In Defense of Star Wars Special Edition or: Between being cut in half and being beaten, I'll take a beating

Today, there has been incredible surge of energy and excitement over the tradition finals week Star Wars Marathon. That's because this time the movies are being shown on VHS and not the Special Edition DVD. People were excited for seeing Star Wars "as it was originally intended to be"

To be fair, I'm not a Star Wars Geek. While watching The Empire Strikes Back today, I felt like an anthropologist watching an intense ritual and spiritual manifestation quite foreign to me. I never had any of the reference books and know no random trivia. My first encounter with Star Wars was the special edition rerelease in theaters, when I was ten years old. My dad, who is of the Star Wars-broke-movies persuasion, had the same face throughout the three movies as he did when he took my family to Disneyland. While, in retrospect, I more than agree with him on the latter, I broke with him on Star Wars. While my theatrical instinct tells me to dismiss Star Wars, my film instinct jumps in and embraces it. Like no other movie before had it gone so far in developing a gorgeous, intensely detailed framing on nearly every shot. Not even Lord of the Rings, with 25 years of technological superiority, could match the detail and aesthetic glory of the original Star Wars trilogy. Where I part with the Star Wars devotees is thata pan-and-scan VHS copy that disrupts the framing is worth the sacrifice for two lines of dialogue and a couple of unfortunate cameos.

The reason I prefer the Star Wars trilogy to Lord of the Rings and, albeit in a much more extreme sense, the new Star Wars trilogy, is that the original Star Wars world was unrivaled in imperfection. This world is grimy, swampy, full of dirt and haze, and serves as a startling reminder that the universe we always imagined can be as dissapointing, and perhaps even more so, to the universe we know. While CGI can do things that no analog effect can possibly do, it is far too glossy and perfect to suggest anything like this, which to me is the primary reason why the new trilogy pails in comparison. Watching the original trilogy ona VHS however, reminded me of this, as the movie felt much more condensed and tighter, as if the film was permanently caught in the Death Star sewage system. The dark, icky world became distorted and rounded to the point where it was to fluffy too suggest sinister motifs. While this is bad in almost any movie, it is particularly egregious in the Star Wars movies, most of all Empire. While I'm more fond of Return of the Jedi than most (for me, the lush, tribal mis-en-scène overpowers the Stormtroopers inability to blast Ewoks), I could not stand to see them do to that world what they did to Empire's. I even missed the most notorious pan & scan in A New Hope, where at the final scene, in what's supposed to be a grand, all encompassing commemoration of the honor of all those involved, the camera swoops across the shot so fast that it's not even possible to assess just how much damage pan & scan has done.

To be fair, this was my first experience with the movies outside of Episode 4 not in theaters or on widescreen DVD. It was also the first time seeing any of the movies before takinga film class, before which I had almost never heard of pan and scan, and didn't understand the values of the film's shots that has made critics so reluctant to dismiss the Star Wars trilogy despite their implications. While Hayden Christianson at the end of Jedi and primitive Jabba are wrenching fallacies, seeing the "original" Star Wars put a new light on the recent DVDs. For the past twenty years it has seemed that George Lucas cannot make a good decision (or at least a good artistic decision, for his economic decisions have literally paid off quite nicely). But perhaps the best decision he has made was to wait on the release of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD until the technology was properly developed for the extravagant wonder of Star Wars . The DVD's, Hayden Christianson or no Hayden Christianson, were remarkably gorgeous, as dreary as the film required, and even more jubilantly mystical in the light than previously imagined, especially in Cloud City. While the TV in the rec room of Hithcock is by no means a marvel of digital techology, the image was a sharp as it had ever been, and more than made up for the TV's rounded edges.

I suppose the main difference between my view and that of the fanatic is the values we place on the movies. Fanatics love the movies for the world it creates; I love them for how it creates that world. In reality, all movies create an intensely detailed world, it happens that, in this world, the detail is publicized and glorified like few other films. While I recognize that the plot and character development in the Star Wars trilogy is almost unrivaled in previous and subsequent epics, the narrative is nothing compared to that of the critically heralded movies of its time (Empire, for instance is child's play in terms of narrative and character in comparison to the other masterpiece of 1980, Raging Bull). The restrained beauty, balanced with the murkiness, is more brilliant than any monologue on the balance of the Force. Seeing that world altered frustrates me more than a bad actor ever could.

The Maroon's version of my review of Him

I thought the copy editing was acceptable for this review, so I am posting the version as published on the Maroon website. I feel the title they gave it was amazing:

Poet cummings marries—and divorces—art and reality in sole full-length play

For just about anyone, e.e. cummings can initially seem utterly indecipherable. While those who know better do not to judge his work on this superficial level, it is easy to see how, for some people, cummings represents the worst excess of poetry—a random string of words with no substance. Upon further inspection, however, a method appears to drive his madness: Cummings’s work is characterized by bold verbal and syntactical experimentation, innovative political and social criticism, and a desire to reveal the deeper layers of society. While poetry allows an almost unparalleled level of freedom in writing, playwriting is different; every line in a play must have a purpose, and the audience must be kept constantly engaged. Cummings, it would seem, is the antithetical playwright. Accordingly, Him, his only full-length play, is so rarely performed because it is almost impossible to produce. Despite this, Him is one of the 20th century’s most direct and self-sacrificing explorations of the nature of artistic thought, much more so than even cummings’s poetry. For that matter, the Viaduct Theater Company made one of the bravest theatrical decision in recent memory when it chose to revive the play. And, to the best of their ability, they’ve nailed it.

Cummings demonstrated an anachronistic ability to explore the avant-garde. Featuring impossible characters, absurdist dialogue, and perplexing vaudevillian music, Him, like cummings’s poetry, simply cannot be viewed at face value. There are many subtle themes that lend the play continuity. These include an exploration of the problems that plague relationships (partly autobiographical, the play features a frustrated wife of uncertain fidelity); criticisms of capitalism, fascism, and apathy; and the perils of reconciling art with real life. Refusing to give in to the standards of his time, cummings takes a more aesthetic and unique approach to these problems. He had a fascination with so-called “low art”—the flier for Him declares, “Damn everything but the circus!”—yet he was also a brilliant verbalist. Cummings couldn’t have constructed a sentence that wasn’t beautiful if he had tried. This peculiar disparity is utilized masterfully in Him, creating thematic and linguistic eclecticism. Scenes are, at various times, poetic, eccentric, raunchy, experimental, comical, and absurd; but they are never conventional. Yet for all this variety, the play is surprisingly well balanced. This is largely due to director Whitney Blakemore’s extensive cuts. Although it is a shame to think of what is not said in a play like this, the result is a version of the play that is much more approachable than the one cummings provided or intended.

Productive cutting is just one of the many aspects of the Viaduct Theater Company’s consistently brilliant production. All levels of the production work stunningly together—Robert Whitaker’s inspired set design, Rich Peterson and Heather Graff’s complexly layered lighting, Allison Siple’s absurdly masterful costume design, and eerie Chicago vaudeville blues. If the production weren’t top notch, not only would the play be impossible to watch, it would be impossible to perform.

While not as strong as the tech crew, the cast is still quite impressive. Each actor seems perfectly cast, delivering lines flawlessly, although they had not quite memorized their lines as of the preview performance. Each cast member looks appropriately spooky and circus-like, except Him and Me (David Shultz and Julia Siple, respectively), the characters apparently based on cummings and his second wife, who form the narrative core of the play. While plot is obviously not the focus of Him, Him and They do provide the play with much needed continuity, and, despite cummings’s trademark whimsical dialogue, they manage to play the scenes as straightforwardly as possible. This controlled technique helps to underscore the contrast between the real world and the world of the play.

This contrast proves to be extremely essential to the larger motifs of the play. Like perhaps no one since Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, cummings extensively explored the boundary between the world of art and the world we, as humans, actually live in. Cummings had the advantage of working under the auspices of modernism, Freudian psychology, and the history of an enormous war that challenged people’s view of society. One of the main points of the play is that despite the fact that the art world is more beautiful and appealing than ours, the two cannot coexist. Furthermore, those focused on the world of art will, by nature, have problems existing in the real world. Despite recognizing this problem, and warning against it, cummings can’t help backsliding into such inadvisable behavior, and the paltry audience at the Viaduct’s production (the actors outnumbered audience members in Friday’s production) demonstrates the public’s aversion to such indulgence. Yet, for anyone who wants an aesthetic, rich, and incomparable view of the nature of art and life, the Viaduct’s production of Him is an absolute must, one of the highlights of this spring’s Chicago theater season.

On the Sciences-Liberal Arts dichotomy at the U of C

Posted Tuesday on my live journal, with editing and additions

Last week was devoted almost exclusively to writing a paper for my Sciences of the Mind class. It was probably the only 10 day period all year where I didn't have a problem set or a lab report hanging over my head (unfortunately, I had a midterm in chemistry on Wednesday that cancelled this trend). In this time, my level of academic functioning was devoted almost exclusively to historical analysis, creative thinking, and writing coherently. I worked just as hard as I have in the sciences, in fact even harder, but I was extremely satisfied with the result, and only wish I could have worked on it more.

After that, I ended my hiatus from science and went back to studying chemistry. About an hour ago I had my chemistry discussion section. In the discussion, there were students antagonizing and yelling at the TA for explaining a concept poor to the point they were almost abusive. People walked out of the discussion section after he explained one of the many concepts just about 10 minutes after the discussion, and was reminded of the ongoing feud between the students in my class and my chemistry professor over the material covered on the midterm, which has also been somewhat abusive. In another example of mutual abuse between Chemistry teachers and students, the lab director and professor, despite dozens of requests from students, refuse to post solutions to past midterms online, but insist that they still post them (in fact they only post the first two) in the Chemistry builidng. Not only does this assume that students do most of their studying in the Chemistry building, it leads to overzealous students bringing cameras and taking pictures of the wall where the exams are posted. Not even in the excesses of grade-grubbing in high school have I seen both students and teachers go to such ridiculous lengths

I have begun to realize: is this really the way my classes have been functioning? With these people who have almost no academic insight or curiosity but abuse, cheat and force their way to success? Have I really been functioning in this manner all year?

I began to think of last quarter, when I was in chem, bio and Greek Thought and Lit. Theoretically, no one could have been born in the past 2000 years, and my education in the winter would not have changed. While I loved Greek Thought and Lit to no end, it was consistently overpowered by the other two monstrosities of classes, and it affected my intellectual and creative thought. I noticed that, beginning towards the end of the fall and continuing until the middle of this quarter, when I began writing more again, my reviews for the Maroon and my creative writing (playwriting, free writing, lj entries, etc.) began to become less expressive, less interesting, and less rigorous. I felt constantly that my creative thinking had been sapped, and lamented about how I was not at my academic peak like I was my senior year. After this experience, it's quite obvious that my misguided decision to immerse myself in science was at the core of all this, and my abilities in the humanities and social sciences, which had been the core of my modes of academic thought throughout my life, were being profoundly ignored.

The worst part about this is, the fact that I had been clinging on to my creative tendencies has actually hurt my performance in the sciences. The reason I got a C+ in bio last quarter, and the reason that I'll probably take psyc pass/fail this quarter, is that on midterms, which call for short responses, I've responded in prose-like fashion. I didn't realize this was a problem until I went to my psyc TA last week to go over my abysmal grade, and he pointed out that I should instead, be writing bland, to the point definitions in bullet-point format. Among the other causes, he pointed out that all the TA's who were grading were not native-English speakers, and that my lack of neatness, neatness that is inversely related to my passion of writing, was confusing. While Pascal is amazing and has been a huge help, it only confirmed that my tendencies as a writer will hold me back in the sciences. While I do have some level of scientific creativity, it has not been aspoused by intro classes with no fewer than 60 students and as many as 300, and probably won't be until I take the second part of the AP 5 sequence next spring.

This means a lot to me. I am still profoundly interested in the questions science asks and the method it seeks to answer those questions, but it seems that the majority of people who pursue the path those questions require don't think the same way. That's why I love with the History of Science program here, and while I feel like sometimes the program can be excessively hostile to sciences (though in most cases, it's at least somewhat deserved), it maintains my interest in sciences while continuing to facilitate my writing and historical analysis sensibilities. It means that, unlike what I was previously considering, there's no way in hell I'm taking O-Chem, as the things I find unacceptable about Gen Chem will only be amplified in O-Chem. For the upper-level science class required for HIPS, I will instead take the neuroscience sequence which, while still presenting the same problems as my other science classes, will be more directed to my interests and intellectually stimulating. I still may take 130s Physics, since I feel like I haven't been fair to physics and it will be much more intriguing and bearable after Chemistry, and won't be too infested with pre-meds like 120s is.

Nonetheless, I shouldn't let my experiences this year ruin sciences for me. As people have suggested to me, quite fairly, I am too quick to create a dichotomy between sciences and writing. The trick for me in the upcoming three years will be finding a way to channel my abilities in both fields in a way that keeps both interests active while maximizing my concentration and thinking in both aspects of my life. I must also learn to ignore the problems of the people around me in my pursuit of science, something very hard to do in beginning science classes where your ability seems to be solely based on your relationship to other people's abilities. Part of the reason I was so quick to denounce the sciences is that I feel curving tests with a class of over 50 students practically accepts that the faculty doesn't care about the individual, while paper grades are more oriented towards an individual's strengths and weaknesses, even if it's a large class where TA's spend no more than half an hour per essay. Sciences like to see themselves as filtering out the not-as-bright with large intro classes, which in and of itself is elitist, and they don't seem to realize that along the way the tend to filter out individuality as well. I feel like I've learned so much in my sciences classes, despite the large lecture classes and essentially incompetant TA's, yet the intro science classes don't seem to teach rigor in terms of creativity, only rigor in terms of studying for intro science classes.

Mathematics is a noticeable exception, as mathematical creativity is fostered even in the standard 150's calculus classes. I personally think the design of the math department is phenomenal, and while I am no more fit to take Analysis in Rn than I am to fly, I appreciate the kind of thinking that goes into mathematics here that, in many ways, borders as much on Philosophy as it does science. My only problems with mathematicians here is there arrogance behind their field. Perhaps this comes from living in Hitchcock, but I've noticed that most mathematicians feel like Math is what goes on behind everything, that everything in life can be explained in mathematical terms, that math is the highest up on the scientific and academic food chain, and that people not in mathematics are not as intellectually gifted.

While I can certainly understand how a mathematician would be susceptible to such a claim, there are huge, egregious problems with such a claim. For starters, mathematical platonism is no more philosophically legitimate than Cartesian dualism. To suggest that mathematical reality exists outside of human reality ignores the fact that it is only humans who have perceived that so called reality, and that, in other cultures, perceptions of mathematical reality is quite different and much more flexible. Another noticeable problem is that mathematicians overemphasize the role of mathematics in academia. While it is true that the physical sciences, and increasingly the biological sciences, could not exist as we know them without mathematics, that doesn't mean that fields in the sciences that don't require thorough mathematical knowledge aren't equally viable. Furthermore, while it is certianly acceptable to say that mathematics has a role in the social sciences and humanities, in most cases that role ignores the larger issues that are more relevant. While it may be possible, for instance to break down Hamlet's motivations first in terms of psychology then in biology then in chemistry than in physics then in mathematics, doing so would miss the issues relevant to intensive literary criticism. And while mathematicians make amazing progress in rational thought, they often forget the mounting evidence that, for the most part, human minds are not designed to be entirely rational. Mathematics is not the only field to have this misperception (Economics being the other obvious offender), but they use the claim of supreme rationality as fuel to promote their superiority.

The attitude academics must take, which goes for the humanities as well as the sciences, is that no major academic field is illegitmate. A field may not be fully developed, and there may be problems with their methodology, but the questions each field asks and the type of thought they encourage is just as viable as any other field. Physicists and Mathematicians often ignore that the social sciences have not been around as long as the so called "hard sciences" have, and that, given the time to grow, they can come up with just as many revolutionary ideas as Newtonian mechanics, Einstein's relativity, or Dedekind reals. All fields must recognize, and attempt to surpass, the role of bias in the establishment of their fields. While that task is too great for any field to accomplish, and in fact will most likely never be achieved, it is something every field, from Physics to Film Studies, must struggle with for the entirety of their existence.

Officialy Starting for the Summer

Now that classes in my torrential first year are over, I will officially start keeping up Tynan's Anger, posting reviews, rants about the arts and arts at the U of C, creative writing, people profiles, responses to the media, and anything else that I deem necessary tonight. I will make three posts in the upcoming week: the first will be my recent livejournal post about writing versus science classes in my first year at the U of C The second will be my review of Electra, the finale to UT's Spring 2005 Season. The last will be my review from the Maroon of one of the highlights of Chicago Theater this spring, the Viaduct Theater's production of e.e. cummings only full-length play, Him. If I find the copy editing of the Maroon's version unsatisfactory, which I do for nearly everything I write for them, I will publish my original version.

Three finals next week means it will be pretty sparse for arts entries, but I will nonetheless post once I get back to New York regarding how I feel about the outcome of my first year and what it means for my perception of the arts at Chicago.

Look for a post later tonight. Until then, cheers from 10th week at the University of Chicago