Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Page 15
Smoke fills the courtyard, overlaid with the smell of burning plastic and so much dust. Everything is burning; the heat washes over her. Janine's eyes water. People pour out of the union building; the automatic door opens and closes and opens and closes. The plump woman from the refec checkout hurries up the stairs. A man screams, a long and drawn-out wail.
On the steps near her, three guys in polo shirts and surf shorts stare in disbelief, one of them crying openly (23731.209, 2998.377, 15687.988). An African woman in a blue suit runs past, clutching a small girl to her chest (15430.472, 20004.589). The hot sun shines through the swirling haze.
Soon the outdoor area of the refec is almost clear of people. A breeze blows the smoke away from Janine.
At one of the tables, a red-haired guy sits clutching his leg and crying. He isn't going to die for twenty-three thousand days, but right now, he is in pain.
Janine walks down the steps and crosses the dusty, rubbish-strewn bricks to his side. He looks up at her, white-faced. His hands are pressed against his leg and bloods seeps between his fingers. Janine unties her cardigan from around her waist and wraps it around his leg as tightly as possible. He pants while he watches her work.
"Thanks,” he says.
"You'll be okay."
She waits with him until the ambulances arrive.
* * * *
Thirty-two hours later, she is on the bus. It leaves Brisbane and the sun sets. Her heavy bag is in the luggage hold underneath and her backpack is on her knee.
She turns the reading light off and watches the dark paddocks and trees pass the window. Then the houses and lights of Ipswich. Then the highway again, the winding ascent to Cunningham's Gap, and they are over the Great Dividing Range.
Thirty-five k's to Warwick, then seventy-nine to Stanthorpe. Her parents don't know she's coming.
In Stanthorpe, she calls them from a public phone.
"I've come home for a bit,” she says. “I thought it would be a surprise."
Dad picks her up in the station wagon, enfolds her in a bear hug.
"I'm so glad you've come,” he said. “Are you feeling better today?"
She nods.
"It's like a warzone up there. What are people blowing up buildings for?"
She sighs. “They don't know, Dad."
They drive past dark hills, dotted here and there with the lights of houses.
"Everyone's been asking about you. In the paper it said you were in the room, but you left to go to the toilet or something."
She can hear in his tone that he's surprised she didn't say more about this on the phone.
"Dad, I knew those people were going to die."
There is the sound of the tyres on the dirt road.
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know how to explain it, but I knew."
Dad keeps driving, up the hill, round the bend, onto another straight stretch.
"What do you mean you knew?"
"I just knew."
"How did you know?” His tone is very serious, probably humouring her.
"I can just tell. That's how I knew to leave the room. It's just this thing. I can tell when people are going to die.” Her voice sounds not like her own. Can he really be understanding her? “I'll understand if you don't believe me."
Trees rush past the window. Dad slows the car when there's a hare caught in the headlights. They watch it hop off the road.
"Of course I believe you. You're my only daughter. Why wouldn't I believe you?"
"Well..."
"So, you're saying that you know, like some psychic, that people are going to die?"
"Yes."
"Jesus."
She lets the silence roll out.
"Like I said, I'll understand if you don't believe me."
"Of course I believe you. I just have to think about it for a while."
She is unutterably relieved.
"Do you know when I'm going to cark it?” His question comes out of the dark night.
"Yes."
"Shit.” A silence. “Excuse my French, Janine.” He's driving quite slowly now, swerving around the familiar potholes. “When is it?"
Janine opens her mouth, but he says, “No, don't tell me. I don't want to know."
They are not far from home now. Out here the sky is filled with stars, so many more than she can ever see in Brisbane.
"How long ... is this a new thing?"
"Yes, just recently."
"Fucking hell. Sorry, Janine. Well.” He looks over at her, then back at the road, then over at her again.
They don't speak for the rest of the drive, and the silence is sometimes heavy and sometimes comfortable.
Eventually the car pulls into the drive. The lights in the house are on.
"I'm not going to tell Mum about this,” Janine says.
"Why not?"
"I'm just not."
He looks at her. His hands are still on the wheel. “Okay. Whatever you say."
They get out of the car and slam the doors. Dad takes Janine's bag from the boot.
It is so quiet out here.
Mum rushes out of the house, hugs Janine, enfolds her in her perfume.
"What a nice surprise, honey!” she says. “It's so lovely to see you."
She puts a hand on Janine's shoulder and guides her inside, into the warm, brick-walled kitchen.
"I've put the kettle on and I've got some dinner in the oven? Have you eaten yet?"
"No."
"And how long are you going to stay?"
"Um, well, I'll have to go back to Brissie next week to get some stuff and to sort out things with the girls, but otherwise I'm home for good."
"For good? What about your studies?"
This is the question she's been waiting for, and she pulls out her mentally rehearsed speech. “They can wait. I'm going to take the rest of the semester off and stay down here with you and Dad, maybe get a job or something. I've already withdrawn from my subjects. I'll have a HECS debt from them, but I don't really care about that. I want to spend some time with you and Dad."
"Well...” Mum looks at her across the green bench. “Well I guess it's your decision. But I think you should think about it very carefully."
"Don't worry, I have."
Her tone becomes delicate. “We know that what happened ... must have been difficult. But maybe it would be better to keep yourself busy."
"I've made my decision."
Dad stands in the doorway, watching them and listening. Janine knows exactly what he's thinking, and it makes her heart ache.
"Can I have a cup of tea, too, darl?” he says. And he sits down on a stool next to where his daughter is standing, and life goes on.
Copyright © 2007 Grace Dugan
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MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of the Latest Films
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For John W. Campbell, Darwin was humanity's sunniest hope. Cannily recognising that what Astounding readers wanted was reassurance that their vestigial social skills and poor personal hygiene were merely symptoms of their true status as Slan-like masterpeople whose destiny was to inherit the galaxy, he kept open house for warming fables of enlightened mutant psi-people triumphing over persecution and ushering in a new dawn for humankind whether the benighted hom-saps liked it or not. Over in Oakland, however, the young Philip K. Dick was having none of this, and in the amphetamine summer of 1953 wrote ‘The Golden Man', set in a world of rampant mutation contained by ruthless state extermination programmes which finally meet their match in a beautiful but feral youth whose consciousness is not limited to the present moment. With the power to view ahead and choose paths in time as easily as old-style humans do in space, Dick's golden child effortlessly eludes his captors, and escapes to father a grim new race of post-intelligent humans who will no longer need to be doing with language, culture, or anything else very much. If the Campbellian superpeople were indeed to emerge, Dic
k mischievously argued, they'd hardly be good news for the rest of us, let alone for the species.
But in a way that even the golden man of fifties SF could hardly have foreseen, Campbell was right all along about fanboys inheriting the Earth. The summer of 2007, as nobody could fail to notice, is the first in film history to be dominated by mature blockbuster franchises that have already evolved beyond sequel stage, and which are being forced to explore new kinds of narrative and new kinds of relationship with their audience that simply baffle traditionally-minded non-geek viewers. As fan culture becomes mass culture, big texts make demands on their audiences that only the obsessive are able to meet in full, through multiple viewings, community-based discussion, cross-reference with exotexts, and in the most extreme cases direct engagement with the creators. Yet these very processes only serve further to alienate viewers who cling to old ways of experiencing film, as single-serving hero-centred narratives in non-persistent universes securely bounded by the opening and closing credits.
It's therefore an appropriate irony that Dick's own vision has been turned round 180 degrees in Lee Tamahori's Next, “based on the novel story ‘The Golden Man’ by Philip K. Dick.” Whatever new textual species a “novel story” might represent, Next is actually a bit more than just another increment to the canon of overblown chase films namechecking early PKD speed-shorts, with an unusually instructive evolutionary history of its own. Next began, like Minority Report, from a script by Gary Goldman, the final writer on Total Recall and the Dick estate's most tireless Hollywood drumbanger. But unfortunately for Goldman, a sincere and serious PKD fan who has always tried to make a virtue of fidelity to Dick's themes, the film version was commissioned to be written for Nicolas Cage, who not only is neither youthful nor golden but is still working off his thwarted life's ambition to play Superman. The result of these adaptive pressures is a mutant inversion of Dick's concept into one that Campbell would thoroughly approve—with the mutant now hero rather than nemesis, civilised and sensitive rather than mindless and self-absorbed, hounded only for the usual superhero reasons that his use of his powers for good is misinterpreted because nobody ever sees the disasters he averts, and sought by the feds not to “euth” him but to preempt a terrorist plot unfolding in downtown LA.
Now, in fact Goldman's own draft worked quite hard to keep what it could of Dick's story within these constraints, including the title and (crucially) the mutant's drive to propagate. But the gimmick of Next is that if one draft of your plot doesn't do what you want it to, you can always go back for a rewrite; and in this case Goldman's version passed into the hands of the egregious Jonathan Hensleigh, purveyor of preposterous action scripts from Die Hard III to The Punisher, who has duly worked his trademark magic with a much sillier final act that leaves Dick's narrative entirely behind for a gear-crashing shift into 24 homage. (Goldman's original ending rewound the entire plot without allowing our hero to confront the terrorists at all, which was in a way the whole point, but you can see why he was never going to get away with it.) Hensleigh has tried to tauten the plot sinews a bit by introducing a time limit of two minutes to how far Cage can see into his future; but as he's had to exempt the two key prognostications on which the entire plot is built, the result is if anything less rather than more coherent. He's also succumbed to the inevitable pressure to snazz Cage's character up a bit, further promoting him from professional gambler to Vegas stage conjuror; while Hensleigh's solution to making the most of the gorgeous Arizona locations has been to move a central sequence to the CLIFFHANGER MOTEL, located right on the lip of a CLIFF, with an assortment of heavy plant perched precariously RIGHT ON THE EDGE. It doesn't take a precog to see what's going to happen next.
Yet for all this, Next does offer an interesting glimpse into the future of action plotting and the kinds of evolve-or-die challenge new media environments are already starting to pose. Time-twist narrative is a notorious elephant trap for Hollywood plotting, which has enormous difficulty with the inflexibility it imposes on narrative structure and sequence, to say nothing of the non-negotiable commitment to closed and explicit story logic. Back in the spring we had Premonition, which had the ingenious idea of reshuffling the days of Sandra Bullock's most traumatic week, only to screw it up totally with a colossally stupid and glaring blunder in the plot continuity that made instant nonsense of the attempt. Next is quite a lot better than that, for all its millstone casting and inert romantic chemistry. If little of Dick's thematic agenda survives, it's still a technically adventurous film that tries to do something new and challenging with film storytelling devices for a generation grown fluent in the tropes of post-linear narrative in other media, where the problem-solving of plot is not a one-shot process, and regression to earlier forks in the path is permitted to viewpoint characters. At its best, Next recognises and celebrates the fact that narrative is evolving in ways that may ultimately undermine, as its own ending does, the values of linearity and closure on which film itself has depended.
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Another hopeful monster lumbers into view in Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End, a strange and fascinating spectacle which may be the harbinger of a new form of cinema or may simply be the last of the dinosaurs: an unremitting typhoon of plotting that carries its viewers off the edge of the known world and back again, across an ocean of intertwined pursuits and double-crosses to a final vertiginous descent into an all-consuming maelstrom of ending. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are unusual in the industry in their readiness, through their site wordplayer.com, to give straight if self-congratulatory answers to baffled fans’ questions; and one thing that emerges strongly from the dialogue is that, whatever else this strange film is, its makers are under the sincere impression they know what they're doing, and that what they think they're doing is inventing a new post-classical language of film plotting for audiences trained to handle huge uptakes of information at previously unimaginable speeds. Where explanations and motives seem elided or entirely inexplicable, it's generally either because the writers were consciously trying to move away from on-the-nose expodumps or because something was in there at one stage and got cut for reasons of pacing. In either case, the viewer is credited with competence to figure it out from what's there, with the help of additional viewings and dialogue with other fans. What World's End feels most like is a Harry Potter film, with its novelistic convolutions of intrigue and bafflement compacted into dense, busy film plotting for hugely extended running times. But whereas the Potter films can at least be made sense of by going back to the book, the Pirates franchise is, aside from a handful of nods to the ride, a work of autonomous invention whose only key is itself.
We're not used to blockbusters this difficult, and not all will feel the rewards are worth the effort. Very few first-time viewers stand much chance of grasping what the pre-title song signifies, or what happens to the Calypso plotline, which seems to peter out so strangely just before the climax; and so far as I can tell the film offers no intimation whatever of what the writers believe to be the true terms of Davy Jones's curse and the Dutchman contract, to the extent that the dialogue repeatedly affirms the opposite. (Apparently this is meant to be unreliable.) There seems to be no explanation at all for the armada's failure to do anything at all after the Endeavour gets trashed, and it's not actually clear that the writers agree between themselves what's actually going on in the crucial Easter-egg scene following the interminable credit crawl ("Ten Years Later,” says the caption when you finally get there). But at the very least it has fun with the poetics of pirate plotting, which are built on the attractive premise that everyone's primary instinct is to double-cross everyone else, with the sole inhibitor the continuing usefulness of the prospective doublecrossee. It's a bit startling to see Disney, of all intellectual-property potentates, celebrating the proposition that piracy is heroically romantic and its would-be exterminators commercial fascists. But then this is the first Disney film to hang a child in the opening min
utes. It's certainly not the world we thought we knew.
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Of course it's Marvel who've been the biggest trailblazers and canon-masters in this new fan-fuelled genre of very long films with insane budgets and a massive weight of backstory; and Spider-Man 3 is a textbook demonstration of the Mighty Marvel Movie Method, where you put three famous storylines from canon in a pit together and withdraw food until they reach an accommodation. As World's End's polarised reception confirms, it's an iron law that third films make their landing on a wave of disappointment, but actually there's a lot to like in Spider-Man 3 after the maudlin and saggy 2. Instead of one severely softened villain, we have three rock-hard ones, whose plotlines been plaited as well as could be expected given that they have nothing whatever to do with one another. Sandman, in particular, is the most resonant and spectacular Marvel movie villain yet seen, blowing through the streets like a living 9/11 duststorm, and you'd have to be made of sandstone not to smile at the post-combat vignette where Spidey tips a pint of sand out of his spider-boots, musing “Where do all these guys come from?” Inevitably the sheer scale of the plot carpentry creaks in places, and sometimes a foot goes through the planking—most startlingly in the (fairly faithful) sequence when the fleeing Flint Marko runs across some waste ground and falls into a sandpit, whereupon we cut to an unheralded roomful of labcoated strangers going “Initiate demoleculisation!” and the light duly tears him to pieces. Gwen Stacy is allowed to drift out of awareness rather than making the expected exit for which her character is mainly famous; while for a predatory alien parasite Venom spends an improbable stretch of the middle of the film hanging harmlessly out in Peter's apartment and listening to the radio, and even after the obligatory MJ dangle-and-scream finale does come rather suddenly together ("Breaking News!"), he does a bit of a Jean Grey's Last Stand and seems to go off for a cup of tea during the Sandman fight.
The strange idea to turn the film into a semi-musical with song-and-dance numbers is presumably a concession to the leads, who as always are aware they're absurdly too good for the material; as in 2, but more so, Tobey Maguire seems positively allergic to Spidey's mask, which has a comical tendency to slip off or fall into tatters whenever any non-stunt acting is called for. But in fairness, the mask does turn off his distinctive star wattage, which is given ample rein here with the adoption of the Venom-possessed dark Spidey and (far more entertainingly) the swaggering dark Peter Parker. ("It amplifies characteristics of its host,” we're told, “especially aggression,” but also overacting.) And if the jobs for Raimi mates and relatives are getting a bit out of hand, the regular supporting cast do get more and better to do, particularly JJJ and the landlord/daughter double-act; while James Franco's Mitchumesque sneer is turned gloriously off and on as he flips between good Harry and gobby Harry, whereas the weepy, trembly-lipped reversion to 2 territory at the end got laughed off the screen, and quite right. Nuff said.