The Profound Illiteracy of Facebook and the Web. Don't miss the Canon Shooting!

One of the not entirely unexpected revelations of the endless posts on my Facebook wall, is just how the grasp of the English language by friends and acquaintances has disintegrated. Judging by the near non-existence of proper spelling, grammar and punctuation, one might conclude that we are all suddenly living in the late 19th Century before the advent of Public Schools and education and dictionaries despite the spectacular availability of online resources and spell checkers.

Creative spelling is astonishing as is the equally adventurous ignorance of punctuation.

Here's a "sentence" (paraphrased so as to disguise its origin) that comes directly from a FB post.

time to learn my part I'm performing tomorrow!!!

Now this could be interpreted in a number of ways.

1) It is now time to learn my part which I am performing tomorrow.

2) There is time to learn my part which I am performing tomorrow.

3) It is now time to learn my part. I am performing tomorrow.

4) There will be time to learn my part. I am performing tomorrow.

I sort of think number (3) was intended, but without talking to the person, I have no idea.

I'd be tempted to write it as:

It is time to learn my part: I'm performing tomorrow.

From a journalistic viewpoint, this is highly speculative, but, hey, you've got to take a chance sometimes.

I've changed "I'm" to "I am" since the extravagant use of apostrophes (and commas or the non-use of apostrophes and commas) is a new aspect of modern creative writing.

The favorite trope is the addition of an apostrophe to nearly everything that has an "s" at the end of it.

The previous sentence using this remarkable linguistic revelation would include:

"... the extravagant use of apostrophe's... " to indicate more than one apostrophe. [If there was such a thing, it would be correct to say that "I am visiting the apostrophe's new house."]

The distinction in the mind of many between possessive and plural has vanished in the wake of the eradication of the distinction between "less" and "fewer." Perhaps this has to do with some unknown additive to highly sugared breakfast cereals (or is that cereal's ?) or some other more pernicious plot. Oops. Sorry. That's "perhap's" and "Oop's" isn't it? Or is it Thats' perhaps's and oops's, ain't it?

"I went to visit the Smiths" becomes "I went to visit the Smith's." If it was "I went to the Smith's house" all would be well, but this puts us back into the realm of speculative journalism.

There seems (ummm seem's) to be no cure for all of this. All of my friends (er... friend's) in the educational professions (ahhh... profession's) tell me that high school students and college students come to them unable to write clear sentences (sentence's). Instead of advancing the knowledge of students, these hapless educators slave at getting the kids to disentangle themselves from their IPods and smartphones long enough to consider history or philosophy or home economics. (Do they actually teach Home Ec any more? I wonder.)

I'm going to go right out on a limb here and state the obvious. The majority of this linguistic chaos originates with texting. Now just why any sentient being would want to spend more than a nanosecond informing another sentient being that "hey whoa it rocks" in the midst of watching a movie or eating or taking a dump is totally beyond my compreshension. But, hey, whoa, different strokes... .

The need to contract words so that one's thumbs don't fall off from exhaustion is crucial. T nd 2 contct wds sew tht my thmbs r stil hr iz imptnt. Or something like that with the addition of lots of smileys and other strange symbols alien to my aging eyes, but highly meaningful to those under 12 years old.

There is more at stake here than the generation gap: The continuity of civilization depends upon the communication of various forms of knowledge.

There is a genuine difference between "It's here" and "Its here." The former means "It is here," the latter means "This 'here' belongs to It" (whatever that means).

A sign in the New York City Subway reads "Haircut's." Haircut's what? The Haircut's dog? The Haircut's life insurance policy? You can argue that everyone knows what they really meant. I can argue that this requires lots of unnecessary speculation and that it panders to ignorance.

Indede y bother spelin nething kurectlee in the furst plaze. We kin awl figyour owt whut I mene neeeway, kan't weee?

The world has not collapsed yet, but when I view a subway car full of grown people so plugged-in to their electronic devices that they don't even notice where they are, that they are shoving their backpack into the eyes of some hapless old lady who is blissfully IPod free, that they miss their stop and curse because they weren't paying attention, that they stand in the middle of the door unmoving because they are so involved in whatever music is playing far too loudly into their ears that they haven't noticed that the door is open, that the chime is ringing, that seven people are trying to shove them out of the way to escape, and then, that it's really everyone else's fault for interrupting, bothering and annoying them!

Steve Jobs and colleagues have provided the world with the finest excuse in centuries for rudeness, inattention, small-mindedness and unnecessary redundancy of function with those cute little IPhone thingies. A great, elegant toy. A great, inelegant time waster. A great distraction from the reality of where you are. If you looked up from your smart phone for just a moment, you might see where you are instead of having to call up a GPS application that pings three satellites in orbit around the earth, pings your phone back and displays a map that shows you where you already should have noticed that you were standing in the first place. (Okay, it is convenient to be standing on a strange street corner in heaven only knows what country, to be able to push a button and find out how many steps you need to take to reach the nearest McDonald's. Don't know how I lived for decades without it).

My favorite Facebook malaprop this week is a notice for the "Canon shooting" as part of a Pirate Week Celebration. One wonders what crime the poor Canon committed to be shot! Was it Pachelbel's Canon? Whatever did Pachelbel do to deserve this? Obviously, they meant "cannon," didn't they? But this is an event put on by a government agency and promoted by, oh I don't know, the agency director's sister's son's girlfriend fresh out of fourth grade. I'm pleased to know, in retrospect, that pirates were deeply into Canons. It shows that they were not all lowly, child-raping, thieving scumbags. Some of them appreciated the finer things as they pillaged and burned with their IPods blasting in their ears.

Sew, eye xstole tha vertewz uv lerning how 2 spel ahnd punkyewweight if ownlee owt of consideration to us awld fokz hoo r stuk withe Inglush az it yewst 2 b b4 yew kreeyaytive kidz fixed it 4 us awl. :-)

Oh, wait! I'm sorry. I forgot the punctuation.

S'ew, eye xstole, tha vertewz uv lerning, how 2, s'pel ahnd punkyewweight, if ownlee owt of consideration. to us awld fok'z!!! hoo r, stuk, withe Inglush, az it yew'st 2 b, b4 yew kreeyaytive kid'z, fixed it 4 u's awl !!!! ;-) :-D :-P~~~

That's better, isn't it?

Thank you.

The Days the Earth Stood Still: 1951 and 2008

The 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (a 1951 masterpiece) was not as terrible as I imagined it would be, but it is a pale shadow of its predecessor.

It's interesting to note that the newer version credits the Edmund H. North screenplay as a source, whereas the 1951 film is based in part upon Harry Bates' short story "Farewell to the Master." (full text at http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates-farewell-to-the-master.html ). North elegantly riffed on the original and made it a strong and affecting cautionary meditation on the cost of war and violence. Sad to say, despite its high-tech CG effects, and more than a few "moments," the 2009 update never achieves the power of North's work.

Perhaps if I hadn't seen the original so many times, I would have spent less viewing time comparing the two, but we are what we are, and I couldn't help but do that. There's no question that David Scarpa managed to re-frame North's scenario in terms of the modern American military, modern technology and a sketchy, not terribly offensive version of the United States goverment. In 1951, for example, Klaatu simply walks out of the hospital where he is being kept under what seems today like minimal security. It was as though the average citizen would have simply honored the uniform and side-arms and not bothered to try to escape. Not so with the new Klaatu. He is kept under high-tech, computer controlled lock and key which requires that he use his extraterrestrial powers to jam video and audio surveillance systems, deafen and knock out myriad layers of security guards, pick electronic locks on the fly and generally avoid all sorts and kinds of impossible to defeat systems. All of this is plausible and rather clever and exciting, but, in the end it misses the point or dilutes it so badly that in the end it's just a lot of sound and fury.

It's awfully hard to put my finger on what's not right about the Scarpa retelling, but I think it has to do with the aforementioned "average citizen." It had always struck me that the original had the look and feel of a newsreel, and Robert Wise indeed confirmed that to me: he'd intended the film to play like what we would now call a "documentary." It had a simple photographic and editorial style that echoed what the average moviegoer would have seen each week in the black and white newsreels of the day including commentary by actual radio announcers. (Prior to the 24/7 coverage of the every twitch and flatulent sound of every world leader on CNN and the Web, each of the major film studios, but especially Fox and Universal, turned out a 10-12 minute "newsreel" that summed up the major breaking stories of the day with on-the-scene movie footage that augmented what people read in the newspaper or heard on the radio. There are, in fact, wonderful moments in the 1951 DESS with the rooming house boarders sitting around the breakfast table earnestly reading the Washington DC newspaper in order to find out what was going on in the world).

North tells his story through the reactions of these average folks to extraordinary events simply and sincerely. The Scarpa script instead uses the literal internet to show what people world wide are experiencing, but -- although authentic and visually clever -- it lacks emotional and human connection. That, indeed, may be one of the tragic by-products of the web itself: many of us (and apparently the current screenwriter) have lost touch with genuine face-t0-face human communication. Instant messaging and YouTube and blogs will never replace handshakes, conversations, deep meaningful eyeball to eyeball glances or real hugs and kisses. The 2008 film reproduces the cold, impersonal, arms-length modern world only too, too well.

Perhaps 1951 was a simpler more innocent world. I doubt that really, but the realities of military life, inter-continental communication and transport, and technology were certainly less sophisticated, varied and complicated than they are today. To be true to 2008, one must show it as it is.

The original Gort was about 7 feet tall, the new Gort is 70 or 700 feet tall (I don't really know how tall he is, but he's very, very tall). Yet, the itsy bitsy original Gort is mighty scary and ominous and the big tall Gort just looks like yet another slick Video Game robot. We have little emotional connection to this character. In fact, Scarpa (or someone) decided that G.O.R.T. was an acronym instead of a name. Gort like his namesake Gnut in the Bates story was a real character, not a throwaway piece of electronics. The audience cared about what he did, what he might be thinking, what he could do: The signature 1951 dialogue "Gort, Klatuu barada nicto" was absolutely all about Gort as a character, not Gort as an abstract idea or a clever visual effect.

By compressing the drama down to a basically three character story (Klaatu, Helen, and her son Jacob), Scarpa acheives a certain economy that allows lots more time to show nifty CG effects. But it loses the relationship to "every man," to the down to earth man on the street so lovingly set out in North's screenplay and Wise's incisive casting. The 1951 film is all the more terrifying, suspenseful, funny and heart-breaking for the foibles of people that, aside from the sort of clothes they wear and minor affectations of speech, we would recognize as people we know today. I just can't help thinking (perhaps unfairly given the homogenization imposed on so many scripts by studios) that Mr. Scarpa spends far too much time on Facebook and MSN Chat and far too little time sitting and talking to people or getting drunk in some low-life bar where he could hear directly about the petty, debilitating pain of the underprivileged. The montages of the Robert Wise film showing peasants and rich people alike all over the world paralyzed and terrified by the events of the story are eerie and affecting even today. There is no similar moment in director Scott Derrickson's (or the studio editor's) take on all this. While it moves along okay, I could have cared less.

And then there is Bernard Herrmann's score. It's a cliche to praise it as one of the greatest motion picture scores ever composed, but it is true. No offense to Tyler Bates who does good work as a composer. It's just that Herrmann was one of a kind: we will not see his like again. And his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of a kind as well: there will be no other that achieves what this score achieves. It is one with the movie just as Herrmann's score for Psycho is married to that story as well. Herrmann's genius, perhaps, was in the way that his music became an active character in the story telling. Unlike the symphonic, operatic, program music style of Korngold and Rosza which wrapped the story in warm, Wagnerian layers of sugary emotion, Herrmann's music shed all the calories and acted both in counterpoint and to create information that didn't exist in the movie itself. Watch, for example, just the opening title sequence of DESS first without the sound and then with it, and you'll immediately understand what's added: it's rhythm, suspense, mystery, emotion, but all in a subtle and unexpected way with startling instrumentations and sounds that were otherwise non-existent in mainstream music of his day. YouTube Video

I'm not entirely sure what the message of the newer film is. I took it to be saying that humans were polluting their world uncontrollably (although some reviewers I've perused seem to be obsessed with the notion that Klaatu is destroying the world because humans have caused global warming which, they go on to say isn't real anyway as every Fox News Channel watching viewer would already know) and that this was not good form for sentient beings. North, on the other hand, was all about human violence and the threat of carrying wars, idiosyncratic destruction, and nuclear weapons into space where it would harm other more advanced, peaceful civilizations.

Sadly, North's message is as true today as it was 60 years ago: the behavior of Iran in 2010 is identical to the sort of thing North warns us about in 1951. The average citizen of this or any other country was well aware of atomic weapons in 1951: they were frightened by them in a way that perhaps modern citizens -- accustomed as they are to remote-controlled drone weapons that zip around like so many video-game toys -- may no longer be. The every day reality of nuclear annihilation has been pushed from our minds by information overload.

This brings me back to the risky notion that 1951 was a "simpler time." I reject that. No historic time was ever simple. But at any moment in history certain ideas and events stand out in more relief. Polio was not cured in 1951 and atomic bombs and spies lurked in every shadow. The Robert Wise/Edmund North/Bernard Herrmann Day the Earth Stood Still had all of those terrifying shadows faithfully reproduced. When I saw it as a small child, it frightened me in an indelible and, to its credit, constructive way: I never forgot the film and became (perhaps shamefully) a wee bit obsessed with its craftsmanship and message. It will be a long time before I think I'll be moved to dig out the 2008 version to watch it again, but having just watched a few clips from the original on YouTube in the last hours, I can truthfully say that I can't wait to watch the whole thing yet again. It pulls me in everytime.

I've been exploring, in other essays, some sort of practical definition for "masterpiece" in the context of motion pictures. A troublesome, slippery word. But one quality that jumps out at me is the magnetic pull of the great films. You can turn them on, tune in to the middle of them, hear them from the next room, and before you know it, you have stopped washing the dishes or typing in your blog or Instant Messaging, and you find yourself sitting absolutely still and watching the whole movie yet again. You just can't help it. Excuse me, but I want to see what happens to Klaatu...