Two Davids

When I was looking through I Watch Stuff for a bigger version of that Jurassic Park map on Tuesday, I came across the first of what would eventually be two Lynch/Jedi posts. It included the video above, which is Lynch telling the story of a meeting with Lucas about maybe directing Jedi. He's amusing in his cranky way, though not as much as Patton Oswald in the Lucas sketch that dominated the blog over last weekend.

The IWS post also included this challenge: "Internet, you now have twelve hours to produce an edit of exactly what that insane combination would look like." A while later IWS posted an answer to the challenge, which JPX posted below.

I have to admit, there were twenty seconds or so when I thought they maybe had something. Darth Vader sounding like the yawning vents in Eraserhead was not only fitting but also exactly echoed a joke I had heard (or possibly made) years ago during a geek chat about the hypothetical Lynch-directed Jedi. The shot of Yoda disappearing was an excellent and appropriate choice. But in the end, it devolved into a one trick pony, i.e. bits of the actual movie with Julee Cruise music playing in the background. I feel like some footage from some other movies could have been worked in there somehow. But I guess twelve hours isn't very much time.

Anybody know what bit of Lynch was supposed to be referenced when the Emperor's lightning sounded like that? I have no idea.



Anyway, I was going to make this two posts; my second subject is that I picked up the above book on JPX's recommendation.* But HandsomeStan provided some unexpected connective tissue with his Dune discussion on the Awful Avatar Poster post yesterday.

I loved the novel Dune. Just loved it. I've read it at least three times, and thinking about it I probably could read it again. I didn't care for the sequels; I read the first two and found them very disappointing.

I was, as you would guess, extremely amped up about the movie version. Unfortunately our lovable crank (and dearly departed friend) Mike Cain saw exactly what was coming: "I don't trust him to do it right" he said, "He directed Eraserhead, that's no reason to think he can do a big sci-fi flick."

So right! Extremely disappointing. Watching it again later, having seen more of David Lynch's work, I was able to spot the similarities. Lots of impressionistic montages like Blue Velvet, but... who cares! Why are you wasting time on this when there's so much of the book you're skipping! I know Jedi has severe problems, problems that anticipated the prequels' problems, but I think we're all better off without the Lynch version. Anyway, Dune the novel provides my link... let's talk about science fiction and the written word.

* The recommendation I speak of occurred around 1983, when the book came out. You see, old friend? I do listen to you, it just takes a while. As I recall JPX and his dad had both gotten into this series and described it to me in glowing terms. David Gerrold is one of those guys who's been around forever; one of his claims to fame is "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode of original Star Trek.

I had no plans to pick it up, but I found a used bookstore I had never seen and did what I always do in used bookstores: look for first edition paperbacks of William Gibson's first three novels.

If you don't know who that is, here's a bit of Wiki: "Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s."

Over the years I've insisted that people read Gibson so much I keep giving away my copies of his books. So I'm always hunting for replacements, and I always want those same editions. I had no luck at this new store, but they did have the Gerrold book and I wanted something to read.

Now, I am a longtime lover of science fiction, but I've read very little of the prose that's out there. There's the old chestnut that these guys have groovy ideas but that doesn't mean they can write. That does account for some if it (although personally I also think most of Philip K. Dick's ideas were crap too, but that's another rant), but for me it's something more specific.

The reason I like Gibson so much is that he shows you everything. The bars, the hotel rooms, the fashions, the weapons, the streets, the shopfronts, the furniture -- everything gets enough deft bits of description to really ground you on what these places look like. Without cluttering up the words he manages to be cinematic, and I love that.

A Matter for Men, for example, takes place sometime in the 21st century, with some hints of advanced technology. But they're just hints, like "The handsome woman was in a lab coat and was carrying a clipboard. She switched it on while she waited and began reading through some notes." Okay, so in the future we switch on our clipboards, but what else ya got? In a Gibson book it would say "she carried one of the new Chanel clipboards, encased in deep green translucent plastic."

Or something like that. If you think about how much information bombards you every time you leave your house, you'll wonder why you'd want to visit a fictional world in which most of the same details are swept away. An essential part of what makes Blade Runner so good is all the brand names in neon (hated that book too, but... later). Details! I want details!

The trap my complaints fall into easily is this: I'm asking the authors to short circuit my own ability to visualize, or I'm saying they're leaving too much to the imagination because I'm lazy. Not so, I'm lucky to have a very good imagination. But in a book you travel landscapes of the mind, and if nobody bothers to mention what a room looks like, you can read the passage fully and it doesn't have to look like anything. And that lack of visual grounding means the cover artist can basically draw any damn thing and it's fine, like that foolish, skin-tight, sleeveless military uniform in the picture above. Fucking Boris Vallejo. Good painter, but does he really know what he's doing?

As far as I can tell, what I'm bitching about is a feature of a lot of what's out there. In 1997, anticipating Starship Troopers like a salivating dog, I got a copy of the book. I was kind of dismayed to find it was a really long civics text about the fictional progressive/facist society bookended by two too-short action scenes (the movie, however, did not disappoint). Ideas over images, yet again. I think that was my problem with Larry Niven's Ringworld, which I kind of liked although I wasn't inspired to check Niven out any further (Jordan's a big fan, and he later convinced me I should).

So there I am, reading Gerrold book. I Wikipedia The War Against the Chtorr books and find out the damn series isn't even finished yet, so I'm even more discouraged. I come upon a scene in which the main character listens to a famous professor guy pontificate at a party for pages and pages, my eyes droop. There are a few flashback chapters about the main character's high school civics class that are extremely remeniscent of stuff in the book Starship Troopers, and I start to get annoyed.

And then, the book turned around. The idea revealed itself to be very cool and very interesting (Earth is basically being invaded by an alien ecosystem. From an unknown source weird flora and fauna are showing up, more aggressive and able than the Earth critters in the same niche). Then the global political backstory got fleshed out and that was pretty cool, too. So I went back to the bookstore and got book number two, A Day for Damnation and another one besides. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I read an installment of a graphic version of this in Heavy Metal or something like that, and the title always stuck with me.

So it looks like I'm on something of a sci-fi novel kick. Maybe I'll see if there's any Larry Niven tucked away on those shelves.

Discuss!