It's not a good sign for a movie when on its opening night, in one of the largest theaters in San Francisco, it's playing in the half-sized theater, usually where they put either the modest rom-coms, or the films that are in the geriatric phase of their run. Given that the word is they spent $200 million, and given my soft spot for popcorn films, it feels like seeing the lemonade stand with the hand made sign, and an eager toe-head kid looking up and down the street, hopeful. I mean, what do you expect--it's lemonade made by a child.
I won't go much into the story, but it's like this: there's a self-centered protagonist, he has the chance to lead a warship against aliens called in by the liberal scientists, triumphs by banding together with a former enemy, gets the girl, learning something about his own ability and the value of teamwork.
Formula. That's what these movies do. I just scanned through the reviews and the dominant sentiment is that the film is "stupid, crass, and loud." Wrong. These films are like Shakespeare productions: they're not about the text or structure, they're about the elements, framing, and flourishes. The play, like the formula, is set, and it's the interpretation and engagement with those set structures that makes the fun. For the smarter directors, they're like the Lars von Trier's film "The Five Obstructions," in which von Trier sets up arbitrary structural constrictions for his fellow director Jergen Leth to re-produce a film Leth had made decades earlier. (We won't get into what an evil bastard von Trier is...) The beauty and excitement is in the formal reenactment, not the underlying, mandated form.
| Differential development of human value structures make the use of force a necessary possibility throughout the spectrum of advancing integration. Also, I like explosions. |
So what we have in Battleship is certainly a "pro-military" film, but not one which is either fetishistic about war or strategically blind to the effects. The qualities it highlights and gives emotional weight to are those of individual integrity, intra-group cooperation, inter-group cooperation, and love of country (meaning, love of family, really). It also is sincere about appreciating the sacrifices of former generations, when it brings on the bunch of old codgers to crew the battleship Missouri. It doesn't get into the complexity of politics, and the politics and economics behind war, because although framed as a military virtue (lightly), "Battleship" emotionally draws forward the valor itself and leaves in the background the complexity of the expression of that valor within a war context. If one confuses the two--the quality and the formal and contextual expression--you are going to miss the emotional truth being presented.
And this truth is that: we humans are deeply, deeply wired to move towards and emphasize social bonding (see "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," by Cacioppo and Patrick), and we tell stories about what is important to us, and to our nervous systems, there's virtually nothing more important than the social. So in these terms, "Battleship" is, within the popcorn vernacular/formula, another instance of the culture reaffirming to itself the importance of social cohesion, sacrifice, and family.
Heather and I were talking about this point in reference to the system of Spiral Dynamics (as embedded in philosopher Ken Wilber's work), which is a developmental model of human value systems. In that model, the color blue represents the stage where values circle around conforming to an absolute/higher authority that provides structure and order. Fundamentalism is an expression, often reactionary and sometimes rancid, of what is an essential element of human development and cultural unfolding. We need blue values as the structural cohesiveness of a society; a society without order, isn't.
And even though on its surface "Battleship" looks like a piece of jingoism, which the U.S.Navy must have been very happy to participate in, it's not essentially a "blue" film. It's not saying the obedience to a higher authority is the measure of value in a life, even though it embraces sacrifice and protecting one's group. "Battleship" is what blue-level values look like when taken up by a much more (developmentally speaking) developed mind. It's not simply propaganda.
Rather, it implicitly believes in, and presents, a complex and more-or-less integrated set of values in which the individuality of members of a group is not suppressed in the service of the group, but rather in which the self needs are augmentative of, and augmenting to, the strength of the group. And as part of that, the strength of one group is seen as being dependent on its cooperation with, while respecting the integrity of, other groups (in this case, different nations, represented by the American protagonist and the Japanese antagonist who turns into co-protagonist). These are, again in Spiral Dynamics terms, orange and green values, being those that focus on individual success (orange) and the equality of individuals and groups (green). Go look at the Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nuremberg rally and compare the values side by side with those in Battleship. This is not jingoism, but rather a contextualizing of those blue values within higher levels of value.
It's in that sense that I can feel the warm flush of post-nationalism in such a film. Yes, it's the military, and there's huge problems in multiple dimensions with both the American military and militarism in general. But there's also the truth that, until there's a serum that up-levels all sentient beings to their highest potential--maybe what would happen if everyone watched all of Star Trek while being injected with Ken Wilber's blood--there's going to be divergent value systems, some of which are not going to be interested in resolving conflict through measured rationality, and a willingness to compromise. To avoid this truth is actually really, really dangerous, and not in the Bush area paranoia sense (the latest version of the commie under the bed phenomenon), but in the observable truth sense. This is what we have to all deal with; it's apparently part of the structure of the universe that sentience has to unfold in stages, and until that's changed, we're going to have conflict, and at the "conflict plane" there's going to be choices about how to resolve that conflict which will substantially be determined by value systems.
Thus, like it or not, force must not be taken off the table, at any level. At higher and higher levels of development, it takes on more and more sophisticated forms, in which the use of force is contextualized by intelligence, discrimination, and love. But, given the nature of development as expressed in human life, even at the higher levels, as Wilber puts it, "If you run into Hitler in a bar, you whack that boy [i.e., in the mafia sense]."
OK, aliens. I love-d the aliens! They are so meaty! The science is ridiculous, of course, but that's not the point. Again, what's going on here is genre: its work is to interpret and novelly present an existing narrative structure, not create a new wheel. The "aliens attack" subset of science fiction is tried and true, and it's the how you do it that counts. It's the costume choices that draw the eye and the "oohhhhs!", not the set dances of the ball.
Here, director Peter Berg (who did the won-der-ful film with The Rock, "The Rundown") chooses something that you don't see often, which is the space alien that you can image having to take a shit. There's no super-duper-high-tech energy forcy gizmo thingy (well, there is, but you can blow it up!), but rather flesh and blood and (alien) steel, and the aliens have to actually plug machines together! When do you ever get to see aliens having to do the shit-work of conquest?
There's actually an analogy here with film making. Have you ever made a film? I made a 10 minute film with my uber-friend James called "The Norwegian Draftsman," which we shot in one night on a single chip camera, and then spent months editing. There was one actor (to stretch that word), found props, on-hand equipment, a crew of one, no money, and it took us months to finish (albeit, with other things like jobs and wives soaking up time). Now, here's a $200 million production, probably five thousand workers all told ("The Lord of the Rings" had something like 25,000 workers throughout the whole production), with vast infrastructural needs and resources, and though the result is a seamless two hours of story telling, the shit-work that has to go on behind it to make it seamless is staggering. (As a crystalline example of this--though all the making-of material points to this--is the documentary of how a one minute sequence of the last Star Wars movie is made.) You hear films being compared by directors to going to war, and here you see it, that conquest of another species and planet requires tedious grunt work...like setting up an alternative communication system, using found parts, because some asshole didn't calculate the vectors properly and crashed your own unit into an alien satellite.
The aliens in "Battleship" have to live in the same meat world that we humans are stuck with (though, apparently, they have faster-than-light technology, because they get here in what seems like a few years, from 20 light years away, but we'll let that go...). Their ships are these clangy, bangy hulks, whose weaponry is as material as the bullets and rounds on the human navy vessels. When they shoot at their foes, they fire explosive canisters, not laser beams, and when they lunge and hulk around the ocean, they take time to move from one place to another. Just like us! And when they hit the satellite that notified them of our presence (why they can't navigate around an object the size of a semi-truck after flying through the galaxy of space crap, well, we'll let that go, too...), their ship does what it should as a constructed object. It breaks up into fiery debris and crashes into Hong Kong and elsewhere.
Then the aliens themselves, a humanoid species who does fine on Earth except the sun's a bit bright (their helmets act, essentially, as sunglasses), are fleshy, seemingly have emotions (there's a fist fight between one and our disabled Gulf War veteran), and are vulnerable. And apparently they're not just out for genocide, but rather are having trouble with their own planet, apparently some destructive war. Or maybe they conquer worlds, or something. Whatever. But the upshot is that they think and have motive. That's so great! And my favorite part is them setting up comm station on Oahu, having to schlepp in a bunch of alien tech units, and them connect them together with hoses that can be broken by a rampaging Jeep, and then have to scurry around semi-frantically trying to get them up and going again.
In other words, you can really identify with these guys, and their technology is not just at a similar level to ours, but actually functions on principles and rules that they are subject to. The comm machine gets fucked up by the natives, and you just have to deal with it. No near-magic tech here. It's bolts and couplings for these guys.
And that's true at the mental level, too. This is essentially a scout party, so they're not there to burn everything to the ground (again--read my past reviews--ground combat is a stupid way to destroy a culture of 7 billion beings, so go for the toxic mold, I swear it will work much better) but to gather information to beam back to their folk. Thus, they are on defensive status, and only destroy and kill in service of their mission. They're rational, not like the emotionally unbalanced aliens of so many films.
So, for all those reasons, that's why "Battleship" is not the drek that the reviewers say, and can be enjoyed and appreciated at multiple levels, not out of some prissy academic exegesis that's meant to get the professor's attention for either a good grade or getting laid, but because it's all actually there. Enjoy.
It's in that sense that I can feel the warm flush of post-nationalism in such a film. Yes, it's the military, and there's huge problems in multiple dimensions with both the American military and militarism in general. But there's also the truth that, until there's a serum that up-levels all sentient beings to their highest potential--maybe what would happen if everyone watched all of Star Trek while being injected with Ken Wilber's blood--there's going to be divergent value systems, some of which are not going to be interested in resolving conflict through measured rationality, and a willingness to compromise. To avoid this truth is actually really, really dangerous, and not in the Bush area paranoia sense (the latest version of the commie under the bed phenomenon), but in the observable truth sense. This is what we have to all deal with; it's apparently part of the structure of the universe that sentience has to unfold in stages, and until that's changed, we're going to have conflict, and at the "conflict plane" there's going to be choices about how to resolve that conflict which will substantially be determined by value systems.
Thus, like it or not, force must not be taken off the table, at any level. At higher and higher levels of development, it takes on more and more sophisticated forms, in which the use of force is contextualized by intelligence, discrimination, and love. But, given the nature of development as expressed in human life, even at the higher levels, as Wilber puts it, "If you run into Hitler in a bar, you whack that boy [i.e., in the mafia sense]."
| Meaty! |
Here, director Peter Berg (who did the won-der-ful film with The Rock, "The Rundown") chooses something that you don't see often, which is the space alien that you can image having to take a shit. There's no super-duper-high-tech energy forcy gizmo thingy (well, there is, but you can blow it up!), but rather flesh and blood and (alien) steel, and the aliens have to actually plug machines together! When do you ever get to see aliens having to do the shit-work of conquest?
There's actually an analogy here with film making. Have you ever made a film? I made a 10 minute film with my uber-friend James called "The Norwegian Draftsman," which we shot in one night on a single chip camera, and then spent months editing. There was one actor (to stretch that word), found props, on-hand equipment, a crew of one, no money, and it took us months to finish (albeit, with other things like jobs and wives soaking up time). Now, here's a $200 million production, probably five thousand workers all told ("The Lord of the Rings" had something like 25,000 workers throughout the whole production), with vast infrastructural needs and resources, and though the result is a seamless two hours of story telling, the shit-work that has to go on behind it to make it seamless is staggering. (As a crystalline example of this--though all the making-of material points to this--is the documentary of how a one minute sequence of the last Star Wars movie is made.) You hear films being compared by directors to going to war, and here you see it, that conquest of another species and planet requires tedious grunt work...like setting up an alternative communication system, using found parts, because some asshole didn't calculate the vectors properly and crashed your own unit into an alien satellite.
| Clanky and bangy! |
Then the aliens themselves, a humanoid species who does fine on Earth except the sun's a bit bright (their helmets act, essentially, as sunglasses), are fleshy, seemingly have emotions (there's a fist fight between one and our disabled Gulf War veteran), and are vulnerable. And apparently they're not just out for genocide, but rather are having trouble with their own planet, apparently some destructive war. Or maybe they conquer worlds, or something. Whatever. But the upshot is that they think and have motive. That's so great! And my favorite part is them setting up comm station on Oahu, having to schlepp in a bunch of alien tech units, and them connect them together with hoses that can be broken by a rampaging Jeep, and then have to scurry around semi-frantically trying to get them up and going again.
In other words, you can really identify with these guys, and their technology is not just at a similar level to ours, but actually functions on principles and rules that they are subject to. The comm machine gets fucked up by the natives, and you just have to deal with it. No near-magic tech here. It's bolts and couplings for these guys.
And that's true at the mental level, too. This is essentially a scout party, so they're not there to burn everything to the ground (again--read my past reviews--ground combat is a stupid way to destroy a culture of 7 billion beings, so go for the toxic mold, I swear it will work much better) but to gather information to beam back to their folk. Thus, they are on defensive status, and only destroy and kill in service of their mission. They're rational, not like the emotionally unbalanced aliens of so many films.
So, for all those reasons, that's why "Battleship" is not the drek that the reviewers say, and can be enjoyed and appreciated at multiple levels, not out of some prissy academic exegesis that's meant to get the professor's attention for either a good grade or getting laid, but because it's all actually there. Enjoy.
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