by Ryan Britt
If you think Her was a hipster movie, that’s correct, because robot stories are probably better when they’re meditations on grabs for spiritual authenticity rather than when they’re about murder.* Despite what killer-robot stories might have you believe, the reality is that robots should and do represent something else in the culture other than a cautionary tale. What is a robot story then? Or at least, what could it be? Easy: it’s a receptacle for our constant discussion about what is and is not “vintage.”
I told you I was wearing a vintage blazer on that rooftop because I was then (and maybe still am) a hipster. Like the Cylons getting called “toasters” or “skin jobs” the word “hipster” is a slur, but it’s the kind you can only pick up from reading the Internet or New York magazine. None of the Cylons liked to self-identify as a “toaster,” and I’m not crazy about self-identifying as a hipster either. But if we can agree that hipsters are people who have an interest in something that existed before their own experience—that is, “vintage stuff”—and incorporate that vintage stuff into their day-to-day lives in an act of stylistic affectation and intentional appropriation, then yes, I am a hipster by the simple fact that I wear Chuck Taylors and, occasionally, vintage blazers. I even briefly flirted with getting into vintage vinyl records at some point, too.
The image of a hipster getting into vinyl records is where the Cylons/robots of Battlestar Galactica thematically live. A sufficiently evolved artificial intelligence won’t have any kind of real experience with an organic body the same way I have no real experience in buying vinyl records. When I was a teenager, I nearly broke my parents’ turntable trying to listen to their 1968 copy of The White Album while they were gone one day. I had no idea how to run it! Lieutenant Commander Data, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, went through this same thing, a desire to get into vintage human stuff, throughout his entire character arc on the show. In Star Trek: First Contact, he’s even given the “gift” of “real” flesh from the evil Borg Queen, a sensation that is overwhelming to him, the same way it would be impossible for us to process “seeing” on the spectrum a new color we’re not used to dealing with. Data’s desire to be human is a weird affectation brought on by a love for something vintage that he doesn’t understand in the same way as the people who experienced it “first.” What’s disturbing about Data is the fact that everyone else on the Enterprise encourages Data in his efforts to become “more human,” when, in reality, there’s nothing really wrong with him just accepting himself the way he is. Though Picard and his crew consistently stick up for Data’s civil rights, they seem to reveal their own brand of robot bigotry by encouraging this desire to get into vintage human stuff as the “right way.” If you’ve ever lived with more than one person who refuses to listen to records on anything other than records, then you know what I’m talking about.
Still, there’s something endlessly pervasive about a killer-robot story, even when you’ve got a friendly, enlightened robot in your midst. By Star Trek: The Next Generation’s sixth season, the writers couldn’t help but introduce a story line (“Descent Part 1”) in which Data gains the power of “emotion” and turns into a complete prick. I suppose that this is, in a way, the inverse of a bad-robot story because Data turns “evil” by becoming closer to his humanity, not by becoming more “robotic.” The only thing that seems to break Data out of this situation is his apparent loyalty to his crew members, because whether or not robots have emotions, robots tend to only be reflections of the hopes and dreams we pour into them.
In Star Trek, the Technological Singularity—that theoretical moment when artificial intelligence will finally lap the human mind—never occurs, because if it did, Star Trek isn’t sophisticated enough to avoid turning that moment into a killer-robot story. Ray Kurzweil, author and predictor of the Technological Singularity, has asserted that in the future “machines will appear to have their own free will” and even “spiritual experiences.” Taking a cue from Isaac Asimov, he also seems to believe intelligent machines will have ethics similar to their programmers or creators. If this is true, and we were to project Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” forward into a future of super-evolved, super-bored robots,* it seems that one of the machines’ “spiritual experiences” would probably include the idea of “going native,” by occasionally slumming it in real or simulacrum organic bodies. These days, I can buy fake-vintage records of the Beatles, the Smiths, and the Ghostbusters II soundtrack at Urban Outfitters, so, you know, anything is possible.
Obviously, the dominatrices don’t murder me because everyone is way too hipster for that. Instead, they just lead me away from the edge of the roof, push me onto my back, duct-tape me to the roof, and ditch me. My friends and the party’s host find me a few hours later. Falling asleep and being awoken by duct-tape being ripped off your mouth is totally what I imagine it’s like to wake up in a new robot body. In I, Robot, the laws of robotics state that a robot can’t through inaction allow a human being to come to harm, which is not at all a rule when you’re going to a drunken underwear party. This is also true, because you can’t actually trust human beings the same way you could potentially trust robots. In last year’s epically divisive Christopher Nolan film, Interstellar, a big deal is made of programming the robots at certain levels of “honesty,” because otherwise they’re just going to tell you all sorts of shit you probably don’t want to hear. The flip side of this is that the robots in Interstellar are trustworthy, which of course makes most normal audience members confused as to why the robots aren’t going to try and kill everyone. We’ve all seen 2001: A Space Odyssey—often considered to be the best science fiction movie of all time—and we know HAL’s singularity moment doesn’t turn out well for anyone other than those of us in the audience. Obviously, if you’re going to a drunken underwear party and you have your choice of robot friends to come with you, you’d pick Data or TARS from Interstellar over HAL any day of the week.
The final story of I, Robot is called “The Evitable Conflict,” which (spoiler alert) reveals that the world is totally run by robots and very few people are actually aware of it. Of course, in a film or television show, it would be impossible to depict this kind of thing without it seeming sinister, and even in the pages of this story, Asimov gives voice to the viewpoint of robot fear. Here’s a snippet from the very end of the story:
“How horrible!”
“Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines from now on, are inevitable!”
The short story “The Evitable Conflict” was published in 1950, way before Kurzweil dreamed up “the Singularity” or the Beatles even recorded albums that could be considered “vintage” by an aging hipster like me. Asimov saw robots as solving the problems of the world and being better than us. They were, to him, the next generation of friends and companions, the kind of people who, thanks to good programming, probably wouldn’t let you get almost pushed off a roof at a party. If Asimov’s robots ran the world, parties would be just as fun and ten times as safe. It might not make for the best science fiction movie starring Arnold or Keanu, but if the singularity does arrive in our lifetime, we might want to start making different kinds of movies about robots. There’s every reason to believe they’re going to dig us anyway. Because in the eyes of the right kinds of robots, we’re going to be the original hipsters.
Nobody Gets Mad About Hamlet Remakes: Rise of the Relevant Superheroes
If you ask most comic book fans the reason why Batman is so great, most will tell you it’s because he’s a psychologically complex person inhabiting a story laden with dark themes punctuated with lots of punching. And while Batman/Bruce Wayne may be a complex person, he’s not remotely hard to comprehend, at least thematically. Batman and his enemies aren’t arch or ironic insofar as everything they say reflects exactly what they do. When Christian Bale’s Batman growls about being the “hero Gotham deserves,” he’s not kidding. A mumble-mou
thed Bane says he’s “Gotham’s reckoning,” and we believe him because he totally starts blowing up stuff right afterward. Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord may have made a giant joke about being an unlikely hero, but there’s still something pretty on the nose when he says, “We’re the Guardians of the Galaxy, bitch” in a movie called Guardians of the Galaxy. After all, no one in a Lars von Trier film says, “Whoa, that’s so Melancholia!”
People within comic book circles endlessly debate various qualitative elements of comic book movies: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises isn’t nearly as subtle or “artsy” as Tim Burton’s Batman. Or Chris Evans was terrible in the Fantastic Four movies, but excellent as Captain America. But when put up against subtle dramas like Inside Llewyn Davis,* all comic book movies become fairly similar. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer has more in common in its DNA with Captain America: The Winter Soldier than either do with In the Bedroom. One might be a good comic book movie (The Winter Soldier) and one might be an embarrassing disaster perhaps best unseen by human eyes (Silver Surfer) but both are essentially in the same phylum. This is because it’s not like there’s an X-Men movie filmed in black-and-white directed by Alexander Payne that is just about an elderly version of Professor X living in an old-folks home using his psychic powers to rig bingo night.
A lot of contemporary comic book movies like Man of Steel or X-Men: First Class might tend to begin like “regular” movies,* but they seldom stay that way. And beyond the fact that comic book heroes are originally “for children,” one of the reasons mainstream critics tend to deride (or at least hold a bias against) this stuff is probably because comic book movies assert an apparent lack of artistic subtly. A. O. Scott of the New York Times complained that The Avengers demanded “obedience” from the audience to absorb the film’s pop narrative while also permanently suspending viewers’ disbelief. And yet, serious connoisseurs of the arts wouldn’t bat an eye at the overtly on-the-nose nature of opera or even of mainstream musicals. If musicals and operas live in an alternate dimension where it’s perfectly natural for characters to burst into song to express their feelings in a direct and obvious way, why are costumed heroes given the critical shaft?
Part of the answer is because the times are a-changin’ and we’re just now, as a culture, getting used to superheroes. Twenty years from now, assuming they are still around, DC Comics will turn one hundred and Marvel will be about ninety. Thinking about that in reverse: I’ve never lived in a world without superhero movies. People of the generation right after me have never lived in a world without good superhero movies. If this keeps happening, by the time I’m fifty years old, superheroes will likely be a cultural institution on par with Shakespeare, opera, musicals, and anything else that everyone just accepts as “normal.” But people who are twenty to thirty years older than me might associate superheroes with the nana-nana-nana-nana BIFF/POW/ZOWIE/ZAP aesthetic. And some of these folks are still really successful (and good, I might add) critics. It may sound a bit morbid, but when those people stop writing movie reviews all of this will change.*
Here’s where I need to address a common complaint among mainstream critics and geeks alike: superheroes are rebooted or remade too quickly. In 2016, just four years after Christian Bale completed his trilogy as Batman, Ben Affleck is set to make his debut as the caped crusader in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. When the casting of Affleck was announced in 2013, a good portion of the world’s population freaked out either in support or in opposition. At the 2014 New York Comic Con, I personally saw at least three dudes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Ben Affleck’s name on a Batman logo with a giant X over it, indicating they were anti-Batffleck. Sadly, this brand of alarmism is nothing new. Tons of fans wrote letters to Warner Bros. in the ’80s because they were furious that “Mr. Mom,” Michael Keaton, was allowed to play Batman. We’re all susceptible to this and even I was irked when Andrew Garfield—whom I viewed as a guy who was on Doctor Who one time—was cast as Spider-Man. But, the thing is, there’s no reason to get mad or worried about any of this because the characters themselves are entering into the zeitgeist in exactly the same way literary or mythological figures did in the good old days. Were you offended when Liam Neeson was cast as Zeus in Clash of the Titans? Probably not. Remember when Leo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan were cast in The Great Gatsby?* Who was mad about that? No one. Because there’s been a cinematic Jay Gatsby before and there will be one again. Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, and, shockingly, Ant-Man, will likely be around just as long as “classic” canonical characters. If you’re irritated they remade Spider-Man too fast or you’re worried they’re rebooting Batman too quickly after The Dark Knight Rises, just wait until they remake all of this stuff for the fortieth time in the twenty-second century. You’ll be so mad!
A 2012 article in the Los Angeles Times is a great example of what seems to me to be a misunderstanding or less-than-thoughtful explanation of the remake/reboot phenomenon. In the piece, Neal Gabler rails against the young generation of millennials who “don’t think of movies as art the way so many boomers did.” Now despite Gabler making a problematic us-versus-them argument, I don’t think there’s any compelling evidence to suggest the appreciation of film as art has anything to do with the reboot phenomenon, nor being young. Being ignorant and unappreciative of great stories knows no generational boundaries. Gabler’s analysis—which represents a larger knee-jerk argument that you hear all the time—seems to suggest that remakes (or restagings if you will) of beloved stories and characters are somehow an epidemic brought on by an ignorant generation’s lack of understanding about the artistic merit of films, and therefore a new phenomenon. But remakes are nothing new. For centuries around the globe, there have been countless remakes of plays by Shakespeare that probably didn’t look a lot like they would have looked in the Globe. And sure, scholars of Shakespeare still freak out about various interpretations, updating, omissions, abridgments, and so forth, but for most of us, Hamlet is a story that we will see at some point in our lives and be all the better for it. Did Steve Martin’s Roxanne harm the essence of Cyrano de Bergerac? No. I love all versions of Cyrano. And I like both the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man AND the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man. Now I’m learning we may get yet another new Spider-Man in 2017. Bring it on! The Gérard Depardieu version of Cyrano may be the definitive one, but it doesn’t mean the José Ferrer version sucks. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is now considered along the same definitive lines as the Gérard Depardieu version of Cyrano, but it doesn’t mean Ben Affleck’s new Batman will somehow ruin that or make Michael Keaton irrelevant.
Most children who are familiar with fairy tales rarely read the original text of the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Andersen first. And while this might be a shame, it doesn’t mean anything has necessarily been ruined, nor does it indicate a lack of appreciation for the stories. A good number of people who saw the Avengers movie did understand these characters from their comic book roots. Another, larger portion of the population didn’t read comics before or after. Should we care? Is this that big of a deal? As we’ve established, comic book source material that is commonly adapted into film is relatively unsubtle and over-the-top. And at the risk of getting stoned to death by comic book purists, I’ll ask, is it possible that these iterations of big, broad characters and themes work better as films?
Because the films constituting the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be technically conceived on the convincing scope that they’re made on, doesn’t that mean these stories and characters are reaching more people than they would if the characters were limited to comic books? If you equate the success of the Marvel movies with Shakespeare passing into the public domain, what I’m saying should start to make sense. Nobody who puts on a serious production of a Shakespeare play thinks oh, ours will just be okay. They want to do the source material justice. And that’s what’s happening every time our culture remakes a superhero. If Shakespeare were around now, he’d probably
be writing plays about superheroes.
The idea that the movie isn’t as good as the source material because it contradicts the author’s vision is another criticism of comic book movies. We might claim Batman was “created” by Bob Kane, but most people will tell you he was co-created by Bill Finger. So, are we seeing a vision of Batman that is true to Kane’s or Finger’s original conception of him when we go to see the latest Batman movie? Absolutely not. From Alan Moore to Frank Miller to Jeph Loeb to Gail Simone to Marguerite Bennett to artists like Neal Adams, Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Lee Bermejo, Becky Cloonan, and countless more, the image and words of Batman aren’t the purview of any one sacred person. And this is true for every single other superhero, too. There are certainly controversies over who gets original credit—Stan Lee versus Jack Kirby, and Bob Kane versus Bill Finger are notable ones—but my larger point doesn’t have much to do with that. Debating whether or not Shakespeare was real or actually one hundred million monkeys doesn’t make Much Ado About Nothing stop existing. And the same is true—or perhaps truer—with comic book heroes. Comics have always had several different narrative voices behind the scenes, which means that by the time the stories get translated into big, watchable movies, all of those narrative voices are condensed down into a single composite story. Because there’s probably a lot of good stuff left over, who wouldn’t want to make another movie?