Empire, Spies and the Twentieth Century

Studying international relations certain subjects come up again and again and again. Even when one approaches such things as the rise and fall of great powers, hegemony and hegemonic cycles, systemic wars, industrialization and deindustrialization on a principally theoretical level, Britain, its rise and subsequent decline as an economic, military and imperial powers comes up again and again and again--and does so that much more when one takes an interest in concrete history, when one considers the situation of the recent or present or future United States in which so many have seen so many parallels.

Dealing with the spy fiction genre and its history, the same theme is almost inescapable. Much as we may think of spy fiction as a Cold War genre, the truth is that it was already well into middle age when the Cold War took center stage in international life, the thread that has really run through it from its beginning to the present the passing of the British Empire that already by 1900 saw its peak behind it. Anxiety that that empire would pass, bitterness that it seemed to be passing or actually was passing, denial about what was happening, and criticism of all these attitudes, are already there at the very beginning, in such founding works as Erskine Childers' celebrated The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux's contemporaneous but much less celebrated Secrets of the Foreign Office. ("The name is Drew, Duckworth Drew.")

As both of these have been major interests for me for decades, thinking about one matter naturally leads back to my thinking about the other, one reason why when writing about the James Bond films and books I spent a certain amount discussing the actual history of the period--more than most such writers, I think. When I published The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I actually included a thirteen page essay devoted to just such historical background in the appendix (and included it again when the second edition of the book came out back in 2015). You can check it out here, reposted on this blog.

Of Starhunter

Starhunter appeared at the tail end of the '90s-era science fiction television boom, and came into that long-crowded field quietly, at least in the United States. Rather than a prime time slot on even a cable network, it went to syndication--and in my area, late night syndication. It ran for only one year before getting a major overhaul (it became Starhunter 2300, with the principal cast mostly changed), then lasted for only one year after that during which, even in that period when I followed the scene very closely and caught something of just about every show (in fact, watched just about all of just about every other small screen space opera), I not only didn't see it but was scarcely aware of its existence until it was already off the air, past which it didn't have much of a life in reruns (not in my area, anyway), and only happened to see it years later on DVD. (Remember those?)

The slightness of the show's wiki (which, despite dating back to June 2009, has a mere 31 articles, most of them quite short) does not suggest much has changed since then.

All the same, a continuation of the show, Starhunter: Transformation is reportedly in the works, and perhaps that is why the show has recently been remastered and reissued as Starhunter Redux, while since May airing in prime time reruns on Robert Rodriguez's TV network, El Rey.

Catching one of those reruns recently the show reminded me of another space opera that flew under most people's radars, Lexx. Like Starhunter, Lexx was an internationally financed Canadian project, and relatively low-budget, but there they parted ways. Despite the slenderness of the resources put up for it, Lexx, packed with colorful sets and bright CGI and surprisingly globe-trotting location shooting (from Namibia to Thailand to Iceland the crew went, and it's all up there on the screen) inclined toward the exotic, the weird, the extravagant--the end of the universe in a gray goo-induced Big Crunch (and no, it wasn't just a dream, an alternate timeline or any other such lame cop-out, it really was the end of the universe) a mere season finale.

By contrast Starhunter, while having some hints of something bigger going on in the background (and not always just the background, as the season two cliffhanger shows), tended toward the low-key and small-scale in its plots and its look from episode to episode, the space ships and stations and colonies utilitarian to the point of being bare bones, and most of the episodes taking place in their dark, dusty interiors, which matched the tendency toward the noirisih and gritty in tone. Looking back on it I suspect this probably did not help it win over a broad audience, but it did set it apart from the generally flashier, splashier, zanier fare that characterized the genre then and now.

Reconsidering Philo-Fiction

Some years ago the philosopher Terence Blake raised the question of "philo-fiction," fiction which uses philosophy the way science fiction uses science, and whether we might see it come into its own as a genre. Of course, that raises the question of what we mean by "philosophy." My initial thought was that philo-fiction as he used the term (fiction where the fundamental rules of the universe differed so deeply from our own) could be thought of a subset of science fiction, and so, perhaps.

My answer's changed since then. Fiction dependent on such a radical difference, it seems to me, is so demanding for the writer, and the reader, that it could probably never be very prolific--so that while we probably will keep seeing people try their hand at it every now and then, I don't think I could see it becoming a full-blown genre, certainly not on the scale that science fiction has at its peak.

However, I have also found myself thinking about the matter of philo-fiction another way, because I find myself ever less satisfied with the way we delineate "philosophy." After all, all intellectual investigation was known by that name, once. However, what happened was that proponents of a particular philosophical approach--old-fashioned induction and deduction, applied in a materialist, empirical way--was formalized by figures like Francis Bacon into the scientific method, after which it was known not as "philosophy" anymore, but a separate enterprise. This has in fact gone so far that many, maybe even most, of today's scientists actually have little intellectual grasp of the premises of their life's work.

So has it also gone with investigation of the social world. Studying International Relations in college we were exposed to a considerable amount of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Hegel, St.-Simon, Marx. In time the IR student (especially if they go past the B.A. level) is expected to read at least some of the actual texts deemed more important, which amount to a healthy chunk of the philosophical canon. Yet one is unlikely to read anyone labeled a "philosopher" from after the mid-nineteenth century, not because people stopped doing philosophy relevant to the subject, but because the labeling of those philosophers of obvious and direct relevance to the field changed to "economist" or "sociologist," "political scientist" or "social scientist," because of their use of a particular epistemological approach now labeled not "philosophy," but the science held to be a very different thing.

Now we use "philosophy" to denote inquiry into epistemology and ethics and little else, just those things that "we haven't learned to treat scientifically yet," with the invidious comparison between the rigorous applier of the scientific method and the fuzzy, verbal, non-quantitative folks with the ever-smaller turf not at all subtle.1 I remember, for instance, a scene in Robert Sawyer's book Flashforward where his protagonist Lloyd Simcoe reacts contemptuously to a philosophy professor's remark on the titular event, which seems worth citing here.

Lloyd . . . found himself crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office. A philosophy professor! . . . Lloyd sighed. Couldn't they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone who understands what really constitutes evidence? A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break.

While I won't claim infallibility on this point, to my knowledge no one has remarked the scene in a significant and public way--and it does not strain credulity that they have not, because this attitude seems so commonplace. But perhaps that is one reason why it seems to me all the more important to argue that despite the relabeling, science did not stop being philosophy--perhaps the more so because of how invidious the comparisons between philosophy and science can get. Accordingly we may regard speculative fiction depicting or extrapolating from or simply playing with the theories, practice, knowledge gained by the sciences as "philo-fiction." Even if in deference to the irrationality of prevailing usages we only regard fiction which is more narrowly interested in epistemology or ethics as philo-fiction, then science fiction has been doing that too, concerned with what we can know and how, and what we ought to do about it, can go by that name as well, at times more recognizable than others, but by any plausible measure never rare or marginal, and by this point quite prolific. (I certainly would not deny that Isaac Asimov, in those early Robot stories, was dealing with philosophy, in "philo-fiction," even as he was producing some of what we think of as the hardest of hard Campbellian science fiction.) In fact, I will go further and say that, in this sense at least, science fiction has simply been philo-fiction all along.

1. I find myself thinking of other eighteenth century terms similarly narrowed--and impoverished. Take, for example, "manners," which has been reduced from culture to etiquette, or "education," which rather than a whole upbringing seems to mean formal academic training and that alone.

Reflections of a NewSpace Skeptic

NOTE: I penned this piece last summer but have only got around to publishing it now. While some of the details have since dated, it still seems to me worth sharing because its purpose, after all, is reflection on the trend of a decade, unaltered by subsequent events.

I recall many years ago running across a headline about Virgin Galactic's unveiling SpaceShip Two. Thinking that progress on the vehicle had gone a lot faster than I had heard, and expecting to see it rolling out of a hangar before the world press, I clicked on it—and saw instead a picture of a broadly grinning Richard Branson holding a model of what SpaceShip Two would eventually look like when it was built.

Of course, headlines commonly promise much more than they deliver. Still, the particular way in which they do so where technology stories are concerned is especially problematic. A company announces an R & D project, or even some scientist mentions a technical possibility—and the journalist in question presents the technology as if it were already developed, put on the market, and in satisfactory, practical, everyday use. This kind of writing is, unfortunately, evident all across the spectrum of cutting-edge technologies today, sometimes in publications whose editors ought to know better. (I recall one respectable popular science magazine that, six years ago, made it sound as if submarine communications systems were already encrypted with quantum keys.) Moreover, this kind of distorting coverage does not prove that a particular line of research and development is all smoke and no fire.

All the same, following the news regarding space technology, and the space business generally, it seemed that from year to year we were hearing much more about boldly announced initiatives, or even the discussion of mere possibilities, than about evidence of concrete progress—and that expectations generally were overblown, especially given the combination of financial and technical hurdles to be overcome, especially in regard to the more genuinely exciting opportunities. (Space tourism was one thing, space-based solar power of significance on a macroeconomic scale a much more interesting but much more demanding thing.)

It seems to me that much of what has happened has validated my skepticism. Virgin Galactic was, after all, was supposed to take its first suborbital tourists up in 2007. Ten years on neither Virgin, nor any other private company, has flown a single customer. Quite the contrary, the greatest success story for NewSpace in recent years has not been a matter of tourism, but the more established (and less glamorous) business of launching satellites, and that not by means of newfangled spaceplanes, but multi-stage rockets of the sort we have been using since the beginning of the space age.

The protagonist of this story, SpaceX's Falcon 9, has yet to attain even the reliability of existing boosters in completing its mission. Its success rate, recently appraised at 94 percent, compares unfavorably with the 99 percent success rate of the Atlas V, the 97 percent success rate of the much more heavily used Soyuz-U, or even the reusable Space Shuttle. The same goes for the success rate of its recovery for reuse, its achievement of aircraft-like turnaround times, or its holding up under repeated missions—thus far, the Falcon 9 not yet bettering the track record of the much-derided space shuttle. Only the first stage of the rocket has been recoverable so far, and that just 80 percent of the time, its refurbishment for another flight recently took six months (again, no better than the shuttle, even post-Challenger) and even its most heavily used rocket remains a long way from matching Discovery's 39 safely completed flights.

Is this an entirely fair comparison? I freely admit that it is not. The Falcon 9 program, after all, remains not just a work in progress, but at an early point in its history compared with these other programs. Despite that the price charged by the company makes it plausible to claim its improving on the dollars-per-pound-to-orbit calculus (for the first time, a Western satellite-launcher might be approaching the $2,500 a pound-to-orbit mark, however one regards the terms), while its technique of rocket recovery, even if less complete or reliable than might be hoped, is clearly deserving of the history books. Still, it is worth remembering that the concrete progress we have seen did not happen anywhere near so quickly as some hoped. Moreover, the advances the company has made so far are more a matter of incremental improvement of familiar equipment where space vehicles are concerned, and a turn to developments from outside spacecraft-building, narrowly conceived, like 3-D printing (now being used to produce rocket parts).

I think it plausible and even likely that the company will continue to make headway in improving the rocket's performance according to all the relevant metrics—higher reliability in its launchings, more frequent and complete recovery, and more rapid refurbishment, which in turn may bring prices down appreciably. However, it seems likely that this will go on being a matter of incremental progress with familiar technology, and the broader improvement of production methods, and that the journey to $100 a pound-to-orbit will be measured in decades rather than years. Additionally, even the most guarded projection is a very different thing from a done deal—all this not having happened yet. However, I am much more optimistic about the efforts of SpaceX and the whole sector than I have been in a long time.

Is the Sci-Fi Blockbuster Frozen in the Early '80s?

Those who have paid any attention to film history know how high concept and the action/science fiction blockbuster arrived in Hollywood in the mid-'70s, and in the subsequent three decades virtually swallowed up the market. (Because so many of the suck-up poptimist critics immediately "Nuh-uh!" any such claim, I afford some hard numbers about this here that should turn that pathetic "nuh-uh" into a spluttering "But, but, but . . .")

Looking back, I'm struck by the extent to which not just this broad trend, but the specific franchises date back to that time--and along with them, the common touchstones in discussion of science ficion film. Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator. (Indeed, it often seems that our hack journalists can't have a single discussion of artificial intelligence or robotics without bringing up an Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie from 1984. Am I really the only one who finds this pathetic and tiresome?)

This past weekend we got our tenth live-action Star Wars feature film, while the last three years saw brand-new, high-profile, big-budget installments in each and every one of these franchises. Our thirteenth Star Trek feature film in 2016 (while the franchise has also returned to TV--I hear, in debased form as Discovery), our sixth (or if you count the two Alien vs. Predator movies, eighth) Alien film last year, a Blade Runner sequel a few months after that, a fifth Terminator movie back in 2015 with the promise that the franchise had finally come to an end quickly broken when Kathryn Bigelow's ex-husband put off the sequels to the much more profitable Avatar yet again to reteam with his other ex-wife and the septugenarian former governor of California for what will apparently be an all senior citizen reboot of the movie they made back when the author of this post was too little even to know about R-rated movies.

Basically, it seems, Hollywood in that early, post-Star Wars boom period when high-concept and sci-fi action blockbusters were new amassed a certain number of properties and concepts that we can call "creative capital." To a great extent this side of its production has been living off that capital ever since, very little not connected with it in some way, coming from the same people, using its images, following in its footsteps. (Avatar, for instance, was a James Cameron production.) The principal exception would seem to be the comic book superhero-based blockbusters, which also had a crucial precedent in this period--the original Superman, somewhat ahead of its time, but with the slowness to tread the same path more than made up for in the enthusiasm that has left us up to our ears in movies based on comic books that are a half century old or older, with one Marvel movie barely leaving theaters before the next has arrived in them (indeed, the #1 position passed directly from Avengers 3 to Deadpool 2 this month, before passing again to Star Wars this weekend), and DC Comics failing to match Marvel but still taking a big bite out of the market in the process. (That disappointing Justice League movie was still the #10 hit of last year, while Wonder Woman, the champion of the previous summer, was #3.)

This is partly a testimony to how salable all this has been to a public extremely susceptible to brand name and nine figure marketing budgets, and very tolerant of repetition of the same material, even the same CGI imagery, far, far past the point of diminishing returns, but also a testimony to the sheer determination to keep milking an old IP, as the flops show. According to the figures over at Box Office Mojo, the last really impressive commercial performance by an Alien movie was in 1986, when Cameron's Aliens was #7 in its year at the American box office, and a very big hit internationally as well. Alien 3 was only #28 in 1992, Alien: Resurrection #43 in 1997, Prometheus a better but still less than stellar #24 in 2012, and last year's Alien: Covenant just #42, with room for doubt about whether there was any real profit in it. Compared with the colossal success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was also a less than stellar performer, while Terminators 4 and especially 5 were real disappointments. (Hence the reboot.) But to high concept-minded executives, hey, following up a string of underperformers or even outright flops with more of the same beats actually giving a new idea a chance. And the fact that government tax breaks, product placement, merchandising and foreign moviegoers to whom the experience of Hollywood's offerings are still more novel helps them get away with this approach by reducing their out-of-pocket expenses and relying less on the readiness of those moviegoers who have seen it all before to fork over twenty bucks to sit in front of a big screen in 3-D glasses.

For now.

Thoughts on Alien: Covenant

WARNING: SPOILERS

I recently saw Alien: Covenant.

I didn't expect much. I got even less.

To be fair, the Alien series has not been a favorite of mine. I appreciate the place the first two films have in science fiction film history (and I did enjoy the second movie in particular, as a shoot 'em up from a period when that kind of thing was still fresh), but my interest in it was limited all the same, and it soon came to seem yet another instance of a series dragging on way, way too long mostly because Hollywood studios are so adamant about keeping every single established IP going for as long as possible.

Besides, I was dubious about the film's predecessor, Prometheus, for reasons John McCalmont described fairly well at the time of release. It raised fairly commonplace, trite (to me, silly) questions, and then didn't try to answer them, instead giving us a plot that "is really nothing more than a series of doors slammed in characters' faces by a cruelly indifferent universe."1

Rather than "playful," it was hateful.

I grant that this sort of thing might--might--have meant something, once. But after three generations of smug postmodernist "subversion" (itself, really just a recycling of a tradition of misanthropy elites have promulgated for self-serving reasons going back to the ancients), do we really need more of this?

I say that we don't.

But I got a vague idea from some of the discussion of the movie that it had something to say about the mysteries--what the deal was with those alien "Engineers." So I gave it a chance.

Instead we got a typically pretentious opening in a huge white room with a grand piano in it (does no one else notice this cliche?), Billy Crudup's character whining about people of faith being discriminated against in an atheist world (that must be that "liberal Hollywood" at it again), and more Frankenstein complex inanity as yet another robot created in our image decides to turn on us, and once again actors look terrified as pieces of rubber (or were they CGI?) jumped on them and members of the crew splashed blood all over the set, because instead of dropping the xenomorphs from the film, like was apparently discussed at one point (and like I would have preferred), the movie pretty was mostly xenomorphs attacking people, all on the way to a final "twist" that even the dumbest viewer of such movies must have seen coming prior to a pretentious close where David has to declare to us his own choice of soundtrack as he heads off to wreak interplanetary havoc.

After seeing this film I wasn't terribly surprised to see that Transcendence's Jack Paglen had been involved (Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Frankenstein, groan), and that John Logan had his hand in this too (groan again).

Allegedly the moviemakers involved with the next installment (this film wasn't such a moneymaker that such an installment could be taken for granted, but, hey, sequel) are again thinking about not spending so much time on the xenomorphs, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Simply recycling the stuff of a forty year old movie is a lot easier than actually doing anything seriously interesting. And I expect that when that movie inevitably comes out, having learned my lesson, I will take a pass on it.

1. I'd link back to McCalmont's original piece on the film, which is well worth a read, but apparently the trolls have driven him to turn Ruthless Culture "private." Yes, what you asswipes do does have consequences.

Remake, Remake and Remake Again

Hollywood has always been quick to remake movies. Astonishingly it made three versions of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon between 1931 and 1941. (It's actually the third, John Huston-Humphrey Bogart movie we generally remember.)

Still, Hollywood was different then. The remakes were part of a far higher output of feature films, a major studio like MGM putting out one movie a week. And film was seen as nearly disposable back then, a bit more like how we view TV than movies, the more so because of how rapid changes were seen as making older material unsalable. With the talkies, "no one" wanted silent movies, while color and widescreen changed the terms yet again. At the same time the more straitlaced "Hayes' Code" meant that a lot of older material made in a freer period was no longer screenable--while if you were going to screen something to which you would have to sell tickets in competition with brand new movies, why not have new stars in it when they were what people wanted to see? All this was reflected in, and itself reflected, the fact that the studios didn't work very hard to old onto older material, much of it literally lost over the tumult of these decades, while the relaxation of censorship later meant that old stories which were presented only in bowdlerized fashion could get more faithful adaptation. (This was, in fact, a justification for the flurry of remakes of noir classics in the '70s and early '80s--The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

None of that applies now. The output of feature film is limited in quantity, each film representing a bigger proportion of the whole. The medium is no longer going through such flux as it did earlier, and the same applies for the bounds of censorship. We no longer think of films as disposable--each and every one treated as representing precious Intellectual Property, to be clasped tightly until the end of time. In fact, far from competing for ticket sales because it is the only way that one can see movies, TV, the Internet and the rest mean that audiences have never had cheaper, easier access to older movies. In the process, much of the justification for remakes has disappeared. Accordingly, it was possible to justify three Maltese Falcons over the '30s in a way that it does not seem possible to justify not three Spiderman movies but three Spiderman franchises in a decade of the twenty-first century (2007-2017). That Hollywood insists on doing it anyway is solely a matter of a critical (or is it uncritical?) minimum of people being willing to come in and see the resulting product, as has undeniably been the case. In commercial terms, high concept remains a success. And so long as that remains the case, it too will remain with us, no matter how much film critics and cultural commentators complain.

E.H. Carr and William Haggard

One of the classics one becomes familiar with studying International Relations is E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, widely considered the starting point for modern "realist" thought.

Appropriately the book is no narrow discussion of billiard-ball-type politics among nations, considering a good deal else, with one issue I find myself returning to every now and then what Carr referred to as the problem of the "Intellectual and the Bureaucrat." The intellectual inclines to theory, reasoning, principles, and what is good and right, and it is from this that their tendency to be involved with radical movements derives.

The bureaucrat--the civil servant--by contrast, "recoils from written constitutions and solemn covenants, and lets himself be guided by precedent, by instinct, by feel for the right thing," a feel guided by experience that leads them to claim "an esoteric understanding of appropriate procedures . . . not accessible even to the most intelligence outsider," and the superiority of bureaucratic experience and training to the most brilliant intellect or refined theoretical understanding in these matters. And whether one sees this as self-serving, obscurantist nonsense or not, it carries carries serious political implications. That "practical practice" by which they set such store "easily degenerates into the rigid and empty formalism of the mandarin," with "politics an end in themselves," adding to the implications inherent in their position. More than just about "any other class of the community," the bureaucrat is "bound up with the existing order, the maintenance of tradition, and . . . precedent as the 'safe' criterion of action.'"

Recently recalling Carr's comment on this "antithesis" I found myself thinking of William Haggard's Colonel Russell novels. I can think of no other works of spy fiction that treat the opposition between the two types so directly or extensively. Nor of any that, in treating that opposition, is so vehement in taking a side.

Where political life is concerned, Haggard is as hostile to intellectuals as anyone you might care to name. In Slow Burn Haggard had the latter to say of scientists:

Take a clever boy . . . and put him into a laboratory for the next seven or eight years. What emerged inevitably was a materialist . . . a man who would assume without question that the methods of science could be applied to human societies.

In short, in the eyes of this particular right-winger, they were a bunch of damned crypto-Communists, all too likely to turn traitor. And indeed, one of them (not just a leftist, but "no gentleman" either) did prove to be the traitor Russell spent the novel ferreting out.

In The Power House, Haggard bashes a type of intellectual to which one would expect him to be even more hostile, not the physicist who dares have an opinion about politics, but those whose principal concern is the social, economic, political order, in his depiction of the hapless Labour MP Victor Demuth. A "fossil," espousing "doctrines as archaic for a modern left-leaning party as the Divine Right of Kings was now archaic to the Right," Russell held the man's attitudes to be a mark of deep personal failure, resulting from deep defects of what a certain sort of pompous person would call "character." Despite a background of great privilege, which combined with a genuine intelligence and determination "equipped [him] to compete at any level he'd cared to aim at," the Prime Ministership included, a lack of confidence and inclination to "flinch from conflict" made Demuth "slip . . . into the security of protest" instead.1 Ineffectual protest because, as another character in the novel reflects, "The Time of the Left would come perhaps, but it wouldn't be . . . the intellectuals, the professional washed-out rebels, but ruthless and determined men" who made it happen, ruthless and determined men who, whatever else they happened to be, would not be mere intellectuals.

By contrast Haggard's hero, Colonel Russell, is the consummate civil servant, and not merely by virtue of his title or pay grade, but his being an administrator who, unlike most spy chiefs in spy novels, actually administers, and plays his main part in the story by administering. However many times Fleming calls Bond a civil servant, what we usually see is Bond playing commando. And even as he ascended to a fairly senior level in Central Intelligence, Jack Ryan's adventures tended to have him caught up in heroics of some kind or another--in Clear and Present Danger this Acting Deputy Director of the CIA personally flying down to Colombia in a Pave Low and manning a minigun with which he mows down drug cartel soldiers in the course of rescuing an American special forces team inserted into the country. (I repeat: Deputy Director shooting lots and lots of people with a gatling machine gun as if he were Arnold Schwarzenegger.) Such black bag work and gunplay as the Haggard stories offer, however, Russell leaves to others, while he navigates the system, and in doing so "saves the day" in dramas that, like no other, celebrate the Bureaucrat as Hero.

Of course, in continuing his series over the next few decades Haggard did eventually start playing up the action, with Yesterday's Enemy an example of this. Still, this is how they started, and tended to run. In Yesterday's, certainly, what drew Russell into his more conventional spy adventure was in fact his old, legendary reputation as Super-Bureaucrat Extraordinaire.

In hindsight, it is an additional way in which these largely forgotten books were and remain unique within this genre.

1. To round out the right-wing cliche, we also see the upper-class leftist portrayed as a snob and a bigot, disliking his niece's suitor, allegedly, for his being in the casino industry, unintellectual, Catholic and therefore "a reactionary fascist beast."

Notes on High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, by Justin Wyatt

Picking up Justin Wyatt's High Concept I (like most people who pay much attention to this sort of thing these days, I suppose) already had a fairly good idea of what the term denotes. As Wyatt explains it, in great depth and yet concisely, it is a "straightforward, easily communicated and easily comprehended" narrative whose themes and "appeal" to a broad audience are "immediately obvious" (8). The project that sounds good to an executive in a 25-word "elevator pitch"; that they can be persuaded at least has the potential to look good in a 30-second TV spot or even a poster.

The ease of communication and comprehension is simplified in the case of a "pre-sold property" with a "built-in audience," like a sequel to a prior hit--because not only is there a proven past success, but because the job of selling the product has already been done, and all one has to do is remind the audience of it. It helps, too, for the film to have other, pre-sold features--"bankable" stars (however shaky this concept is), a soundtrack capitalizing on already popular hits (sales of which are, in turn, helped by the movie), a compelling look that in itself is the subject of the sale, integrated with and even overwhelming the narrative. (Fast! Flashy! Sleek! Ultra-modern! Maybe there's nothing much to "see" here, but you can't stop "looking" at it, can you?)

A high-concept movie is a movie that looks good in a commercial, or a promotional music video, because in contrast with a classically made movie it is essentially a very long commercial or music video, in part because it was probably made by a director whose background, at any rate, is in directing commercials or music videos. (Wyatt cites Adrian Lyne, and the Scott brothers Ridley and Tony, and one can spend a long time listing those who have entered filmmaking in similar fashion since--David Fincher and Michael Bay and Simon West and Alex Proyas and Spike Jonze and Dominic Sena and Antoine Fuqua and McG and Gore Verbinski and Zack Snyder and Tarsem Singh and and and . . . while by this point such directors have so long dominated the medium that even a director who learned their craft actually studying movies probably can't help being influenced by their practice.)

Still, Wyatt's book did have some surprises for me, the biggest of which was the range of cinematic concepts to which he saw this as being applicable. Looking at the cover's array of images from major films of the '70s and '80s I am unsurprised to recognize a shot from Jaws. But I am surprised to see shots from Flashdance and Saturday Night Fever above Jaws. Where the actual text of the book is concerned, Wyatt begins not with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, but Grease (and specifically, a comparison of that critical flop and commercial success with the diametrical opposite in All That Jazz).

And this is, I think, a reflection of profound change in the business over the years. We think of the late '70s as the era which saw the rise of the blockbuster, the '80s as the rise of the Hollywood action movie as a staple of the market. Still, the action movie was a comparatively small part of the market back then. Where out of the top ten films of the year in the '80s at the North American box office there were apt to be a couple of action films, in the twenty-first century the figure was more likely to be five movies--half the list--and often more. At the same time the rest of the top ten list was apt to be dominated by a kind of movie which did not make Wyatt's cover at all--the big-budget, Disney or Shrek-style animated movie, which in the 2010s have averaged three of the top ten annually. Which means that between one and the other, they have accounted for eight of the top ten hits year in, year out, with the other movies on the list likely to be of closely related types (the live-action version of the animated Cinderella, for instance). And since action movies and cartoons are what you make if you want a blockbuster, they comprise a much larger share of the market overall than any other one or two such distinctive styles of film ever have before.

As a result, one would not think of many other kinds of movie as high concept (even if musicals, for example, are occasionally popular and profitable). However, as Wyatt shows through a much deeper development of the concept of a film as an ad than I anticipated, movies were not just ad-like in their aesthetic or feel, but ads for a "lifestyle." (Beverly Hills Cop was about the fantasy of what it is to be rich in "Beverly Hills" as much as it was about the adventure of the "Cop.") I do not think that this is quite as prominent in film today, the use of "lifestyle" in it different. Certainly luxury is common currency in today's commercial filmmaking, anything remotely resembling actual middle-class life or working-class life or poverty generally banished from the screen, but a movie, while expected to depict an "attractive lifestyle," gets a lot less mileage out of doing so, enough so that a movie principally selling lifestyle seems unlikely to earn $1 billion in ticket sales and surcharges. (Tony Stark's high-end consumption in the Marvel movies is part of the package, but it is backdrop, relatively less important to the movie than in a comparable film from the '80s that would have luxuriated in it all a great deal more, more noticeably amid the slighter special effects and slower cutting.)

Still, if Wyatt's profuse discussion of blockbuster as lifestyle ad seems a bit dated now, his discussion retains a relevance for other aspects of pop culture, like music--exemplified by Ted Gioia's observation that, in the course of its swallowing up everything else, "Music Criticism Has Degenerated into Lifestyle Reporting."

As Gioia remarks (finally, other people noticing this!), "During the entire year 1967, The Chicago Tribune only employed the word 'lifestyle' seven times," but today "newspapers have full-time lifestyle editors," while coverage of all the rest of life from weather to business is construed in lifestyle terms ("your commute," "your money"), and certainly, pop culture, with music "treated as one more lifestyle accessory, no different from a stylish smartphone" and "music journalism . . . retreated into a permanent TMZ-zone." Indeed,

if you force pop culture insiders to be as precise as possible in articulating the reasons why they favor a band or a singer, it almost always boils down to: "I like fill in the name because they make me feel good about my lifestyle."

A still bigger irony would be if most consumers of music actually thought in the same way. After all, they don't have lifestyles to feel good or badly about. They simply can't afford lifestyles.

But that reality doesn't save them from the delusion they do.

Groan, groan and groan again.

Finally, Some Grounds for Optimism?

NOTE: I penned this piece last summer but have only got around to publishing it now. While some of the details have since dated, it still seems to me worth sharing because its purpose, after all, is reflection on the trend of a decade--the decade between the 2006-2008 period when I was researching and writing a great deal about energy issues--and the present, and this still seems relevant.

A decade ago when considering the problem of fossil fuel scarcity and the prospects for alternatives as a way to fill the gap, I was consistently struck by the fact that fossil fuels were only cheap because of the externalization of so many of their environmental and other costs, and on top of this, consistent, massive state support. I was struck, too, by how despite these ways of lowering their apparent cost, the trend was in the direction of their deceptively low market price rising anyway. At the same time it was impossible not to notice how much less support renewable energy had had by comparison, the steady progress many forms of renewable energy were making in terms of price and energy return on investment in spite of this lack of support, and the sheer range of plausible concepts that held out the hope of far better results (at least some of which might amount to something)—all of these indicating enormous untapped potential.

Between the rise in the cost of fossil fuels, on the one hand (especially when one looked past the obfuscations of market prices); and the increasing productivity and cheapness of at least some forms of renewable energy; it seemed likely that the latter would become competitive with the former. It also seemed that this could be greatly accelerated if states were to shift their support from fossil fuels to renewables, and strive for energy efficiency—the reduction of energy consumption involved bringing the target of 100 percent renewable energy production within easier reach—in a focused, massive program.

I did not assume that the 2003-2008 oil price shock represented a new plateau, but I also did not expect that prices would stay as low as they have since then. (That the average annual price of a barrel of oil has, for almost a decade, not gone above $100 again, that the price touched $27 in 2016 in 2008 dollars—is a surprise to me.) At the same time, the switchover of state support from fossil fuels to renewables has simply not happened, the opposite actually happening in the United States and elsewhere by many measures, the subsidies for fossil fuels actually grown more lavish. Meanwhile progress on energy efficiency has been underwhelming, especially when one looks beyond the more simplistic and misleading measures.

Still, the installation of renewable energy-based electrical production capacity proceeded much more rapidly these past several years than it had before the crisis, in the process lowering costs. In 2016 the headline went that the electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells became cheaper than electricity generated by the coal-fired plants that were recently the cheapest of sources. To be sure, this is not yet the case everywhere in the world, under all business conditions, according to every method of crunching the numbers—as career detractors of renewable energy never miss a chance to remind everyone. Nonetheless, many a reading of the market indicates that in much of the world, and certainly much of the Western world (the central and southern U.S., for example), a new solar energy-based power plant can viably produce cheaper electricity over its lifetime than a new coal-fired one. And the math is robust enough that the change is touted not merely by environmentalists given to advocating renewables because of their ecological benefits, but by thoroughly mainstream business news outlets that, if anything, are prone to the opposite bias, like Bloomberg and Fortune.

Especially given the unpromising market conditions and policy circumstances the world attained this milestone rather faster than I expected. And unlike the great majority of what is reported about energy and the environment, this was welcome news—and a significant boost to optimism about rebuilding the world's energy base along more sustainable lines. Certainly it has demonstrated the enormous, untapped potential of a technology derided and dismissed by so much mainstream opinion. (Simply put, Goldman Sachs was wrong and Greenpeace was right.)

Additionally, it seems very likely that this trend will continue through subsequent years, to the advantage of photovoltaics over fossil fuels. And not only is it expected that within the next decade or so its price advantage will become a global norm. It is widely expected that even without rises in the price of fossil fuels that advantage will go on deepening. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), which has tended to be conservative in its past estimates, forecasts that the cost of solar-generated electricity will fall to a third its present level by 2040. According to one projection, well before that date, perhaps in the early 2030s, energy companies will find it cost-effective not just to opt for solar over coal in building new plants from scratch, but to actually junk an old coal plant on which they are only paying operating costs in favor of building a new solar plant. Another, still more aggressive projection by Ray Kurzweil has solar energy providing 100 percent of the world's electricity by then, simply by sustaining its recently observed rate of growth in its share of the energy mix for a mere decade.

Given that no one seriously expects solar to carry the burden alone, that long-established hydroelectric power already contributes over a tenth of what the world uses, and that comparably cheap wind installations are also making rapid progress (up 13 percent in 2016 over the prior year according to the Global Wind Energy Council), the date at which all electricity is generated by renewables would come well before the arrival of 100 percent solar. And, in contrast with many of the forecasts for which is so well-known, he is far from alone here, our producing 80 percent of our electricity from renewables by 2030 now a subject of serious debate.

Of course, in considering such expectations, certain caveats have to be remembered. The most significant is that even if the expansion of renewable energy production has been very rapid, the world is still dependent on fossil fuels for five-sixths of its energy. Additionally, of the one-sixth derived from renewables, long-established hydroelectric energy is still the principal contributor (supplying two-thirds). By this measure, not very much has changed from before. It might be added that the recent woes of the coal industry have been due not to the drop in price of solar or other renewables, but the expansion of that last hope of the fossil fuel industry, natural gas. Meanwhile coal production and consumption appear to be bouncing back after the drop of the prior year, not only in the United States, but China and India as well.

Additionally, some parts of the transition will make the matter more complicated than a straight extrapolation from observed growth rates. It remains far easier to phase out a coal-fired electric plant in favor of photovoltaics, or wind turbines, than to shift to renewable energy-based vehicle fleets, even just looking at ground transport, rather than the more difficult matters of ships and aircraft. (Sales of even electric private cars are, if fast-growing, still a very small share of the sale of new vehicles, at the same time that the American taste for large cars has gone global.) The efforts to develop alternatives to fuel oil, like algal biofuels, sadly, cannot point to equally dramatic progress, while simple math demonstrates that even should we fully electrify transport, it will mean that much more demand for electricity, delaying the point at which we get 100 percent of our electricity from renewables. (Indeed, as the situation stands it is worth remarking that the consumption of oil as well as coal has been rebounding recently in the United States and elsewhere.)

Moreover, the possibility that the transition will be resisted politically rather than just in the marketplace has to be taken seriously, given the dismal record of governments during the four decades since the energy crisis of the 1970s forced the question. Certainly the career fossil fuel-boosters and renewables-bashers continue to blanket the media with specious arguments about the unworkability of renewables on a large-scale, from dubiously calculated figures on Energy Return On Investment to straw man arguments about grid unreliability to sanctimonious ranting and raving against any and all instances of government support for renewable energy by those who turn a blind eye to Big Oil's vastly larger support to silly charges that from an ecological standpoint renewables can only ever be a curse "worse than the disease." (And of course, accompanying all this are plenty of Cornucopian promises of fossil fuel superabundance and climate change denial directed against the two most significant non-price arguments for a shift away from fossil fuels.) Even if it increasingly looks like a rear-guard action, the extent to which such an action can slow down the desperately needed transition ought not to be slighted given how much longer it has taken to reach this point than was hoped by the more forward-thinking in the 1970s. Indeed, the recent direction of policy in several of the principal energy-consuming nations has been less than encouraging, with this going even for the nations which have so often been looked to for leadership in the area of energy and climate, particularly Germany and China.

All the same, the current press regarding Big Oil's hopes for a "golden age" of natural gas carries with it considerable qualifications and doubts not merely about its grossly exaggerated attractiveness from a greenhouse gas emissions standpoint, but even its price-competitiveness. At the same time many observers suggest that this year's spike in coal prices and output is a temporary, short-term shift that ought not to distract from the long downward trend (peak coal possibly behind us already).

Additionally, thorny as the problem of transport may be, transportation accounts for less than a third of energy consumption, such that slower progress here does not eliminate the reality of enormous gains if electricity production is effectively shifted to renewables. And even the hints of backtracking in national policy have been judged by many to be of less enduring significance than alleged—with even the more bullish predictions regarding the coal use of China and India appearing less inconsistent with their longer-run commitment to reduced fossil fuel use and carbon emissions when their policies are examined comprehensively.

Still, even the most optimistic reading of the situation underlines how complacent and wrong-headed it would be to trust merely to the progress of one or two technologies to wholly transform the energy base. It would be complacent also to trust to market forces—or more accurately, the current combination of market forces and policymaking. Instead there is a need for ambitious policies at the local, national, regional and global levels committing governments to locking in and accelerating the deployment of renewable energy production of all types to the greatest extent possible, not simply by encouraging the expanded installation of photovoltaic solar and ground-based and offshore wind, but investigating and developing the fuller range of options in this area. The next generation of solar cells (thin-film cells, etc.), holding out the prospect of greater efficiencies, also hold out the possibility of lowering costs and enlarging capacity still more rapidly than the BNEF analysis suggests, while there are, too, new ways of deploying these technologies that may expand capacity and reliability are well worth examination (like airborne solar and wind generation). The same goes for other sources scarcely exploited to date (tidal energy, wave energy), while algal and comparable biofuels remain worthy of continued interest.

These policies should facilitate the fullest possible use of the energy produced, with power generation more widely distributed at one end (with net-zero and net-positive buildings as the goal), and grids more integrated at the other (perhaps working toward a resilient global smart grid), while improving storage capability through support for the development of more cost-effective batteries and biofuels. They should devote attention to the special problems of transport based on renewables. (Equipping those most voracious of oil-burners, large commercial ships, with SkySails-style kites could be just the beginning.) They should encourage a more efficient use of energy at the demand end, interest in which seems to have sadly declined after the post-2008 oil price drop, despite unending demonstrations of the capacity of properly designed goods from housing to vehicles to electronics to provide meaningful savings in energy consumption without compromising (and even improving) economic productivity or living standards. (While more novel, more dynamic and therefore less certain, the same can be said for changed approaches to the production and delivery of goods and services, from telecommuting to 3-D printing to cellular agriculture.) And of course, the more affluent and technologically developed nations should do all in their power to promote and facilitate the implementation of these technologies in those poorer and less developed nations still building their infrastructures.

Indeed, robust policies promoting the full gamut of potential contributors to the solution, developing the options with which too little has been done, and searching out the possibilities scarcely thought of now is likely to be essential to turning the target of a 100 percent transition to renewables inside the next generation from a pious wish into a reality—a goal all the more desirable given how even the most rapid progress envisaged by today's optimists is still less than what the climate crisis demands.

Thoughts on Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, by Peter Biskind

Shortly after reading Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and being very impressed with those two books (for quite different reasons, their accomplishments differing), I turned to his history of the independent film boom, Down and Dirty Pictures.

The book, in its journalistic reconstruction of the making of a movement within the film industry rather than close-reading the movies it produced for their social and political content, is much more like Easy Riders than Seeing in its objective, structure and feel. However, I have to admit that I didn't find it nearly so interesting a read as Easy Riders, though I should also that I don't blame Biskind for that. Easy Riders was a more memorable read largely because it had a more memorable subject. Even moving past the romanticism and the confusion surrounding it, New Hollywood remains a far more interesting subject than indie film, in part because the confluence of cultural forces was so much more fertile and dynamic (as Biskind himself points out, these guys were products of a far more conservative time, far less conducive to critical thought), while the filmmakers made a stronger impression as genuine artists. The ambition, the daring, the bet-it-all-on-my-vision--we get a far stronger sense of this in Biskind's writing about the guys in the '70s than his writing about the later counterparts, the more in as the best of their films really were great films. (At one point in Down and Dirty Biskind quotes Edward Norton saying that Sex, Lies and Videotape was his generation's The Graduate. I was appalled by that. As one growing up in those same years, my Graduate was the actual The Graduate, my first viewing of which was an experience to which all of the films of the '90s rolled together could not even begin to compare. If anything, I have only felt more confirmed in my opinion since.)

In fact, after the first ninety pages or so, I started skimming. And didn't stop skimming until I got to the end, because I was never tempted to stop skimming and start properly reading again. Which is why this is just a little post and not a proper review such as I wrote of Mr. Biskind's two other books.

That's it, my whole comment on the book.

You thought I was going to say something about Harvey Weinstein, didn't ya?

If you're disappointed that I didn't, well, tough.

Peter Biskind and Star Wars

In telling the story of Hollywood in the '70s in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind cannot avoid discussing Star Wars.

Alas, in doing so Biskind not only repeats the charge that Star Wars "ruin[ed] movies," "obliterating . . . aesthetic self-consciousness and critical reflection," and eliminating any possibility of other kinds of films getting made, and lengthily citing what seems like half his cast of characters to that effect--Pauline Kael and John Milius (who called it a cheap amusement park ride) and William Friedkin (who compares Star Wars to McDonald's, after which "'the taste for good food disappeared,'" "'devolution,'" "'everything going backward into a big sucking hole'") and Martin Scorsese ("'They're not subsidizing anything else . . . They're smothering everything'") and Robert Altman (looking back on a visit to the multiplex in the summer of 1997 as not offering a single "'picture that an intelligent person would want to see'"). He even cites George's then-wife Marcia, confessing that she was "disgusted" by the current state of the American film industry, that part of her thought Star Wars "'partly responsible for the direction the industry has gone in, and . . . feel[ing] badly about that.'"

Biskind also makes Lucas look foolish for even attempting to argue in Star Wars' defense. (He declared that the blockbuster revenues created a space for less commercial fare; Biskind terms it "a Reagan-era trickle-down spin on the situation," not implausibly but at the least unkindly, while sandwiching Lucas' defense between those paragraphs of denunciation.)

In fairness, Biskind's history of the period has sufficient scope and sufficient detail to make one see that the story is much larger than a single movie (or two, or three). He makes clear that Lucas was far from the only commercial-minded filmmaker in the bunch. Biskind makes as much as anyone else of the mistakes of the New Hollywood superstars that were to cost them and the bigger movement so dearly (Friedkin, and Scorsese, and a good many others getting in way over their heads, blowing big budgets on failed projects, losing their capital that way). He tells of the rise of "high concept," brought into film production by Barry Diller from TVland, and refined by his cohorts, even before Spielberg and Lucas had their hits. Still, he does not connect the dots here so illuminatingly as he might have, the New Hollywood myth winning out over the more complex facts of the situation.

Review: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, by Peter Biskind

Peter Biskind's history of the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, is notorious for its repleteness with unflattering details about what one might think of as the "principal characters" in the drama he presents of the time. He has Dennis Hopper more egomaniacal and violent than the villains he would later play (and yes, weapons are involved); Paul Schrader (despite being an exceptionally unlikely protagonist for a Balzacian drama) trying to sleep his way to a directing job with astonishing lack of subtlety; the sex life of Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving as a tissue of neurosis and manipulation and betrayal (which I'm sure made many of those who think Steven Spielberg uneasy with sex in his movies say "I knew it!").

All of this has naturally got the book a lot of readers, but also seen it attacked ferociously. (Spielberg's biographer Joseph McBride, whose book presents a very different of the Spielberg-Irving marriage, was not flattering in his review of the work for the New York Times.)

Personally I don't care enough about all this stuff to spend one second trying to figure out who really said what, or slept with whom. But even as one who ordinarily finds this sort of thing distasteful, I do have to say that the book cannot be dismissed as the sleazy tell-all so many make it out to be. Whatever the accuracy of the individual stories (and Biskind fully owns to the fact that many of the principals deny what others have said of them), they are relevant to his discussion of the work these people did as artists. Biskind goes into, for example, Peter Bogdanovich's involvement with Cybill Shepherd in such depth because that affair had its significance for his career as he analyzes it--the split from a wife who had been a hugely important collaborator damaging his moviemaking, and his decision to build around Shepherd films for which she was unsuited (like Daisy Miller), no trivial factor in the decline of his career after Paper Moon.

Indeed, the significance of these episodes extends beyond these individual stories to the bigger story Biskind tells about all of them together, the Tragedy of the New Hollywood, presented as a brief but wonderful moment in which "the artists had the power," and gave us a burst of creativity such as Hollywood has not seen since. But alas, nemesis clobbered hubris in a tale of young people of talent ruined by success and the temptations that it brought--callow youths getting "too much, too soon" as the cliché has it, the nerdy and repressed kids and poor kids who didn't get invited to their party having the biggest party of all time and going nuts, the Artists getting the creative freedom to go nuts and doing that in an environment saturated with the least healthy aspects of the '70s counterculture and the Hollywood scene and all their potential for encouraging self-destructiveness.

Certainly those inclined to buy into this sort of thing can find plenty of substantiation for their views in the specific incidents Biskind relates--in egomaniacal artists making enemies and alienating people, like Hopper's or William Friedkin's over-the-top personal rudeness to industry veterans and executives; in projects pursued because of a personal whim, like Friedkin's Sorcerer, and not always an artistic whim, like Bogdanovich's would-be Cybill Shepherd vehicles; of artistic arrogance that led to chaotic production processes, like Martin Scorsese's cavalier attitude toward scripting and editing during his cocaine-fueled making of New York, New York, or the notoriously out-of-control production of Francis Ford Coppola's far more ambitious Apocalypse Now.

However, whatever the truth of the little stories, this rather dramatic Myth seems to me to obscure rather than enlighten. The plain and simple fact is that the artists were never so powerful as is so commonly believed (or as they themselves believed, to go by such remarks as a young George Lucas' echo of Marx after Easy Rider became a hit that "the workers have the means of production"). Rather what happened was that with the breakdown of the old censorship (goodbye Hayes' Code) and a measure of uncertainty among the Suits about just what would sell (per capita ticket sales plummeted from thirty a year to just four a year in the two decades surrounding the proliferation of television), they had a greater measure of freedom than before. Not a free hand to create by any means, but just enough discretion that, if they fought tooth and nail for their visions, they could get somewhere, especially if they were prepared to gamble their careers on those visions, with the winnings from successful gambles letting them raise the stakes the next time around . . .

Some gambled big, and won big. Francis Ford Coppola had a triumph for the ages with the original The Godfather. However, almost from the very start those who gambled poorly paid the consequences, with Hopper ruining his career with The Last Movie (yeah, never heard of it either 'til I read this book), while even if the effects on their careers were less totally devastating, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and William Friedkin all suffered for making costly movies that failed to go over well with audiences (New York, New York, Sorcerer), even if they went over well with critics (Nashville), while the later and at least initially less successful gambles of Coppola and Michael Cimino, if since recognized as worthy efforts, are remembered as having ended an era (Apocalypse Now, and above all, Heaven's Gate).

Moreover, even that margin in which to fight for a vision and gamble a career was accorded to only a relatively small part of Hollywood (alas, Biskind gives the impression that the handful of figures on which he focuses were the whole place), the rest still an updated version of the Old Hollywood churning out the disaster movies and musicals and backlash culture crime movies and exploitation films for which the era is also well known, the Old Hollywood that even at Oscar time could walk away with the big prizes. (Let us not forget that in 1976, when the era was supposed to have still been flourishing, not Network or Bound for Glory or All the President's Men or Taxi Driver walked away with Best Picture, but Sylvester Stallone's old-fashioned inspirational sports story Rocky.)

And even that margin was just a temporary matter, which would have come to an end much as it did, as ticket sales stabilized (we have never stopped going to the movies four times a year), in part because the studios, too, were innovating, if in ways film critics damn rather than admire. The trinity of Barry Diller, Don Simpson, Michael Eisner ushered in the age of "high concept," with its blitzes of TV ads to pave the way for ultra-slickly packaged wide releases, and films like Jaws and Star Wars pointed the way to the kind of product that could make the best use of such backing. This has, of course, led innumerable observers of the scene to excoriate Lucas and Spielberg (Biskind certainly does so, enough for this to warrant its own post, here), but had they not done it, someone else would have. After all, virtually every feature of the blockbuster, from the mechanics of the action movie to aggressive merchandising, had been perfected in the '60s by the Bond movies--and that it took Hollywood until the late '70s to really assimilate their precedent just shows it to have been a slow learner (while the artistes who damned Star Wars had scarcely been less commercial, Friedkin making The French Connection and The Exorcist, and John Milius serving up throwbacks to '30s-era swashbucklers like The Wind and the Lion, while the Salkind brothers backed the colossal Superman: The Motion Picture). Meanwhile the counterculture that doubtless made the New Hollywood a more interesting and daring place proved a very fickle thing, no match for the global turn to the Right that, amid so much else, turned the hippies into yuppies lamely insisting that "they're still cool" . . .

Still, if Biskind's allowing Myth to get the better of the historiography, leaving the book less illuminating than it might otherwise have been, this telling of the Myth is so rich in information and commentary (others' as well as his own) that there is plenty to interest those who doubt the essential line, even in the illusions so many of the players had at the time. Reading what young filmmakers in that period thought about the potentials of portable lightweight cameras for letting aspiring filmmakers "shoot their movies in the street," and still more, the colossal but in the end spectacularly pointless investments that Coppola and Lucas made in trying to build a counter-Hollywood up in the San Francisco Bay area--American Zoetrope, Skywalker Ranch--is an antidote to the eternal hype that some new wonder is about to bring on the millennium by liberating the Artists from the control of the Suits for good and all. (Certainly Biskind applied a good many of the lessons to his analysis of later times, most of all when he recognized that for all the hopes put in it, the indie filmmakers were in no position to live up to the example or standard of their predecessors, least of all in their capacity for looking at the world critically.) The result is, for all its flaws, a book that seems to me indispensable for anyone interested in American cinema in this crucial period in its history.

Seeing Star Trek: Voyager Again

In reruns the later iterations of Star Trek have been less conspicuous than the original series, and the franchise's relaunch on television with The Next Generation. By and large their appearances as regular programming have been fewer, briefer, further between.

Star Trek: Voyager, however, has recently returned to the air on BBC America, and the new H & I.

Seeing many of the old episodes again I have had some occasion to rethink my earlier assessment of it.

After all, the show came right on the heels of two fairly well-received editions of Star Trek--some two hundred episodes in a little over seven years, with the second of those shows, Deep Space Nine, the more obviously unique with its space station setting. And those two shows, moreover, were part of a larger boom in TV space opera such as has not been seen before or since--the years when we got shows like Babylon 5 and Lexx and Stargate and Farscape. Simply standing out was that much more of a challenge in that very crowded field, where shows unencumbered by their attachment to an established universe, an established franchise.

Additionally, the show seemed to be trying to do things that Trek had not been great at in the premise it served up, the characters it presented--this crew of mixed Federation and Maquis who had to get along. The Trek shows generally do best when focused on dashing captains and charming exotics, not the regular human drama of which we got more than usual this time around. (Where The Next Generation is concerned, fans fondly remember Picard, Data, Worf--not Riker, though he did, at least, inspire Steak Starbolt.1)

I still think Voyager was not, could not, have been as original, distinctive, fresh as a B-5 or a Lexx, that in many ways it did feel and sound a lot like the other Trek shows that previously covered much of the same ground in more compelling fashion. (Making the big speeches, this ship's officers just didn't seem to have the same gravitas as their predecessors.) And my favorite character, the most consistently sympathetic and entertaining and interesting, remains the Doctor, an opinion in which it seems I'm far from alone.

Still, I find myself more generously disposed to it, more inclined to enjoy those things it got right and more charitable in appraising those things it got wrong.

1. I have a recollection of Riker being told by a woman that he's "seasoned," and replying "Like a good steak?" I haven't been able to trace the precise exchange, and I admit that my memory may be faulty here, but it does seem that Deanna Troi did refer to him as seasoned in Part One of "The Best of Both Worlds" and he replied that "It's a horrible thing to say to a man."

Revisiting The City on the Edge of Forever

I recently revisited White Wolf's edition of Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever, which not only presents his various scripts for that episode, but includes his version of just what happened between him and the production team during that process, and after.

Essentially Ellison thunders at those he believes wronged him for sixty straight pages. One doesn't see much of that sort of thing--few writers dare. And part of its considerable entertainment value is the extreme novelty of one of those figures Hollywood cannot do without but is so notorious for mistreating, its writers, getting his own back.

Much of what Ellison has to say seems persuasive, but I am less interested in making a judgment about who said or did exactly what than in what seems in hindsight the sheer oddity of the match-up of Trek and Ellison. I am an admirer of both. But they were a mismatch, pure and simple. That did not prevent Ellison from writing a memorable teleplay that, even if much modified, provided a basis for one of that influential series' most celebrated episodes. Still, Beckwith and his jewels of sound really had no place on the Enterprise; while if Kirk's dilemma is more intellectual and less personal in the final version than in the original, it is exactly the kind of thing that science fiction is uniquely equipped to deal with in ways and to a degree that other sorts of fiction tend not to do, if not its reason to be.

In fact, the interaction and its frictions strike me as replicating in miniature a major division within science fiction at the time and since. On the one side was science fiction, narrowly defined, whose traditions were not limited to but certainly had at their center a humanistic and rationalistic consideration of the world in which we live, and extrapolation from what is to what might be--and with them, utopianism in the best sense of that term. On the other was the New Wave, whose writers and editors brought a great deal of energy, enthusiasm and talent to the writing of science fiction, but lacked any appreciation for it as a genre doing different things by different rules from the Modernist literature they wanted it to be so much more like. In some ways it has made the genre a more interesting place, but that division has had its risks and costs as well.