Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  Now the roles are reversed and it’s Kelvin who daren’t leave Hari out of his sight for fear of what she will do. He hears the shattering of a vacuum flask and rushes to find her writhing in agony, encased in ice crystals after drinking liquid oxygen. In minutes the crackling ice has melted, the raw wounded mouth healed, and she has recovered. Kelvin tells Snow: ‘She did it out of despair.’

  Kelvin lapses into a feverish coma in which the cabin becomes confused with his parents’ dacha, populated by his mother and several replicas of Hari. When he recovers, Snow tells him that Hari begged Sartorius to use the annihilator, and she’s gone – ‘in a flash of light, a puff of air’. Snow says it’s time to return to Earth, and Kelvin agrees: ‘My mission is finished… little by little everything will return to normal.’

  Kelvin stands by the lake, now frozen, where we first met him. He walks back to the house and through the window watches his father preparing food. Water drips down onto the old man’s jacket and turns to steam. The old man is oblivious. We leave Kelvin staring in at the familiar objects in the room swathed in thick sheets of plastic. From a viewpoint high above the dacha the camera pulls away. A cloud of mist disperses and we see the lake and surrounding countryside as a tiny enclave marooned on an island in the vastness of the ocean that covers the planet Solaris.

  It’s almost impossible not to draw all kinds of meanings and metaphors, to impose any number of moral and religious interpretations upon this story of man’s contact with an alien intelligence. Indeed, Dr Snow offers one such theory: ‘We don’t want to conquer space at all. We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror. Man needs man!’ Or how about this. Because the human imagination conjured up the universe in the first place – according to quantum mechanics – any aliens out there have to come from within us. We’re all aliens in the head.

  SLEEPER

  (Director: Woody Allen; starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck, Mary Gregory - 1973)

  Michael Bishop

  Between my first look at Woody Allen’s Sleeper in 1973 and two additional viewings thirty-six years later, I fell into a nightmare encompassing, among other events, a spate of wars, revolutions, and terrorist acts, including September 11, 2001, and its continuing aftermath. This nightmare twisted my head free, as if with tongs, and substituted a greyer, less ‘aesthetically pleasing’ proxy.

  But when I revisited Sleeper in October 2009, I still laughed my ass off. I didn’t crow as loud as in 1973, but nowadays, I’ve found, it takes less oscillation to dislodge my derrière.

  Sleeper, you see, qualifies as both genuine science fiction and true-quill slapstick comedy – thanks to the fact that Allen and Marshall Brickman based their collaboration on the guffaw-filled 1899 dystopia of H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes, which Wells revised and reissued in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes.

  Allegedly, in a special critical edition of this novel, Leon Stover accuses Allen of acquiring rights to the book and then ‘wildly distorting it’ in his film.

  Well, Leon, no kidding?

  If a young Woody Allen had adapted King Lear, he would have done so from the vantage of the Fool, with a soundtrack of cowbells and calliopes.

  For Sleeper, though, he wrote a Dixieland score performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the New Orleans Funeral Ragtime Orchestra, with clarinet solos for Allen himself. He then choreographed its most antic scenes to the madcap rhythms of this music. Obviously, Leon, Woody wanted to suggest a Keystone Kops short in a Silent Era movie house, a ragtime piano putting silly syncopation to the onscreen mayhem.

  Even Herbert George would have laughed his ass off.

  Anyway, Sleeper honours its literary sources by borrowing a couple of their salient plot points. It also extrapolates current events, fads, suppositions, cultural artifacts, and mores two hundred years into the future, for Sleeper is bona fide sf as well as knockabout satire. Therefore, it makes its ostensible year, 2173, look like tomorrow, albeit a more attractive one than today’s futurists would most likely project.

  Perhaps to save money on sets, Allen shot much of Sleeper in Colorado and in or around futuristic-looking homes and buildings. (Architect Charles Deaton receives credit for designing the character Dr. Melik’s house.) The result is an aura of open-air serenity and calm peculiarly at odds with the cruel rigour with which the film’s falsely benevolent society plies its materialistic fascism.

  And Woody’s Wellsian borrowings?

  First, in When the Sleeper Wakes, the Victorian protagonist, Graham, falls into a two-hundred-year trance and awakes in a fortress-like London divided between patrician despots and oppressed proles.

  In the film, Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store and a part-time clarinetist, enters a hospital for gall-bladder repairs in 1973 and winds up in cryogenic stasis, clad head-to-toe in cheap tinfoil. (Only God, or dog, could possibly explain why.) Scientists in 2173 revive Miles. After a period of loopy recuperation, however, he must flee the security police because his benefactors are not only scientists but freedom-loving insurgents who have broken the law by resuscitating him.

  Second, in Wells’s novel, a dark-haired young woman, Helen Wotton, inspires Graham to throw in his lot with the oppressed. Theoretically, Graham owns at least half the world because his fortune has grown to monstrous proportions during his puzzling slumber. Practically, however, a despotic Council controls Graham’s financial resources, and a subtle tyrant named Ostrog heads the government.

  Meanwhile, back in the movie, a poet and greeting-card versifier, Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), loves her commodity-laden life, or thinks she does, and resists Miles’s efforts to recruit her to the insurgents. Unlike Graham, Miles does not awaken rich, even though, as he blurts out to his resuscitators, ‘I bought Polaroid at seven. It’s probably up millions by now.’

  Miles first enters Luna’s fancy home disguised as a robot and later kidnaps her to escape the robot repair shop where she’s sent him to have his head replaced with a more ‘aesthetically pleasing’ noggin. (This repair-shop scene shows Allen miming at a level of dread-driven pathos comparable to that of Chaplin at his funniest.) Then, Luna embraces rebellion just as the state, having caught Miles, reprograms him to accept the Orb- and/or Orgasmatron-mediated docility of its most loyal citizens.

  If you must ask, the Orb stimulates ecstatic drug highs, whereas the Orgasmatron simulates mind-blowing, pot-augmented sex. Miles likes the Orb but regards the upright Orgasmatron as an appliance built to render hands-on human sensuality obsolete and thus a horror even more unspeakable than brain scrambling.

  ‘My brain?’ Miles babbles: ‘My second favorite organ!’

  Like Helen in When the Sleeper Wakes, Luna – with lots of help – persuades her sleeper of the justice of insurgency. Then she and Miles foil the state’s efforts to clone its leader, a bomb victim, from his nose: the only bit of him to escape smithereenization in a deliberately unpublicised assassination blast.

  Having bickered and cooed through the end-game portion of their partnership, Miles and Luna wind up safe and alone, declaring their mutual love but haggling over the degree to which Miles – rather than stud-muffin rebel, Erno Windt – has influenced this upbeat outcome.

  When the Sleeper Wakes and its revision, The Sleeper Awakes, end more bleakly, with hero Graham either just about to die or found dead, by a shepherd, after a mutually fatal aerial dogfight with chief foe, Ostrog.

  Hence, as these interleaved synopses prove, only an academic could argue, sans tongue in cheek, that Sleeper ‘wildly distorts’ the vision of H. G. Wells. No, it cunningly distorts it for satiric purposes reflecting the high esteem in which Allen holds the father of modern English-language sci-fi. In fact, he celebrates Wells in Sleeper just as he does the immortal Russian novelists – viz., Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Bukowski – in his very next movie, Love and Death.

  Of course, in Sleeper, Allen also quasi-apotheosizes the great silent comedians: Buster Keaton (no relation to Diane), C
harlie Chaplin, and Harpo Marx, but not Harold Lloyd. Yes, Woody does wear specs as Miles Monroe (even in tinfoil deepfreeze and somewhat imperfect impersonation of a robot), but don’t cite Lloyd as an influence; Woody won’t have it.

  In a four-hour interview with film critic Richard Schickel, printed in its entirety in Woody Allen: A Life in Film (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), Allen admits that he had two ambitions for Sleeper that he failed to fulfill. Apparently, these alleged failures continue to niggle at, if not to haunt, him. First, he approached United Artists with a much more expansive, maybe even downright grandiose, concept, that of ‘a three-hour picture, with an intermission’.

  Its first half would take place in Manhattan in the 1970s and its latter half – after its contemporary hero stumbles into a cryogenic vat and wakes two hundred years later – would present a world in which ‘suddenly everything looks completely different. And this was a good idea. I just didn’t have the stamina to write so much… the will to carry it off’.

  Like Dr. Malik and Erno Windt, I beg to dissent. This was a lousy idea, and its practical effect would have been a shot of Novocain to the glutei, a babysitting bill to the maximus. At least 73% of attendees would have wound up watching two disparate films when they probably would have preferred to see only the first one, or vice versa. Those opting for the first movie over the second could have slipped out of the second as soon as they grokked what a turkey it was, but they still would have lost some of their length-inflated ticket costs and a spicy soupçon of self-respect.

  Had Allen been truly serious about this bizarre double bill, he could have waited a few years and tacked Sleeper onto Annie Hall or Manhattan, thereby wowing everybody wow-able by such ego-fueled hoo-hah. Kevin Costner would have bit, and maybe Orson Welles, who, rumour has it, was still alive back then. And Allen could have achieved this triumph simply by changing Miles Monroe’s name to Alvy Singer or Isaac Davis.

  So cheers for the timely depletion of Woody’s stamina and will.

  Allen’s second unrealised ambition was to shoot Sleeper without dialogue. He intended to justify this strategy as a sort of homage to Keaton (Buster) and Chaplain (Charlie), by having his hero awake in the future, ‘and in the future no one was allowed to speak… And so I could do a silent film, with a very good motivation [for silence] and could do all those silent gags’ [Schickel’s brackets].

  Schickel implies that folks would have missed all the jokes about cigarettes and deep fat being healthy for us – ‘precisely the opposite,’ says Dr. Aragon in the film, ‘of what we now know to be true’ – so I needn’t upbraid Allen for this wild-hair notion. In any case, he concedes the point by allowing that, yes, he usually writes and delivers such lines more amusingly than he dangles from a ladder or tries an arm-flapping getaway via, as Miles sneers, a ‘cheap Japanese flying [pack].’

  So is Sleeper as funny to me today as in 1973, when I was a mere twenty-eight? Schickel notes that ‘overall [Allen’s early comedies] make me feel restless, dissatisfied with their patchiness.’ He adds that most of us don’t revisit old movies, but ‘operate on memory,’ turning them into ‘nostalgically tinged hilarity. To reevaluate these movies now would be to reevaluate [ourselves]. Better to go on trusting memory.’

  Yes, I find some of the bits less than chuckle-worthy and assume that anyone born after 1973 must think Howard Cosell the spawn of a bad computer-animation program. Also, the references to McKuen (‘poet’) and Keane (painter of big-eyed waifs) must soar way over such innocents’ heads.

  Further, the beauty-pageant send-up, the ethnic kibitzing of the robot tailors (who have human counterparts in Part Three of Gulliver’s Travels and in Chapter IV of When the Sleeper Wakes), and the kitsch versions of Tennessee Williams’s characters Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski that Miles and Luna (rather than Luna and Miles) enact in the rebels’ hideaway – these scenes, in my latest viewings, induced yawns or incredulous cringes. I have changed, in more than my matinee-idol looks, over the past three-and-a-half-plus decades, and am now fully awake to the jejune nature of the Saturday-cartoon tastes of my teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and…

  Even so, many of the gags that Allen ties to Sleeper’s supple narrative armature, whether visual or verbal, retain their sparkle:

  Miles, modestly: ‘I’m not the heroic type. I was beaten up by Quakers.’

  Miles, asked if he’s ever taken a committed political stance: ‘For twenty-four hours once, I refused to eat grapes.’

  Miles, a fixed grin on his face, shuffling at speed through a servitor repair shop to avoid having his head removed.

  Miles later telling Luna that if she tries to escape him, he’ll give her, uh, ‘large and painful hickeys.’

  A future farm where a gargantuan chicken struts and waxy-looking bananas reach the size of fiberglass kayaks.

  A Macdonald’s with a signboard numerically touting sales of a gazillion-gazillion hamburgers.

  Miles and Luna eluding government medicos by flipping the blast-detached nose of Big Brother under a steamroller drum.

  And who can forget the mud-caked VW bug that they find in a cave while again on the lam from the security dolts? I primed myself for this bit, a nostalgic favourite, but still nearly missed the key turn prompting instantaneous engine noise.

  It happens quickly. Don’t blink.

  Meanwhile, I had not recalled that the VW’s bumper bears a sticker demanding ‘Register Commies, Not Guns,’ a slogan of the NRA, which Miles identifies as ‘a group that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot citizens. It was a public service.’ Allen must have figured that by 2173 the National Rifle Association would have gone the way of all flesh, or at least that of Green Stamps. He probably would not have believed that, thirty-six years on, it would still be warning members of imminent firearm confiscations and opposing gun-show background checks, and all other sensible gun-related laws, as violations of the United States Constitution.

  But real life is funny that way… just not as funny, or as satirically spot-on, as Sleeper at its best.

  WESTWORLD

  Director: Michael Crichton; starring: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Norman Bartold - 1973)

  Stephen Volk

  To paraphrase W.H. Auden (quoted as an epigraph on the first page of the screenplay for Alien), science fiction ‘plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes’ and disguises them, namely, as the monster and the rocket. Surely one should add a third icon to that short list of primal SF tropes – the robot. Or perhaps a robot is no more than an amalgam of the monster and the rocket: abnormality and technology fused in unnatural synthesis. And that synthesis is never more chilling than when the robot looks exactly like us.

  Way before The Stepford Wives (and way before Freud), Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay first identified ‘The Uncanny’ as a state in which we ‘doubt whether an apparently animate object is really alive, or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.’ He cited as an example in fiction our uncertainty whether a particular figure is human or automaton, as in Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann featuring the life-like doll Olimpia.

  We experience that same frisson of the ‘uncanny’ when we look at dolls, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and, certainly, Repliee Q2, the female android developed at Osaka University that can mimic blinking, breathing and human speech – giving the appearance not just of animation but of sentience that feels just worng (sic; more of which later).

  This is such a prevalent human reaction that Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 coined the term ‘Uncanny Valley’ to describe the effect that when facsimiles of humans look and act too much like humans, our natural response is revulsion. For that reason, I’m sure, Honda’s Asimo robot was designed to be fairly unlike a human in scale and without detailed human facial features. (Nevertheless, when I saw the dwarfish but charming fellow walking up steps in Edinburgh, I admit I felt – against my better judgement – a weird vacillation between thinking it was alive
and knowing it was a machine.)

  The brilliance of Westworld is that it’s all about that feeling. Like all the best horror films, as John Carpenter says, an internal emotion projected up there on the big screen. Made real.

  Funnily enough, before I saw the movie I read the screenplay: a little white paperback from Bantam with Yul Brynner, half his face circuitry, on the cover. (It was the first film script I’d ever read so, you could say, it has a lot to answer for. And the ‘Making Of’ preface the first gob-smacking take I’d read on the trials of Hollywood budget film-making. Art versus commerce. Story versus studio.)

  Michael Crichton, of course, was well known even then (long before ER and Jurassic Park), already the wunderkind qualified-doctor-become-creator of The Andromeda Strain (possibly the most downright believable SF to date), and The Terminal Man (again a riff on robots, with a man’s synapses controlled by technology that, surprise surprise, screws up big time). Back then I thought he was at the top of his game. Little did I know.

  I loved his work (including historical ‘what-ifs’ Eaters of the Dead and The Great Train Robbery) because the ideas were big and he did his homework: I believed every word. So I was inordinately excited at the prospect of seeing Westworld, his debut as writer-director. Not least because in its conceit he answered a question no science fiction writer had answered before.

  Which was: why would we bother to make human-looking robots, even if we could? Crichton’s answer: for entertainment. For pleasure.