Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Wrath of the Titans was a late show. By the time I arrived at the theater, there was only one other person in the lobby, and he worked there, a lava-lamp ovoid of male youth in a heather-blue cineplex-issue polo shirt. His name tag said: BOB. Okay: BOB. BOB sold me a ticket, and here I ran into a complex bit of trouble, because I tried to use a free-ticket voucher I’d gotten as a reward for participating in the theater chain’s discount-card program, only it turned out that the voucher didn’t apply to 3-D movies, which Wrath of the Titans was, and BOB, who spoke slowly and with an anxious, mouse-like precision, had to explain to me that the cineplex’s concession-counter computer interface would allow the face value of discount-card vouchers to be applied toward a larger order total, but the ticket-counter interface would not, meaning that I could use a voucher for a small popcorn toward the cost of a medium popcorn, but not a voucher for a regular movie ticket toward a 3-D movie ticket, although, BOB told me sadly, “we’ve been hoping for an upgrade for a while.”

  I wanted to ask if it would be possible to use a regular movie voucher toward the cost of a medium popcorn, i.e., if the concession-counter interface was sufficiently advanced to enable trans-categorical discount offsets, but this seemed like a lot of words to say at one time, so I slid my credit card over to BOB across the slightly mottled and somehow interestingly dense-feeling gray laminate countertop. I did this tranquilly.

  Since you asked: I fell down the back staircase because I was wearing socks and carrying dishes and we’d just had that staircase refinished and the top was slippery and I took a bad step, just one of those things. Trust me when I say I’d have made a great Marx Brother, apart from the weeping. I had no permanent damage, just a better-than-average excuse to look up “hematoma” on Wikipedia, plus this arm I couldn’t move for a few weeks. A medium degree of medium-term pain, which I was dutifully killing, or at least filtering. Not much compared with the trials of Perseus.

  Weird thing about BOB: Maybe eight minutes after he sold me the ticket, after I’d one-armedly hauled my stub and transaction receipt and cellophane-wrapped 3-D glasses and medium popcorn and Pepsi back to auditorium 6—it took two trips—and discovered that I was the only person in auditorium 6, and started to wonder if perhaps I was the only human being in the entire cineplex, not counting BOB, so that auditoriums 1–5 and 7–8 were airing their explosions and murders and desperate kisses to the empty air, while I was processing all that, deep in the coming attractions, BOB wandered into the theater, carrying one of those orange-cone flashlights that ushers walk around with, and saw me, and did a freaked-out jiggle in place.

  “Oh shit, someone’s in here!” BOB said, and scurried out.

  I wondered about this, at the time, less than I should have. My only immediate reaction was to look at Facebook on my phone. On Facebook I saw that back in my hometown, in Oklahoma, my high-school friend Kara had uploaded a picture of her kids, and in the background of the photo, behind her two sons, you could see a piece of art she’d hung on the wall. It was a giant poster that read INSANITY IS MERELY AN OPINION.

  I think the Vicodin had mostly come online at this point.

  * * *

  I have a dumb affinity for cornball sword-and-sandals epics: thus Wrath. For cornball SF and fantasy in general, really, although like most former child nerds I have somewhat particular taste. I prefer stuff that’s actually good, of course, but am often happy with stuff that definitely isn’t, as long as it seems to reflect somebody’s odd extruded personal vision rather than just, like, orcs. What I don’t like is genre work that’s neither great nor endearingly awful, but merely competent and serviceable about meeting expectations. I felt tremendous fondness for the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, which I’d seen as a kid, loving in particular the golden owl, Bubo; years later, when I read “Sailing to Byzantium” for the first time, and got to the part where Yeats asks to leave his mortal body and be refashioned as a golden bird, Bubo was what I pictured him becoming. The movie I was seeing tonight was only thinly related to that film, though, being the unasked-for sequel to an unnecessary 2010 reboot. It was a sure bet to be terrible. The question was whether it would be terrible enough, and in the right way, for me to maybe enjoy it by accident. A lot of the time getting by in this world requires outmaneuvering your own intentions.

  Stirring music. Camera gliding through deep space. Constellations wheeling in 3-D. Intro voice-over: Man’s fate is written in the stars. If, for instance, you’re an accomplished English character actor, your fate may be to intone exposition over opening credits for money. Blame the stars!

  The early scenes were a mixed bag, badness-wise. Whether because of the opioids, or the effect of solitude, or the fact that BOB had screwed up the volume on auditorium 6’s surround-sound interface, the whole thing came at me in a numb, murmurous rush, through a faintly buzzy sheen of overexposure. On the other hand, shit kept breaking that plane of coolness—violent, mythic shit that tended to erupt right when I was hoping for a big Sofia Coppola zoom out followed by a Pastels song. Perseus (Sam Worthington) would be talking to Zeus (Liam Neeson) about what Hades (Ralph Fiennes) said to Ares (Edgar Ramirez), when suddenly Perseus (Worthington) would be snatched up into the air by a two-headed fire-breathing demon-dog (MacBook Pro) and hurled into a marble column (Doric). Beast swarms of various descriptions kept pouring out of the mouth of Tartarus, right toward me, in 3-D. Piety speaking! The Vicodin membrane wasn’t quite strong enough to keep it all out.

  They take a lot of damage, these heroes. Having recently experienced a degree of blunt-force trauma myself, I wasn’t entirely prepared for how it would feel to watch half-naked, very vulnerable-seeming human bodies crash through stone walls, or bowling-ball into temples, or fall to the ground from fifty feet in the air. One thing you can say about the Greek myths is that they’re often astonishingly beautiful about killing people. My favorite moment in Bulfinch’s Mythology comes when Perseus (Worthington), the selfsame hero of Wrath, is denied hospitality by the giant-king Atlas. This makes him furious, so he pulls out the head of Medusa, and

  Atlas, with all his bulk, was changed into stone. His beard and hair became forests, his arms and shoulders cliffs, his head a summit, and his bones rocks. Each part increased in bulk till he became a mountain, and (such was the pleasure of the gods) heaven with all its stars rests upon his shoulders.

  Like reality, though, Wrath of the Titans mostly sticks to hurling people into very hard objects. And occasionally lighting them on fire, impaling them on a trident, snapping their necks, electrocuting them, choking them to death, and transforming them into disintegrating sand sculptures.

  At the same time, though? Nobody feels any pain. The heroes are mainly demigods, which is like being on Percocet at least. They’re anesthetized by their own awesomeness. By and large, Wrath adheres to the timeless law of damage in action movies, which is also the idea the NFL dined out on for years—that slashing can wound you but concussive force can only move you around. No deep-tissue bruising for Perseus after being swung around like a private wrecking ball by the ogre that jumps him in the labyrinth of Tartarus, only a razor-thin cut where its horn-shard grazes his pectoral. Everything is sort of numb, although the Jesus and Mary Chain is nowhere to be heard and the only whispered personal revelations are between Heston-bearded gods played by aging male Oscar winners. It was okay, I decided. I had a wrecked elbow and a complicatedly dislocated shoulder and the back of my thigh looked like a map of ancient Greece, but I felt fine, and Perseus & Co. kept getting hit by comets, but they felt fine, and we were all floating in the dark, waiting for the fire-minotaur to show up, feeling fine together. Insanity is merely an opinion.

  * * *

  It’s a little odd, given the movie’s title, how few Titans actually put in an appearance. We’re not really talking about the wrath of the Titans, plural, so much as the wrath of one Titan, Kronos, who is admittedly no slouch in the wrath department (make no mistake: he’s furious), but still, a really appalling amount of
potential wrath gets left on the table. Mnemosyne, for instance, is a Titan who I would think could dispense very terrifying wrath—she’s the mythological personification of memory. Kronos can lay waste to the desert (although why, it’s already a desert), but memory is what really kills you. Especially since Perseus’s whole motivating backstory has to do with anguish over his lost home, his dead wife and daughter. Imagine what Mnemosyne could spin that into, if they’d flown in, say, Cate Blanchett and given her some scenery to chew. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already? she’d sing. “Should the pillars of memory / topple out of my reach, / I must remake the air,” Pablo Neruda wrote, which is an incredible action sequence if you’ve got the CGI budget for it.

  We floated there, Zeus and Andromeda and I. By any standard of human achievement predating about 1900, Wrath of the Titans is a deathless miracle, a visual wonder you could escape into for days. The sight of Kronos, father of the gods, lumbering across the plain, this living mountain of brimstone, would have upended civilization in Queen Victoria’s day. The Goya painting of the same character is terrifying because it’s an expression of mad, almost will-less appetite, a staring animal driven to consume its own child. The Kronos of Wrath, by contrast, is simply a malignant machine. No pity, no fear, hardly even the capacity for desire, just a numb, annihilating force rolling forward, leaving nothing feeling behind.

  By any applicable standard from almost any prior point in human history, it was completely transfixing. By today’s standards, it was just a dumb, fun-enough thing, a minor example of the influence of Shadow of the Colossus on movie-monster scale. Where we’re at, I thought, the machine has long since passed by. I thought about tweeting that, but it would have hurt to get my phone out.

  Afterward, the lobby was deserted. Not even BOB was around. The lights had been dimmed, though the mini-arcade was still bleeping in its corner, partying contentedly in its medium-tech ghost town. I felt sure that I was the only customer at any cineplex in America at that moment, and that BOB was waiting for me to leave so he could close all of them. I hoped that somewhere, maybe in a bigger city, he could try out his upgraded interface.

  I adjusted my arm in its sling, tried unsuccessfully to pull my jacket on, and called Siobhan to come pick me up. Our house was five minutes away, so I had five minutes to kill in the parking lot. Panera Bread was closed. GameSpot was dark. The lights from Walmart looked a long way away. I thought about anesthetics, how they differed from analgesics—painkillers—how you could trace that through the words’ Greek roots. I didn’t know which one to file this night under. You could make the case—people had—that American culture itself was now mostly one or the other. But that, too, was merely an opinion, and I didn’t think it was mine.

  In my case the Vicodin wouldn’t wear off for another couple of hours, if it was even doing anything. Then I would take some more. I looked up and the stars looked back down like an interested audience. Chained to the chalky / chalice of night. The moon was as white as a bone.

  2. COMPUTER LOVE (1989)

  We had orange carpet in our living room in Oklahoma, where, on regular weeknights, I would stay up and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of doing my algebra homework. My seventh-grade algebra teacher was a sneering, straw-haired, lip-smacking wearer of short-sleeve dress shirts named Mr. White, whose strategy for handling classroom disruptions was to flex his biceps one at a time and say, “I call this one Thunder and I call this one Lightning. Let me know if you’d like an introduction.” Mr. White spent the first part of every class bivouacked behind his desk reading Whitetail Bowhunter magazine, which gave me time to get caught up, imperfectly, if I’d skipped a problem set the night before.

  In our living room, on the wall across from the TV, my parents had hung a couple of 1930s advertising posters for Royal Mail cruises. When the black reaches of space appeared during Star Trek: The Next Generation’s opening credits, you could see the cruise ships’ reflections in the TV glass: the Enterprise sliding at its usual bold angle out of starry darkness, SOUTH AMERICA BY ROYAL MAIL, with its big blue ocean liner and flaming tropical sunset, shimmering like a nebula around it. Also reflected: me in pajamas on the couch. Sometimes my dad would watch with me; sometimes the rest of the house was asleep.

  I wasn’t a Trekkie; not really. The minutiae of setting, the language of the truly devout, left me cold. I didn’t know the rules of tridimensional chess or care about Romulan politics. I’d tried watching the original Star Trek and found its cartoon-bright universe—the soundstage brawls, the sonar blorps, the happy overacting—almost incomprehensible. For some reason, though, The Next Generation awakened in me a feeling of serious, almost overwhelming yearning, that suffocating childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain type of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be yourself. I carefully recorded each episode on our VCR and typed out labels on my enormous electric typewriter, a Christmas gift from a year or two before. One VHS tape held two Next Generation episodes, so I had to fast-forward through the first in order to get the label timings. “Who Watches the Watchers 0:00:00” b/w “Déjà Q 0:58:59.” Having the correct timings seemed vital, possibly because so many Next Generation episodes themselves hinged on matters of fine timing, radiation leaks with critical exposure imminent, warp jumps that had to be calculated to the nanosecond (yet somehow always involved a character yelling, “Now!”). Except to get the episode lengths, I don’t think I ever played the tapes. None of my friends watched the show, or at least we never talked about it. For me, the series was a fleeting, unconnected ritual, a regular hour when everything hushed and got bright.

  One of the problems with revisiting science fiction is that every voyage into the future eventually becomes a voyage into the past. I recently rewatched the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, all 178 episodes, and I found that traveling to the show’s twenty-fourth century sent me hurtling backward at about warp 9. That’s partly because the series is bound up so strongly in my memory with those misfit hours of adolescence. It’s also because The Next Generation itself is helplessly, indeed movingly, of its time.

  You can’t help but notice this, watching now. The first sign is that for a franchise that famously defines space as an extension of the Old West, TNG very quickly dispenses with almost any sense of a frontier. Captain Kirk’s Enterprise was a ship of phaser-happy explorers forever pressing onward toward the next fistfight on the next undiscovered planet; in comparison, Captain Picard’s Enterprise is a calm, sleek vessel of end-of-history galactic administration—a faster-than-light embassy, complete with chamber music concerts. There’s very little fighting; there’s a great deal of personal growth and a staggering amount of trade-pact negotiation. Many, many episodes turn on the decidedly nonstandard TV plot of “something has gone wrong with a diplomat.” There’s an only-global-superpower, world-policeman feel to most of this: The Klingons, the wild, violent others of the Kirk series, are now allies of the Federation. Everything’s running smoothly. The crew’s heroic quest is just to keep it that way.

  So they transport medical supplies. They help colonies fix their weather-control systems. Gene Roddenberry’s guiding vision of the Star Trek franchise was, famously, that it would offer an optimistic vision of humanity’s future. The Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years into the filming of The Next Generation, and the show’s optimistic future became startlingly coterminous with the optimistic present of the George H. W. Bush presidency. Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? The grand adventure of the NCC-1701-D was no longer to spread civilization, or even defend it; it was just to keep the machinery oiled. Remember 1991, America?

  And it breaks. There is something bizarre and significant about how often the Enterprise breaks. Geordi La Forge, who is the chief engineer but who still has to crawl on his hands and knees through the ship’s cramped interconnecting Jefferies tubes to spot-fix most problems himself—well, let’s please note that after a couple of weeks of wel
ding between-decks trifusium relays in order to prevent cascading sensor-pattern overruns from harmonically generating a reactor-core breach, I myself would not retain the tenth part of Geordi’s amiable disposition. One of my uncles was a tech enthusiast who lived in a geodesic-dome house and built (and subsequently crashed) his own airplane. One Christmas, not long after I discovered Star Trek, he gave us a towering beige computer—it must have run MS-DOS, if that—and gave me a quick course in hacking the autoexec.bat file. I was the only one in my family who used this PC, which I remember as physically fortresslike. It was always broken, always, and always broken in some complicated and hard-to-define manner that meant you could use it, but not use it all the way. It would work, but loading programs, or whatever I was trying to do with it, would be elaborately difficult. If the constant malfunctions Scotty had to cope with on the first Star Trek series were drawn from large-scale stuff, war experience and manufacturing and the rapid expansion of infrastructure, Geordi’s troubles seem to reflect the small-scale nightmares of late-eighties personal computing. Machines—nanobots, space stations, the ship itself—are constantly becoming sentient. This thing has a will of its own! Whole episodes revolve around arbitrary glitches and bugs. (For instance, every episode in which anyone goes into the Holodeck, for any reason, ever.)

  The Next Generation drew something like twenty million viewers a week in its heyday, a colossal number by today’s standards, and the penetration of the show’s keywords—“energize,” “engage,” “Number One,” “I am Locutus of Borg,” “resistance is futile,” “make it so”—was light-years beyond what you’d expect from a syndicated SF show. But in a way, it’s no wonder. The Enterprise crew was driving a misfiring IBM PC in the service of a quasi-neoliberal agenda, and so, at the same time, were we.