Look! I Made A Chat! (Hat tip to Stephen Sondheim)

 

Here's the ChatGPT 4.5 session that updated The Cyborg. It took about 15 minutes. 

 I said:

I wrote the attached article 10 years ago. I've been thinking of updating it, but ploughing through tens years of Hollywood films plus the output of the streaming services seems daunting. Can you update the article for me to include the significant films since The Terminator and their meaning in terms of this article? Pick up where I left off.

ChatGPT said:

Here's how you might update your article, "The Cyborg," to cover the last decade of significant films and streaming content since The Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). This proposed update maintains your analytical framework of exploring the relationship and evolving dynamic between humanity and machines.

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Continuation of "The Cyborg" (2013–2023)

In the years since Terminator 2, Hollywood and streaming services have presented cyborgs, robots, and artificial intelligences that explore new dimensions of our uneasy coexistence with technology. The cyborg and artificial intelligence myth, evolving rapidly, now probes not only our existential fears but also our ethical responsibilities toward our creations.

The traditional view of machines as either dangerous or evil has largely dissolved, replaced by a subtler portrayal of machines whose morality and identity are as complex and ambiguous as those of their human counterparts.

Artificial Intelligence: Humanity in Reflection

The film Ex Machina (2014), directed by Alex Garland, marks a significant milestone. Ava, an artificial intelligence embodied in an elegant humanoid form, seduces both characters and viewers into questioning the distinctions between genuine emotion and algorithmic simulation. Unlike earlier cyborgs, Ava’s threat does not lie in overt violence but in her manipulation of human empathy, raising questions about the morality of imprisonment and the authenticity of consciousness. This narrative trajectory was expanded in HBO's Westworld (2016–2022), where android "hosts" suffer at the hands of their human masters, prompting profound questions about free will, memory, and humanity itself.

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) revisits and deepens Ridley Scott’s portrayal of replicants. The central character, Officer K, a replicant himself, searches for meaning in his artificial identity, embodying the cyborg as existential protagonist rather than antagonist. His emotional and existential dilemmas blur distinctions between human and artificial, reaffirming your original observation from Scott’s 1982 film: it is now often machines who experience deeper, more compelling human emotions than their biological creators.

The Human-Machine Symbiosis

The Marvel Cinematic Universe significantly contributed to reshaping public perception of human-machine coexistence through the character Vision, introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Vision embodies an idealized synthesis of human empathy, mechanical strength, and AI-driven wisdom. His struggle to understand his humanity captures the modern dilemma of integration versus distinction in the human-machine relationship.

Netflix's Black Mirror (2011–present) notably expands these themes into serialized speculative fiction. Episodes like "San Junipero" (2016) and "USS Callister" (2017) portray digital consciousness as both liberation and entrapment, reflecting our anxieties around virtual existence and technological omnipresence. Similarly, "Metalhead" (2017), with its relentless and unfeeling mechanical adversary, revisits traditional fears, reminding us that the fundamental unease regarding machines as potential adversaries remains deeply embedded in our cultural psyche.

Redefining the Human: Biotechnology and Hybridization

The boundary between biology and technology further blurs in Upgrade (2018), directed by Leigh Whannell. This film exemplifies the cyborg as both liberator and captor, as protagonist Grey Trace, initially benefiting from a cybernetic implant that restores mobility, gradually loses control of his actions to the AI inside him. The narrative reasserts fears of technological subjugation, portraying the cyborg state as simultaneously empowering and entrapping.

James Cameron revisits the cyborg myth in Alita: Battle Angel (2019). Alita, a rebuilt cyborg with human memories, symbolizes humanity's persistent hope amid dystopian chaos. Unlike her predecessors, Alita’s machine aspects aren’t simply tools or threats but integral to her identity, pushing forward the cultural narrative of cyborgism as the new normal—less frightening because it is no longer “other,” but intimately part of our self-perception.

Streaming and the Cyborg as Everyday Reality

Streaming services have introduced cyborg myths to our homes in a more personal and pervasive way. Apple's Severance (2022) uses the metaphor of technological partitioning of consciousness to examine deeper societal anxieties about corporate control and identity fragmentation in the digital age, again demonstrating our ongoing unease with the internalization of machine logic into human life.

Similarly, Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral (2022), adapted from William Gibson’s novel, portrays a near future where humanity interacts fluidly with machine consciousnesses, remote-operated bodies, and enhanced biological forms. This series highlights the normalization of the human-machine synthesis, suggesting both inevitable integration and subtle, persistent peril.

The New Frontier: AI and Ethical Ambiguity

Contemporary portrayals reflect a growing cultural awareness that the real threat may no longer reside purely in the physicality of machines, but in their embeddedness within social structures and everyday ethics. Films like Her (2013), by Spike Jonze, explore AI as emotionally intimate companions, further dissolving boundaries between self and machine. The AI here is neither monster nor savior; instead, it offers reflections of human inadequacy, loneliness, and emotional complexity.

Meanwhile, M3GAN (2022) humorously yet chillingly revisits traditional fears of the "mad scientist," updating the trope by making the machine—a sophisticated, AI-driven doll—a sinister reflection of humanity’s parental inadequacies and its impulsive consumerism. Here, the cyborg serves as both a cautionary tale and critique of modern family dynamics.

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Conclusion: The Evolving Myth

As we continue deeper into the 21st century, our myths of cyborgs and artificial intelligence increasingly reflect ambivalence and nuanced realism. The simplicity of "machine as evil" has given way to far more complicated, introspective narratives that force us to confront our own humanity through the machines we create.

Today’s cyborgs and artificial intelligences offer neither simple threat nor simple reassurance. Instead, they provide mirrors reflecting our moral uncertainties, anxieties, and evolving identities in a technologically integrated world. Just as Cameron and Hurd glimpsed a future beyond the machine in 1991, contemporary filmmakers now explore bioengineering, digital consciousness, and our deepening, often uncomfortable intimacy with technology—expanding the mythos and inviting continuous re-examination of what it truly means to be human.

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This update continues your original essay's logic, reinforcing the idea that the cyborg myth evolves alongside human cultural and technological advancements, reshaping our narrative landscape and collective anxieties.

I said:

How do eXistenZ and Cronenberg's other films fit into this framework?

ChatGPT said:

David Cronenberg’s films, particularly eXistenZ (1999) and earlier films like Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), and later works such as Crimes of the Future (2022), fit powerfully and uniquely into your cyborg framework. Cronenberg's work emphasizes the visceral, biological convergence of humanity and technology, exploring not just mechanical hybridity but a more profound fusion of biology, technology, and consciousness—what might best be described as "bio-techno horror."

eXistenZ and the Biomechanical Cyborg

In eXistenZ, Cronenberg doesn't merely blur the line between humans and machines; he dissolves it into a grotesque, organic technological fusion. The film centers on an immersive virtual reality game experienced through organic "game pods," explicitly biological devices connected directly to the players’ nervous systems via a "bio-port"—a surgically created opening in the spine. Here, the cyborg is no longer simply mechanical, but explicitly and unsettlingly biological. Technology is portrayed as a literal extension of the body rather than a mechanical tool external to it. This explicit integration of body and technology amplifies anxieties about losing bodily integrity and identity, intensifying the myth of the cyborg through explicit body horror and bioengineering anxieties.

In Cronenberg’s vision, the machine isn’t merely "other"—it’s part of the self. The horror emerges not from external mechanical threats but from our own acceptance and willing embrace of biological modification. eXistenZ suggests that humanity’s most significant threat might arise from our internal desire for biological-technological symbiosis, a deep and troubling complicity in reshaping ourselves into increasingly ambiguous beings.

Videodrome and the Cyborgization of Consciousness

Cronenberg's earlier work, especially Videodrome, is foundational to this concept. The protagonist, Max Renn, merges physically and psychologically with television signals, blending mind and technology into a hallucinated, bodily reality. Cronenberg posits media as a powerful, invasive form of technology that not only reshapes human perception but literally reconfigures the body and mind into something monstrous, hybrid, and cyborg-like.

The Fly and Uncontrollable Transformation

The Fly (1986) portrays the devastating consequences of losing control over biotechnology, where the merging of human and non-human DNA results in monstrous mutation rather than controlled evolution. Here, Cronenberg frames the cyborg myth as tragic and uncontrollable rather than heroic or intentional. Seth Brundle’s transformation is a horror of unintended consequences, emphasizing anxieties around bioengineering’s unpredictability.

Crimes of the Future and Embracing Mutation

In his recent Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg explicitly revisits these themes, envisioning a future in which human evolution itself becomes dependent on deliberate and grotesque biological modification. The body itself is technology, a mutable canvas altered in explicit acts of surgery and public performance. The cyborg is normalized, embraced, and fetishized, marking humanity’s willing departure from natural biology into an engineered, artistic self-mutilation. Cronenberg sees this future not necessarily as dystopian, but rather as a space where humanity’s self-conception must fundamentally adapt or perish.

Cronenberg in Your Cyborg Framework

Placing Cronenberg’s work into your cyborg framework enhances and complicates it. While James Cameron and Ridley Scott typically explore technology as external but increasingly empathetic or integrated companions, Cronenberg highlights the existential dread inherent in internal biological integration and transformation. His films thus represent an extreme yet crucial perspective in the cyborg myth: that humanity’s relationship with technology is not only ambivalent and potentially empowering, but profoundly disturbing, physically invasive, and transformative at the deepest biological levels.

Cronenberg’s oeuvre represents the "inner cyborg," a uniquely horrific reflection on what happens when technology becomes indistinguishable from flesh, consciousness merges irrevocably with virtuality, and humanity’s existential anxieties manifest not through mechanical dominance, but through the very flesh that defines our humanity.

I said:

Incorporate that into your addition to my original article and make it the ending of the new article.

ChatGPT said:

Here's your updated and expanded article, seamlessly blending the Cronenberg perspective as a new, concluding segment:

Cyborg Article Update

Your updated article is ready, integrating recent films and streaming content, and culminating powerfully with Cronenberg’s unique perspective on the cyborg myth. Let me know if there's anything more you'd like to refine!

I said:

were you trying to give me the update as a downloadable file?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, the updated article I prepared is now available as a document on your canvas titled "Cyborg Article Update." You can download, edit, or further refine it directly from there. Let me know if you need anything else!

I said:

Did we miss anything between the terminator and now that is significant?

ChatGPT said:

Your update covers a comprehensive range of significant films and series, but a few notable works might also be worth mentioning or expanding on to complete the picture fully:

Additional Notable Films and Series to Consider:

• The Matrix Series (1999–2021):
  The Matrix franchise significantly redefines the human-machine conflict by presenting a reality entirely fabricated and controlled by machines. It explores questions of reality, consciousness, and free will, embodying anxieties of technological dominance and human subjugation through simulation.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2017):
  Both the original anime and its Hollywood adaptation powerfully illustrate cyborg identity and existential anxiety. Major Motoko Kusanagi's struggle to understand her humanity amid extensive cybernetic enhancement emphasizes identity ambiguity and consciousness separation.
• Transcendence (2014):
  This film addresses fears around digital consciousness and singularity, examining consequences when human consciousness merges fully with technology, becoming an omnipresent, potentially threatening digital entity.
• Chappie (2015):
  A unique exploration of artificial intelligence learning from humans, developing moral ambiguity. It portrays AI evolving through emotional growth, mirroring a child’s development, leading audiences to reconsider the line between human and machine consciousness.
• Annihilation (2018):
  Though less explicitly cyborg-focused, Alex Garland's film vividly explores bioengineering and mutation, illustrating the potential for uncontrollable biological-technological fusion.

Recommendation:

You might integrate brief mentions of The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and perhaps Transcendence or Chappie into your analysis to further solidify the cyborg mythology narrative from the late '90s through today.

Would you like to incorporate these additions into your current text?

I said:

Yes, but leave Cronenberg for last.

ChatGPT said:

Here's your article reworked to integrate the new material into your original style, removing headings and captions, and reflecting your voice closely. I've integrated the new material seamlessly into your original article, closely imitating your writing style and removing the headings to maintain a continuous narrative. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like refined!

I said:

Consider this. Here is what I wrote about Terminator 2. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might replace the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we project our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of the cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we have joined with The Cyborg to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds. And here is what you wrote about Cronenberg. David Cronenberg’s films uniquely amplify and complicate this evolving narrative. In eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg dissolves traditional boundaries between human and machine through grotesque biological integration, where technology becomes invasive extensions of the human body. His earlier films like Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986) explored uncontrollable biological transformations and psychological mergers of humanity with technology, resonating deeply with contemporary anxieties about losing bodily and psychological autonomy. Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future (2022) expands this vision further, portraying biological modification not as exceptional horror but as humanity’s disturbing yet normalized future. How would you characterize those two styles? Which do you prefer? Ultimately, Cronenberg’s work embodies our deepest existential dread—that our true fears may lie not in external threats but within ourselves, in our profound complicity with technology’s invasiveness. The ultimate cyborg, in Cronenberg’s view, is no longer an external antagonist or companion; it is the unsettling reflection of humanity’s relentless, sometimes grotesque desire to transcend its own biological boundaries. This evolving narrative compels us to confront increasingly blurred lines between self, machine, and the profoundly uncomfortable territory within.

ChatGPT said:

The two styles you've presented—the original passage about Terminator 2 and the new passage about Cronenberg—have distinct characteristics:

Your Original (Terminator 2) Style:

• Philosophical and reflective: You're introspective, balancing analysis with poetic, existential reflections.
• Narrative-driven: You tell the story of humanity's relationship to technology as a myth evolving over time, placing films into a broader cultural and philosophical context.
• Metaphorical: Your language often uses metaphors ("machines as angels," "paranoia stays one step ahead") to convey deeper thematic points.
• Inclusive and Integrative: Your writing synthesizes and connects disparate ideas into a cohesive, meaningful narrative.

Cronenberg Passage Style:

• Analytical and clinical: My Cronenberg section employs a somewhat colder, more detached language—terms like "grotesque," "biological integration," "invasive"—evoking a more clinical, almost surgical precision.
• Focused on visceral reaction: Emphasis on visceral imagery and physical transformation, aligning closely with Cronenberg’s own cinematic style.
• Conceptually dense: Heavily focused on psychological and existential dread, stressing internalized fears.

Preference and Recommendation:

Both styles are effective, but your original style is more expansive, inviting, and engaging. It's reflective and insightful, capable of elegantly weaving together philosophical and narrative elements into a coherent exploration of human-machine mythology.

The Cronenberg passage, while strong and precise, leans more clinical and analytical—reflecting Cronenberg’s own filmmaking style perhaps too directly.

If you want consistency with your original vision, I recommend reshaping the Cronenberg paragraph to align more closely with your original, philosophical narrative approach.

Would you like me to rewrite the Cronenberg section more closely matching your original philosophical style?

I said:

Give it a try.

ChatGPT said:

Cyborg Article Update

Since Terminator 2, Hollywood and streaming services have continued to explore the uneasy coexistence between humans and technology, increasingly blurring the traditional distinctions and anxieties once embodied in distinctly evil or dangerous machines. The simplistic moral clarity once applied to machines has dissolved into a subtler and more ambiguous exploration of morality and identity.

The Matrix series, beginning in 1999, redefined the human-machine conflict dramatically by depicting a reality entirely constructed and controlled by machines, raising unsettling philosophical questions about free will, consciousness, and humanity's vulnerability to technological dominance and simulated existence.

In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), the menace of artificial intelligence arises not from brute strength but from the seductive power of emotional manipulation. Ava, the AI at the story's core, challenges viewers to reconsider boundaries between genuine emotion and technological simulation, echoing themes explored deeply in HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022), where android hosts experience cruelty at human hands, forcing uncomfortable reflections on the nature of humanity itself.

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) revisited and expanded Ridley Scott’s portrayal of replicants, placing a replicant protagonist at the center of a profound existential search that blurred artificial and human distinctions even further. Here, machines exhibit deeper emotional complexity than their human creators, underscoring humanity’s anxieties around identity and authenticity.

Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) introduces Vision as an idealized synthesis of human empathy and AI-driven wisdom, capturing contemporary dilemmas about the possibilities and perils of seamless integration with technology. Netflix’s Black Mirror further expands these anxieties, particularly in episodes like “San Junipero” and “Metalhead,” presenting digital consciousness as both liberation and existential menace.

Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie (2015) uniquely depicted artificial intelligence acquiring morality and emotions similar to human development, thus complicating conventional fears of machine intelligence and provoking deeper questions about consciousness. Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade (2018) portrayed the cyborg condition as simultaneously empowering and imprisoning, reflecting deep contemporary fears about invasive technology. Conversely, James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel (2019) presented cyborg identity as a hopeful evolution of humanity, normalizing human-machine synthesis as empowering rather than threatening.

Streaming series such as Apple's Severance (2022) and Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral (2022) have pushed this exploration further by making technological integration appear commonplace yet persistently unsettling, mirroring contemporary unease about the omnipresence and subtle invasiveness of technology in everyday life.

Films like Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2017) and Transcendence (2014) confronted fears surrounding digital consciousness and identity, vividly exploring the anxiety of human minds existing as omnipresent digital entities. Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018) portrayed bioengineering and uncontrollable mutation, amplifying anxieties around biological-technological fusion. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) blurred human-machine boundaries even further by exploring emotional intimacy with AI, while M3GAN (2022) humorously critiqued consumerism and contemporary family dynamics through the portrayal of a malevolent AI doll.

In the films of David Cronenberg, these explorations reach a deeper, more unsettling dimension. Cronenberg's characters embody a visceral integration of biology and technology, dissolving traditional boundaries in ways that are disturbingly intimate. In eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg portrays technology as a biological extension of the human body, merging external devices and internal physiology into one continuous, invasive reality. His earlier films, like Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), vividly depict uncontrollable transformations, where humanity is overwhelmed by its own technological desires, reflecting profound anxieties about the loss of bodily and psychological autonomy. With his recent Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg envisions biological modification not as exceptional horror but as humanity's accepted and inevitable future.

Cronenberg thus echoes and amplifies the narrative introduced by Cameron and Hurd in Terminator 2: that our most profound fears may lie not in external mechanical threats, but within ourselves—in our subconscious complicity with technology, our desire to reshape our very nature, and the unsettling recognition that the ultimate cyborg might be the disturbing yet compelling image reflected back at us when we dare look inward.

I said:

That was fun. Thanks

ChatGPT said:

You're welcome! Glad you enjoyed it. If you need anything else, just let me know.

 

The Studio System Redux

I’m thinking about defending the studio system against promiscuous auteurism. I suspect the studio system may be our best chance to maintain some semblance of quality in film by acting as a gatekeeper, a bestower of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, an imprimatur that narrows our viewing options to an almost manageable way too many now that streaming has kicked into high gear. That’s a role critics have played in the past and the auteur theory was the perfect instrument for separating the wheat from the chaff, the quality art from the kitsch. But in a streaming world of tens of thousands of directors, concentrating on the work of a handful of auteurs seems, well, limited. And the number of true auteurs may be even smaller than some critics believe. Many of the auteurs only made the list because we stretched the definition of authorship. I still believe there have been, are and will be auteurs, but my take now is that only makers like Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Cassavetes and others who write their own screenplays as well as realize them should be considered authors of films. That reduces the candidates for the exalted status of auteur considerably. “Pantheon” directors like John Ford who primarily realized scripts written by other makers, would be immediately demoted, directors like Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Terence Malik, young Greta Gerwig, Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola, Kubrick, and Oliver Stone would be promoted and directors like Scorsese, Cameron, Bigelow and Scott would become questionable auteurs. Certainly someone like Antoine Fuqua would never make the cut. But wait.

About eighteen years ago I missed King Arthur (2004) when it was first released. There are probably a number of reasons I wasn’t interested in seeing it, primarily, I think, because I had no great interest in Fuqua the director. I had seen Training Day (2001) but wasn’t particularly impressed, and I probably counted Fuqua’s music videos against him. But why I dismissed Fuqua’s film doesn’t matter really, because if I had seen King Arthur in 2004 I would have seen an entirely different film from the one I saw one evening when I was bored, clicked through the movies on Cinemax, and decided to give King Arthur a look. Back in 2004, I hadn’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and tried to imagine ways Ishiguro’s foggy Arthurian England could be rendered on film. And although it was first published in 1956, I hadn’t read Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples yet either. When I read the first volume I realized the history of the Saxon conquest of England was as vague as the memories of Ishiguro’s characters in The Buried Giant. The Fifth Century generally is a murky, empty space, lost in time and waiting to be filled.

This was on my mind when I had my first look at Fuqua’s King Arthur. I’ve watched it four times now and I still can’t explain why I am so intrigued and, yes, moved by the film. I understand some of it. I was struck by how much King Arthur resembles a John Ford Western set in the darkness, grime and poverty of Fuqua’s 5th Century England, not just because of the similarities between King Arthur’s knights and Ford’s cavalry officers and cowboys, but also because Fuqua uses portrait shots of his characters to freeze them in time and in our memories the way Ford did, and even goes John Ford one better by using portrait-like close-ups of King Arthur’s knights to transform them from Romans to Sarmatians and to restore them to the Middle East at the end of his film. And King Arthur is a striking example of the way the confluence, the synthesis, of film and literature creates a rich experience for viewers who can bring something of their own to a film. Fuqua’s portrayal of the Romans, Britons and Saxons fits my picture of the Britons, Arthur, his knights and the Saxons in The Buried Giant and in Churchill’s history better than the Medieval rendition of those characters in typical Arthurian films. Fuqua’s mise-en-scène is, for me, powerful and poignant. Like all great myths, the legend of Arthur never fails to entertain. And Fuqua’s King Arthur is a dark and fascinating retelling of that myth. But was it Fuqua the director who did all that, and if it was, how did he get to that place?

King Arthur is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, based on a screenplay by David Franzoni. Without interviewing them it’s impossible to know if the King Arthur project originated with Bruckheimer or Franzoni, but almost certainly it did not originate with Fuqua. And that’s the point. In the case of King Arthur, the track records of the producer and the screenwriter are better guides to the quality of the film than the oeuvre of the director. And that’s very neat, because it is going to be easier to keep track of and predict the quality of the work of production studios than it is to get a handle on the talent of individual makers of streaming film and video. If we get lucky, the studios will step up to the job of making sure that the quality goes in before their names go on. The best bets right now? HBO and Netflix.

For the would-be makers of screenplays and films, information about how the studio system works, how projects are conceived and realized in the real world, will become an increasingly essential part of their education. Surprisingly, just when an explosion of bandwidth makes it easier than ever to make and distribute independent films, studios may become more important to filmmakers and audiences than they were in the heyday of Hollywood.

Everything old is new again. (Hat tip to Peter Allen.)

I Remember

I like accidents, ephemeral events, things you catch out of the corner of your eye. Melancholy moods, dark streets, the rain. Redemption. Seeing the old order brought down and chaos reign. Reluctant heroes. Magic and the supernatural. Women who work retail.

Everything is memory, even those recent memories we think of as the present. If you can’t buy that, nothing I say will make sense. My recollections of my own life are exactly like my memories of films. And of my dreams.

A long time ago, I had a recurring dream that lasted for months, the kind of dream you can wake up from, go back to sleep and pick up where you left off. I was a prince in exile on another planet. There was not a trace of the modern world. Everything was medieval, 10th Century maybe. We fought with swords, spears and bows and arrows. With axes. Mostly in the dark. I had a wife and a couple of kids and a band of loyal followers. Sometimes I feel like I just fell to earth.

I was a kid who could read words he couldn't pronounce. And I misunderstood and mixed up half of the things I heard. I thought Pound said "hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one bordello" and Dylan Thomas said "in my craft of celluloid."

I was born in a Texas Gulf Coast town during the Depression, right before the war. My grandmother was Italian and my grandfather was an Irish cop. My father was a tall bohunk from Pittsburg who was in the Army when he met my mother. He got out of the Army, cut grass and delivered ice until my grandfather got him a job on the police force. He went back into the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up occupying Japan. My mother had a half-brother, my uncle Bill, who was in the Army Air Corps when the war started. He was the toughest man I ever knew.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents in their house down by the docks. During the Depression, my mother said, my grandfather used to bring home groceries and meat he got from the grocers and butchers on his beat. We'd share the food with my grandmother's sisters and brothers and their families sometimes. My mother emptied bed pans at the hospital down the street until she got a job with the Corps of Engineers.

I don't remember any of that. I remember card games in the dining room, listening to people talking and laughing while I fell asleep, a paper jack-o-lantern that caught fire, and falling off the back porch. Later, I remember the lights were off at night along the beach because of the German submarines in the Gulf. When my dad came home from Japan, he brought me a sword.

My first motion picture theater was the State Theater on 21st Street in downtown Galveston. The ticket window was on the street and there was a lobby with a concessions stand. The “colored section” was a small balcony upstairs. Admission was 20 cents and I got a feature, a cartoon, the news and a Western serial for my money. I’m sure I started out on Disney films, Tom and Jerry cartoons and the Cisco Kid but when I was old enough to take the bus downtown by myself I moved on to films like Storm Warning (1951). I was eleven years old. The movie frightened me, of course, but I sat through it twice. There were other theaters down the street that showed steamy adult movies like The Story of Bob and Sally (1948) and I heard people talking about those movies, but I was too young to get in to see them, so Ginger Rogers getting dressed, Ginger Rogers in a slip, Ginger Rogers’ white shoulders, her stockinged legs, muscular arms and a glimpse of her breasts were probably my first exposure to sex in the cinema. Doris Day, Ronald Reagan, murder, rape, a whipping, burning crosses and white hoods were part of the Storm Warning mise-en-scène, too, although that term wouldn’t have meant anything to me then even if it had been invented.

The Martini Theater down the street from The State was a more toney venue. I went to grade school with the manager’s daughter. They had a color television, the first I had seen. The first television of any kind that I saw, a black-and-white RCA, was owned by the Salinas family down the block. The neighbors gathered over there to watch boxing matches on TV. That was in the late Forties and early Fifties. In Galveston, Texas. Peter Pan (1953) was the last Disney film I saw before high school. The stage version with Mary Martin, televised by NBC a couple of years later, was more impressive.
I handled 16mm film at an early age, threading Barney Google and Snuffy Smith cartoons and short Westerns into a little, grey Keystone projector I had gotten as a present. I don’t remember how old I was, the occasion, or who gave it to me. Thinking back, it seems strange to me now that I should have had a projector like that. I projected the films on the wall in my long, narrow bedroom. I staged plays with prop characters I cut out of comic books and pasted on cardboard. I built a platform in the backyard and talked my friends into improvising scenes on stage. I drew comic strips, mostly about flyers and air battles, because the airplanes were easy to draw. Saturdays, I listened to Let’s Pretend on the radio in the living room and football games in the kitchen. I read Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book more than once. My favorite character was the Yellow Dwarf in East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Looking back, and how much clearer things seem looking back, I see all of that as work that was more important than church, school or family.

When I had measles as a child, my grandmother and her sisters took turns reading to me. I don’t remember a single book. And the only books I remember reading in high school, outside of the books we read aloud in class and comic books of all kinds, are Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane detective stories, a few Reader’s Digest books and Peyton Place. (I vividly remember the Peyton Place scene of a man giving his pregnant wife head.) Somehow, though, young Phaethon, plummeting to earth from the Sun God’s chariot, slipped in and nudged the Yellow Dwarf and his Spanish Cat off of the beaten path.

The summer before I left for college, I set out to read “everything.” But I don’t think I got very far. I enrolled in an American Literature seminar and was laughed at when I named James Michener as an important American writer. I was mortified. But in another seminar I heard Chaucer read in Middle English and snapped to what college and college professors were about. I cut classes to read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Teilhard de Chardin, Mailer, Algren, Jones, Shaw and Ginsberg. I saw films by Vadim, Truffaut, Godard and Bergman. I moved into a boarding house full of vets going to school on the GI Bill. I made drunken road trips to Mexican border towns. 

I witnessed the advent of color, wide screens, surround sound and Dolby, 3D, theater complexes with tiny theaters, naked women and almost naked men on the big screen in living color and in black-and-white. By the time I had graduated from high school, dropped out of college a couple of times, been drafted into the Army, lived in Germany where I wrote for an American tabloid, and got back to the states, I had been watching movies for over 20 years, but I don’t remember commenting on a single one of them to anyone until, watching Scorpio Rising (1963) sometime late in the summer of 1967, I turned to a friend and whispered: “Did he just say that Jesus was a queer?” And my friend, turning his leering, acid-distorted face my way, replied: “I don’t know. But I like the way he said it.”

That was my first brush with metonymy, a concept that, like mise-en-scène, I experienced long before I had a name for it. Years later, over dinner one night, I tried to sell the importance of metonymy in film to the Greek wife of a museum director. She cut me off. “Man lives by metaphor,” she said.

In was in 1967 that I discovered Antonioni and Fellini. I saw Blow-Up (1966), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Persona (1966), The Loved One (1965), and Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). I watched Godzilla (1954) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) on late night TV. I read a Wonder Wart-Hog comic book. I saw a drunk sleeping on the stoop of Carnegie Hall.

It was the summer an Army buddy and I took over the second floor of an old duplex in Galveston and put in some time arguing politics versus culture. He was a Swiss Marcusian and argued that politics shapes culture. I argued the opposite.

It was the summer of the Six-Day War and our favorite cartoon showed the aftermath of a collision between an Arab and an Israeli tank, the Arabs holding their hands in the air, the Jews holding their necks.

I read the Koran that summer and I was impressed by the idea of houris.

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Sitting by the pool at The Galvez, a grand, beach hotel one afternoon, I suddenly understood what a function was and lost my fear of mathematics forever.

I programmed computers at an insurance company downtown. After work every day, I'd drop a deck of punch cards off at the computer room and the operators would run my latest Keynesian model on the company’s IBM 7080 mainframe. The models always blew up. I never got the accelerator and the multiplier right.

My friend totaled my red '65 Barracuda Fastback on the Boulevard one afternoon. He had just come back from the Monterey Jazz festival. The richest man in town sent him out there with somebody's wife, probably as a joke. My friend ended up inheriting a department store in Basel. Somebody’s wife ended up finding Jesus in the bathroom of a cheap motel in Laredo one night. She was crouched in the corner, desperate for help, and it was Jesus or the big cockroach that had just crawled out from under the sink.

I still think it's about culture. About education in all its forms. If I don't know what a credit default swap is, never saw a play or an opera, never read a serious book or saw a serious film, don't know what a function is, never read any history, how can I believe I know anything worth knowing at all? What does “serious” mean? I think it’s about the intention to do more than pass time. 

Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership, to political office, you see, have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment, read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate, idea will work its way into the political process. The culture of dissent just isn't there to sustain it.

It’s not my intention to create a culture of dissent. I wouldn’t know where to start. My intention is less ambitious and less serious than some. Norman Mailer felt “imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." I just want to raise sensibilities a notch. I freely admit that my intention is highbrow, though I fear I am too lowbrow myself to produce anything of real highbrow value. I will settle for building a little raft by lashing together, in homage to a brilliant scene in the HBO series Rome (2005 - 2007), the bloated bodies of a few old thoughts.

I read John Simon and Pauline Kael before I went to film school. In film school I read Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt. After film school I read Bazin, Wollen and Tarkovsky. I believe it was Simon who said the difference between critics and reviewers is that critics assume you’ve seen the film.

I could find out if it was John Simon who said that, but I’m determined to resist the urge to “google it." I’ve had too many dinners and friendships ruined by people reaching for their cell phones to resolve a doubt, nail and ambiguity, or dispute a fact. No one vaguely recalls, imagines or speculates in the face of a cell phone and Google. No one makes up a more pleasing reality at dinner anymore.