What exactly is a Meta-Warrior and why are they so distressed? We find out from Alistair Rennie, a Scottish writer living in Italy. And we are blessed with music that reaches far beyond the boundaries of language from Chiles Samaniego, originally from the Philippines but currently residing in Singapore.
Enjoy. Then go and seek more.
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APOCALYPSE RIGHT NOW: How Hollywood learned to stop worrying and love the
end of the world
Culture | by Robert Isenberg
I recently ran into my friend Patrick, an actor friend in Pittsburgh, who was bummed because he'd been turned down for a role in
The Road
. “They said I wasn't skinny enough,” he said. “It's this post-apocalyptic movie, so everybody has to look emaciated, like they haven't eaten in weeks.”
It's a morbid thing, this casting call for anemic extras. The joke around Pittsburgh is that John Hillcoat, director of
The Road,
looked high and low for a real post-apocalyptic shooting location—and found one. Based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize- winning novel,
The Road
concerns two survivors of an unnamed holocaust, a father and son who wander the blasted countryside, avoiding cannibals.
But
The Road
is only the latest in a macabre new genre: The World is Screwed Cinema. We've already seen Clive Owen wandering through the tattered ruins of Britain, where armed savages ambush cars in the forest, and nobody can procreate, so life is deprived of meaning. But at least
Children of Men
still claimed a city full of living humans.
I Am Legend
is a solo show, with Will Smith picking through the empty superstructures of New York, tough and savvy but completely alone.
What's this new obsession with annihilation? Why are we drawn to the nightmarish visions of
Cloverfield
, where Manhattan is reduced to grimy tunnels and half-collapsed towers? What fears have inspired the film version of Jose Saramago's
Blindness
, where an unknown sickness blights our eyesight, or
The Happening
, where masses of people just start killing themselves?
These are disturbing predictions, surely, but what's more disturbing is the mystery that lies at the heart of each film: We don't know where the
Cloverfield
monster came from. Nobody can explain the impotent world of
Children of Men
. Even Spielberg's
War of the Worlds
was filmed in intimate close-up; we know the Martians have invaded, but we have no idea why or what they're doing, aside from wiping us out. There is no omniscient narrator in these newer films, no “ah-ha” moment, like in
Independence Day.
These are not morality tales; they are experiments in total nihilism, where unexplained disasters destroy everything we know and love, but life (if you can call it life) torturously slogs on.
There have always been Armageddon stories, and humanity has always been preoccupied with its own destruction. But in the past half-century, our biggest fear has been nuclear catastrophe: cities razed by missiles, the survivors slowly wilted by radiation. Now, post-Cold War and post-September 11, the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction is a little passé. Our anxieties are a little more primal; anybody could be a terrorist, anybody could be in cahoots with terrorists, and meanwhile we still have the pedestrian fears of gangs and viruses and serial killers. (
Psycho
made us afraid to stay in scary hotels, but
Funny Games
makes us terrified to even open the front door.)
And then there's this sudden fear of lost resources. How long will petroleum fuel our civilization? How vulnerable are we to environmental disaster? How much like the late Roman Empire is our decadent lifestyle? Even Idiocracy offers a frightening vision—a world of morons eating raw Crisco and watching porn all day, oblivious to its Himalayan landfills. In all these films, humanity is too naïve, too comfortable, to anticipate its own demise. In
The Road,
McCarthy kills off even the world's plants, leaving only a scatter of mushrooms.
Unlike earlier apocalypse films, our latest movies have the benefit of eye-popping CGI, making our future miseries all the more vivid.
Tank Girl
and
Omega Man
were violent, but they were also incredibly silly. The
Mad Max
films were well-shot, but they took place in a barren desert. In contrast to the Australian Outback, London and New York are familiar cities, and watching Will Smith wander through a rubble-strewn Times Square makes the anarchy much more personal.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
was scary, but
The Invasion
's advanced cinematography and A-list actors make the story look as realistic as a documentary. (Directors take note: If you want to make the future look scary, just hire Julianne Moore or Nicole Kidman. Redheads apparently sell disaster). You want to see escaped zoo animals lurking in a shattered office tower? Hollywood can do that.
The question is not where these anxieties come from; the world is faster and more uncertain than ever, and our fears of plagues and suitcase bombs and city-destroying weather patterns are certainly well founded. The real question is this: Are we making these films to warn ourselves about near-future calamity, or are we just resigning ourselves to chaos? In other words, do we still believe we can do something to
prevent
all the death and cannibalism? Just how fucked are we?
The genre's weirdest twist is that it's both cynical and hopeful at the same time: Cynical, because the future is awful, but hopeful, because we can expect some shred of life to continue. A telling tagline comes from a
Children of Men
movie poster: “In 20 years, women are infertile. No children. No future. No hope.” Then it adds: “But all that can change in a heartbeat.” Sure, death is a random and inevitable event (one major character is unexpectedly shot in the throat; another bludgeons a man's head with a rock), but there are still heroes. These heroes are smart and resourceful, and they're basically good people trapped in horrific circumstances.
Cloverfield'
s New York slackers are really nice kids, and they find love and purpose before getting crushed by a giant space monster. Life sucks and then you die, but at least there's some nobility woven in.
American cinema is always criticized for its unwillingness to allow an unhappy ending. Now that Hollywood is on a roll manufacturing portents of universal doom, we get to see ourselves obliterated by a dozen different cataclysms. So what are we supposed to do with these prophecies? Treat them like any other fictional story? Weigh the pros and cons of our imbalanced world? Or just start believing that, yes, the end is nigh? Because at last, we're getting a pretty good idea of what that nigh end looks like.
Robert Isenberg is a writer and actor based in Pittsburgh.
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Author Spotlight | by Elizabeth Genco
LAUREN GROFF, WORD HOARDER: Five questions for the author of The Monsters
of Templeton
One of the weird literary hits of 2008 is Lauren Groff's novel
The Monsters of Templeton
, in which a dead sea-beast interrupts the life of a young woman questing for her father's identity. Stephen King raved over it; we talked with Groff about writing it.
In one of your interviews, you mention that you “write full drafts, then throw them out completely, and start anew.” Is that as horrifying as it sounds?
It does sound terrifying, but it wasn't so extremely bad—what breakdowns I had were mostly manageable. The write-and-toss process came about from the project of
Monsters
itself, actually. That's what usually happens, depending on what I'm attempting to do. For example, most of my short stories live in my head for years and years before they're ready to pop out, fully formed, and I only do small modifications before they're ready to go. Novels are different because they're far too large to live in their entirety in my brain.
My two (awful) previous novels, which will never see the light of day, were all written in excessively different manners: the postmodern, fragmented tale was written on index cards and shuffled to make some kind of order; the straightforward story massively over-influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was written from beginning to end in a white heat. Because I had always wanted to make
Monsters
a layered, broad tale spanning centuries, it just so happened that I had to write three complete drafts and throw them away before I found the final, fourth, structure that would make all those layers work together. I do end up keeping some things . . . But mostly, I just try to write from what I remember, which makes the memories better than they are.
What was going on in your life when you began writing Monsters?
I was twenty-four, and had just thrown out my second novel and was living in California. I'd had a series of horrendous jobs after college—I was the world's worst bartender, temp, canvasser, caseworker and administrative assistant—and I would run home after work to write until my then-boyfriend came home for dinner. I'd also write during my lunch break and, during slow times, at work itself (once or twice prompting shockingly unwelcome commentary from some computer-administrative god who could see everything on my screen). I guess I could have been accused of stealing “company time.” One of the temp agencies where I worked in Boston the summer before graduation had previously had Elizabeth Wurtzel in my exact temping position, and apparently she was a time-stealer, too, so it wasn't just me . . . Writing this obsessively was a way, I think, to stave off despair. After the previous novel, which abjectly failed, I decided that I needed to write about something I loved so deeply that I would see through as many drafts as I needed to until it was completed.
Do you write for yourself, or do you have a particular audience in mind?
Overall, the first drafts are definitely written for me—they're so horrendous nobody else would want to read them. Then, in massive revision or rewriting I tend to picture a kindly, cheery, exuberant yet intimidatingly smart little fellow who has the ability to turn nasty when I strike a false note or make a logical error,
a la
Bilbo Baggins when he's feeling greedy about the Ring. In graduate school, I wrote my short stories for Lorrie Moore, who was my advisor, and though she was only kind and wise, it was awfully intimidating. Whatever I do, I can't picture my family, because that would kill every artistic impulse I'd have. It's my greatest fear to shame them, and I have to pretend they don't exist to get any writing done at all.
Many of the pictures in the book are from your personal collection of antique photos. Collecting seems to be such a writerly habit; do you collect anything else?
I have a very long list of beautiful words, and have a collection of books that is threatening to go through my office floor at the moment. And I love plants—my garden is tiny but full of native Florida specimens that I love more than I love most people.
Name five of your favorite words.
After I wrote these, I realized I liked all of them because they created very clear images in my head:
Hirsute
, because I imagine a hair-suit every time. And that makes me laugh.
Fritillary
, a kind of butterfly, because it evokes exactly the kind of movement a butterfly makes.
Lapidary
, a word as smooth and gemlike as whatever it describes.
Ondine
, a kind of naughty water-nymph, which, because I feel most alive in water, makes me happy. And the French word
coquelicot
, which means poppy, because it so perfectly evokes the cheery little red flowers, millions to a field, that once so astonished me with beauty I fell off my (moving) bicycle.
Book Reviews: Halloween Picks
THE GHOST QUARTET
edited by Marvin Kaye
(Tor, hardcover, $24.95)
It's natural for ghost stories to channel the past and echo the mythic patterns of folklore, for the ghost itself is an echo of the recognizable past. The customary stereotypes are a part of the genre's comfort zone for readers—but not in
The Ghost Quartet
, where the chilling subversion of genre conventions will knock a traditional horror fan right out of his Victorian armchair and slippers. Brian Lumley's “The Place of Waiting” spirits us away to the Scottish highlands, a favorite locale of phantoms; but few readers will have met the betrayed, vengeful creature that preys upon the protagonist as he struggles to recover from a terrible loss of his own. “Strindberg's Ghost” by Tanith Lee offers us the familiar motif of a supernaturally lovely spectre, but turns the cliché on its head by portraying a ghost who, rather than fatally enticing her victims, is herself held prisoner by the needy mortals who feed off her presence. Marvin Kaye's “The Haunted Single Malt” concerns friends who are engaged in the time-honored pastime of ghostly storytelling when a disturbing stranger brings them closer than they want to the ethereal world. Finally, Orson Scott Card unsettles us further by ushering in “Hamlet's Ghost,” whose hideous secret will catch even the most jaded Shakespearean off guard.
The Ghost Quartet
contains all the wonder and terror of a vividly familiar nightmare—but expect more than a few of its lurking denizens to create nightmares of their own long after their tales are told. —
Colin Azariah-Kribbs
LOCKE & KEY: WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT
by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
(IDW, hardcover, $24.99)
Their father's brutal murder by a young schoolmate sends three kids to seek sanctuary in the mysterious old family estate—where a special doorway frees souls from their bodies, and where, at the bottom of a well, dark secrets lie waiting to make things much, much worse. The collected first storyline of Hill's compelling new comics series mixes supernatural awe with page-turning dread. —
S.H.S.
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Arts & Artifacts | by Amanda Gannon
A BESTIARY OF BRASS & BONE
Steampunk critters in strange shapes galore.
(
www.jessicajoslin.com
)
Mad genius is how one wants to describe the impulse that's led Chicago artist Jessica Joslin to create a menagerie of beasts out of skulls and brass. And yet it's not megalomania, but a love of nature and a firsthand knowledge of animal anatomy that bring her creations to life.