Lost
In Space
Budget Warps, Cinematic Overdrive & Unending
Bombast
published in Real Time No.25, Sydney,
1998
Airheads.
Space cadets. Head in the clouds. Off with the birds. Lost
in space. Welcome to the film industry. We know nothing
about what we do; we only hope that somehow something will
work. We believe that as the media we are powerful, but
we haven't the faintest idea why that might be the case.
We just like to believe we are powerful, and hope you do
too. So we make powerful block-buster films about ... well,
powerful block-bustery type stuff.
Picture
that TV news image of Wall Street. All those GEORGE-reading
(or RALPH-reading) wanna-be Tom Cruises, screaming to be
heard through the noise of the free market, altering values
in a system held together merely by the ruthlessly binary
pressures of inflation and deflation. That's how movies
get made. Everyone's got the money, everyone's a director,
everyone's creative. They're all 'making movies'. Their
little ego thrill of being a cog in the machine allows them
to believe that they are a prime force in controlling the
power of production, just as a blue-shirted drone on Wall
Street feels that his pathetic voice is directly controlling
the economic forces of the world. Masters of the Universe,
one and all.
Audio-visuality
reaches critical status under these contemporary conditions.
In those 'powerful blockbustery type' films, every moment,
every event, every gesture is pressurized to simultaneously
contain and release the totality of the film, to express
not single values but complete value ranges. Yet despite
the highly fragmentary nature of films full of these pressurized
incidents and details, a primal fear of the fragment governs
the films' production, belying a neurotic reflex to tell
everyone everything all the time lest they misunderstand,
misconstrue, misapprehend. Stupidity is evident in wanting
to tell a story so correctly, so ultimately, that one ends
up saying nothing except that one is concerned to tell a
good story.
LOST
IN SPACE has all the key ingredients for such stupid story-telling.
It's based on a TV series - 15 years after it was interesting
to make viral references and allusions to the television
medium. It fetishizes technology in its representational
content and its imagineering - like, as if technology is
some sort of big deal in the cinema. It's about outer space
- so 'big power' concepts invoking the military and NASSA
can be inferred. And it stars a family - for all those people
who still haven't resolved things with their parents or
(worse) for all those who know no better than to have kids
of their own. But my sarcastic comments are not needed.
This film degrades and degenerates these pithy humanist,
rationalist ideals far more than I could critically achieve.
It aptly expresses the chaotic delusions of a film industry
that thinks it is powerful, believes it has control, and
pays post-dubbed lip-service to whatever social mores currently
are deemed worthy of story-telling.
The
film opens with a standard po-mo textual pretzel which moistens
the loins of media theorists and digital evangelists: in
this case, a digitally composited representation of army
dudes fighting actual star wars via virtual simulation.
Reality, realism, depiction and grain confound each other
- but this is the typical state of cinema, caught between
championing and chastising the mortal struggle between the
chemical and the digital. Furthermore, the pretzel effect
is normalised to the nth degree, freed of any textual knots
through the fetishization of speed. Things might be textually
confounding, but they move so fast that everything blurs,
blends, blands-out. Thus, LOST IN SPACE's opening Star Wars
scene collapses under the force of its own acceleration.
10 minutes of screen time states the same thing at every
nano-second (there's some battle going on in outer space),
suggesting that the endless options to pan/track/zoom anywhere
in the screen void (of outer space and digital space) are
ultimately meaningless. The scene could have been 1 minute;
it could have been 20 minutes. In the digital realm, you
can get anything you want - which means you get ranges without
points; options without decisions; stuff without stuffing.
The
role of sound design in such a dizzying realm of traumatized
semiotics is to further confuse and disorient the auditor.
Spatialization accordingly constructs not a 'dimension',
but a network of directional impulses: movement is sensed
not for dramatic purpose but for pure vertiginous sensation.
Yet - and the most intriguing aspect of LOST IN SPACE is
the consistency with which it corrupts its own formal logic
- there is a clear demarcation between music and noise.
That is, between the sound effect of an orchestra streaming
out 'film musicy type stuff' (to remind me that I've paid
money for a powerful blockbustery type of film) and the
gorgeous noise of explosions, detonations and weaponry.
The former is locked into a boxed stereo field emanating
from the front screen, with occasional lifts off the screen
into the surround channels, while the noise effects hang
loud and heavy over the audience, mixed strongly into the
wider surround field. So, despite the disorientation of
what the sound effects are doing and why they are so overloaded
and continual along with everything else, they have their
own territorial place. Typical of conservative modes of
cultural production, chaos and otherness is allowed but
accorded its place. Their existence is never a problem (as
claimed by taboo theory) - but their place is. Fixity of
location is safety. Heroin dealing in streets you never
go to is OK. Consistent noise in the surround will eventually
grant you sonic equilibrium to filter the noise and concentrate
on the frontal dialogue and orchestra.
But
I got my money's worth in LOST IN SPACE. For about 8 seconds,
the orchestra was mixed solely into the surround channels
when the Space Family Robinson realized that they were indeed
lost in space. No noise; only some slightly mournful orchestral
murmuring to my extreme left and right. Then William Hurt
took control of the situation and the family regained hope,
and bang: the orchestra hits centre field again. That was
worth $3.50. The remaining $1.50 of my 1/2 price Tuesday
cinema patronage was for the two explosions which were preceded
by some beautiful silence. The spatial and gestural shape
of these explosions were erotic and eventful, and reminded
me of the sophisticated sound design which has typified
Japanese animation for the past two decades. But then I
thought of the complex formal, technological, semiotic,
audio-visual and spatial logics which energetically swirl
throughout series like BLUE SEED, DNA2, ARMITAGE III and
NEON GENESIS EVANGELION. And then I realized I was experiencing
a fast-flickering version of a Little Golden Book.
The
only other sonic character of LOST IN SPACE worth mentioning
is its voice-dubbing. Is that really Penny's voice? Or did
that stupid cute CGI chipmunk do it for her? And what's
with her and Will each talking like a journalist who wants
to be a stand-up comedian and mulches advertising-saturated
bites from Lenny Bruce, Marshall McCluhan and Oprah into
a supposedly knowing take on sitcom dialogue? Don't tell
me - you script writers are hip to the fact you're working
on a powerful blockbustery type film and you're being really
subversive. Uh huh. These kids are mutant simulations of
an old fart parent culture who wouldn't know how a kid thinks
at the great non-eventful close of the millennium. These
actors will be holding up convenience stores for their drug
habits ten years from now. Maybe they'll rob the houses
of the script writers. Hopefully they'll escape tabloid
terror because no one will recognize their real voices from
LOST IN SPACE.
Conceptually,
this mania for telling everything at once, showing everything
at once, sounding everything at once suggests great potential
for new spectral materializations of audio visual combines
where sounds fuse with images in unimaginable ways. Usually,
loud noisy action cinema with an exploitation bent delivers.
However LOST IN SPACE is funnelled into a thin stream of
humanist pro-family syrup whose potency overpowers all the
assaultive pyrotechnics of the film's chaotic narration.
It voices the audio-visual noise of production - a mechanical
cacophony not of controlled forces, but of wildly unleashed
effects and terminally unresolved decisions. It is so dense
in its restless networking of fragments it creates a highly
compacted veneer of bright, shiny, impenetrable nothingness.
Most people recognize this glossy surface as 'entertainment
quality' and 'production value'. It's what they want, and
they'll get it until they die. Despite the bourgeois banality
of adhering to tasteful cinematic decorum, LOST IN SPACE
is not vacuous, trashy, inferior, insubstantial, dismissible.
It adheres to the Speilbergian/Lucasian mythological ideals
both dumb and intelligent people admire so much. It is good,
solid family entertainment of the most despicable sort.
Unlike true exploitation cinema, it never ventures into
those terrains of the pornographic, the horrible, the de-gendered,
the abjectly violent, the psychoacoustic or the terro-sonic
which would make it an engaging intellectual object. Go
to sleep, Will Robinson. There is absolutely no danger whatsoever.
