probabilityfields

Okay so you’re on the classic game show Let’s Make A Deal, and Monty Hall shows you three doors. Behind one of those doors is a NEW CAR! But behind each of the other two doors is a stinky goat. So you pick Door Number 1.

But wait, Monty says he will reveal one of goats behind one of the other two doors. He opens Door Number 3 and there it is, stinking of piss and feta. So now you’re left with two doors, and Monty gives you the option to switch doors (much like Howie Mandel does today).

So…do you switch? Does it matter? The odds are 1 in 3 no matter what, right? Might as well keep Door Number 1. Well, you’re wrong and now you’re the proud owner of a stinky goat. In fact the odds are 1 in 3 if you don’t switch, but they improve to 2 in 3 if you switch.

Think of it this way, if you picked the car first, then switching would get you a goat. But if you picked a goat, then switching would get you a car. There’s a 1 in 3 chance of picking the car first (losing), and a 2 in 3 chance of picking the goat first (winning).

The New York Times let’s you play the game and gives a wonderful graphic explanation here.

They played V for Vendetta on HBO tonight and I got back from a night of drinking just in time to catch it. I’d seen it twice before. Both times at the Alamo Draft House in Austin and both times I was probably more intoxicated than I am now. So three viewings combined with slightly lower BAC can comprise a ’sober’ analysis, I say.

So I’ll start off by saying that I enjoyed my first two viewings. Mostly because Natalie Portman is so pretty, the beer was so good, my friends were so fun, and V paraphrased Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance it’s not a revolution” (I love that line)…and the movie had some good parts. Specifically, the exploding buildings were wonderful. V conducts a recording of a well-known piece of music whose name I can’t remember (get used to it) as the Bailey, in a perfect phallic image, explodes.

The Wachowski brothers are known for quoting fashionable philosophers (The Matrix: “Welcome to the desert of the real” [Baudrillard said it before Morpheus]). The orgasmic-orchestral explosion of the Bailey recalls the quote by an art-intellectual-whose-name-escapes-me that said something about the 9/11 attacks being a wonderful performance.

And I’d have to agree. I saw it on TV. It was amazing. A giant plane hit the first tower like only Hollywood’s biggest budget could wet-dream-of. Then the cameras were there, wishing they’d been able to capture such a spectacle. But sure enough, we’ve got another tower, and another plane: perfect! An instant replay! The media should have thanked them for their foresight. Osama should have taken over Paramount.

Back to the film: the Bailey blows up. Then we get the suggestion that blowing up a building can change the world.

“Oooooooh.”

But this is different from 9/11: V is a good guy. And after seeing some policemen try to rape poor Natalie, we want to blow the goddamn building up with him. And the innocent lives lost? Well, we can assume that no one was inside the Bailey. Kind of like the even-better-music-video-explosion-ending of the pre-9/11 Fight Club.

CUE: Pixies “Where is my Mind”

So yeah, I cheered when the buildings exploded, assured that no lives were lost, that this battle was fought between symbols: a mask and an edifice. Wow, if that were what life was like. Unfortunately, it’s not. People die, or get maimed, survive guilty and alone, walk around with ounces of ash in their lungs and die slower. (And yet the destruction of symbols is still the primary goal.)

So yeah, back to Tarantino: remember the scene in Pulp Fiction where QT does a terrible job of acting and he complains to Samuel L. Jackson that his house doesn’t have a sign out front that says ‘Dead Nigger Storage.’ Holy crap, how powerful is that scene? It’s amazing. A suburban middle class white male who’s afraid of his wife’s wrath gets to say the dreaded N-word in front of a black man with a ‘fro and a gun! Awesome!

The ultimate white man fantasy: to be cool enough to say nigger in front of a tough black guy.

And V for Vendetta is the post-9/11 white man fantasy where we get to blow up buildings like radical Islamists, only no one dies that doesn’t truly deserve it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there weren’t any poor or brown or black people and us white guys could just have another bourgeois revolution?

Then again, perhaps there’s some universal element here that can show us how we’re deep down all the same and that we should learn to love and accept each other. Sure, but I believe that anyway.

My biggest problem with V for Vendetta’s plot is that the mask becomes a man, falls in love, dies, but still succeeds. I think that once the mask became a man he should have died and failed. And that the masses with masks should have run amok and raped and pillaged the country. That would have certainly been truer to history. The whole film pivots on the relations between individual/ideology, individual/society, and ideology/society. But it failed tragically because it glossed over the bad parts with clean and spectacular destructions of people and things a la The Count of Monte Cristo. In these ways, it was maybe the worst embodiment of film: projection of the fantasies of white middle class men.

Despite all this, the Wachowski brothers have proved that they can make amazing films. And even by painting morality in broad strokes you can do some good. Obviously The Matrix made people think about the moral consequences of the media, and V has some great anti-Bush comedy and a pro-gay rights mini love story. But for the Wachowskis the phrase ‘grand scale’ only means ’special effects.’

I’ll end it with a quote from the great Roger Ebert, “To attempt a parable about terrorism and totalitarianism that would be relevant and readable might be impossible, could be dangerous and would probably not be box office.” I think V falls somewhere in the middle of all of these.

P.S. My more astute readers might question my use of the n-word in the title, obviously placed there to be edgy. My answer would be that only my friends read this blog, and that anyway it’s just a cry for help for anyone to tell me why I shouldn’t ever use that word.

There was an article in Slate a while back discussing the uber-hipness of the Gieco auto insurance spokescavemen: ‘They have poetry magnets on their fridge(sic)…in Esperanto.’ The article specifically called out the commercial with the caveman in the airport on a moving sidewalk with his velvet tracksuit and tennis racket that looked like they came–I was gonna say ‘from 1968,’ but the article said, ‘from a Wes Anderson set.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah! Cool,’ because I freakin’ love Wes Anderson.

Flash forward to tonight when The Last Boy Scout comes on and for no reason I notice the absence of cell phones. Then I imagine if they did have a cell phone how hilarious it would look: Bruce Willis holding up a beige brick with an antenna.

Being a hotshot writer/director/producer, I made a note: never include current technology in a movie because it’ll be dated and it won’t be charming; it’ll be corny. Obviously Wes Anderson knew this, if only instinctually, and thus littered his films with anachronistic accoutrements.

If I may restate the obvious, we live in an age where technology moves so fast that the past looks ridiculous. Sure, we laugh when we think about bell bottoms or powdered wigs, and we cringe when we see that pic of our ducktail from 1986 or that video of us doing the Macarena. But the difference is that today we record everyday life so much in photos or videos that we are surrounded by representations of ourselves from only months, days, or hours ago.

So now a paranoia has set in and we avoid trends like the plague, except we fall into a new, safe trend: vintage. We take an old Bon Jovi shirt from Goodwill (more likely Target) and wear it proudly, not because we like Bon Jovi, but because we can make fun of everyone who used to sincerely like his music. It’s sad really. It’s like making fun of love because you’re too scared of getting hurt. (Did you read that sincerely, or with an ironic affectation?)

Of course there’s another, more innocent side to this all: nostalgia. And what are we nostalgic for? I’d venture to guess that in our lonely moments we clutch that original pressing of The Dave Clark Five across our vintage-T-shirt-clad chests and we cry for an imagined past when you could sincerely feel or be something without being bombarded by media, whether commercial or personal, like a funhouse mirror floating three feet in front of us at all times to make us feel like morons.

It’s not the robuts in movies like “The Terminator” or “I, Robut” or “The Matrix” that are evil. Some would say that they can neither be good nor evil because they only do what they’re programmed to do. But I’m inclined to say that when they’re good (bringing us orange juice and saving children) they’re great, and even when they’re bad (destroying the human race) they still serve a purpose.

You see, the robut is the epitome of Enlightenment thinking, the idea that rationality holds the key to peace and happiness on Earth. When Kant said, in not so few and small words, don’t do anything that you wouldn’t hold up as a universal law, he was basically speaking Robut, a language of simple and rational conclusions designed to make the world a better place.

In the aforementioned films a problem usually arises when the robuts come to the impeccably rational conclusion that humans should be destroyed. At this point in the movie we’re forced to face the fact that as a species we pollute, murder, make war and a whole bunch of other stuff that sex, art and religion couldn’t possibly make up for. It’s no accident that the robuts in these movies usually appear as grotesque replications of ourselves. The robut is an extension of human consciousness, pointing out our uselessness, and threatening the quick fix solution.

Had we been able to come to this conclusion ourselves we would have most likely descended into a suicidal orgy. But as attractive as that sounds, it’s simply not an option for most people. So, in spite of this perennial aporia, these movies usually end with a triumph of the human spirit.

But what is the human spirit? Certainly more than the mere will to go on living knowing that your existence is a plague on the world. Against cold rationality, the human spirit welcomes multiplicity and mystery. It suggests that the robut jumped off Kant’s bus too soon, and proudly sports the old cliche that it’s the journey, not the destination.

The evil robut is a mirror in which we first see our vile and corrupt nature, but come to see the beauty of our spirit.