Day: August 12, 2006

Certainly it seemed to us [Moore and Gebbie] that sex, as a genre, was woefully under-represented in literature. Every other field of human experience–even rarefied ones like detective, spaceman or cowboy–have got whole genres dedicated to them. Whereas the only genre in which sex can be discussed is a disreputable, seamy, under-the-counter genre with absolutely no standards: [the pornography industry]–which is a kind of Bollywood for hip, sleazy ugliness.

For the American remake, horrormeister Craven and his team have toned down the teen-suicide themes, beefed up the backstory, amped up the scares and made explicit the mythology that was all but absent in the original movie. In other words, they have turned a minor J-horror creepfest into a Hollywood/Wes Craven horror movie, and the results are about as interesting as the wallpaper on a PC.

The original is pretty terrifying. It’s also pretty confusing. But it looks like, in an effort to make this American version less confusing, they’ve also made it made it much more bland fare.

And then of course there’s this from the Sci-Fi Wire:

Somerhalder offered details about Pulse‘s plot. “What if, just by chance, through all the use of our wirelessly beaming information around to each other and communicating with each other, something happened?” he asked rhetorically. “We’re doing this more and more. And what is the information transmitted through? Frequencies. What do frequencies do? Well, they have the ability to travel through space and they have the ability–possibly–to be reached by, say, this, quote-unquote, other dimension.”

And they said the men in tinfoil hats on street corners were crazy!

I’m not sure what I find more amusing here: Somerhalder’s slippery grasp on how science and technology actually work, or the Sci-Fi Wire’s insistence on “he asked rhetorically.” Thanks…because otherwise I might have thought he wasn’t speaking rhetorically, and that Pulse was some kind of documentary or something.

Or maybe what’s so amusing is the whole hokey premise of the film — I mean didn’t we have at least one lousy movie out of this already with feardotCom?

The original Japanese film that Pulse is (loosely) based on gets a lot of mileage out of just hinting at terrors. It takes the sensible approach and treats its “ghosts” more as metaphor: the technology that’s supposed to bring us together instead keeps us isolated; our isolation leads to despair; and in our despair is the end of life. The ghosts are a symptom, more than anything. This new movie seems to approach the ghosts more as big meanies from another dimension, alien creatures poking their heads into our world. It gives them flesh, makes them real. Maybe that makes them and their motives more understandable for an American audience, but I suspect it also makes them much less frightening — and, more to the point, just more of the same.

No, it’s definitely Somerhalder:

“Basically, these souls, ghosts, what have you, are traveling through our telecommunications. I can fax a sheet of paper from someone from L.A. to New York. Based on what scientific evidence we do have on what we call souls, they’re pure energy. So is a fax, basically. So who’s to say a soul couldn’t be transmitted just as easily through a line of telecommunications?”

You know, I don’t want to get into a whole theological debate here, but — “Based on what scientific evidence we do have on what we call souls”? Huh? So when the fax machine at the office jams, am I, like, damning a soul to purgatory or something? I may be wasting toner, but damn it, man, I’m saving the world from invasion from another dimension!

The director of the film, Jim Sonzero, doesn’t fair much better at explaining things:

When I first got a hold of the script it was Wes Craven’s version, it was already a couple years old and the theme was about more artificial intelligence and I think that concept was pretty beat up and creaky at the time so I abandoned that immediately and was talking about WIFI and super wiband and what this means and vibrations and realms of frequency that we have never experienced before and thought it was a great opportunity to bring something new in the forefront of technology and exploit that.

Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to be getting a job working in IT anytime soon…

A personal story about this marketing mania: Earlier this year, my publisher said he wanted me to write a book of a well-known Sudoku/crossword hybrid puzzle. This specific variety of puzzle has been known for decades in the United States as “Alphacodes” or “Coded Crosswords.” They’ve been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, so I eagerly agreed to do the book.

“But we need a Japanese name,” the publisher told me.

It’s a language-specific puzzle that’s never been seen in Japan, I replied. It doesn’t have a Japanese name.

“Then come up with one,” he shot back. “Marketing wants a Japanese name. Can you have it to me by Tuesday?”

…although it’s when I go to ‘Out of Bounds: Transgressive Fiction’ that I get really annoyed. It’s a seminar analysing Hermione Granger-Professor Snape fan fiction. That is to say, a relationship between a teenage girl and a fortysomething man, which often, it transpires, takes the form of a rape narrative. There are 200 women in the room. And a whole lot of talk about female empowerment and gender reversals, but, frankly, if it was 200 men talking about rape narratives involving underage schoolchildren, it would be a matter for the police, and I don’t think this is empowering anybody.

While it sounds like a dangerous undertaking, the physicists involved believe that if the project is successful, the space-time around a tiny point within our universe will be distorted in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid space, and eventually break off, separate in all respects from our experience of space and time, causing no harm to the fabric of our universe.