I've been drowning the waves for you

[sovay]

It is grey and pouring and the winds keep slamming the telephone lines outside the window, a real nor'easter. We saw the T entrances near the waterfront piled high with sandbags last night. Now the downtown is underwater. The Aquarium station flooded. The glittering rich playground of the Seaport has the sea itself in the streets. I approve of this last in theory because the Seaport as a symbol of Boston's gentrification angers me, but since it sounds as though the storm is hitting the construction workers harder than the suits, in practice I'm glum. I don't know how long this weather is supposed to last. I'm hoping it will blow off by tomorrow morning: the Somerville caucus is being held at the high school and I want to be there, to stand as delegate again to the convention this summer and choose a gubernatorial candidate who's even better than an artichoke with ethics. My sleep schedule is borked, but I slept almost eight hours. The cats are in full rainy-day hibernation mode. I cannot blame them.

1. The current issue of Poetry comes with a mixtape. I have not yet tried listening as I read, but of the poems I am particularly struck by Carla Panciera's "And Standing before Those Canvases, He Said, I Would Feel This Tingling," Danez Smith's "sometimes i wish i felt the side effects," Camonghne Felix's "Willing in the Orisha," and Martha Silano's "Ode to Autocorrect."

2. Musicophilia has curated a lot of library music. I feel people who like Ghost Box should know.

3. Tracy Butler draws faces. Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.

4. The HFA has announced—but not yet detailed—a series of German Films 1945–1957. Please God, let this include a print of Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951). The illustrating image seems to point that way.

In the meantime, while the organizing theme of Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination seems a reach when some of these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995) on a big screen is just fine by me. When a friend asked me to outline a (purely speculative) 'Thon of my own, both of those films were first-choice programming.

A series of Wim Wenders is also a fine thing. I imagine everyone on the planet will come to Wings of Desire (1983), including me—Otto Sander turned up in the first half of Das Boot (1981) last night, reminding me of how much I love him as Cassiel—but it might provide an equally good excuse to try for Paris, Texas (1984), The American Friend (1977), and Until the End of the World (1991), which I have been generally meaning to see on grounds of Harry Dean Stanton, Patricia Highsmith, and Talking Heads.

5. I know the title of this photograph is "Moonwalking," but she looks like the deep sea to me.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

Yeah, a lot of those strike me as very pre-internet. The two internet-paranoia films which have always stayed with me are The Net and Copycat – both ‘nineties movies, and both have to stack their decks by making the heroines reclusive agoraphobes, who pretty much only communicate via email, in order for their plots to work. Then again it’s probably a defining trope of the Paranoid Thriller that the protagonist either has no friends/family, or worse, friends/family who are really easily manipulated by the villains.

[sovay]

The two internet-paranoia films which have always stayed with me are The Net and Copycat – both ‘nineties movies, and both have to stack their decks by making the heroines reclusive agoraphobes, who pretty much only communicate via email, in order for their plots to work.

I've never seen either of those. What are they like?

Then again it’s probably a defining trope of the Paranoid Thriller that the protagonist either has no friends/family, or worse, friends/family who are really easily manipulated by the villains.

And I agree the internet is great for that—when you think you know all about a person, but you are in every terrible particular wrong. When you think you have all the facts at your fingertips, but really you're just insulated. I don't know if we make movies about that anymore because we just live it.

I think I'm really annoyed by the categorization of WarGames as an internet movie. It's too early. It's prescient science fiction, sure; it's without a doubt a technologically anxious movie. It's nervous about computers, AI, the human ability to control or interfere with either of these creations; it's afraid of the stealthy, easy connectivity of hacking and the untried morality of bright, bored teenagers who can break into the government while only meaning to break into a game. But we didn't even have the World Wide Web in 1983. David isn't even hacking ARPANET. I understand how anything to do with interconnected computers blurs together in the popular imagination, but it's just anachronistic to claim that "the very openness of the Internet causes near nuclear annihilation" in WarGames. I wouldn't balk if the HFA wanted to call it a proto-internet thriller. But not the thing itself, with or without capital letters.

[moon_custafer]

I agree the internet is great for that—when you think you know all about a person, but you are in every terrible particular wrong

That wasn’t even what The Net was doing, though. When I talk about them having to stack the deck, I mean that they wrote the character so that she had no current friends who’d ever seen her face-to-face (I think she might have had an ex who got killed off by the villains after she went to him for help) and her only living relative had dementia and no longer recognized her; so that when the Big Conspiracy needed to discredit her, they could just alter her info in all databases to “criminal fugitive” and there was no one to say “wait, what? I’ve known her for years, that makes no sense.”

[sovay]

When I talk about them having to stack the deck, I mean that they wrote the character so that she had no current friends who’d ever seen her face-to-face (I think she might have had an ex who got killed off by the villains after she went to him for help) and her only living relative had dementia and no longer recognized her; so that when the Big Conspiracy needed to discredit her, they could just alter her info in all databases to “criminal fugitive” and there was no one to say “wait, what? I’ve known her for years, that makes no sense.”

You're right; that's a lot more narrative contrivance than I was thinking of.

[moon_custafer]

The Net I describe a bit below. Copycat may well have aged better, in that one of the heroines is an FBI profiler turned recluse after her identity became famous and every serial killer and serial-killer-fanboy in the world began obsessing over her; she never leaves her apartment and communicates with the outside world through the internet and a loyal gay personal assistant (who naturally doesn’t survive to the end of the movie.) I can’t recall how she can afford to do so — I think she was actually attacked and nearly killed at a law-enforcement conference, so possibly she won a big worker’s-comp lawsuit against the FBI, or maybe she does well-paid security-consultant stuff online, or maybe it’s just the movie thing where characters never have to worry about money unless it’s a plot point that they do. Anyway, staying in ultimately can’t stop one of her “fans” from sending her messages* and crime-scene photos from the string of murders he’s committing to get her attention, so a pair of detectives (one male, one female) are sent to simultaneously protect her and enlist her help in catching the killer, who is deliberately staging each murder as a tribute to a different famous serial killer, and who is being mentored and encouraged from prison by the most notorious criminal she caught in her earlier career. Semi-spoiler — while the copycat killer/stalker is ultimately killed at the end, the epilogue shows her real antagonist, still in prison, answering his fan mail and encouraging new wannabes to go after her, like some kind of serial-killer Gamergate.
*The online messages from “Peter Kürten“ are all made of quicktime clips and crude sixteen-bit animated computer graphics, and they are Creepy As Hell.

[sovay]

Anyway, staying in ultimately can’t stop one of her “fans” from sending her messages* and crime-scene photos from the string of murders he’s committing to get her attention, so a pair of detectives (one male, one female) are sent to simultaneously protect her and enlist her help in catching the killer, who is deliberately staging each murder as a tribute to a different famous serial killer, and who is being mentored and encouraged from prison by the most notorious criminal she caught in her earlier career.

I've heard of this movie! I forgot the title, which is not very distinctive; it stars Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter and has sounded interesting to me since I found out about it, I just haven't managed to see it. You're right that the ending twist is distressingly plausible.

[kore]

It's a good movie if you just ignore the final five minutes, which I do. It's worth watching for Weaver and Hunter's relationship.

[kore]

The Net is absolutely completely terrible.

Copycat has two female leads, Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and NEITHER OF THEM DIE, and a really OTT performance by Harry Connick Jr as a serial killer. It's not a great film, but I loved it because it's prickly female buddy-buddy teamup and Weaver is great and the film's really about female agency. I don't know if I'd recommend it per se (it has some gory bits) but it's kinda like a little crime film gem.

....yeah, WarGames is about hacking and the classic AI threat in scifi, not The Internet Is Evil. And the thing about the Cold War was we didn't have open communication -- Kennedy installing the hotline was a big thing, and that came AFTER the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'd class it more as a Cold War/A.I. movie. (Also how good is John Wood in that? So good. And Ally Sheedy!)

[sovay]

Copycat has two female leads, Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and NEITHER OF THEM DIE

MY GOD WHAT ALTERNATE CONTINUUM OF WOMEN IN FILM DID THIS COME FROM.

I don't know if I'd recommend it per se (it has some gory bits) but it's kinda like a little crime film gem.

"Gem" sounds like a recommendation to me. I'll look for it.

....yeah, WarGames is about hacking and the classic AI threat in scifi, not The Internet Is Evil.

Right! Like, it's a wonderful movie and I don't begrudge the HFA wanting to show it, but the series theme is objectively silly. They could just as easily have fit that lineup under "anxiety of technology" and saved me the blood pressure spike.

(Also how good is John Wood in that? So good. And Ally Sheedy!)

I imprinted deeply on Stephen Falken.

[kore]

THEY'RE PRICKLY BUDDIES AND BOTH REALLY GOOD AT THEIR JOBS AND NEITHER OF THEM DIE. IT'S GREAT. You do have to ignore about the last five minutes, tho, which is seriously what I do.

I still remember that kind of amazing shot when the world is going up in flames again and again and again and "What's happening?" "It's learning" and then it all fades out on Falken's face and the last thing you see of it is (IIRC) he's kind of smiling, it did happen, the world's not a doomed nihilistic joke. -- Why didn't HE get nominated for an Oscar, while we're at it.

[gwynnega]

Danez Smith is great. Any mixtape that includes Nina Simone, Lou Reed, and the Jackson 5 is good with me.

[sovay]

Danez Smith is great. Any mixtape that includes Nina Simone, Lou Reed, and the Jackson 5 is good with me.

I like how specifically it's linked to the poems, and I love the inclusion of songs as in-jokes. (I have that recording of "Yemaya" and I approve.)

[dhampyresa]

Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.
He really did! Butler's Joséphine Baker is also amazing.

[sovay]

Butler's Joséphine Baker is also amazing.

Yes! And if I'm not mistaken, a quite decent Conrad Veidt.

[thisbluespirit]

these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995)

I don't know whether this is about the content of the films, rather than the date - but the origins of the internet go back to the 60s and 70s and some of it was in place by the 1980s (not the wide use that we have now, of course - mainly military-academic?). I have a 1984 TV show that has internet use between war gamers being a plot point, for instance. And many SF writers like to pick up on things that are coming, or they think they are coming. DW had a proto-internet paranoia serial in 1966 (WOTAN is linked up to all the computers of the world and decides to take over!) and I really don't think that was very unusual. (There's a lot of various computers will kill everyone stuff from that era, although not usually via a proto-internet, which is why I mention that one. But it continues through the 70s, so by the 80s, pulling in the existing elements of the internet hardly seems early to me.)

Plus, 1995 was certainly not early at all, as I was on the internet right then and it had been in existence for a while already! I wandered into newsgroups full of people and used Netscape as a browser on the separate World Wide Web.

And I'd have thought a lot of the paranoia comes very early, cos after that it's just normal and the fear seems less plausible. (Unless it's turning accepted tech against us in a particular way, I suppose.)

(I don't know, I don't know any of the films. But it wouldn't strike me as too early for internet paranoia.)

[sovay]

Plus, 1995 was certainly not early at all, as I was on the internet right then and it had been in existence for a while already! I wandered into newsgroups full of people and used Netscape as a browser on the separate World Wide Web.

I don't think—and did not say—1995 is too early for the internet. I also remember Netscape and Usenet. I am also aware that the term internet was coined in the mid-'70's and the internet protocol suite widely adopted by the mid-'80's. But the computer networks available to make use of it at that time were and are not interchangeable with the commercial, accessible internet as it would exist less than a decade later and therefore I object to the three films programmed from 1983–84 being classed as "internet films" and discussed in those terms when what they are really dealing with is the proto-internet. See reply to moon_custafer. They are totally on a continuum. (WarGames is the closest to an internet film from my perspective; Blue Thunder is more general surveillance paranoia and Electric Dreams is straight-up anxious AI. The Terminator with its future fear of Skynet would have made the most sense and I have no idea why they didn't include it.) But computing technology and culture shifted so radically around the coming of the actual internet that the HFA does the history no favors by blurring all the stages anachronistically together.

[moon_custafer]

Another thing about ‘90s movie/tv depictions of the internet was that the number of things accessible via the internet was usually a bit ahead of real life at the time. The heroine of The Net orders takeout pizza online, which I don’t recall being commonplace at the time* — it’s possible she had set up a website for her local pizza place in exchange for them taking her orders by email.

On shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, newspaper morgues, town records, control systems for the local electrical grid, etc., are all connected to the internet and can all be hacked into, at least if you’re a computer-genius witch. It’s as though the Internet was some sort of transitive property that automatically linked up *everything* in the category “electronic devices,” regardless of date of manufacture. There’s probably a TvTropes page for this.

* What I do remember is an irritating number of businesses whose websites were single, non-interactive pages with their physical address, phone number, and maybe a jpg of their building or one of their products, and nothing else.

[sovay]

Another thing about ‘90s movie/tv depictions of the internet was that the number of things accessible via the internet was usually a bit ahead of real life at the time.

I remember this about the school-computer-hacking episode of Ghostwriter, which did not quite match what I knew of chat rooms and school systems. Wikipedia tells me that was in '94.

[kore]

That also happens in a terrible movie called January Man with Alan Rickman in, which I watched after his death because, well, Alan Rickman. But same kind of "all the computers are hooked up with all the explicit information" thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_January_Man

[moon_custafer]

Ooh! Someone’s got a detailed description and screenshots of all the websites in The Net! Apparently the pizza actually is from a pizza-delivery site (“pizza.net”)!

https://gizmodo.com/every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net-1592821504

[kore]

I think "the general Internet" starts right around 1995 or 1996, tho, and even then I was getting access at home via my college's server. AOL is maligned by everyone (including me), but that and Prodigy (ISP version) and CompuServe really were the gateways for a lot of people. Like the whole GUI revolution for home computing.

(I am old enough to remember griping about Mosaic v Netscape, hah.)

[sovay]

think "the general Internet" starts right around 1995 or 1996, tho, and even then I was getting access at home via my college's server.

It's hard for me to tell when the general internet began for other people, because my father designed and built computers and their infrastructure for a living. I didn't have e-mail until my senior year of high school or a computer of my own until I went away to college, but that's separate from my awareness of connectivity. I was a B5 lurker from about 1995 on.

(I am old enough to remember griping about Mosaic v Netscape, hah.)

I haven't thought about Mosaic in years! The dark and backward abysm of time.

[kore]

I wonder if we ever ran across each other on the alt.sf.rec.tv.whatever B5 group. Ahahaha.

I remember going to the computer lab to type out papers and, later, to download and save email, but didn't have a home connection until 1995. Maybe 1994. Didn't have a cable modem until about 1999, hah.

[asakiyume]

Those videos! I had no idea. I showed them to Wakanomori and the Tall One (who visits on Fridays and who is headed your way on Saturday), and there were many exclamations. Hello sea. Welcome to Boston.

[sovay]

Hello sea. Welcome to Boston.

Like everyone else, it tried to take the trains and the MBTA broke down.

[asakiyume]

So long as, UNlike Charlie, it doesn't get trapped there.

[sovay]

So long as, UNlike Charlie, it doesn't get trapped there.

STORY STORY STORY.

[asakiyume]

Challenge ACCEPTED.

I'll send it to you/post it when I'm done ;-)

[asakiyume]

Okay! Up now

Not exactly a story, but...

[sovay]

Not exactly a story, but...

It's gorgeous.

[asakiyume]

I'm really happy you like it. I wanted it to do credit to you, a primary sea intermediary.

[sovay]

I wanted it to do credit to you, a primary sea intermediary.

I love it. Thank you.

[asakiyume]

And speaking of Poetry, evelyn_b reported on this issue, too. I am feeling mighty tempted to subscribe.

[sovay]

And speaking of Poetry, evelyn_b reported on this issue, too. I am feeling mighty tempted to subscribe.

Oh, cool! I enjoy Poetry very much as a magazine, even if it has rejected all the work I ever sent it. There is always something in every issue I really love and sometimes much more than that.

[kore]

LOL, back when I wrote poetry, I got no love from them either.

[drwex]

I haven't seen Wings of Desire in a long time. It's one of my favorites, even if I'm un-hip to admit that.

Until the End of the World, though... I didn't like the original and the massive director's cut couldn't hold my interest long enough to finish it.

[sovay]

I haven't seen Wings of Desire in a long time. It's one of my favorites, even if I'm un-hip to admit that.

I don't think it's unhip. For a long time, if I had to choose a favorite movie (a thing I hate being asked to do), it was a tough choice between Wings of Desire and The Seventh Seal. These days it's A Canterbury Tale, but that doesn't mean I love Berlin of the angels less.

Until the End of the World, though... I didn't like the original and the massive director's cut couldn't hold my interest long enough to finish it.

Understood. I'm still thinking I might try for it. I haven't seen that many all-day movies lately.

[kore]

IS THAT THE FIVE HOUR CUT OF UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD? ARE THEY ACTUALLY SHOWING THAT ON A BIG SCREEN? DAMN.

Paris Texas is great. It might actually be my personal favourite.

[sovay]

IS THAT THE FIVE HOUR CUT OF UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD? ARE THEY ACTUALLY SHOWING THAT ON A BIG SCREEN? DAMN.

295 minutes looks like five hours to me!

Paris Texas is great. It might actually be my personal favourite.

I've never seen it and it has Harry Dean Stanton, so I'm interested.

[kore]

I WOULD BE DRAGGING SO MANY PEOPLE TO THAT IF I LIVED THERE. DAAAAAAAMN. (I have no shame. I have forced people to watch Frederick Wiseman documentaries and woken them up when they started to nap.)

In some ways PT really gets the Southwest in a way I haven't seen in a lot of other movies. Gas Food Lodging was another one, as were Desert Bloom and Desert Hearts.

[kore]

I have been trying to think of The Internet is Evil movies but hand to God all I can think of is The Lawnmower Man which is a truly craptastic "adaptation" of a King story in which....well, I don't have the heart to summarize it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)#Plot

[sovay]

hand to God all I can think of is The Lawnmower Man which is a truly craptastic "adaptation" of a King story in which....well, I don't have the heart to summarize it.

Yikes.

I take it Pierce Brosnan had gambling debts.

[kore]

It's so terrible. I don't even know why I remember it. Cable TV has a lot to answer for.