I am very taken with XtraNormal, a website for making free animations online. It is perfect for school projects and the like, and will be instantly employed for satire in the Get Your War On style. but I think it might also have a use in serious political debate. Here is a video I made using a robot, who explains more:
Reagan quote from here.
Tag: Film (Page 6 of 11)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on films
I was talking about free expression at an event the other day, when the subject of incitement to violence cropped up. I mentioned the formulation that Aryeh Neier (President of the Open Society Institute) gave at GFFEx last year, regarding whether the person doing the violence agreed with the person whose speech provoked it.
Blasphemy or religious defamation are essentially insults against a person or group of persons on the basis of one’s religious, or it could be another form of group defamation, where one is attacking or insulting members of a particular race or a particular nationality. But it doesn’t have the effect of inspiring the supports of the speaker to engage in violence; rather it is the opponents of the speaker who might engage in violence. So hate speech incites; blasphemy and religious defamation provoke.
That seems to me very important. I think there limited circumstances in which it may be appropriate to punish those who engage in hate speech. I think there are virtually no circumstances where it is appropriate to punish those who engage in in blasphemy or religious defamation, that is the circumstances in which they have provoked others to attack them.
An interesting retort to this, was to ask whether King Henry V was engaging in incitement to violence when he gives his famous, rousing speech?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
My only response was to suggest that, yes, the French would probably consider Henry’s speech an ‘incitement to violence’ and worthy of censorship, if only they could! But in practice, such political speech is usually seen as exempt when matters of war and national survival are at stake. Governments and their populations are usually comfortable with placing extra restrictions on our human rights during times of crisis.
However, there are times when this special exemption might not be as clear cut as we think. Who, on 14th September 2001, objected to President George W. Bush giving a memorial speech for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre just three days earlier? Yet it was in that speech that he first used the phrase ‘War on Terror’, a formulation that has become hugely problematic and inciting. The following week, when America was still reeling from the shock and in need of rousing leadership, the word ‘crusade’ slipped into the President’s remarks, which not only provoked the Islamic world, but certainly had the effect of inciting certain elements of American society to violent, disproportionate action. The last film I went to see, My Name is Khan, deals with the aftermath of such words.
(This post contains vague spoilers, which should not damage your enjoyment of the stories in question)
Would I restore my mind from back-up?
I’ve been reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow’s first novel. It is a science-fiction thought experiment on what might happen if we all had immortality, and scarcity of resources had been abolished. Money is redundant, because one can simply utilise public replication machines to generate whatever food or tools you need. Instead, people earn credibility points (Doctorow calls it ‘Whuffie’) for all the good things that they do – The protagonist, Julius, earns this by maintaining the rides at Disneyland. Through these tweaks to reality, Doctorow gets to meditate on human purpose and ennui in a time of plenty.
The central, fantastical technology available to the characters, is the ability to upload and back-up to hard-drive your mind and all your memories. Should some accident or murder befall you (as of course it does to Julius) you can get a-hold of a clone body, and overlay your complete consciousness onto the tabula rasa. Doctorow has played with this sort of technology before, in the delightful I, Rowboat (yes, a knowing pun on Asimov’s I, Robot) and another story involving an absconded mother (the name of which escapes me just now). Apparently, such technology a staple of science fiction: Back-ups and clones are certainly used in the Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day and I am sure they are found in Philip K. Dick and elsewhere in the canon.
For those who wish to live forever, brain-backups and reboots are exciting idea, but the immortality on offer would be false. In both The 6th Day and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, its clear that in taking a snap-shot of your brain, you are not preserving your consciousness (or your soul) but simply making a copy of it. As both Adam Gibson (the Schwarzenegger character) and bad-guy Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) discover in The 6th Day, it is possible to make a clone of yourself before you die! When your original ‘version’ dies, the fact that there is a replica of you living on somewhere is of no comfort as your own light fades. When you finally expire, you know your soul cannot fly away and awake in the new clone, because the clone is already wandering around making memories of his own (see also ‘Second Chances’, a Star Trek: TNG episode with two Commander Rikers).
Stepping into the Star Trek transporters or Fly-style teleporter carries the same philosophical risk. I simply wouldn’t have the guts to step into such a machine – Not because I worry that my psychology or physiology might be altered due to a malfunction, but because even if the thing works perfectly, the guy stepping in is not the guy stepping out.
One of the few places in fiction where the idea that the soul does not persist through back-ups and cloning is in The Prestige. Its a film I’ve previously slated for seeming to violate the rules of mystery-telling, but on reflection I think it is internally consistent (the opening shot of the film fortells the final revelation). Both the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale characters discover, in their own very different ways, that you cannot achieve immortality through the creation of a clone or a twin, regardless of how that might appear to the rest of the world. In the end, both characters rightly weep at the demise of their clones, but Jackman’s character is the more tortured because he has caused the death of his ‘original’ self, merely by choosing to step into the crackpot machine in the first place. This is a sadness that seems to be missing from the characters in Cory Doctorow’s stories.
However, realisation that backup-and-restore is not bona fide immortality would not discourage me from plugging in my brain and making a copy. This is because we naturally value the things we have created, and we want to see them persist. I would like to pass on bits of my DNA through children and grandchildren. I would like people to read the thoughts I have written down, even after I become an ex-person. A human consciousness restored from my uploaded back-up would be indisputably my creation, a more detailed product of my life and times than anything I might write or carve, or anyone I might sire. Far better that they, in particular, get to witness the heat-death of the universe (Doctorow, with a nod to Douglas Adams) or the “more glorious dawn” of a Galaxy-rise than some other, generic homo sapien.
‘The Same River Twice, part V’ by ruSSel hiGGs. Creative Commons License.
I watched The Execution of Gary Glitter tonight. Just as executions have a morbid fascination, dramas about executions, like Dead Man Walking or The Green Mile seem to have that same fascination (although perhaps one degree removed).
I think the death penalty is a valid subject for Channel 4, a public service broadcaster. Though it is not a live debate here, it is a real and divisive issue for our cultural cousins in the USA. The hanging of paedophiles is an oft repeated thought experiment, whenever a Huntley or a Vanessa George is arrested, and it is sufficiently discussed in the UK for pollsters to regularly ask the public’s opinion on the issue. According to the programme, 54% of British adults support its reintroduction.
The device of using Gary Glitter felt like exactly that, & hopelessly crass. If we executed people in the UK they’d be poor & unknown. (@leylandrichard on Twitter)
There’s no doubt that the choice of Glitter as the anti-hero was was a fantastic marketing ploy. He is, shall we say, the most culturally significant bogeyman we have. However, this also gave the narrative extra depth, because his rock-star past allowed the programme makers to pass commentary on popular culture. The Daily Mirror headlines for a Glitter trial felt real, and the MP3 remix sending Gary Glitter back to No.1 (on downloads) on the day of his execution was an obvious slam dunk. It is an uncomfortable thought, but I think he is the protagonist many writers would have chosen. The device cannot simply be marked down as the product of pure cynicism.
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Here’s a short interview with the animator Joseph Peirce about the forthcoming A Family Portrait, produced by Fifty Nine. Its about a family portrait session going bad. I’m glad he mentions AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, which is hilarious and fascinating in equal measure.