First

Welcome bloglodytes, above is a video that I hope will sum up what this blog is about. It's a regurgitated mixture of extraneous art, trash, film, science, philosophy, politics, and shitty metaphors, haphazardly crammed on a large conveyor belt and painfully squeezed through the filter of my sieve-like mind.

It's an attempt to put down the kinds of inchoate ramblings I usually have around friends or to myself when no one's around, but with references, links, and embedded videos.

Incidentally, the above short was made by the same plucky Noo Yawk hipster duo Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, them what done Catfish. For anyone who saw that film, *SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*, what did you think of it? Assuming it isn't real, which I kinda think Kevin Smith did ("Tokin'" too much of the ol' reefer eh Kev*? *See recent Smodcast for in-joke) there are two possibilities.

One is that the bored frumpy housewife hoaxster behind it all is real, and a narrative was constructed around that to make the film more "filmic". The other is that the whole thing is fake, as the title might cleverly suggest, and given that the poster is basically a picture of a red herring:

If it's the former, and this poor woman is real, then the film is massively exploitative, as despite patronisingly empathetic scenes at the end of the film, the film is constructed as a kind of horror mind-fuck, with Angela as the she-witch psycho at its centre. If it's the latter, then there's also a slight exploitation of Freaks style subliminal fear, in that the central reveal of the film comes with a disturbing look into the day-to-day life of Angela caring for her severely disabled children. Either way, the whole thing stinks of film-school-grad post-ironic meta nonsense.

I mean look at the smug cunts.

These gripes notwithstanding, they've made a wonderful short about a genuine artist (don't be fooled by the micro machines, this man's legit).

So what's the blog title about, I hear the voices in my head cry, in amongst the ever-repeating commands to kill. Maybe you don't care, in fact my wife doesn't seem to give much of a shit, so perhaps it should remain a mystery.

As I assign no value to building mystique, I'll tell you right away that it's in reference to Stanley Kubrick's unique approach to film narrative:

"[Stanley] had a contempt for narrative, I was hooked on narrative. But he said to me: forget it, all you need for a movie is 6 or 8 non-submersible units."

Brian Aldiss

*******

Non-submersible units are fundamental story pieces, the irreducible core of a narrative when all the non essential "padding" has been stripped away. According to Brian Aldiss, Kubrick's collaborator on the scipt for AI, "One of the many sensible and perceptive comments he made over the years was that a movie consists of, at most, say 60 scenes, whereas a book can have countless scenes. So, he said, it's very difficult to boil down a novel to make a film, as he found with The Shining. Much easier to take a short story and turn that into a major movie. 'All you need is six non-submersible units. Forget about the connections for the moment [...] once you've heard this, you see how 2001 was constructed."

Following on from Aldiss' last remark, here is a breakdown of 2001 into its 7 non-submersible parts.

1/ The monolith visits humankind in its infancy

2/ An early man discovers technology (Moon Watcher smashes the bones)

3/ The monolith is excavated on the moon by astronauts and sends a message to Jupiter

4/ Humankind send a manned mission to Jupiter to investigate

5/ Advanced technology (Hal) endangers the mission crew

6/ Technology is defeated and the surviving cremember rendezvous with the aliens

7/ The Starchild is born

RM

Aldiss quotes from Paul Joyce's "The Last Movie" and John Baxter's biography page: 356.

Tru dat, truuu dat...

But, alas, I'm not clever enough to have discovered this on my own, oh no, I'm regurgitating an idea someone else had as always. I actually heard about it at a recent screening of Kill List, when, during the Q&A, director Ben Wheately explained that before he even thought of a structure for the film, he simply wrote down ideas based on nightmarish images that had haunted him (they literally could not be repressively submerged away from conscious awareness!). I'd never been to a Q&A screening before, and I were all proper dead excited and such (read last bit in giddy northern tones):

Look it! Blurry photo of vaguely famous people!

By the way, if you haven't seen Kill List, GO SEE THAT FUCKING MOVIE NOW! WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU MISERABLE SHIT, GO NOW!

I can't recommend the film enough, and the less you know about it the better (I may do a spoiler filled review in a future post).

Coming back to non-submersible units, I find it interesting that Kubrick felt that all you needed were 6 to 8 units to construct a narrative around, as famously Miller (1956) gave the world his Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, which essentially purports that Working Memory can only hold on to around seven chunks (or units!) of cognitive information. Of course it turns out to be complete bollocks and is a wonderful example of how a single scientific article can be misinterpreted and have a huge cultural impact. It's even commonly thought that the reason Tetris is such an enduringly popular game is because it contains no more than seven Tetrominoes, complementing our natural capacity limit for Working Memory.

Unfortunately, most studies find that Working Memory depressingly holds around three to five chunks of information at best. Don't despair entirely though, as a single chunk could simply be a number or could refer to an entire concept.

Fittingly, I think I've covered around five topics, which is plenty for an initial post.

So, you know, g'bye.