A Good Year

Time Magazine has up a list of 2008 Top 10's, of varying degrees of interest and capacity to depress. I'd recommend everyone read Top 10 Medical Advances and Top 10 Scientific Discoveries (though the latter cheats a bit) as a reminder that we haven't totally bollixed up the world just yet.

"SpaceSquid Obviously Can't Be Bothered" Friday

Finally got hold of some pictures from my trip to Slovenia. These are shots from inside the Church of St George in Piran.

That last one is the statue of St George himself, so brutally mocked at the time.

Because You Can Never Start Too Early

If they hadn't sold out, I would demand my flunkies acquire me these for Christmas: A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks.

"Each block measures 1 3/8 inches square and depicts six mad science concepts and the appropriate letters."

Genius. T is tentacle by the way, which raises a number of disturbing questions. It also isn't clear what is on the four spare faces, though blueprints for an atomic bomb, a secret volcano hideout and a fembot, along with the chemical formula for a shark-mutation serum, are good bets.

No h/t to MightyGodKing, for though 'tis true that I found this on his site, he had the nerve to post up that Cure T-Shirt and pretend he located it on a non-me blog, which is clearly impossible.

UPDATE: Link fixed. Thanks, Jamie.

Maintain Hope In Adverse Meteorological Conditions

I've always found it difficult to get next to Stephen King. Having never read any of his books, it's difficult to tell whether he's a mediocre writer or just poorly served by those who adapt his work, but as a general rule most of his stuff leaves me cold. Maybe it's just the wheat-to-chaff ratio that's the problem, given the sheer number of stories he's written (Wikipedia lists almost sixty novels and over a dozen short story collections) and the desperate rush to turn each and every one into a movie or TV series (I believe the current total of adaptations is somewhere around ninety), maybe it's hardly surprising if a lot of what is churned out doesn't appeal. Certainly there are some genuinely impressive examples; although The Stand is the only one that really springs to mind specifically from his horror oeuvre [1], and even that is marred by a lack of logic, crappy dialogue, and one of the worst endings in fictional history.

So I was kinda bummed to see trailers for The Mist, which looked really quite interesting until King's name swam up on screen. I considered maybe giving it a whirl on the off-chance, missed it at the cinema anyway, and eventually finally got round to watching it on DVD on Sunday night.

And it's fantastic. Seriously. OK, so a story in which so many different extra-dimensional creatures appear probably needed a much higher effects budget (the monsters look just about plausible in the mist, but in the harsh light of day they're somewhat less than impressive), but the monsters aren't really the point, and it's always nice when you can say that about a monster movie.

We'll get the plot out of the way first. The day after a massive thunderstorm David Drayton, his son Billy, and his acerbic neighbour Norton are shopping for supplies in a local convenience store when Dan Miller runs in screaming about his friend being taken by something in the mist. Minutes later an impenetrable fog descends, and those trapped inside the shop have to decide what they're going to do.

So far, so ordinary. Frank Darabont mentioned the 1944 film Lifeboat as one of the influences he considered in directing the film, which gives you some idea of how old the basic idea is. What matters, in The Mist as in Lifeboat, is how the characters react to the situation. It's a study of the human response to what Dashboard Confessional called "rapid hope loss."

Many of the film's characters find themselves caught inside a triangle of hope, duty, and despair, and the fascination (and ultimately tragedy) comes in watching each character as they gradually slide toward the latter. For Frank, the hope is that his wife, back at the house, is still alive, but his duty is to keep his son safe inside the grocery store. For Mrs Carmody, the hope is that she will get to Heaven following the End Times she is sure have finally arrived, and her duty is to try and take as many people with her when all that ascending kicks off. One woman leaves the store moments after the mist arrives, determined to find her children, in defiance of what might be lurking outside. Others assume duties in order to shore up their hope; Ollie becomes the primary defender of the group as their best shot with the only gun, and Hattie asks to be allowed to look after Billy whenever possible (she is the only character in the film to actually drive home this point, she specifically states that her duty to Billy is the only way to stop losing all hope herself).

There are other characters, though, that eschew responsibility. Jim Grondin encourages the bag-boy Norm to go out into the mix to fix their generator, despite Miller's warning and Frank's descriptions of strange sounds outside. When Norm is attacked by carnivorous tentacles from beyond space, Grondin freaks out and runs for cover as Frank and Ollie try to stage a rescue. Without sufficient strength, though, Frank can only watch as Norm is dragged into the mist by the unseen monster, at which point Grondin argues Frank is guilty of not describing the threat well enough (he later implicitly apologises for blaming Frank, though he doesn't really go so far as to take responsibility himself). Later in the film, Grondin comes across a survivor, tied up in webbing, and again freaks out rather than trying to rescue the victim [2]. This second failure, and the following massacre, causes his mind to snap completely. At this point he joins the growing religious cult of Mrs Carmody, in affect placing his hope and his duty in her hands.

Carmody is probably the most important character in the film, and certainly the most interesting. For her hope is never really in question (though she does allow herself one moment of weakness in prayer), every disaster that saps morale from the rest of the group only adds to her conviction that she was right all along, and that God's vengeance is at hand. Nor does she waver in what she sees as her duty to preach to the masses that they might be saved. As a direct result, she has a man sacrificed to the monsters outside (for the crime of working at the military base that was likely the source of the mist), and ends up being shot when she tries to prevent others from leaving the store. The message seems clear, it's one thing to balance hope and duty against despair, but quite another to try to force those things onto others. Of course, it isn't quite as clear cut as that, whilst Carmody dies in the process of "saving" her flock, it cannot be doubted that the fate of her followers is, as far as we see, better than that of anyone who attempts escape. Since she gives the impression of truly being willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good, perhaps she ultimately got what she wanted, albeit in a very different form to the one she expected it to take.

So what exactly is the answer? Part of the fun lies in the fact that it's so hard to find. The mist is not a homogeneous, predictable evil. Some die the instant they leave the store, others get some distance, some are never heard from again, and may even have survived. There is no magic formula. What is certain, though, is that hope is the keystone. At the end of the film Frank, Billy and three other survivors escape the shop in a car, only to find Frank's wife dead at home, and then ultimately to run out of gas miles down the highway, with no end to the mist in sight. There are only four bullets left in the gun Ollie carried until his death at the shitty end of a giant praying mantis claw, and Frank, finally out of hope, shoots each one of his passengers in the head before exiting the car, waiting for the mist to claim him.

Instead, the military arrive, using flamethrowers to destroy the remnants of the alien horde as the fog begins to retreat. Had Frank held on to his hope just a little bit longer, his son would still be alive. The brutal point is rammed home as a refugee truck passes carrying the woman who first left the store, along with her two children. Her hope got her to safety, though again the film leaves no easy answers: her salvation came from her hope and her duty lying in the same direction; Frank's were separated for so long that he never had the chance to follow her example.

It's to the film's credit that it suggests hope as necessary to survival but in no way sufficient. By its very nature, hope cannot be built on guarantees. The message here is not "here is how to win", but "here is how to avoid certain defeat".

Even so, it's a message worth remembering.

[1] Well, 1408 was quite interesting in places, but given that a) that's mainly due to tension building that is entirely cinematic, and b) it falls apart like a motherfucker towards the end, I'm not sure how much credit to give to King.

[2] Admittedly, said victim then burst after thousands of alien spiders hatched out of his body, but there was no way Jim could have known that at the time.

Torturous Logic: Redux

This piece by Jim Henley is worth reading in its entirety, but for those short of time I shall extract a few choice morsels, since it links back to my banging on about torture a few months ago.

First, why the "ticking bomb" hypothetical is somewhat flawed:

Let’s say you’ve caught a suspect and you’re sure he’s a terrorist, and you’re sure there’s a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, and you’re sure he knows where it is, and you’re sure this particular terrorist has been trained to resist torture just long enough that you could never get the true location of the bomb out of him in time. But you’re also sure this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way.

Wow! Fascinating hypothetical, huh?

Second, why anyone who believes they can torture someone to save millions of lives but doesn't because it's against the rules is a dick:

If you could stop a bomb from killing 1 million Manhattanites at the cost of your own life, would you do it? What if it would mean imprisonment for the rest of your life? Could you live with yourself if you let all those people die for your own comfort? If you couldn’t, and you somehow just had to torture this bad guy to stop the bomb, then you ought to do it anyway and face your punishment. Right? Leave possible pardons and runaway juries aside. We are hard men for hard times, and we want hard make-believe conundrums.

And why torture-supporters only ever come at this from one direction:

Here’s another poser: Suppose you’re an innocent suspect whom your captors are convinced is a terrorist. They don’t believe your protestations, so they decide to torture you into a confession. The more you protest your innocence, the more frustrated they get that you won’t “crack.” What do you say to get them to stop? How do you get them not to decide they need to hurt you even more?

That puzzle has two features that make it unpopular with torture advocates. It asks you to sympathize with the victim rather than the perpetrator. And for too many people, it isn’t a hypothetical at all.

Think Of It As A Shot Of Methadone...

...Or possibly morpha. The new Galactica webisodes started airing on Friday, and once again anyone not lucky enough to be born over the graves of Native Americans gets shafted. Of course, if you feel like breaking the law, and have some idea of an exciting new website called "Yootoob", or something...

Glad to see they've finally gotten round to giving us a character who lives in the intersection of the Venn Diagram of homosexuals and non-douches, BTW.

Actually, It's Usually Tuesdays For Me

Observe, if you dare, the most awesome T-shirt in human history.