Since Halloween seems to have swallowed up all of October, I had an opportunity last month to see a lot of horror movies. Mostly on TV, though also one theatrical showing, which I will get to presently.

White Zombie: This 1932 film is said to be the first of the Hollywood zombie movies. Back then, zombies were not inherently threatening; what was really frightening was the sorcerer who created them, and thus had power over life, death and free will. Here the sorcerer is played by Bela Lugosi, with the fabulously unsubtle name of Murder Legendre. (It still amazes me that some studio higher-up didn’t say, “Oh, come on.”) The story concerns a wealthy white Haitian who makes a Faustian bargain with Legendre to win over the woman he desperately desires, who is about to marry someone else. Legendre’s solution is to turn her into a zombie … and by implication, a kind of animate sex doll.

I would like to track down a better print of this movie sometime, because the edition I saw — free on demand through my cable provider — was in absolutely terrible shape. (I think a better print does exist on DVD — an online review of it includes screen shots that, even in shrunken screencap version, look much better than what I saw.) The visuals are clearly very important to the film, given the number of painterly tableaux and unusual angles it employs. Despite that problem, however, the film managed to be pretty creepy. Zombies who just wander around vacantly don’t sound too threatening, but their vacancy is itself terrifying. Like many horror ideas, it is ultimately about desecration of the body. An eerie visit to Legendre’s sugar mill shows dozens of zombies working away mechanically, stripped of all humanity except their function in the business. Anyone who’s ever worked for a corporation will probably feel a shiver of recognition from that.

Shallow Ground: This is a 2004 film that I stumbled across one afternoon on SyFy knowing absolutely nothing about it. That’s probably the best way to see it, because much of the interest in watching it is trying to figure out what the heck is going on. To the film’s credit, I formed several different theories before realizing there are actually two stories going on — neither of them original, but which I haven’t seen put together this way before.

The movie was made on a shoestring budget and apparently released directly to DVD, and in a gorier form than the TV edit that I saw, if the online reviews are anything to go by. I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody, but I found it an engrossing way to spend a couple hours. The production is minimalist — it relies heavily on that great cheap setting for horror films, the deep woods — but never looks amateur, and the characters and plot are developed with unusual care for this kind of movie. The last scene made me roll my eyes — blatant sequel set-up! But I will say, the Wikipedia article on the film made a suggestion about what was happening that made it a bit more interesting. (Am I being vague and non-spoilery enough here?)

Horror of Dracula/Curse of Frankenstein: TCM had a Hammer-fest last month, and this was, to my knowledge, the first time I’d seen any films from this famous British studio. They are fun to watch, and in a way seem made to be watched on TV. I watched horror movies from a range of decades this season, and the ’60s came across as a sweet spot between the staginess of the old movies and the grittiness of the new ones. The actors had by then learned not to dial up their expressions for the cheap seats, but they still deployed classical British acting enunciation and a touch of stylization that gives the movies a “hey, let’s play at monsters!” feel. The sets are definitely sets, but in the fantasy-horror genre the artificiality can be a strength. Dracula’s castle looked like a near cousin to the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel.

Horror of Dracula was Hammer’s first Dracula film, with Christopher Lee playing the Count. It’s based on Bram Stoker’s novel, in an extremely loose sort of way. The novel has always been too unwieldy for film, and here Hammer crunched it into a brisk 82 minutes, so it’s not surprising that they changed a lot. The most profound thematic change is that the movie version shapes it as a hero’s quest, with Peter Cushing playing Van Helsing as a more conventional protagonist than the colorful supporting character he was in the book. The story is also shrunk geographically, with the London scenes moved to Austria, and the ship’s voyage removed entirely. The result is a sort of miniaturist version of Dracula; it feels like listening to a chamber-music version of a symphony. Nonetheless, I thought it worked on its own terms: it was absorbing, it was scary, and it justifiably made stars out of its two leads.

Curse of Frankenstein came a bit earlier, and was actually the first film to pair Cushing and Lee. It was, apparently, the film that turned Hammer into a horror factory, due to its enormous success. I found it more tedious than Dracula, but that may be because the whole Frankenstein concept never seemed scary to me — just sad. Cushing is again the star of the show here, and what he does with the character is interesting, though perhaps more in concept than in execution. He plays Frankenstein as a sociopath, but not so much the Hollywood demonic version as the shallow narcissist that sociopaths usually are in real life. He’s not a sadist; he just doesn’t feel anyone’s pain but his own. This makes the monster all the more pitiful. When the scientist opens the door to the monster’s prison to show a friend how he’s “trained” his creation, the monster reflexively shrinks away against the wall. We’re left to imagine what the poor creature’s existence has been like.

Dagon: We return to the 21st century with another movie with a somewhat distinguished pedigree with which I’d had no personal acquaintance. The producer and the director first collaborated back in the 1980s to make Re-Animator, and since then have had a somewhat steady business making H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. Given the infamous gore in Re-Animator, I’d never been interested in the films. But here, as with Shallow Ground, I was shielded by the censorship of SyFy. And also as before, I ran across it and got pulled in.

In this case, I think it was because I liked the nerd hero. Paul Marsh is a young man who just made a fortune with a dot-com startup (a sign the film was made in 2001), who heads out on a boating trip near Spain with his girlfriend and another couple. Before the first ten minutes are up, the boat has hit a rock, and Paul and the GF go ashore to find help in a very strange village, where increasingly sinister things happen. Paul is in some ways a stereotypical movie nerd — he has large glasses that he keeps futzing with, since it’s almost constantly raining — but I didn’t feel that either the actor or the filmmakers were condescending to him. In fact, I think the movie’s strongest point is that our protagonists aren’t movie Good Guys, but they’re not slasher-movie bastards either. They’re nice people who get into a very bad situation, and over the course of the film develop some real courage. Unfortunately they’re in the Lovecraft universe, where heroism is never rewarded.

I first read Lovecraft just a couple years ago, and like Frankenstein, it seemed less frightening than depressing. I think it depends on how you feels about inexorable doom. I dimly remember Eve and Sean Collins debating this a few years ago. Sean found inexorable doom to be about the scariest thing that could happen in a movie, while Eve said she wants horror to be about sin, not predestination. In my case, I think it’s more a basic emotional reaction. When faced with a bad thing that is truly unavoidable, I tend to withdraw into myself, detaching emotionally. That’s a reasonable strategy for real life, but it’s not really the reaction you want to a movie. Movies thrive on emotional engagement. Maybe Sean and other viewers react more with panic, which would at least make the experience more stimulating.

Nosferatu: This I saw at the AFI Silver theater with Eve. It’s a silent film from 1922, and the showing was accompanied by the Silent Film Orchestra. The “orchestra” turned out to be two guys — one on keyboard, one on percussion, both on computers. But I thought they did a really good job. They managed to make music that didn’t seem dated, but at the same time, didn’t seem anachronistic.

Nosferatu was the first film adaptation of Dracula, and was made in Germany. I have seen many adaptations of Dracula by now, and this one really stands out because it was not influenced by the Anglophone tradition of “doing Dracula”, but took the character in a quite different direction. The Count is here identified as a sort of demon personification of the Black Death; he commands an army of rats, looks a lot like rat himself, and spreads pestilence wherever he goes. As a result, the sexual horror that features so prominently in most Dracula adaptations is here almost entirely replaced with sheer repulsiveness. Even the most potentially erotic scene — the vampire biting a young woman lying in bed — emphasizes his verminous nature. We get a sidelong shot of the woman with the Count’s bald head rising behind her, perfectly still, looking like nothing so much as a giant tick having a feed.

The interesting thing is, the rudiments of this were present in the book: the connection between vampirism and disease, the Count’s physical weirdness and his friendliness with rats. The other adaptations just haven’t made much of it, preferring to go for aristocratic decadence and sexual perversion (which were also certainly present in the book). Hammer’s Castle Dracula is, in fact, almost the exact opposite of Castle Nosferatu. The latter’s castle scenes were reportedly filmed in an actual ruined European castle, with the correspondingly dank medieval rooms. Everything about it feels earthier, dirtier — making the plague seem that much more real.

You do have to put yourself out a bit to connect with this movie. The print was almost as bad as White Zombie, which was especially a problem when atmospheric dark shadows looked like masses of scratches. The vampire is well played, but the two romantic leads are too faithful to stage conventions, ludicrously overplaying their parts. There are also a few moments of sped-up photography that are meant to show the Count’s superpowers but just look goofy. Still, it’s a fascinating look at a road not taken in English-speaking vampire movies: the undead not as a seducer but a loathsome, pestilential parasite upon the living. That vision would eventually come to Anglophone film in the 1960s, but with the monsters we started with: zombies.

I must say, my second year in Washington is really showing me what a different climate I have moved into from California. The first four-season cycle I went through was pretty mild, but this year we’ve lurched from record snowfall to record heat. All this has added up to a lot of time indoors on my part, and — since reading about fascism all the time can get a girl down — an inordinate amount of TV watching. Here are some things I’ve been tuned into lately:

The Good Wife. This drama series is basically two shows in one: a legal drama that deals with one case per week, a la Law & Order, and a longer-form story about one of the lawyers, whose husband was the attorney general of Illinois before being thrown in prison for soliciting prostitutes, as well as the office politics inside her law firm. Recently I stumbled across the Onion AV Club’s write-up of this show, and was surprised at how exactly the author’s reaction lined up with my own. “I watch every episode, and I enjoy every episode, and I am impressed by just how much the show is able to squeeze out of the old workplace drama model. And then every week, I have to force myself to watch the new episode. Once I’m done, and I’m still in love, I say, “Man, why didn’t I want to watch that?” But the next week rolls around, and I’m not interested, and it takes me a moment to remember just how much I liked the last episode. It’s a never-ending cycle, and I don’t know why I’m stuck in it.”

It’s an interesting example-by-inverse of something I’ve wondered about as a fiction reader: what makes a novel a “page-turner,” even when you know it’s not very good? Books like that tend to be “comfort food,” of a sort: they take place in a world that has moral structure and direction and you expect things to be neatly wrapped up in the end. The legal half of The Good Wife is actually like that. Although the lawyers engage in a lot more skulduggery than Perry Mason did, the show is basically optimistic that the courts can be a vehicle for justice. The other half of the show is exactly the opposite. It takes place in the world of Chicago politics, after all, and everyone swims in moral murk. The characters are rarely perfectly honest with each other, to the point that the audience can also feel left out of what’s really going on. Moral ambiguity can make for great drama, of course, but it is harder to fit into the needs of storytelling. There needs to be some kind of arc — a fall, a redemption, a learning experience, etc. — and right now, I don’t know where these characters are heading but sort of dread it. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to go back and watch.

Man vs. Wild/Survivorman. This is not really the sort of thing I would have thought I’d like. Each of these two shows follows a man dropped into some remote wilderness location with minimal gear, who then survives off the land for a number of days, explaining his methods as he goes. This is the sort of vocation that seems a little bit nuts, and the fact that they kill animals onscreen makes me wince (though we are talking mainly about insects here). But I guess the appeal of the wilderness locations to my apartment-bound self is obvious, and I find that following a man going through them on foot gives me a more ground-level, you-are-there sense of them than the more panoramic nature documentaries I’ve watched all my life. The Sahara desert seems like a far more interesting place now that I’ve tracked Bear Grylls through it on Man vs. Wild; there are sand dunes and oases, yes, but there are also trees popping up in the middle of nowhere, clusters of bushes with huge poisonous gourds, and the odd Bedouin offering you a goat testicle out of hospitality.

Though the two shows have a very similar format, they have somewhat different attitudes. Survivorman, the older show (it ended in 2008), features stoic Canadian survivalist Les Stroud filming himself in complete solitude for seven days. Although he is usually within hiking distance of a support crew, he understands the peril of his situation and plays things pretty conservatively, avoiding most hazards, fasting rather than eating something that might make him sick, and occasionally bailing out early if things are just not working out. Grylls, a flamboyant Englishman, takes his camera crew along with him and plunges into practically every danger he comes across; if the natural environment doesn’t bring enough excitement, they’ll stage a challenge for him. This sometimes makes Man vs. Wild seem less like survivalism than like a wilderness-based circus act. And if you’re impressed by sword swallowers, you should see the stuff that Bear eats. I sometimes wonder if he’s being a bad influence on younger viewers; watching him could take those playground games of “I dare you to eat that!” to a whole new level.

Still, I have a hard time holding it against Bear because he always seems to be having so much fun. As scripted TV seems to keep getting darker and more cynical, I often find myself turning to reality shows if I want to be put in a good mood. Such as…

Clean House. This is a variation on the home-makeover show, focusing on people with insane amounts of clutter. The crew swoops in on homeowners who are getting buried in their own junk, persuades them to part with many of their beloved objects, holds a yard sale, and uses the money to refurbish what’s left. I wouldn’t have been interested in this show a few years ago, but going through the long, arduous process of clearing out my grandparents’ house really made me a fan. As a “reality” show it’s at the Man vs. Wild level of stageyness, but it still captures the mixture of comedy and horror in such an enterprise. And the conversations with the homeowners, with their conflicted attitudes (“Save me from all this crap! No wait, don’t take that!”) make me feel a bit like I’m finally hearing the other half of the conversation I kept having with my grandfather in my head: “What on earth were you thinking? What the heck is this thing?” And of course, it all ends happily.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This is another show that I’m kind of surprised to find myself liking. While I don’t feel that George Lucas raped my childhood, I did feel things were going downhill with the prequels, so watching the weekly cartoon version seemed like eating something way past its expiration date.

When I finally did see an episode though, I remembered the line from some Internet critic to the effect of, “Finally, Star Wars has become the Saturday matinee serial it always was in its heart.” Since the show takes place within an already finished story (specifically, between Episodes II and III), it does not have the burden of trying to move forward an epic narrative, and can go back to just having fun. You get the tone right off from the narrator who gets us rolling on each episode, who I could swear is the same guy who narrated Superfriends back in the ’70s. It’s just that pulpy. The computer animation, to my untrained eye, looks really good, and shows that ILM hasn’t exhausted its imagination yet. Like the movies, the series borrows plot elements from all over the place, but it isn’t even bothering to hide it anymore. One set of adventures featured a giant prehistoric animal awakened from its long slumber who goes on a rampage, called (naturally) the Zillo Beast.

Amidst all the lighthearted fun, though, I think the series does honor one element of the original film that the prequels didn’t. When Obi-Wan first tells Luke about his father, he says, “He was the best star-pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. … And he was a good friend.” Anakin seems like such a mess throughout the prequels that you don’t really see that, but the series, unencumbered by the Darth Vader plotline, is essentially a buddy show about the Republic’s top two enforcers. It makes me feel even more strongly that Lucas is best at telling heroic tales of adventure, not morally ambiguous tragedies.

Eve reviews The Last Station at Inside Catholic. Her reaction is very similar to my own, which was not a surprise since I saw it with her and we discussed these very points at some length afterward. (One’s impression of a movie can be greatly affected by who one sees it with…)

It’s kind of funny to me that a couple of commenters on her article suggest that Tolstoy’s problem was that he was a leftist — Deal Hudson compares him to Marx and Rousseau, as someone whose utopian ideas could never square with reality. But I think that the very reason the movie needed to spell out its characters’ ideals is that they don’t fit familiar modern American political categories. People planning earthly utopias don’t go around promoting celibacy, unless their idea of utopia is a world without humans. So why did Tolstoy do it? At one point, Bulgakov paraphrases Tolstoy’s writing as saying the body is an illusion. So what idea of reality are the characters mortifying their flesh for? We’re not told.

I also find myself wondering about the motives of Vladimir Chertkov. The movie portrays him as a sort of Machiavellian villain, but it also says in a postscript that he remained a committed Tolstoyan until his death in the 1930s. Now, at the start of the film we find Chertkov under house arrest, and life for a Tolstoyan wasn’t any easier under the Communists, who literally sent them to Siberia. Machiavelli probably wouldn’t have approved. Meanwhile, Tolstoy’s wife insinuates that he’s homosexual, and is fighting her out of jealousy. That would have interesting implications both for the politics and the celibacy question, but the audience has no way of knowing whether it’s true.

We also have no real way of assessing the Countess’ motives. She says — repeatedly — that the loss of Tolstoy’s copyrights will leave her “starving,” but it’s clear there’s quite a bit of family property apart from the novels. What are the Tolstoys’ finances actually like? Do the children have other means of making a living? The film doesn’t seem interested in these questions, instead framing the issue strictly as whether Tolstoy loves his wife or his ideals more.

This might be a bit much to ask of a two-hour movie. But I do think there was some fat that could have been cut. I felt like we kept watching the Tolstoys have the same argument over and over. Also, the Valentin-Masha affair could have taken up less screen time. In fact, the New York Times’ review of the novel doesn’t even mention Masha, suggesting that if she’s in there at all, she’s a much smaller character. I can’t help thinking that Masha was invented precisely to address the problem I mentioned earlier: no character in the true history really shared the values of the target audience, so somebody has to be in there espousing the gospel of personal liberation. Given what was coming in Russia’s near future, however, I have to wonder how much good it would have done. I sympathize with the movie’s valuing the personal over the political, but sometimes the political is inescapable.

Hi folks, sorry for the abrupt shutdown. Things are going OK, though torturously slowly as my brother-in-law’s treatment is being prepared. It won’t have to be as aggressive as they feared, apparently. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, and life trucks along.

In the meantime, Eve and I have seen a couple of interesting shows at the Synetic Theater, as she mentioned here. It’s difficult to describe the style — sort of interpretive dance mixed with pantomime. That’s just as artsy-fartsy as that sounds, but so well done that it still works. They make incredibly creative use of minimal props — some of the “props” are actually people posing as furniture or whatever — and brilliant use of lighting. It’s an ideal form for fantastical subjects.

Dracula wasn’t quite as successful as Midsummer Night’s Dream, though it was still remarkable. MND was entirely wordless, but Dracula included some dialog, much of it lifted straight from the book. I was amazed, actually, at how faithful to the novel it was, given how long and convoluted the novel is. They managed to fit in all the main characters and important set pieces, though they essentially eliminated the last act in Transylvania. The only additions were a strange dream sequence in the middle (I think it had something to do with Renfield and the rats, though it confusingly didn’t involve Renfield), and a sort of back-story at the beginning showing Dracula as a Christian warrior who is tempted and inhabited by a demon. (This gave me a horrified moment where I thought they might base the play on the Coppola movie, and they did lift a few elements from it, but not egregiously.)

The dialogue scenes didn’t work as well as the wordless parts though, especially since the Count, rather than playing the smooth aristocrat around Jonathan Harker, seems like a nutcase from the beginning. To be fair though, I don’t think any two-hour adaptation could build the suspense as wonderfully as the first act of the novel does; it would just take too much time.

Another problem that modern adapters always seem to hit, though, is that they can’t stop feeling superior to the novel’s complete and utter Victorianness. The program notes include this comment from the director:

Dracula’s three wives represent both a Victorian male’s dream and nightmare: the unbridled sexuality of the female. Their voluptuousness opposes the Victorian ideal so completely that it leaves the men of the story bewildered and fearful — seductive in the same way that their powerful, violent master is to everyone in the story.

The production, as you might imagine, makes the most of this, casting three gorgeous, slinky dancers in red dresses as the Brides. But it also completely leaves out their taste for infanticide. An early scene in the book, but not in the play, involves Dracula bringing them an infant to munch on at the castle, and later sending the wolves after the infant’s mother when she shows up to look for it. The play does show how Lucy develops the same taste for baby blood when she becomes a vampire, but the Brides, once they get to London, are shown only preying on adult men (which I don’t think was in the book). The connection between unbridled sexuality and women turning on babies is a real one, even if you don’t include abortion under that heading; certainly in Stoker’s day, a great many unwanted babies were left to die, or dropped off in foundling hospitals, which often amounted to the same thing. But vampires seem to have acquired such a porno-fantasy patina that no adapter seems to be quite willing to go with the novel’s full-on sexual horror.

I think what frustrates me about this kind of thing is that the really scary part of the novel, in my opinion, is that Dracula is a straight-up sexual predator. He sees his victims as — literally — meat. This ought to be readily translatable to 21st-century viewers, but no adaptation that I’ve seen, strangely enough, has been willing to go as far with this idea as a 112-year-old book. (Though this one was better about it than some; as another friend pointed out, the bite scenes were played straightforwardly as rapes.)

Speaking of the book’s political incorrectness, after the show Eve ventured the theory that it was also based on xenophobia. The Count, and the country he lives in, are frightening embodiments of foreignness. I objected that Van Helsing, the main vampire killer, is also a foreigner (and I might have added so is Quincy Morris, who as a Texan is foreign from an English standpoint). Eve thought that Van Helsing is considered OK because he’s less foreign, from someplace closer to England.

My own theory was that the conflict isn’t so much English-foreign as modern-premodern. It is an observable fact that what people often despise most in foreigners are cultural features that they themselves have recently thrown off. So Americans got passionately involved in the struggle against apartheid, but were mostly baffled by the Hutu-Tutsi conflict; and where medieval Europeans may have criticized Muslims for being infidels, now we criticize them for being sexist. Likewise, the book’s Transylvania could be a scene from England’s past: the arrogant, parasitic nobleman and his insular, superstitious subjects living in a state of mutual distrust.

From what I remember, it’s modernity as much as anything else that destroys Dracula. After seeming almost omnipotent at the beginning, he becomes less and less threatening over the course of the novel, as he is forced to grapple with shipping and train schedules and whatnot. Van Helsing describes him as having a “child brain”, fixed in his habits, incapable of abstraction or deduction. By the time we return to Transylvania in the end, the place is in literal and figurative daylight, and the Count’s eventual destruction is almost anticlimactic.

But of course, the viewing public doesn’t really want to remember Dracula that way. It wants horror to be about the dark places of the world unilluminated, and unilluminatable, by the Enlightenment. Yet this recent turning of vampires into objects of sexual fantasy, or even into superheroes of a sort, seems to diminish them just as much.

Not long ago, I was talking with Eve about my failed attempt to get interested in the recent Battlestar Galactica. It was difficult to put my finger on what was wrong with it. Certainly the dark, depressing tone was a factor (hey, remember the days when sci-fi was fun?). But I think I’m also running out of patience with sci-fi’s obsession with artificial intelligence.

I remember discussing this last year with my brother-in-law, a former LAN administrator, after I’d read an article about speech-recognition software. The gist of it was that, while language seems simple enough for us humans to learn, it’s far, far more complicated than it appears. The piece quotes Steven Pinker saying that language “could involve the entirety of a person’s knowledge.”

My BIL said that the whole idea of creating a computer that can think and act like a person is much, much farther off than many in the tech business would have you believe. It may actually be impossible, if we follow Emerson Pugh’s dictum that “if the human mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.” Stories such as the Terminator series and Ghost in the Shell get around this by having a computer network’s self-awareness emerge naturally from its growing complexity, as it gathers more data and abilities than a single human mind could hold. But the connection between that and having a separate personal will is rather obscure to me. A flatworm has a will, but it can’t beat you at chess. So part of the problem is that a lot of sci-fi rests on an anxiety that I, for once, am not particularly worried about.

But even if we ignore these problems the same way sci-fi tends to ignore the light-speed limit, creating AI would still entail an advance in human self-understanding that itself would change society. Instead, though, AI-based stories tend to plant sentient robots in societies where human self-conception is pretty much the same as it is now, which makes the situations it creates ring hollow. In the recent TV series Dollhouse, for instance, a shady organization has AI so advanced that it can make copies of one person’s personality and implant it in the brain of another, even making specific adjustments like adding or subtracting memories and mixing and matching traits from different people. The whiz who operates this technology is a stereotypical computer geek who feels more at home with machines than people, a stereotype that actually refutes the show’s premise. Wouldn’t a man with such godlike knowledge of the human brain be less intimidated by people than anybody else?

Of course, some will object that I’m taking all this too literally, and robots function symbolically to make larger points. Sometimes, though, it seems like using robot characters in stories isn’t so much pointing towards truth as evading it. The robots in Wall-E, for instance, don’t make much sense as robots — why would a walking trash compactor be able to fall in love? why do some robots know about Buy N’ Large’s real plan and not others? But it actually holds together pretty well if you put it in an Arabian Nights type setting of palace intrigue, where ambitious eunuchs are foiled by loyal servants to the monarch who should rightfully rule by inheritance, even though he’s an idiot. The droids in Star Wars also fill the old narrative functions of slaves, including as comic relief.

Formally, a lot of these stories are warning us about our dependence on machines. (Even the first Star Wars film did this, though the rest of the series seemed to forget about it.) But the reliance on these old slave themes shows that, to a great extent, they only threaten us if they’re like people. Which is appropriate in a way, because really, our current opulent western lifestyle still depends on human labor as much as mechanical — Mexican farm laborers, Chinese factory workers, etc. And these persons, since they already have self-awareness and free will, are far more likely to rebel than hypothetical sentient machines. Robots seem to both fulfill the fantasy of a perfect servant and create an unconflicted villain out of a rebellious one.

Of course, lest I sound too Marxist, I think fictional robots also fill the role of more personal underlings: children. The Terminator storyline of Skynet naturally evolving self-awareness and autonomy doesn’t make technological sense, but it obviously parallels child development. Seeing one’s own children, even rebellious ones, as evil is a pretty tough concept for popcorn entertainment — unless the children are robots.

There’s also, occasionally, a robot who serves as a metaphor for being different. In the title essay to An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks mentions that people with Asperger Syndrome often identify with Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: TNG. Interestingly though, what characterizes Asperger is not a lack of emotion, but a lack of the ability to perceive others’ emotions. So they are left, like Data, trying to logically figure out what others pick up intuitively. Since this ability to perceive others’ mental states varies even among the non-Asperger population, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what a lot of people like about robot characters (not to mention other supposedly emotionless characters like Mr. Spock).

But what robots seem to channel, more and more, is paranoia. The change between the old BSG robots and the new ones exemplifies that: once they were obviously alien, now they have moles walking among us, like Pod People. In a way, that seems like the flipside of the problem of understanding other people’s minds: who knows what they could be hiding in there, if they can put on a convincing facade? So in a way, AI fiction seems to bring us full circle: a premise based on the transparency of the human mind turns into a metaphor for its impenetrability. Why that bores me as a plot, though, I can’t really tell you; maybe just because it seems so obvious.

The sudden death of Michael Jackson wasn’t as personal as the death of my ex’s father, but it certainly was more shocking — I had never really pegged him as one of those famous people headed for an early grave. Then again, during the TV coverage of the event someone mentioned the “longtime rumors of drug abuse” that I’d been unaware of, so I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention.

In fact, I’ve realized that I hadn’t really thought about Jackson in a long time, not because of indifference but because I had put him on a sort of mental shelf labeled I Don’t Know What To Think. When Thriller came out I was twelve, and I was awestruck. Although I never actually bought the album, probably because Michael Jackson was always really an audio-visual experience. For a while there, he seemed not only to be a crossover artist in sound and format but to embody the meeting of opposites in his own person — black and white, male and female, child and adult. And of course, there was the dancing.

But as time went by, as his musical output thinned and his face turned into a death-mask, he also descended to a strange place of epistemological uncertainty. How many of those tabloid rumors were true? Was he really a victim of the press, or did he feed them to the tabs himself? And what of those child-abuse allegations? They were dropped, but they were dropped in that unpleasantly unresolved way that reminds us of how life is different from Perry Mason. And so I think that, half-consciously, I started tuning the whole thing out. Not only did I not know, I didn’t really want to know.

For death to claim him at this point leaves me with a sort of bleak feeling, similar, oddly enough, to the bleak feeling I had when Anna Nicole Smith died. I didn’t feel much about her in life, but there’s something upsetting about a person never having a chance to get out of the trash celebrity pit, never getting older and wiser and being able to reflect back and chuckle at the insanity of it all. But the insanity really does eat people, something we would all do well to remember, especially those of us in the press.