The Invisible Library

Over at the Battlestar Galactica Blog, Ron Moore discusses the implications of Starbuck’s torture scene, and other troubling moral quandaries that have been addressed on the show:¹

Would I personally behave the same way in similar circumstances? I hope not, but neither am I so confident of my own immunity to the pressures felt by an interrogator charged with finding a nuclear weapon or to the enormous weight sitting on a chief executive trying to protect her citizenry that I can say I would absolutely have made the more “moral” choice.

[…]

These are the debates that I hope you have among yourselves, your families, your friends. I want the show to provoke you into thinking about the times you live in and the choices that are being made all around you every day. In a time when the President of the United States actually asserts that he has the power to arrest without warrant and detain indefinitely without charge or appeal, any citizen (indeed any person on the face of the Earth) simply by designating them as an “illegal combatant,” we should all be engaged in a vigorous and energetic debate about who we are as a people and as human beings and exactly how we do intend to respond to the very real threat posed to this nation and to the foundations of liberal democracy posed by people capable of, and willing to, fly airplanes into buildings.

What is admirable is that Mr. Moore and his staff writers don’t take the easy way out. “I do see the show as an opportunity to raise questions in the minds of the audience and ask them to think, which is something of a rarity in these days when politics seems to be about stoking emotionalism and finding simple-minded slogans to stand-in for actual answers to complex problems. (”Culture of Life!” “Right to Die!” “Ban Smoking!” “The Ownership Society!”)”

It’s hard to say what we would do in the situations dramatists on the show. But the fact that someone has made a show that asks the tough questions without offering glib, shallow platitudes instead of answers while still being a lot of fun is something we need more of on TV. Now if we could only get our politicians to do the same.

Be sure to check out the discussion board where all this talk started. There are some nicely thoughtful comments, as well as the usual Gung Ho, kill ‘em all freeperisms.

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1. For those who don’t watch the show, some of the thorny sceneries involve the President of the 12 colonies flushing a Cylon out an airlock after promising him his freedom, Commander Adama shutting down a tribunal that was about to get ugly and pretty much everything Baltar does. Baltar is the real morally complicated character of the show. He’s withheld vital information about Cylon sleeper agents in the fleet, all to save his own ass.

April is National Poetry Month. Last year, I posted a few poems to celebrate. Seems the trend is catching on this year. Glad to know I started something besides that fire on the living room table.

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
‘Souls eat souls in the general emptiness’
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
‘It’s all taking pace in one mind’
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There’s a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather’s Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel’s Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago’s Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes

Kevin, Jenny and I saw Sin City Friday night. Fantastic. The single best adaptation of comic to film, ever. It seems to be getting mixed reviews, however. Those, like me who’ve read the graphic novels love it. Those who aren’t familiar with the source material however, seem to come out shocked and disturbed by the violence. I find this odd, since the title of the movie is Sin City. Not Pleasent Burg or Village of the Kittens. It ain’t Naughty Town, people. They aren’t fibbing to grandma and stealing pies off of window sills. These are prostitutes, killers and crooked cops. They kill, kill, kill people. Sometimes they torture them first. The film, like the comics, is Noir with a capitol N. I don’t remember seeing any puppies and dreamy, romantic kisses in the trailer, just guns and thugs. You were warned.

Prior to going to the theater, we ran into someone else who was disturbed by the film. She called it misogynistic. She must have had her eyes closed during the Big Fat Kill sequence, when the prostitutes stand up for themselves and do what they must to ensure that they stay free of mob influence, free of abusive pimps and free of the cops. There are more independent, strong female characters in Sin City than in a half dozen Hollywood movies put together, but for some reason, this person couldn’t get past the surface of the prostitutes and thugs to really get the story. It’s all about loyalty to one’s friends, standing up for yourself in the face of certain doom and doing what you think is right, even if it’s confused and uncertain. Marv’s actions are brutal, but noble. They are a scream of defiance at an unjust world. Sure, Dwight’s a killer and Miho’d sooner slice your balls off than say hello. But when they’re fighting against cannibals, pedophiles and serial killers, you root for them anyway. Because they may not be pretty but they’re still better than the real bad guys, the crooked cops, flesh-eating priests and sick, twisted psycho offspring of senators. Complaining that Sin City is too violent is like saying Sense and Sensibility is too Victorian. That’s just the setting, folks. Sometimes the heros don’t wear white hats and aren’t rich and nice. I know this flies in the face of American Mythology, where the rich, well dressed people are good and the dirty drunks and whores are bad. But this is Sin City. Things are different here.