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.