Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
I have not made single comment about “Brexit”—the popular handle regarding Britain’s recent referendum whether to stay in the European Union or to leave it—because I don’t know anything substantial about it, things that an intimate and lived-in knowledge of the intricacies of culture and the palpable impact of policy can only bring.
Not that you and I shouldn’t care, because even the politics of Britain, halfway around the world, does affect all of us in unseen ways. There are reverberations, especially in a world that is increasingly run as a closed system dictated by the whimsies of internet, the weather, trade agreements, and the stock market—and only fools would say, “Why should you care? You’re not British.”
But I really don’t know anything.
Still many of the British people I do know—smart ones whose opinions I trust—are genuinely horrified by what has happened. So I feel horrified for them.
The writer Lara Stapleton, echoing the many Cassandras sprouting all over the web, told me over in Facebook: “It could crash the world economy, which might help Trump.”
That is, help Trump goose up enough fear-mongering to become the American president to succeed Barack Obama.
Oh. Dear. God.
I replied to Lara, given my own fears about the uncertainty that can unfold here in the Philippines after June 30: “After Duterte and this [the Brexit], a Trump win would be the final nail to the coffin called Apocalypse.” It didn’t help that when I tried to write “Duterte” in Facebook, AutoCorrect insisted on spelling it as “Détente.” Which might not be incorrect. Maybe AutoCorrect knows something we don’t? We’ll find out soon enough.
But that made me think. The likes of Duterte and Putin are increasingly in power all over the world—macho leaders with an almost fascistic appeal, and most of them brought to power by a popular vote, which begs the one irony and frailty of democracy. If the people decide, on a vote, that they don’t want freedom, what do you do?
So there you go. Macho leaders with macho blusters. And China in a standoff with the rest of Southeast Asia over territories it claims for itself. Then Brexit and the continuing European crisis, hobbled with the troubles in the Middle East and the migration nightmare that has created, plus the continuing crisis in Greece and the Ukraine. Then there’s the likelihood of President Trump.
It made me come to this tarrying conclusion: given the way all the chess pieces of current world events are positioning themselves, is World War III a possibility?
This superb introduction to Fallout 4 seems like the best illustration to use about war.
It is a farfetched idea—but is “farfetched” even a reality anymore. A year ago, the idea that Britain would leave the EU was considered “farfetched.” Look what happened.
All I know is, I can smell the gasoline and the trigger, and the world can burn.
This somehow reminded me of the planet in Isaac Asimov’s short story (and eventual novel) “Night Fall.” In that story, the world of Lagash has never seen night. The reason for that is because of their six suns. The Lagash daylight is a perpetual reality—and it is the only thing they know. Darkness is a myth, and shadowed places are places you never venture to.
Art by Dirk Terrell
But both prophecy and science soon unveil a terrifying truth: once every 2049 years, the suns are eclipsed by a rogue planet in their system, and there will be a quick descent to night fall. Night would be brief—but for a planet that knows only light, there is no such thing as a “brief night.” Alas, they’ve also found out that older and more mature civilizations before them had succumbed to the same temptation every time this phenomenon happens: the people, in beholding for the first time a thorough darkness, and with that the appearance of all the stars that had been until now completely unseen, they go mad. Seeing the far-off pinpricks of light suddenly surrounding them in the blackness of the night skies, they have gone mad—and they have proceeded to burn their cities and everything else that has made them “civilized” to the ground. And it appears the current cycle would go about the same exact way.
It has been a while since 1945. The sun has gone on for far too long.
We are such a blood-thirsty species, and we strangely privilege conflict above everything else.
Somebody ought to invent a fitting term, something nice and cozy, for sci-fi films that are undeniably low-budget but have an immense imagination to them they go beyond their monetary restrictions. I'm talking about something in the caliber of Shane Carruth's Primer (2004), a wonderful film which literally took the idea of time travel to the driveway, and ran away with our imagination. Has there been anything else like it? Perhaps Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997), which brought a thriller quality to mathematics? Perhaps, to some mystical extent, Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998)? There's Neill Blomkamp's mysteriously overpraised District 9 (2009) -- but this odious film is less sci-fi than just a monster movie featuring aliens from outer space becoming a lazy allegory for apartheid. Perhaps Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) is a perfect example of what I'm looking for, but this film explores its science with a hefty Hollywood budget so it's almost a given that we get a huge return in terms of pictorial spectacle. But what about those filmmakers who barely have enough to cover craft services? I'm talking about small films that dare to play around scientific mysteries, and somehow manage to bring spectacle for a much lesser price tag.
I'm thinking about this because, for some reason, today was spent watching films released in 2014 that somehow managed to do this. I'm quite surprised at the bounty.
There's Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, which is really a domestic drama with a Twilight Zone twist involving familial dopplegangers. A husband and a wife are going through a rocky patch -- they don't communicate well and the passion is virtually gone -- and so, upon the recommendation of their therapist, they go on a vacation in a country cabin, where soon each one encounters a completely realised version of their partner's better self. Its Solaris meets Scenes From a Marriage, and McDowell -- after a fashion -- manages to stretch the conceit well enough towards an unexpected ending. The narrative juggling act veers dangerously close to tedium sometimes, but the film manages to catch itself in time with every swerve.
Which is what exactly happens as well in James Ward Byrkit's Coherence. This one ostensibly begins as a story of eight friends gathering together for dinner on a night when a comet just happens to graze the earth's atmosphere. Dinner talk soon turns to convoluted terror and madness as the friends realise that their neighbourhood -- perhaps an effect of the comes passing -- has suddenly become a patchwork of the same house where alternate versions of themselves go through the exact same dinner in parallel timelines but with divergent details. The comings and goings of the characters, as each one seeks answers to the puzzle they find themselves living in, are an act of cinematic narrative chaos -- but for some reason, it works. It made me consider its most tantalising thought experiment: if you stumble on an alternate world, and your alternate self is enjoying the dream life you never had, would you be willing to kill your alternate self to take its place?
There is nothing neat and ordered in William Eubank's The Signal as well -- but not exactly for the same reasons. This one is a genre-bender that goes from a road trip movie involving a couple and their best guy friend, but then swerves towards horror film territory without warning, and then, in equal measure, swerves to another kind of film: a sci-fi mystery involving aliens and robot technology, set in a sketchy laboratory somewhere in the wasteland of Area 51. Or so it seems. And then it ends with the same majestic and mysterious power as Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998). The way I have described it now seems to make the film senseless -- but it is surprising in the way it makes sense and in the chances it takes with its stakes. Its genre-bending seems almost organic.
All in all, a splendid, unexpected day spent in science fiction. I wonder what other movies from this year, and of this persuasion, that I've missed out on...
9:01 PM |
Night Remembers
