From Truth vs Fiction on Brain Pickings

I saw Timo Vuorensola in November on a panel at Futures of Entertainment and he spoke at length about how the film has been financed and put together. This was the first time I’ve seen anybody put crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing in a credible business context, and the first time I’ve contemplated the prospect of blockbuster movies being produced in this way. With all the fallout from SOPA/PIPA, I can’t think of a better time to be invading multiplexes with a film pitched as INGLORIOUS BASTARDS meets SIN CITY meets ‘old French movies’. Expect the space hun to be big in 2012.

And, if that’s not enough Alan for you…

Read all about it on Brain Pickings.

I have nothing to add.

Bleeding Cool have already exhaustedly dissected it in relation to ALIEN, of which it is clearly antecedent.

What the trailer confirms is that the connection goes further than the fact of the two films being situated in the same sprawling storyverse. Even with the poster released a couple of weeks ago (see below) it seemed evident that what’s being sold here is a reboot, albeit one with a poise and finesse that’s only possible when your director has been talking ‘transmedia’ since you were in facehuggies (note to self: might sell).

It brings to mind a talk I gave at EAVE just over a year ago in which I framed film production in terms of a new paradigm for popular entertainment: Content, Community and Application.

Content is story, but also universe, the universe through which the story arc passes. Community is audience, but also inhabitants, from stakeholder to smallholder across the spectrum of participation. Applications are anything that realise and extend the relationship between the two. That means anything.

The ALIEN franchise is a perfect example of this. Four principle films over twenty years, each helmed by a director with his own distinctive style and creative vision. As it expands, the universe fragments. Certain truths remain intact, while others lie out of sight, on the dark sides of as yet undiscovered moons.

Franchises are interwoven, and universes collide. Do your homework and you’ll find that the Giger-designed xenomorph has crossed paths at one time or another with Predator, The Terminator, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and the WildC.A.T.S., in myriad spun-off movies, comics, novels and video games.

Then there’s the fan fiction, with the Alien vs. Predator crossover pulling the biggest crowd. One fan movie, by CrippleHawk, comes in twenty-nine parts and has a four hour running time. And there’s an audience for this stuff: the opening instalment has notched up over a quarter of a million views.

Another, baseballguy11avp’s Aliens vs. Predator: Dark World is closing in on three hundred thousand plays, despite being stop-motion animated with action figures and subtitled throughout. Sure, a few people probably leave before the end, but I bet plenty, like me, watch on a little longer than they’d expect to, if only to enjoy the sheer resourcefulness and ingenuity (shot for shot) of the ultimate in micro-budget film-making:

All of these are ‘Applications’ as I understand them, each as legitimate as the last. Questions of authority are secondary: story belongs to those who write it. CrippleHawk and baseballguy11avp have painstakingly created their own little corners of this infinite universe precisely for the purpose of autonomously owning and exploring them.

So what if exploration sometimes leads to exploitation? Do I see Ridley Scott chasing take-downs when some YouTuber runs some ads over the top of Alien vs. Bladerunner? (note to self: make this).

No, I see him too busy terraforming, taking talents as immense as the resources he can bring to bear on them and carving out new worlds and new dogma, a modern day Prometheus, stealing fire from the heavens of the imagination and making it a plaything for mortal hands.

And this is what S.O.P.A. means to me, this is the price it asks us to pay. A world in which Content, Community and Application remain in corporate hands, regulated and restricted, whole civilisations neutered in the name of outright ownership, and ‘quality control’.

How long do we expect the master story-tellers to accept these terms, how long will the universe-builders choose to labour under the badge of Weyland-Yutani? Sure, they might be career control freaks, but will they always want a sandbox only they can play in?

Especially when they wake up in the not-so-distant future and discover that, for all the industry’s best efforts, all the take-downs and law-suits, all the lobbying and land-grabs, it’s a broken business model.

“You think this can last. There’s a storm coming Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

So speaks Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, in this week’s trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, with a prescience promising a resolution of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy uncannily zeroed in on the Zeitgeist.

Ever since comics legend Frank Miller dispatched a missive of purest vitriol in the direction of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, speculation has been being speculated by the usual suspeculators as to exactly where the caped crusader stands on the issue.

Here, for those who missed it, (care of Bleeding Cool) are Miller’s very words, through the prism of a page from The Dark Knight Returns, his irrefutably epic (and, in places, exquisitely poetic) riff on Gotham’s grandee:

[UPDATE: Hideously, this is a lie. It's actually from BATMAN: YEAR ONE. Also Miller. Also epic.]

For my money, it would be an exercise of particular pointlessness and narcissistic nerdery to scribe some sprawling diatribe pondering precisely where Batman’s feelings lie. He’s a comic book character, y’know, he kind of goes where we please in that respect, morally confused, the ace of spades in a house of cards, and I’ve not yet had breakfast.

He presents an interesting paradox though, of benevolent billionaire donning a disguise from behind which to bat for the little guy. Going toe-to-toe with the status quo, all the while reaffirming it: that you need money to buy toys, and toys to play hero.

Bottom line is he’s as schizophrenic as the rest of us, wants to have his cake AND give it to some homeless guy. Inconsistent as hell, a true sell-out, just doing it with style. A kid with a few natural talents who got pushed to his limit, and decided to push back.

Maybe that’s Miller’s story. He went to his special place, a place filled with empty bourbon bottles and scrunched-up monkey porn, and got angry. Saw that his best years are behind him, his best comics too, and figured he’d take it out on the softest target Google had to offer.

Maybe the ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ are actually you and I, and Miller the embittered voice of a power elite telling us we had it too good, that the party’s over, that the imminent implosion of their regime spells hell-fire for us all. Telling us to get a job, get busy, die stupid. Telling us to await Mitt Romney’s ‘American century’, or no century at all.

(‘Batman vs Occupy Wall Street’ illustration up the top there pilfered from Boulet.)

Odder.

via @sizemore

(From Josh Macphee’s ‘The Occupation of Alcatraz’ print (above), part of the Celebrate People’s History series.)

Released in 1988, John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE finds honest, hard-working Americans – personified in this case by the muscle-bound mullet that is ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper – on skid row, under the thumb of a kleptocracy of aliens masquerading as decent, clean-living human beings in cahoots with a power elite of Reagan-era Republicans doing much the same thing.

Los Angeles offers the perfect backdrop to THEY LIVE. Wall Street might be America’s financial capital, but LA is its epicentre of conspicuous consumption, the natural point of origin for the TV signal being used by these intergalactic free-enterprisers to addle and exploit the collective human consciousness.

In Carpenter’s eyes we are not resigned to our fate, simply blinded to it. In the world of THEY LIVE, as in this one, it is he who controls the medium who controls the message.

So reads the inscription over the main entrance of LA’s City Hall. Completed in 1928, in 2001 it underwent a seismic retrofit enabling it to remain functional in the case of a magnitude 8.2 earthquake. Between its broad foundations and dizzying spire it stakes its ownership of this corner of downtown LA, and of the city as a whole, casting the cluster of tents at the base of the building’s north side into an indifferent shadow.

I’m approaching from the north having ridden the bus down to Union Station , covering the last few blocks on foot. People on the buses here look dead tired, even in the middle of the day. Those who aren’t sleeping deeply are drowning in the shallows of Transit TV, spellbound by the staccato splurge of cheaply commercials and syndicated televisual excrescence.

It’s during a short promo for something called ‘The Jace Hall Show’, adorned as it is with garish graphics instructing me to find, follow and fan Jace Hall, at all fucking costs, in all four million corners of the (fuck me I’m tired of saying it) social web, that I finally understand: TV isn’t going to be conquered by YouTube. It’s just going to become it.

Carrying on a little way down Main St I see the south side of City Hall, and the #OccupyLA encampment proper. On my way in I get chatting to a guy called Luke. He’s recently lost his job, his apartment, he’s basically here looking for a place to stay. He’s friendly, well-spoken, we talk a little about Occupy and what we both think it stands for, but it seems like Luke has more pressing concerns. I leave him meandering off between tightly-packed tents, in search of enough open ground to make a new home.

Is Luke a ‘protester’? Not in the Middle English (and, I suspect, Middle American) sense of the term. He doesn’t have a placard. He isn’t lining up to join ineffectual millions marching for one day only, he isn’t settling down with firearms and french fancies for a tea party. He’s just looking for somewhere he can be around people, feel part of something larger than his singularly troubled self, sleep a little sounder for the knowledge.

Spotting one of the circles signifying a meeting work-group, I wander over. The consensus process used at Occupations is deliberately open and inclusive, anyone can wander up, listen in, ask a question. At the same time, I make a point to volunteer who I am and what I’m doing there. The paranoia’s palpable these days, the Occupiers aware that plants and provocateurs are among them, becoming ever more entrenched in the logistics and liturgy of their struggle to survive.

Whatever neurosis they’re feeling can’t be being helped by the pungent smell of weed filling the air. Seems like it’s everywhere in LA these days, not just the boardwalk of Venice Beach and the backstreets downtown, but clouding street corners all along the route of the 704 running between the two, a rich aroma on Rodeo Drive, a purple haze on Sunset Boulevard. The signs are everywhere, lurid cannabis leaves drawn in green neon, brightening windows of the clinics where it’s sold.

That’s another of the skewed stereotypes the Occupiers have to put up with: they aren’t just jobless (ergo lazy) and homeless (ergo destitute) they’re also potheads (ergo crazy) and stoners (ergo dangerous). For my part, I’ve drunk a lot of booze and I’ve smoked a lot of weed and I know what I’d rather have my revolution powered by. If the smell of sensimilla hangs heavy in the air at #OccupyLA, the smell of sense hangs heavier.

I end up in the Media tent, being shown twenty-minutes of footage they shot on Veterans’ Day, showing a bunch of cops herding some vets from Somewhere-They’re-Not-Allowed-To-Be to somewhere they are. It’s not the incendiary contretemps I’m expecting, it’s actually kind of depressing. The droning recalcitrance of the protesters, the drone-like bewilderment of the police, each quietly hoping to provoke a reaction, each outwardly keeping the peace.

As I’m watching I’m joined by Tere (pronounced Terry), a blogger and comedienne heavily involved in the pro-cannabis movement. We get talking, and she tells me about the catalyst for her conversion into activist and Occupier: the experience of staring down the barrel of an automatic weapon, after being caught up in a federal raid on a doctor she was visiting.

(As she’s telling me this I think back to my experience of the Hackney riots and scribble down the words ‘consciousness scales’ in my notepad. I’m thinking about tipping points and radicalisation. I’m thinking that it doesn’t take much, just an accident of circumstance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe just the opposite. And that it can happen to anyone.)

Tere explains that the key issue with cannabis is federal government interference in state rights, acting on behalf of powerful lobby groups nervous about potential commercial applications of cannabis undermining existing interests in the food, drink, tobacco, clothing and energy industries.

They’re right to be nervous. In California they have conditions second only to Afghanistan in terms of suitability for large-scale cannabis cultivation. Whatever obstacles the Obama administration throws in their way, somebody here was paying attention when John Lennon prescribed a solution to Britain’s economic woes back in 1969: “We had an answer to Britain’s problem. It was to legalize pot and let homosexuals marry and Britain would be the richest nation on earth. It’s as simple as that.”

Tere and I finish our conversation realising what little hope we have that the markets can put aside decades of institutionalised self-interest and work together. We don’t think they’re capable of working together. We don’t think they know what it means. They seem less evolved to me these days, our leaders. They seem, in the words of one of their kind, ‘behind the curve’.

Which is where the people of #OccupyLA strike the most positive contrast. That’s right, these ’spoiled brats’, this ‘pond scum’, ‘these louts, thieves, and rapists’, they’re the ones taking the initiative, in the face of gratuitous intimidation by fear-mongers on the far-right. They’re thinking ahead. They’re working together, in their own minds at least, for all our sakes.

As I leave #OccupyLA the General Assembly’s getting underway. Someone mentions the name of J. Edgar Hoover. I’m already thinking about another Hoover, Herbert, the former President who gave his name to ‘Hoovervilles‘, the shanty towns that sprung up all over America during the Great Depression into which he led the country.

The more Occupations I visit, the more I’m starting to think of them as pre-emptive shanty towns, set up by people who aren’t waiting for the powers that be to foreclose on their future. By creating their own process, their own infrastructure, their own model for consensus-based community, they’re showing us all ways we can hope to stay civilised in a world of diminishing returns. We only call it ‘protest’ because they’re doing it in places they simply cannot be ignored.

And there they remain. Waiting for their ranks to swell, as joblessness grows, as the markets consume themselves, as consciousness scales. They’re digging in for the long haul, matching energy with inertia, making this ramshackle home for themselves on the right side of history. They’re going nowhere, and still staying ahead of the curve.

If only it wasn’t curving downwards.

Rollovers stolen from Christian Annyas.

You can watch the whole of THEY LIVE on YouTube.

[UPDATE 16/11/11 07:20 ] This is also worth a look, from John Carpenter himself (via Fraser):