100 Things, Week 41: The Philosophers/After the Dark
I bet you'd thought I'd forgotten this little project. Or fallen off the face of the earth. Or something like that. I am still here, and adjusting to my new prescription for SSRIs. The nausea, dizziness, and inability to sleep are fading, and I'm starting to feel much better. Hopefully soon my ability to focus will return. Meanwhile, during the height of the depression that forced the need for medication, and the two weeks of the feeling the most awful from side effects, I had to mastermind the purchase and setup of equipment for a complete overhaul of my workplace's network, on a timeline and a budget that was somewhat reminiscent of a reality TV show challenge. And of course during the troubleshooting phase we had several significant snow storms. It's been a fun month. Very much looking forward to the Ragnarok party we're throwing this Saturday, which will be doubling as my 30th birthday party (even though it's 4 days before my birthday, but whatevs). Who could ask for a better birthday present than the Twilight of the Gods?! [EDIT: the links above are not about our Ragnarok party, which will be a small gathering of friends at home. They are, rather, announcements from the people who declared Ragnarok to be this upcoming weekend, which is what inspired us to have a party.]
But! Now it's time for a review of a movie I've been looking forward to for months! I am not promising to go back to reviewing something every week, since I'm not yet in a condition to make promises like that (and also I have a lot of fanfic to write vis-a-vis the next installment of 15 Mokona), but I was strongly moved to review this piece after seeing it and I figured, hey! Why not make it one of my 100 Things while I'm at it? For those of you who may not remember the format, I will write 5 paragraphs (which are unbeta'd, and may be long and rambly) critiquing things I feel are important strengths or weaknesses of the piece or pieces in question. This week's selection is a movie that was called The Philosophers when it was first announced, and was later retitled After the Dark for reasons upon which I will not speculate, but my friends and I still call it The Philosophers. If you're not familiar with the movie, the plot centers around a class of 20 lucky students at a select, competitive international high school in Jakarta and their Philosophy teacher, on the very last day of their senior year. Instead of bringing pastries to throw his students a party, he presents them with one last test: a thought experiment wherein they are facing a nuclear armageddon, and must decided based on randomly assigned careers which ten members of the class get to live in a bunker for a year to restart the human race, and which eleven must die horribly of radiation poisoning. The rest of the movie alternates between views of the classroom discussion, and dramatizations of the causes and effects of the different scenarios they choose. Here's the trailer:
The film is currently in limited release (New York and Los Angeles only, I think), which was a huge disappointment since I wanted to see it in the theaters, but I understand that when a movie studio is expecting the film to appeal to a limited audience, a limited release is a much better idea -- and I will even admit that a movie about thought experiments is really not a movie for everyone. If you actively want to debate the logic of the options raised in the film, see this movie with friends of the same temperament. If you're interested in potential intrigue, or character development, or sex and action, be aware that they're fairly incidental. Your viewing options, for those of us who don't live near theaters in New York and Los Angeles, are thankfully extant. The film has also been released to multiple pay-to-stream sites. I watched my copy through Amazon Instant Video. Remember to support the artists! And now, on to the critique... Warning: There will be HUGE SPOILERS below the cut!
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Week 41: The Philosophers/After the Dark. (An Olive Branch, John Huddles, 2013).
I want to state right off the bat that I enjoyed this movie tremendously. It did itself no favors by promoting the idea that the thought experiment would become "all too real" and have life-shattering consequences, since that only serves to create a false expectation of the movie that will draw in an audience disinclined to appreciate a film that never is and never needs to be "all too real", but what it is, I liked. I watched it with some of my friends from college (why yes, we attended a school that centers on philosophy, how did you guess?), and we spent quite a lot of time afterwards debating the protagonists' take on the central question, our own thoughts on who should go in the bunker, and things we thought would have improved the film. Watching and debating the film was a fabulous experience. I've already pre-ordered the Blu-Ray. I want to say this up front because the reasons that the movie was so eminently watchable are very simple, and while they are weighty and important reasons, discussing them past the end of this paragraph won't add anything, and I think the critiques that follow in the next four paragraphs might make it sound like I thought the movie was nothing but a load of useless sophistry (that's a bad thing). This movie is, at its heart, about people and their answer to an impossible question. I remarked to my co-viewers that this was like watching the philosophy class equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru -- there is no right answer, and the power of the scenario is that it reveals how you face the no-win situation. The visuals, of course, were absolutely stunning. From the first shot, we remarked on how well the filmography was done. The Philosophers may even have been visually perfect, and pacing was even bang-on-target (not easy for a conceptual, dialogue-heavy film). But even if the entire movie had been shot inside a cinderblock classroom instead of the gorgeous locales of Indonesia, the people would have carried the whole thing for me. Despite the large cast, most of whose names are not established nearly as well as their randomly assigned careers, all of the roles shine with personality. All of these students inhabit the range I have learned to expect from basic philosophy classes, and their characterizations are clear from the outset, varied between each other, and consistent throughout the film. All the young actors tapped for this project deserve to be commended. I loved this movie because I loved their performances, end of story.
I loved them so much, in fact, that I thought they deserved a much better Philosophy teacher than they had to put up with here. I could put up with his vindictiveness and favoritism. It may be ideal for teachers to remain perfectly objective, but even idealistic teachers who make extreme efforts to deal fairly with all students regardless of their personal feelings will probably fail to do so. Favoring circumstances or persons you find pleasant is human nature. And this teacher is clearly one who has had idealism beaten out of him, if it was ever there, which is all too common for the thankless job of a high school teacher. He is a man who believes that some people are not good enough students to be worth his time, or worth expending the limited resources of the class time that is so valuable to the students he feels will be successful. There are absolutely people like that, and although I would like to bar them from all forms of teaching (not just Philosophy), I can't. He is a particularly bad Philosophy teacher because he seems to be grading his students on whether or not they get the right answer rather than how well they have considered their answers and how they will adapt in the face of scrutiny. Early on, one of his students calls him out on being a "slave to binary logic". He defends this status as being the only reasonable way to live, with logic guiding your every decision. This makes him a hypocrite, of course, because he spends the movie acting out a highly illogical, emotionally charged vendetta, and declaring that his in-experiment persona acts in unpredictable, violent ways that would only be logical (given the shock and betrayal his students give him, his petty vindictiveness causing complete tragedy, and his lack of real explanation after the fact) if he revealed in the second round that his character's "hidden quality" was, "I'm the one who knows the exit code... and I'm a full-blown psychopath prone to murder."
The logical action in the first round -- where the teacher's role-playing of the sudden and secretive murder of everyone who'd been left out of the bunker caused Petra, the class star, to incite the class to lock the teacher outside -- would have been to write down the exit code and allow the nine people inside the chance to live. If he had the opportunity to write a taunting note saying, "I'm the only one who knows the exit code," he could have offered them a chance at real survival instead of declaring that they lived a year in misery because their logic in shunning a potential murderer left him on the outside, and that they couldn't even think of hacking/shorting the panel, would resort to cannibalism, then kill themselves in disgust for what they've become. He claims that Petra's final, pollyannic solution is "disordered", and that it's "not logic" and "not philosophy" just because her opinions on what makes life valuable don't match what the teacher considers to be the "right answers". Her answer is not, in fact, made well, but for entirely different reasons than he claims. It's not a bad answer because it's "wrong", and the teacher's behavior is far more disordered and far more distant from philosophy than Petra's. The orderly, philosophical way to conduct this class would have been to question the logic of the entire class's choices, and to guide a discussion about what could make those choices good or bad rather than declaring, "Oops, you're wrong for not liking me, you're wrong for not doing what I say when (in the second round) I hold a gun to your head and tell you to start sleeping with people you don't like, I'm going to destroy you all for not appreciating me in the imaginary world, and then I'm going to bust you down from an A+ to a C- for valuing people differently than I would." The teacher himself claims that "doing okay" -- a merely functional life that keeps going with no spark -- is vapid and meaningless. Theoretically, then, his goal is to help these students learn to lead an examined life, a life that is worth living. It's all well and good for his examination of his own life to reveal his pure valuation of utilitarian skill, but why reject instead of examine someone else's valuation of art, culture, and joy? If I could watch my ideal form of this movie, there would be no right answers, only evaluations of what each different person considers essential to life. It's there to find, if you look beneath the surface, but sadly obscured by the emphasis on the teacher's extraordinary unreasonability.
As far as the question of how well our culture could rebuild itself, there's actually very little chance to address the meat of the question. Too much of the movie's focus goes into how the choice of inhabitants would affect their psychological state and group politics during the year inside the bunker. In two of three scenarios, the teacher's character vindictively kills the entire group rather than let them survive to repopulate the Earth (here, I commend the movie for stating that there are 1000 such shelters around the world, providing for around 10,000 humans to survive the nuclear apocalypse, which is much more viable than 10 people). In the third scenario, the proposer herself buys into the idea that, in embracing the joy of living by picking artists, a florist, a gelato maker, and other such "impractical" people to populate the bunker, she has doomed civilization. Their lack of practical skills means that they will die, so after having one last year of fun, she summons an atomic bomb out of nowhere, and they commit mass suicide, potentially dooming all the other bunkers full of people as well. This was the big problem with her solution. There is no reason whatsoever why she could not defend her choices, or why humanity needs to go extinct just because we have culture. The structural engineer/electrician is still around. The opera singer may lose her voice to cancer in three years, but she'll still be able to communicate in writing in all seven languages she knows if you need diplomacy (you will) or even to teach someone else to sing. A gelato maker probably knows more about preparing food than just gelato recipes. A florist still knows things about plants, even if it's not knowledge as specialized as an organic farmer. You still have a doctor. You still have someone who excels at pattern recognition and basic logic for problem solving (your wine auctioneer with the IQ of 200). Your published poet and world-class poker player clearly has some real mathematical ability... The point is, when the human race first started inventing civilization, our ancestors were working with a lot less practical knowledge than that. There is no salient reason why these people could not learn to build houses, plant fields, and use the trove of books inside the bunker to remake the world from the ground up. Petra had no reason to declare that her own choices were illogical, but that was fine because they would enjoy life before they died. She chose people who were capable of wonderful things, who might not rebuild the first stage of their new society with complete technical proficiency, but who could do it, and could express an eminently logical conviction on Petra's part that the artistic skills these people provided are an essential part of a meaningful life -- not just a source of good wine and playing cards for waiting out Armageddon.
So, yes, I would have liked this movie to show the consequences -- both pro and con -- for the society that resulted ten, fifty, or one hundred years after they choose who enters the bunker. Just as I believe a published poet is capable of learning to build a house, a professional electrician is certainly capable of telling stories or singing songs to entertain, even if his technique doesn't measure up to the standards of the greatest opera houses in the world (although the singing of the particular electrician in this film might have). That the class never actually answered the question of what kind of society they would build with the parts they selected is one of two disappointments I have with this film. The other is not, actually, the sophistry, fallacious logic, self-delusion, and short-sighted egocentricity so many of the characters display in between their very real insights. Having been in many a philosophical discussion, both in high school classes, in college classes, and in casual conglomerations of friends at all ages, as well as being a regular reader of laymans' philosophy magazines, I would say that the faults of the people and progressions of logic within this movie are incredibly realistic for the subject matter. So many of the things that most reviews deem flaws, I would consider a form of strength for how very on-point they are as a representation of Philosophy's academia. It felt real in that way, not idealized to the point where everyone in this high school classroom is somehow a thinker on the order of Kant, Aristotle, and Kierkegaard all rolled into one -- not even the teacher. I liked the humanity. I will even give a pass to the sudden revelation that the teacher and Petra had been having an affair, which she is breaking off for a student the teacher thinks isn't worth her attention. The last few minutes, however, that hint at the teacher contemplating suicide after she leaves, and explicitly leave the viewer to guess whether or not he's killed himself, were to my eyes a weak ending to the narrative. I would have much preferred a simple door shutting with a cut to black, and credits rolling. Perhaps if a more thought-provoking ending was required, by all means give me a slideshow run-down of what professions and hobbies these students ended up pursuing, because if this is a high school Philosophy class, no matter how selective, I assure you the majority will not end up as Philosophy professors. Let me ponder as the credits roll, which of them would I want in a bunker with me to restart the human race in reality? I would have loved that. But maybe that just means that I value something different in my entertainment than the director did, and I'm glad to appreciate this movie for what it did bring to the table.
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/115930.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But! Now it's time for a review of a movie I've been looking forward to for months! I am not promising to go back to reviewing something every week, since I'm not yet in a condition to make promises like that (and also I have a lot of fanfic to write vis-a-vis the next installment of 15 Mokona), but I was strongly moved to review this piece after seeing it and I figured, hey! Why not make it one of my 100 Things while I'm at it? For those of you who may not remember the format, I will write 5 paragraphs (which are unbeta'd, and may be long and rambly) critiquing things I feel are important strengths or weaknesses of the piece or pieces in question. This week's selection is a movie that was called The Philosophers when it was first announced, and was later retitled After the Dark for reasons upon which I will not speculate, but my friends and I still call it The Philosophers. If you're not familiar with the movie, the plot centers around a class of 20 lucky students at a select, competitive international high school in Jakarta and their Philosophy teacher, on the very last day of their senior year. Instead of bringing pastries to throw his students a party, he presents them with one last test: a thought experiment wherein they are facing a nuclear armageddon, and must decided based on randomly assigned careers which ten members of the class get to live in a bunker for a year to restart the human race, and which eleven must die horribly of radiation poisoning. The rest of the movie alternates between views of the classroom discussion, and dramatizations of the causes and effects of the different scenarios they choose. Here's the trailer:
Click to viewThe film is currently in limited release (New York and Los Angeles only, I think), which was a huge disappointment since I wanted to see it in the theaters, but I understand that when a movie studio is expecting the film to appeal to a limited audience, a limited release is a much better idea -- and I will even admit that a movie about thought experiments is really not a movie for everyone. If you actively want to debate the logic of the options raised in the film, see this movie with friends of the same temperament. If you're interested in potential intrigue, or character development, or sex and action, be aware that they're fairly incidental. Your viewing options, for those of us who don't live near theaters in New York and Los Angeles, are thankfully extant. The film has also been released to multiple pay-to-stream sites. I watched my copy through Amazon Instant Video. Remember to support the artists! And now, on to the critique... Warning: There will be HUGE SPOILERS below the cut!
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Week 41: The Philosophers/After the Dark. (An Olive Branch, John Huddles, 2013).
I want to state right off the bat that I enjoyed this movie tremendously. It did itself no favors by promoting the idea that the thought experiment would become "all too real" and have life-shattering consequences, since that only serves to create a false expectation of the movie that will draw in an audience disinclined to appreciate a film that never is and never needs to be "all too real", but what it is, I liked. I watched it with some of my friends from college (why yes, we attended a school that centers on philosophy, how did you guess?), and we spent quite a lot of time afterwards debating the protagonists' take on the central question, our own thoughts on who should go in the bunker, and things we thought would have improved the film. Watching and debating the film was a fabulous experience. I've already pre-ordered the Blu-Ray. I want to say this up front because the reasons that the movie was so eminently watchable are very simple, and while they are weighty and important reasons, discussing them past the end of this paragraph won't add anything, and I think the critiques that follow in the next four paragraphs might make it sound like I thought the movie was nothing but a load of useless sophistry (that's a bad thing). This movie is, at its heart, about people and their answer to an impossible question. I remarked to my co-viewers that this was like watching the philosophy class equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru -- there is no right answer, and the power of the scenario is that it reveals how you face the no-win situation. The visuals, of course, were absolutely stunning. From the first shot, we remarked on how well the filmography was done. The Philosophers may even have been visually perfect, and pacing was even bang-on-target (not easy for a conceptual, dialogue-heavy film). But even if the entire movie had been shot inside a cinderblock classroom instead of the gorgeous locales of Indonesia, the people would have carried the whole thing for me. Despite the large cast, most of whose names are not established nearly as well as their randomly assigned careers, all of the roles shine with personality. All of these students inhabit the range I have learned to expect from basic philosophy classes, and their characterizations are clear from the outset, varied between each other, and consistent throughout the film. All the young actors tapped for this project deserve to be commended. I loved this movie because I loved their performances, end of story.
I loved them so much, in fact, that I thought they deserved a much better Philosophy teacher than they had to put up with here. I could put up with his vindictiveness and favoritism. It may be ideal for teachers to remain perfectly objective, but even idealistic teachers who make extreme efforts to deal fairly with all students regardless of their personal feelings will probably fail to do so. Favoring circumstances or persons you find pleasant is human nature. And this teacher is clearly one who has had idealism beaten out of him, if it was ever there, which is all too common for the thankless job of a high school teacher. He is a man who believes that some people are not good enough students to be worth his time, or worth expending the limited resources of the class time that is so valuable to the students he feels will be successful. There are absolutely people like that, and although I would like to bar them from all forms of teaching (not just Philosophy), I can't. He is a particularly bad Philosophy teacher because he seems to be grading his students on whether or not they get the right answer rather than how well they have considered their answers and how they will adapt in the face of scrutiny. Early on, one of his students calls him out on being a "slave to binary logic". He defends this status as being the only reasonable way to live, with logic guiding your every decision. This makes him a hypocrite, of course, because he spends the movie acting out a highly illogical, emotionally charged vendetta, and declaring that his in-experiment persona acts in unpredictable, violent ways that would only be logical (given the shock and betrayal his students give him, his petty vindictiveness causing complete tragedy, and his lack of real explanation after the fact) if he revealed in the second round that his character's "hidden quality" was, "I'm the one who knows the exit code... and I'm a full-blown psychopath prone to murder."
The logical action in the first round -- where the teacher's role-playing of the sudden and secretive murder of everyone who'd been left out of the bunker caused Petra, the class star, to incite the class to lock the teacher outside -- would have been to write down the exit code and allow the nine people inside the chance to live. If he had the opportunity to write a taunting note saying, "I'm the only one who knows the exit code," he could have offered them a chance at real survival instead of declaring that they lived a year in misery because their logic in shunning a potential murderer left him on the outside, and that they couldn't even think of hacking/shorting the panel, would resort to cannibalism, then kill themselves in disgust for what they've become. He claims that Petra's final, pollyannic solution is "disordered", and that it's "not logic" and "not philosophy" just because her opinions on what makes life valuable don't match what the teacher considers to be the "right answers". Her answer is not, in fact, made well, but for entirely different reasons than he claims. It's not a bad answer because it's "wrong", and the teacher's behavior is far more disordered and far more distant from philosophy than Petra's. The orderly, philosophical way to conduct this class would have been to question the logic of the entire class's choices, and to guide a discussion about what could make those choices good or bad rather than declaring, "Oops, you're wrong for not liking me, you're wrong for not doing what I say when (in the second round) I hold a gun to your head and tell you to start sleeping with people you don't like, I'm going to destroy you all for not appreciating me in the imaginary world, and then I'm going to bust you down from an A+ to a C- for valuing people differently than I would." The teacher himself claims that "doing okay" -- a merely functional life that keeps going with no spark -- is vapid and meaningless. Theoretically, then, his goal is to help these students learn to lead an examined life, a life that is worth living. It's all well and good for his examination of his own life to reveal his pure valuation of utilitarian skill, but why reject instead of examine someone else's valuation of art, culture, and joy? If I could watch my ideal form of this movie, there would be no right answers, only evaluations of what each different person considers essential to life. It's there to find, if you look beneath the surface, but sadly obscured by the emphasis on the teacher's extraordinary unreasonability.
As far as the question of how well our culture could rebuild itself, there's actually very little chance to address the meat of the question. Too much of the movie's focus goes into how the choice of inhabitants would affect their psychological state and group politics during the year inside the bunker. In two of three scenarios, the teacher's character vindictively kills the entire group rather than let them survive to repopulate the Earth (here, I commend the movie for stating that there are 1000 such shelters around the world, providing for around 10,000 humans to survive the nuclear apocalypse, which is much more viable than 10 people). In the third scenario, the proposer herself buys into the idea that, in embracing the joy of living by picking artists, a florist, a gelato maker, and other such "impractical" people to populate the bunker, she has doomed civilization. Their lack of practical skills means that they will die, so after having one last year of fun, she summons an atomic bomb out of nowhere, and they commit mass suicide, potentially dooming all the other bunkers full of people as well. This was the big problem with her solution. There is no reason whatsoever why she could not defend her choices, or why humanity needs to go extinct just because we have culture. The structural engineer/electrician is still around. The opera singer may lose her voice to cancer in three years, but she'll still be able to communicate in writing in all seven languages she knows if you need diplomacy (you will) or even to teach someone else to sing. A gelato maker probably knows more about preparing food than just gelato recipes. A florist still knows things about plants, even if it's not knowledge as specialized as an organic farmer. You still have a doctor. You still have someone who excels at pattern recognition and basic logic for problem solving (your wine auctioneer with the IQ of 200). Your published poet and world-class poker player clearly has some real mathematical ability... The point is, when the human race first started inventing civilization, our ancestors were working with a lot less practical knowledge than that. There is no salient reason why these people could not learn to build houses, plant fields, and use the trove of books inside the bunker to remake the world from the ground up. Petra had no reason to declare that her own choices were illogical, but that was fine because they would enjoy life before they died. She chose people who were capable of wonderful things, who might not rebuild the first stage of their new society with complete technical proficiency, but who could do it, and could express an eminently logical conviction on Petra's part that the artistic skills these people provided are an essential part of a meaningful life -- not just a source of good wine and playing cards for waiting out Armageddon.
So, yes, I would have liked this movie to show the consequences -- both pro and con -- for the society that resulted ten, fifty, or one hundred years after they choose who enters the bunker. Just as I believe a published poet is capable of learning to build a house, a professional electrician is certainly capable of telling stories or singing songs to entertain, even if his technique doesn't measure up to the standards of the greatest opera houses in the world (although the singing of the particular electrician in this film might have). That the class never actually answered the question of what kind of society they would build with the parts they selected is one of two disappointments I have with this film. The other is not, actually, the sophistry, fallacious logic, self-delusion, and short-sighted egocentricity so many of the characters display in between their very real insights. Having been in many a philosophical discussion, both in high school classes, in college classes, and in casual conglomerations of friends at all ages, as well as being a regular reader of laymans' philosophy magazines, I would say that the faults of the people and progressions of logic within this movie are incredibly realistic for the subject matter. So many of the things that most reviews deem flaws, I would consider a form of strength for how very on-point they are as a representation of Philosophy's academia. It felt real in that way, not idealized to the point where everyone in this high school classroom is somehow a thinker on the order of Kant, Aristotle, and Kierkegaard all rolled into one -- not even the teacher. I liked the humanity. I will even give a pass to the sudden revelation that the teacher and Petra had been having an affair, which she is breaking off for a student the teacher thinks isn't worth her attention. The last few minutes, however, that hint at the teacher contemplating suicide after she leaves, and explicitly leave the viewer to guess whether or not he's killed himself, were to my eyes a weak ending to the narrative. I would have much preferred a simple door shutting with a cut to black, and credits rolling. Perhaps if a more thought-provoking ending was required, by all means give me a slideshow run-down of what professions and hobbies these students ended up pursuing, because if this is a high school Philosophy class, no matter how selective, I assure you the majority will not end up as Philosophy professors. Let me ponder as the credits roll, which of them would I want in a bunker with me to restart the human race in reality? I would have loved that. But maybe that just means that I value something different in my entertainment than the director did, and I'm glad to appreciate this movie for what it did bring to the table.
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/115930.html. Please comment there using OpenID.