Attention! Bad Science Fiction Movie Approaches! Morbius, Beware!

I am 12:40 seconds into Prometheus (2012).

I like to give these timeless epic movies a few years to age before I see them.  Usually I wait a decade at least, but in this case I am making an exception and seeing it when it is a mere two or three years old, positively still green and hanging on the tree by my standards.

On a ship deep in space we have a very odd person, who seems to have a broom handle stuck up his ass, exercising with a basketball, while on a bicycle, who then studies Indo-European linguistics and makes reference to Schleicher's Fable (see note below), watches Lawrence of Arabia and tries to imitate Peter O Toole.

Check out the attempt to imitate Peter O'Toole's haircut... here ... 

But then.

Oh !

Destination Threshold !

Red Blinking Lights !

... and here.

Oh my Gosh! Open the windshields, I mean the blast shields, we have arrived! Golly! What a surprise!

What total bullshit. 

You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are on a spaceship. As we have previously spent minutes of expensive screen time demonstrating, interstellar travel is very boring. You put the biped mammals on ice, you leave the robots around to keep the ship tidy and watch movies wishing they could have kinky man-android sex with Peter O'Toole, and being bored out of their android mind. You know very well when you are going to arrive because you have been watching a clock counting down digitally for years if not decades waiting for this moment. In fact, not only are you not surprised by this, you are probably on the observation deck as the planet creeps ever so slowly into view.

Indo-European historical linguistics aside, this is not a good sign.

But seriously, what this little moment implies is that at a deep and fundamental level the filmmakers are not making a science fiction movie for adults.  Obviously they are just blinking the red lights in order to create tension, which is fine, but there are plenty of ways of doing so without being stupid.  It means that the filmmakers either do not know any better or, more likely, that they do not care.  It could also mean that the story is for children, but I think we can presume in this case that the film is for the above-13 set.

An example of a science fiction movie that does not immediately throw reality out the window was Alien (1979) also directed by Ridley Scott.   This movie also played loose and fast with the technology of androids and also had some stupid plot moments, such as the usual corrupt corporation theme, but I do not recall that it immediately insulted our intelligence as this one does.

What other triumphs of stupid science fiction screen writing await us?

_____________________________________________

Notes:

Schleicher's Fable is an attempt by historical linguist August Schleicher to write a short story in Proto Indo European, an early reconstruction of a language common to many languages in the west, including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German, English and so forth. It is an entertaining whimsy of early Indo European language studies and no one in their right mind would memorize it unless they had a lot of time on their hand, which our android probably does.

Schleicher's Fable on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable

Prometheus (2012) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/

Alien (1979) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/

Irresistable Videos on the Ancient Silk Road

In the world of archaeology, few topics are more interesting, controversial and entertaining than the whole combined issues of Indo European Language Dispersal and its dozens and dozens of mysteries and controversies.  You may not realize that you are living immersed in these mysteries, but you are, you are one of them.  You speak one (or more) of the languages that is at the heart of the mystery.

The Penn Museum had a seminar on some of these issues which had as speakers the superstars of this world: Colin Renfrew, J P Mallory, Victor Mair and so forth.

Its all online, which is wonderful.

Now you can waste another day or two of your life learning about this stuff.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HCs6PVnzI or all 10 seminars/talks at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QapUGZ0ObjA&list=PL286E934A56954D08

Fraulein Usage in Modern German and Its Effect on Cinema and Special Effects

[Global Wahrman has had an admittedly ambiguous policy towards comments, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, having its origins with so many spam comments in the early days.  But in a stunning reversal of policy, we wish to encourage user comments on this topic: are these pictures sexist and does it relate to the term "fraulein"?]

There are few more important things to people than what they are called. One person's diminutive is another person's mortal insult. And there are many rules here, culturally specific rules. Eddie Murphy can use the "N-word" but under no circumstances may I use the "N-word", for example.

So fair warning for those of you who are not up on your contemporary German: "fraulein" is a word that is strongly discouraged these days, through a German social process that is the equivalent of our "Mrs/Miss/Ms" dialectic.

When I first heard this, I was not all that impressed.  But I just did a test and it occurs to me that there may be some subtle issues here (sarcasm, sorry).    Just do the following experiment.  Go to Google, type in "fraulein" and then go to images, then stand back.  Holy moly!  See for example:

Is there something sexist about this image?

From a latex couture magazine, yikes, fraulein, please, put some clothes on!

What could be sexist about this?

Click here for the Google image search.

So, to be clear, to the best of my knowledge one may still use "fraulein" in a way that is not insulting when addressing a very young girl, either sternly or genially (e.g. humorously, perhaps, just guessing, one might say "perhaps the fraulein would be so good as to clean up her room" when addressing a six year old gal, perhaps, and that might still be OK). But otherwise, one uses the term "frau" so far as I can tell.

Now I have a few friends who are far more knowledgeable about both feminism and modern German, so they will enlighten us all, I hope, but in the meantime, a word to the wise is hopefully sufficient.

Now does this mean that we should go back and change all our World War II movies and television shows? That is a question with no single answer, I think. If one were going for authenticity in the movie/show, then the answer would be no, it would still be correct to use "fraulein" in that time period. But if one were doing a new show, today, about the period, then one might think about using the modern usage if one did not intend to provoke a reaction. It could go either way, depending on what you wanted to achieve.

Now to get to our final topic: the potential effect this language change will have on the practice and art of special visual effects.  To the best of our knowledge, this change will have absolutely no effect on special effects, now or in the future.   Just wanted to reassure those of you who may have been concerned.

For a wild screaming match on the topic, see the Wikipedia discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFr%C3%A4ulein

For a more balanced discussion and presentation of the issue(s), see:

http://german.stackexchange.com/questions/966/why-is-fraulein-considered-offensive-as-opposed-to-frau

Wm Jones and His Famous Paragraph

[As an aside, I wonder why I feel some responsibility to tell this story, whether in my own words, or not. Surely something as important as the Indo-European language problem is taught to all 1st and 2nd graders in elementary school as part of introductory philosophy, linguistics and dialectics?  Yet, for whatever reason I feel compelled to beat this horse into the ground, or some other mixed metaphor, maybe out of some confused ego need to try and prove that I am smart or something.  No, honestly, its just because I think its a cool story.]

This is the story of a man who made a discovery about language and history and started an academic field with a single paragraph. He may not have been the first to make this discovery, but he was by far the most important in getting the ball rolling. What he discovered turned out, when you thought about it, to reveal something about the distant past of about half of the people of the world.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man who made his living as a lawyer, was assigned to the Supreme Court of Bengal, a part of the British Empire of its time. The year was 1783. At the time, what we now call India was considered the furthest reaches of the earth, with many very alien peoples and a vast and very different history. This was in that period of history, about which I know little, that England was trying to bring order out of chaos in a part of the world that had been managed by the famous, or infamous, East India Trading Company.

Our lawyer was also an accomplished linguist, and was well known for his Persian English grammar and translations of Persian poetry. Apparently back then it was not considered unusual for someone to be accomplished in one field and yet make a living in another. Obviously our lawyer knew English, he also knew Latin and Greek as all well-educated men did back then, he remembered his childhood Welsh and he knew Persian.

The traditional and formal language of India was Sanskrit, attested to at least 1300 BC, far older than the earliest attested Greek or Latin. Indians would come to court and quote legal precedent in Sanskrit but none of the justices knew it, so it was decided that someone had to learn and our protagonist, with his linguistics background, was selected.

He found an appropriate tutor and went away to learn this ancient and very alien language.

Languages borrow words from each other all the time. The fact that two different languages may share a word may not tell us much about their history. But languages rarely borrow grammatical structures from each other, and so if they share such things in common, they may very well share a history. English borrowed "attorney general" from the French, but when we make it plural we do so in a way that is consistent with English and not with French.

Greek looks very different from Latin because of their writing systems (e.g. the Greek alphabet has some different letters which, like Cyrillic, make it look very exotic to us).   But to someone who knows both Latin and Greek it is clear that the languages are related.    How the nouns are declined, how the verbs are conjugated, irregularities in both languages that are unlikely to be accidental and so forth.

Suppose one language uses an internal vowel to determine tense: --i-, --a-, and --u-. Swim, swam, swum. Sing, sang, sung. Now suppose you came across a language that had the verb "ring" as in "to ring the bell" and it was conjugated ring, rang, rung.   You might suspect the two languages were related.  But if there were hundreds and hundreds of those similarities, far more intrinsic to a language than mere borrowed words, then you would really have to wonder if the languages were related in some more fundamental fashion.

So Sir William Jones learned Sanskrit. And he discovered something very odd.  Something he really did not expect.  Sanskrit was like the older brother of Greek and Latin. The structure of verbs, nouns, irregularities, all of it. But that was impossible. Sanskrit was far older, and on a completely different side of the world spoken by a very alien people.

And in 1786 he gave a lecture which contained that famous paragraph:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

You may wonder what that may have to do with you, or with anything else in the modern world. The answer is, everything. But that will be for another time.

The Run-on Sentence and Charles Dickens

You will have noticed by now that I am fond of run-on sentences and use them all the time, often with a sense of barely repressed glee. You have no idea how it used to irritate me to have my sentences corrected back in the day when anyone cared enough to try and correct me. Now they know better.

But I do realize, I mean, I am aware, that there are many out there in Internet-land who believe that this style of writing is wrong, also very wrong, and some people believe that it is also extremely and definitely very wrong.

Well, I just don't agree and for support I am going to call upon my friend the well-known writer Charles Dickens. This is from an essay he wrote in 1852 about the "Ragged Schools" movement in England of the time. I am sure you will agree with me that Mr. Dickens knows how to write English and that we should strive to emulate him in our own work.

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to contemplate.

Now that is a run-on sentence to be proud of.  I have a ways to go before I reach Mr. Dickens' level of excellence in this area.  But I will try.

If you don't know about the Ragged Schools, its a great story, and here is the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragged_school

The above quote is from an article written by Charles Dickens for The Daily News, published in 1852. See http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/dickens_ragged_schools.htm for the complete essay.