Unexpectedly free on a Friday night, I rang Spence and we saw Sunshine (IMDB) at the Neptune last night. Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), the film’s narrative concerns a second and final attempt to reignite the dying hearth of Sol via nuclear injection.

I think the film is actually most concerned with three non-narrative filmic objectives. I’ll enumerate them in descending order of ambition.

The primary objective and possible inspiration appears to have been making a bleak, nihilist film about light and the exploration of light as religious metaphor and as the underlying, unifying basis of filmmaking itself. In this view, the narrative’s concern with reigniting the sun can be seen as an attempt to reignite the sources of western religion and/or the sources of western genre film making. The nihilism, however, undercuts the film’s apparent call for a rebirth of film.

Second, Boyle looks to have a goal of re-envisioning effects as the basis of sci-fi film and sublimating the effects shot to the camera effect. The film deploys effects shots to good order and suitably showed me things new to my eye. Two in particular stay with me. First, an image of a doomed spacewalker literally washed away in a solar wave, light imagined as a tsunami of flame which erases the suited figure, hanging in space. Second, a transit of Mercury viewed, apparently, from inside 36 million miles distance to the sun.

There are numerous exterior effects shots of both solar spark plug ships, even, improbably, a revisitation of the open-airlock sequence from 2001 which appears to have been the direct result of a classic studio-boardroom one-upsmanship meeting, and which may be notable in the history of sci-fi for it’s careful depiction of the consequences of improper tailoring.

Despite this, the film’s visual heart is in some seriously over-the-top optical effects, including single-frame drop-ins, crazy lens-stretches, focus pulls, camera rotations, lens-flare overlays, and so many shots that erode the image via quick cuts, overlaid imagery, and the like that one loses count of the moments when one is looking at a wholly abstract film image, no form, only light and color.

Finally, and in the end distractingly for me, the film is literally packed with direct references to a specific canon of science-fiction films, more or less beginning with the twin monoliths of 2001 and the originial Solaris, but also clearly nodding in direct sequences, plot elements, or dialog toward Darkstar, Silent Running, Blade Runner (listen for the Vangelis endtitle theme), Alien (in this case, excerpting several lines of dialog, possibly a crew-hat, and what must be the statutorily-required crew-dines-at-an-illuminated-table-surface scene), and the entire stalker-in-space subgenre that Alien accidentally summoned into being (The Abyss, The Sphere, etc.).

The density of reference can be justified within the framework of the film’s apparent call for a rebirth of sci-fi filmmaking. After all, a baroque period customarily precedes a scourging change of stylistic seasons. What’s odd about this film is that the baroque referentiality which might justify the film’s call for scourging and rebirth are not, to me, exemplified by the films it quotes with such reverence. Instead, the film’s impetus for rebirth seems to be exemplified by itself.

Granted, while we live in an age in which the well-funded, thematically ambitious men-in-space scifi film is far from the rarity it was when 2001 first hove into view. It’s also true that recent examples of the genre have had a mixed track record and tended to the obvious rather than the visionary, popcorn movies or clumsy franchise sequels instead of protean visions of transcendence or squalor.

What’s odd, in the end, about Sunshine is that it is, in fact, clearly out of the league of that herd of starships and space cowboys. Yet, by studiously displaying its unassailable heritage it gives its own game away. One wonders to what extent the retread elements in the script and plot emerged as a result of studio-mandated rework and which were there from the beginning. It seems to me the film’s visual splendor and direct interest in light-as-metaphor should have been enough to create a truly unique, intellectually and spiritually challenging SF film as successful as its antecedents. Instead, unfortunately, it falls prey to the referentiality which may have inspired it.

Despite this, I’d recommend the experience to any lover of the canon the film addresses itself to. There’s some serious eye-candy here.

Damien Hirst’s Skull – a photoset on Flickr.

It may surprise some, or perhaps it will not, that I think this is clearly Hirst’s greatest work and possibly the greatest work of art of all time.

I suppose if I had the opportunity to closely interact with the piece, the first thing I would do is take the jaw off and flip the cranium so that I could look up into the braincase. My understanding is that the piece was made with a cast as the base for the jewels, and that the cast came from a real skull the artist (ahem) scared up in the flea markets and costermonger stalls of Airstrip One.

I see, Montresor, some of the work’s aesthetic aims as:

to create the most impossibly highly valued work of art ever
to present a grinning selfportrait of capital at work
to provoke examination of the iconography of the skull (my favorite!)

My aim in flipping the head and removing the jaw would be to examine the delicacy and faithfulness of the cast’s re-rendering of the initial bone’s nasal cavities. The bone inside the nose is impossibly delicate and filigreed, layers weaving and dancing like flower petals. The degree to which this post-Faberge egg cup proffers that delicacy and fineness might provide a viewer with a measure by which the craft and craft value in this presentation toy is genuinely present.

My guess is that the nasal cavities are smoothed and not presented with delicacy, as the piece does not appear to be about the heritage traditions of craft-work pieces created to legitimize wealth in a domestic context. Instead it appears to be about craft in this time, and the importance of delicacy has passed, I think.

I have been thinking about westerns on and off this year – I’m working my way through Deadwood and a trip to The Searchers and The Man who Shot Liberty Valance seems in order. I might want to review the Leone / Eastwood Man with No Name stuff too but that material is much more familiar to me than the Ford / Wayne material.

The Ford stuff, if I recall correctly, presents a myth of the West in which good men compromise themselves in order to bring the benefits of law-n-order to the lawless plains. Having done so, these men find themselves unable to fit into the new framework, which turns out to be more compromised than they are (suits, showers, and building codes apparently greater burdens on the conscience than genocide and rapine). The fear and discomfort of the characters as they shift nervously in front of the newcomers, the feminized easterners, the women, is played for laughs but reflects an American media tradition of misogyny that was more actively damaging to the audiences of the time than the genocidal acts of their ancestors.

The sixties stuff sort of dispenses with the idea of nobility save as the active principals in the tales exhibit an existential morality – thus the Good is true to himself, the Bad is a paid assassin and military man, and the Ugly is fundamentally uncertain of his alliegances. Eastwood’s later Westerns exhibit a hybrid attitude between the Ford-birthed myth of the cantankerous misfit law bringer who retires to his hand-hewn cabin on far Olympus and the existential hero who only accedes to nobility when acting in the service of his own agonizingly accepted desires..

Deadwood seems to be engaged in birthing a new myth, not one that I find tremendously appealing (although the show itself I find magnificent). The show, for the uninitiated, depicts the transition from extraterritorial mining camp to incorporated American town of Deadwood, South Dakota during the Black Hills gold rush of the 1880s. As the show progresses the initial cast of bedraggled, mudspattered reprobates and refugees from the crowded metropolises of the East are increasingly joined by later arrivals, all of whom exhibit greater comfort with the day-to-day comforts and treacheries of civilization than the initial set of characters. The central hook of the show reflects a Fordian premise in contrasting the ‘honest’ savagery of the pioneer with the back-room evils of civilization. But the apparent contrast can also be viewed as a purely nihilistic view of humanity, and the theme of going along to get along is clearly the show’s central moral perspective.

If we accept the thesis that Westerns have always functioned as a bellwether of America’s self-image and value set, the show predicts a horrible and highly corrupt future for our nation. It seems unlikely that the show runners are constructing a deliberate reflection of the consequences of American actions in Iraq. They are clearly developing a self-justifying pseudohistory in which it is necessary for all members of the body politic to lie to one another and to themselves about their own actions with no sense of personal responsibility. Within the show, the only consequence of taking such responsibility is horror, death, and murder.

I would say that such a perspective appears to me to be the necessary underpinning of contemporary American corporate life, most especially including life in entertainment media.

But I exaggerate. I believe I will watch the show once more with this interpretation in mind and an eye for at the very least existential-style nobility – when a character knows their own mind and acts upon it, are they punished, or lifted up?