Inland Empire

We've had David Lynch's move Inland Empire out from Netflix for a month, and finally started watching it last Saturday when we had our friends Michael and Lesley over for dinner. We made it through about an hour and a half of it at that sitting, and then I watched the remaining almost hour and a half later this week, albeit without my full attention. If I didn't know that the movie had been made by David Lynch, I might have taken the movie for the work of a younger auteur who wanted to construct an hommage to Tarkovsky and Sukorov (and probably Bela Tarr, but I have to admit I've never seen a Bela Tarr movie) and Lynch all at once. It's not just the fact that half the movie is made in Polish and apparently in Poland, it's the languorous shots, the use of shadows, and even one shot that looked like a direct reference to the fantastic scene in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia where the camera traverses a mini-landscape that appears to be located entirely inside a building.

The Lives of Others

The opening scenes of this year's Academy-award winning Best Foreign Film promised a compelling experience of going inside the head of a participant in a system of political belief we know little about, except that it is going to implode in a matter of three or four years. The question of how people in the secret police of a utopian world convince themselves that they're doing good certainly fascinates me and bears a relation to debates that might be going on, unknown to me, inside the "war on terror" in our own country. Unfortunately, after that promising beginning the movie for me was a long unravelling into implausibility and unmotivated sentiment -- a big disappointment.

The Dawn of Human Culture

Feeding my continuing fascination with the historical origins of consciousness and art, I finished reading Richard G. Klein's The Dawn of Human Culture last night. Klein demonstrates as well as any scientist I've read how well scientific practitioners (with a little help perhaps) can translate their work for a non-scientific audience. The book reminds me of the work of Ernst Mayr in that respect (I've never understood why Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould are considered such wonderful writers about science). The book is also an extended exploration of how difficult it is to make conclusive statements about human origins based on the available physical evidence, meaning the very meager collection of bones that Klein catalogues exhaustively through the book. Evolutionary theory is augmented by a kind of storytelling that is reminscent, as Klein points out, of the way legal cases are made.

Consciousness in the brain stem

An article in the September 15 issue of Science News claims that kids without cerebral cortexes display enough basic evidence of consciousness to invalidate the automatic identification of the possibility of consciousness with a human cerebral cortex. The implications drawn in the story range from questioning when a person can be considered to be in a vegetative state, to whether newborns can feel pain, to whether the form of consciousness achieved by these kids extends to all vertebrates. As I understand the hypothesis being proposed, all of these entities have in common the inability to retain any meaningful memory of what happened to them more than an instant ago, except through behavioral types of conditioning (which is still enough for some of the kids in the story to learn to associate sounds like "mama" with particular people for whom they feel emotions). So are we forced by our inability to treat brown rats as conscious beings with rights (at any rate, I'm certainly unable to do so) to insist on a certain threshold of continuing memory for full consciousness, and to devalue the actual experience of consciousness, where actual suffering and experience of pain and pleasure as well as "being in the moment" occur? Would our ability to somehow use the memories of others to replace our own (by using Google, for instance, or because someone's willing to take care of us) make up for our own lacks in guaranteeing our rights as conscious beings? Where does this slippery slope end?