Edge-Fiction

Contagion - Film Review

2011-11-20T20:20:00.000Z

As one of Soderbergh’s last films (apparently), Contagion hooks in on the fears raised by the potential of a bird flu crisis a couple of years ago and tells the story of a hybrid flu-type virus pandemic (this time a mutation of bat and swine flu) that the poor human race cannot cope with. It’s the 1970s All-star Cast Disaster Movie genre given a 21st Century makeover. Yet that’s where the similarities end.

The script’s approach is more essay than dramatic movie, preferring instead to analyse the organisations involved and their numerous procedures and strategies to contain the virus. The trouble is that the film moves with an urgent pace that counteracts the story’s emotion. The film seems uninterested in lingering on the fear and loss of everyday people, refusing to spend time getting to know the characters, to sympathise and empathise with their situations.

The main emotion is channelled into the storyline of Matt Damon’s character (as is the moral theme of the story), the single father (who’s immune) trying to protect his daughter and come to terms with his wife’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) death. However, Matt Damon as an actor does not do emotion well, so the point, to a certain extent, is lost. What little emotion remains comes from Kate Winslet’s doomed CDC medic and her futile attempts to contain the virus. But this works only on the level of sympathy, nothing deeper.

The film’s most appealing element is its cinematography. Soderbergh’s (who worked as both director and DOP) camerawork is faultless, capturing the stark, cold imagery of the pandemic with assured poise.

If you enjoy procedural movies, then the pace will keep you riveted.

I Saw the Devil - Film Review

2011-11-20T20:17:00.001Z

I Saw the Devil is about angels. Really? Well, there's plenty of religious imagery at work, but it's really not that deep. A very glossy and sometimes over the top serial killer story that pits good against evil. The midpoint reversal is fiercely fresh and ultimately leads the two main characters to become as wicked and immoral as each other. That's a theme in itself, but the film seems less interested in these social morals, prefering instead to simply have fun with the genre, and it becomes a better film because of that.

Senna - Film Review

2011-11-20T20:14:00.001Z

The producers of this film achieve their aims brilliantly by making Senna much more than a documentary. The vast use of archive footage to tell Ayrton Senna's inspirational story turns this into a real life action drama that never loses sight of the fundamental function of all stories, both fact and fiction – to illicit an emotional response in the audience. Senna does this superbly. The dramatic irony is in-built and inescapable – I knew what was coming but by the time I arrived at the end I didn’t want to watch.

The Switch - Part I

2006-11-28T15:21:00.001Z

This was the first short story that I managed to get published (as Genna's Ghost), although this version is much changed from that which was published. It's a supernatural story about loss and guilt, and the huge sacrifice that's sometimes needed to put wrongs right. Enjoy...

The Unknown Writer

The Switch

White dust sheets cover every item of furniture as far as she can see into the house, ghostly testaments to its desertion. Daylight slices through the boarded windows to cut portions of the oak block floor into bright squares, like haphazard stepping stones leading over some unknown pond. Dust dances in the glare, like twinkling stars, its clarity enriched by the gloom of the distant interior.

Genna Reed stands outside the entrance, rain pouring from the slate sky, and absorbs every detail of this atmosphere, her nose catching the sweet cedar that she remembers of the house, her body sinking into the comforting nostalgic warmth of a childhood spent within its walls.

She smiles, and yet she also trembles; not enough for her to worry that Steven might notice, but enough for her to be aware of: this is the first time in twenty years that she's set foot inside her childhood home.

It is a moment to savour, and as she steps across the threshold, she lifts her leg in through the doorway almost in slow motion, and carefully sets it down on the oak floor.

“I’m home,” she whispers.

A sudden squall of wind howls in through the door from behind her, lifting her shoulder-length chestnut curls to briefly hide her face. The gust catches the chandelier and its crystals clink delicately, like rusted wind chimes.

In her peripheral vision she sees movement. She turns in time to see a picture frame fall glass-side down on top of a bureau that runs along the stairs. She creeps across the hall and reaches to lift it back up, to see who is in the photograph.

“When you said you’d inherited a house, I didn’t think it would be a mansion.”

She snaps her hand back without touching the picture and turns to face Steven, who is looking around the hall with childish amazement. He surges past her to the foot of the stairs.

She sighs and says, “It’s not really a mansion-”

“This is a great place.” He caresses the mahogany banister. “A really great place.”

She walks across the hall, a ray of daylight gleaming over her chestnut curls. She enters the nearest room, the door creaking as she pushes it in. The interior is darkened by the shutters over the windows, and the oak floor runs all the way through, the gloom amplified by its dark stain. Steven enters and begins uncovering the furniture like a child unwrapping presents on Christmas morning.

“Most of this stuff is antique,” he says.

The furniture is old, that is all. Its financial worth is valueless to Genna. What the place represents to her is where the real value exists: the memories, the nostalgia, her very childhood. She creeps around the edge of the room, gazing up at the grand portraits of past kings and queens. She pauses before a portrait of Napoleon. It had been her father’s favourite, a possession that he cherished more than anything, or anybody. As a child she had never been allowed to touch it, and in fact had never been allowed in the same room as it until she was fifteen.

A nearby door clicks ajar, creaking slightly. She stares at it for a moment, trying to see through the crack into the gloom beyond. She turns back to Steven, but he is still busy uncovering furniture and examining ornaments. She turns back to the open door, stares a moment longer, as though willing herself the courage to go through, and then, before she can change her mind, slips through into the room beyond.

The shuttered windows allow in only a little of the daylight, which pierces the gloom in crisscrossing lasers of grey. The room is vast, with a high ceiling from which hangs two grand circular chandeliers. Baroque coving, which would have been more fitting inside some ancient mausoleum, runs everywhere. In the centre of the room is a single piece of covered furniture.

The light brightens and the floor flares with countless pools of shimmering sunlight. She searches them, eyes flicking from one to another, and the memories flood back.

The room was filled with hazy summer sunshine and a ten-year-old girl danced a waltz to Vivaldi’s Winter, her bare feet padding the sun drenched wood floor as she danced.

Smiling, Genna slips off her shoes and slides her bare feet towards the nearest pool of sunlight. It fades before she reaches it, and her smile fades with it. She slips her shoes back on and turns to the white dust sheet.

She gives it a slight tug and it slips away to reveal a piano. She caresses her hand over the wood, her fingers floating over the elaborately carved roses along the instrument's side, lovingly, ardently. She sits on the seat, delicately lifts the lid, and presses a key. The tune resonates through the room, and the nostalgia hits her again, hot and heady.

The room was again filled with hazy summer sunshine, and the same ten-year-old girl sat at the piano playing Moonlight Sonata with taught precision.

Genna dances her fingers over the keys and plays Moonlight Sonata with the same perfection. Her eyes well and a tear rolls down one cheek.

Footsteps bellow and she looks up to see Steven striding across the room towards her. She lifts her hands from the keys and silence engulfs the room, the spell broken. She carefully lowers the lid back over the keys.

“This house is great,” Steven says. “Are you going to sell it?” He twirls, looking up at the chandeliers. “You’d be crazy not to. It could make a million, easy.”

Genna stands and looks up to humour him, then edges away. Steven strides across the room and looks up at a portrait of a gaunt man which hangs over the fireplace.

“Who’s this?” He hears a door creak and turns to find Genna gone. “Gen?”

He waits for a reply, but there is none. He paces to the door and steps through only to be faced with what seems like an unending labyrinth of doorways and stairs. He sighs and marches into the maze.

“Genna!” he shouts. “Come on, I haven’t got time for this.”

To be continued...

Do Androids Dream Of Electirc Sheep? - A Discussion of Theme

2006-11-20T13:09:00.002Z

First published in 1968, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a story of great thematic and ideological beliefs that even today still resonates with absolute power. Its voice, instead of decaying with time, has grown stronger and is now at that pinnacle where it has simply become infinite.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the novel, but I prefer to discuss the novel because, in my opinion, it is by far the superior of the two works.

Throughout most of Dick’s works, and Androids is no exception, he seems distracted with the question, What is reality? Most Dickians will know that this theme comes from his ravaged days as an LSD lover, which fuelled his growing paranoia, but with Androids he also focuses his themes to analyse and exhibit the human penchant for destruction.

Set far in the future, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the story of Rick Deckard, who is a Blade Runner - a specialised bounty hunter hired by the police to hunt down and kill escaped androids. He’s tasked to kill six who have escaped to Earth from their Mar's colony, but they are the Nexus 6, the newest model, hard to discriminate between their human counterparts, and very dangerous. The only distinction is the androids’ lack of empathy, but to distinguish this, Rick has to get close to his prey and give them the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test before he can identify them as androids, and kill them.

Androids has a seemingly limitless wealth of philosophical themes and ideologies, of which a whole encyclopaedia could be, and probably has been, written. However, for the benefit of this article, I just want to concentrate on its main theme to show how Dick constructed its strand throughout the novel and, most importantly, gave it meaning.

It is a complex theme that highlights humanity’s predilection for the persecution of people based on ethnic difference. The fact that the androids in the novel are exterminated because of their classification as non-human is the story’s prevailing statement, which already begins to exhibit certain parallels with the Nazi decrees against the human rights of the Jews during the Second World War. Is this what Dick is trying to show? If so, how does he lead the reader to this conclusion? How does he create and develop the theme of the novel?

Simply, he does it by comparing his story, which is set far in the future, with something that happened twenty years (at the time of writing) in the past? The mechanics he uses is the novel’s structure, that is, the events of the story, and the associated imagery of those events, which, as you will see, really does have powerful parallels with the past.

The setting of the story is a future Earth ravaged by a past nuclear war. Due to the radioactive fallout, the genes of all humans are deteriorating, and when the decay passes a certain level it is detected by compulsory monthly medical testing. The humans who fail this testing become known as 'specials' and are forbidden to leave the planet because of the government's desire to preserve the healthy gene pool of other human colonies.

"Loitering on Earth potentially meant finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind." (p. 15, SF Masterworks version, 2004).

Already these events echo Hitler’s devotion to the creation of the Master Race. Yet, in the eyes of the reader this in itself would not be enough to automatically parallel the extermination of the Jews during World War Two, and their subsequent ‘drop out of history’, their ‘ceasing to be part of mankind’, as Dick puts it. Dick has began his comparison with the past that he feels so passionate about, but there is not yet any explicit connection to draw the reader’s attention towards it; he needs something more to bring out his theme, so he employs a number of devices that can be associated with that past, and make the connection that much stronger.

For Rick Deckard to determine what is human and what is android, he uses the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test. Clearly the name Voight-Kampff is German, and is also structurally similar to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto title, Mein Kampf. This immediate association subtlety prompts the reader of the crimes against humanity which the dictator perpetrated twenty or so years before Dick wrote this novel. The enslavement and murder of androids in the story is justified because of what Rick constitutes as non-human, in this instance, the androids’ lack of empathy, just as European Jews were classified as subhuman by the Germans because of their difference in ethnic and genetic origins.

In order to expound and reinforce the theme that Dick wanted to drive at with this novel, he employed further imagery associated with Nazi crimes. One of Rick's android targets is an opera singer called Luba Luft, who, most notably, is originally from Germany. Rick tracks her down to an opera house where she is practising for a show. Rick sits in a seat in front of the stage and listens to her, even enjoys her singing, then traps her in her dressing room to kill her.

Dick purposefully wrote this scene to echo the stories he’d heard about German officers forcing Jewish opera singers to perform before sending them to the gas chambers. The event in this scene parallels those events in the past, but Dick is not only clarifying his theme with this imagery, he is also comparing Rick Deckard to those Nazi officers. Why?

Because he’s questioning humanity. The Nazi’s clearly had no empathy for the Jews (Dick actually believed that the lack of empathy demonstrated by the Nazi’s proved that they were not human), so by comparing Rick Deckard with these cruel officers he is demonstrating his lack of empathy. To be human is to have empathy for others, and androids are incapable of empathy, that's why Rick has to use the Voigt-Kampff test. Yet Rick has no empathy for androids. The very fact that he watched Luba Luft's performance before moving in to kill her demonstrates his lack of empathy. On the surface this may suggest that Rick is actually an android, but I feel it goes much deeper than this, suggesting that to be human is to have failings, just like the androids: therefore they are identical to humans because of their failings, so doesn’t that make them human? If so, do they really deserve to die? And because this story compares itself with the atrocities of World War Two, it’s therefore asking the same question of the Holocaust: did the Jews deserve to die because of their ethnic origins? The answer to both is obviously no.

This overall thematic thread is a simple case of ‘signposting’ - placing events and images at certain stages throughout the story, each building on the last to achieve some kind of ‘hidden’ meaning. Obviously it’s assumed some knowledge on the reader’s part regarding the past events that Dick compares his story to (and even if not, only a little research is needed to gain an understanding), but even without that knowledge the events do not detract from the story because they are the story; they work on many different levels, showing a story unfolding whilst simultaneously giving it thematic meaning. Yet signposting is the easy part; giving the events and images thematic meaning is where the art of the writer comes into play, it’s what separates the greats, the true geniuses, from the everyday amateur throng.

What Dick achieves so far then, is to contrast events and images of this future world with the events and images from the past, therefore connecting them, binding them, but other than that this theme has no real meaning… or has it? What Dick does to bring meaning to this theme is to brilliantly utilise one simple device:

He sets the story far in the future.

By doing this Dick gives the theme meaning, and ultimately turns it into an ideological message - by comparing events from the past with events from the future he’s saying that humanity is still the same, that it has not learnt, that it cannot learn, that even after all this time it has not changed, cannot change; that ultimately it is destined to continually carry out the same terrible mistakes.

Clearly I have only looked at one element of Androids, and it may appear that I have not done it justice. There are undoubtedly other ‘signposts’ throughout the discussed theme that I have chosen to omit; as I said earlier, one could write volumes about this particular novel, and although I would love to, I simply do not have the time at present to write what really would be an encyclopaedia.

Got any questions about this? Just add them to the comments.

© The Unknown Writer

Recommended books for aspiring writers

2006-11-10T16:47:00.000Z

For those who might like to obtain a better understanding of the story medium, here's a few of the more accessible books that I believe you could learn a great deal from:

On Writing - Stephen King
Screenplay - Syd Field
Teach Yourself Screenwriting - Raymond G. Frensham
The Writer's Journey - Christopher Vogler
The Creative Writing Coursebook - University of East Anglia
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers - Renni Browne & Dave King
The Writer's Handbook
The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I will add to it as I remember the better books.