"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" (1967)

Once again, with Damon Knight's contribution to the Dangerous Visions collection, we find a generally incompetent monotheistic God at the center of things, and once again I am put in mind of the 1966 Time magazine cover, "Is God Dead?" It may be too easy to speculate it made such an impression on editor Harlan Ellison and/or these writers. But a feeble and useless if not dead God does seem to be one certain epitome of a dangerous vision here, as it occurs more than once. Maybe it's even true enough, per existentialist thought and so on. Then there is the matter of Ellison's introduction to the story, which is weird. It gave me the impression Ellison didn't care much for Knight at the time, though he tries to pass it off as a joke. In turn, Knight's clipped afterword seems to confirm a strained relationship. The story itself is very short, about five pages. God and a posse of angels have returned to Earth for Judgment Day, but no one is home. Nuclear war seems the likely reason. Upon looking around for answers, God finds a sardonic message etched into a stone by those about to pass: "WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?" So it goes in the worlds of faith and faithlessness, and I'm sure I don't know what it has to do with science fiction, dangerous or otherwise. You're better off contemplating that cover of Time as far as I'm concerned. Knight's afterword, though very short, sounds familiar themes of the aggrieved science fiction writer—well, maybe more generally all writers. When he first wrote the story and tried to publish it via his agent, Knight writes, "my then agent returned it with loathing, and told me I might possibly send it to the Atheist Journal in Moscow." Ba-da-boom—Cold War times, Cold War times. I don't like the story that much either, but more because it feels kind of lazy. I'm not averse to this preoccupation with religion in self-consciously controversial work (which is maybe all that "dangerous" means after all), just surprised that it was where so many science fiction writers would think to go in 1967. I want to think it's the influence of Ellison, but then his story was not focused on religion at all. I'm telling you, it's that Time cover.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Widows (2018)

From the preview, which I liked and motivated me to see Widows sooner rather than later, it looked like it might be a kind of all-star jamboree Ocean's Digits play, but with women. Except I knew that movie already came out last summer—it was called Ocean's Eight—and I knew it was unlikely that director and cowriter Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Hunger) would get involved in such a project anyway, paycheck or no. But it's still a high-stakes thriller all the way, and no cute bantering either. Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is a master thief, the elaborate heist his specialty. His last job went south bad and now he's dead, appearing in tender flashbacks. All the cash he stole was burned in the firebombing and SWAT attack and now the offended owner of that cash has made it clear to Rawlings's widow Veronica (Viola Davis) that he expects her to make it right. Naturally she decides to reach out to the other widows in that last job and see if they're interested in pulling off a highly dangerous caper. Naturally they are. So Widows is indeed a jazzy caper movie, as advertised, but its detailed story, vivid imagery, and intricate motivations have all the icy precision of a season of The Wire unfolding. Set in Chicago, where life appears to be hard at all times but there's a lot of money (from drugs, from jewelry, from politics), Widows takes its time developing its many angles, letting the elements assemble one at a time, with a handful of surprises up its sleeve. It plays fast and loose with its own credibility here and there, the twists and turns can be a little too surprising, and more often convenient, and there are too many of them. After being a caper movie, however, and then after being a Steve McQueen art film, Widows turns to a third theory for existence—Oscar bait. By that I mean specifically the casting, with players lining up in their respective queues and working the paces: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting, etc. They are dazzling on paper and they're not bad in the picture either: Davis (Fences, The Help), Colin Farrell (In Bruges, Minority Report), Daniel Kaluuya (Black Panther, Get Out), Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar, multiple Fast and Furious movies), Elizabeth Debicki (The Great Gatsby, Guardians of the Galaxy), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook), and Garret Dillahunt (Deadwood, No Country for Old Men), among others. Plus also, Robert Duvall (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) hams it up cackling Eli Wallach style and Neeson flexes his hardass bastard chops (for the 10 millionth time). Widows is a pretty good time, with enough substance, complexity, and inspired filmmaking that it might be worth seeing again too.

His Promised Land (1886)

John P. Parker's slave narrative was never actually published until 1996, but editor and historian Stuart Seely Sprague makes a thorough and painstaking job of it. Parker was a freed slave as of 1845, at the age of 18, who worked out of Ripley, Ohio, "running off" Kentucky slaves by way of the Underground Railroad. Twenty years after the Civil War the reporter Frank M. Gregg tracked him down and interviewed him. Gregg's interest was primarily in verifying the factual basis for the Eliza scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which involves a young woman escaping with her baby across the melting ice of the late-winter Ohio River. Slaveholders and other Southerners took an interest in debunking it as implausible, but Gregg wanted to prove it. Parker died in 1900. His narrative had to go unpublished in his lifetime because of the danger the story represented to himself and family, both legally and personally. It's harder to say why it went unpublished for nearly a century after his death, but the reasons are not hard to guess: lack of interest as African-American liberation was replaced by Jim Crow laws and Confederacy memorials. Still, Parker may be the single most heroic figure in all these slave narratives, smart, brave, and committed to freedom. "Freedom" has become a dangerously inapproximate word these days, but in Parker's case it's pretty clear: "freedom" means freedom from enslavement. As always, the details of the context—notably the high value of slaves—contributes to understanding the difficulty of ending it once it had become an institution. As always, there is the mystery of seeing Americans accept it so readily, often aiding the slaveholders rather than the slaves. Parker's story is fragmented because of the way it made it into print. Some sections are simply missing. But it also contains some of the most exciting scenes in slave literature, with anecdotes of amazing adventures. They are too short and there are not enough of them, but they will do. Parker earns his bona fides and then some here as a genuine American hero. He did not have to stay in Ripley and help runaway slaves. As a shrewd and successful businessman, with several patents to his name for metalworking inventions, he could have stayed in Ripley and let the runaways see to themselves. But he did not. Partly out of hatred for slavery and slaveholders, partly for the thrill of what it involved, he spent his nights for years on exceedingly dangerous work. We still need more like him.

In case it's not at the library.

Elephant (2003)

USA, 81 minutes
Director / writer / editor: Gus Van Sant
Photography: Harris Savides
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, Kristen Hicks, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor, Carrie Finklea, Nicole George, Brittany Mountain, Alicia Miles, Timothy Bottoms, Matt Malloy

It's not possible to deny the power of Gus Van Sant's strange meditation on school mass shootings. Yet it is also full of groaning missteps and off-key decisions. Start with the title, so portentously vague as to mean almost anything, good discussion fodder for a high school classroom by implication. What do elephants have to do with a high school in suburban Portland, Oregon? An elephant never forgets. The elephant is the mascot symbol of the Republican Party, conspiring with manufacturers and their lobbying arm the NRA to irresponsibly flood the country with guns. The "elephant in the room" is the obvious thing no one wants to talk about (in this case, presumably, the relation between huge numbers of guns and high levels of gun violence). In the old parable, six blind men could not agree on what an elephant looks like. Elephants are presently the largest land mammals on the planet. An internet rumor claims that elephants consider humans "cute," because of the size difference, the way that humans consider dogs and cats and other smaller mammals cute. Two of these are actual reasons for the movie's title. Darrell, can you tell us which ones you think they are and why?

Elephant has an obvious source in the 1999 Columbine school shooting. The fact that the movie works from the assumption that Columbine was an extreme outlier event—like most of the rest of us thought in the early 2000s—does tend to date it already a little. But Van Sant is so meticulous about abstracting high school life to the symbolic nub of physical space and motion I think he manages to overcome that. Fifteen years later, nearly 20 years after Columbine, Elephant in its best moments has the cool terrifying look of unassailable reality. It's the realization of a nightmare carried in the head, the one going on several times each year. You feel like you are seeing exactly what it looks like to be caught in the situation. The strange urgent silence as people frantically run away. The panting and whimpering. The panicked adults. The empty hallways. The strange noises. The way death is dealt in a way at once clumsy and breathtakingly efficient, always impossibly sudden. But then, geez, I swear every 10 or 15 minutes, Van Sant indulges some ridiculous impulse that makes you want to jeer and hoot.

"Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" (1967)

Carol Emshwiller's story is truly weird, an invasive sexualized peeping-tom or stalking situation with the usual gender roles reversed and some suggestion that one or both characters might actually be aliens from outer space, perhaps something like David Bowie's man who fell to earth. It is deeply and richly creepy. As described, Mr. Morrison's place is such a sty that the unnamed first-person narrator can conceal herself in the piles of dirty laundry. She is there for one reason—to see him naked, not so much for sexual reasons as curiosity. But inevitably it is sexually charged. She invades his home and sneaks about undetected. For his part, Mr. Morrison is a grossly obese middle-aged man living by himself. The narrator is attracted to him. She lives in the room below him. "He's too big to be a quiet man," she writes. "The house groans with him and settles when he steps out of bed." She doesn't mind hearing him, even enjoys it. But she wants to know who he is, "one of the Normals or one of the Others?" This is never really explained and could mean anything, from the aforementioned possibility of aliens to questions of sexuality or class. I also saw an internet synopsis that said the narrator is elderly—a clue I missed. At any rate, into the place she goes, making some close reconnoiters, as in the kneehole of a desk the man is sitting at. It's intense, but it's also hard to believe he would miss her. Is she that small? Is she not generating body heat? I think you see the problem. Maybe he would miss her under the bed or even in a pile of clothes, but really. Meanwhile, she is reveling sensuously in the experience, the smells, the sights, the textures. She's intoxicated with herself in this invasion, like a burglar prompted to a bowel movement in the act. We're inside certain nether regions of brain function here. Not to say the story isn't working, but it's just so powerfully repellent. It's like finding out someone is so attracted to a fetishized body part of yours they have masturbated near you. No harm no foul, maybe, but still. In this case, breaking and entering is involved. Now there is also some interesting play in this story with the gender reversals, subverting perhaps some predisposition to outrage because it is a woman. As with the Mary Kay Letourneau story, it's still often hard to entirely avoid a double standard, probably because cases like these are so rare. This story makes a woman the predator but her victim could control her simply by noticing her. Does that make the story comic, with or without the overlay of aliens? Or is it just an exposition of creepy—and illegal—behavior? The more I think about it the more I think it's another one that might actually qualify as dangerous.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Snake" (1963)

[Original review of Johnny Rivers recording here. Version of "The Snake" by Oscar Brown Jr. here, version by Al Wilson here. My video of the Johnny Rivers version here. Version by Donald Trump here.]

[swear words] Out on the social media beat: I started my own YouTube channel (I know it's comical that I even have one) because, several years ago when I was much better about doing regular 300-word write-ups of individual songs, I would occasionally run across one that somehow wasn't on YouTube yet. So I'd make a video and upload it, giving me something to point to in my review and enabling people, at least in theory, to hear the song. All the song videos on my channel, such as they are all 17 of them, represent the rock-bottom production value type of video, made from a music file of the song with a decent bitrate and for visuals using a static image, usually the cover of an album that houses the song. This is also from back in the days when I kept music files by the gigabyte on my hard drive. Mostly these videos just sit there, accruing modest levels of views. Five digits is big traffic for them. Most are obscure one way or another, just things I love and have written about: Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling," Percy Mayfield's "The River's Invitation," Boss Hog's "Ski Bunny," etc. Inevitably they attract the kind of comments every YouTube song video attracts. After newspaper sites, YouTube comments are well known for being the most rancid on a per capita basis. They also contain significant portions of vacuousness.

Once in a while someone files a complaint and then a video is banned in certain countries, or everywhere, usually for commercial reasons. It's not always permanent, and I can't always tell when it changes because the videos are always visible to me (thanks YouTube!). But some do appear to go live more widely on and off, judging by view count patterns. Just this month, someone complained about the Angry Samoans video for "They Saved Hitler's Cock." Honestly, I'm so chickenshit I didn't even use the expletive, labeling the video simply "They Saved Hitlers" to avoid problems (for which, just last month, someone else came along and mocked me ... for that matter, I ducked a similar way in my write-up). In this case, though possibly it was the usual copyright protectionism, I suspect the problem was not the word "cock" like I worried about originally but the word "Hitler." The song uses the name lightly, making him the usual symbol of bottomless evil but more playing it for a joke. I happen to think it's a pretty good joke, which is why I was writing it up in the first place. But in the current historical moment I have much less problem with putting it out of sight. If people are going to be idiots about it, I prefer seeing Hitler and his ideas shunned categorically and the more aggressively the better.

In terms of the Johnny Rivers song, that's a different matter, posing a quandary I have been wrestling with for some time. I posted the video on November 8, 2012 (I must say I'm a little chilled by the fact that it was two days after the 2012 US presidential election and exactly four years before the next). I wrote about it because I think Johnny Rivers is generally underrated and I wanted to say some things about that, because I like the song (and, more exactly, I like the album that it is the first song on), and because I felt nostalgic about the album. My judgment when I wrote it up was that the song plays way too loose with misogyny—it's dated—and the whole story of the snake is trite. My misogyny angle was confirmed in a way by the first comment that came in, not so long after posting it (by the way, I'm sure all or most of these comments are from people finding the video on YouTube or the internet and very few if any via my blog posts, at least I hope so): "all cunts are snakes!" (three years later someone replied "PIG!"). Now I'm going to talk about YouTube comments.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Bohemian Rhapsody is not just for fans of rock star icons Freddie Mercury and Queen, but it mainly is. I can speak with some authority as someone who isn't one. I'm sure some of the dazzling scenes here were lost on me, but others were rousing and a lot of fun, and I always appreciated the '70s rock star ambience. Admittedly, I may have been too hard on Queen in the past because I thought the only thing they ever did that mattered was the novelty "Bohemian Rhapsody" (not coincidentally the name of this picture). The song is a lengthy, intricate, and wonderful pop confection and it's exciting to see it worked out here across scenes of studio recording. I do wish they had just let the whole song rip at some point, the whole six minutes in all its glory, but apparently there was no time for that in a movie that runs over two hours. A good part of the "Bohemian Rhapsody" excerpt we see was also decorated with a score-settling barrage of bad notices from critics in the '70s. Well, fair enough. Like many a star in the hardcore pop firmament—Mariah Carey, Billy Joel, Chicago, Olivia Newton-John, and Celine Dion are names that come to mind—Queen has long been something of a mystery to me outside of the top 40 (and often within it) and I have more often been on the side of the harsher judgments. But you can't deny the love of the people, not least because it's a recurring feature in this movie, CGI-enhanced or otherwise. Queen fans might make this movie a hit yet via sheer willpower. A certain strong suit is the biography of Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara of Parsi descent in Zanzibar and raised in England, an interesting and complex story that was all new to me. Also recommending Bohemian Rhapsody is the performance of Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) as Mercury, bug-eyed and full of sparkling wonder with a looming overbite and sheer electric confidence. I liked Freddie Mercury during this movie more than I ever have, perhaps because it's the first time he's ever felt genuine, perhaps because it was still very hard during his lifetime to live openly as gay. But Malek might be effectively as charismatic as Mercury here. He certainly won me over. I also have to say I enjoyed the movie's versions of what I had previously written off as sports anthems ("We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions")—pretty good stuff, yeah. On the downside, the movie starts slow, loses its way in the middle, makes up shit for dishonest dramatic purposes, and is generally about 40 minutes too long, until finally reaching a heroic finish with a reenactment of the band's 20-minute set at Live Aid in 1985. That finish, and maybe an hour or so of Mercury's story, are good for anyone who cares about '70s rock. The rest is for Queen fans.

"Second Variety" (1953)

This early long story by Philip K. Dick works equally well whether you take it as a '50s-style killer robot rampage or as a prescient treatment of artificial intelligence (which term would not come into use as we understand it now until two years later, in 1955, with The Logic Theorist computer program). Dick invented a fiendish device here called a claw, a silver sphere with retractable whirling razor blades reminiscent of the weapon / monster / dream object in the movie Phantasm. "Second Variety" is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and these claws were developed as a defense weapon, largely against encroaching small mammals. Claws are not only highly intelligent in their hunting protocols, but they are also programed to manufacture and improve themselves. How that is accomplished is another question but one Dick distracts us from with a swiftly moving action story. Like the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica first seen as menacing "toaster" killing machines and then later returned with hyper advancements, so these lowly rat-chomping claws became something far beyond what anyone had ever imagined. Dick manages the story with a lot of skill and a sharp series of reveals that often surprise. If nothing else, "Second Variety" confirms Dick's abilities as a storyteller, sustained long enough that some refer to it as a novella, whatever. Forty years later it was turned into a movie, 1995's Screamers, that made a few changes to the story but was reasonably faithful. I read the story first—it's a better experience, as is often the case—and I'm not sure how much sense the movie would make without knowing the story. I think it might be very little. Screamers has its bona fides. Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon also worked on Dark Star, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, and Total Recall. Total Recall is as close as I've seen to anyone getting Dick right, so there's that too. And they're doing the best they can with obvious limitations on casting and special effects. It's more an exercise in atmospheric mood and brawny swaggering. It also includes some scenes distinctly reminiscent of Blade Runner, and I happen to know for a fact they don't come from the story, so that's weird. But the story is really great and also genuinely Dickian in the way he simply imagines artificial intelligence and exactly what can possibly go wrong just the way we imagine it now. Say, which reminds me, what is the present status and/or policy on military technology and artificial intelligence? You say it's classified? Well, damn.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

A Scene at the Sea (1991)

Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi, Japan, 101 minutes
Director / writer / editor: Takeshi Kitano
Photography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Cast: Claude Maki, Hiroko Oshima, Sabu Kawahara

For a movie that is so self-consciously about silence, A Scene at the Sea has a notably beautiful soundtrack. Director, writer, and editor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes the music an integral part of it. Composer Joe Hisaishi had already established himself with animated films from Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and many others). With A Scene at the Sea he began a fruitful collaboration with Kitano as well (including soundtracks for Sonatine, Fireworks, and Kikujiro). It is moody keyboard synthesizer music in A Scene at the Sea, occasionally reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, overflowing with emotional tug points but at the same time cool and distant, like the sea vistas themselves that populate this movie so constantly. As much as anything A Scene at the Sea is a movie about watching. We spend a lot of time watching people who are watching other things, as often as not the sea itself.

Formally, it's because the two main characters—Shigeru (Claude Maki) and Takako (Hiroko Oshima)—are deaf, a boyfriend and girlfriend in their 20s who are living in a world with only visual and tactile cues. The music works as a kind of analog of their feelings. Shigeru is a garbage collector who decides one day that he wants to be a surfer. That's the narrative arc and chief point of clarity. Much of the rest of it, including what happens to them in the end, is shrouded or at least obscured by silence. No one has much to say, in other words. Kitano, who can be prone anyway to cinematic stunts inserted like fits of expressive joy, emphasizes the situation by borrowing heavily from the aesthetics of silent film. Title cards could cover all the dialogue in this movie. The way A Scene at the Sea stops and starts and moves sideways and returns again to its through-lines is like nothing so much as Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera, luxuriating in the simplest pulses of a love story, and even more, in the pure visual.

The Terrorists (1975)

So happy endings all around? In a general sort of way, yes. The democratic social welfare system remains as riddled with defect as ever, and as Dennis Lehane points out in his introduction for the 2010 reprint, the last word in the book and thus the whole Story of Crime series is "Marx." Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would likely consider themselves optimists in that regard, and so do I. But getting there is still not a pretty picture. Even so, police detective Martin Beck and his crew at least manage to get to some hard-won happy places in their lives. And bully for them. In the larger series I'm more interested anyway in the context of liberal paradise Stockholm, even more than the specific crime cases, which are artfully constructed but also tend toward the pro forma. Published in 1975, inevitably the point of view of The Terrorists is historically bound. People with the sense that terrorism started in 2001 might be interested to learn about some of the prequels alluded to here. A mastermind terrorist cell network—the Red Army Faction of the time is the likely model, but even more deadly and effective—is determined to strike at a conservative U.S. senator on a scheduled visit to Stockholm. It's up to Beck to stop the mayhem, or, well, actually his various superiors, who variously take the credit for themselves. And stop it they do. Though Per Wahlöö died of cancer the year this was published, at the age of 48 (coauthor Maj Sjöwall is still alive today), The Terrorists was always intended as the final volume in a series conceived much earlier. The novels are more episodic than working within a larger narrative arc, but they veer about carefully from touchstone to touchstone, from serial killers to police violence to a locked-room mystery to international spy intrigue and more. The larger theme is the nagging question of barbarism and civilization and the social welfare state. What's it going to be? If we give up barbarism we opt for the suffocations of cooperating with one another on a scale of numbers we can't even comprehend—presently approaching 8 billion people. You could say it's pretty well a bleak vision too. Just look around you. And Martin Beck would have to agree. Take it as a mercy for him that he ended up in a happy relationship.

In case it's not at the library.