…It was really brilliant, full of sharp insight and shimmering wit and no spelling mistakes at all. I’ll never be able to recreate it so to summarise:
- Woke up at 4 this morning, after tossing and turning and generally fidgeting for a couple of hours I got up and was in the office by 7:30. Much closer to my natural rhythm I think, I like to be in bed by 10. Naturally uncool. Why is it cool to stay up late?
- Episode 2 and The Trap’s not going very well; still no mention of iterated PD + misrepresentation of selfish gene.
- Never get involved in debates online with people you don’t know, I’ve been tempted to over the last few days but seeing how they’ve played out the same way they always seem to (unproductive point scoring/ bullying) I’m glad I stayed away. People who talk about the internet as a global conversation seem to miss the fact that conversation only ever seems to happen on a small scale. Large scale ‘discussion’ sites like The Guardian’s Comment is Free, BBC news’ Have Your Say and the granddaddy of them all Slashdot all seem to be pretty good proof of this theory. The opposite situation, a kind of echo chamber circle jerk, is just as infuriating and unproductive.
- I really Enjoyed the Dawn of The Dead remake but I’m don’t like Frank Miller’s retarded macho shtick and apparently 300 is a racist gore fest which is worrying though it the fact that the same reviewers who are saying that kind of thing seem to feel the need to make derogatory references to computer games (1. it’s you mean video games. 2. Alongside the DVD box set, they’re the defining art form of our age, get over it granddad) and adolescent males (as if they don’t get demonised enough already) both of which kind of undermine credibility in my eyes. Also there’s all sorts of confused commentary about the films sexual politics along the lines of: “Man those Spartans are gay, in their speedos and so on” and then later on, “OMG! I can’t believe they made the Persians all gay! This film is totally homophobic”. the subtext of a lot of this stuff seems to be that cinema audiences are too stupid to work out that they’re being manipulated by the film into supporting an invasion of Iran and voting in the BNP at the next election and need to be protected from themselves by Guardian columnists and tiresome critical theory bloggers.
Anyway, I was thinking of seeing it at the I-Max on Friday or Saturday if anyone fancies it.
In the original version all these things were deftly interwoven and there was an overarching point but as I said I lost that version so you’ll just have to make it up.
And then KateG said:
Apparently there are war rhinos. If only I lived in London I would say count me in!
As per tiresome commentators, if everyone would just do the sensible thing and vote me in as Empress of the Universe I would stick them all on one giant Big Brother with the gimmick that although they think they are being televised the cameras are fake, and leave them there forever.
By commenting I seem to have included myself in this…
And then Diggory said:The latest version of WordPress has a rather clever feature which auto-saves posts as you are writing them. I did something similar to what you did, and was mighty thankful for it.
And then tom said:Yeah I keep meaning to update Wordpress (also add open id plugin as I notice you’ve done) but I’m lazy.
And then Charlie said:I’ve now seen the first two episodes of The Trap, and while I really enjoyed them, I think the thesis is pretty specious.
There was way too many eerie shots of poor John Nash looking hunted, as if to underline Curtis’ apparent point that because Nash suffered from mental illness, his rigorous mathematical theories were somehow suspect.
What was definitely missing was a good example demonstrating what appeared to be Curtis’ position: that distribution of economic resources was much better in the good old days prior to game theory and modern evolutionary genetic theory. Maybe that wasn’t his point, maybe it was that more equality would lead to more freedom, in which case I wish he’d just said it.
Film music from the second episode was mainly from Vertigo. Maybe they are connected to their theme, if you can equate Assault on Precinct 13 to the siege-like mentality of the Cold War, then you can definitely connect Vertigo to mental illness.
And then tom said:…also I noticed a nice bit of Halloween, though I can’t remember at which point.
But yeah, I totally agree that the argument seems pretty specious. What I’m getting mostly from it is that it’s possible for theories to have unintended consequences when put into practice (dur!). Beyond that it’s more an exercise in skilful editing and persuasive composition than anything else.
The picture it paints is one where all these things just kind of happen, like there was no opposition to or debate about any of the things the program talks about. Though I guess that’s the danger with this kind of broad brush stroke style documentary.
Also, for me it just seemed to be dragging on a bit, as you say lots of shots of Nash looking haunted quite a bit of repetition in the script (did we really need to 4 minute intro in full the second time?) lots of “last week I showed…” er well not really, I mean OK you literally showed us some stuff but to me that word “showed” connotes a certain completeness of argument which frankly wasn’t there etc etc.
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