piece of cotton? Try throwing it, or eating it, or sticking it in your ear.

How well do science fiction books fare in portraying these sorts of games? A few weeks ago, I discussed Killobyte, Piers Anthony's 1993 novel about characters who become trapped in a role-playing VR game. I decided to dig up a particular young adult book with a similar plot, Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly, which I first read in 1992. I remembered very little about it other than that I enjoyed it.

The gaming machine in this novel actually places you into REM sleep and hooks directly to your brain to make you think you're in the virtual setting. The session lasts no longer than an hour, but feels like five days. You can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste your surroundings. You're able to experience pain, and you must eat and sleep in the course of your journey. You are provided with new memories and skills, corresponding to the character you occupy.

That almost makes the technology in Killobyte sound primitive by comparison. It brings to mind Orson Scott Card's warning to novice sci-fi writers about presenting an extraordinary invention without considering other uses it might have. If one hour can be made to seem like five days, then (doing the math) three days can be made to seem like an entire year. Such a device could in effect greatly prolong a person's life--or at least provide a little extra time for reflection.

As for the implanted memories, if a computer can do that, what need is there for school (much less Jeopardy)? Just hook your brain to a machine, which will feed you all the information you need to know.

Needless to say, the book does not deal with any of those possibilities.

The narrator is Arvin, an eighth-grader who enters the game along with several of his friends. One of his challenges is figuring out which of his friends appear as which characters. His mom is also playing, much to his chagrin. I may have missed it, but I didn't catch what she thought of the fact that they're using a pirated version of the software.

Vande Velde's greatest strength is her attention to detail. She has plotted out the game in great depth. She structures the book in numerous short chapters that end in cliffhangers, as the characters encounter wizards, elves, trolls, orcs, goblins, and dragons, not to mention enchanted boots, sand hands, and giant rat zombies. The book kept me reading, with its fun blend of excitement and humor. (One example of the latter involves a dwarf who feels compelled to recite his entire genealogy any time someone asks his name.)

But the book compares poorly with Killobyte, which spent many pages in the real world, fleshing out its two main characters. User Unfriendly begins in the game itself and stays there until the very last few pages, without any flashbacks along the way. There are more than a half-dozen characters, all vaguely drawn. Arvin comes off as a typical teenager, embarrassed in front of his mom, eager to prove himself before his peers.

In Killobyte, the characters weren't just trying to win the game but were literally fighting for their lives. The stakes are lower in User Unfriendly. Because the game is pirated, some bugs and glitches appear, and the kids cannot exit the game prematurely. But the book bases a great deal of its plot around our vicarious experience of the game rather than anything more urgent.

The game itself is lacking in the qualities of computer adventures I mentioned before. Most of the time, the kids seem to be winging it, and their successes feel arbitrary. Again, Killobyte does a better job on this front, which is doubly impressive since Piers Anthony admits to having very little gaming experience.

In 2002, Vande Velde published Heir Apparent, about another game from the same company. It is narrated by a fourteen-year old girl named Giannine, who was a relatively minor character in the first book. It makes no mention of the events in User Unfriendly, and it may take place earlier. The front, inside, and back cover do not mention the older book at all.

Vande Velde writes on her website that she does not consider Heir Apparent a sequel, just a story taking place in the same universe. I have another theory. I think she was attempting to do User Unfriendly over again, but better. If so, she has succeeded. It improves on User Unfriendly in all the areas I mentioned.

For the first time, we get to see the world these kids occupy when they remove their VR helmets. In the first chapter, we encounter a robotic bus driver and a tiny, genetically engineered dragon. The setting can't be too far in the future, however, for we also see conventional-looking email, Windows Freecell, and a $50.00 gift certificate enabling Giannine to play a VR game of her choice. (By the time all this advanced technology exists, wouldn't fifty bucks be pocket change? Never mind.) She chooses a medieval fantasy about a peasant girl who becomes king. The session will last thirty minutes but will feel like three days. The catch is that any time her character dies, she will have to start over from the beginning, which she can do indefinitely.

That reminds me of the old Atari game Pitfall II. Possibly compensating for the fact that the original Pitfall was almost unwinnable, Pitfall II was made literally unlosable. Any time you'd get hit by an enemy, you'd merely be transported back to the last red cross you touched. The only way to end the game without winning was by turning off the computer. In the VR game depicted in Heir Apparent, however, you cannot just turn off the machine, or leave it sitting and come back to it later. You're stuck until you win the game or a technician pulls you out. That's practically asking for trouble.

The trouble comes in the form of an activist group called Citizens to Protect Our Children, or CPOC (pronounced "sea pock"), who feel that VR games are corrupting the youth. To show just how concerned they are for the children's welfare, they break into the arcade and sabotage the equipment. The problem is, Giannine is already hooked up to the game.

A technician briefly enters the virtual world to inform her that if they detach the equipment, she may suffer brain damage. But if she stays hooked up for too long, her brain will surely fry. All she has to do is win the damn game--and avoid getting killed too many times.

Easier said than done. The game is set up so that that there are many ways to succeed, and a lot more ways to fail. At first, it seems that every time she stumbles, a character pulls out a knife and slaughters her. Then she finds herself back on the sheep farm at the beginning, where she has to do the whole game over again. This aspect of the novel has an intriguing Groundhog Day vibe to it, as she meets the same characters in a host of different situations that change depending on all the little choices she makes.

There is, for example, a boy caught by guards who claim he stole a deer. The evidence is lacking, and Giannine has no desire to sanction the boy's execution, even though he is only computer-generated. But if she simply frees him, more problems will occur.

The technician gives her only two clues on how to win the game: find a magic ring, and keep a weird, mystic nun away from Kenric, one of Giannine's three half-brothers vying for the throne. (The nun, who seems to worship Oneness rather than God, is made nondenominational by the game's manufacturer so as "not to offend anyone.") Among the many challenges she faces is a knight who will chop her head off if she does not create a poem he likes. The poem can be absolutely inane, so long as it's original.

Unlike User Unfriendly, she is the only real person in the game--the rest of the characters are computer-generated. But they all have personalities, and they seem able to carry on nuanced, naturalistic conversations. I presume they're simply responding to cues in her speech, but the effect is quite convincing.

One way or another, I enjoyed the book much more than User Unfriendly. The game is still not much like the computer adventures I remember as a kid. It's ten times better! Maybe that's the point of books like these, to depict games we wish we could play, but which exist only in the author's wildest imagination.

Return to the source

I have a habit of reading the same books over and over instead of moving on to new ones. Last week I wrote a post on Piers Anthony's Killobyte, which I reread recently and enjoyed as much as the first time I read it 13 years ago. In that post, I offhandedly mentioned Jack, the Giant Killer, the first Charles De Lint book I ever read, back in fifth grade. Over the years I've gone on to several other books and stories of his, but this one stayed in my memory as his greatest work. Rereading it now, I'm rethinking that judgment. It isn't as good as I remember.

The book was his contribution to a series of modernized fairy tales by various fantasy writers. The classic tale he chose to update was "Jack the Giant Killer," but he threw in elements of various other stories (including the related and better known "Jack and the Beanstalk") as well as some folkloric material.

De Lint was ideal for this project, since his specialty is incorporating traditional fantasy into a contemporary urban setting. He could easily write mainstream fiction if he wanted. His books always begin in the real world, and he has a reputation for drawing believable female characters. But he also has a lifelong interest in mythology and folklore. His passion for the subject always comes through in his fiction.

The "Jack" of the book's title turns out to be a young woman named Jacky, who lives in modern-day Canada and has no belief in fairies, elves, or sorcerers. Depressed after her boyfriend walks out on her, she is walking down the street drunk one night when she witnesses a bizarre sight. A biker gang chase down and kill a strange little man by shooting lightning at him through a staff. The dwarf's corpse soon disappears, as does a mysterious man who was watching from a nearby house.

Naturally, she thinks she hallucinated the incident, but one item from the scene remains: the dwarf's red cap. When she returns to the spot a few days later, she discovers that donning the cap allows her to see into the land of Faerie, a world of gnomes, giants, and other mythical races. They all live right in the modern world, occupying the same space and traveling on the same roads. They've always been there, and always will be there, but most mortals are unable to see them.

This intriguing premise is part of what I remember loving about the book. I especially enjoyed the names of the creatures, which include the Gruagagh, the hobs, and the bogans, a race of pirate-like ghouls with a penchant for the phrase "Hot damn!"

The book also has an element of female empowerment, as a tiny woman from the contemporary world becomes a fighter and learns to kick Giant butt. (I have a theory that this book, published in 1987, inspired Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.)

Unfortunately, the novel soon gets bogged down in plot details that aren't quite as compelling as the early scenes promise. Jacky is called upon to rescue some enchanted princess (or something) and restore order to the land. There's a lot of names and places to remember, and my eyes soon glazed over.

De Lint wrote in the introduction that what attracted him to the character of Jack, who shows up in at least three classic fairy tales, was his mixture of luck and pluck; he is, according to De Lint, "both foolish and clever."

But it isn't until a while into the novel that we get a sense of this character in Jacky. The book doesn't feel much like a fairy tale. It seems to owe more to Tolkien than to Grimm. There is even an enchanted object that corrupts the one who wields it, just like in Lord of the Rings.

This weekend, I read the 1990 sequel Drink Down the Moon for the first time. In some ways, I enjoyed it more than the first book, even though it departs even farther from its fairy tale origin, with scarcely any giants in the plot. It is more of a typical De Lint novel.

It continues the adventures of Jacky, now a permanent resident of Faerie. She's forced to confront a powerful villain called the droichan, who is considerably smarter and scarier than the rather witless giants and bogans from the first novel.

The book contains much joy and humor, but the scene I will probably remember for the longest is riveting. The droichan captures Jacky and uses magic to torture her. I will end this post with an excerpt from this scene. Do not read further if you aren't interested in getting nightmares.

"When my kind dies," the droichan said, "truly dies, this is where we go."

One by one, Jacky's senses deserted her. Sight went first--from a gauzy veil to nothingness. Her other senses compensated, becoming more acute.

She heard her own raspy breathing, the droichan's light breaths. In the Tower itself, the cries of the bogans and other creatures readying for war....

Then her hearing went.

Now she could smell the sharpness of her own fear, the earthy smell of the droichan. The open window of the Tower brought in the scents of autumn with a bog-reek of sluagh and bogans.

Smell went.

She could taste her fear now--a raw vomit sour in her throat. The salty sweat that beaded her lips.

Taste went.

There was nothing left but touch. The hard wall at her back. The vague kiss of a breeze on her skin. Then her nerve ends began to tingle and go numb. Limb by limb, feeling withdrew until she was devoid of all sensation.

No outside stimuli entered her. She might as well have been immersed in a sensory-deprivation tank. But there was no peace to be found in this. No rest. No solace. She hadn't chosen to withdraw from the world to capture some inner harmony. She'd had her senses stolen from her by a monster and been cast adrift in a bleak void of his making.

There was no way to measure time.

A moment could have passed and it could have been forever. An eternity slipped by in a scurry of seconds. Blank, utter panic came gibbering up from the back of her mind and flooded her brain....

She was here forever.

She might already have been here forever.

Escape was impossible. Without the droichan's help, she couldn't return to the world.

VR dreams

I've always been intrigued by how we refer to present-day technology using the names of far more advanced devices from science fiction. Real holograms do not look like solid objects, real robots do not have human-like personalities, and real spaceships do not visit faraway planets. Rarely is the human tendency toward hyperbole captured in science fiction itself, one exception being the "star destroyers" in Star Wars.

Virtual reality is an astounding example of the phenomenon. I first started hearing the term in the early 1990s, referring to machines placed over your entire head, sending imagery to the inner walls to make you feel like you're in a different world. I'm surprised this technology never caught on, and I'm disappointed that I've never had a chance to try it. Nowadays, the Internet has produced computer-generated alternate worlds like Second Life, but they're still presented through the flat screen of a monitor. They aren't like the VR that has been invented, let alone the VR in science fiction, where you enter a three-dimensional, fully sensory environment that feels the same as traversing the real world, even though you may be lying on a chair in your basement the whole time.

I was having those thoughts the other day as I reread Piers Anthony's 1993 novel Killobyte. It's the best of the dozen or so novels I've read by Anthony, though that isn't saying much, considering he's written over a hundred more. His books, while wickedly imaginative, have not generally had a lasting impact on me. I recognized in Killobyte many of the elements from his other books, including bizarre sexual scenarios, and the incorporation of medieval fantasy into a futuristic setting. (The sex scenes in his books have generated controversy, since children constitute a large chunk of his audience. In fifth grade, I almost did a book report on an Anthony novel in which an android has an affair with a female unicorn who can shape-shift into human form but still has heat cycles. I chose Charles De Lint's Jack the Giant Killer instead.)

The creativity of this book is accompanied by a page-turning quality that he claims he got from Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. There are also some astonishingly realistic chapters, including a painfully vivid depiction of a girl suffering from diabetes. These qualities are important, because virtual-world stories often get so caught up in world creation that the story just sits there. (That was a problem with the dreadfully dull 2000 movie The Cell.) Not so with Killobyte: the complex VR game conceived in the book is intriguing enough to keep us reading, before the book turns into a slam-bang thriller.

In Killobyte, players are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but also responds to brain signals to move a player's character in the virtual world. The only way to exit the game and return to the real world is by selecting that option from a menu that appears within the virtual world. Otherwise, you're stuck, like someone unable to wake up from a dream. (I doubt I'm giving away too much of the plot, since virtually all stories of this kind have the characters getting trapped inside the virtual world.) The game itself is pretty much traditional RPG, but it involves sophisticated voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and simulated sex so convincing it can work for a paraplegic who has lost that function in the real world.

It's amusing to read the book now, for there's no direct mention of the Internet, and all the players connect to the game's network using telephone modems. That's hardly surprising. Anthony apparently wrote the book in 1991, when the World Wide Web had only just been invented, and when the term "Internet" was still techno-jargon. He did not specify when the book was supposed to take place, and for all intents and purposes it felt very much like the present. He was optimistic that the technology described in the book was not far off: "I suspect we shall have games very like this in the next decade or so" (p. 308).

That this hasn't happened should give us pause. Science fiction hasn't forgotten: the popularity of The Matrix and its sequels proves that it's still in the public mind. And I have heard that inventors are on the brink of creating machines that respond to brain signals. But we aren't close to inventing virtual-world machines that effectively trap a user inside them, like an electronically simulated dream. The question is whether we will create such machines--or, more importantly, why.