I watched a thing and have thoughts, specifically how knowing the
person behind it was a gigantic asshole changes how you view something.
The
asshole this time is Michael Crichton, one of the most successful
novelists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He was also a drawstring shitbag of a
person. You can consult his wiki entry for specifics, but he was a
person who basically got cancelled before the term existed entirely by
his own efforts. My suspicion is that he was ruined by big success early
on in life. By the time he finished his undergrad at Harvard he had
accomplished his childhood dream: being a successful author. Dude then
went to Harvard medical school, but was so successful by that time he
did a residency but never practiced. Maybe because of this, he seems to
have decided personal growth was for other people.
The
fact that his BA is in "biological anthropology" which was the name
"scientific racism" had been living under likely doesn't help, though it
does explain why he stormed off the set of the already questionable
movie "Rising Sun", and never returned, when he discovered a white
character was being played by Wesley Snipes.
Anyway,
I recently saw the old SF movie the Andromeda Strain. It is a good
movie, one of the VERY few good SF made between 2001 and Star Wars. The
movie was adapted from Crichton's first novel, which was a huge success
and established him as a bestselling author. It opens with a dead town
in California, where a virus collected from space almost instantly
strikes the entire town dead, with the only survivors being an infant
and an alcoholic hobo. The government does what they do in a lot of MC
novels, activate the best and most privlidged elite personnel they can find to
Solve The Problem. So I assume they were all first in their class at
harvard and yale, and then, I dunno, did post-doctorate work at places
so elite I've never heard of them.
Good
things first: this movie was directed by Robert Wise, and he knows what
he is doing. The art direction, especially, is strong. The facility,
'Wildfire', is this fantasy take on one of those CDC labs that is
capable of safely dealing with lethal infectious agents - I think it
even has the same level 1 to 5 structure. The lab features stainless
steel everything, and exists as a five level subterranean donut. It also
could be 'Chekov's Gun, the building' as pretty much every detail we're
told about becomes part of the plot. The labs also feature really
clever devices to make visually interesting very boring things (like for
example the changing of a particulate filter) and has some early
graphics that are computers in operation and *almost* computer graphics.
So if you like a retro design, all of that is a joy. I should also say
the central plot is in fact, pretty interesting and well done, being the
only time I've seen speculative biochemistry as a major factor
in a plot. Also I noticed the "PA/computer page sound" [I
think] was sampled by one of my favourite musicians, Yoko Kanno, to
create a track for a TV show some thirty years later.
Could
be a coincidence, considering it is, after all, just two notes on a
piano, but they are a really good, distinctive set of notes.
The
characters are kind of a letdown, but then again they are four doctors
doing intense research, so there's not a lot of leeway there. One of the
doctors is AN FEMALE, and is written to be...exactly like a male doctor
in their 50s in deportment and intellect. I forget if in the book Crichton just doesn't gender that character - I read the book as a teen
and remember being genuinely surprised that the character was a lady -
but this is about as close as Crichton gets for gender equity.
Eventually
the Crichton surrogate figures things out and saves the day. This is
where we get a whiff of the drawstring shitbag. The Crichton surrogate
does this by 1) not comforting a crying baby (even when the female
nurse really really wants to) and 2) by catching an omission the female
doctor accidentally made. In what's a genuinely interesting plot
development, the female doctor has been slowly developing epilepsy. I
forget if the female doctor was aware of this - it's a subtle plot
development in the book because we see the signs from her perspective,
which naturally are fairly subtle and confusing. Once it comes out,
another doctor speculates if she hid her condition to keep her position
of privilege as a fourth level nesting doll. Still, at one point, thanks
to the constant flashing lights and intense screens, they discover what
neutralizes the mysterious strain, which is looked over because the
female doctor is having a minor seizure. So it's partially the female
doctor's fault, and it's the author surrogate's job to correct it.
The basic theme is one
Crichton would use throughout his career: "science and technology are
bad". [His other basic theme is "people's brains are bad because they
want amusement" which is expressed mostly in plots about deadly
futuristic theme parks, and I'm not kidding about his views on the
brain, as you can check his wiki about how he "didn't trust his own
brain."] The reason why science and technology is bad is, well, I'm just
going to quote a friend here:
"It was always
there - one of the core ideas in the Jurassic Park novel is that science
is an unearned power because scientists inherit so much of their
knowledge and thus don't respect it. With the specific analogy that
science is like buying a Saturday Night Special instead of spending a
lifetime mastering a martial art."
Very "while you played games, I studied the sword" if you spend too much time on the internet
You
can certainly see this in the Andromeda Strain. The Wildfire facility
breaks, as it must, as the entire movie is basically a mechanism for an
exciting story. Really, the facility is also more than a little absurd.
There's a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the facility, and it's clear
that the magic computer system they use to do work is also being used to
monitor the scientists, with the facility being able to vaporize itself
in a sufficiently compromised situation, which has one scientist
feverishly cutting AV feeds when the topic gets too dangerous. There's
an extended series of scenes in the middle where the scientists go
through ever more invasive decontamination, despite the fact that the
scientists still must work in clean rooms etc. The baby spends about 90%
of the movie wailing in a room with the semiconscious hobo, and both
are transported very slowly through the facility on a very slow moving elevator. I'm guessing Crichton didn't pay much attention to what nurses did.
The
real "you manics, you blew it all up" energy comes from the revelation
that the virus was brought to earth via a space probe that was sampling
stuff to create new bioweapons from. (Crichton is a victim of timing
here: the movie came out in 1971, and Nixon had by that time terminated
America's bioweapon program, for the extremely rational reason that
bioweapons were as serious as nuclear weapons, and thus any situation
you'd use them you'd be using nuclear weapons, which were frankly
better.) Still, the movie ends with....no solutions whatsoever. That's
not surprising if you know Crichton. Fear of science never has any
resolution, in no small part because Crichton's books are engines of
entertainment, amusement park rides, and so the problem being solved
would undermine the whole enterprise.
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