In Which It Strikes Us As A Brash Move

This is the sixth in a series.

A Mirror

by LILY GOODSPEED

I must have read the first chapter of The Golden Compass at least ten times before I graduated elementary school. The premise was appealing: an alternate universe where humans held half their souls in animal companions called daemons, where the type of animal mirrored the personality traits of its owner. But getting through that first chapter was tough.

Lyra Belacqua spends most of the time hidden in a closet with her daemon Pan listening to stuffy old men discuss mysterious Northern phenomena. I remember one of my first attempts at reading this chapter particularly well. I was on an American Airlines flight to Florida to visit my grandma and I purposefully brought along the chunky paperback, convinced that a three-hour plane ride was the push I needed towards Lyra’s adventures. I promptly fell asleep on my brother’s shoulder.

Eventually I struggled through the slightly superfluous Golden Compass and scrambled through the much darker and more interesting books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Even at eleven, I knew that these books were taking on some heavy stuff. In the first book, kids are killed, or at least zombie-ified. In the second, teenagers are stalked by soul-sucking monsters invisible to their pre-adolescent counterparts.

The third ups the ultimate ante, with Lyra and her friend Will traveling directly into to the land of the dead, and Lyra’s parents basically murdering God. I could tell that framing the Catholic Church as the world’s primary source of villainy was a brash move by Philip Pullman, even if I didn’t know much about God with a capital “G,” since I was raised in the religious vacuum that is Reform Judaism.

I was perhaps the only kid in existence who read His Dark Materials and felt more religious afterwards, or at least more spiritual. The phrase I have used since childhood for my faith, or lack thereof, is “culturally Jewish.” At Hebrew school, I spent more time in “Meditation” class listening to songs from the Garden State soundtrack with a chilled-out Wesleyan grad than I did discussing any metaphysical topics.

The Goodspeed family worshipped knowledge more than anything. My mother brought my siblings and I to every children’s’ museum in the Tri-County area, evidenced by the number of stories I can tell about losing my brother between exhibit rooms. (One time Sam got lost at the aquarium and casually joined a new family to view the seal room.) My dad bought me a rock tumbler for my eighth birthday.

My third grade notebooks are filled not only with the names of crushes, but also the names of my favorite birds of prey from most to least deadly. I knew a lot about dinosaurs and volcanoes but not much about souls and sin.

Pullman’s books were both puzzling and exciting to me. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, for all its rants against organized religion, the two protagonists save the world through some approximation of love, not strength or cleverness. Even the daemon element made me think about my soul in ways I hadn’t. What would my daemon’s form settle into? In a lot of ways, the His Dark Materials trilogy was a perfect bridge between my own love of learning and bigger and deeper questions I felt less comfortable answering.

Pullman advocates a kind of humanist spirituality while simultaneously extolling the importance of science and discovery. So says the scientist Mary Malone in The Amber Spyglass: “I stopped believing that there was a power of good and evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not what they are." It’s dialectic, not diametric. You don’t have to choose one or the other. The line between religion and science is fuzzy, perhaps even non-existent.

For instance, the empirical and rational field of physics on Earth is called "experimental theology" in Lyra’s universe. Physicists study dark matter, and experimental theologians study “Dust”. They are different, but the same. This was a revelation for an atheist kid obsessed with Animorphs and Bill Nye living in the suburbs of New York City. Maybe religion didn’t have to be this God with a capital “G” or the boring parts of Hebrew school. Maybe religion could have something to do with which bird of prey my daemon would be.

Lily Goodspeed is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Prometheus.

"Strange Man" - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)

"Long Progression" - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)

In Which We Examine The Nature Of Creation

Robotic Faith

by LILY GOODSPEED

Prometheus
director Ridley Scott
124 minutes

In the case of Prometheus the title’s nod to the classical Greek Titan is almost insultingly intentional. The mythological figure is known for bestowing humankind with the power of fire along with his subsequent and sadistically creative punishment from the Gods. Prometheus attempts to place itself on a similarly grandiose scale. In a sweeping elimination of millions of years of evolutionary progress, Prometheus reveals that extraterrestrials were the so-called “Engineers” of human life on Earth. At the start of the film, a pasty almost-human-looking alien disintegrates his body into primordial waters, and his DNA seemingly reconstructs into a new line of native Earth-based life. Prometheus then jumps to the year 2089, where archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find awe-inspiring evidence of this original creation.

Fast-forward to the year 2093. On a streamlined spacecraft, humanoid robot David (Michael Fassbender) wanders about the empty ship, biding his time studying ancient linguistics until the human members of the crew wake from artificial slumber. Eventually, the team is assembled, which includes the aforementioned archaeologists, a few more feisty scientists, a smart-mouth pilot named Janek (Idris Elba) and an icy commanding officer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron).

The ship has landed on a moon named LV-223, on which this motley team of scientists has traveled in hopes of answering questions about these Engineers and the bigger question of human purpose. Once there, the crew makes some unexpected discoveries. This is not the Engineers' home planet but a military base, and the Engineers' own weapons, which are organic, parasitic aliens, seemingly killed them while stationed here. Now those parasitic aliens, in various forms of maturation, are set on the destruction of the crew. Get ready for the deaths of numerous expendable characters.

The film’s impressively ambitious philosophical scope is not inherently misguided or unsuccessful. Yet Prometheus at times forces stilted dialogue and overwrought character development to definitively prove the existential importance of its thematic goals. Dr. Shaw’s Christian faith is constantly being questioned, as if the film is reminding the audience that this movie is about the meaning of life, and that’s really important. Rapace is a skilled actor, so it’s even more disheartening to see her attempt the cheesy line, “It’s what I choose to believe.”

The film also pursues extraneous storylines. Early on, David plays a holographic recording of the CEO of Weyland Corporation to the crew, as the company funded the expedition. Mr. Weyland (Guy Pearce), although apparently deceased, expresses his overwhelming commitment to the spiritual importance of the mission from beyond the grave. Eventually Weyland is revealed not only to be alive and on the ship (gasp!), but devoted to finding the Engineers simply to attain his own salvation from death. The plot twist is superfluous and unnecessary, though perhaps it solidifies a character motivation for David who hopes to impress his father figure.

The tragedy of these clumsy plotholes and dialogue is that Prometheus is an incredibly successful movie in other ways. The aesthetic execution is close to perfect. The grayish landscapes of LV-223 and primordial Earth are haunting and expansive. The streamlined symmetry of the inner ship is flawless. The spacesuits look Tron inspired and are desperately suitable for future cosplaying.

The last forty-five minutes of the movie can only be called “thriller movie porn,” with a face-paced sampling of ship explosions, flamethrower fights, and squirmy squid aliens erupting from surprising organs. On a purely visceral level, Prometheus easily achieves the same level of suspenseful anticipation that Alien is famous for.

Michael Fassbender’s performance is stunning, which is paradoxical since he succeeds in portraying a dispassionate robot. The character of David lacks human empathy, as evidenced when he infects Dr. Halloway with a parasitic spore without much concern. Despite this handicap, Fassbender’s David is also the emotional center of the film. We see brief glimpses of inner conflict, or at least some robotic version of conflict. He messes with his co-crewmembers, but does so in part to fulfill a strange father-son relationship with his creator Mr. Weyland. David watches Lawrence of Arabia in an attempt to parrot the cadence of human interaction; he exhibits signs of curiosity as he explores and discovers aspects of Engineer technology. David and Vickers, revealed as Weyland’s biological daughter, even have moments of sibling tension.

David is also engaged in Prometheus' deeper metaphysical issues. The film directly compares human’s creation of this robot with the Engineers’ creation of human kind. When David asks Halloway about the purpose of his own existence, Halloway bluntly answers, “We made you because we could.” David immediately retorts, “Do you imagine how disappointing it would be for you hearing the same thing from your creator?” This trillion-dollar space mission was funded to answer the meaning of human life, yet David is offered no answers of his own.

This issue of creation is the most intriguing thematic thread of the film. Prometheus makes a lot of lip service to Elizabeth Shaw’s “faith,” but the movie is much more successful in examining that relationship between the creator and created. In fact, the scariness of the parasitic aliens comes in great part from their disruption to this natural dynamic. Parenticide is mentioned numerous times, the most famous and publicized of which is Vickers' declaration: “A king has his reign and then he dies. It's inevitable. It's the natural order of things.”

For me, Prometheus is a lot like Lost which makes sense as Damon Lindelof is behind both projects. Both ask unsolvable questions, and fall flat in attempting to answer them. Yet, when Prometheus eases on the overly aggressive religious posturing and lets the mystery of creation remain a mystery, the film triumphs. When it examines the nature of creation, instead of attempting to explain it, Prometheus is a beautiful and surprisingly thoughtful movie. And if that’s not to your liking, there’s more than enough blood, guts and goo.

Lily Goodspeed is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Timekeeper" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

"Roulette" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

The new album from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals is titled The Lion The Beast The Beat and it was released on June 12th.