A Synopsis of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" (2008)

The Gist of "The Happening"

Angry foliage rebels against humanity to repay us for our wanton disregard of plantkind. Magical tree-gas forces masses of New Yorkers to commit suicide, prompting Zooey Deschanel and Marky Mark to flee for their lives. While shrubs and saplings get medieval on the asses of unsuspecting east-coasters, the highly-forgettable main characters hide in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse until the plants have killed off just enough humans to make rush hour on I-95 bearable for a while. In the end, the pissed-off vegetation turns its sights toward the French, but no one cares because the Americans are safe.

Watson

So this week on Jeopardy! IBM's supercomputer, Watson, destroyed the two winningest players in the history of the game show, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. (He didn't destroy them literally. I mean he won the game by a sizeable margin. We're still a couple years away from computers and robots destroying us literally.)

It's been years since a similar supercomputer showdown happened between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. The world chess champion was defeated by a computer.

But we all know that recognizing the billions of variations of words and human speech, lingo, nicknames, and subtext is far more difficult for an intelligence that deals in nothing but oodles of "1's" and "0's" than recognizing the combinations of moves on a chess board, despite the fact that there are millions of possible scenarios and outcomes.

Since I've discovered that not very many people have ever looked at this blog, I'm not going to delve too deeply into my philosophies about artificial intelligence. Instead, I shall post a link to this article.

Here's some food for thought: the modern laptop has way more processing power and memory than those gigantic room-sized computers just a few decades back. Imagine that in another few decades, computers with the capacity of Watson will be inside our iPads, phones, laptops, cars, appliances, and whatever else they can manage to stick a computer into.

If you consider that, and the fact that moving, walking robots are improving with every passing year, an android like "Data" from Star Trek: TNG might not be that far fetched after all...

photo courtesy of wcizmowski/morgueFile

Look at Future Boy! What a weirdo...

Check me out on twitter!

Future Boy

@MacRodge

Twitter died off long ago where I'm from, and I always thought it would be fun if I could go back in time and tell people about what's in store for the planet.

Just look at some of my bizarre tweets featuring little tidbits of knowledge from the future!

"In the future, everyone will write love letters to their food. Not due to a fetish. Just cuz they'll be that lonely."

"In the future, after all the hot sauce is gone, people will just stab their tongues with needles when they eat."

"In the future, everybody's diet will be completely organic. Bugs count as organic, right?"

"In the future, fish will have nearly lethal levels of mercury in them, but people will be too crazy to care."

"I was going to tell you guys about the army of robots that rebels against mankind in the future, but I think you guys already see that coming."

Follow me, @MacRodge, on twitter!

Adam

Max Mayer's Adam combines the sweet and the real, yielding a subtle, but successful romantic comedy. Hugh Dancy stars as the Asperger's-stricken Adam, an awkward electronics engineer with few friends and even fewer romantic prospects. Rose Byrne plays opposite him, as his intimidatingly pretty, but kind-hearted neighbor, Beth.

 

This movie's ability to portray the fumbling nervousness associated with young infatuation between two slightly socially-awkward human beings is this movie's heart. Adam's social ills are obvious. Asperger's syndrome causes glaring obsessive-compulsive-like behavior in the title character. He rambles and rattles on about "nerdy" subjects that his audience seldom cares about and almost never comprehends. He is obsessed with space, the cosmos, and the origins of the universe. His fascination with scientific discovery and knowledge of astronomy and quantum mechanics gets balanced out by an equally obsessive love of the theater.

Beth, though not as blatantly challenged socially, reveals her own insecurities throughout the film. As an only child, she shares with her father in one scene that she feels "emotionally retarded" and inter-personally underdeveloped. (As an only child myself, I can certainly relate.) Adam's innocent fondness for Beth intrigues her, as her previous relationships have ended in heartbreak. The film opens with Beth reminiscing about a children's story she had read when she was little. It's about a prince from outer space. His weirdness, his awkwardness, and his love of the stars suggest that Adam is indeed that prince from outer space.

What sets this film apart from other romantic comedies is its adherence to the dying notion that a relationship isn't about being loved, but is about loving. Through their brief, but life-changing relationship, both Adam and Beth are deeply moved. Beth, as the slightly more advanced counterpart in the relationship finally realizes that central truth; that Love (yes, Love with a capital "L") isn't about receiving love for herself. It's about loving the other. It's about meeting a prince from another planet and finding a way, not only to appreciate him in spite of his weirdness and faults and flaws, but to truly sacrificially care for and cherish his whole being.

**WARNING: The following paragraphs may contain SPOILERS**

In the movie, Beth's mother, bearing the brunt of an adulterous affair, chooses to continue loving her husband in spite of his unworthiness. She chooses to love him in the middle of a world that promotes the idea that love must be earned. Likewise, Beth chooses to love Adam, despite his unworthiness.

At the end of the film, she readies herself to sacrifice all for him. Adam, not fully grasping this sacrificial concept of love, insists she must follow him to California because he "needs her." He can't tell her he loves her. He can't ask her to come with him on the basis that he is ready to sacrifice for her -- because he isn't. But in the closing scene, Adam receives a children's book from Beth -- the book tells a children's version of their own romance. Adam realizes how deeply he impacted Beth's heart, and he finally realizes that he is truly loved by her. For one reason or another, whether he deserves it or not, he knows he is loved. We know from earlier in the film that Adam's mother died early on in his childhood. This moment is probably the first time in his life that Adam feels loved by a woman. And although they don't wind up together at the end of the film, Adam takes a giant step toward being able to love someone else, now that he understands that he himself is loved, despite his many flaws.

The end of the film takes place at the Mt. Wilson observatory, a famous southern California haven for stargazers, astronomy buffs, and researchers of the heavens. Adam found himself in the land of Receiving Love. He didn't belong there. But there he was. (As a Christian, blessed with a myriad of things I don't deserve, I can certainly relate.)

The Leer

The Leer is here.

I feel his presence on this dark moor.

The lawns of blue have merged into a sticky black floor.

The moons are low.

His angry eyes outshine their soft glow.

The gnomes he's slain launch cries of pain across the fields to echo.

My harp is sharp.

The strings are tight and power is felt.

The notes of peace I shall release will make his bones melt.

He will return.

The heat from morning suns will soon churn.

And so I wait at his den's gate; my song will make his flesh burn.

The Leer is seared.

He runs for shade inside his rock home.

He meets the noise from music toys and turns into a gray stone.

No more fear!

We're done with troubles from the Leer.

He's molten bone and rock and stone, since life shot into his ear.

Problems With Time Travel

Is time travel possible? My generation knows, that with the flux capacitor, it is. All you need is a shiny DeLorean going 88 miles per hour, and presto! You're off to cause paradoxes, time loops, circular plot structures, and incestuous crushes that could negate your own existence...

But really, if time travel were actually possible, what would happen when you travel into the past and somehow change the events of the future? Well, there are several theories we've seen in popular culture films. The first is in Back to the Future. Marty McFly inadvertently keeps his parents from getting together. As the timeline of events progresses, it becomes clear that Marty and his siblings may not be born. He can tell because he has a photograph of himself and his siblings in his pocket, and one by one, the McFly kids start disappearing from the pic. When things get really hairy, Marty can feel himself starting to disappear. Drenched in a cold sweat, he notices that his hand starts vanishing. But after Marty rights all the historical wrongs with his parents, he and his siblings return to the photo, and all is well...

So, what would happen if you traveled back into the past and killed your father before you were born? (Sorry to be morbid, but this is the best example I can think of to illustrate this point). If your father were truly dead, you wouldn't have any chance to correct the mistake you had made like Marty does in Back to the Future. BUT, here's where time travel gets interesting: logically, if you killed your own father before you were born, you would have never been born in the first place, and you would never wind up getting in a time machine, going back, and killing your father. The results of such an act would make it impossible to ever commit the act itself. Trippy, eh?

**SPOILER ALERT: The following paragraph may contain pseudo-spoilers for Lost season 5.**

Or, another popular time travel storytelling mechanism employed to avoid such paradoxes is the idea that the past simply cannot be changed. In Lost, we learn that "whatever happened, happened." It's the simple idea that you can try, but you will never truly succeed in altering history. God or fate or whatever J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof want to call it, is in charge. Everyone has a destiny that is irrevocable. In the past, the character Sayid shoots a young version of Ben Linus, his future enemy, in the chest, creating a wound that should have been mortal. But since history can't really change, Ben doesn't die. People come to his rescue and nurse him back to health.

My own personal idea about time travel paradoxes is that every time someone time travels, a brand new timeline is created; a brand new reality; a parallel universe. In other words, if you traveled back in time and killed your own father, you would succeed in killing him, and you would not cease to exist. You would create an alternate timeline in which your father is now dead. Back in the original timeline, your father is alive and well, and you were indeed born, thus enabling you to travel back in time to kill your father and create this alternate timeline. Confused yet?

And please don't think I have some weird father issues because of all this talk about killing my father in the past before I was born...I mean really, what other example could I use other than going into the past and killing my mother...? And if you're sitting around at the dinner table discussing this blog and talking about time travel paradoxes, I think your dad would be able to handle the talk of going back in time and killing him better than your mom would.

Anyway, so one intelligent argument I've heard about time travel is this: If time travel ever happens, then we would have had contact from time travelers already. And since we haven't, we know that time travel never becomes a reality. The logic is pretty solid, but I can think of a few loopholes. The first would be if a form of time travel is possible in which travelers are not able to interact with their surroundings at all -- that in fact, the subjects of the past are not even able to see the time travelers among them. Time travelers can simply witness historical events, but are not able to interact with anything they see.

Or, perhaps there are an infinite number of parallel timelines or universes, and in many of those, there are historical records of encounters with time travelers.

Or, maybe, in an effort to minimize the alteration of history, there have been time travelers here, but they've kept an extremely low profile. During WWII, a number of pilots -- we're talking credible, military witnesses here -- saw UFO's hovering above their planes during famous aerial battles. Is it possible that these UFO's were not, in fact, extraterrestrials, but were actually time travelers; historians from the future, returned to witness a legendary battle in the past? They referred to these strange aircraft as "foo fighters."

If you want to check out a time travel flick that will blow your mind, try Donnie Darko. It's a subtle look at time travel, in which a tangent universe is created when a young man cheats death. And, I was blown away by The Time Traveler's Wife. This film is a sci-fi romance that chronicles the life and love of a man who can't live out his days in chronological order. It's a thoroughly confusing movie, but if you can wrap your brain around what's happening, it's well worth the effort. Finally, I really enjoyed the remake of the H. G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, starring Guy Pearce.

Ah, if only I had a time machine...I would totally go back and invest in Apple.

photo courtesy of healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Sky Is Falling

Through the hours of dreamy sleep,
The Sandman through the night doth creep.
Heav'n forbid our dreams would die
If on our pillow foreigners leap.

Corrupting truth with fearsome lies,
As a ruptured realm frees Lord of Flies.
Intruders from the outer lands
Watch us with malignant eyes.

As oceans steal the grains of sand,
Our dreams are stripped with evil hands.
The private palace in our minds
Cannot protect us from their plans.

The room comes filled with lights that blind,
And in walk men of different kind
With eyes that paralyze my limbs
Which will real life and nightmares bind.

My mem'ries past that point are dim
While we flew high like cherubim
My captor fills my head with pain.
His voice was hoarse, his face was grim.

He strapped me down with table chains,
Injected juice which swelled my brains.
With no defenses for my fear,
I am left to go insane.

When I woke a light was near;
So bright it filled my eyes with tears
That light's been with me through the years,
And in my life, at will, it peers.

No private thoughts are now protected,
My every whim is checked; inspected.
My plans to kill the fear; rejected.
Through the wasted hours neglected.

The golden face, the silver suit
Forever will my mind pollute.
I just lay deaf, blind, and mute,
No cross or banner to salute.

The blackest eyes, like depths of space
Came to all my peace erase.
The specks of light upon his face
Came with terror's cold embrace.

With cold, black steel the rapture comes;
Delivers me from dingy slums.

Fast the city lights now fade,
Along with all that man has made.

A billion points of burning light
Invade the black, eternal night.

As blue and green is swept away,
The last threads of my mind are frayed.

I am pressed to sleep again,
My body quiet, cold, and thin.

Upon return I slowly rise
And open wide my weary eyes.

As often as my story's told,
I cannot reobtain my soul.

I live in impotence and fear,
Knowing they are always near.