Capstone Week 5: Romancing the Alien, Even Though It's Mostly For Your Own Benefit

I’ve talked with Jason and explained the general plot of Blindsight to him, and now I’m trying to decide whether this story deserves to be a feature-length film or a miniseries of short television/web episodes. Working in television might be a little less glamorous than film, but there’s something attractive to me about creating something for it. Maybe it’s that I don’t watch very much of it any more, and I’d like to contribute something I’d consider good in the hopes of improving it. Or maybe I just want to pay tribute to the SciFi originals I used to DVR and watch over Legos as a kid.

Beyond that, my research has been going slowly, and I’m hoping to make some hard progress in the next week. I have received my copy of Screening Space, though. There’s a section in it on aliens, and the failure of SF in many media to portray them well, which I wholeheartedly agree with. They blame this on “anthropormophic reduction” (94), the practice by which completely exotic civilizations are crushed under the weight of the writer’s inability to make them sufficiently unlike-us. They also quote film critic Raymond Durgnat a page earlier, who summed up the problem perfectly with “‘It’s hard enough to understand certain assumptions of the Samoans, the Balinese or the Americans, and all but impossible to empathize into the perceptions and drives of, say, a boa constrictor. How much more difficult then to identify with the notions of, say, the immortal twelve-sensed telepathic polymorphoids whose natural habitat is the ammonia clouds of Galaxy X7?’”

It’s one of the most difficult things to do well in science fiction, to the point that very few writers really bother with it and the academic consensus has often decided that the genre’s just us writing about ourselves in silly googly-eyed costumes. But that’s not what it’s supposed to be, and it isn’t impossible to do correctly, and I know that it isn’t.

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, humanity makes first contact with “the Wunch”, a set of third-rate subroutines in a greater galactic router-system who steal and brutalize the forms of the unsuspecting as the nasty monsters just outside the playground, only to overcome them easily and start dealing with runaway alien economic systems. In the short story “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” we see romance and tragedy from the viewpoint of an alien insect with an arachnid mating cycle, and in the more ambitious modern offering “Three Worlds Collide” humanity discovers a society where eating babies is the ultimate moral imperative, for completely intelligible evolved reasons, and then has themselves interrogated by a race which has eliminated all pain and suffering from themselves. And in Blindsight...

Blindsight is named after a condition in certain blind people, those who can’t see because of damage to the brain and not to the eyes, where they can still identify things in moments of danger. If you throw a baseball at one of them, for instance, they’ll catch it without a problem, but they won’t be able to explain how they did it and they’ll continue to insist on not being able to see anything. The brain continues to be a mysterious object, and in Watts’ novel this is one of the core themes; all of the main characters are damaged or split up in some way, their consciousnesses stretched and their minds ravaged in the name of higher learning or personal protection. The aliens themselves don’t seem to be really alive, and it’s revealed in the climax that they aren’t conscious at all. They’re so good at what they do because they don’t have any pesky self-reflection soaking up their neurons, and that’s what makes them so dangerous as a spacefaring race. While we become great at things by training them until we do them without thinking, they can do them that well automatically.

That’s the ultimate horror in this story’s universe, that we aren’t alone in the sense that there are no other creatures in the universe, but just in the sense that there’s never going to be anybody to talk to, anyone remotely comprehensible to us. Humanity is a biological glitch in a universe dominated by much stronger, fitter, survivable species with far fewer qualms about cogito ergo sum.

I just need to figure out how to express that visually, and not by sitting the audience members down and ranting to them about it individually.

Work Cited

Sobchack, V. C. (1987). Screening space: the American science fiction film. Ungar Publishing.

Capstone Week 4: A Blindsided Blindsighted NoSourGrapes Denouement

Not a very productive week, overall. My ILL requests arrived, and I was going to pick them up on Saturday, but I had work for exactly as long as the library was open, and I couldn’t get someone else to pick them up for me since they’d have to show the helpdesk my ID. (It doesn’t help that they’ve doubled my hours.) Having learned that the Sunday hours are a lot laxer than I remembered, I’ve received two of them now, How to adapt anything into a screenplay and Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes.

Without any correspondence from Doctorow, and knowing most of his work is under a NoDerivatives license anyway, I decided I needed to find something else to make into a script. Unfortunately, almost everything in the public domain worth adapting has already been done, and a lot of the people who should reasonably be copyright-free (like Lovecraft) still have tenuous claimants despite all of the adaptations. Some authors like Olaf Stapledon seem to be in the public domain in their countries, but not here (which is terrible because a film of Last and First Men sounds like the best cinematic idea of the year), and for others no one can really tell and people seem to be using other metrics besides actual copyright law. It’s a horrible mess.

What surprised me, while I was doing all of this frantic running around, is that Creative Commons isn’t actually much better than copyright. It’s in the blood of the major to champion systems like CC, and I used to think that it was naturally going to be the light at the end of the tunnel for copyright trouble, but… Well, nearly every licensed work I could find worth working with was under a “NoDerivatives” license that barred any actual creative usage. Admittedly coming from someone who likes derivative fiction as much as any other kind, if not slightly more, this is childish and misses the entire reason people fight copyright. We didn’t want Tarzan of the Apes copyright-free so we could read it on our iPads without paying, we wanted it so we could make movies about Tarzan! Saying people can distribute it however they like but must not make anything in, of, or around it is an attempt to get famous and build fandom without accepting the consequences of accomplishing either of those things.

Besides, saying that it’s fine for people to share your work is a nicety at this point, given there’s no actual way to make people pay if they’re monomaniacally devoted to copying that floppy. If CC were the dominant means of copyright control and not an idealistic underdog struggling for donations, I think most of the futurists and up-and-comers would find similar reasons to criticize it, if only because that’s their natural response to anything in power.

Anyway. In my search I narrowed my options down to two, Doctorow’s Little Brother and Peter Watts’ Blindsight. I’ve read both of them, but the former was already turned into a play, and it’s for teenagers more than adults, so I chose Watts. Blindsight is actually a really great story, although it’s more grim and philosophical than colorful and wondrous, and I’m going to need to take steps to make it clear that this isn’t a space slasher film because the characters seem designed for that kind of story. Everything’s certainly cramped and neurotic, and first contact only makes it worse.

How to adapt anything into a screenplay is a broad text, and it’s mostly about adapting things into three-act Hollywood screenplays - Krevolin’s philosophy appears as early as page 10, with his cardinal rules: “You owe nothing to the original text!” and “If it makes for a good story, it stays. / If not, it must be trashed!” He characterizes screenwriting as a very trimmed-down mode of writing, where only the bare necessities make it into the final work, which is a good point, and he’s also of the opinion that many pieces of fiction are actually in the wrong media entirely for their purposes, which I think is a fascinating reaction. His actual thoughts on how far an adaptor should go seem much more reasonable than his initial rule - “just look at how well O Brother, Where Art Thou? Played with The Odyssey and yet still did not betray its essence… so, yes, you can alter [the source] in any way you need to, but don’t lose the essence that drew you to the material in the first place” (174) - and I plan to keep that in mind when trying to tell the story of the p-zombies from beyond Pluto.

My copy of Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes has an ILL paper-slip over the cover, which charmingly lists the AUTHOR as “Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver”, as if it’s trying to summon him. The book’s a compilation of fifty or sixty separate interviews with people from the black-and-white low-budget days of pulpy SF filmmaking, but given how thick the volume is I’m going to need to review the directors interviewed specifically and look for the ones I’m coming the closest to emulating here.

Work Cited

Krevolin, R. W. (2003). How to adapt anything into a screenplay. Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Capstone Week 3: Adaptation, Adaptations, and First Notes on Genre

My endgoal’s morphed twice in the last week. I started out wanting to write a vague script of some description, and I moved to adapting Asimov’s “Nightfall” properly and trying to do it some justice (which the two extant adaptations have apparently failed at). When it turned out I was about two decades late to avoid copyright trouble, so I’ve had to turn to older material. I’ve decided I do want to work on adaptation, partly because I’ve always enjoyed the intellectual challenges involved with translating stories between media and partly because it’s so difficult to do well that I want to understand what I need to avoid.

So, for right now, I’m trying to get Cory Doctorow’s permission to use one of his modern Creative Commons short stories for the project’s sake, and if that doesn’t work out I’m going to look through what the public domain has to offer. Until that’s ironed out completely, my research will be in how adaptation works and how to write science-fiction screenplays in general.

While the ILL delivers some meatier sources, I have found something to discuss in the “Science Fiction” chapter of Jule Selbo’s Film Genre for the Screenwriter.

There’s always some contention in defining science-fiction about where it falls on the speculative spectrum and how we keep it separate from fantasy (or don’t, in the case of bookstores). Selbo argues the rules of the genre are simply that there must be some extrapolation of existing scientific thought, focusing on asking and answering one or more what-if questions. Fantasy is about creating a new rule for the setting whenever you need one, while sci-fi is about following a handful of rules to their logical conclusions.

(Funny enough, the book lists Twister as a science-fiction film, which is accurate even though it’s the exact opposite of what someone would expect when they hear the term. In much the same way, Donnie Darko is one of the best fantasy films of the 2000s.)

More than that, the central technique for any screenwriter working in the genre, the author advises, is the creation of a sense of wonder. The audience needs to be shown “the world of scientific possibilities and how mankind can be/is affected by mankind's fascination" (166), which is at the heart of this kind of narrative even when it plays out darkly in works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

That sense of wonder is what I’m courting. It’s what endeared SF to me, and made me interested in both reading and writing. Whatever I adapt, I want it to be the sort of thing that would’ve inspired me as a kid.

Work Cited
Selbo, J. (2015). Film Genre for the Screenwriter. 147-169. New York: Routledge.

Capstone Week 2: Screenwriting, Collaborateurs and Courting the Danish Indie Kids

I discussed this project with my friend Stephen, who’s going to be creating a Capstone next semester, and we’ve decided to collaborate: I’m going to write a script, and he’s going to film it. This makes going forward a lot less complicated, except for the business of deciding what I should be writing. But whatever the finished product should be at this point, I know it has to be filmable by someone with a very low-budget, and I’ve decided to start my research from there. (My entry in Screenwriting class was rejected for filming elsewhere because it was so intensely high-budget, so this is a weakness I direly need to shore up.)

The best resource I’ve found thus far on dealing with penniless-filmmaking is an online article in the magazine Script, written by Clive Davies-Frayne and entitled “Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the FIlm”. It makes some points that were pretty obvious to me, like that you should film all of a location’s scenes all at once at that location, but also some that I’d never thought of, like that defining all your locations from the beginning saves time and effort compared to writing location-independent scenes that could be filmed anywhere. Some of it is based in the idea that the reader will actively be paying actors, and the slightly optimistic note that big names sometimes take on small roles for less money if the productions are interesting enough, but the meat of it is in its advice on making the most of your locations and not just writing long scenes to cover up a dearth of places to go. (This is one of the lucky things about writing a screenplay being shot somewhere you’ve spent four years living in.)

The article also lists items in the manifesto of Dogme95, a film movement started by Lars von Trier & co. in Denmark, the same year I was born. The manifesto forbids things like nondiegetic sound, props not found on location and complicated lighting, and styles itself as a vow of chastity on traditional means of directing. I’d heard of the movement through clicking through random Wikipedia articles a year ago, but I never really understood what they were trying to achieve; looking at it as a money-saving measure the way Davies-Frayne does, the whole thing comes together. However, it also forbids genre movies, and there are some things I’m not sure I’m willing to give up in this as-yet-unconceived script of mine.

Moving forward from here, I’ve found a bunch of guidebooks on writing low-budget scripts, and I know where to find the script of at least one of my all-time favorites, but once I have a concrete direction I’m going in I could take a deeper dive into the films and traditions my work will be trying to descend from.

Work Cited

Davies-Frayne, Clive (2013, Jan 18). Alt Script: Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the Film. Retrieved from http://www.scriptmag.com/features/alt-script-four-ways-to-control-your-scripts-budget-without-compromising-the-film

Persuasion, Occultism, and Lizard-Thinking

The bit of The Persuaders that interested me the most was its look into the confusion and desperation of advertisers themselves. It’s easy to think of advertising as a kind of all-knowing conspiracy, given how omnipresent it is and how it conditions and affects us in ways we don’t really appreciate, but seeing the burden for any one group trying to actually pull it off makes it much less scary and more personal. The idea that advertisers are themselves unsure of the effects of their work, and that many of them are artistic people who resent having to work in the industry, fleshes out the profession in a way I never really thought about before.

There’s a kind of schadenfreude that comes from seeing people slowly fail at creating an ad campaign, but Rapaille’s seminars create a much bigger picture of the kind of soft mysticism that happens in the field. Having read his interview, his work on Nestle seems like a straightforward, smart campaign based on raising children with coffee, but it’s not very long before we see him as the kind of person who removes people’s chairs and makes them scribble out their memories to find out their “true” opinions. If you’re curious, the “reptilian brain” thing comes from the triune brain hypothesis, a theory of the brain which has been thoroughly criticized by people who at least seem to know what they’re talking about. (My pet reason for doubting it is that its idea of the primitive unreasoning reptile-brain doesn’t fit well with things like toolmaking crows.)

But the best takeaway from Rapaille, for me, is that it doesn’t really matter which underlying system he’s using. He could just as easily be starting with the eight-circuit model of consciousness, because he’s still going to get some lucky hits on the back of folk-psychology alone. The fact that any company with a diverse-enough ad campaign will never know if his advice worked would be enough to keep him afloat anyway, because he’s accomplishing for corporations what bad self-help books do for individuals.

Even modern esotericism takes these things deathly-serious, given its concern with ideas-as-supernatural-agents, although not much of it makes these kind of connections outright. This very blunt statement of it is taken from The Psychonaut Field Manual, Third Edition by Bluefluke the Arch-Traitor.

Ultimately, companies are often prepared to believe very superstitious things, and their tendency to go too far and create cultish structures is already well-discussed. I don’t mean to discredit it entirely when I call it “mysticism”, though, because even guesswork systems of the human mind can accomplish a lot when enough money and effort’s poured through them, and you don’t need a neurologically accurate picture of your customer to make them want something. I just think it’s important to understand that this is a very messy, groping-in-the-dark method of understanding people, and that ultimately it leaves a big gap in the way advertisers understand the world. Whether closing that gap and giving them a truly effective brain-model is a good idea is a question for another essay.