Ruthanna Emrys's Journal

Another Presidents' Day has come and gone and with it my eighth 'Thon with spatch. This year we watched about nineteen out of twenty-four hours of science fiction film, which considering how flattened we both were going into the weekend feels like no small achievement. (Then I had to recover enough to write it up.) The endurance is not the point with us, though. The movies are, and the movies are worth it.

We had to resort to a taxi because the buses of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority grow more theoretical by the day, but this year we made it to the Somerville in time to secure seats in the balcony, fill our pockets with Atomic Fireballs, and shout the noon countdown to the marathon's traditional kickoff, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953). I have not yet reached the point of being able to recite the dialogue in time with Mel Blanc and a significant percentage of the audience, but I have also not gotten bored with its jetpack-jonesing mix of double-talk, technobabble, and sight gags that generally go boom, not to mention the wonderfully ingenuous line "Happy birthday, you thing from another world, you." I just wish the smithereening ending didn't feel like it was circling around to relevance again.

Joe Dante's Innerspace (1987) is at least three different movies in the same two-hour runtime, but I liked the majority of all of them. The plot is basically spy-fi, with miniaturization technology serving as both premise and MacGuffin: the interruption of a maiden fantastic voyage by industrial espionage leaves the teeny-tiny test pilot injected into, instead of a placid white lab rabbit, a high-anxiety supermarket clerk who was just trying to talk himself into a vacation, not dodge corporate assassins all over Silicon Valley. Emotionally, it works like a three-way buddy movie: the test pilot (Dennis Quaid) is a hotshot screw-up whose laid-back bravado covers badly for a broken heart, the clerk (Martin Short) is a dead-end milquetoast who has nightmares about register errors, and the woman they both love (Meg Ryan) is a Taser-toting reporter chasing a high-profile story until it starts chasing her in the form of a robot-handed henchman of a kinky mad scientist working for a megalomaniacal CEO who likes to monologue in refrigerator trucks. And in case it was not at all clear from the end of that last sentence, the execution is comedy, at points approaching live-action cartoon: Frank Tashlin would appreciate the commitment to zaniness that sees a self-sacrificing scientist respectfully remembered as "a good man who tried to save my ass by injecting me into yours." The supporting cast is such a rogue's gallery that while William Schallert, Henry Gibson, and Dick Miller—deservedly applauded for his one scene which he steals along with accidentally Quaid's towel—feel like no-brainers, even a random couple of doctor's patients are played by Andrea Martin and Joe Flaherty and Ryan's editor turned out to be Orson Bean. I have now seen Robert Picardo pop a bottle of champagne while wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and what looked for all the world like a genuine lizard codpiece. I have also seen Kevin McCarthy shrunk half-size trying to make a pay phone call. Plus a lot of the inside of the human body, squishily and Oscar-winningly represented by practical effects of fuming stomach acid and a sleeting maelstrom of red blood cells. The script does not often go for the gross-out, however, and it almost strictly eschews cringe comedy, and its characters retain recognizable human proportions even when one of them is microscopic and the other is panicking that he's possessed; that really counts with me, especially in a story so dedicated to mining its sci-fi tropes for screwball applications ("Congratulations, you just digested the bad guy"). I like the giddiness of the non-ending, which doesn't beg for a sequel so much as it invites noodle incident. I am beginning to feel the '80's are severely underrated as a decade for weird film.

It is not the fault of either Merian C. Cooper or Ernest B. Schoedsack that the placement of a character named Dr. Bullfinch in a story about shrinking made me wonder where my copy of Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine (1969) had got to, but no one in Dr. Cyclops (1940) gets small enough to scoop nectar out of the flower-spikes of clover, merely to be menaced in a rough-hewn laboratory high in the Andes by Albert Dekker's Dr. Thorkel, whose Coke-bottled vision provides the eponymous allusion. Plotwise, it's fairly standard-issue mad science, with radioactivity rhapsodized as "the cosmic force of creation itself" and our band of scientist-heroes pitted against the wrong 'un literally playing God with miniaturized pigs and horses and human beings; it was filmed in three-strip Technicolor and it looks like a million bucks of pulp comics, mottled with eerie blue-greens in the rays of the doctor's experiments, lush with ferns and lianas in the soundstage jungle, half-ruins shored up like a prospector's shack over a near-bottomless mine of uranium that would make any fortune twice over, so Dr. Thorkel decides to use it to shrink things. The special effects are still solid, both the oversized sets and the process shots and even some theatrically effective moments like a tiny horse seen as nothing more than a disturbance in the tall grass and a thrashing in a butterfly net. I cannot really say the same for the characters, each of whom has a scientific specialty and a personality trait. I do appreciate that the personality trait of Janice Logan's Dr. Mary Robinson is not screaming all the time but bravely decoying crocodiles and reminding her male comrades about basic principles of engineering, but I could have done without her inevitable romantic pairing with the only male character in her age bracket, since as far as I could tell the personality trait of Thomas Coley's Dr. Bill Stockton was lying around being a smart-ass. Both Rob and I felt strongly that it is unfair to demonize a black cat for hunting the prey it's given, even if that prey is technically the protagonists.

Half of Norman Jewison's Rollerball (1975) is a chilly, clever dystopia about professional sports and corporate government; the other half is future-shock swords-and-sandals so heavy-handed that triclinia have come back into fashion. Taken individually, each is a perfectly respectable mode of screen science fiction. They go together like Andes mints and béchamel sauce. I ended up feeling much more invested in discrete elements of the film than the overall experience. I like the cold open of the rollerball match between Houston and Madrid, dynamically filmed and vigorously edited and not so initially gruesome that a contemporary audience would reject it out of hand. The game itself recalls a bone-crunching combination of football, roller derby, and pinball, sufficiently worked out that the rules can be deduced beyond the necessities of the screenplay; it was apparently played on set by the cast and stunt crew in between scenes. I like the low-key early worldbuilding of "our corporate anthem" and the realization that when John Houseman's Mr. Bartholomew speaks of "executives," he doesn't mean men with particular jobs, he means the ruling social class. I like James Caan as Jonathan E, undisputed champion of a game designed to show how the tallest poppies are the soonest cut down—not a dissenter or a rebel by nature, but so baffled at being asked to relinquish the one thing he's good at that his mere pushback sets in motion a conspiracy whose full lineaments we never learn because Jonathan doesn't. I don't enjoy that the function of non-executive women in this world appears to be interchangeably sexual-ornamental, but I get the point it's making. And I appreciate the scenes of Jonathan and his trainer reclining at dinner served by his concubine and the party scenes where executive women eye the rollerball players like a stud service ("You can almost smell the lions") and the environmentally pointed scene in which a gang of drunken executives stumble out into a pre-dawn field with a plasma pistol and gigglingly waste a harmless copse of trees, but they're received images of decadent empire rather than extrapolations of the real ills of 1970's America and they don't match moments like Jonathan's prescient attempt to research his own society's history, only to be told that all his requested books have been digitized and classified, but the summaries are electronically available and what did he need them for, anyway? There is one splendid fusion of the two modes before the finale and it involves Ralph Richardson. He's a character actor and able to appear anywhere once seen, so I don't know why I didn't expect to find him as the distracted librarian of Zero, the great global supercomputer that either doesn't do its job or does it scarily well: on the morning that Jonathan visits Geneva, it's lost an entire century. "Poor old thirteenth century," Richardson mourns. "Just Dante and a few corrupt popes." He coaxes the computer to explain the Corporate Wars, but it just repeats buzzword tautologies until it bluescreens; the librarian kicks it annoyedly to no avail. It's funny and chilling, satirical and plausible. Why go to the drama of burning books when you can just warehouse history and make it disappear? The brutal victory of the ending seems deeply ambiguous; you worry about what happens after the freeze-frame. It is similarly not this movie's fault that I associate Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor so inextricably with A Canterbury Tale (1944) that when we were supposed to be watching the setup for a game, all I could hear was Sergeant John Sweet saying, "Well, that was a good job too."

We did not see any of this year's short films; their slot was our only chance at a dinner break before a movie we really wanted to see. We walked very quickly to Dakzen and got curry puffs, khao soi, and pad thai with enormous, delicate, head-on shrimp. They were out of kanom moh kang—a taro-thickened coconut custard I have been trying to eat for like two months now—but sold me a coconut-milk panna cotta topped with chopped fruits, which was delicious. We ate upstairs at the theater, since the mezzanine benches were not yet covered with sleeping bags and bodies. It would start to snow a few hours later.

I wrote extensively about Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929) when I saw it for the first time in 2014: I adored it. Watching the digital restoration with live music by Jeff Rapsis, my feelings hadn't changed. It's hard science fiction with a romantic heart; it flirts with science fantasy but really has a thing for cold equations; it solves them passionately, but it expects its audience to love the technical minutiae of a moon shot as much as the characters who work toward it. The accuracy of its foreshadowing of the Apollo program looks like precognition in 1929, but it's merely cause and effect of the history of rocketry. (Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley served as technical advisors on this movie, designing trajectories and models for manned and unmanned moon missions. The models were lost during World War II, confiscated by the Nazis—foreign prints of the film were suppressed—for fear they would give the secrets of the V-2 away. Cf. Tom Lehrer: "And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun.") Except that it runs almost three hours, it could be a proto-blockbuster with its high-concept effects and grounding love story, but it's not impersonal—it's full of small superfluous human details like one character nervously scissoring a Christmas cactus to confetti while trying to place a vital call or another sitting quietly alone, sick at heart, in the midst of brilliant excitement and expectation. I was delighted to hear the audience cheer just as loudly for Gerda Maurus' Friede when she refused to be left out of the crew of her namesake spaceship as they shouted for the launch countdown of the Friede herself. Fritz Rasp also received somewhat dubious applause when "the man currently calling himself Walter Turner" did his quick-change trick, going from sharkish operative to obsequious nonentity and back with little more than a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, some hair oil, and a discreet cut. I still feel for Gustav von Wangenheim's Windegger, who would have been just fine as mission control. I don't understand the criticisms of this movie as unemotional or laborious or unnecessarily plotty; it would be fairer to fault it for the sense of wonder coming out its ears. It's got great rocket science. It's got a great heroine. It's even got an only sort of love triangle that I don't want to shoot in the face. This time around, I didn't have to worry that something terrible was going to happen to the spacefaring mouse.

We went home to feed the cats during Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). It was supposed to be loud. The cats were very grateful. We made sure to be back by midnight and the buses almost complied.

I loved Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018) so much when I saw it last spring, I never figured out how to write about it. I still don't know that I have. The film is not a direct transfer of the award-winning novel by Jeff VanderMeer, although it retains the key elements of a biologist on an all-female expedition into an unknown region of recombinant horror and beauty; it remixes them aptly and lyrically into a dream-quest of self-destruction and self-discovery, all within an ever-changing alien environment that three years ago was just part of the Florida coast. Something fell from the sky, earthed itself within a lighthouse. Something blooms outward from the site, a slippery, prismatic phenomenon known as "the Shimmer" where the sky is filmed like a soap bubble, the sun is lost in a haze of rainbows, all water reflects a motor-oil sheen. Drones, animals, radio transmissions, people, nothing and no one has ever returned from within its steadily spreading bounds except for one man, lying now in critical condition in the government facility of Area X as his body tries to bleed itself apart. His name is Kane; he is played chiefly in flashback by Oscar Isaac and his wife is Lena, a soldier-scientist with the finely hardened face of Natalie Portman, carrying a movie as if she's carrying nothing more than the kind of grief that buries knives in its own heart if nothing else is closer to hand. Something went wrong between them. To understand what happened to her husband, to rescue him from it or revenge herself, to atone, to follow him down, Lena joins the next expedition being organized into the Shimmer. Her colleagues are played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, and Tessa Thompson and they are as damaged, diverse, compelling, and unpredictable as women who don't have to take the weight of being the girl in the story; the screenplay like the novel whittles them away until, as forewarned by the quarantine frame-story, only Lena is left to face the heart of the Shimmer, but none of them are disposable and the emotional effect is far less the who's-next of survival horror than a general disorientation from narrative expectations as well as time, cardinal directions, and morphology. "It's a one-way trip." The alienness of the Shimmer is never confused with malevolence or mere fatality. The production design has a genius for Rilke-style beauty as just bearable terror—a soldier's cut-open corpse burst against a wall like a crystalline seed pod, an immense white alligator with its throat swirling away into tiny, grainy shark-teeth—but it doesn't make the mistake of thinking there's no other kind. Mitotic white deer with antlers of soft pink fungi do not suddenly split open predator's mouths; they bound away into the undergrowth, as easily spooked as the white-tailed deer that were their template. Leafy, human-Hox-gened silhouettes in a lichened-over neighborhood are not full of bones under their bark and branches; they are in bloom. The glassy trees that spike like fulgurites or neurons from a sunset strip of beach-sand never do anything but stand and eventually fall burning. Even the shaggy, skull-faced thing that might once have been a bear, that cries out in the degraded signal of a woman's dying voice, is curiously innocent in its assimilation of its kills into itself—it is not clear that the process is even conscious, much less a decoy. Despite a couple of legitimately stomach-jolting scenes, I have a hard time thinking of this movie as horror. One of its most beautiful images is a character's acceptance of her abandoning humanity, her scars keloiding into leaves, her skin blossoming. Another becomes mercury and white fire, a sibyl in a cave of fractal transformation. The film never sets itself as a puzzle for the viewer—nothing about the plot is difficult to follow—but I like how much it plays with resonance and juxtaposition, edging up against surrealism, teasing human pattern-finding in a space where human laws no longer apply. I do not think it is an accident that one of its most contagious symbols is the alchemical ouroboros. I also think it's important that you can enjoy it without knowing anything about alchemy. It teaches you to read itself as it goes along, like the writing on the walls of a lighthouse; it grows on you. I was very glad to see it in a theater where the exit lights were not shining on the screen. "You forgot the flag."

I was sufficiently punchy by the time of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain (1971) that when I realized one of the four protagonists was played by David Wayne, my reaction was straightforwardly "Dude! The last time I heard from you, you were a leprechaun!" (Since the leprechaun turns human at the end of that musical, obviously he went into the arts.) Beyond that and an instantly favorable reaction to Kate Reid's sharp-tongued, chain-smoking microbiologist, I'm not sure how I feel about the movie. The procedural aspect is clipped, taut, and creepy: if some extraterrestrial contagion brought back on a government satellite really killed an entire small town in New Mexico in virtually one blow, leaving only the mystifying survivors of one crying infant and one Sterno-tanked elder, can the team of scientists pre-selected for just this far-fetched extremity identify, isolate, and contain something so alien, they might not even recognize it as life, or is humanity about to go out with a whimper, dry red sand in our veins instead of blood? It's yet another variation on the Michael Crichton moral that science will fuck you up, but at least its heroes are scientists themselves and presented as neither eccentrically reckless nor clinically inhumane; they are intelligent people with a terrifying job which they go about with urgency, care, and fallibility. Like a Golden Age mystery, the screenplay by Nelson Gidding gives the characters no information not also available to the audience, so everyone has a fair chance of figuring it out. And then the movie seems to get lost in a fetish of containment levels and decontamination procedures and subterranean architecture of the school of smooth curving plastic interrupted at decorative intervals by geometric banks of lights and monitors, all seamlessly color-coded; it's like living in refrigerator coils. I like the late, dark accusation that the top-secret government facility of Wildfire was developed not as a fail-safe for Project Scoop but as a refinery for biological warfare in the guise of benign SETI, but it's dropped in the wake of an inconvenient seizure and forgotten in the ensuing race to disable the nuclear self-destruct. Which is the other problem I had after the first act. The stakes of this movie are high enough when all earthly life might be wiped out by a cluster of mutating crystals; we don't need anyone dodging lasers in a five-story airshaft. Rob just confirmed my suspicion that during this exciting climax I briefly fell asleep.

Previous iterations of the 'Thon have shown episodes of The Twilight Zone as early-morning shorts, so it feels only equitable that this year we got our horizontal and vertical controlled by The Outer Limits. "Soldier" (1964) was the first of two episodes Harlan Ellison wrote for the show, the other being "Demon with a Glass Hand" (1964). I had seen the latter but not the former; I knew mostly that Ellison sued James Cameron over the similarities between it and The Terminator (1984), which now that I've seen the episode seem mostly to consist of time travel from the future to the present day. In fact the time travel is the least important aspect of the story: Michael Ansara's Qarlo Clobregnny may have been knocked back through time from the laser-ridden forever war of the thirty-eighth century into the comparative or at least more complicated peace of mid-twentieth-century America, crèche-bred as cannon fodder by his all-powerful "State" and mechanically indoctrinated to have no purpose or desire but to kill "the Enemy," but we have child soldiers in this time and we have veterans dehumanized by their wars and except for his slangy future-speak ("I don't peep . . . Freddit! Think-speakable me") and his streamlined medieval armor this tall man with radiation burns on his face might pass for one of them, trying to adjust to even the concept of life outside the battlefield. He reacts violently to all confusions; he doesn't feel safe without a weapon; he keeps trying to parse family dynamics in context of command. He's treated like an animal and he's not stupid. There is little science fictional and a lot difficult in that. The ending is kind of a slingshot, but it makes its poignant, ambiguous point. Lloyd Nolan plays a compassionate philologist, Tim O'Connor a gum-chewing G-man. The idea of cats telepathically linked with troopers as reconnaissance units reminded me of Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1954) and for all I know it was an homage; Ellison didn't get that pseudonym of "Cordwainer Bird" from nowhere.

The problem with Destination Moon (1950) is that it can be devastatingly and accurately summarized as the stupid American version of Frau im Mond. I wanted to see it; it was produced by George Pal, directed by Irving Pichel, and co-written by Robert Heinlein partly from his novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and novella "The Man Who Sold the Moon" (1950). I couldn't do it. I got through the first act on the strength of curiosity and a genuinely charming introduction to spaceflight by Woody Woodpecker and then even the iconic space paintings of Chesley Bonestell couldn't keep me watching. The rocketry was single-stage-to-orbit atomic, the motive was rah-rah-America militarism, and the launch was rushed ahead of schedule to get out of answering to the authorities for nuclear safety. The four male protagonists were interchangeable except for the comic relief. No one had thought of handholds inside the Luna; instead they relied on dramatically clanking—and totally impractical if you want working navcom—magnetic boots. It is possible that my mood would have improved if I had stuck it out to the heroic engineering, but the marathon program had already given away that the third-act crisis involved the cold equations of the trip home and I don't want to get near either of their politics, really, but screenplay-wise it's Thea von Harbou by yards. Rob was experiencing similar difficulties. With all due to respect to its Oscar for special effects, we bailed.

The time was nearing seven in the morning; we had hit a scheduling impasse. Rob was interested in Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007), I was interested in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981), and in order to watch either we had to figure out what to do for the ninety minutes occupied by Duncan Jones' Source Code (2011), a film which my husband saw once in theaters and is never, ever seeing again. We were pretty sure that if we went home we'd stay there. Waiting for the donut-and-bagel shop to open late for the holiday so that we could camp out in it was not an incredibly appealing option. It was snowing beautifully but briskly. Plus my lower back was starting to threaten me where I had pulled a muscle coughing last week and the buses, as previously mentioned, were running on a schedule composed of pure nope. We tried to stick our heads back into Destination Moon and confirmed that we just didn't care whether any of the characters made it back to Earth or explosively decompressed. We waited for a bus which came unsurprisingly late and went home. The cats rejoiced. No regrets, except about the donuts. This observance brought to you by my technical backers at Patreon.