Utopia

It’s appropriate, I think, that David Cronenberg got Greek money to shoot CRIMES OF THE FUTURE in Greece, because it may be his first utopian science fiction film.

It might not seem that way, but consider: it’s a world where infection and pain have been all but eliminated. Also, people seem to spend all their time making and consuming art. The few people we meet who have vaguely regular jobs seem to be living the dream: the tireless bureaucrats running the National Organ Registry set the place up themselves so they could work there; the sexy grease monkeys from LifeFormWare love their work; the cop has a sense of mission.

“…with all our earthly problems solved and with bigger ones worth the solving,” says Squadron Leader Peter D. Carter in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, and this seems to be the heaven Cronenberg offers us. No mention is made of longevity or immortality, but he might as well have thrown that in too, since his characters are all in a search to give meaning to their lives, now that the usual problems of late capitalism and biology seem to have been removed.

Also, perhaps for budgetary reasons, there are no cars: motorhead Cronenberg might not consider that utopian, but I do.

The film feels quite NAKED LUNCH-y, but I think XISTENZ is the best comparison: there are factions in ideological conflict over questions of authenticity, but instead of Phildickian Big Question #1 (What is reality?) this is more about Phildickian Big Question #2 (What is a human being?). Evolution seems to be getting out of hand… is this a good thing or a bad thing? Though a performance art piece is titled Body is Reality, the film doesn’t play the VIDEODROME/NL game of leading us into hallucination without warning. Or at least I don’t think so.

CRASH is another comparison: again, factions, individuals and couples pursuing some kind of meaning through quite extreme activities

The film looks terrific: Cronenberg’s period films have always benefitted from the added panache imparted by the past. This uncertain future has its own aesthetic: retro tech is in fashion; biomechanical gadgets are everywhere. Rather than the glassy and inhuman Canadian architecture he started out celebrating, here Cronenberg has beautiful crumbling Greek buildings, acid-lit and ominous.

I have quibbles. The internal logic is at times flakey — Viggo Mortensen’s art involves regular surgical interventions, but his body starts out free of scars. This is a distracting puzzle that doesn’t help anything and could, one feels, have been inexpensively dealt with. Is the biomechanical chair supposed to be so shonky? The design is nice, but its awkward lurching doesn’t seem to perform any service for the poor occupants, especially while they’re eating. The motivations of one lot of assassins seemed vague to me, their place in the overall narrative unresolved.

On the other hand, this is perhaps Cronenberg’s most visually beautiful film: his new collaborators, like cinematographer Douglas Koch and costume designer Mayou Trikerioti, seem to tread nimbly in the footsteps of Peter Suschitzky and Denise Cronenberg, and composer Howard Shore and production designer Carol Spier are back to provide direct continuity with the past.

I’m undecided about the ending. It struck me as anticlimactic — we’d been waiting for an IMAGE to top all before it, and Cronenberg instead focuses on performance. It’s a lovely performance, though. A second viewing may clear my doubts away. At any rate, it’s a proper Cronenberg film, arriving when it had looked like we weren’t going to get any more of those. Now do RED CARS.

Page Seventeen III: Trinity

She did have one admirer: her uncle Horace, the husband of her aunt Nina, her mother’s wayward older sister. When the teen-aged Nina had taken to romping with farmhands in the hayloft, George Smith had packed her off to a San Francisco boarding school noted for its Carmelite discipline. On the train she met Horace Robinson, and after a brief tete-a-tete they eloped several stops before San Francisco. Months later they actually were married — or so they told George Smith.

The obsession, found in twins, with dualities–as complimentary and conflicting at once–has been termed twinning by Dr. George Engel (“The drive is always to be two, yet unique from all others.”) This “twinning” motif found expression in a number of Phil’s stories and novels, notably Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981).

So we followed him, as behind us the second man–George, apparently–busily transferred all the luggage from the plane to a rough wooden cart. The first man led us to the cliff, and then around a bit to the right, and there was an elevator. Or not exactly an elevator, but a kind of cable car on tracks, a large square room with railroad-type wheels on the outside of its slanted rear wall. When we were all aboard, with the windowed doors shut, the man pushed a lever and we were winched slowly and smoothly up the steeply angled side of the cliff.

They stepped through the door into the main hangar, George pointed to the object in the center, bathed in floodlights planted in a fenced off circle. The ship was not a saucer at all; it was spherical, all gray in color, and about sixty feet in diameter.

There were four of us to six of them, like I have already indicated, but poor old Dim, for all his dimness, was worth three of the others in sheer madness and dirty fighting. Dim had a real horrorshow length of oozy or chain round his waist, twice wound round, and he unwound this and began to swing it beautiful in the eyes or glazzies. Pete and Georgie had real sharp nozhes, but I for my part had a fine starry horrorshow cut-throat britva which, at that time, I could flash and shine artistic. So there we were dratsing away in the dark, the old Luna with men on it just coming up, the stars stabbing away as it might be knives anxious to join in the dratsing. With my britva I managed to slice right down the front of one of Billyboy’s droogs platties, very very neat and not even touching the plott under the cloth. Then in the dratsing this droog of Billyboy’s suddenly found himself all opened up like a peapod, with his bare belly and his poor old yarbles showing, and then he got very razdraz, waving and screaming and losing his guard and letting in old Dim with his chain snaking whisssssshhhhhhhhh, so that old Dim chained him right in the glazzies, and this droog of Billyboy’s went tottering off and howling his heart out. We were doing very horrorshow, and soon we had Billyboy’s number one down underfoot, blinded with old Dim’s chain and crawling and howling about like an animal, but with one fair boot on the gulliver he was out and out and out.

‘I took the opportunity to call upon the Rector, after I had questioned Mr. George Jarnock, who required to my queries in place of Sir Alfred Jarnock, for the older man was in a nervous and shaken condition as a result of the happening, and his son wished him to avoid dwelling upon the scene as much as possible.’

“You mean that you don’t know, George?” Marne gave a low whistle of astonishment. “You have not realised that our time is running out? Haven’t you heard of the Cass River Scheme? Well, for your information, it is being prepared by your own ministry and if the project goes through quickly we may never have a chance of opening the Railstone tomb, because Caswell Hall will be at the bottom of a reservoir. The odds are that Brownjohn will have been enthroned long before that, of course, but we are not out of the wood yet. In fact the trees are closing in on us. I would study the details of the Cass scheme, if I were you. To the best of my memory the reference contains the initials K.V.I.” There was a click and the line went dead.

Seven chaps called George in seven paragraphs from seven page seventeens from seven books distributed around my bookshelves. Why George? He just started turning up a lot.

Anita Loos: A Biography by Gary Carey; Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin; What I Tell You Three Times is False by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Samuel Holt; The Gift of the Gods by Raymond F. Jones from Things, edited by Ivan Howard; A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; The Thing Invisible from The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by W.H. Hodgson; Bury Him Darkly by John Blackburn.

Page Seventeen II: The Quickening

Hannah’s financial situation must have been desperate, but her sons were to remember more vividly than the privations her efforts to bring gaiety and small pleasures into their lives: the weekly comic, bloater breakfasts and an unforgettable day at Southend after Sydney found a purse containing seven guineas but no means of identifying its owner. She was, when well, a constantly amusing companion. She would sing and dance her old music hall numbers and act out plays to them. In his old age Chaplin still recalled the emotion aroused in him by her account of the Crucifixion and of Christ as the fount of love, pity and humanity.

There were no meals served in the house but the best of hors d’oeuvres and titbits, from beluga caviar to grandma’s cookies. The coffee was the best this side of Italy, the connoisseurs said. So were the drinks, plentiful and expensive, although the prices varied. I have often wondered since what ESP guided Madame Frieda’s pencil to guess the extremities of the freight. The cover charge was the same for everybody, for which you could have a cup of coffee and if any of the hostesses was bored and felt like talking to you, she did. No extra charge.

The lift opened and I stepped out into a small foyer done in a restful shade of matt grey with carpet to match. These Intelligence boys are getting so much dough nowadays they can even afford to employ pro decorators to do up their torture chambers. There was another guard, the ex-Eton and Oxford smoothie type this time, to be found wherever Government practices its more obvious lunacies, in another armoured-glass cage. I gave him my credentials and he picked up one of his several phones.

The next morning, when I awoke and looked out of the bow window of the big, old-fashioned bedroom, I saw under a grey sky a country that was all mustery. The long, lovely valley with the river winding in and out below, crossed in mid-vision by a medieval bridge of vaulted and buttressed stone, the clear presence of the rising ground beyond, and the woods that I had only seen in shadow the night before, seemed tinged with enchantment, and the soft breath of wind that sighed in at the opened pane was like no other wind. I looked across the valley, and beyond, hill followed on hill as wave on wave, and here a faint blue pillar of smoke rose on the morning air from the chimney of an ancient grey farmhouse, there was a rugged height crowned with dark firs, and in the distance I saw the white streak of a road that climbed and vanished into some unimagined country. But the boundary of all was a great wall of mountains, vast in the west, and ending like a fortress with a steep ascent and a domed tumulus clear against the sky.

Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power – mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself – to come from Above and aid them . . . on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above, Ubrem Sternenzelt, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes, beyond the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.

It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.

SATAN

Up there, my friend, there’s only One who creates. One who rules. One who does everything, is everything.

Seven passages from seven page seventeens from seven books found lying around the Shadowplayhouse.

Chaplin by David Robinson; Fragments: Portraits from the Inside by Andre de Toth; The Dolly Dolly Spy by Adam Diment; Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen, from The Novel of the Black Seal; Dies Irae by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny; Selected Writings by Edgar Allan Poe, quoted in the introduction by David Galloway; Milton’s Paradise Lost, Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind by John Collier.