The Jedi mind trick

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

—Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

At some point over the next few hours, perhaps as you’re reading this post, The Force Awakens is projected to surge past Avatar to become the highest-grossing movie in the history of the North American box office. We usually don’t adjust such figures for inflation, of course, probably because there wouldn’t be as many records broken each year if we did, and it’s all but certain that the original Star Wars will remain tops in the franchise in terms of tickets sold. Yet it’s impossible to discount this achievement. If the latest installment continues on its present trajectory, it has a good chance of cracking the adjusted top ten of all time—it would need to gross somewhere north of $948 million domestic to exceed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and earn a spot on that rarefied list, and this is starting to feel like a genuine possibility. Given the changes in the entertainment landscape over the last century, this is beyond flabbergasting. But even this doesn’t get at the real, singular nature of what we’re witnessing today. The most unexpected thing about the success of The Force Awakens is how expected it was. And at a time when Hollywood is moving increasingly toward a tentpole model in which a handful of blockbusters finance all the rest, it represents both a historic high point for the industry and an accomplishment that we’re unlikely to ever see again.

When you look at the lineal timeline of the most successful films at the domestic box office, you have to go back seventy-five years to find a title that even the shrewdest industry insider could have reasonably foreseen. This list, unadjusted for inflation, consists of Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music, The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T., Titanic, and Avatar. Gone With the Wind, which claimed the title that The Birth of a Nation had won a quarter of a century earlier, is the one exception: there’s no doubt that David O. Selznick hoped that it could be the biggest film of its era, even before the first match had been struck for the burning of Atlanta. Every other movie here is a headscratcher. No studio insider at the time would have been willing to bet that The Sound of Music—which Pauline Kael later called The Sound of Money—would outgross not just Doctor Zhivago and Thunderball that year, but every other movie ever made. The Godfather and Jaws were both based on bestselling novels, but that’s hardly a guarantee of success, and both were troubled productions with untested directors at the helm. Star Wars itself hardly needs to be discussed here. Columbia famously passed on E.T., and Titanic was widely regarded before its release as a looming disaster. And even Avatar, which everyone thought would be huge, exceeded all expectations: when you take regression to the mean into account, the idea that James Cameron could break his own record is so implausible that I have a hard time believing it even now.

Which is just another way of saying that these movies were all outliers: unique, idiosyncratic projects, not part of any existing franchise, that audiences discovered gradually, often to the bewilderment of the studios themselves. The Force Awakens was different. It had barely been announced before pundits were speculating that it could set the domestic record, and although Disney spent much of buildup to its opening weekend downplaying such forecasts—with the implication that rival studios were inflating projections to make its final performance seem disappointing—it’s hard to believe that the possibility hadn’t crossed everybody’s mind. Most movie fans will remember that William Goldman said “Nobody knows anything” in Adventures in the Screen Trade, but it’s worth quoting the relevant paragraph in full. After noting that everyone in town except for Paramount turned down Raiders of the Lost Ark, he continues:

Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that may just cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a billion dollars? Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.

If Hollywood has learned anything since, it’s that you don’t pass on Star Wars. Whatever you might think of its merits as a movie, The Force Awakens marks the one and only time that somebody knew something. And it’s probably the last time, too. It may turn into the reassuring bedtime story that studio executives use to lull themselves to sleep, and Disney may plan on releasing a new installment on an annual basis forever, but the triumphant rebirth of the franchise after ten years of dormancy—or three decades, depending on how you feel about the prequels—is the kind of epochal moment that the industry is doing its best to see never happens again. We aren’t going to have another chance to miss Star Wars because it isn’t going to go away, and the excitement that arose around its return can’t be repeated. The Force Awakens is both the ultimate vindication of the blockbuster model and a high-water mark that will make everything that follows seem like diminishing returns. (More insidiously, it may be the Jedi mind trick that convinces the studios that they know more than they do, which can only lead to heartbreak.) Records are made to be broken, and at some point in my lifetime, another movie will take the crown, if only because inflation will proceed to a point where the mathematics become inevitable. But it won’t be a Star Wars sequel. And it won’t be a movie that anyone, not even a Jedi, can see coming.

The light of distant stars

By now, Interstellar has inspired plenty of conversation on subjects ranging from the accuracy of its science to the consistency of its intricate timelines, but I wanted to highlight one aspect of the film that hasn’t received as much attention: its use of physical miniatures. If you’re a visual effects nerd like me, Interstellar represents a welcome return to a style of filmmaking that other directors seem to have all but abandoned, with huge, detailed models—the one for the spacecraft Endurance was a full twenty-five feet across—shot against star fields in the studio, a tradition that stretches back through Star Wars to 2001. And the result speaks for itself. The effects are so good that they practically fade into the background; for long stretches of the film, we’re barely aware of them as effects at all, but as elements in a story that persuasively takes place on the largest imaginable scale. (There’s even a sense in which the film’s scientific rigor and its reliance on modelwork go hand in hand. Dealing with big, unwieldy miniatures and hydraulics can only make a filmmaker more aware of the physics involved.)

Last week, I suggested that Christopher Nolan, the most meticulous creator of blockbusters we have, is drawn to IMAX and the logistical problems it presents as a way of getting out of his own head, or of grounding his elaborate conceits in recognizably vivid environments, and much the same is true of his approach to effects. If Inception had unfolded in a flurry of digital imagery, as it might easily have done in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the story itself would have been far less interesting. Dreams, as Cobb reminds Ariadne, feel real while you’re inside them, and it’s revealing that the most controlling of directors understands the value of techniques that force him to give up control, while paradoxically allowing for greater realism. As Nolan says:

These are things you could try to calculate into CG if you had to, but the wonderful thing about miniature shooting is that it shows you things you never knew were there or couldn’t plan for. I refer to it as serendipity—this random quality that gives the image a feeling of life.

And the randomness is key. Critics often speak of the uncanny valley when describing how virtual actors are never as convincing as the real thing, and a similar principle seems to be at work with other visual effects. Computers have made enormous advances in depicting anything a filmmaker likes, but there are still crucial details—artifacts of lighting, the behavior of surfaces seen against real backdrops—that digital artistry struggles to replicate, precisely because they’re so unpredictable.

Light, it seems, is a problem as intractable, in its own way, as the subtleties of human expression, and while we may feel less of a visceral reaction when the technology falls short, it still prevents us from immersing ourselves completely in the experience. Even in films like The Return of the King or Avatar, which look undeniably spectacular, we’re often conscious of how expertly the imagery has been constructed, with the uniform, unreal light of a world that exists only on a hard drive at Weta. It holds us at arm’s distance even as it draws us in. That said, technology marches on, and it’s telling that Interstellar arrives in theaters almost exactly one year after Gravity, a movie that takes a diametrically opposite approach to many of the same problems: few practical sets or models were built, and for much of the film, everything in sight, from the spacesuits to the interiors to the panorama of the earth in the background, is a digital creation. The result, to put it mildly, looks fantastic, even in IMAX, and it’s the first movie I’ve seen in a long time in which computer effects are truly indistinguishable from reality.

At first glance, then, it might seem like Interstellar arrives at the scene a few months too late, at a point where digital effects have met and exceeded what might be possible using painstaking practical techniques. Really, though, the two films have a great deal in common. If the effects in Gravity work so well, it’s in large part due to the obsessiveness that went into lighting and wirework during principal photography: Emmanuel Lubezki’s famous light box amounts to a complicated way of addressing the basic—and excruciatingly specific—challenge of keeping the actors’ faces properly lit, a detail destined to pass unnoticed until it goes wrong. Interstellar takes much the same approach, with enormous projections used on the sound stage, rather than green screens, in order to immerse the actors in the effects in real time. In other words, both films end up converging on similar solutions from opposite directions, ultimately meeting in the same place: on the set itself. They understand that visible magic only works when grounded in invisible craft, and if the tools they use are very different, they’re united in a common goal. And the cinematic universe, thankfully, is big enough for them both.

Fanfic and the first million words

A million words, we’ve all been told, is the minimum amount a novelist needs to write before achieving a basic level of technical competence. Like most such rules, it isn’t meant to be precise, and its true impact is difficult to gauge—we rarely know exactly how many words a writer has gone through before his or her first serious publication. Clearly, the most straightforward way of measuring this effect would be for a previously untested writer to produce a single work of fiction a million words long, and to track how the author’s skills evolved from first page to last. On its face, this might seem ridiculous, but in fact, there’s one place where this kind of experiment takes place on a regular basis: in the unregulated, unedited, often inexplicable world of fanfic, in which nonprofessional writers routinely write stories many times the length of War and Peace. In the past, I’ve mentioned A Different Lesson, the Kung Pu Panda fanfic that weighs in at a modest 632,000 words, and this page maintains a list of stories in multiple fandoms that are 800,000 words or more. And if an author can really hope to grow in competence after those first million words, you’d expect to see at least some evidence of it here.

So what do we find? Here, for instance, is a passage from the first page of an Avatar fanfic of close to a million words, which the author says is his first attempt at writing fiction of any kind:

When the spaceship was almost out of sight, it was time to celebrate! And then begin with preparation for the ritual which will allow Jake and others who were helping Na’vi to become the real part of The People, the mind transfer.

And here’s a passage from close to the end:

“Could you please take care of her? It will be hard for her once I’m gone.” Rick said in depressed voice, he knew damn too well that she won’t be able to live over this, he will leave her for the second time and this time he isn’t coming back…

Now, it’s all too easy to pick on fanfic for its stylistic shortcomings—and to be fair, the author here notes that English is not his native language—but I think it’s reasonable to conclude that any evidence of stylistic growth is elusive at best. All the same, the story comes from a place of real commitment: writing a million words of any kind requires an insane level of dedication, and judging from the number of favorable comments the story has received, it has been read by thousands of people. It might seem unfair, then, to hold it to standards that don’t have much to do with why the story was written, or enjoyed, in the first place.

Yet there’s an important point to be made here, especially for those who see fanfic, as I once did, as a training ground for other kinds of fiction. I spent years writing fanfic in high school and college, and was drawn to it for a very particular reason: I discovered that I could write a novel-length work of fiction and post it online, and by the following morning, I’d have responses from complete strangers who had read and enjoyed it in its entirety. For a young writer, this was a heady experience, and the chance to reach an existing audience of willing readers was enough to keep me going, even though I never thought of myself as a true member of the fanfic community. I saw it instead as a valuable way of building skill and confidence as a storyteller, and there’s no doubt that much of my work since, especially in science fiction, was shaped by the experience. In the end, I produced close to a quarter of a million words of fanfic over five years, and in the process, I learned things about plot, structure, and pacing that made it much easier, when I began writing my own work, to avoid many of the technical frustrations that confront writers trying to tell original stories for the first time.

But it came at a price. The trouble with fanfic is that it allows a writer to produce massive amounts of material while systematically avoiding the single hardest element of fiction: the creation of imaginary human beings capable of sustaining a reader’s interest and sympathy. Fanfic begins from an enviable position, with a cast of characters to which the reader is already emotionally attached. As a result, even after writing a million words or more, a writer can easily be left in a state of arrested development, with superb technical skills when it comes to writing about the inner life of existing characters, but little sense of how to do it from scratch. And without this basic skill, the time spent on those million words has a fraction of the value of the same amount of original work. When it comes to learning the nuts and bolts of craft, I’d estimate that a thousand words of honestly crafted original material, with all its attendant mistakes, is worth ten thousand words of fanfic—and the true ratio may be even higher. Of course, even bad fanfiction is likely to be read by someone, while a very good original novel may never see the light of day. But if you decide to write your first million words in fanfic, you may find, when you get to the end, that you’re right back where you started.

Transformers: Death of the Author

Never has a city been more lovingly destroyed on camera than Chicago in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. By the time the movie reaches its crowning orgy of destruction, my wife and I had been staring at the screen for close to ninety minutes, along with an enthusiastic crowd in the IMAX theater at Navy Pier. My wife had seen much of the movie being shot on Michigan Avenue, just up the street from her office at the Tribune Tower, and I think it was with a sort of grim amusement, or satisfaction, that she watched her own building crumble to pieces as an alien robot spacecraft crashed into its beautiful gothic buttresses. It’s an image that merits barely five seconds in the movie’s final hour, which devastates most of downtown Chicago in gorgeous, even sensual detail, but it still struck me as a pivotal moment in our personal experience of the movies. (And hasn’t the Tribune already suffered enough?)

Like its immediate predecessor, Transformers 3 is generally pretty lousy. (I actually liked the first one, which had the advantage of comparative novelty, as well as a genuinely nimble comic performance by Shia LaBeouf that both director and star have struggled to recreate ever since.) As a story, it’s ridiculous; as a perfunctory attempt at a coherent narrative, it’s vaguely insulting. It’s also staggeringly beautiful. For the first ten minutes, in particular, the IMAX screen becomes a transparent window onto the universe, delivering the kind of transcendent experience, with its view of millions of miles, that even Avatar couldn’t fully provide. And even after its nonstop visual and auditory assault has taken its toll on your senses, it still gives new meaning to the phrase “all the money is there on the screen.” Here, it feels like the cash used to render just one jaw-dropping frame could have been used to pay down much of the national debt.

As I watched Dark of the Moon, or rather was pummeled into submission by it, I had the nagging feeling that Armond White’s notoriously glowing review of Revenge of the Fallen deserved some kind of reappraisal. At the time, White was dismissed, not without reason, as a troll, for issuing such pronouncements as “In the history of motion pictures, Bay has created the best canted angles—ever.” And yet I don’t think he was trolling, or even entirely wrong: it’s just that he was one movie too early. Michael Bay’s genius, and I use this word deliberately, is visible in every shot of Dark of the Moon, but it’s weirdly overdeveloped in just one direction. Bay is like one of those strange extinct animals that got caught in an evolutionary arms race until they became all horns, claws, or teeth. While a director like Christopher Nolan continues to develop along every parameter of storytelling, Bay is nothing but a massive eye: cold, brilliant, and indifferent to story or feeling. And it’s pointless to deny his talents, as ridiculously squandered as they might be.

So what exactly am I saying here? To steal a phrase from Roger Ebert’s review of The Life Aquatic, I can’t recommend Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it—provided that you shell out fifteen dollars or more for the real experience in IMAX 3-D, which Bay has lovingly bullied the nation’s projectionists into properly presenting. (On video, I suspect that you might have the same reaction that my wife and I did when we rented Revenge of the Fallen: within forty minutes, both of us had our laptops out.) It’s an objectively terrible movie that, subjectively, I can’t get out of my head. As an author, I’m horrified by it: it’s a reminder of how useless, or disposable, writers can be. I won’t go as far as to say that it’s a vision of my own obsolescence, or that I believe that the robots are our future. But at this point in history, the burden is on writers to demonstrate that we’re necessary. And the momentum isn’t on our side.

Source Code and the state of modern science fiction

On Saturday, my wife and I finally saw Source Code, the new science fiction thriller directed by Moon‘s Duncan Jones. I liked Moon a lot, but wasn’t sure what to expect from his latest film, and was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be the best new movie I’ve seen this year. Admittedly, this is rather faint praise—by any measure, this has been a slow three months for moviegoers. And Source Code has its share of problems. It unfolds almost perfectly for more than an hour, then gets mired in an ending that tries, not entirely successfully, to be emotionally resonant and tie up all its loose ends, testing the audience’s patience at the worst possible time. Still, I really enjoyed it. The story draws you in viscerally and is logically consistent, at least up to a point, and amounts to a rare example of real science fiction in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

By “real” science fiction, of course, I don’t mean that the science is plausible. The science in Source Code is cheerfully absurd, explained with a bit of handwaving about quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus, but the movie is unusual in having the courage to follow a tantalizing premise—what if you could repeatedly inhabit the mind of a dead man eight minutes before he died?—through most of its possible variations. This is what the best science fiction does: it starts with an outlandish idea and follows it relentlessly through all its implications, while never violating the rules that the story has established. And one of the subtlest pleasures of Ben Ripley’s screenplay for Source Code lies in its gradual reveal of what the rules actually are. (If anything, I wish I’d known less about the story before entering the theater.)

This may sound like a modest accomplishment, but it’s actually extraordinarily rare. Most of what we call science fiction in film is thinly veiled fantasy with a technological sheen. A movie like Avatar could be set almost anywhere—the futuristic trappings are incidental to a story that could have been lifted from any western or war movie. (Walter Murch even suggests that George Lucas based the plot of Star Wars on the work he did developing Apocalypse Now.) Star Trek was often a show about ideas, but its big-screen incarnation is much more about action and spectacle: Wrath of Khan, which I think is the best science fiction film ever made, has been aptly described as Horatio Hornblower in space. And many of the greatest sci-fi movies—Children of Men, Blade Runner, Brazil—are more about creating the look and feel of a speculative future than any sense of how it might actually work.

And this is exactly how it should be. Movies, after all, aren’t especially good at conveying ideas; a short story, or even an episode of a television show, is a much better vehicle for working out a clever premise than a feature film. Because movies are primarily about action, character, and image, it isn’t surprising that Hollywood has appropriated certain elements of science fiction and left the rest behind. What’s heartening about Source Code, especially so soon after the breakthrough of Inception, is how it harnesses its fairly ingenious premise to a story that works as pure entertainment. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing the high and low aspects of the genre joined so seamlessly, and it requires a peculiar set of skills on the part of the director, who needs to be both fluent with action and committed to ideas. Chris Nolan is one; Duncan Jones, I’m excited to say, looks very much like another.

Great Directors: An introduction

At the risk of stating the obvious, the life of a movie director is vastly different from that of a novelist. While a writer is free to invent a world at his or her own leisure, in relative privacy, a director soon finds that even the simplest story requires a collective effort only slightly less complicated than that of going to war, as well as the need to cajole and compromise with a thousand interested parties, and in public. It’s no surprise, then, that so many of our best directors—from Welles to Von Trier—have something of the con artist about them, or that the movies that create the greatest popular impact—from Gone With the Wind to Avatar—seem less like acts of the creative will than like massive feats of organization.

Still, for a novelist, there’s something to be said for looking to the example of great directors. Like filmmaking, the bulk of the writing process is less about creativity than persistence, and much of an artist’s time is spent on rote work, heavy lifting, or simply waiting around for something to happen. Both fiction and film draw on an untidy range of skills and disciplines. For the director, it’s screenwriting, performance, art direction, camerawork, music, and editing; for the writer, it’s plot, character, research, theme, style, and revision. The director, unlike the writer, has the luxury of outsourcing much of the work to others, but the hard task of making decisions remains. And a director, like all artists, is defined by the choices he or she makes.

This week, then, I’ll be looking at five—or actually six—directors, all now gone, whose lives have shaped my own life and work. Tomorrow, I begin with the very best: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.