1 September 2007
Just as I was clocking off work today, one of my coworkers came up to me and told me I had to see this movie, no questions asked. I’m so glad she told me. This was just a wonderful picture.
The story is about a research team busy developing a product that can allow dreams to be transferred onto computers. It’s supposedly going to be very useful in psychotherapy. But when a disgruntled member of the research team steals the device, the whole crew has to kick into action to prevent the world of dreams from breaking through and overwhelming reality.
We’re never completely sure, though, if the research team itself is especially “real.” As the movie goes on layer after layer gets pulled away. People keep “waking up” from one reality into another even more fantastical than the last. But even as every bit of reality comes into question, the characters themselves become more and more real to us, especially the brooding, beautiful At-Chan, who’s created an alternative identity in her dream life: the sprightly and flirtatious Paprika.
In the century or so since Freud released his book on dreams, it seems we’ve amassed this huge visual vocabulary of dream images that we collectively know tell us something about ourselves: lately a slew of science-fiction movies have come out which attempt to harvest the vast field of burgeoning archetypes in a single swoop of the cinematic scythe. “The Matrix,” “The Cell,” and “Existenz” all come to mind, but none of them are quite as honest or as beautiful as “Paprika.”
After Dark
by Haruki Murakami, 2004, translated to English by Jay Rubin, 2007; published by Knopf. 191 pages.
1 September 2007
Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.
1 September 2007
Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens, 1854, published by Penguin Classics with introduction by Kate Flint in 1995. 319 pages.
1 September 2007
For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.
1 September 2007
For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.
Girls + Boys
by Lynda Barry, 1981, Reprinted in 1993 by Harper Perennial. 94 pages.
1 September 2007
I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.
1 September 2007
I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.
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