Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"

The ScatterKat and I went to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday, and I thought about writing a review, or trying to, but it seemed a bit more of a challenge than I'm feeling up for, so here's Johnny Rivers miming "Secret Agent Man" on some '60s music show, instead.

Well; I'll say this about TTSS: I liked it a lot, and ScatterKat liked it. She found it enjoyable to watch though hard to follow; I can see that, as I found it enjoyable to watch and was able to follow it mainly because I just read the book a few weeks ago, and so could say to myself, "Oh, yeah, it's that guy!" a lot. TTSS is brilliantly acted and it's beautifully shot; the entire cast, led by Gary Oldman, really is magnificent, and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In, one of the best vampire movies ever made) has a brilliant eye for the grittier side of the 1970s.

I think TTSS is absolutely worth seeing, but there is a sort of inevitable problem with it: John le Carré's novel is just brilliantly dense in its tense plotting, although much of the actual action in the book consists of an old fat man (George Smiley, played as an old thin man by an extraordinary Gary Oldman) sitting around interviewing people and reading files while reminiscing in his mind. ScatterKat and I will be watching the 1979 British miniseries soon (I recently bought it on DVD; I've heard Alec Guinness is incredible in it), and I imagine a six-hour version of the story has time to get into the plot's windings and the nuanced relationships between and among the various characters. The film version is stuck with a reasonable running time, though I sort of hope maybe they shot enough during production to do an epic-length director's cut for DVD, thus stickier bits of plot get smoothed out and some of the vital character interactions are reduced to shorthand and quick sketches. I don't think that makes the film easy to follow, unfortunately, and I suspect if you go in having read the book or seen the miniseries, you'll get a lot more out of it. And this is an unfortunate caveat if you haven't read the book or seen the miniseries, because Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy is absolutely worth seeing on a big screen and immersing yourself in a dark, silent theatre for (where all the fine details packed into every shot and scene can really register), and because, although it's early in the year, I have a suspicion TTSS will make any shortlist of the best movies you could have seen this year. Even if you have a hard time following it, and you might, it's just such a damn well-made movie.

Another thing re: the previous paragraph: saying the movie streamlines, simplifies or reduces is generally a criticism, but one of the impressive things about the TTSS screenplay is that, first of all, they actually did a stunningly good job of keeping all the major beats from the novel and even work in little details and scenes that I would have been certain they would have cut; and, second of all, that the changes they make largely work and/or aren't that troublesome (especially picky spycraft enthusiasts may wonder how Control, played by John Hurt, ever got away with taking so much of his work home with him, but it's a really good scene in the movie and it ticks along so well, you might not even scratch your head bemusedly over it until you're on your way home; I also can't mention it without also mentioning that having Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) cover his nose with a handkerchief in obvious disgust over god-only-knows what kind of musty old crank smell has infused the place is one of the best touches I've ever seen in a movie--given that people in movies tend to only have two senses, and often aren't even able to use those to see and hear what's on the same scene they're in).

Anyway... hm. I've possibly written a review of Tinker, Tailor after all. Well. Keep the video anyway. Cheers.

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Dumb quote of the day--getting my nerd rage on edition

Well, it's not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It's a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn't. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

It’s the same thing with Yoda. We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn't get it done in time. We couldn’t get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn’t as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.

If you look at Blade Runner, it's been cut sixteen ways from Sunday and there are all kinds of different versions of it. Star Wars, there's basically one version--it just keeps getting improved a little bit as we move forward. ... All art is technology and it improves every year. Whether it’s on the stage or in music or in painting, there are technological answers that happen, and because movies are so technological, the advances become more obvious.

George Lucas, as quoted by Alex Ben Block,
"5 Questions With George Lucas: Controversial
'Star Wars' Changes, SOPA and 'Indiana Jones 5'
The Hollywood Reporter, February, 9^th, 2012

Yeah, um... no.

Look, a couple of things. The first and biggest, actually, is Lucas' disingenuous or clueless implication that he's somehow being mistreated because nobody, supposedly, cares about all the various cuts of Blade Runner. The problem with that comparison is actually twofold: (1) people actually do argue about which version is better, with some people very vocally favoring the original theatrical cut (which included voiceover narration and a happy ending) and the director's cut (which cuts the voiceover, restores several dream sequences, and has a purposely ambiguous ending); and, more importantly, (2) all of the several versions of Blade Runner have--unlike the original cuts of the original Star Wars films--remained available: in fact, a five disc collector's edition featuring a "final cut" version, the theatrical cut, the first "director's cut", and the "international version" was released in 2007, providing audiences with the chance to pick their favorite versions and giving film buffs/cinema geeks/Blade Runner fanatics the power to compare/contrast the assorted incarnations of the film. (By way of contrast, Lucas has maintained, at various times, that the original releases of Episodes IV-VI no longer exist, the only DVD release to feature the original versions is no longer in print and the originals were only presented as remasters from Laserdisc on "bonus" discs; the earlier Special Editions and previous cuts of the prequels have been superseded and have been "uncreated" as well.)

You know, I don't think it even occurs to Lucas that Star Wars geeks almost certainly wouldn't feel any nerd rage over his constant re-cutting if he actually went the Blade Runner route, which is what is so ironic and inappropriate about his comparison: if Lucas released a four-disc "super edition" of Episode IV featuring the original theatrical cut (if the negatives were in fact destroyed during the process of making the Special Editions, I'm sure fans would be satisfied by a digital remaster from a low-generation positive), the Special Edition version, an "ultimate" version and a disc of bonus features, I'm sure fans would be peeing themselves like a puppy whose owner just walked back in the front door. Lucas could, in fact, have his cake and eat it, too, even though that's supposedly impossible: he could insist that his latest tweaked version was the "real" movie while acknowledging that many fans will prefer the first version they saw in the theatre, and how releasing all these versions in one box will allow fans to better understand his evolving vision of the Star Wars universe, etc., blah-blah-blah.

This latter point being one of the other ironies about Lucas and Star Wars that really sticks in my craw: Lucas has spent a lot of money and time on movie preservation and restoration, and he and Lucasfilm deserve an enormous amount of credit for being at the forefront of salvaging old celluloid and guaranteeing that a number of movies that were literally disintegrating in storerooms will always be available for future generations of fans and historians alike. And yet, when it comes to his own work, his own movies fall on the punctum caecum, as if he simply cannot perceive that maybe somebody, sometime, maybe even somebody right now might actually want to see both versions of the original trilogy films, watching the original versions especially for the flaws and places where the effects pushed the technical limitations of the medium because the Star Wars films have historical value and have passed well beyond merely being pop culture ephemera.

The fact is, we don't just throw actual art out--or deface it--when it's technologically superseded. And, while there are a lot of reasons for this, one of the basic reasons for it is because new artists learn their craft from the old stuff. The saddest thing about Lucas replacing a puppet with CGI in The Phantom Menace or replacing practical effects with CGI in the original trilogy isn't that he triggers a whole new round of nerds whining about raped childhoods or some similar surge of hyperbole; the saddest thing about it is that he's inevitably denying future generations of filmmakers the opportunity to learn about film the same way Lucas did at USC: by watching a lot of old movies to see how their forebears used technology to tell stories.

All of this touches on what's become the most-irritating thing to me, personally, about the whole Han-shot-first business, too. At this point, it's almost less important that Lucas has decided, for some inexplicable reason, that Han Solo needs to be a less morally-ambiguous, shady, savvy, clever character and should be whitewashed and made more boring. What's gotten ridiculous is Lucas' perverse insistence that everybody who remembers things were any other way are confused, deluded or mistaken, that things were always the way he's recently edited them to be. I mean, I don't really agree with the idea that Lucas' films are his and he can do what he wants with them: once he shows a movie to even a single other person, that film becomes shared mental real estate, a communal experience in which the artist presents and the audience interprets, and the work becomes something else and more interesting; but even if I did agree with that premise, I have no idea where Lucas gets off thinking he can tell me I didn't see something I saw and in fact own on VHS and DVD (I have the previously-mentioned out-of-print original trilogy editions with the original movies as "bonus features") and can watch in slo-mo any time I'd like.

Last: whenever this subject boils up, someone inevitably suggests the complainant just not buy the latest version. Well, y'know, I won't. I have the editions of the movies I like, and I wish they would endure, but if they've gone down the memory hole as far as Lucas is concerned, that's that, then. I won't be buying the recent Blu-Ray box even if I get a Blu-Ray player separate from my laptop, and I have no intention of seeing the 3D releases coming to theatres over the next several years, starting this weekend with The Phantom Menace (given my druthers, I won't be seeing the 3D releases, but I won't completely rule out being dragged, grumbling, to any of them by friends if they really must; that's more about the social occasion than about the films at that point, you realize). I'm pretty much done with Lucas, I'm sad to say.

(H/t io9.)

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Cloud Nothings, "Wasted Days"

I liked the first track anyone started playing from Cloud Nothings' new album, Attack On Memory, the Radiohead-esque "No Future/No Past" well enough; in fact, I thought for a moment or so that it was a new Radiohead cut and the boys were getting back to the basics. But as much as I liked it, I don't know it would have sold me on the album.

"Wasted Days" absolutely did, however. I hesitated about embedding it as a taste because it's a long taste, a nearly nine-minute song, which is a short forever in Internet terms. But this is just... this is just an amazing cut, starting out as it does with a kind of Green Day-ish sound (circa sometime) before morphing into a Pink Floyd-esque frenetic space jam (circa 1968; think "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" post-scream) and then winding back to something a little '90s-ish, Radiohead again, maybe (Pablo Honey era). The cliché "tour de force" comes unfortunately to mind, but there it is: it's just an utterly epic cut.

Although I also have to admit that there may be a personal echo that has me playing the track over and over again, and not just that it's a quality tune; this is another reason I was just a little hesitant about building a post around it, especially on a Friday. "I thought / I would / Be more / Than this" has felt like a sad summary, especially this week, of recently turning forty.

I don't know how much of this is a generational thing or not. Does everybody think they were going to be special or were Gen Xers unduly encouraged. There was also something very resonant in David Fincher's and Jim Uhls' adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club to the screen: "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake," Tyler Durden rants at one point; the protagonist has a soul-killing job he just stumbled into and (briefly) a condo full of Ikea furniture and absolutely no reason to do anything; he certainly isn't anybody awesome, and it turns out the only way for him to feel anything at all is to actually, really, non-metaphorically get himself punched in the face a lot. He absolutely isn't anybody important (setting aside the implications of the movie's ending, assuming, for the sake of convenience, the ending of Fight Club is even happening).¹

Part of the premise of Fight Club is that there's a generation of men who were brought up to feel like each and every one of us was supposed to be special and unique and wonderful in our own way, when the bitter truth is we're almost all chumps. And maybe the Millenials share that and feel much the same way about it: Cloud Nothings' main dude, Dylan Baldi, must be fifteen years younger than I am. I suppose I wonder how Boomers feel about themselves, and before them, did the Greatest Generation feel full of themselves only to find themselves let down--"Let down and hanging around / Crushed like a bug in the ground", as Radiohead once put it. (Typing that question, it almost seemed to answer itself: were the Greatest Generation full of themselves? Gee, d'ya think?)

Sorry. I'm not sure I wanted to get into a melodramatic, hair-yanking, clothes-rending, rolling around in the sackcloth and ashes and baring my breast, Job-like, to the universe kind of rant. Least of all on a Friday. I think the point was to share a song I'm really loving, while conceding that only part of the love comes from the inherent awesomeness of the song and a fair bit probably comes from feeling like I'm in a shadowy part of the vale right now, and with the buzzards circling to add a nice bit of color to the locale, to boot. I... hope you're having a nice day and hope you have a great weekend?

---

¹By the way, if you've seen Fight Club and are a fan of one of the greatest newspaper comics of all time, you might want to take a look at the single greatest exegesis of Fight Club ever committed to the Internet (if you haven't seen Fight Club, I have to warn you that the entire article riffs on the film's central spoiler). I wholeheartedly endorse Galvin P. Chow's theory: it makes perfect sense and explains everything.

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Dumb quote of the day--think inside the box edition

We can all theorize why the intense desire for change has so far produced relatively few coherent recipes for change. Maybe people today are simply too deferential. Raised to get college recommendations, maybe they lack the oppositional mentality necessary for revolt. Maybe people are too distracted.

My own theory revolves around a single bad idea. For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition.

-David Brooks,
"How To Fight The Man",
The New York Times, February 2^nd, 2012

So, Brooks goes on to say that leftists ought to crib from Marx (I'm pretty sure he means Karl, but Groucho would suit me fine), libertarians from the Austrian School (he specifies Hayek and von Mises, but I think they'd do better citing Gibson and Miller... oh, wait, that's the Australian school, my bad), and various spiritual movements riff from... various spiritual movements. Well, okay, then. I mean, none of that is per se stupid. Yeah, leftists ought to have some kind of appreciation of Marx and everybody should know and respect who runs Bartertown.

What's stupid about it is that Brooks seems to completely miscomprehend what "Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview" actually means and has always meant: it's never meant, "be an ignorant asshat and make it up as you go along," it's always been assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the independent thinker would actually assemble and correlate data, including what other people have thought about the subject.

I think I need to backtrack a little: Brooks actually starts his column talking about some kid named Jefferson Bethke who apparently made what is described as a silly, heartfelt, and wholly inaccurate YouTube video titled, "Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus". I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on it. But Brooks recounts how Bethke posted this video, how he found himself bearing the brunt of forceful and thorough critiques from various parties, and how, as a result, he changed his mind.

Now, Brooks takes this story--and this is a big part of what makes his whole column one big dumb quotathon--and runs with the idea that if this kid had just rummaged through the past and regurgitated whatever he gobbled down, he would have never had to eat his words in public. Expanding on this, Brooks then... enh... well, uh... okay, here's another reason his whole column is a BDQ: he doesn't so much extrapolate from this one kid's theological evolution to a larger point so much as he hops from the kid getting schooled to some kind of point about how contemporary protest movements need to present some kind of alternative, not just griping (a point it's hard to disagree with and I think is so self-evident and obvious it hardly merits a Twitter comment anymore, much less a whole NYT op-ed).

Let's go back to the part before Brooks gets on his rocket-powered hog and ramps the Grand Canyon. Where were we? Ah, yes: Brooks "runs with the idea that if this kid had just rummaged through the past and regurgitated whatever he gobbled down, he would have never had to eat his words in public," is what I just wrote. Yes, well: I guess that's one way you can take in the whole affair. An alternative, of course, is that the kid did exactly what open-minded, independent thinkers ought to do; he presented an argument (granted, one he apparently hadn't put a lot of thought into), listened to new evidence submitted in rebuttal, and changed his mind.

What Brooks is saying might really be summed up as: "If the kid had been better indoctrinated in some kind of dogma to begin with, he wouldn't have had to think as much about what he was saying and wouldn't have had to retract his prior brain fartings." You would have to be a constipated thinker--perhaps that should be in quotes, "thinker", so-called--to conceive of this as a good thing. You'd have to be particularly and peculiarly twisted, as well, to go even further than that and extrapolate "what's wrong with kids these days" from an example of what sounds like somebody demonstrating that he possesses a receptive and flexible mind in a manner that is charming, gracious and humble. (To be fair, Brooks even describes him similarly--"Bethke responded in a way that was humble, earnest and gracious, and that generally spoke well of his character"--before adding, "He also basically folded," as if admitting you were wrong is ever a bad thing.)

You know, even when Brooks says something smart, he can't help saying something stupid. This penultimate paragraph would have been an excellent short blog or Facebook post:

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain--then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.

Isn't that nice? And true? If only he'd stopped there; instead, his ultimate paragraph reads:

Effective rebellion isn't just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

Wait, what? If Brooks meant to say, "Effective rebellion isn't just ranting about stuff that bugs you, it also means offering solutions," okay, we agree; but it's clear from the context that Brooks is saying rebels need their own substitute dogma, which is a ridiculously conservative thing to say in the most intellectually pejorative sense of the word. I.e., not "conservative" as in "ideologically right-wing", whatever that entails, or "conservative" in the sense of "traditional", but "conservative" in the sense of stubbornly rejecting innovation and refusing to consider novelty on the grounds that innovation and novelty are bad per se. As for authorities and institutions: Brooks is potentially right that they aren't inherently bad things; what authorities and institutions are, actually, are tools, to be evaluated, used and disposed of by craftsmen according to fitness and purpose. A good authority or institution is to be embraced, while one that is no longer good for a purpose is rejected, and the tool is never to be picked up at all merely for the sake of having it in one's hand so one can say, "Yes, but I have a tool."

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Happy eightieth, Mr. Williams!

So I heard this on the clock radio when it went off this morning: today is John Williams' eightieth birthday. I'm not a major fan or expert in classical music, but if more than half a century writing the soundtrack for American pop cinema means anything (Williams has been scoring films since the mid-1950s), I'm wondering if we can't all agree this guy is the most important composer of the 20^th Century (Fox?).

I may have mentioned it here: Williams' soundtrack for Star Wars was the first real album I ever owned. I asked for it for my sixth birthday, very insistent on getting just the music and not the picture-book record, and my parents felt like there was no way to refuse me. I don't want to belabor an old story. I guess I'm just bringing it up again because Williams' score was maybe the first time I was ever conscious at any level of the part music played in telling a story on film. The Star Wars soundtrack was methodically classical in its approach: taking a page from Wagner (an obvious influence on much of the composition itself), Williams more-or-less reintroduced the idea of leitmotif into film after several decades in which composers--even greats like Herrmann and Mancini frequently wrote cues for scenes; Star Wars had a bit of music that went with Luke and another bit that came up every time the Empire was on the screen, and a lovely little flourish that still sometimes moistens my eyes whenever Princess Leia was about, etc.

He's been, of course, Stephen Spielberg's and George Lucas' favorite composer, and that's meant he's written some of the best-known scores for some of the most successful films of all time. One hopes that familiarity hasn't bred contempt, though it's very possible Williams hasn't been taken as seriously as he deserves. Some of his scores are such an integral part of the collective unconscious they've almost, unfairly, become a sort of punchline.

The story is that the first time Williams played that ominous, repetitive duhn-duhn-duhn-duhn-duhnduhn riff on the piano for Spielberg, Spielberg asked him if he was kidding. But it's perfect, isn't it? And I may have miswritten a little about Star Wars, Williams, leitmotifs and first times: play the above clip from Jaws and dig how the "Out To Sea" theme is worked in as a playful tease that will show up at lighter moments throughout the movie. Here it is as a standalone piece:

In Jaws, the particular motif isn't necessarily tied to a character (though, if memory serves, the musical cue does associate with Chief Brody (Roy Scheider); primarily, it's a jaunty little, "Just going fishing with the boys" cue that serves brilliantly well as a counterpoint to the ominous shark theme. What it does, then, is underline the idea that these guys going out to kill this ginormous man-eating, boat-crushing white whale Carcharodon aren't really prepared for what they're getting into, are, in fact, getting in well over their heads.

I mean, think about this for a moment: if you were composing a score for Jaws (let's pretend you've been to a conservatory and are a capable symphonic composer), and you have a scene where this boat is leaving the shore to go and get destroyed by this beast that's been stalking and devouring men, women and children up and down the New England coast, what kind of music would you write for it? I think the temptation might be to write something ominous and imposing, something that says, "these guys are in danger, they might die". Something dire and portentous. And what did Williams actually do? He wrote something jaunty and precious--and that's fucking perfect, that is so much better that it's preposterously unbelievable. Writing an ominous foreshadow-ey number would be easy and obvious, and, yes, it would get the job done, but by writing something that is consciously ironic, Williams hammers home the point of the scene ten million times better. They're doomed because they're not taking it seriously, get ready to shit your pants when they see what you saw during the first five minutes of the film with that chick getting dragged under and dismembered.

I started with Star Wars because that's where I started with Williams, but, you know, Jaws may be the perfect score, right there. And yet I don't want to end with that. I'm trying to keep this post down, try not to get too ridiculous with clips (which, f'r'instance, is why I'm going to bypass Raiders and The Paper Chase, a score I've long harbored a perhaps-inordinate affection for). But here's a (long) clip of Williams and Spielberg running with the idea that music might be a universal language:

That. I get a little shivery watching that. I sometimes think Close Encounters Of The Third Kind doesn't get enough love, either as a Spielberg film (it sometimes seems weirdly eclipsed--as if every conversation about Spielberg now has to begin with Schindler's List, which is undeniably an awesome and serious movie) or as a science fiction film. CE3K is, I think, one of the best first contact movies ever made, and the only first contact movie scenes I can think of that can rival the above clip with the same kind of visceral thrill, the same sense of awe and mystery and fear and curiosity all mixed up at once, are any of the Monolith's appearances in 2001. The CE3K scene doesn't just share 2001's portrayal of a first contact as an epic-yet-oddly-abstract event (aliens might communicate with us through shapes, colors, and sounds), but also have in common the way they both set up the arrival of the whatsits largely through the audience's ears, perhaps even moreso than their eyes (in 2001, of course, the musical cue is Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, which is now perhaps better known as "the 2001 music" than it is as a classical composition in its own right, written in 1896).

But Williams isn't just capable of bombast. We may have already established that with the playful "Out To Sea" music and the playful human-alien jam session from CE3K. One of my relatively-more-recent favorite Williams soundtracks is yet another Spielberg score, Catch Me If You Can; I especially adore the main theme--

Obviously, I think, not Williams' first foray into something jazzy. But it utterly delighted me the first time I saw the movie (and still does). That coy, flirtatious four-note arpeggio on the clarinet slays me.

Happy birthday, Mr. Williams, and thank you, thank you, thank you for a half century of music. In a very real way, you've written the soundtrack to my dreams. Thank you.

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The Smiths, "Sweet And Tender Hooligan"

Exhausted cynicism. I has it. Happens sometimes, you just have weeks at this gig where you wonder why you're bothering or what you got in it for. Frustrations, unappreciations. It isn't just the clients, it's from all quadrants. Your annoyance is flaking from your skin at every little jar and brush.

It's only Tuesday.

It might help if the writing was going better. I have a terrible short story. I stepped away from the terrible and unfinishable novel to take a shot at it; I had an idea, it was compelling, or perhaps it wasn't so much an idea as it was an image. Stepping away from the novel could be justified by the fact this story, or this nugget, or this character can be found in the same world as the novel. Now I have a beginning, an end, and a spotty middle and I'm sort of revising the thing while going through and trying to stitch up the middle. I was shooting for a short length and it's still around 2,500 to 5,000 words too long, and also a lot of the words are the wrong words. This is totally uncalled-for and unfathomable: they all seemed like the right words when I was putting them in there, and now I go back and read it and find they're all completely misplaced. Is it possible somebody else went in and made the thing awful when I was asleep. Perhaps it's Dropbox's fault: at some point while the file was uploading or downloading during a sync between various machines, Dropbox replaced all my words with identical words that weren't as good. Or it's signal degradation: instead of syncing over wifi, I should have used a hard cable connection, because my words have all been ruined by the aether. Sure. That's it.

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In memoriam: Christopher Youd, a.k.a. John Christopher

This is the kind of thing Twitter is good for: but for Twitter, I don't think I would have heard that Christopher Youd passed away last week.

Only, of course, I had no idea who Christopher Youd was; or, to be more accurate, I think I'd heard he was Christopher Youd but in my brain he will always by John Christopher, the pseudonym he used for a lot of post-apocalyptic juvenile science fiction back in the day. I guess the proper term these days would be "YA" or "young adult", though I read Christopher's Tripods Trilogy and Prince In Waiting Trilogy when I was a bit less than a young adult, probably no older than junior high and it might even have been late in elementary school.

I haven't revisited those books in decades, and it's hard to say how much of an influence they might have been. But the Tripods books in particular are lurking down there in the bottom of my brain and bubble up periodically even now. This was a series of books, for those unfamiliar with them or the various comic and television adaptations that have been done, in which aliens have reduced humanity to a medieval state, controlling the humans' brains through permanent headgear called "caps" that are installed during a person's teenage years, patrolling the landscape in gigantic Wellsian tripedal walking machines and ruling from three great cities of "gold and lead" scattered around the world. The heroes of the books are a group of adolescent boys who run away from their home villages just prior to having their heads scrambled by the alien masters, eventually joining a group of human rebels in Switzerland, later infiltrating the alien cities and ultimately leading an epic assault upon them using the intelligence they gathered inside.

What sticks in the head for me is some surprisingly primal horror for a series of books aimed directly at kids. The aliens steal your brains when you turn fourteen: the horror of having your thoughts controlled and your personality stripped away, and not being you anymore is something that still sticks with me, though these days it's the fear of brain injury or eventual Alzheimer's that has replaced the idea of mind control. (It also occurs to me only now, looking at the age for capping, that the whole thing is an interesting metaphor for puberty, no? And there's a basic horror there: how much of body horror in general goes back to the major physical and mental transformations we all face--puberty, pregnancy, old age, et al.?) The ginormous alien walkers have flailing tentacles that are used to sweep up candidates for capping, escaping fugitives, anything else they fancy; and I still have this vertiginous fear, not uncommon, I'm sure, of falling, of being swept up, of being lifted from my feet, of being out of control of my movements. (And while I've never been afraid of flying, ironically enough, isn't the root of that phobia the fact that your life is placed in the hands of a pilot, faceless ground mechanics, and gravity?) The alien colonies, domed cities containing the aliens' poisonous atmosphere and calibrated to provide the aliens with artificially-increased gravity and intense heat comparable to their homeworld speaks to indelible fears of suffocation and drowning. (And kudos, upon reflection, to Youd for making his alien invaders aliens, monstrous-looking creatures comfortable in an inimical environment.)

I can't remember anything about the quality of Youd's prose or characterization. But I have these indelible memories of the story he told, and specifically of these basic horrors. And these are books, I repeat, that I read around three decades ago. Thirty years is a long time to occasionally imagine the terror of a sinuous arm grasping one round the waist, sweeping one up into the black maw of a striding metal monster to have one's head shaved for the installation of a prosthetic lobotomy. I'm re-imagining it now, as I write this.

As much as I enjoyed Lewis' Narnia books and L'Engle as a child around the same age-range, and as much as I enjoyed the Rowling and Pullman books as an adult, I have to think that I'm not sure anyone went as far as Youd did in the Tripod stories to peddle basic human fears in a way that was serious and unadulterated, a manner that took it for granted that his audience ought to be able to read something like that and be appropriately unnerved by it. There's probably someone else doing it; I don't read a lot of YA lit, to be honest, and I'm sure some reader can point out an author who is as nasty as Youd was. So maybe he wasn't unique, but I would say he was something of a trailblazer in that regard.

For that matter, I'm not sure I can think of another children's (or YA or whatever) author other than L'Engle who took a young audience so seriously all around. The Tripod books weren't just about BEM's stealing brains, they were also about individuality, freedom, community--this was a series that actually ended by raising the question of whether the human race wasn't arguably better as aliens' slaves (after defeating the alien invaders, the victorious humans almost immediately begin squabbling, re-drawing old national borders, and rattling assorted sabers they've managed to come up with). Youd was interested in ideas about ecology and history and science. While his aliens were certainly pulpy and in some respects derivative, Youd also went to some trouble world-building them: it wasn't enough to borrow tripod war machines from Wells, Youd needed to give his readers a reason the aliens were hidden away and mysterious, nor was it good enough to just use pointy-eared-humanoids as so many would have--so we have tripedal, three-obsessed creatures living in an exotic environment that has to be sealed up and hidden away. I think there's a lesson there for anyone wanting to write a kid's book: treat your audience seriously, and you might give them something to remember for three decades and running.

(Maybe "Young Adult" is less a marketing ploy and more an inspiration.)

I haven't mentioned the Prince-In-Waiting series. Truth is, I remember finding them a little derivative of his own work (another post-apocalypse-reduced-to-medieval-living setting?). I still devoured them, for all that, and reading the synopsis on Wikipedia brought back some memories.

Joe Hill tweeted that he was saddened by the news. At the risk of sounding callous, I wouldn't say "sad"--I think I thought John Christopher was already dead. What I am, though, is grateful for his work. I suppose it would have been better if it wasn't his death that reminded me of how much Youd's writing has stayed with me, but Mr. Youd had a good run (he was 89) and we all pass away, some of us sooner than later; it would have been better to have a happy reason for remembering his work, but things are what they are (sorry for the banality, but it is what it--argh!), and if this is the occasion upon which I get to send a thank-you out to the universe for Mr. Youd's work: thank you. Mr. Youd, you scared the crap out of me when I was a kid and I still cringe at the thought of electrodes being drilled into my scalp by a monstrous extraterrestrial device--I can only hope anything I ever write has a tenth of that kind of impact on anybody of any age. Thank you for the work, thank you for the stories.

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