Life in the 21st Century looks the way it looks.

I have a co-worker about my age who said she wants to wear shiny, "futuristic" clothing and makeup for a Halloween party.

I told her, "Uh, Lorna. Look at the date on the calendar and the way people dress now. We live in 'the future' from the perspective of our childhood. And we don't dress all that differently from the way our parents did."

I don't think she understood my point, however. What does a "futuristic" look mean these days, any way? Many Americans in 2011 sport piercings and tattoos, which few Americans had in the 1970's, but on the whole the clothing we wear has stayed conservative. I doubt we'll dress like this in the 2030's, for example, though this couture must have seemed plausible to producer Alexander Korda when he commissioned "futuristic" clothing designs for his film Things to Come (1936):

"Atlas Shrugged" meets script doctors

Hollywood has people with a curious profession called script doctors, namely, experienced screenwriters who have mastered the craft and get called in to study and improve promising but flawed screenplays for movies and TV shows. I've heard of analogous experts who call themselves novel doctors.

Reportedly the people who gave us the first segment of the widely panned Atlas Shrugged film adaptation (which I haven't seen) have decided to convert the rest of Ayn Rand's novel to film. Given the ideological nature of the project, I can just imagine how badly it will turn out if they stick too closely to the novel. I can also imagine what a regular script doctor might say to these individuals in response to the following aspects of the novel:

First of all, if you set the movie in our immediate future, you can't have Galt's Gulch mysteriously hidden in the Rocky Mountains, like a Republican version of Shangri-La, when millions of Americans visit the Rockies every year and the audience knows about Google Earth, satellite photos, GPS, air traffic control networks, tracking of cell phone calls and so forth, even if the hero John Galt kludges together an invisibility screen over the valley.

Secondly, if you play the Galt/Dagny aspect of the plot straight, Galt's stalking-like behavior will remind them of unsub characters who threaten innocent women in police shows like Criminal Minds. Viewers might also pick up on Galt's implied adult virginity, especially if they've read the novel, and laugh at the character's expense. You have to downplay those aspects of the story somehow.

Thirdly, you just can't have Dagny Taggart's sister-in-law, Cheryl Taggart, commit suicide after Dagny makes an emotional connection with her, and yet have Dagny go on with her business as she does in the rest of the novel like nothing out of the ordinary happened. Dagny in a film version should show grief because of Cheryl's suicide, and also anger at her brother Jim because of his shabby treatment of Cheryl. (Given that anomaly in the novel, I've wondered if Rand inserted the part about Cheryl's suicide just to get rid of a character she couldn't figure out how to use, without working through all the consequences in the plot.)

And fourth, you'll have to play the latter half of the film adaptation like a zombie apocalypse or a Mad Max movie. You just can't have the heroes hang out in Galt's Gulch for a few months while America experiences a massive Malthusian collapse, and then show them going back to work and rebuilding an industrial society, again like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Too much of the support structure for a modern economy will have fallen to ruins by then, and America's cities will look like Life After People.

I can think of some other objections a script doctor might make, like to the part in the hobo Jeff Allen's story about the mean, ugly 8-year-old girl who got braces under the 20th Century Motor Company's new employee benefits plan, and how a disgruntled auto worker struck her and knocked out all her teeth. Would you really want to show that on film to demonstrate the depravity caused by health & dental insurance? Passages like that in Rand's novels support the impression that she really didn't like children.

No, to me a proper film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged would have to try to capture the novel's weirdness. In my imagination it would look something like Sky Captain, and it would need cgi work in post-production to represent Rand's literary prosopagnosia. Rand describes the heroes' faces almost like geometric objects, and the villains' faces like a gooey, disgusting chaos. So the post work would have to modify the villains' faces, at least, to push them into the uncanny valley and elicit the sort of revulsion Rand wanted the readers of her novel to feel towards them.

But, of course, nobody listens to me, so the Atlas Shrugged film project will just turn into a different sort of disaster.

Cryonics on "Castle"

You can watch the episode on ABC's website. Mike Darwin analyzes it here.

The premise of the Castle series strikes me as implausible: A hack crime novelist tags along with a homicide detective who looks like a supermodel slightly past her prime. She lets him participate in interrogations of suspects and so forth, despite the fact that he lacks the training or the authority to do so, no matter how many crime novels he may have published commercially. It makes about as much sense as the premise of the Tarzan and Jane stories, where an attractive, young, upper-class English woman goes off to live with an ape man in the African jungle. Could either situation happen in real life?

Setting aside my inability to suspend disbelief, this episode may have broken new ground in the portrayal of cryonics in popular culture for several reasons. One, the police treat the fictional cryonics society with respect, instead of storming into the building to tear the place apart like what happened to Alcor in the late 1980's. Two, it portrays the cryonicists as normal people with a passionate commitment to an unusual idea, instead of making us seem like a bunch of kooks, cranks and misfits. (Yeah, I know, some of us supply material for that stereotype.) And three, it turns the hostile-wife phenomenon on its head by showing a woman so committed to the use of cryonics, both for her husband's survival and hers, that she violates the law to get her way.

It just disappointed me that this cryonicist woman and her point of view didn't get more screen time. Where can I find a woman like that in the real world?

We have a word for "being your own boss."

From a new Gallup poll:



Yet some christians have a problem with the desire for "being your own boss," otherwise known as entrepreneurship, which they demonize as "the self-directed life":




I'd like to see the entrepreneurial model of life-direction (Become your own CEO!) spread through the culture, if only to counter the self-sabotaging futility which characterizes so much of human existence and feeds the growth of nihilistic leftism. To its credit the Atlas Society has published articles about this approach on its website, instead of focusing exclusively on the sort of Ayn Rand superlativity which most people find weird and cultish. You can see examples here and here.

Surviving another rapture

Hal Lindsey appeared on a talkshow recently to plug his end times nonsense, while also addressing his competitor Harold Camping's prediction for today. I found this saddening to listen to, basically because one foolish old man chastises another foolish old man for holding to a similar folly: "No, no, no, Harold! You don't understand the rules of the game. You don't set dates for the rapture!"

So how does it happen that one man spends his life in folly and reaches his 80's like Hal Lindsey, while another manages to accomplish useful things and winds up like, say, Warren Buffett?

I still think Lindsey owes a public apology to everyone he has spooked with his doomsday fantasies since 1970. Give it up, Hal. You'll die soon from one of the usual causes just like everyone else, without getting "raptured."

As for christian apocalypticism in general, christianity can't get away from the fact that it started out as a doomsday cult. People in this religion will keep coming up with new variations of the end times because the cult's founding texts support that interpretation.

I also have to wonder if many christians need to believe they live in the last days - yes, the prophesied events will really happen this time! - because they know on some level that christianity will eventually disappear, without any rapture, tribulation or second coming. Would people living 10,000 years from now even know about christianity, apart from a handful of scholars who study ancient religions?

And how much would the scholars in that era know about christianity any way, or about anything else which started 12,000 years in their past? The last ice age ended 12,000 years ago relative to us, but have any religions from that time survived to 2011?