Nothing But Words

Iron Man: The Comic is Good, the Movie Trailer Isn’t

Topic: TV, Movies, and Music
Tags: Comics, Movies

A while back I confessed to my renewed interest in comics. Iron Man was my favorite when I first started reading comics in high school. Tony Stark is Iron Man, and he’s essentially the Batman of the Marvel universe: a billionaire industrialist with no superpowers, he becomes a superhero by means of his own ingenuity and limitless resources (refreshingly though, he doesn’t have Bruce Wayne’s brooding, morbid personality). What impressed me at the time was the bold and unconventional plot the series had going in the 80s:

…a ruthless rival, Obadiah Stane, manipulates him [Stark] emotionally into a serious relapse into alcoholism. As a result, Stark loses control of Stark International, becomes a homeless vagrant and gives up his armored identity to Rhodes, who becomes the new Iron Man for a lengthy period of time. Eventually, Stark recovers and starts a new company, Circuits Maximus. While Stark concentrates on new technological designs, Rhodes continues to act as Iron Man but steadily grows more aggressive and paranoid…

That kind of storytelling has become more common as the audience for comics has matured, but it definitely stood out in the 80s. I was amazed to see issue after issue with the main character as a homeless man. It wasn’t just a “social issue of the day” storyline that the writers dispensed with in a couple months. They didn’t shy away from the ugliness of alcoholism, as Stark inexorably lost his company, his fortune, and his friends.

I stopped reading comics after high school, and then started again last year with Civil War, and the new Iron Man series. I was astonished to learn that the original Iron Man series was canceled in 1996, after a 28 year run. That was the year Marvel went into bankruptcy due to mismanagement. I also learned that the current series is actually the fourth, following two ill-fated attempts to revive it. Iron Man was one of many titles that suffered as Marvel’s top talent left the company.

The new series is great - one of the best titles Marvel has going right now. Both the character and plot development are intricate and engaging. What’s annoying though is the distortion of Stark’s character when he makes appearances in other series. In Civil War he becomes almost unrecognizable, portrayed as a brutal fascist, willing to violate any and all ethical principals to force total compliance with the superhuman registration act. And in the otherwise fantastic Ultimates, where he always seems to have a martini in hand and a woman on his arm.

Unfortunately, he’s a self-caricature in the new movie trailer as well (available in hi res for Quicktime, or low res at YouTube). I was looking forward to when it became available online last week, but my heart sank as I watched it. The problem is that they turn Stark into an overgrown frat boy with a passion for things that go boom. He thinks it’s cool when a reporter refers to him as a “merchant of death,” and in a speech to some troops he proclaims he prefers weapons you have to use only once, as opposed to ones you don’t have to use at all. Compare that to the more faithful portrayal of his character in the current comic series. This is from an interview he’s having with a Michael Moore-like filmmaker, after the interviewer takes him to task for designing hi-tech landmines and “seedpod,” a daisy-cutter style bomb (click to enlarge) :

Judging by the trailer, it seems likely you’re not going to get thoughtful dialog like that in the movie. Also, I have to admit while watching the trailer I went from just a sinking heart to an audible groan when my ears picked up the droning bass line of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man in the soundtrack. Being hit over the head with early 70s heavy metal is more than enough to take me out of the moment of the film. I can only hope that the song is just in the trailer and not the actual film.

I don’t understand how Marvel makes its decisions when bringing a comic series to the big screen. The flagship series Spider-man deservedly got top notch talent, substantial financial backing, and careful attention to the portrayal of the characters. So did the much more obscure series Blade. But then another flagship series, Fantastic Four, was made into not one, but two mediocre films that were far more cartoonish than the actual comic. Unfortunately, it looks like Iron Man is also getting the cartoonish treatment, just with a better cast.

Update: I’ve seen the movie since writing this post, and it was pretty good. Without giving anything away, Stark has an experience in the first part of the movie that changes his outlook, making him much less of a jerk. In the preview we only see him as a jerk, so I’m happy to report it was not representative of the overall film.

More Robot Stories

Topic: Politics, TV, Movies, and Music, Technobabble
Tags: Economics, Movies, Robots

I’d like to expand on my point yesterday about the relevance of science fiction. But bear with me as it will take a while for me to get to my point. Along the way I’ll make points about other things.

The pace of technological change is every-increasing, and, just as an example, one area where it’s going to have a huge impact over the next quarter century is the labor market. Both the top and the bottom of the workforce are going to be squeezed.

The Top: there’s already a lot of buzz about high-tech jobs (like mine!) being outsourced to India, South Africa, etc. Politically, this poses a fundamental problem for the arguments previously used in favor of free trade. The idea (but not neccessarily the reality) always was that the manual labor and low-tech jobs got pushed to less-developed countries overseas, while the advanced capitalist countries continued to improve and expand the range of products, technologies, and jobs they created. So the new wrench in this argument is that plenty of countries now have workforces that are just as well educated and offer the same set of skills as the US workforce, and they’re available at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately the only jobs that will be “safe” - anywhere in the world - are the ones that require direct personal interaction, localized skills, or simply being physically present: doctors, janitors, real estate agents, cooks, construction workers, etc. But wait…many of those will get squeezed too…

The Bottom: I was just reading up on the current state of robotic technology. The current projection is that within the next 10 years or so we’ll have robots with reasonably good vision and manual dexterity. We already have robots that are pretty good at factory line work, vacuuming floors, cutting grass, etc. What does that mean? It means that once they’re mass-produced, say goodbye to migrant farm worker jobs, janitorial jobs, burger-flipping jobs, lawn mowing jobs, etc.

While this dynamic at the low-skill end of the scale is nothing new - remember the story of John Henry? - this is different because it’s going to happen at a faster pace and with a broader scope than ever before. At the same time, the high-skill jobs are spreading to numerous countries where costs and wages are lower. The US will not be able to sustain the quantity or the wages of those jobs within its borders.

So who has a safe job? The low-skill jobs will be automated. The high-skill jobs - other than those that require highly specialized skills or physically being in a particular place - will be outsourced (or have their wages reduced). It turns out that many doctors may not even fall into the “safe” category: the British now ship cataract surgery patients to India and back - even with the travel expenses it’s still a fraction of the cost of doing it in England. In the long run, so the free-trade argument goes, the countries where the jobs get outsourced will bring their living standards up to ours (assuming no environmental catastrophes due to the massive resource extraction and pollution that would entail, but that’s another story), and then there’s no need to keep outsourcing. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said “in the long run we’re all dead.”

The “ideal” idea behind technological improvement is to make people’s lives easier: to automate the boring stuff (washing machines), get us places faster (cars and planes), etc. The “sinister” idea is to make people irrelevant, except as consumers. But if they can’t work, how can they consume? One outcome is that we all live lives of leisure while the machines do the work. Another possible outcome is a deeply polarized and stratified society, with a small enriched ruling class, and everyone else in grinding poverty. A third, and probably most likely outcome, is at least limited protectionism, such as exists in Japan and France. This will happen as the pain wrought in trying to reach the “long run” I just described will be deemed too high a price to pay for low prices. At least some “inefficient” sectors of the economy will be protected, depending on the political strength of those sectors.

I should say, of course, that I could be proven wrong. When major advances happen - such as the spread of the Internet - it usually triggers a boom, as you end up with a whole new area of the economy that needs to be populated with workers. A continuous series of such booms could continue to sustain a middle class through these changes. Historically, they only happen a couple times per century though, and when the booms end there is is considerable upheaval, such as the .com crash.

Another, positive possibility is that “the long run” ends up happening in the short run: global markets grow at a pace roughly equal to the global spread of jobs. That is, outsourcing to say, India, would lead to growing demand for those same services within India, wages would go up there, and then there’s no longer a cost-basis for outsourcing. But I haven’t seen any evidence pointing to that outcome.

So what does this have to do with science fiction? Well, it seems that you have to turn to science fiction to find any kind of discussion of these kinds of futuristic concerns. I’m not saying that science fiction is about economics. I am saying that it gives you a window into thinking about the future. All the old sci-fi stories about the role of robots in society may be relevant sooner that you think. When ideas that were once only in the realm of science fiction are thrust upon society, we are generally ill-prepared to tackle them. For example, advances such as cloning don’t seem to get any kind of really thoughtful public discussion. Only fear-mongering on one side, and complacency on the other. So how we end up absorbing these changes into our society ends up being driven pretty much by whatever way the wind blows. So a little movie like Robot Stories, which illustrates the impact of technology through very personal tales, is one way to get people to start thinking about these issues.

Robot Stories / Philip K. Dick

Topic: TV, Movies, and Music
Tags: Movies, Sci Fi

The other day I heard an interview with the director of the new low-budget sci-fi film Robot Stories. Here’s the web site: http://www.robotstories.net/ - unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to Philly. The film consists of 4 short stories. I’m most keen to see the last of the four “Clay”. It’s about an aging sculptor, trying to finish his final work, but his body is falling apart on him. In this story, people can have their consciousness scanned and uploaded, and that’s what old folks and the dying do, so they can live on. Once uploaded, they can merge with all the knowledge and experience of others who have been uploaded, and they live in a sort of digital nirvana. So his kids and his already-dead-and-scanned wife are gently telling him, “Dad, it’s time to upload.” I gather the story focuses on his internal struggle between fulfilling his families wishes, the innate desire to live on, and trying to retain an important aspect of his humanity: his mortality.

To me this is what good science fiction is all about. It’s not about big budgets and battles in space. It’s about understanding our own humanity, and providing some kind of moral framework for understanding where we, as a society, may be headed. Through the use of plot devices not available in other kinds of story telling (e.g. another one of the stories in the film is about a couple that’s required to adopt a robot baby before they will be given a real baby), science fiction can offer a fresh perspective on what it means to be human.

This is why I’ve been a fan of Philip K. Dick for so long (the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report were based on his stories). He was writing these kinds of stories in the 50s, long before anyone else was. (And long before we were hit over the head with Data in Star Trek). If you’re looking for a good read, I’d recommend his novels VALIS and and Time Out of Joint . BTW, the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” is what they based “Total Recall” on. I like the short story title better, but I suppose that’s too many words for the title of a Hollywood movie

LOTR vs HHAW

Topic: TV, Movies, and Music
Tags: Movies, Musings

I had to watch the 10 hour Lord of the Rings trilogy in order to learn that even the smallest person can save the world. Well last night I learned the same lesson in 25 minutes, watching Horton Hears a Who. “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” and it’s the smallest of all that ends up saving all the Whos in Whoville.