Did you know that Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut was the movie version of a German story called Traumnovelle (Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, or also known simply as Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler? The book was even made into a movie in 1969 and is free on Youtube. Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is a near identical re-creation with some updated scenes but same themes.
If you want to read the original book, it’s available for free.
Perhaps you have seen the fantastic series Chernobyl. One of my favorite parts was the ending when Valery Legasov gives this amazing speech. His summary on the cause of the Chernobyl disaster? Lies.
This scene is a clear reference to the Soviet reformer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s amazing “Live Not by Lies“. It was published the day he was arrested and exiled in 1974. In it he exhorts his fellow Soviet citizens to no longer cooperate with the Soviet regime’s lies. It’s a very quick read and definitely worth it.
When violence [the various bloody Socialist Revolutions] bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!
Solzhentsyn
In just 50 years, Solzhentsyn saw how Socialist revolutionaries went from utopian idealism of collective support and ownership by the workers into one of the worst police states in history. One that killed millions of its own citizens. It was a regime that carefully crafted and brutally imposed lies. After the revolutions, the regime quickly changed narratives, erased (canceled) their own revolutionary leaders/party members, and carefully controlled the reporting of every story.
Yet Solzhentsyn was right. Despite a regime that had unlimited control to silence any dissenting voice, in just 14 short years the entire Soviet regime collapsed. Lenin’s grand experiment of Socialism barely lasted 65 years (1923 – 1988). Brought down in large part by a policy of lies.
So what does it mean to live by truth instead?
Truth used to be a simple concept that has been engrained in everything from the court systems to the scientific method. For centuries, all thought was based on the notion one found truth through careful investigation, experimentation, and repeatable work. Truth is universal – others can do that same experiments, investigation, and come to the same answers regardless of who did them, where, or when.
In the US over the last 5 years or so, there is a growing problem with echo chambers and false news. Instead of truth, echo chambers and fake news simply reflect what we want to hear and feeds emotional outrage instead of thought.
How does this slow progression happen? Instead of actually believing that truth is universal – something that can and will stand on it’s own no matter what is thrown at it – we now have come up with the idea of telling ‘our truth‘. ‘Our truth’ is philosophically little more than opinion and all too often collapses in the face of any real science, examination, or facts. This position about truth lets us avoid thinking critically about our own position nor engage in the charitable and necessary hard work of dialoging and debating our viewpoints with opponents so that real truth can be found by all. This notion of proving and debating what we believe is true is the core of scientific discovery and any democracy. Without that, we live under the oppression of whomever is most willing to enforce their views. History shows us this happens both with progressive (Russian/Chinese/North Korean socialist revolutions) and conservative (Fascist) movements.
Solzhentsyn points out what happens next with this kind of thinking. Violence. We now are going down that road with growing US domestic terrorism. Instead of simply fixing corruption or prosecuting bad actors, we have juvenile calls to throw away the notion of truth and replace it with…well, violence. Once relegated to compound dwelling militants, we now see activists of many stripes openly encouraging people to use violence to impose their ideas on others WITHOUT public debate or discourse. Ironically, it is increasingly being seen in left-leaning quarters that previously called themselves progressive and enlightened. Fringe groups like Antifa call themselves anti-fascists while threatening violence and following exactly the kind of views that actual Fascists believe.
Example: this congressional hearing where representative Nancy Mace grills activist Alejandra Caraballo on her Twitter posts. It is a perfect example of what we are increasingly seeing today from activists who are promoting the same ‘self-assured’ violence Solzhentsyn talks about.
Many now choose to believe lies even when those lies fly in the face of science – such as proven environmental or biological science. But reality doesn’t care about your opinion – it exists outside ourselves. If you choose not to wear your seatbelt because you don’t believe in them – the physics of a car crash will correct you. If you choose to ignore vaccinations, changing environmental conditions, or deny your chromosomal makeup – your viruses, storms and your biology will exert themselves no matter what you want to believe is true.
Some lies only hurt ourselves or do injuries to another’s reputation. Chernobyl shows, however, even seemingly simple lies can also cause disastrous consequences. The Soviet Union showed that millions can die and even with complete control and absolute power, it could not stand for more than 65 years based on violence and lies. What began as a utopian experiment became one of the most brutal and murderous forms of government in all of human history – because of lies.
Yet, each of these horrors also showed us that truth always wins. In the end, you are not fighting ‘them’ – you are fighting the truth.
When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there.
But it is still there.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
For the Christian, this is nothing new. Christians went from being a tiny, fringe oppressed group in the Roman empire to completely conquering it in just 300 years – without a single battle. They did this simply by living the Truth. What is the real Truth? It’s the Truth that has lasted longer than every country, government, culture, company, and civilization since it entered the world. It’s the teachings of and relationship with Christ. Unlike the notion of ‘our truth’, Jesus promises us that living as He taught and living daily with Him is real Truth – Truth that is the same today, yesterday, and always. Truth that has overthrown and outlasted the most powerful rulers and kingdoms in the world. If you wish to live in universal and eternal truth, then live by the author of Truth.
Live not by lies. Let the rule of lies hold not through me.
Amazon Studios has a new 34,000-square-foot virtual production stage in Culver City. Well, maybe not new. It’s the historic Stage 15, built in 1940 was once home to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Robocop”.
Like other projects that have traded the problems of green screens for much better filming alternatives, Stage 15 has been revamped with a wall of more than 3,000 LED panels and motion capture cameras that re-create the outside world indoors. It allow actors to interact with the environment rather than pretend in front of a green screen.
These are the deeds that pass with us to eternity. Helping another man when he is at his lowest point is a sign of a true man.
‘Les Tontons flingueurs‘ doesn’t seem to have the first clue how silencers sound – or even how guns work. Many claim this was done on purpose and it’s a well known comedy scene. Still, there’s some real laughs in the youtube comments.
After starting out like any other Yule Log video with cheery music playing over a warmly lit fireplace for the first couple of minutes, the Adult Swim Yule Log special slowly devolves into the story of a young couple that fall prey to a series of disturbing and increasingly strange circumstances while spending the holidays in a remote cabin.
The special actually marks the feature-length debut of Casper Kelly, who has shown his mastery of subversively creepy comedy with the likes of a Blair Witch Project parody starring Mystery Inc., called The Scooby-Doo Project and, most famously, the hilarious and horrifying 2014 short film, Too Many Cooks.
The filmmaker has also written for cartoons like CatDog, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, as well as co-created the live-action Adult Swim series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. One of his first contributions to more earnest horror was in the 2018 movie Mandy where he crafted the bizarre in-universe commercial for a branch of mac-and-cheese called “Cheddar Goblin.”
You can watch the Adult Swim Yule Log (aka The Fireplace) on HBO Max or here:
https://www.adultswim.com/videos/specials/adult-swim-yule-log
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Like it or not, AI generated art is here to stay. TheArtofAI used the generative image technology to imagine what Star Wars: A New Hope might have looked like as a 1980s anime.
If you want to read some epic nut-ball theories that put the average tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to shame, you don’t need to go much further than the average Stanley Kubrick movie analyst.
There’s a lot of modern movie critics out there that believe that movies can mean whatever you want them to mean – and boy do people make some tenuous connections. While relativist interpretations are the most popular logical fallacy in our post-truth world, I would argue that approach is nonsense – and now we have a little more proof from a director most often cited by critics as supporting their nutty interpretations.
Stanley Kubrick’s movies are often multilayered and difficult to comprehend, but it turns out he absolutely did have a message for each of these movies. He does, however, say that he is reluctant to reveal his interpretation: “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas, they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized, one feels it.” That part I very much get. The experience of something is far different than logically thinking about it.
So what were his intended meanings?
The meaning of the ending of 2001 – This one is NOT hard to interpret. Why? Because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book the movie was made from and very clearly lays out what is going on visually. Personally, I think a lot of the reason the movie 2001 was so confusing was due to effects limitations Kubrick struggled under. I bet we could re-do the gate transport sequence today and make it much more amazing and clear what’s going on. But anyway, here’s what Kubrick said about the ending of 2001:
“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities — creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form, and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.
“And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so inaccurate, because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure what to do in zoos, with animals, to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. And anyway, when they get finished with them, as happens in so many myths, of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being sent back to Earth. You know, transformed and made into some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is a pattern of a great deal of mythology. And that was what we’re trying to suggest.”
The ending of the Shining:
“Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle where he is part of the hotel’s history. Just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the ghost of the former caretaker who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.’ One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of evil reincarnation, and also — well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain.”
But you don’t have to take my word for it, we have it recorded from Kubrick’s own lips:
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Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.
Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.
These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.
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Disney published this paper about using AI to digitally age and de-age actors in a fraction of the time it usually takes for normal frame-by-frame manual aging techniques used today.
FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background. Using synthetically generated training data is a method that’s been utilized for things like training self-driving cars to handle situations that aren’t easily reproducible.
The age changes are then added/merge onto the face. It appears this approach fixes a lot of the issues common in this kind of approach: facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. It does have some issues with greying hair and aging very young actors, but produces results better than techniques used just a few years ago (not that the bar was very hard to beat).
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