Review: Moon (2009)

(Warning–several spoilers below, beyond what can pretty much be inferred from the trailer.)

It’s remarkable the lengths to which one must go these days to completely isolate a character in science fiction. Much of the work of Moon (dir. Duncan Jones) is spent explaining just how it is that a person can become utterly disconnected from the live flow of networks while still being able to receive prerecorded media. So, the conceit here is that we have discovered a way to supply 70% of the Earth’s power with solar energy; that “H3” from the sun is trapped in lunar rock on the dark side of the moon; that Lunar Industries, Ltd. employs a staff of one in its mining colony, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), whose three-year contract is almost up; that communications relay satellites have been damaged by some solar flare; OR that mysterious dark pylons have been erected around the base in order to block any communication with Earth (not to neglect the ‘fiction’ elements in favor of the ‘science’ determining the protagonist’s seclusion).

This is the first in a series of reversals that Moon performs in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These obelisks, rather than appearing as unknown technological wonders and beacons of interplanetary communication, are used to block any transmission, carving out a solitary, dark space within already given technological systems.

Jones (born Zowie Bowie) obviously wanted Rockwell to have the space he needed in this role, and Rockwell’s particular style works nicely with the overall themes of the film. Hinting at the compressed life span and strange familial ties between identical Sam clones, a humorous father/son relationship develops between various versions. Sam shows Sam how to properly carve wood with the thumb closer to the blade. Sam tells Sam in his more decrepit state, “Jesus, your fly is down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

The lunar base’s AI, named Gerty and voiced by Kevin Spacey, is also there for Rockwell to play off of. In yet another 2001 reversal, HAL 9000′s strangely emotive red eye is replaced here by Gerty’s small LCD screen with a severely limited range of emoticons––smile, mumble, blank, cry. Gerty’s sole function is to keep Sam safe, apparently even at the expense of the station and its mission. Seeing as this company is willing to dispose of (living) clones and reproduce them ad infinitum, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t program their steward more thoroughly. If the clone-on-clone relationship more or less works as comic relief, the one between AI and clone is a bit more sappy. Sam at one point declares, “We’re people Gerty, you understand?” When Gerty agrees to erase his own memory so that no trace is left of the Sam clone who rockets back to Earth.

With the dialectic of command/control paranoia and utopian space boosterism of 2001 thoroughly undone, we are left in the face of these sentimental closing moments wondering just what it is the film is getting across. Moon was screened at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the Q&A afterward detracted a bit from any interesting take on the place of the space opera genre in contemporary network, post-cyberpunk culture that the film itself may have had. Especially notable was Jones’s groan-inducing response during a Q&A after the screening to the question of whether this was a critique of corporate culture: “I dunno man, you tell me. I’m just a filmmaker.”

Regardless, the premise itself of isolation within networks does serve as a striking thought experiment–it seems that it’s not just Sam’s psyche that becomes isolated on the dark side of the moon once off the grid. Based on the very logic of this isolation, stored memory (which is implanted and uploaded into the clones) slips out of sync with the “liveness” of the present tense of networks. If there is one thing to take away from Moon’s mash-up of space opera with our contemporary networked discourse, it is the degree to which memory is now fundamentally reliant upon being distributed, networked.

Super Heroes and The Phonograph

This passage from Adorno’s 1927 essay, “The Curves of the Needle”:

“With its movable horn and its solid spring housing, the gramophone’s social position is that of a border marker between two periods of musical practice. It is in front of the gramophone that two periods of musical lovers encounter each other. While the expert examines all the needles and chooses the best one, the consumer just drops in his dime—and the sound that responds to both may well be the same.”

Setting aside the sort of dated yet often repeated point that the audience member enjoys not the film or music she goes to see but the money she spent on it, I think the real brilliance of this passage lies in the conflation of the audition with the auditor, and the needle with the curves–no matter what is played, the sound remains the same to all. What is the selfsame sound that each type of musical lover hears? It is, of course, the sound of the dime dropped to purchase the needle. It is the sound of the music subsequently enjoyed in the privacy of the home. And it is the sound of the needle itself, that is to say, those crackles and shifts in pitch that reveal the actual machinery of reproduction. This triad of commerce/sound/technology will most likely structure any discussion on the semantics of listening in popular culture. Today, the latter two terms, sound and technology (along with the listener floating ambiguously somewhere in between), create the most productive and interesting tensions.

Adorno goes on to say of the apparent improvement in the quality of sound reproduction technologies that “The moment one attempts to improve these early technologies through an emphasis on concrete fidelity, the exactness one has ascribed to them is exposed as an illusion by the very technology itself.” The rhetoric of technological fidelity is a productive paradox. Constant improvements such as Hi-Fi or Dolby 5.1 are not necessarily steps forward in sound quality, but a shift towards a new style of hearing things. This point was made in Sound Theory Sound Practice, I believe it was. This is to say that the spectacular sounds that accompany the otherwise awful Spider Man 3 straddle many points of audition. The recent spate of super hero movies humping claims of realism (the “this could actually happen!” aesthetic) are not only rehashing/warping the Frank Miller led The Dark Knight Returns aesthetic of the 80s, but are constantly making an argument for the medium through which these mythologies are now pushed.

I met Jonathan Lethem (see his list of the five most depressed superheroes) at a book signing and nervously asked him something inane like, “what do you think about the new Superman movie?” In my defense, the teaser trailer was absolutely breathtaking—it looked like a scene right out of the 1940s animated serials, an aesthetic that would pull cgi and tights out of dimensions other than the ostensibly real. He said that he had learned not to stop getting his hopes up for comic book movies, as there is something in the medium that is inherently untranslatable.

But the superhero is not a medium, it is a perfectly translatable commodity–television, action figures, games, costumes, film, books, etc. The mythology of superheroes today is squeezed through the nascent field of digital cinema ever proclaiming its fidelity to the our world so that we can look up walking the streets of New York and half expect to see a red and blue blur sling overhead. Going into Spider Man 3, I expected the cgi to be significantly improved on the previous film, there having been years elapsed and most likely technological leaps made. Spider Man always looked a little awkward and unnatural in 1 and 2. It wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I realized not only have the graphics not really changed, but their verisimilitude is not what matters anymore. The sound of Spider Man 3 seems to take an unprecedented amount of control, to the degree that the most spectacular way possible to defeat Venom at the end of the film is, and I’m not making this up, with sound. Spider Man discovers the symbiot’s weakness to sound waves, and beats a series of metal pipes, driving the black goo away.

While the plasticity of the image has been made virtually infinite thanks to cgi and digital film, it is still strangely anchored in some rhetoric of ever greater fidelity to the real or photographic. Sound is employed to an ever greater degree in recent popular film as a sort of filler, enhancing these images through synergism and sync points and added dimensions that allow the spectator relief from the images that often fail, look flat, seem taken out of a video game. And this is why digital film today is such an exciting sound medium. While cgi is bogged down in claims to verisimilitude, sound is free to improvise in countless dimensions with breathtaking results, making up for the mistakes of the clumsy image. Seriously, go see Spider Man 3 and listen to the Dolby TrueHD.