Rudolph, the red-nosed alcoholic

This Christmas season at the movies has left me feeling, well, slightly hoarse. Based on that pun alone you might have an idea of what I'm intending to talk about here, and if so, I apologise at the outset for inflicting such a stinker upon ye good people of the Internet straight out of the gate. If not, well, that doesn't matter, that just means I got away with it. Twice. Phew, I guess.

So it's summer blockbuster territory for those of us who are south-of-the-border, while it's non-denominational holiday blockbuster territory for all those, ahem, normal people up north. You may have noticed a certain picture focusing around a roving young stallion being sent off to fight and die in a miserable horrific conflict in Europe's past has been the recipient of a surprisingly intense marketing push given its competition with other, higher-profile sequels and followups that are due to hit theatres this season. Hmmm, I suppose that description reveals quite a bit in itself. Violence! People like violence. Give the people blood and guts and pinata parties gone horribly wrong in the Colosseum sands I say. Right?

The point is, the comparatively aggressive promotion for Steven Spielberg's War Horse has been the catalyst for me doing no small amount of head-scratching and wondering: are we seeing the emergence of a “horse movie” subgenre within the drama film category, and if so, what is it about the “horse movie” that holds so much appeal to a wide audience?

As soon as I started considering the former question I had a couple of early examples I could raffle off in somewhat arguably flimsy support of the whole sordid affair and here they are: The Horse Whisperer, Hidalgo and Sea-fucking-biscuit. Not much to build an empire on, for sure, but the Mongolians did it with less. Nearest as I can see, the narratives contained within these movies all hold the following in common:

They focus first and foremost on the horse as a character in its own right, if not the primary protagonist altogether. Perhaps given that a studio can't predict the subjective appeal/bankability of a particular lead human actor to one member of the audience or another, it's safer just to assume that everyone likes horses and will thus rally in support of an anthropomorphic protagonist. Animals can't speak (parrots and dolphins please place yourselves in the temporary self-designated Exclusion Zone visible in the corner) so to some extent, we as audience can project onto them whatever personality we relate to. Nonetheless...

The horse is an animal with recognisably human idiosyncrasies. This is what I could and will call the inevitable “cute factor”. Horses are also not unlike us in other ways - they're temperamental, they can feel pain and we can empathise with their suffering. There is also a sense of impenetrable loyalty in their actions, particularly in movies such as Hidalgo where a bond is shown gradually developing between horse and master (notably, this is subverted for comic effect in the Zorro movies) But...

Horses also possess attributes we ourselves would willingly possess. Strength, speed, majesty – who wouldn't want these as physical traits? Or, in a more abstract sense, the ability to literally just focus on a goal and run full tilt at it- bravely shrugging off whatever life throws in your way. We also project onto ourselves the desire to possess the characteristics of the person riding the horse. Aristocratic dashing cavalry officers, cowboys, knights in armour, impossibly regal elven queens moving soundlessly through the forest while a hapless courtier rides in front to throw his cloak or himself over muddy potholes so she can cross. None of these guys is exactly chewing the proverbial plankton off the floor of the food chain's country franchise outlet. (God that was a terrible metaphor, even by my standards) The horse functions as a symbolic metaphor for speed, power, courage and grace and it shares these attributes with its rider – they are ultimately inseparable as an image of subjective, abstract desire.

We recognise in the horse a yearning for the pastoral ideal. My childhood memories of playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time largely consist of gritted teeth, smashed tv screens (blatantly untrue) and generic little-shit frustration at being unable to win that bloody Golden Scale by coughing up a 20 pound hake to the capitalistic owner. But those that don't have a certain nostalgia for the times spent larking in Hyrule Field, galloping Epona in circles and firing fire arrows into the distance to hit some poor unsuspecting subsistence farmer's prize pumpkins, or riding to the crest of a hill to simply sit and watch the sun go down in all its 1997 graphics era-lens flarey goodness. Do all horses live such carefree lives as this? I would guess not. 

But that doesn't really matter. We assign the horse an idyllic existence, a place in the mind with the boundless freedom of wide-open plains. This is of course a whole world away from the cramped-cubicle office compartments, car interiors or concrete Fuhrerbunkers that many of us inhabit in cold stark reality. This imagined life of the horse seems somehow more “natural” or “essential” than what a certain cross-section of human life seems to consist of these days. It connects with us at a primal level, because we recognise our own yearnings to be out on those open plains with the freedom to go anywhere and do anything we want without a care in the world. It's a powerful association. 

Now, my immediate conclusion for the next logical place that Hollywood could go as far as specific-animal movie genres was, naturally the dinosaur film, and I even had a snide joke lined up with exactly this slant. It would have involved me having a good chuckle over the outlandishness of such a thing and posting a jpeg of the Philosoraptor as guest star to end on a vaguely Platonic note. But then I realised it wasn't outlandish, and how close to the truth that idea actually was, and it kind of wasn't really funny anymore, if it ever was to begin with. Jurassicparkgodzilladinosauriceageserieskingkongjustaboutanymonstermovieevermade. Um, yes.

So there we have it, the outlines of what I would consider the horse genre in popular Western cinema. I hope that's something to build the foundations of a taxonomy on. Meanwhile, I've got to go clean my room and vacuum the carpet. Fresh straw doesn't replace itself, you know.

Your nuclear existence

A scant observation I'd like to borrow thirty seconds of your time to share, if I may: no, not to tell you the word about Jesus Christ, but to note that an increasing number of consumer technology advertising hooklines are deploying a very specific phrase as breezily as if it's the latest model battle tank.

Last year, you were buying gifts for “your family”, this Christmas season it's “the family”. I thought I was just getting a pair of socks for dad, but whatever. Oops, I guess I just indirectly invalidated my claims three sentences earlier. Bugger, I guess. You'll have to forgive me, my record for delivering on lofty assertions in which I have no stake whatsoever in upholding has been faltering as of late.

Now in this techno-savvy context, what does the use of “the family” as opposed to “your family”, or “my family”, connote?

First and foremost, the family appears as a kind of obligatory accessory, a mandatory ingredient in the life of the sophisticated, hip urban consumer. It's something that “everyone” has, whether they want it or not – regardless of and totally divorced from the reality that not everyone has a family, or even one they particularly want to associate with.

If you belong to the certain youthful socio-economic bracket that can afford hip-and-happening consumer technology like /Ipads/Galaxy S II's/miniature pocket keyring hydrogen bombs et al., then you have “the family” that has provided you with the lodgings, education, nourishment and home life throughout the course of your privileged upbringing presumably necessary to attain the stance in society whereby you have the disposable income to purchase such items.

“The family” is successful in its own right. It made you what you are, it got you to where you are today. You're successful, you've made it, and now you're going to build on that success by buying one of whatever Mr. Shitface is dangling like a droopy marshmallow on the end of his long pointy stick over your proverbial cage.

To be sure, I guess the element of depersonalisation in such a phrase is necessary for exactly the same reasons outlined above – the marketing boffins can't know for sure that whoever is reading their advert is going to fall into the aforementioned consumer demographic, so saying “buy a gift for your family” might ruffle some feathers and/or possibly be a bit un-PC.

But really, I guess the whole feel-good-about-yourself-because-you're-a-wealthy-urban-guerilla-connotation that comes with it is just an unexpected bonus – like finding that your laptop doubles as a place setter. Bon appetite, and don't you go handling those crackers irresponsibly, you hear?.

Built to last

Christmas time always seems to bring out the techno-head in me, so it is with a healthy suspicion when I say that for no particular reason, I decided today I would write a blog entry about Toughbooks. I may as well have chosen to write one about Siberian snow leopards. But I've spent the past year working with the damned things and for all their interminable bloody quirks, the things have grown on me, when I'm not curtailing my urge to put the manufacturer claims to the test in the most spectacular way possible and hurl them into the nearest solid surface or Atlantic maelstrom at warp factor 5. I like their old-fashioned quality. They're solidly built and well made, which I guess is appropriate and a real breath of fresh air when every other notebook and/or/ prosumer product in general these days is crappy plastic or some substitute thereof, cooked up in a chemical vat somewhere next door to the WMD factory. And they incorporate all the best elements of the wave of trendy tablety-stylusey computing-type thingy consumer devices that have hit the shelves in recent years. I don't think I would be making too outlandish a statement to say that they basically channel the spirit of the mouse-bot from Star Wars in notebook form. I won't use the word cute. That would be committing political suicide. But anyway, hopefully you get what I'm on about. I'm really not sure I do, so some help might be appreciated in this department. 

This in conjunction with the venerable Lumix dynasty of compact cameras convinces me that Panasonic are quite capable of making some good stuff and quite possibly one of the key players that will cause DSLR's to become a thing of the past for the enthusiast or hobbyist in the conceivable future. I splashed out for a Canon 550D approx. 7 months ago (just before the 600D landed and caused the price to drop, grr) and now kind of wish I hadn't – the range of compact cameras that are on par with DSLRs in terms of image quality is steadily increasing every time I turn my head to look, like some kind of aggressive mutant algae on the colourfully exaggerated mural of my perceptions of the camera market.

Funny how neither of the invincible heavyweight duo (Cannikon)'s offerings in this area have caught my eye quite as readily. Powershot and Coolpix are names that are known to me, but they just don't have the same up-there or trendy connotations of something like a Lumix, Olympus EP-series or a Finepix X100 (drools) Which reminds me... Anyone want to trade? Kiss X4 plus two lenses, Tamron 17-50 & Canon 50mm 1.8, both with hoods & 52mm polarising filter for the latter. Chuck Fujifilm's second-to-latest offering, duly mentioned above in my direction and I'll consider. No, I'm not talking about the X10. None of that popcorn-snack-sized Roman rubbish. (Disclaimer: Above offer may not actually be propositioned in seriousness and may possibly be the result of the author talking glibly out of his ass, as usual)

I do digress, don't I? I may have to amend my initial statement about this blog post being about Toughbooks, because as it turns out, it's really not. I would have bored you all senseless if it were, anyway, because no-one's heard of the damn things who doesn't shoot terrorists or chase dinosaurs for a living. But I suppose there is a common thread here, and it goes something like this: Build quality is a drawcard for the lay consumer as well as the professional, and when you mix quality build with antique retro aesthetics, more often than not you get something really rather nice. My 550D is not really built for outdoor shooting. I know the 5D Mark II (now there's something I really would trade my entire camera kit and quite possibly a substantial number of other valuable things in my possession for as well) has that beautifully constructed magnesium-alloy body and all the other trappings of professional ruggedness much like the 1D Mark IV, the Nikon D700, D3s or whatever else have you. Whenever it starts raining, I run for the nearest solid object between me and the man upstairs taking a leak. I guess it's not all about the camera body, there's no way you can keep an expensive lens swaddled in cotton wool forever, and if you're going to be shooting in downpour or thunderstorms or lava flows or biblical apocalypses you would probably be best off throwing in your lot with the Canon camp and dropping multiple weeks' worth of pay checks on an L lens that is specifically weather-sealed. But I like things that are metal or alloy or wood or solid fibreglass, things that seem to be well-made, things that seem to come from the real world that you can picture some old guy sitting in a room spending hours polishing and buffing to the extent that he can look in the front panel and see his own reflection and remember that he forgot to put his monocle on that morning and shrivel up in embarrassment.

It's not just about the functional properties of the build. When you own an item that you perceive to be quality, you are inclined to look after it better, you anticipate the results it delivers with a more positive outlook. There is a definite market out there for lay-level consumers who like products that affect an air of quality construction, whether or not they actually are, or whether they have any idea of the technical intricacies that define it as well-made or otherwise. I definitely bloody don't. The Leica M9 could be stuffed with newspaper and old Cheezels inside and I wouldn't have a clue.

As a side note, I'm wondering if this has anything to do with an infusion of the steampunk aesthetic popularised in recent films like Sucker Punch or the Bioshock franchise? The technology in those textual worlds have a common, definite sense of the internal workings of devices being made transparent. You can see all their gears and knobs and levers going like the inventors were using the Incredible Machine as their prototype simulator. Mousetrap hits see-saw which strikes match which lights rocket fuse which blows hole in wall causing water to flood through and power turbine. You might not get exactly the same effect with a Cf-18 Toughbook or a Fujifilm X100, but you still get the undeniable impression that it was made using real materials not mined on the Moon, it has a real weight and substance to it. It's part of the built environment, it will last when your 50mm 1.8s or school-lunchbox notebooks are biting the carpet.

Oh and Digitalrev fixed their site! This is worth celebrating. I am impressed mucho.

Work (no longer) in progress

http://theenlistedman.deviantart.com/#/d4h51pu

The sound of silence

If games are their gameplay, then the essence of the first person shooter genre is noise and violence. It's things happening, multiple threats coming from opposite directions, a player who is required to think and adapt to a rapidly evolving situation in real time.

Half-Life 2 is really rather unique in this respect, even as an entry in its own franchise. Not many first person shooters are confident enough to let players take a step back and drink in the silence every now and then. To allow them to stand alone on a clifftop and just do nothing, taking in the stark vista of the abandoned surroundings until they are ready to press on. This stands in contrast to a number of more modern shooter games where the noise, action and violence is omnipresent to the point of being numbing.

The examples that spring to mind for me occur primarily in the vehicular chapters “Water Hazard” and “Highway 17”, but I don’t think it’s especially specific to the road trip-style vignette gameplay that these sections engender. Think of the section where you battle it out with that carpet-bombing attack chopper in the lagoon just before Black Mesa East. After ten minutes of intense combat, adrenaline, concentration, there’s a thrilling rush of exhilaration as you watch the bloody thing spiral out of the sky in flames to land in pieces at your feet, the stinger music providing a sudden spike of dramatic tension and relief.

Then comes a brief instant of confusion. For those past ten minutes you had a single-minded purpose in the game: you knew without question what you had to do: escape from and/or preferably destroy the most immediate threat i.e. the chopper. But now, for just a split second, you’re unsure of what to do next.

And in that moment, that’s when the game’s peculiar silence takes on a life its own. You realise where you are, the sight of the setting sun over the lake dawns on you (no pun intended), and it compels you to stop and marvel at this strange oasis of picturesque beauty hidden just on the outskirts of technocratic dystopia. Barrels bobbing in the water look like lifebuoys, and stone monoliths create long shadows on the surface. There's a chirp of evening crickets coming from some unidentifiable source (crickets, presumably, or perhaps someone making cricket noises) In this light, Half-Life 2’s crumbling post apocalyptic earthscape takes on a weird sense of peace.

 

The fact that it’s placed immediately after a balls-to-the-wall action sequence is not accidental either. The player has a chance to catch their breath, remember why they are here and proceed at their own pace (although sometime today would be nice, I’m sure)

Highway 17 uses silence a tad more liberally and not in any so memorable set-pieces; it’s more in the creaking of an old boat-shack door, a tyre swinging from a tree, the chilly wind blowing over the cliffs, the vastness of the seascape that remind you just how alone you are. Even the Combine patrols encountered at regular intervals seem like quaint anomalies rather than the symbols of all-powerful authority over this Hebridean landscape.

The absence of any soundtrack is crucial to these moments. It creates an immersiveness that is impossible to fake, one which is further authenticated by the lack of characterisation of the player character (G. Freeman esq, this guy). The seemingly natural progression of time, the sky darkening as day turns to night and vice-versa, is similarly a key component here.

What moments of silence such as these achieve, in a functional sense, is to remind us that the essence of this game is more than the noise and violence of its core gameplay elements. We are more than just players; at another level, we are participants in a fully-realised fictional drama, and beyond that, we inhabit a fully realised fictional world where we have the freedom to do as we will, to sod the hero's journey and go dune-buggy joyriding squashing antlions till judgement day if we so choose.

Half-Life 2 is, in its own way, a uniquely lonely game. (Yes, I get that may possibly be related to a significant chunk of its target market being perceived as possessing minimal to borderline functional social skills) But a starkly beautiful one, too. I’ve yet to see any subsequent entries in the genre, even those which are self-touted as “post-apocalyptic” that have quite managed to replicate the same effect.

No doubt there are plenty of recent shooters out there with technically more impressive visuals which ooze atmosphere (dammit, I thought I'd get through this spiel without making a single use of that word) in every singular facet of their art design. But Half-Life 2's silence is all its own. It's in the uncanny strangeness of the emptiness of this world, which hits you all at once when you least expect it. It's of a type that players will seek out voluntarily rather than having it bludgeoned into them at the end of a Combine stun-stick.

Ok, I’m done licking Valve’s boots now, but you get the point. It’s still a bloody well-made game in terms of art direction, even when the Source engine is going on seven candles on its birthday cake (which is not a lie).

Oh, and it was Halloween last night. Probably should make some mention of that. When I snap my fingers you will awaken and re-read this article all over again, except this time it will be scary. Blah.

Lie or no lie, it's still one for the metaphor hall of fame

Broadly speaking (the best kind of speaking. Or not actually. Probably comes in somewhere about seventh, on a good day) there are a couple of different ways of evoking atmosphere. Not to trot out the dead horse that is the second-most long suffering metaphor of all time currently in use in modern everyday conversation after automobile engines, but it’s vaguely analogous to baking a cake. You can drop that extra sprinkle of cocoa into the pan last of all as topping, or mix it into the batter from the word go so you get a garden variety (vanilla, even?) chocolate cake.

Really, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking cinema, games, literature, dance or what have you. Structurally, the narrative and the atmospheric elements of a text should be seamlessly integrated as to make the audience unaware of the process by which each supports the other. However, there are always creative decisions to made with regard to the specifics, which of course is where things get interesting.

Today I want to look at something a bit different: Sloth racing on Saturn. I couldn't find much on that topic, though, so instead I'm going to put Tom Waits’ spoken word piece from the 1985 album Rain Dogs, titled "9^th and Hennepin" under the microscope. This is quite a compact and economical snippet of dark musical poetry that begins by painting broad strokes, quite literally rounding out the scenery on all sides to create an effectively realised picture in the listener’s mind’s eye:

Well it’s 9^th and Hennepin

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky

Like a tarp thrown all over all of this, and the broken umbrellas like dead birds

And steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow

And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos

And everyone is behaving like dogs

And horses are coming down Violin Road, and Dutch is dead on his feet

And all the rooms, they smell like diesel, and you take on the dreams of the ones who slept there.

And I’m lost in the window, I hide in the stairway and I hang in the curtain and I sleep in your hat.

And no-one brings anything small into a bar around here, they all started out with bad directions

And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear. One for every year he’s away, she said.

Such a crumbling beauty, ah

There’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won’t fix

She has that kind of razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and the thunder

Of the Southern Pacific going by

And a clock ticks out like a dripping faucet, till you’re full of ragwater, bitters and blue ruin

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen

I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all, through the yellow windows of the evening train.

The streams-of-consciousness style flow and overall structure is maintained by the continual use of “And” at the beginning of each line, which gives the piece as a whole the air of a hazy vignette, one intended to be mainly texture and atmosphere without much basis in reality. There’s a sense of disconnectedness in which the speaker realizes all of his worst suspicions and fears about the place (a real street corner in Minneapolis), but he is imagining without seeing, as Waits himself has commented in his explanation of the piece.

What’s really interesting here I think is the way Waits begins. He starts out by describing the broader picture and then moves into the closer, more personal. If this were a scene from a film it would be a long continuous crane shot that starts out above the city skyscrapers, swooping down into the streets, past the streetlights and shadows of people and into the doorway of the hotel in the story, eventually meeting the “girl with the tattooed tear” at the bar. What we have here is a sense of progression from the disconnected abstract to the specific. We shift gradually from broad strokes of disjointed atmospherics to concrete realities of character and narrative. Waits fully fleshes out the world he has created before plunking us squarely in the middle of it as one of the spun-out drunks at the bar. 

This prominent foregrounding of atmospherics is a popular technique in modern cinema because it allows the filmmaker to fully immerse the viewer in the imaginary universe on the screen, before introducing the who-what-where-why of the story itself. It becomes immeasurably easier for the audience to accept and be emotionally involved in what they are seeing, if they perceive that which they are seeing to be reality, or are at least superficially unaware of its fictionality. I suppose it makes more sense to guarantee your audience will be totally under the spell and ready to listen to what you have say when you finally start to say it. Examples? I’m thinking along the lines of Wall-E. I’m well and truly sick of talking about that film though, so I’m going shut up and leave that one up to you to expand upon for the time being. Maybe after a decent interval I’ll be able to discuss it critically again without feeling like a malfunctioning gramophone. Seven posts or so should do it.

On the other side of the pancake, consider a futuristic science fiction film. Something like your Minority Report, or its similarly styled spiritual father, Blade Runner. Here we have injections of atmospheric detail at regular intervals throughout the movie. In this case, it’s largely made possible by the constant visual onslaught of what the filmmakers have imagined everyday life in the XX^nd century (insert random post-noughties date of choice here) will look like. Indeed for the science fiction genre, this is precisely what makes the regular maintenance (I use that phrase completely ironically) of atmospheric detail so easy - technological change is one of those things that is all-encompassing, and will be evident in virtually every facet of the on-screen activity, from projecting quarterly reports to feeding the cat. Flying cars, or colossal urban billboards that advertise personalised consumer goods help keep the suspension of disbelief constant, allowing the viewer to fully accept the theatrical illusion. In places these immersive footnote details are even used directly as plot devices – I’m thinking, for example, of the tiny spider scout police robots in Minority Report that hunt Tom Cruise through a skid row tenant block.

But in both of the films used as examples above, there isn’t really a tutorial half-hour of atmospheric acclimatization before the plot proper starts. We’re launched head-first into the who-what-where specifics of the story and characters and expected to acclimatize to the reality of the onscreen world as we go. Those little atmospheric flourishes sprinkled throughout are the one-percenters that enable us to do this. It’s a somewhat different approach to the one outlined in the Waits example, and I would say, a less risky one to be sure. Putting all the texture and atmosphere up front and then launching into specifics risks audience disconnection once the spell wears off, but a seamless transition between the two is like a well-made gateaux: a culinary one-two-punch with delicious piped chocolate icing on the top and outer sides and something exponentially more awesome in the middle. I don’t know what. This maybe:


 

"He's more machine, now, than man..."

So I’m back…again.

I spent the frigid winter in a manor by the coast after my court physician told me a spell in warmer climates might aide to “slayeth the bad humours”.

Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. That last sentence wasn’t quite true. Nonetheless. I haven’t been doing any writing in quite some time because, to be as honest as a sodium pentathol elemental, I’ve been less inspired than the architecture in Soviet-colonised Boredomland. There’s two flighty metaphors in quick succession… Caught those? Still alive and kicking? That’s good. Anyway, with a change of colour scheme comes a change of topic and, appropriately (I guess) for such a lengthy interlude (also in the interests of writing something of slightly broader interest than my usual choice of material), I’m going to take the focus away from the pop-culture banquet platter to wax philosophical for a bit.

I spend a lot of time working around machines. Specifically, machines marketed to the general public consumer base. Like the card-carrying consumer junkie I am I also tend to spend a lot of my disposable income on technology. Going to buy a new toy, whether it be a computer, camera lens, graphics tablet, cassette player (no! Bad Cameron! Shove this paragraph bum-first back through the time portal and get out of the 1980s) or such, you’ll frequently hear the remark “It’s a lovely machine”. I’ve heard that same comment thrown around once or twice when showing a customer a computer at work.

So my question for today is this: can a machine be beautiful?

I should qualify. When I use the b-word, I’m not referring to an objective idea of beauty submitted by popular culture, rather a personal or subjective one. I say that here not with the intent to moralise against the former. I want to draw attention to the fact that in the late nineties and in the era since we have seen an increasing push toward consumer devices becoming smaller, curvier and more stylised, a phenomenon which, notably, has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing ability of virtual graphics technologies to render extremely realistic and lifelike scenes. Clearly, this streamlined aesthetic is the direction that consumer-culture notions of beauty seem to be firmly set on heading in.

However, this fact is relevant to our question for the following reason: Man constructs his inventions in imitation of nature. And nature is, traditionally, the ideal of beauty.

You only need to take a quick look around your immediate surroundings to recognise the extent to which this is true – unless you are reading this blog post from the slopes of an ascetic retreat in the Himalayas, but maybe even then. Devices such as cars, planes, boats, music players, iPhones, they all possess an unnerving familiarity, a ghost of a resemblance to things from the natural world.

And nature is not all sharp edges and protractor-iffic 90 degree angles. Nature is curves, the curling form of a leaf, the figure-8 twist of an elephant’s trunk. Nature is messy, though of course it exhibits a subtle, at-times-literally-mathematical elegance as anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code will be quick to shout out. Nature is also the sleek outline of a cheetah’s hide, which carries with it associations of speed, cunning, athletic prowess and general badassery. This goes some of the way toward explaining the marketing drive of the modern sports car and its more primal connections with the masculine psyche (of which the entire Fast & Furious movie franchise is basically an extension). Many such campaigns, unfortunately, often choose to emphasise the twin elements of speed and aggression, to the detriment of their audience (not least their audience’s safety!) and perceptions of automotive culture in general.  

Machines resemble nature, yes, and at the same time, they resemble people. There are many devices out there in the everyday which seem to have a literal or abstract “face”, or other apparatuses, which are vaguely but distinctly humanoid in character. Some examples are things like handheld smartphones, old clothes dryers, ghetto blasters and tape decks, forklifts – the list goes on and on. There is a simultaneously eerie and comforting familiarity to seeing devices such as this that I will talk about in greater detail later on.

Certainly there’s an element of the practical in this type of design. For example, what might be analogous to “fingers” - i.e. the keypad on a smartphone, or the stylus on a tablet - facilitate physical human interaction with such devices; LCD monitors or “faces” allow interaction at the level of the visual i.e. through our eyes, and the speakers or “ears” either side of my computer monitor transmit sound waves to my own ears.

But are such practical considerations merely a side effect of an inherent human instinct to construct things in the image of nature, in the traditional (abstract) locus where beauty is to be found? Or is “the natural” or the “beautiful” in a machine just a by-product of the practical?

After having written several posts with reference to the Pixar movie Wall-E this is one of the most fascinating ideas to come out of that film, that continues to haunt me to this day: When does a machine become invested with a soul? The answer, or the only answer I could find that seemed consistent with the impression given by that movie, was that a machine gains a soul only when its creators have ceased to exist. But I don’t think this is objectively true - rather it seems just one angle of looking at a much larger picture.

To a lesser extent, but still relevant, I’m thinking also of the scene in American Beauty where Caroline arrives home to find Lester’s shiny new 1978 Pontiac Firebird in the driveway, a vignette which is reprised and given additional depth during Lester’s final black-and-white monologue at the film’s conclusion. The image of a man buying his dream car – a symbol of wealth, prestige and material happiness – is excellent material for dissection in line with the film’s argument, that true beauty is something altogether more subtle.

But the inclusion of the Firebird in Lester’s dialogic coda suggests there is a deeper spirituality to the experience, one that transcends the banalities of Western consumer or car culture. What is it? Is it the simple joy of getting what you want? Is the Firebird, for Lester, a symbol of something else, of youthful innocence, of boyhood lost? Is it the car itself? Is there a beauty to this particular machine that requires deeper divination?

I’m not sure to any of these questions, but I do have my own experience to relate. Many nights as of late I’ve found myself going for a walk around the garden to get a breath of fresh air, and I’ll be alone outside, with my brother’s new car parked in the driveway. At some subconscious level, I’m sure, I’ve always wondered if that car wasn’t alive somehow, if those headlights weren’t a pair of eyes looking back at me. It wasn’t a malevolent presence. Just, watchful, I suppose. I could never shake the feeling that machine didn’t have a soul, somehow, that there was an uncanny awareness, like a passive dog dozing with its head in its lap. I’d see the porch light glimmer in shades on the bonnet, and I caught the thought mid-flight making its way across my brain, “That’s a beautiful car”. I knew I wasn’t using the word beautiful in the purest sense that I usually associated with things I found attractive, or wonderful – but all the same, there was something there quite distinct from the shallow commercialised culture of car-worship perpetuated by advertising and media. What was that? I still don’t have the answer. But perhaps you do? I’d be really interested to hear other people’s insights on this. Can machines be truly beautiful? What machines do you find have a kind of beauty? The truth is out there. I think. I could be wrong about that. Maybe. But probably not. I dunno. I haven’t checked recently. Only on a Tuesday. Or was that every second Sunday? Yes. No. Possibly. Hmmm.