Passing by and Time

James Nesbitt is a fine actor who doesn't always get parts that give him enough to get his teeth into.  Furthermore, he's an actor who can show vulnerability without it seeming in the least bit hammy.  We caught up with a TV movie the other night called Passer By (a somewhat unusual 'spelling' of this common phrase - usually it's hyphenated if it's not treated as a single word).  Nesbitt plays a man who seems to have it altogether, but when one night coming home on a suburban train he's forced to make a decision as to whether to help a girl who's likely to be sexually assaulted if he leaves the train, he still decides to get off at his normal stop, suggesting she pull the emergency cord if there's further trouble.  Once off the train, he comes to the place where he can make an emergency call himself, but still fails to speak into it.  The consequences for the next year of his life, and for his family, are traumatic, as he's more and more pushed into having to face his cowardice and his unwillingness to get involved.

It's a play that hits home to all of us: how far are we willing to go to help a stranger in distress, someone who means nothing to us in terms of relationship, and whose only connection with us is their common humanity?  Nesbitt's character is given grace in more ways than one, as it turns out: from his wife (who's a good deal wiser than him, but who hasn't personally had to face the crisis), from his 14-year-old son, who's having trouble himself with bullies at school, and from the police.  The young woman who's attacked, of course, has to live with the ongoing trauma, and decides to repress it to a great extent, and comes to despise Nisbett's character.  The story could have ended far more tragically than it does; however without any great tweaking of the characters, it manages to offer a satisfactory and hopeful ending,   Nesbitt's wife in the film is played by Siobhan Finneran, who's perhaps now more famous as the sharp-tongued personal maid, Sarah O'Brien, in Downton Abbey.  Here she shows a much softer side, though it's combined with considerable strength.  Nesbitt's troubled son is superbly played by Ben Smith, who was 15 at the time, and already had considerable experience in television (he'd first appeared when he was four.)  His part certainly needed an experienced actor, since it combines violence and vulnerability in fairly equal measure.

On a different note, we watched In Time, last night.   This is set in some future time, though it doesn't appear to be too far away.  At this point everyone is genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and then given only one more year to live.  By swapping and buying 'time' they can achieve longer life spans (the first female 25-year-old we meet is actually 50), and of course, those with enough capital in 'time' are effectively aeons old.  There's a difficulty with having all that time available: this form of immortality can become increasingly tedious, but it's also dangerous, as those with greater amounts of time are at greater risk from those who want to steal their 'time' from them.  Time can be transferred from one person to another, like a kind of debit/credit system, or can be bought from places that charge increasingly large amounts of interest.  It doesn't pay to think too much about how this system works; during the course of the film it makes sense enough for the viewer to go along with it.

The film stars Justin Timberlake (as a young man from the wrong side of the tracks - the 'ghetto') and Amanda Seyfried as the daughter of one of the most wealthy men in the country (she lives in 'New Greenwich').  Through various circumstances they meet, and wind up on the run - from the Timekeepers.  These are a kind of police unit that aims to keep some sort of balance in the society, ensuring the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor (the latter often only having the means to accumulate one extra day, or less, at a time). 

The story behind the film has been done innumerable times before, but the twist in having 'time' as something that can be bought and sold adds an interesting and novel approach.  The cast of mostly mid-twenties actors is excellent, though I'm not sure that Justin Timberlake is quite your action hero.  He pulls it off, and adds some warmth and humanity to a character who could have been nothing but macho. Seyfried is a nice match for him, and the two become a kind of Robin Hood duo in due course.  At the end of the movie we see them continuing on their goal of robbing the rich to give to the poor; given the world they live in, it may be the only way the film can end, but it seemed just a little less than satisfactory.

The world they inhabit also seems a little constricted: there are lots of empty streets, and in the ghetto everything visible has been reduced to blandness: there are no shops, apart from pawn shops, so it's hard to work out how anyone manages to eat or clothe themselves. There's no entertainment, apart from one or two streetwalkers.  Even the Mission gives away only 'time' - no food or clothing or shelter.  When people do appear in the streets, it's as if they have nothing else to do all day.  Even in New Greenwich there's a shortage of bodies.  Perhaps this is intentional, part of the kind of world that we're experiencing.  It certainly feels a little odd.

The film is sharply directed (and written) by New Zealander Andrew Niccol, who leans towards stories in which the world isn't the way we normally experience it (The Truman Show, Gattaca).  A small-scale action movie, perhaps, but worth watching.

Art and Science

I've begun reading Proust was a Neuroscientist by (30-year-old) Jonah Lehrer. The following quote comes near the end of the introduction:

Our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can’t be quantified or calculated, then it can’t be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) it is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. We now know enough about the brain to realize that is mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.

Transformers and Human Waste

This was originally written back in 2010, but I've updated it a little. The book I discuss in the second half I've now read at least twice, and was disconsolate for a while because I thought I'd lent it to someone and he hadn't given it back. 

If ever Transformers come knocking at your door, make sure you've got your life insurance paid up - along with every other kind of insurance. They certainly make a dent in anything they touch. And don't come back to clean up the mess. My grandson and I watched Transformers tonight; someone had recorded it onto the DVD hard drive a while back and though I'd seen some bits of it, I'd never caught up with the whole thing. Well, the beginning is definitely a lot better than the end. Shia LaBeouf has a lot of fun with his 'teenage' role, and there's plenty of comedy early on, notably from his parents. (He also has a rather kooky pal early in the piece, but he gets one or two scenes and then vanishes. Pity.)

But once all the action stuff starts, the film pretty much falls apart. It probably doesn't help watching it on a TV screen, (and not even in letter-box format), but the action scenes are so badly staged that you hardly have a clue who's doing what to whom. Early on even these aren't so bad, but the last long, long, long battle is rubbish. Megatron, the big baddie, is about as clueless a baddie as you're likely to come across. He likes smashing stuff up, but it never seems to achieve anything. Perhaps all those decades of being frozen have played havoc with his brain wiring. The CGI is of course fantastic. But, as I think I've said before in this blog, we've become so used to CGI that it no longer makes us gasp at what we're seeing. (Only Avatar, which arrived a couple of years later, was more eye-popping, and that was because it used imagination as well as CGI.) 

I keep meaning to mention a book I read a few weeks back. I was going to do a proper review, but it's now got a bit past that point. It's The Big Necessity, and it has the delightful subtitle: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. It's by journalist, Rose George. (The alternative subtitle is: The unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters.) Most people I've spoken to about it have switched off fairly quickly. As George points out, in spite of the fact that human waste is a fact of life for every single human being on the planet (and for many, other people's waste is also a fact of their daily lives), we just don't talk about it. We barely even joke about it. In Western society we're so prim and proper that our TV ads hardly point out the fact that it's poo that we're using all those chemicals to clean up: instead they focus on the bacteria. But we're also so attuned to having waste flushed away that we regard it as something quite unmentionable. 

This isn't the case with much of the world. There are still plenty of countries where poo is literally thrown around, or left lying in open areas next to villages, or indisposable in slums, or plastered all over the walls of public toilets until they become unusable. Civilisation and poo are still only just getting their act together. For most of the world they've hardly started. 

The book is full of wonderful stories, and wonderful people - and facts. For instance, 37,000 miles - yes, I said miles - of waste tunnels between London and Swindon, some of which are big enough to drive a mini around in. New York is a city that's just a couple of days away at any time from being caught up in its own waste. (In another book I discovered that the underground waters in New York have to be continually pumped out of the subway - if they were left alone for a few days, the subways would be swamped.) In Japan, for years they've been using toilets that actually clean the rear end while you're sitting there. A spray does the job, and apparently in the best of these models, does it very well. Then there's a drier to finish off the job. Many Japanese regard the idea of wiping your bottom with toilet paper as not being clean at all. 

There have been some great people working on dealing with human waste, some highly innovative and entrepreneurial people. But in India, the land where technology is rapidly outstripping anywhere else in the world, human waste is still in a Neanderthal state for great swathes of the country. There are still people, the Dalits, the lowest of the lowest castes, whose job it is to cart other people's waste away. It's almost always the women who do this work, (the men somehow escape the task by handing it over to their wives and daughters), and many of them carry the baskets of waste on their heads. However, there is one man - I can't note his name as we've recently shifted and my books aren't at present in any order - who has gradually rescued Dalits from their abysmal life, and is educating them in schools financed by the public toilets he's built (and which people pay a minimal sum to use). 

Public toilets are a rarity in many countries still, and nonexistent in others. In Rome, when my wife and I went on our honeymoon some 46 years ago, it was very hard to find a public toilet. I still have a photo of me pointing disconsolately at a disconnected toilet in the middle of a worksite. And even when we went abroad in 2007, it was still hard to find public toilets. At that time I was having some prostate problems, and at least twice we had to board a river cruise boat just so I could use the toilet on board. On another occasion I popped into a port-a-loo that was officially there for the men working on a site. 

As I said the book is eye-opening, and the stories abound. I can't say why the topic appealed to me, but I found it fascinating. Maybe I'm just a child at heart, still wanting to know what happens to the brown stuff...!

The Great Unspoken

What's the great unmentionable in human society? Sex, nah. Death, nah. These are both talked about everywhere. We just pretend they're not.
The great unmentionable is defecation, and its companion, urination. Okay, the second of those two occasionally gets a mention in public life, but the first is mostly viewed as something no one actually does.
Why am talking about this then? Because I've just seen a review of a book called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. It's written by Rose George, and was published by Metropolitan Books, back in October this year.
More than 6 billion people have to deal with this (an anagram of shit, did you realise?) day in and day out, and in many parts of the world there just isn't the provision for it, which is why there's a great deal of disease, and so many deaths from diarrhea (I'm using the US spelling because I can never remember the English one.) According to the review (which is based on the book's stats), diarrhea kills a child every 15 seconds. Can this really be true? Perhaps it can, but it's certainly hard to comprehend.
The review, by Bill McKibben, on the Books & Culture site, is well worth reading (only a couple of pages.) It makes a book on a not-so-enticing subject enticing!

John Gray and humanity

I’ve been reading John Gray’s Heresies, a book published in 2004. Some of the essays go back to the late 90s, but they are, for the most part, still very relevant. I don’t think Gray is particularly optimistic about the future of the human race (he certainly doesn’t see science as our great salvation and he sees our history as being littered with war and strife) but at least he’s more honest about it than the secular humanists, who somehow think we’re going to overcome all our difficulties by putting faith (yes, faith) in the willingness of scientists to work together. Here’s one typical example of his thinking, from Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs.

The need for religion appears to be hard-wired in the human animal. Certainly the behaviour of secular humanists supports this hypothesis. Atheists are usually just as ardently engaged as believers. Quite commonly, they are more intellectually rigid. One cannot engage in dialogue with religious thinkers in Britain today without quickly discovering that they are, on the who, more intelligent, better educated and strikingly more freethinking than unbelievers (as evangelical atheists still incongruously describe themselves). No doubt there are many reasons for this state of affairs, but I suspect it is the repression of the religious impulse that explains the obsessive rigidity of secular thought.