An Interstellar encounter

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Note:  there area  couple of minor spoilers in here, for those who have not seen the movie. There is a bit of unexpected casting, not listed in the publicity materials, that is a genuine surprise. I'm actually not sure what the point of that surprise is, really, but it is there, so think about it before reading.

Science fiction movies come in two main categories, both large: the loud, weaponized alien invasion type, with stuff blowing up and carefully placed taglines, and the spiritually transcendent Big Idea kind with soaring music and people staring off at things. Chistopher Nolan's recent Interstellar is definitely that second kind.

It was OK, actually. It had some good science fiction stuff in it, though its best parts seemed to crib a bit too much from the 2013 Cuaron film Gravity (a vastly superior work, I think, largely because it was on a human scale, involving the survival of a single person in space, not entire races, civilizations, etc.).

I could go on about a lot of stuff I didn't like in it (the stunt-cast Matt Damon plays a smarmy douchebag so well it is startling than anyone would ever believe a thing he has to say, for example), but I want to focus on just a couple of things:  the film's portrayal of poverty, and of dishonesty.

The world we step into in the beginning of the movie is explicitly impoverished. Crops are failing, civlization has largely collapsed. And its intellectual horizons are likewise impoverished, as is shown at a parent/teacher conference where a former astronaut is cautioned to not have his daughter tell her classmates the Moon landings ever really happened--those dreams will impede recovery, it is implied.

But the main character, Cooper, lives with his family in a classic Midwestern farmhouse. He drives a pickup truck, goes to baseball games. It is dusty. OK. But otherwise, it does not look like any real compromises need to be made. Even the corn we see is high and vigorous (though weirdly flammable, as is shown in a late scene that makes little sense).

The whole thing is symbolized when the pickup has a flat. Cooper says to get the spare, his son says "that is the spare". Then a drone flies past and Cooper takes off in pursuit of it. Despite the fact that his rear tire is flat, he drives up and down hills, and through cornfields that, presumably, are the only food they have. The terrain is hillier than good corn country generally is, but I can deal with that.  What I can't deal with is that the flat tire vanishes as an issue.

Having a flat you can't easily fix is a great referent for poverty. Nolan likes the idea of poverty, but neither its reality nor its appearance.

Later, of course, we find an entire concealed space program, paid for by some secret appropriation, and one that is much more effective than our own open space program.

This is all a lie--appropriate, becaue, aside from poverty, the movie is about lies and promises not kept (except by deus ex machina miracle). The government lies to people to keep them from dreaming too high, Cooper gives his daughter an assurance he can't keep, Damon's Dr. Mann lies about his planet, Anne Hathaway's Brand (did she really not get a first name?) lies about how neutral she is about picking the planet that holds her lover (in a self-justifying speech so lame I can't imagine the crew doing multiple takes of it without cracking up), Michael Caine's Dr. Brand lies about pretty much everything.

Some of these lies aren't just self-justifying fibs, they threaten the very survival of the human race.  This is a society in crisis, falling apart and losing everything that once held it together. How does an honorable person of good will deal with this situation?  That's an interesting movie, and one, I think that the Nolans had in mind before they succumbed, as they usually do, the the lure of their favorite fabrics, fustian and bombast.

And can we give "clever" robots a rest for a while?

I did like a couple of moments:

Cooper and Brand return from serious time dilation on their first planet and the man they left in orbit stares at them, quaking, because for him it has been over twenty years.

Dr. Mann starts on a standard self-justifying villain speech but doesn't get more than three words into it before the consequences of his bad decisions wipe him out.

Starting with Scrivener

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Someone always has a piece of software that will make your life better in some way. And you know the kind of person too: bright-eyed, evangelistic, full of tips and tricks, obscure menu items, time-saving keystroke combinations...

And sometimes, they are right. They just need to overcome my suspicion first.

All writers, at least in my field, at some point talk about Scrivener, the program from Literature and Latte. It's a program that gives you a variety of ways to outline and plot, as well as write, compile, and submit manuscripts.

For a long time I had it, and didn't do anything with it except contemplate how much of a pain it was going to be to learn to use it. How much more productive would I need to become to make up for the time spent learning it? A got a couple of books, because that is how I prefer to learn, and then didn't read them.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I set aside a day to dig into a vast mass of notes and discarded drafts of a book I once worked on, set on the partly terraformed Venus of my novel Deepdrive.

First off, it was a dismaying experience. There were a lot of notes, on various sizes and colors of paper, in various notebooks, and even included a file I generated by Dragon Naturally Speaking after I had had my eye surgery and could not use my eyes to read or write. It was a bit like something you would have expected to find stuffed into a drawer in the Unabomber's cabin.

There was a lot of good stuff there, but it had no organization, and there were several sticking points that kept not getting resolved, the reason I had never managed to move things forward.

I decided to see if Scrivener could help me with this. Scrivener has a feature called the Corkboard, which is an image of notecards on a corkboard. Each notecard can actually be the top card of a stack of cards, if they all relate to the same thing.  And you can move them around and reorganize them. These cards are just a way of looking things, and this information can be viewed in other ways in the program.

So I spent one long day taking my notes and pouring them onto notecards. It was actually a transformative experience.  I created Plot cards, each of which was a scene, with groups gathered into sections, Character cards, one for each, cards for locations, organizations, and other important facts that needed to be decided.

When I was done, where I needed to work and make decisions became much clearer. And it wasn't actually that hard at all to do. I'm sure there is a lot of functionality that I haven't yet managed to get access to, but the liberation of being able to move cards at will, and scan over the plot at a high level, has already showed the program's value.

I have one set of cards called Open Questions. These are issues I have not yet resolved. How does someone escape from the situation they are in? How did this character learn this particular essential fact? Which of several possible characters does something important to the plot?

Having each question on a single card means I can sit down and focus on one clearly defined problem at a time.

Now, to solve each Open Question, I still write on my pads. It's the way I think, and I don't think that will ever change. Scrivener has let me clearly define the problem, though, and then I can focus my mind on it. When I think I have solved it, I write an underlined Good under the solution, and then delete the Open Question card, and put the solution in its proper place in the plot cards (what happens) and character cards (who does it, how this relates to their personality and goals).

Now, I can't say yet that I have solved the problem of the book, but Scrivener has allowed me to make way more progress on it than I have in years. So, score one for the clever software that helps me do my work.

 

 

Can a "mad annotator" be female?

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I'm fiddling with a story that has an annotator. You know,one of those secondary unreliable narrators who add notes to what purports to be the main narrative, arguing with it, subverting it, sometimes amplifying it. Just to make it more complicated, the main story is itself a lexicon, a collection of entries on an alien culture.

In my original thoughts, both the lexicographer and the annotator were male, two standard types of literary academics, one more flamboyant and fraudulent, one more nervous and obsessive. But I always like to try out different alternatives, and one would be to change the sex of one or both of these characters.

But, somehow, the obsessive annotator seems to naturally come down as male. At the moment, I can't figure out if that is just literary convention, or actually says something about the male neurophysiology. I'm inclining to the "it's just convention" position, since there are certainly many autism-spectrum women, obsessively detail-oriented women, narcissistic "this is about me, isn't it" women, etc. But, in my experience, while they certainly act as unreliable narrators, they more rarely appear as annotators. Maybe Amy Dunne, the wife in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, can count as an annotator, though not in a strict technical sense.

Could Kinbote be female? This is the kind of thing I think about when I can't sleep, which was certainly true last night.

The nebulous "Midwest"

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I grew in in Illinois, in suburban Chicago. I have relatives in Minnesota, Ohio, and Michigan. I am a Midwesterner, and will never be anything else. Acute ears here in Boston can instantly peg me to, not only the greater Midwest, but the Great Lakes area.

So I am surprised that there is debate about which states are actually in the Midwest. In this survey from 538, only 80% of respondents thought Illinois was in the Midwest. Who are these people, and why do they bother having opinions about anything?

To me, the Midwestern states are (West to East): Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, MIchigan, and Ohio.  No Southern states, please. No Missouri, no Kentucky (!),  One historical characteristic of Midwest states: they were settled from New England, and they were not slave states. In a sense, you could say that southern Illinois and Indiana are not in the Midwest, by this criterion, being more Southern inflected. It's basically the old Northwest Territory, plus Iowa ("around here, dear, we pronounce that Ohio").

The Old Northwest Territory

So they have townships, deep glacial soil and a lot of other glacial geography, nice folks who like casseroles (or "hot dishes"), and a scattering of French place names, which they grotesquely mispronounce.

Quick rule: if you could imagine anyone in town volunteering to serve in the Confederate Army, it is not the Midwest.  It is somewhere much meaner and more ornery. Maybe more fun, I won't argue about that. But not the Midwest.

And no Great Plains states. Great states, all, but completely different. Less water: not a lot of canoeing.  I'd say Midwest is corn and hogs instead of wheat and cattle, but Minnesota and Wisconsin wouldn't fit then. People from Minnesota are incredibly nice, so they want their friends in North and South Dakota to be in the Midwest. I've lived in Massachusetts long enough to say: screw that. Get your own region.

And, seriously, Wyoming, or Pennsylvania? Once words can mean anything, how do you communicate?

Perhaps with a gesture, I guess, which is not visible in this post.

"Feral Moon" on StarShipSofa

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My story "Feral Moon" came out in Asimov's last year. It's a work of military SF, somewhat out of my usual line, and I was pleased with it. It had been a long time since I'd written a solid novella. It dealt with the specific tactical issues of fighting your way through an inhabited asteroid (moon, really, this taking place inside Phobos) as well as the strategic issues of a too-long series of wars and the emotional issues of a recently dissolved marriage.

StarShipSofa has done an audio version of it.  Check it out.

The continued life of my one quote

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As I've mentioned before, when you write things, you can never be sure what will catch someone else's imagination. While I think I have coined many sly and clever aphorisms in my time, the one that has had real legs is

This is my "rose red city, half as old as time"

This nice graphic comes from this article, which informs me that Billy Beane, the baseball GM who was the subject of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, is particularly fond of the quote.  The article is nice in that it cites me very specifically.

I can't say as I've seen a lot of sales and interest coming to me as a result of this, but then, how would I really know?

Odd bits of Mound-Builder-related art

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I am currently working on a story that involves archeological hoaxes and  the Mound Builder myth. One research book is Mound Builders of Ancient America, by SF's own Robert Silverberg.  He has written several pleasing historical works during his career, and this one is complete, well-researched, and well-written.

One thing that strikes me is the cover illustration. which is identified as "An American Battle Mound" from a book called Traditions of De-coo-dah, by William Pidgeon (1858), an imaginative reconstruction of some ancient battle.

Would probably work better with parapetsThe thing that strikes me about the picture, though, is the two guys in front. While there is a desperate battle going on, they've decided to have a friendly little chat.

So, what are you doing this weekend, anything?I guess the artist needed a still point in the foreground to point up the frenzied activity in back. Or maybe the whole thing was less of a deal than it might seem.

Mound Builder myth has some relation to the Book of Mormon, and there is an illustration in the standard edition of that book which struck me in high school, and which I just looked up. It involves one of those many prophets throughout both myth and history who piss people off. Real prophets always do, you know, so be careful of anyone who claims to be a prophet, either in life or in fiction, who does not stimulate rage and opposition in otherwise placid people.

Safety firstThe Nephite inhabitants of this town are trying to get Samuel the Lamanite to just shut up.

But you know what's interesting? Not only did the Nephites build a nice staircase up to their parapet, they made sure it had an OSHA-approved guard rail.

Enough poking fun.  I have to get back to work.

Apologetics: explaining why what seems to a bug is actually a feature

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I'm going to start out with my clever definition of what the word "apologetics" means, and then I'm going to relate to a somewhat ill-mannered thing I sometimes do while giving a critique in a writing workshop.  Ready?

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Gross and Livingstone (why should an atheist have this massive tome sitting in the bookshelf closest his work desk? The world is full of mysteries. Even if you are an atheist) defines apologetics as "The defence of Christian belief and of the Christian way against alternatives and against criticism". But the part of it I find most interesting is when a religion has to explain some really weird thing in its scriptures or its traditions that outsiders make fun of. You come up with a mechanism. You explain how this seemingly out-of-context thing really is essential to the context. You create a story out bits of other stories. This can be an extremely creative act.

So I do define apologetics as explaining why what seems to be a bug is actually a feature. I was inspired to this way of approaching it from an episode of Roman Mars's wonderful podcast 99% Invisible, the one on interface design in SF movies called Future Screens Are Mostly Blue. Go listen to it, it's both funny and informative. What we all strive for.

What does this have to do with workshop critiquing? My, you are full of questions today, aren't you? Lost your negative capability again?

Sometimes there are things a writer has written that don't seem to hang together. Characters seem incorrectly motivated, events seem to arrive without cause. Maybe the author has a deeper scheme. Or maybe the author, being human, just hasn't worked things out thoroughly.

So coming up with an explanation for these disparate events, even if that explanation is clearly not what the poor author ever intended, can be....well, okay, it really isn't that useful to the person being critiqued. It's like doing backflips over a car wreck. This form of literary apologetics, particularly used in a mean-spirited way, is just not good form.

I like to think that wanting to show me where I'm wrong is a motivating force. Or is that just after-the-fact self-justification?

At any rate, use this on some piece of your own that has pieces you like, but just isn't jelling. What other underlying scheme might explain the observed phenomena? How many different coherent explanations can you come up with? Do any of them have features that stimulate your own thoughts?

Or do what Noessel and Shedroff, the subjects of the episode, do, and come up with other explanations for what doesn't make sense to you about works you love but find annoying in some way. It can be a really fruitful way of interacting with them, and is the basis for some lively fanfic.

 

Are there Pantones for teeth?

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In the past I have praised dentists for their largely unsung role in making our lives better.

Today I will do it again. A few months ago I lost a chunk of a tooth, and finally went in to get a crown fitted. I learned two interesting things.

One is that many crowns are now made of zirconia, a different form than that used for earrings sold on QVC, but based on the same properties of hardness. In a few weeks I will have zirconia in my mouth. I'll let you know how that works. Every time you go to the dentist, there is some new device, implant, material, or procedure. It never stops. That is the great thing about our civilization. No matter what it is, someone is working constantly to make it better, cheaper, or faster. A time traveler with a tooth problem would startle a dentist from even a decade ago.

The other interesting thing was that the dentist carefully matches tooth color. Everyone's teeth have slightly different shades. My dentist brought out a whole board of tooth color samples and carefully matched them against my teeth, finally picking one color for the bottom (darker) and another for the top (lighter). When I said that when he decided on his career he probably had never expected color matching to have to be part of his skillset, he said seriously that aesthetics is really important, and that a crown or implant that does not match the surrounding teeth is considered a failure. I don't know if the Pantone corporation, which essentially owns all color, also has a stake in tooth colors, but I wouldn't be surprised.

He explained each procedure as he performed it, drilled and excavated away, put on a temporary crown, and sent me on my way.

For much of human history the occasional person who managed to survive to my advanced age had no teeth. I not only have teeth, they are firm in my mouth, and those with problems are replaced with indistinguishable replicas. Give thanks to dentists, and the researchers and device makers who keep our dental technology moving forward. Sexy? No. Wonderful? Yes.

Lighting each story with the embers of the last

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In my new stint of writing, I have so far been successful in having one story thought about and ready to be started as I come to final words of the last.  Some days I have even finished one story and started the next in the same session.

This is a great way to keep the work flowing. But it does require that you have a story ready and thought about when the last one reaches THE END.

But tomorrow morning, when I get to my desk at 5:30, I won't! I finished a story this morning, and thought I would put another one together tonight, only to spend my time on a lot of essential business. It's nice to say that writing should always take priority, but there is a lot of other things that need to get done.

So I'm going to have to do what I don't like, and that is just start writing, hoping a story will emerge. Some writers thrive on this. I do not. Sometimes I do create something useful. More often, though, I create...a lot of words.

Wish me luck, and if you are up early, like I am, throw some narrative thoughts my way.

 

An explanation for opposition to female schooling

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One thing we see in religiously fundamentalist cultures is an opposition to female schooling. This comes up in the news most often about Moslem fundamentalists, but is part of other fundamentalist traditions as well. The usual explanation for this is the kind of non-explanation about how these people just want to keep women down, women are threatening to their worldview, something like that. Those things might very well be true, but seem inadequate.

A couple of days ago I was listening to Russ Roberts's indispensable Econtalk podcast. It was an interview with Edward Lazear on the works of the economist Gary Becker, who died recently. One topic caught my ear: Becker's work on the opportunity cost of raising a child, where he, controversially, classified a child as "a consumer durable".

Becker was trying to explain why poorer women in the 19th century had fewer children than wealthy women, while, in the 20th and 21st centuries, it was wealthy women who had fewer children. If having a child is a choice (and to some extent it always has been, even before reliable contraception), the relevant resource is the woman's time, since women, even in our theoretically equalitarian age, do the majority of child-rearing.

So Gary reasoned, well, if it's the mother's time that's involved then you have to ask: What is the cost of using the mother's time? And of course in economics one of the most fundamental concepts is opportunity cost. It's the cost of foregoing the next best alternative. And so Gary then reasoned that the opportunity cost of a child was the price of the mother's time; and the price of the mother's time is what she could be doing elsewhere. And that related to her wage rate. All right, so what does that tell you? Well, in the 20th century, what that says is that when women had the option to work, or when most women were working, as they are now, what you'd expect is that women with high wages have very high values of time, and as a result, it's more costly for them to take time off and to have children, and so they tend to have fewer of them.

In the 19th century, it was poorer women whose time value was higher, given how valuable their labor on the farm or in the household was to the success of the family enterprise, so they tended to have fewer children than wealthy women, who, given the constraints they faced, could contribute little to their own families.

That's an interesting observation and explanation of facts otherwise hard to explain, the kind of thing Becker was known for.

My issue here is not that, but to note that if you have a cultural value of having lots of children, and see them as an underlying resource in your struggle against the world, and essential to the success of your enterprise, the last thing you want is educated women, no matter how much value you get out of their additional brainpower. The greater the value of that brainpower, in fact, the less likely they will be to want to give birth to and raise a large number of children.

So, if you accept those premises, refusing to let women get educated only makes sense. Of course, I was kind of deprecating "attitudes" as a way of explaining things, but have really just identified a deeper and less structured attitude than just wanting to subordinate women, so clearly the real explanation is even deeper than this.

In fiction, we don't usually dig underneath for the contingent material circumstances that constrain and condition the cultural attititudes that affect the characters and their personalities and opinions. Except in science fiction, of course, where sometimes that is the point of the story, and one reason the genre still has unexplored potentialities.

Do I have a story in mind to deal with that issue? Not yet.

Dozois's Best SF 31: my story

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The Gardner Dozois anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection came out a couple of days ago.  It has one of my stories in it, "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in the same universe as my novels Carve the Sky and River of Dust. It comes from the wonderful anthology The Other Half of the Sky, edited by my friend Athena Andreadis.

As I've mentioned before, Athena is the reason the story exists to begin with, since she asked me to contribute to the anthology, and then, when I was unable to come up with anything, suggested the subject, the life of a certain character, Miriam Kostal, in between the two books (Dust is kind of a prequel to Carve).

This is always a great collection, and I look forward to reading the rest of the stories in it.

And the story itself has generated enough interest that I am thinking about another story with Miriam and the characters she encounters in it. We'll see.

 

Writing, and teaching writing

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There are a lot of excellent teachers of the craft and trade of writing out there, particularly in my genre, fantastic fiction.  Many writer friends of mine teach writing, either occasionally, or as their main money-earning career. On Thursday and Friday I was up at Jeanne Cavelos's Odyssey Writing Workshop, in New Hampshire, where I was a guest speaker for a day.

I have always been reluctant to add that particular arrow to my professional quiver, for a few reasons.  First is the fact that there are so many dedicated, talented, and hard-working people already providing the service. The second is that I have a day job, and another skill set, in content marketing, that pays the bills, so any spare time I have I want to devote strictly to the creation of fiction. And third is probably that I did not come up through the residential workshop structure that already existed when I was a new writer, in the form of Clarion, and so have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about being a free-range writer, idiosyncratic and unpolished, with no stake in the system.

Then I try something like a day at Odyssey, and have more fun than I've had in a long time. I do like to perform, and I do have opinions about the writing of fiction, and it was fun to do both with a group of interesting and intelligent people. In some ways, I am at my best when volleying ideas back and forth with other people. Ideas come to me that wouldn't emerge any other way. And, yes, I do like the idea that something I worked out with a student might actually stimulate their own ideas, and lead them to come with things they otherwise would not have.

So, maybe, I might try this more, we'll see. I do need to be careful to position myself in this market as what I really am, kind of an outlier, not necessarily trustworthy or a good example to emulate, but someone who can be entertaining and fun while being respectful of the individual needs of the writers he deals with. Call me the Crazy Uncle of writing workshops. With a well-written warning about potential side effects, I could actually be useful.

How big is your comfort zone?

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Big news from the Gray Lady today:  even crayfish get anxious when you shock them. They become less willing to venture out and discover new worlds and new civilizations.  After being given a nice Librium, they relax right down and start getting down with exotic alien maidens....

I was just sitting around minding my own business....

The real question is, when is the menace of researchers administering electric shocks to anything that moves, and many things that don't, going to end?  I mean, look at that poor thing. They should be ashamed of themselves.

But, now that they've done it, it is another indication about how much our minds depend on relatively simple structures evolved millions of years ago, sometimes for other purposes. And those ancient creatures evolved relatively complicated ways of judging and reacting to reality. That evolutionary environment didn't contain nasty researchers with electric crawdad prods, but it contained things just as nasty.

That's a difficult thing about coming up with a genuine alien. It's not that species that's alien, its the entire lineage it comes from. The reactions come from choices made deep in the forgotten past. Once you start thinking of the complexities of that, you'll never get off the ground.

Image search serendipity

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Often, when you text search a movie title for images from a movie, you see a few iconic images, images from a 70s remake, images of the actors in other movies, images from lists of similar movies, etc.  And then there are always the oddballs, images that have some matching text associated with them, but that don't have anything to do with the topic of the original search.

When I wrote my little piece on "The Narrow Margin", I of course searched on the movie title.  And, among all the various images that came up, the one below always did.

It's probably because of the margin of victory in 1916, or something, but I prefer to think that search is giving me a clue about the roots of noir, and the kind of overconfident men who think they can handle a situation that is completely beyond them.

"But I just wanted to make the world safe for democracy!"Of course, look at him enough, and he seems a lot more sinister than just the poor schnook who gets his lunch eaten by Henry Cabot Lodge. This is the man behind the guys behind the guys you think are the problem. The star of a new genre: Progressive Noir.

This week's arrogant rewrite: "The Narrow Margin"

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Many lists of great minor noir movies includes the 1952 train-centered The Narrow Margin, where a tough cop from LA is sent to Chicago to secretly escort a mob moll, Mrs. Frankie Neal, back by train so she can testify against her husband's gang. Gangsters get on the train to find her and kill her. The movie is usually described as tight and suspenseful, and, at 71 minutes, goes by fast.

Still, I think it is overrated, for reasons I will go into.  People really like it for one thing: the performance of Marie Windsor as the moll.

"You don't like me--but you aren't going to look anywhere else."

You may remember her as the disastrously sexy Sherry Peatty, the unfaithful wife of the Elisha Cook, Jr. character in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 noir, The Killing:

A classic noir marriageWhat happens in The Killing is mostly her fault (as expected). But what is with the "noir bad girl" wig thing?  I mentioned this in my discussion of Too Late for Tears a while ago. Fortunately, the actresses compelled to wear these things were hot enough to overcome their disadvantages.

Fortunately, if Windsor's wearing a wig in The Narrow Margin, it is a good one.

Windsor does her wise-ass sparring with Walter Brown, who is as bricklike as his name, and not much of a sparring partner. He is played by Charles McGraw, who has a voice like a cement mixer. He looks and acts a bit like a slowed-down Kirk Douglas, and, what do you know, he played Douglas's gladiatorial trainer in one of my favorite boyhood movies, Spartacus.

Brown comes to Chicago with his older, wiser, more cynical partner, Gus Forbes, to to pick up Mrs. Neil. En route, Forbes asks Brown what he thinks Neil looks like. "A dish," Brown answers. "What kind of dish?" And then we get this classic description:

Translation: "girls are icky."Because who else would marry a hood? But there is a twist in the plot that brings this whole assumption into question. But that twist is not the one that is interesting.

Here at the Chicago apartment, someone is lying is wait, and as Forbes and Brown escort Mrs. Neal out, someone tries to kill her, and kills Forbes instead. Brown gets her safely to the train station, and aboard the train. There she is resentful, and he is angry, sad about his partner, but dedicated to his job. They never do learn to get along:

"I still think you're icky."After this, it's a bunch of hugger mugger, with an innocent woman with one of those annoying 50s children whom Brown befriends, and several overlapping baddies. In fact, one smooth baddy who tries to bribe Brown is then whisked off the train at a station stop and is replaced by another one who flies from Chicago by plane to totally disrupt the "we're all stuck on this narrow train" concept.  And, at one point, a car drives parallel to the train on a totally straight road for miles and miles, also messing up the isolation scenario.

The story is really about institutional corruption, not about Mrs. Neal. Everyone is compromised, particularly Forbes. If this was an actual noir, the events of Forbes's death in that Chicago apartment building would be returned to, a couple of times, as it is reinterpreted.

And Mrs. Neal should actually do manipulative, maybe even nasty things in her desperate attempt to survive. There is actually an explanation in the movie for why she doesn't, but it comes late and is just a routine movie reversal rather than something that makes you reexamine all of your assumptions about what's going on. I do like that Brown never warms to her, never likes her, and never even seems to find her hot, which shows something about him, given the fact that they have to live in such close proximity:

A mysterious man on the wall is standing between them: part of the hidden movie.Forbes was clearly on the take. Someone took him out, or he got taken out by accident. And all the playing around in the train has a deeper purpose. I actually think a lot of this was in the story originally, but was removed during rewrites, or edited out to keep the focus on Windsor, and the running around on the train. Fine, I guess, but it leaves a perfectly good noir plot just sitting around, ready to be reused.

Speaking of "running around", at several points Brown is blocked in the narrow corridor by a self-deprecating fat man, Sam Jennings:

"No one likes a fat man except his grocer and his tailor"

There's something to him, but not enough. Potentially another interesting and expanding character.

Good stuff:

Aside from some credits music, there is only ambient sound in this movie, including the portable record player Mrs. Neal plays her jazz records on.

Brown never falls for Mrs. Neil.

Given the limitations of the big cameras they had then, this has amazingly flexible camera work.

In addition to that lacy thing, Mrs. Neal shows why giving up on dresses has made our lives poorer:

No need for a negligee with a dress like this.Oh, look, her hair does look like a terrible wig here. I think I have uncovered the dark truth of noir.

Fat Boy's Folly

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In college I wrote a story called "Fat Boy's Folly" to entertain my friend Bill. I don't actually remember what the story was about, but Bill later put that title on the weight track sheet he had on the wall above his scale. Somehow, though, I don't think I could have competed with Weight Watchers with that title for a business. Tough Love for the Tubby. Nah, that wouldn't work either.

A couple of nights ago, Marilyn, Sherri and saw a more recent version of Fat Boy's Folly, this time called The Whale, at the SpeakEasy in Boston. As it starts, an immensely fat man (actually a normal man in an impressive fat suit) sits in the middle of disgusting piles of old takeout containers, running what sounds like a fairly typical and boring online class where students write meaningless essays about great literary works. Who these people are, why they take this class, and how it works never quite becomes clear.

Class over, the fat man puts on some gay porn, masturbates, and almost has a heart attack. This lets you know you're in a modern work of art.

Then, various people pop in an out of his house: a Mormon missionary with a hidden agenda, a nurse who has a weird affection for this carcase, and a wittily obnoxious long-lost daughter. Later on, ex-wife and mom shows up.

There is a kind of plot, but it's more an actor's play, with some nice scenes, and a bit of a sitcom pace. Mormonism comes in for some whacks (is it really the easiest religion to make fun of?), particularly about its intolerant spirituality. As usual, a gay relationship has some extra oomph that a regular heterosexual relationship wouldn't have, at least to the kind fo audience that goes to a play like The Whale.

There is a cute essay about Moby-Dick that gets read over and over until you realize where it came from at the end. That is cute too, but is paced to seem like some kind of deep revelation.

Overall, not a wasted evening at the theater (Boston has a lot of those, as we know), but not so great either. But the fat suit is pretty amazing.