Christopher Nolan succumbs to Lucas Syndrome, makes doody on the lawn

 It's a sad fate for creative people. First you make a masterpiece or two. The entire industry bows at your feet. Now you're making your next work but you've lost the all-important advantage of critical feedback, because there's nobody left who has the guts to tell you when you're making something fucking dreadful. It happened to George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels, it happened to Peter Jackson with the Hobbit movies, and now it's happened to Christopher Nolan with his new blockbuster train wreck, Interstellar.

As the name suggests, this is a film about interstellar travel. However, we don't actually get to see any of that for at least the first half hour of the film. Instead we stay on Earth with a series of pastoral scenes that would be more at home in a daytime soap opera than a Hollywood blockbuster. Presumably, Christopher and his co-writer/brother Jonathan Nolan didn't feel confident that they could get the audience to connect with the characters unless they spent a good deal of time establishing them. This is a good idea in theory but with this film's wooden dialogue and bargain-bin stereotypes, even another three hours probably couldn't have gotten me to give a damn about anyone on the screen.

So, after a half hour of corn farming, the story finally takes off into space. Things will get more better from here on, right? Nope. Once the ship is through the wormhole is when it becomes painfully clear that we're watching a film produced from a first-draft script. I could complain that none of the scientists in this movie talk like scientists, but frankly the broader problem is that the people in the movie don't talk like people. Half-baked Deepak Chopra-style musings on the nature of time and space are shoehorned awkwardly into the dialogue. Characters' emotions and motivations are not shown through action, but outright stated to the camera. And it's beyond me how Anne Hathaway managed to get through her atrocious monologue in which she states that "love is the only thing that can transcend time and space" without barfing.

The film's plot has more holes than a colander, but still somehow manages to be broadly predictable, probably because it draws so heavily on cliches established by earlier, better films. There are trippy wormhole sequences but they aren't nearly as interesting as in 2001. The banal second-act "twist" attempts to replicate the sense of existential isolation from films like Moon and Dark Star, but falls far short. And the silent space action sequences are a poor man's Gravity, with none of the deft editing and spatial geography that made that film work.

Indeed, it's apparent that Nolan's style as a cinematographer has gone backwards. He's still able to competently frame a shot, but Interstellar has none of visual inventiveness of Inception nor the kinetic energy of the Batman films. Instead we get interminably long "action" scenes where nothing happens except the frenetic cutting of shots and the drone of obnoxiously loud space organ music, forcing an artificial sense of "tension" down our throats.

Which brings me to my single biggest complaint about the film: it is so god damn long. The one moment of true empathy I found with the characters was in the scene where McConnaughey's daughter is frantically looking at her watch, since that was what I'd been doing for the past two hours. Like Peter Jackson, Nolan seems to be under the impression that the way to make a movie 'epic' is to take an average-length story and then make everything twice as long as it needs to be. A competent editor with the balls to stand up to Nolan could easily have cut 20-30 minutes from the film just by downsizing each scene. A really good editor could have cut another 30 minutes by excising Matt Damon's subplot altogether. This wouldn't have saved the movie but it would have saved me some time.

Interstellar has been hailed as another "thought-provoking" and "mind-bending" science fiction film, but it has neither the emotional nor the scientific depth to stand alongside the greats of the genre. It's a superficial carnival ride through the realms of hard sci-fi, flashing one concept after another before the audience as though trying to dazzle us with quantity rather than quality. And this is the quality that makes a movie not just boring but insufferable: it's stupid, but it thinks it's smart.

The Black Company and Agency in Fiction

Glen Cook's The Black Company is a classic of the fantasy genre, a true page-turner, and the grandfather of all the 'gritty and realistic' fantasy novels that swarm the shelves today, from A Game of Thrones onwards. But it's also groundbreaking in another way that might easily be overlooked: it's a work of popular fiction that gives its protagonists almost no agency in the narrative.

What does this mean? Agency means a character's ability to affect the outcome of the narrative. The idea that the protagonist of the story should have agency is a core tenet, albeit often an unstated one, of writing fiction. The conventional logic goes that whatever the stakes of the story, it must be the hero's actions that determine the outcome. If the story is about an intergalactic war, it has to be the hero who blows up the bad guy's space station, not anybody else. If the story is about a kid lost in the wilderness, it has to be the kid who finds a radio and calls for help - he can't just be rescued by someone who accidentally stumbled across him. The same rules apply even if it's a tragedy and the hero doesn't succeed: Hamlet, Oedipus and Tony Montana all bring their fate upon themselves, through their own actions. They have agency.

But in The Black Company, the protagonists have practically zero agency. The story concerns a war between two groups of enormously powerful wizards, each with vast armies and territories at their command. But the protagonists are not the wizards but the Black Company, a band of mercenaries who are nothing more than a single pawn on the chessboard. Through the whole book they are used and abused in a byzantine web of politics and betrayal. The narrator, Croaker, bears witness to several key events, but he is always on the sidelines, watching wizards kill and double-cross other wizards. (Yeah, the novel is pretty big on wizards, can you tell?)

Croaker does make one decision at the end of the book that seems like it will lead into him and the Black Company having more agency in the next two books of the trilogy. But taken as a stand-alone work, it's quite unique. Yes, there have been plenty of works of literary fiction that scuttle the agency of the protagonist - Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and David Mitchell's number9dream come to mind - but rarely has it been done in fantasy fiction, and without losing the page-turning quality of a good adventure story.

There is often an assumption with fantasy fiction that it should feel empowering to the reader: that you put yourself in the shoes of the mighty hero, and feel a sense of triumph when they succeed. The Black Company evokes a feeling not of triumph but of helplessness, more akin to the tone of Infinite Jest or The Trial than your typical fantasy epic. Yet on the other hand, the book still cracks along at a great pace because we still get to see, through Croaker's eyes, a lot of dramatic events. The sensation when you turn the page is not of pushing on excitedly, but of being carried along inexorably towards a dreadful conclusion.

I Liked 'The Horror at Red Hook'

Phew! Controversial first post for a literature blog.

 For those of you who don't know, 'The Horror at Red Hook' is a story by H. P. Lovecraft, remembered almost exclusively for being the apogee of racism in his fiction. The tale revolves around a cult of foreign Satanists infiltrating the slums of New York to practice their black magic. According to his wife, the story was inspired by Lovecraft's very real fear and hatred of foreign immigrants, particularly Asians and Arabs. It's full of dog-whistle racism, "slant-eyed folk" and "swarthy hags", permeated by a deep sense of xenophobia, and features an oddly specific attack on a real-life ethnic group, the Yezidis, whom Lovecraft describes as "Persian devil-worshippers".

Still, I liked it.

First I want to say that while 'Red Hook' is racist, it's not really much more racist than several of Lovecraft's other works, or those of other pulp writers. From what I'd heard before reading I expected it to be a stinking pit of bigotry, but it's actually quite similar in premise to 'The Call of Cthulhu': there's an evil cult doing evil things, and everyone in the cult just happens to be non-white. If you didn't know about Lovecraft's personal views and didn't pick up on phrases like "slant-eyed", you might not find it objectionable at all.

And as in 'The Call of Cthulhu', a story can still have artistic merit even if some elements of it are morally despicable. 'Red Hook' is unique among Lovecraft's stories in that it's set in the city rather than the countryside or some far-flung wilderness. The horror of the city, of the criminal underworld, of chaos creeping gently into even our most fortified bastions of civilisation, is an interesting theme to pursue. I love the way Red Hook festers like an infected sore on the body of New York, and how the buildings merge together with subterranean tunnels: a dungeon to rival the cyclopean cities of 'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'Dagon', but this one a dungeon that we have built ourselves. Sadly Lovecraft doesn't take it as far as I'd like because he generally stops at "The city is cruel and dark and rancid... that's because there are so many NEGROES there, obviously!" Perhaps I'll tease out this thread further in a story of my own some day - a noir/horror crossover, and not just of the two-fisted pulp variety.

The other reason I like this story is for the climactic scene, a Satanic fever-dream which surely ranks among the best of all Lovecraft's descriptive passages. Contrary to his usual dark unstated implications, here he really lets the words flow, combining the pagan horror of 'Dreams in the Witch-House' with the wild inventiveness of the Dreamlands stories. The first section is here:

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and Ægypans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould.

It's not his best story - the middle section in particular is weak - but it's far from his worst, and if we can celebrate other stories by Lovecraft, or for that matter by R. E. Howard or C. A. Smith, acknowledging but also looking past their moral failings, then I don't think that 'The Horror at Red Hook' deserves to be cast in the dustbin of literature.