The Evolutionary Pathway of Dr. Vector's Book Club

Evolutionary Pathways in Nature, by John C. Avise of UC Irvine, reads great on the crapper. The book is just under 300 pages long, and that's including a readable intro on phylogenetic character mapping (PCM), a glossary, references, and an index. The 200 pages of meat cover 67 examples of evolution, at about 3 pages per example. "Evolution of what?", you ask. Damn near everything. Magnetotaxis in bacteria. Bipedal hopping in kangaroos. Caterpillars that get ants to feed them their own larvae. Eusocial shrimp. Fish placentas. Cryptic elephant species. Poisonous birds. Parental care in land crabs. The origins of everything from HIV to Afrotheria.

Avise is a adroit writer. Three pages is not a lot of space in which to explain anything, but his descriptions of these biological mysteries and their elucidation by PCM are masterpieces of concision and tidiness. And he does not shrink from discussing the limitations and complications of the studies where they arise. Every example includes a tree with characters mapped on. I will keep this book close when I am writing my next paper, and hopefully turn out something a little more elegant.

If you're tired of seeing phylogenetic analyses that don't seem to tell us anything about, you know, critters and whatnot, or if you're tired of reading speculative wiffle with no phylogenetic grounding, or if you're just plain tired and can only muster five minutes of attention before you sack out at the end of the day, this is the book for you. Three pages is doable, by anybody, under just about any circumstances. If you can take more, go for it. I like the book as an evolutionary analogue of the 1001 Nights, with Avise standing in for Scheherazade, but there is more here than a big pile of short reads. Reading the stories--and they are stories, and therein lies much of their charm--is like watching the stars come out at night. The first one is a little gem, and so is the second, and third, and the fourth. But soon they add up to something that is vast, awesome, and humbling.

But also exhilarating. Like the night sky, the tree of life has the complementary virtues of being knowable--thus inviting exploration--and inexhaustible, so that we need not fear running out of marvels to wonder at. (Note that I am speaking here of the entire tree of life, not just the extant tips, which are all too exhaustible.)

The book's most glaring fault is that, like most Cambridge titles, it is reedonkulously expensive. Sixty-nine smackers for a small, slim paperback--almost half again as much as you'd pay for a new hardback copy of Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which is more than five times as long. The best defense I can offer is that Avise's writing is so engaging and expansive that the book seems much longer, and Gould is so baroquely verbose that when you read SET you'll long for death before the end (trust me, I read it twice).

So, Evolutionary Pathways is a little steep. That's what birthdays and holidays are for. Put it on your wishlist, and when it comes in, park it on your bedside table or in the bathroom magazine rack. It's chicken soup for the evolutionist's soul.

Dr Vector reviews The Children of Hurin

As promised.

The Backstory

The TV show The X-Files had two kinds of episodes: "monster of the week" episodes, in which Mulder and Scully chased lake monsters, shapeshifters, and inbreeders, and "mytharc" episodes, which advanced the overarching plot concerning the big government conspiracy and the alien invasion. The X-Files movie was a two-hour mytharc episode.

Some fans, including some of my friends, loved the mytharc episodes so much that they were hardly interested in the monster of the week (henceforth MoW) episodes. Some people liked both kinds of episodes; the MoW episodes supplied more creepy thrills, and the mytharc episodes kept the whole thing grounded and made it feel like you were watching a grand interconnected story. And some people, like me, loved the MoW episodes so much that they could hardly stand the mytharc episodes, which advanced the megaplot only incrementally and portended much more than they delivered.

I bring all this up because it seems like a good lens for thinking about Tolkien, and it's relevant to my titular purpose. Many people like the fact that Middle-Earth is a sub-creation with a relatively complete history up to the end of the Third Age, with languages and poetry and all that jazz. Some people love all that backstory more than the "frontstory" of LOTR (how many, I wouldn't like to guess, but some). A lot of people, like me, like the frontstory and the backstory; the former provides the cheap thrills (if Tolkien can be said to offer such) and the latter provides the texture of reality--even if our eyes occasionally glaze over during the poetry recitations and we may not immediately recall who is Earendil and who is Elendil.

And evidently there are orc-like hordes of Tolkien "fans" who like all the bits with swords and battles and don't give a rat's ass about the Noldor and the Sindar, Morgoth, Beren and Luthien, Numenor, or any of that crap. I deduce this fact from the massive and continued commercial success of Terry Brooks and his successors.

Also, the mythology concentration increases in the main Middle-Earth books over time (their publication order is the same order in which most readers encounter them: The Hobbit, LOTR, The Silmarillion). The Hobbit is a children's story and it is fairly de-mythologized, although readers who revisit it after LOTR and The Silmarillion will find more than they did before. LOTR is...hard to describe both succinctly and accurately*, but it includes a heroic tale and some pretty good doses of mythology, enough to make some people roll their eyes. If The Hobbit is Kool-Aid and LOTR is a really good beer, The Silmarillion is the liquor of your choice, served warm and straight. It's pretty much pure mythology. It can be rewarding, but it's not necessarily fun.

* A lot of Tolkien fans have either forgotten or never acknowledged that the 3-books-in-1 are not monolithic. The opening chapters of Fellowship are very close to The Hobbit in tone, and from there the formality of the prose increases in a fairly linear fashion, so that by the end of Return you could be reading one of the jauntier sections of the Bible.

The Meat

I am willing to bet that for most readers, by far the most important question about The Children of Hurin is "What brand of Tolkien am I getting here?" Is this a Hobbit-ish lark, an LOTR-esque heroic tale, or more homework from The Silmarillion?

So let's get to it: TCOH is not a lark, nor is it homework. It's a heroic tale, and a page-turner. But it is a bit formal--like the later sections of The Return of the King--and it is a bit brisk--like The Silmarillion. In LOTR the reader follows the day-to-day movements of the characters and has a ringside seat for the battles. Contrary to some reports, most of TCOH takes place at this intimate level. But it is interspersed with summarizing passages that cover long stretches of time: "In this way, before the summer had passed, the following of Turin had swelled to a great force, and the power of Angband was thrown back."

A lot of the book consists of simple dialogues between pairs of characters. Rilstone made the point that if you could keep the battles offstage LOTR could be done as a costume drama. The same is true of TCOH. If you're dying to read about the pattern of blood-splatter as the hero's sword takes off the head of each individual orc, get thee hence. But if you like Tolkien's prose, his ideas, his world, then I'm happy to report that TCOH is the good stuff.

And you may be surprised to remember, or discover for the first time, how much enjoyment you can get from good dialogue between characters who really have something to discuss. Many of the dialogues end when one character says something so perfect that there is no point in continuing the scene. There are even a couple of jokes. Both turn on something that one character has just said to another, and neither are what you'd call knee-slappers, but I chuckled out loud at both of them.

One thing you won't find in TCOH are long descriptive passages about the vegetation. The landscape is sketched in swiftly and deftly, so that you can always picture what is going on, but there is none of the "you are there" versimilitude/boring crap that occasionally irks even dedicated LOTR readers (including me).

Then there's the question of backstory. TCOH is part of the backstory of LOTR, but it has a big pile of backstory of its own, coming as it does at the end of the multi-century Siege of Angband by the combined power of the Eldar and the Edain. I've been through The Silmarillion, and more importantly I have The Atlas of Middle-Earth handy. The latter book has a separate map for every battle or migration in the whole history of Middle-Earth along with a prose summary of each, which makes it about a million times more accessible than The Silmarillion. (I've said this before, but damn, it bears repeating. If you're curious about the Elder Days of Middle-Earth but put off by the boring-parts-of-the-Bible prose of The Silmarillion, pick up the Atlas. It's like Cliff Notes plus pictures.)

So I already knew about the Dagor Bragolach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad (battles), and about Nargothrond, Menegroth, and Gondolin (hidden Elven kingdoms), although I couldn't have located them on a map. The general outline of the backstory (of TCOH) was familiar to me, but not the details. But it made little difference. TCOH has an excellent introduction by Christopher Tolkien that sets the geographical and historical stage, a nice map at the end of the book that folds out so that you can refer to it while you read, and a glossary of people, places, things, and events. I kept the map out most of the time and I referred to the glossary about half a dozen times. That's it.

The Verdict

So what is the total effect of the book? The story is compelling and without any big expositional lumps or descriptive logorrhea the plot moves swiftly along. The novel starts on page 33 and ends on page 259; there is the introduction before and appendices, genealogies, the glossary, and the map after. You'll probably refer to the map a lot and to the other supporting material once in a while, but is there a Tolkien book for which that is not the case? In my view it just comes with the territory. In the end, for me, this read like a "just the good bits" version of some larger, more complete, but quite possibly more boring tale. With the diss. happily out of the way I devoured it in two days; if I'd been well-rested and had a whole day off, I probably would have read it in one sitting.

Dr. Vector's Prescription

If you love The Silmarillion, read this. You may appreciate the 'close-up' window into life in the First Age.

If you love both the frontstory and the backstory in LOTR, read this. It's right up your alley.

If you love the frontstory in LOTR and tolerate the backstory, read this. It's leaner and meaner than LOTR and it won't bore you, and after you've read it some of the backstory to LOTR will actually make sense.

If you love all the battles and sword-swinging bits in LOTR and can't stand any of the "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" crap, don't bother. Robert Jordan and his ilk are defecating new fantasy series at a mind-boggling rate, and this short, brisk, semi-formal but quite moving book would be entirely wasted on your poop head.

...

Oh, hell, you morons ought to read it, too. Maybe you'll get a taste for some real literature and Terry Goodkind can go back to writing cereal-box copy.

The Unholy Reanimation of Dr Vector's Book Club

I wasn't going to blog about this book. But it's stuck in my head like a thorn.

In the first edition of Dr Vector's Book Club I recommended Dan Abnett's Fell Cargo, which features pirates fighting zombies. That recommendation stands; if anything, it's stronger now. If you want to give Abnett a try but don't want to blow a wad of cash on a hardback or an omnibus, get that book.

On the strength of Fell Cargo, I've been not-so-patiently waiting for The Founding, an omnibus which collects Abnett's first three Gaunt's Ghosts novels. The Founding was finally published in February, and recent airline travel has given me time to devour it, and to press further into Abnett's oeuvre.

I was going to write about The Founding. It's good military SF; if you've burned through David Drake's work and you're looking for something else to scratch the itch, you could do a lot worse. But it's merely good.

Eisenhorn is great.

Like many of Abnett's books, Eisenhorn is set in the Warhammer 40K universe. That doesn't matter, in that no prior knowledge of the universe is necessary to enjoy the books. And it matters a lot, in that the WH40K universe is a handy setting for exploring certain questions.

And Abnett is angling for very big questions. Is it okay to use evil to fight evil? How much? Should dangerous knowledge be locked away or destroyed? What about dangerous people? Is a bad person ever beyond saving?

Would you voluntarily sacrifice one innocent life to save others? Who? When? How many?

In the WH40K universe demons are real, heresy is contagious, and the church and the state are one. Gregor Eisenhorn is an Inquisitor, tasked with uprooting and destroying the major threats to human civilization: aliens, mutants, and heretics (the three branches of the Inquisition, and the titles of the individual novels, are Xenos, Malleus, and Hereticus). Thanks to advanced technology, high caste humans of the far future have lifespans measured in centuries. The Eisenhorn trilogy spans something like 300 years, during which time Eisenhorn builds up a supporting organization, tackles ever more dangerous adversaries, and increases his own knowledge and power. Whereas most WH40K novels deal with soldiers and combat, the Eisenhorn books are more like mystery thrillers. Well, science fantasy mystery thrillers punctuated by frequent firefights, anyway.

Actually, what comes to mind when I think about Eisenhorn are two comments that I read about Steve Erikson's Malazan books. First, that they are "epic pulp". That's just about perfect for Eisenhorn. They are epic, and they are pulpy. And yet Abnett is just using pulp trappings to tell a much more subtle and interesting story.

Second, that the characters are too powerful and there are too many battles. That made me laugh when I saw it written about the Malazan books; no criticism could make me want to read a book more. However, I found the Malazan books impenetrable, mainly because of the Star Trek Effect (see below). Abnett's books are a lot more accessible, and by accessible I mean "easy to follow" and not "poorly written". By the end of the trilogy some of the characters are outrageously powerful, but none of it feels forced or unearned because you've followed the character's development all along and seen the specific choices and events that shaped their fates.


The book is not perfect. My main gripe deals with what for want of a better term I call in-story logistics. What are the rules by which the universe operates, where does everyone stand, and how do you know? These are questions that tend to be easier to answer in science fiction than in fantasy. A plasma torch either does or does not have the power to cut the head off a combat cyborg. If it does not, I don't want to read three more chapters and find that the same plasma torch can now cut through the hull of a multi-kilometer space dreadnought. That kind of thing makes it impossible for me to suspend disbelief, and I think that factor above all is what makes most genre fantasy unpalatable to me. A wizard who can levitate his residence just because it pleases him should not be seriously threatened by a barbarian with an axe. I call it the Star Trek Effect: if you can beam onto the Borg cube at all, don't screw around sending Worf and Data. Send over some antimatter and save the Federation, even if means ending the episode 38 minutes early.

Warhammer 40K is a science fantasy universe. In other words, spaceships plus magic (like Star Wars). And that may be part of the problem. I have some idea of how a battalion of Leman Russ tanks would fare against a battle titan, but the fantasy elements are less well constrained. In the Eisenhorn trilogy we see a lot of examples of what daemons can do when they're pissed, but there's really no frame of reference for those events. What are the limits of a daemon's speed and power? Which laws of time and space can they violate, and which can they not? What would ever convince a human agent that he could engage in combat with a daemon and succeed? Under what conditions is success possible?

To be fair, almost nobody gets this right. Darth Vader is supposedly less agile than Anakin Skywalker because he's more machine now than man, twisted and evil, but General Grievous is even more mechanical and he's a freakin' acrobat. The Nazgul are supposedly in thrall to the One Ring but they are able to attack Frodo while he's wearing it (shouldn't they be, like, worshiping him?). No, no, don't flame me, I'm just sayin': fantasy is a tough genre. Magic has to have rules to be believable, but it has to be at least somewhat miraculous or it ceases to be magical.

In Abnett's defense, his characters always seemed to know the score even if I didn't. Their words and actions are all happily consistent, and Eisenhorn is still one of the best (science) fantasy books I've read.

Some reviewers knock Abnett for a couple of things that turn up in a lot of his books: he has no compunctions about killing major characters, and his endings tend to be a bit abrupt. The first one is not really even a complaint in my book; it's more like a compliment for being able to write characters that we care about and still being tough enough to tell the necessary story. It's also true that Abnett's books come to quick ends; you can't help noticing that there are only 15 pages left when you're still gearing up for the final confrontation. On the other hand, this ain't Return of the King. You're not going to cry at the end and neither is Samwise Gamgee, so there's no reason to drag it out for half a dozen endings. I know it's cliche, but really, seriously, the Eisenhorn trilogy is about the journey, not the destination. It's not what Eisenhorn does to the bad guys that's of primary interest; it's what he does to himself and his loved ones along the way.

Go read the durned book.

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The second image above is Daryl Mandryk's winning entry from the CGSociety MachineFlesh contest. It's not related to Eisenhorn, but it could serve as an illustration for a scene in the book.

Dr. Vector's Book Club

If you're looking for a good read, you could do worse than to pick up Dan Abnett's Fell Cargo.

Now, this definitely counts as a guilty pleasure. First, you'll find it in Fantasy and Sci-Fi, genres whose past, present, and likely future are rooted in escapist trash, in which even the immortal classics--Foundation, Dune, The Lord of the Rings--are, in the eyes of the Great Books Discussion Group, escapist trash. Second, it's at the tail end of the rows, past the authors whose last name begins with Z, in the section labeled "Fantasy Series". Below the fleets of Star Wars and Star Trek books you come to the gutter dregs: gaming tie-ins. Dungeons & Dragons novels flaunt their lurid covers, sickly yet appealing, like overripe fruit. Past them, past the Magic: The Gathering books, the Shadowrun books, and even the Warcraft books, at the very end of the very end of F/SF, you'll find the Warhammer books. These aren't even the high-brow tie-ins, based on RPGs or video games. Naw, Warhammer is a tabletop wargame, played with tiny painted miniatures by unwashed pimply neckbeards.

(I'm kidding, of course. Some of the Warhammer geeks can't grow neckbeards.)

My point is, even in the banana republic of F/SF, even in the slum of fantasy series, even in the ghetto of gaming tie-ins, this book is something of a pariah. What would prompt me, a young man with prospects, to pick it up in the first place?

Well, here's the dirty secret about gaming tie-ins: some of them rock. Other aspiring F/SF authors are out plumbing the universe and questing for Hugos, hoping to write the next Neuromancer, trying to predict how this month's Scientific American cover story will spin out in a century or ten. Meanwhile, the tie-in authors have a much simpler mandate: write something awesome. Their books tend to be pulpy and action-packed, the novelistic equivalent of something deep-fried and smothered in gravy.

I can hear you sneering out there, you Great Books wankers. Fess up, now: you may savor the delicate flavor of fresh toro or the fruity notes of a fine merlot, but sometimes at the end of the day you just want a cold beer and some cheese fries, doncha?

I was in Hasting's in Enid, Oklahoma, and they had the gaming tie-ins filed by author. That is, scattered among the respectable novels, m'lud. The cover art on this one caught my eye:


I didn't end up buying it, but I did look it over closely enough to pick out some serious praise for Dan Abnett. Cover blurbs are like letters of recommendation: generic plaudits count for a lot less than specific, detailed compliments. The things people were saying about Dan Abnett are not the kinds of things you typically hear said of most F/SF authors, let alone authors of gaming tie-ins.

Then a couple of days later I was in a Barnes & Noble and I found Abnett's latest in the new hardback section. I was intrigued. Few authors from tie-in world graduate from paperback to hardback. I picked it up and found an interesting synopsis and a lot more serious, specific praise. Most of it had to do with things like character development and wrenching emotion--not the regular tie-in author's stock in trade.

I started to think that maybe I should give this Dan Abnett a try. So I wandered back to the back of the back of F/SF and checked out some paperbacks. I picked up Fell Cargo because of its obviously piratical title. I gotta say, this book has maybe the best back cover hook of all time:

Long believed dead, pirate Captain Luka Silvaro returns to reclaim his ship and embark on a deadly new mission. But the high seas are now more dangerous than ever, and the captain and his scurvy crew of rogues must face pirates, curses, sea monsters and even worse foes. Can Silvaro and his allies track down the dread Butcher Ship and defeat her gruesome undead crew before they too are turned into mindless zombies?

Who could turn that down?

Well, me, for one. I couldn't commit. But I spent the next few days feeling like a pussy. Pirates versus zombies? Come on!

So I got the book. Devoured it in two days. It has a density of incident that would make Edgar Rice Burroughs blush. In 250 pages, there are four major naval engagements, each involving at least three ships and each ending in a bloody boarding action. There is a treasure map, a stowaway, a voodoo ritual, a prophetic dream, chum in the water, kidnapping, a witch, a sea serpent, a cursed mummy, and a case of hidden identity revealed at the dramatically appropriate moment. Duels of honor decided with swords, drugged wine, sharks, walking the plank, abandoned death ships, and vampire feedings (I know, wtf?) each appear more than once.

Oh, and zombies. Fighting frikkin' pirates.

Now, here's the crucial part: I read the whole book without gagging once. Years of grading student termpapers have given me an unusually low tolerance for bad writing. I suffered through Robert Jordan's Eye of the World, and Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule, but I'll go no further. I don't care what happens in the second book (or the twelfth, in Jordan's case), if I have to slog through prose that bad to find out. I didn't get more than a third of the way through Terry Brooks's Sword of Shannara before I realized that my leisure time was in the uneducated hands of a master shitsmith. As Orson Scott Card once wrote, you don't have to eat the whole turd to know that it's not an eclaire.

But back to task: Dan Abnett's writing is, er, good. That is, at no point did I wince or groan, and twice I was so moved that I intended to post short excerpts here for your edification. But, clod that I am, I forced the book on my brother today and those excerpts will have to wait.

In conclusion, you can go to bed with Fell Cargo and not feel guilty in the morning. I'm going to go read a ton more of Abnett's books, and you should, too.



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION, MOSTLY SPOILER FREE

1. There is one plot hole in the book. What is it?

2. What character in the Star Wars movies does Sesto most remind you of?

3. From the information provided in the book, what is the most exclusive clade of real-world animals (living or extinct) to which you can confidently assign the sea monster?

4. Do you think Roque pussed out at the end? Why or why not?

5. If you owned the Bite of Daagon, would you keep it in a golden chest or wear it around your neck on a chain?

6. Who is the shittiest writer, Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind?



ANSWERS (SPOILERIFIC)

1. How in the hell did Jeremiah Tusk find the Butcher Ship? There is no explanation for why the Lightning Tree sails right to the spot that only Luka and his compatriots know of. Now, you may argue that Tusk was following the storm or had some magical gizmo to show him the way, but the fact is that this miraculous event is never explained in the book. But with all the shit in this book, I can forgive one plot hole, especially in the service of a climactic battle as kickass as that.

2. At first you are probably thinking Lando, cuz he's smooth, or Leia, cuz he's royalty. But in fact it's Han. Just as Han makes the journey from piratehood to respectability out of his love for Leia, Sesto journeys from respectability to piratehood out of devotion to Luka. If you answered Padme, cuz Sesto traveled incognito, you are free to drown yourself in the toilet. I meant the real Star Wars movies, you sniveling turd.

3. You are probably tempted to say Thalattosuchia, but that's overreaching. The book says the animal has the form of a crocodile but with flippers rather than clawed limbs. Seagoing crocs have evolved enough times that Crocodyliformes is probably the best you can do.

4. Yes. He should have used his new vampire powers to kick zombie ass. Instead he pulled a big ole Lando (Cloud City Lando, not Battle of Endor Lando).

5. Chain around the neck. Duh.

6. The answer is Terry Brooks. Although I admit that was a bit of a trick question. By using "shittiest" instead of "shittier", I was implicitly asking who is the shittiest writer in the world, not just who is the shittier out of Jordan and Goodkind (FWIW, I don't think the latter question has a defensible answer).

Ruminations on The Fountain (spoilerific)

If you haven't seen the movie, don't read this post. I'm serious. Go see the movie first. Love it or hate it, you owe it to yourself to go into the theater uncontaminated.

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I don't think that it is impossible for an intelligent, reasonable person to dislike this movie. That's not some kind of lame "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion" bullshit either. I've never liked that expression, or agreed with it. If it means everyone can think what they want to, sure, that's obvious. Until we have mind control (beyond TV and Nike ads, I mean), everyone will anyway. If it means everyone is free to voice their indefensible views in public without being upbraded for being a moron, then no, I strenuously disagree. But anyway, I don't expect everyone to like this movie. Not everyone likes chocolate or pizza, either.

(Of course, you like or dislike foods based on taste, not reason. I've never met anyone who had a well-reasoned dislike of chocolate; you like it or not on the basis of incrutable preferences that are not produced by or subject to logic. I think most people's taste in music and movies works the same way, most of the time. It's probably possible to have a well-reasoned dislike of polka or Meg Ryan movies, but I think that most people dislike them simply because they're yucky.)

All that said, I do think the movie functions as an IQ test for critics. I have read one or two negative reviews by people who paid attention and understood what was going on and still found that the movie was not to their tastes. That's cool. That's expected. But I've read many more reviews that betray a breathtaking amount of intellectual laziness or basic stupidity. If you're a professional movie critic and your whole case for not liking the movie is that it doesn't fit neatly into a recognized genre, you need to hang up your spurs and go shovel out calf sheds for a while. Thomas says, "Death is a disease" and Izzi says, "Death is the road to awe." On that basis, one critic complained that the movie is inconsistent. Evidently this lackwit has been weaned on so much cinematic pap that he can't deal with a movie in which characters express contradictory points of view. And anyway, isn't the point of the movie that Thomas--"My conquistador. Always conquering."--has to come to terms with death as a necessary, even beautiful, part of life? I'm not saying that's an easy message to hear, or that you have to agree with it right away. But I don't see how you can fail to at least understand it as a meaningful proposition. And if you are never able to agree with it, you will end up like Tom Creo, alone in his spaceship after 500 years of denial.

Oh, holy shit. The spaceship. One common thread among almost all of the negative reviews is that people can't figure out that the bubble is a spaceship. It's a work of artifice, moving purposefully through space. What's not clear about that? So it's got a forcefield for a hull and no obvious controls. It's weird, but its identity is not murky at all. The future story arc would be severely compromised if the tree was growing in the cargo hold of the Millennium Falcon.

"...instead of going and doing the same old thing of putting trucks in space--which is what people have done … Every rocket ship is just a really souped up, pimped up car in space. You know, hey, let’s get a spherical ship. Why not?"

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I just saw the movie for the second time, and I'm glad I did. I was a little worried about whether I would still be blown away, or if it would seem obvious or draggy the second time around. It didn't. In fact, it was even more moving the second time because I wasn't trying to solve the movie so I could concentrate on the emotional storylines and the connections between stories. I missed a lot the first time.

I am very, very glad that the stories in all three times are presented on screen as being equally real. A lesser director might have presented one or more of the stories as being obviously metafictional, a fictional story within the story, and that would have ruined the movie. Is Tomas just a character in Izzi's book? Is he an aspect of Tom's soul? Is he a real person fighting real battles? The genius of the movie is that it doesn't force you to choose one interpretation and eliminate the others; the best you get from the movie are hints. The same applies to Tom in his spaceship.

This brings up something odd about suspension of disbelief.

When we were walking out of the theater after seeing The Usual Suspects for the first time, one of my friends complained that the whole story was made up by Keyser Soze. He felt cheated because the story he'd seen on screen wasn't real. At first, this struck me as an odd complaint. Evidently it is okay to go watch a movie and know that what you are seeing on screen is an elaborate fiction, because you are able to suspend disbelief and treat the fiction as real. But if at the end of the movie you find out that the the story is fictional even to the characters in the movie, that's somehow bad. Why? You knew the story was fiction in the first place. Who cares what layer of fiction it is, as long as you enjoyed the story?

But now I think, it is bad to have a story revealed to be a metafiction. Well, not bad necessarily, but I can see why people don't like it. Because it brings your suspension of disbelief to a grinding halt. It's like being slapped in the face with your gullibility. And it's a kind of theft. You go to the theater, you invest in a storyline, and then you find out that the story you invested in isn't even a real fake story, it's a fake fake story. The filmmaker may be doing that to you intentionally, to get you to confront the illogic of your own attitudes toward stories. But I still think it's kind of a punk move. Irreverent, at least. Because it seems to imply that we should be suspicious of stories, that we should be careful not to invest in them. And I think that's a lousy message.

At this point Richard Dawkins appeared to me in a fiery vision and accused me of not wanting to unravel the rainbow. I said, "I don't believe in you. I don't believe in you," and *POOF* he disappeared.

Anyway, I thought it was an odd complaint about The Usual Suspects coming from this (ex)friend in particular, because he could not go see a movie without spending half an hour afterwards pointing out all the ways that it was unrealistic. He even did this for movies he purported to like. What an insufferable buttmunch!

Getting back to The Fountain, the reason that not presenting any of the storylines as fake fake is genius is because it allows you to invest in all of them, and be affected by them. If you were told up front that Tomas is just a metafictional character, why would you care what happens to him? You don't even find out that he might be a character until about a third of the way through the movie. By that point, you're already hooked. And even when the framing of the story makes it seem that he probably is a metafictional character, it's easy to forget. Genius.

Well, there are tons more things to write about, but for now my time is up. See you again soon.

The Fountain: no spoilers

To his credit, Mr. Aronofsky does not explain too much, and “The Fountain” leaves a tantalizing sense of puzzlement in its wake. Parsing its logic and arguing about its premises will be among the main activities of the small, devoted cult of admirers that is likely to gather around this movie, protecting it from the derision of the uninitiated.

I am a devoted admirer, but I don't want to protect "The Fountain" from the derision of the uninitiated. Although some movie critics don't seem to have tried very hard to understand it. It's like when The Matrix came out and some critics talked about the action taking place in various dimensions. Sorry, morons. If you can't grasp the concept that the Matrix is a program, not an alternate dimension, then you're too culturally ignorant to be paid to critique movies.

I didn't really want to talk to anyone afterwards, either. I just wanted some time to take it in....If you expect to have this completely spoon-fed to you, you may leave the theater disappointed....If someone dismisses this film with a cursory "weird," my guess is they weren't even trying to pay attention.

Similarly, some critics can't seem to get anything out of The Fountain because no one has pre-chewed it and regurgitated it for them. Trying and not liking it is fine; it's the people who are paid to try but clearly didn't that piss me off. And you know, just as I was composing that sentence, I realized that there is a great deal of chewing and regurgitation in movie criticism. A movie like The Matrix will come out and be critically reviled because many critics are just too damn dumb to get it. Then later it gets put on "Best of" lists and glowingly eulogized by the same people who once damned it. Either they finally found someone with some cerebral activity to explain it to them, or they sensed the zeitgeist and decided to play along whether they really got it or not.

There you have it: "The Fountain," a film that defies description, summation, expectation or any other -tion. Exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad, it is also -- no way around this -- truly strange. However strange you think it is, it's stranger....This is one outlandish film, and many viewers will hate it. Hate. It. ... It's nevertheless a transcendent work of art, a vision of undying love that finds hope in grief, epiphany in death and life in the loss of Eden.

I won't go into details now, because I can't rebut some of the more obvious lunacy surrounding the movie without saying something about what really is going on. Of course you see parts of this movie and think, "What the fuck?" It's that kind of movie. The pleasure is in figuring it out. I don't think the movie is endlessly deep, but there's plenty there to ponder.

Imagine the last 10 minutes of “2001: A Space Odyssey” stretched to feature length. But I can’t stop thinking about it, a good indication that this beautiful, frustrating film is tapping into something I can’t put my finger on.

But anyway, to return to the beginning and to my main point: I don't want to protect "The Fountain" from criticism (of the informed, non-stupid variety, anyway). What I want is someone to talk about the movie with. My head has been resonating from it for almost a week now. I've done plenty of taking it in. Now I need to do some letting out.

It's not the best movie of the year like I'd hoped, but it's certainly the best post-movie discussion of the year.

See, I want a piece of that. If you've got some to spare, gimme a taste.

My new favorite quote about a movie:
Director Darren Aronofsky recently made an appearance at an L.A. press screening and confessed it was best “just to let [The Fountain] do you.”