Does Star Wars Have a Line of Dialog With a Double Meaning?

With this post we now broach a topic of central importance to all of us: the role of ambiguity in cinematic Space Opera.

Near the end of the final Star Wars film, Obi-Wan says something that set me back a moment and made me think. Is it possible that a character in a Star Wars film said something that was layered with meaning? Actually having one meaning on the surface and another at a different level? Could this be?

Arguably there is one other potential case of a double meaning in Star Wars, that being the sequence where Obi-Wan famously tells Luke something about his father, but certainly not everything.   He says that his father was a good friend, a great pilot, fought in the clone wars but had been "murdered and betrayed by Darth Vader", failing to mention that Luke's father and Darth were the same person. Now maybe that qualifies as a double meaning, or maybe its just plain old lying by omission, and that is not quite the same thing.

The case I am referring to is different. It takes place during the the climactic fight between Obi-Wan and his former pupil, Anakin, the proto-Darth. They are fighting over a lava field and of course have time to have a discussion while they try to kill each other.

So Obi-Wan and Anakin are fighting and talking, and they say things like this

Anakin: If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.

Obi-Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.

Anakin: You will try.

They fight for a few minutes, then Obi-Wan says

Obi-Wan: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.

Anakin: I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over.

Obi-Wan: Anakin! Chancellor Palpatine is evil!

Anakin: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

Obi-Wan: Well then you are lost!
Anakin: This is the end for you, my master.

Then they fight some more when suddenly Obi-Wan jumps to a nearby ridge, looks down at Anakin and says ...

Obi-Wan: It's over, Anakin!  I have the high ground.

You see, it seems to me that Obi-Wan is actually saying something here that is both literally true and metaphorically true. He has the high ground, standing on a ridge and all, but he also has the high moral ground. Is this possible, could it be that a Star Wars character would say such a thing?

Well, if it is true, it doesn't last very long.   The next lines of dialog are:

Anakin: You underestimate my power!

Obi-Wan: Don't try it.

But of course, Anakin does try it, and for the first time in the history of the cinema, someone who does a stupid move in a sword fight (like spinning around or jumping over someone) is rewarded as they should be rewarded: they are cut off at the knees. Or worse.

Of course, I can't be sure that I am right about Obi-Wan and his high moral ground but nevertheless I wanted to alert you to this exciting possibility.

The scene itself is located on Youtube at the following location.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwy412nttI

Everything Old Is New Again or Frame Rate in Hollywood

Once upon a time, movies were projected at 16 FPS (frames per second) and each frame was flashed three times, for a total of 48 flickers per second. At 48 or better FPS you get so-called "flicker fusion", and the viewer does not perceive the light going on and off. It looks continuous to him/her.

Then, as time passed, we moved to 24 FPS (double flashed). This had a variety of advantages and this is the reason that when you see old movies they appear to be running around like mad, they were designed to be projected at 16 FPS, not 24.

But although movies seemed to stay at 24 FPS (and then video at 30 frames, or 60 fields per second), in fact there was an arm of the entertainment industry that always played with the frame rate. This is the world of "special venue" which includes theme parks and world fairs. The special venue people experimented with everything from 30 FPS to as fast as they could get film through a projector. Showscan is famously a company that Doug Trumbull and partners started after doing experiments which they believed told them that 60 FPS was the optimal rate for human perception.

So now that Jim Cameron and Peter Jackson want to play with a faster frame rate, everyone and their brother is running around with their heads cut off wondering what they are going to do. Well, I am here to tell you what was learned from Special Venue and suggest you talk to some of the players in more detail.

The major results were this (or this is how it seemed to me, from my very limited view point, obviously not having access to the inner thoughts of major players, but nevertheless...):

1. Yes, a faster frame rate can help, especially with fast action, exactly like you imagine.

2. But not all scenes or topics benefit equally from this technique. In some scenes, slow moving mood pieces, for example, it may even be counterproductive, because more information is not always better.

3. The other thing to realize is that when you change the frame rate you change many, many things with it. You change how you light things, how makeup works, what kind of actors and actresses you cast. The reasons for this will be obvious after you shoot your first tests, and what you do about it is to be determined. But do not think that you merely increase the frame rate and now action scenes just look better. That isnt how this works.

4. Some people find the increased frame rate annoying. I know that my own response to it was that it was amusing for a few minutes but I wasn't sure how I was going to like watching 90 minutes of something like this.

Here is an image of Dr. Emilio Lizardo watching a high frame rate test in Buckaroo Banzai.

5. You will hear people say that an increased frame rate makes things look like video. It certainly does for me.

I want to encourage anyone involved in this matter to pick up the phone and call some people you know in the world of special venue. There is a weird overlap between special venue and motion pictures, some people go back and forth between the worlds, some people stay in their own world. But I would certainly begin by talking to Douglas Trumbull, his partner Richard Yuricich (you can reach both of them throught the ASC) and probably someone involved with the work at Imagineering. (I do not know who that would be, but I am as certain as I can be that there is someone there who has done a lot of work with this).

A separate topic is whether the digital projectors really have the bandwidth to do this. My feeling is that the answer depends on which projectors we are talking about.

Bob Lambert (1957-2012)

My good friend Bob Lambert has passed away at the age of 55.    Bob was a fellow Virginian and I have known him forever, since the earliest days of Computer Graphics in the 1980s, when he was running the tiny 3D group at Walt Disney Feature Animation.

Here is a picture that David Coons just sent me of Bob and myself at SIGGRAPH in LA maybe two years ago.

Goodbye, Bob.

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/08/haiku-about-rodney-king.html

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Setup

It used to be the thing to do to go to the Museum of Natural History the night before the Macy's Parade and watch them set up, which would involve, among other things, a bunch of really large balloons on their backs being inflated.   Now it has been discovered, and it is a tourist thing, and real NYers stay away, I am told.  This happens on 79th and 81st street, between Columbus and CPW.   

This picture would be from the late 1990s. For those who are unaware of the capabilities of various high speed black and white films, I have enclosed a detail from this picture which, if you look carefully, shows good detail inside a utility room inside the building.     I doubt it was handheld, so the camera had probably been stabilized on some available geometry, such as a mailbox or fire hydrant.  

Whenever I think of this event, I remember the first time I saw it, before it was discovered, and an embarrassing celebrity moment that occurred. This would have been in the late 1970s or early 1980s and a few years after Annie Hall (1977) had come out, and the "Annie Hall - look" was an identifiable fashion trend.   Diane Keaton actually dresses that way, one heard, and so Woody Allen just incorporated it into the movie.   So that night, watching the balloons being inflated, I saw across the street a particularly egregious case of someone dressed up to look like Diane Keaton in full Annie Hall regalia. After a while, I figured out it was Diane Keaton and I should stop staring at her.  Its impolite to stare, anyway.

Report On A Very Brief Meeting with the Chair of SIGGRAPH

I had an opportunity to speak to the Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH at the annual conference this year. His name is Jeff Jortner and he works at Sandia Labs (that is his real job that pays the bills).

He very kindly gave some of his time to explain to me a few of his ideas about the future of the SIGGRAPH Annual Conference that seemed very plausible to me.

I asked him if he was aware of the hardship that existed in the computer animation community, the large number of people who were not working, or who had to leave the country in order to work. Or the number of pioneers who were struggling to find work of any type, some of whom were homeless or all but homeless.

I may have caught him by surprise but I got the impression that he (and by analogy, they, as in the committee that runs SIGGRAPH) was not aware of any of this. He was aware of issues involving whether or not CS departments at various universities would continue to hold a slot for a computer graphics professor once the original tenured professor retires, but that was the extent of his or their knowledge or concern, at least to the extent he communicated them to me in that brief and impromptu meeting.

It seems to me that if there is a problem here, if we feel that SIGGRAPH should be doing more (and it is not clear to me that they can do anything, but nevertheless) if we even want them to consider the issues, then we have to do a better job of making the national committee aware of what is going on.

I am a little baffled about how best to do this, but I suppose the first step is to contact the members of the board and either have a dialog with them, or find out who (perhaps a subcommittee) one should have a dialog with.

Dan Weinreb (? - 2012)

I just heard that Dan Weinreb passed away after a long illness.  I was completely unaware of his battle with cancer, which is apparently how he wanted it.

I am completely in shock about this, and I can not imagine that DLW will not be at the other end of an email anymore.

I remember meeting DLW when he and Lee Parks and others came down from Livermore to see one of the Star Wars films, I forget which one. It might have been Empire Strikes Back. He was instrumental in getting me back to Cambridge for the Symbolics R&D open house all those years ago. He was a good friend and listened to my confusion and distress about my current unemployment although he did not know what to advise, except to suggest that I move back to Cambridge.

I remember when I worked at Mass Illusion, that he and Cheryl and their son came down to visit me in Lenox. I think I had run into them by accident in one of the towns in Western Mass. and we recognized each other even though we had not seen each other in more than a decade.

Here is a link to a testimonial about him at a company he helped to found.

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/07/dan-weinreb-boston-computer-geek-community-figure-dies-of-cancer/

Picture of DLW courtesy of Jack Holloway.

Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a classic of American horror. If you haven't read it, it is a short read, you can probably read it in an hour or so. It is online below.

There was some hope about a year ago that Guillermo del Toro would direct a movie of Madness.  But that project has gone away.  Its probably all for the best.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness


Text
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/mountainsofmaddness.htm

Script for Short Version of Dark Star (1974)

I was searching the Internet to find a quote from the intelligent but disobedient bomb in Dark Star (1974), when I came across the entire script.

Dark Star was written by John Carpenter & Dan O'Bannon, and directed by John Carpenter.  It was the first film for both of them I believe.

This is an excellent example of a low-budget film that transcends its origins.   If you have a few minutes, that is all the time it will take to read the script.

 They spent literally $100s of dollars on the visual effects for this movie, and every penny of it is up on the screen.  The "alien" who invades their ship is famously a beachball with plastic feet.

You should definitely think you are reading a script by graduate students at a university in the early 1970s (e.g. the early 70s were the late 60s according to various theories about how this culture by decade phenomena works).

The sequence with the discussion with the bomb can be found at Youtube at the link below.  This is obviously a spoiler for the film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk

Script
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/dark-star_short.html

Imdb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069945/

Autonomous But Not Debugged: the Case of ED 209 and Bomb 20

This post is about a US Air Force report about future technology which seems to foretell a well-known plot point in science fiction, the autonomous device that has been "insufficiently verified".

At various times, groups within our government attempt to give direction to the research and development that they are doing over the next decade.  This is the sixth version of the USAF report, the first being issued in 1945 and co-authored by Dr. Theodore von Karman and General Hap Arnold.

In the words of the current authors:

"Technology Horizons" is neither a prediction of the future nor a forecast of a set of likely future scenarios. It is a rational assessment of what is credibly achievable from a technical perspective to give the Air Force capabilities that are suited for the strategic, technology, and budget environments of 2010-2030. 

A link to the current version of this report, issued in 2010 is at the bottom of this post.   There are a variety of very interesting things in this report but here are three statements near the beginning which I paraphrase here:

1. The USAF must pursue the use of autonomy (e.g. autonomous devices and systems) in an aggressive manner in all areas of its operations and work, far beyond what is currently being done today.   Autonomous in this case means airplanes and equipment operating without humans aboard or directing their actions.

2. But the science and technology of "verification of this autonomy", in other words, how you know it will do the right thing, is far behind the science and technology of the autonomy itself.

3. And this is even more urgent since there are other countries who are far less picky about verification, and who are much more OK about things occasionally not working.  Not working might mean blowing up the wrong building, or dropping on the wrong person, for example.

Thus, research and progress in the area of "verification of autonomous systems" so you don't blow up the wrong thing/person is the highest priority issue addressed by this report.

Now this is of course very funny as any student of science fiction or movies about the future is well aware.

The field of SF is filled with autonomous systems that go crazy or do the wrong thing with disastrous results.  See for example Colossus: The Forbin Project,  2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator series, and literally hundreds of other examples could be cited.

Two of my favorites in this genre include the Ed 209 character from Robocop (1987) and Bomb 20 from Dark Star (1974).   

ED 209 (Enforcement Droid Series 209) is a classic stop-motion model done by Phil Tippet. I am pretty sure that this is stop-motion and not go-motion, although I could be wrong.  And I think that the stop-motion artifacts contribute to the character and animation of Ed.   Ed is a great, if somewhat minor, character, who, in his enthusiasm for law enforcement executes a corporate executive inappropriately.

We have on Youtube two versions of this famous boardroom test sequence.  In the first version, we have the complete demonstration, but with much of the physical make up prosthetics at the end modified to suit those of more delicate sensibilities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9l9wxGFl4k&feature=related

In this version of the famous board room sequence, notice the full use of practical makeup effects to contribute to the story.  This is from the so-called director's cut.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMihmYf4WJI

Then there is the case of Bomb 20 in Dark Star.   Who could ask for a better low budget prop ?  And it has one of the more amusing speeches by a deranged synthetic intelligence in any film, maybe not as great as HAL 2000, who is our Hamlet of deranged synthetic intelligences, but very good nevertheless.

PINBACK (to bomb): But you can't explode in the bomb bay.  Its foolish.   You'll kill us all.
        There is no reason for it.
BOMB 20:  I am programmed to detonate in nine minutes.
        Detonation will occur at the programmed time.
PINBACK: You won't consider another course of action, for instance,
        just waiting around a while so we can disarm you?
BOMB 20: No.

Here is one of the scenes with our unverified Bomb 20.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk

Clearly these are good examples of autonomous devices who could have benefited from more testing and  verification.

There are other interesting technologies and surprises in the report.  

http://www.af.mil/information/technologyhorizons.asp

Mysterious Booms Part 4: A Boom Is Not Proof of an Operational Aircraft

Part 4: Booms, Yes, But What Do They Mean ?

[This post was edited on 9/3/2012 to make it more concise and more skeptical].

Go to your favorite search engine and type in "mysterious booms", possibly setting the date range to the last year. You will notice that there are quite a few of them, but that three in particular are (a) Wisconsin, (b) Northern California near Pleasant Valley, and (c) Southern California near San Diego.

There are others as well, if you keep looking, you will find them. But these three are the ones that have gotten themselves into the news media.

We are just going to cut to the chase here.

The booms heard near San Diego are observed by semi-expert and expert observers.   Something is flying that is causing those booms.

This is less clear in Pleasant Valley and Wisconsin.  Wisconsin is no where near the coast, so if the booms were caused by a flying vehicle then we would expect the boom to travel across country and this has not been reported that I am aware of.  This means that they are not from a flying vehicle, unless there is some reason that they only go above a certain speed in the Wisconsin area, e.g. they are going into space or back from space.  I think this is very unlikely on the present evidence.

So if there is a secret aircraft flying operationally, in contrast to a test aircraft of exotic technology, then the evidence for it involves sonic booms heard on the coast.  There is such evidence at various times, but the evidence is not overwhelming and could be explained by occasional tests or other airplanes flying fast that for various reasons are not public.

So I am going to have to give an ambiguous answer here to the question of whether a black, presumably reconnaissance airplane is operational.   The evidence supporting it is circumstantial, but not conclusive, and this evidence is, in summary:

1. They do spend money on secret programs which are not identified.
2. They do have a history of building and flying very secret reconnaissance aircraft,
3. There have been sightings of exotic, unidentified aircraft.
4. There have been reports of sonic booms in appropriate places (e.g. not Wisconsin).
5. The last time a new, fast, high flying reconnaissance aircraft was announced was 1964.   Either they have moved entirely to satellites and slower drones, or there is a secret, fast craft of this type.

The evidence is suggestive but not conclusive.   The evidence could be explained by programs to test various technologies combined with the use of various existing airframes for secret purposes.

My guess is that whatever it is, if it is anything at all, it will be "outed" in about 10 years or so from now, or about 20 years after it started flying operationally.  If it exists, it is likely to be revealed for one of the following reasons

1. Disclosure for domestic political advantage
2. An operational mistake that reveals clear evidence of the vehicle
3. A disclosure by a former participant on their own initiative
4. An approved disclosure when it is no longer felt that keeping the device secret serves a legitimate national security purpose.