Looking Back At Christmas

            Everyone takes pictures of family, friends, pets, and presents over Christmas.  I’m no exception, but I also like to photograph illuminated decorations, lights, displays.  I find the gleam of lone colored lights in the midst of winter’s darkness to be very appealing (see last year’s Christmas blog on “A Little Touch of Christmas” for the reasons why). 

            Since the holiday is now past and quickly drawing to a close—even if many of the trees are still up—I want to share some photographs taken this year (well, at the end of last year) to help in making a proper goodbye, and to see if the mood can still be maintained, at least until  the end of this blog. 

            The first photo was taken in the PPG “Winter Garden” in Pittsburgh.  I love the “W” formation that occurs when the tree is viewed from a low angle and contrasts with the strong lines of perspective in the ceiling above it.  I’ve taken variations of it over the years, and this time the result was formally symmetric and yet still “Christmassy”:  

            Outside that building in the courtyard is the skating rink, with an even larger tree in the middle of that.  And the walkway across the street leading up to the rink also has trees decorated with lights.  They make for a fine entranceway to the area late in the day when the sky is darkening:  

The contrast of the ivory point-lights against the purplish-blue of the rest of the scene provides subtle contrast and is ideal for the early evening mood. 

            Also interesting is how Christmas lights can become almost abstract when seen in close-up or under modifying conditions.  For example, this shot is of lights wrapped around a brick support column outside the “Good Zoo” at Oglebay Park in West Virginia, near Wheeling:  

The texture brought out by the glows and shadows makes the stonework look more like Styrofoam than brick, softening an otherwise harsh impression.   

            Another abstract view arose when we drove through Oglebay’s new illuminated rainbow tunnel.  The lights are stationary as they change color, but the long exposure and the moving car made the resulting trails seem dynamic and haunting: 

Though the whole length of the tunnel I saw only through the viewfinder of my camera, the number of exciting “starburst” pictures  that resulted was worth it.        

            Finally, near the skiing area at Oglebay, the blue lights wrapped around the trees produced an oddly undersea marine-life impression, turning the trunks into underwater phosphorescent growths gleaming with organic color as they seemed to lift bizarre “feelie” extensions.  The addition of the car’s headlights makes for a furtive interloper from some other universe: 

            These are all abstract patterns of Christmas—avoiding most things personal, intimate, or “cute.”  But even in these pictures that at first might strike you as stark, the interplay of light, color, and shape still create—even without pets, family, and gifts—that essentially “quiet” impression of Christmas, turned-in, secretive, a little haunting, and dependent as much on aesthetic arranging and artistic effects as does a tied bow or Santa’s red suit.  It’s a gift-wrapped season, and as much a joy to look at as it is to feel. 

            So I leave you with these visual impressions, something tangible for your Christmas memories, as we wave good-bye to a holiday that currently might recede in our hearts but not yet withdraw from our view.   

            I hope you all had a merry Christmas, everyone.     

Cosmic Wonder vs. Humanity: "Interstellar" and "2001"

Is cosmic sense-of-wonder incompatible with humanism?

I recently saw Interstellar, the SF film by Christopher Nolan, and the reviews repeatedly compared it to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

The comparison raises a question, however, and suggests an innate limitation to SF film itself.  

Like 2001, Nolan’s film has visual outer-space grandeur and encounters with overwhelming phenomena:  other planets where humans are dwarfed by the environments, a black hole magically used for ultra-light transportation, and the disturbing relativistic effects of time dilation in heavy gravity.  Because of the time dilation alone the movie warrants its “cosmic” designation; it depicts realms more complex, peculiar, and “transcendent” than what we normally experience on Earth.  2001 did the same with its inexplicable messages from aliens, undefined confrontation with galactic “others,” and a transformative experience at the end of the film.

But there’s still a big difference.  

Interstellar is memorable not for its interstellar grandeur but for its emotional tie between an astronaut father (Matthew McConaughey), whose life passes at a slow rate because of acceleration and gravity effects, and his rapidly aging daughter back on Earth (played, throughout the movie as she gets older, by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn).  Indeed, the relationship is so strong that it transcends the vast space and time between them.  The human connection triumphs over the horrendous distances between the stars.  

                                                                                Interstellar

Yet the emotion in 2001 comes from the gosh-wow effects of big space and big cosmic powers, of moving into an area which is different from what we can know and control.  Humans are almost out of place here; they botch the meeting with the aliens by relying too much on a self-programming (and unstable) computer, and they make no decisions once whisked away and “remade”—if that’s what happens at the end, and our not being able to pin a label on what does happen indicates the point:  it’s beyond human understanding.  

Such emotional responses to the cosmos are suggested in Interstellar too—the big scenes of Saturn, that huge tsumani that engulfs people, the brooding icefields of the dead world, the gossamer chandelier of the black hole.  But the film’s viewers connect more to the relationship between the father and daughter:  her hatred of him for leaving her and his unflinching determination to return (even though he’s losing the daughter he knows as she ages past him), and the attempts to communicate between them when stellar communication is impossible or “garbled.” 

I’m not saying one emotional response is better than the other.  It comes down to which you prefer.  What I wonder, though, is whether you can ever have both responses in one film.  Are they maybe incompatible?

2001 was criticized for its lack of particularized and interesting characters, a claim they were too sterile or trivial.  Interstellar has characterization and feelings galore—it’s a love story between father and daughter, and there’s love between the Anne Hathaway character and the lone astronaut on another planet, and we also see the brutal effects of confinement and isolation on the Matt Damon character who goes berserk.  But 2001 hardly cared about such things (the only father-daughter talk is about birthday gifts, telephones, and the mother who went shopping—more materialistic than emotional, and the deaths that do occur are almost icily clinical—“Life Functions Terminated”).  What’s important for 2001 is the alien-spawned Star-Child at the end, and we never learn how “human” it really is!  Indeed, the most emotion in the movie is shown by the computer—which indicates just how far from humanity its characters are.  

                                                                   2001: A Space Odyssey

Meanwhile, Interstellar lavishes in pulling heart-strings and sharing lamentations, to the point where the characters hardly care about how grand, incredible, or overwhelming that black hole (and the universe) really is.  The father just wants to know whether it will get him home to his daughter.  

One film is cosmic and ultimately post-human. Its sole surviving human character is made into something other at the end—which says little for a human-controlled future, given the power of the alien interventionists.  The other film is so human that anything cosmic becomes secondary.  Its protagonist is hardly transformed by his experience of outer-space wonders and terrors—at the end of the movie, he still wants exactly what he wanted at its start; he follows his single-minded devotion and ultimately meets again with his daughter.   

2001 is so focused on galactic wonders that it maybe trivializes humanity, while Interstellar is so caught up in its human viewpoint that maybe it trivializes the universe.

And so the question I raise: are human experience and galactic experience incompatible?  

Or is this just a film phenomenon?  Prose science fiction has been criticized, and defended, as a genre where characterization is often generalized to cover the whole human race, where a protagonist might be a “representative” human being to confront and provide reaction to a changed future or incredible galactic events. 

But some classic examples in prose of compatible successes do come to mind.  Like “Nine Lives” by Ursula LeGuin, which uses cloning to demonstrate how humans are ultimately alone:  a member of a cloned “family,” whose members live together intimately and almost telepathically, suddenly has all his “sisters” and “brothers” killed in an accident, and he’s alone, which he’s never experienced before.  As the other humans in the story suggest, now he knows what humans always feel.  And Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris gives equal weight to both the “inhuman” story of the sentient planet (with its mimoids, symmetriads, and other bizarre phenomena that evade human understanding), and the “love story” between a terrestrial male and alien-created reproduction of his dead wife, where he tries to treat the relationship as “normal” and finds it impossible.  (Note that the Steven Soderbergh film version of Solaris did not even try to tell the “inhuman” part of the story—the weird surface activities of the planet are not presented at all.)  

Ultimately, I raise the question more for debate than to offer any conclusion (for, to be honest, I don’t want humanism and the universe to be incompatible, in film or otherwise).  I’m sure that defenders of Interstellar would argue that humanism doesn’t trivialize the universe but presents it as a formidable opponent, to show just how strong and precious human love can be in its triumph over any distance and time.  And the defenders of 2001 would say that if the universe is to be presented with any authenticity at all, then humanism has to succumb to its overwhelming power, to be flattened by it in order ultimately to be moved and transformed by it.  

And both arguments make sense.  

Maybe the word “cosmic” means exactly what’s implied here:  everything that’s incompatible with humanity.  

And maybe always will be.