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Communication always leaves me incomplete
Mar. 24th, 2014 11:32 amI went to see Under the skin the other night. It’s an interesting film: it stars Scarlett Johansen as an alien from the planet Metaphor* who makes a living murdering Glaswegians in an emotionless manner oddly reminiscent of Mr Spock if he were a psychotic space-vixen. The reviews I’ve seen of it have been uniformly laudatory, and I can sort-of see why. It’s beautifully shot and it’s got that enigmatic, stylised tone like Drive did which critics seem to love, but I can’t help but think most reviews have been a little influenced by the fact that it’s got a famous actress-lady in it who takes her top off several times as I’d say it’s a 4-star rather than a 5-star film.
You can tell it’s a 4-star film as, whilst I watched, my concentration drifted away from what was on screen and I found myself thinking about the soundtrack and the scoring.
You see, it does that sci-fi thing where alien-ness is represented in the score by a jangling, discordant series of unconnected notes which, as the alien discovers human connection, resolves itself into actual recognisable music. It’s a bit of a cliché which everything from Forbidden Planet to Star Trek has used – a wobbly theremin, for example, playing notes which sound more like someone kicking milkbottles over** than actual music to suggest alien thought and language.
As I sat and watched what struck me about this is that it’s actually wrong. Melody derives from pattern; musical theory has a mathematical basis, and language derives from pattern as well. In fact, to communicate information there must be a pattern. The entirety of cryptography is based on attempting to hide or attempting to find the underlying pattern which must exist in order to transmit coherent information, and I’d suggest that the likelihood of an alien language evolving without a readily identifiable pattern – which can be represented by jangling, discordant notes – is so unlikely as to be unbelievable.
I’ve got to say that when thoughts like this break your suspension of disbelief of a film it’s probably not a stone-cold classic. Yes, it’s a good film but it’s not great. I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel over the weekend as well, which is rather better and more enjoyable to boot. If I were going to see one of the two films again it’d be Grand Budapest and that’s despite Scarlett getting her top off.
There’s a great little article about language theory in the ongoing attempts to decipher the Voynich Manuscript here which talks about the locating of repeating patterns which indicate an underlying intelligence to the message, so if you’re a film composer who thinks that kicking a pile of milkbottles over is a good shorthand for suggesting alien thought patterns then I’m afraid you’re actually wrong as there’s no indication of information being transmitted by that. Unless the aliens are thinking to themselves in heavily encrypted terms, which seems unlikely given that no earthlings can understand Martian anyway. This also suggests that the scene in Close Enounters where Earthlings and Aliens learn to communicate with each other by using music to find mutually comprehensible meaningful patterns has a lot going for it.
Anyway, this got me to thinking about things like speech training and elocution and rhetoric and why people who have been trained in public speaking tend to deliver messages in patterned, melodic tones - think of Tony Blair as the great example. Even though a speaker might be saying nothing meaningful in that way politicians have, it is worth at least considering that it's possible to trick the listener's brain into thinking they've actually been presented with a lot of meaningful information just by presenting what they say with the right amount of structure.
So I suppose that's my review. Under the skin is a great little idea, well filmed and tremendously well acted but containing very little dialogue. I preferred The Grand Hotel Budapest which as well as being sumptuously shot (it reminds me a lot of Jeunet's films like Amelie, with heavily saturated, almost cartoonish, colour and precisely framed shots) is crammed with witty dialogue - and witty dialogue is really hard to write. It contains a lot of information concisely presented.
*Or Meta-IV, to give it it’s Star Trek name.
**Or possibly a Fall album.
You can tell it’s a 4-star film as, whilst I watched, my concentration drifted away from what was on screen and I found myself thinking about the soundtrack and the scoring.
You see, it does that sci-fi thing where alien-ness is represented in the score by a jangling, discordant series of unconnected notes which, as the alien discovers human connection, resolves itself into actual recognisable music. It’s a bit of a cliché which everything from Forbidden Planet to Star Trek has used – a wobbly theremin, for example, playing notes which sound more like someone kicking milkbottles over** than actual music to suggest alien thought and language.
As I sat and watched what struck me about this is that it’s actually wrong. Melody derives from pattern; musical theory has a mathematical basis, and language derives from pattern as well. In fact, to communicate information there must be a pattern. The entirety of cryptography is based on attempting to hide or attempting to find the underlying pattern which must exist in order to transmit coherent information, and I’d suggest that the likelihood of an alien language evolving without a readily identifiable pattern – which can be represented by jangling, discordant notes – is so unlikely as to be unbelievable.
I’ve got to say that when thoughts like this break your suspension of disbelief of a film it’s probably not a stone-cold classic. Yes, it’s a good film but it’s not great. I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel over the weekend as well, which is rather better and more enjoyable to boot. If I were going to see one of the two films again it’d be Grand Budapest and that’s despite Scarlett getting her top off.
There’s a great little article about language theory in the ongoing attempts to decipher the Voynich Manuscript here which talks about the locating of repeating patterns which indicate an underlying intelligence to the message, so if you’re a film composer who thinks that kicking a pile of milkbottles over is a good shorthand for suggesting alien thought patterns then I’m afraid you’re actually wrong as there’s no indication of information being transmitted by that. Unless the aliens are thinking to themselves in heavily encrypted terms, which seems unlikely given that no earthlings can understand Martian anyway. This also suggests that the scene in Close Enounters where Earthlings and Aliens learn to communicate with each other by using music to find mutually comprehensible meaningful patterns has a lot going for it.
Anyway, this got me to thinking about things like speech training and elocution and rhetoric and why people who have been trained in public speaking tend to deliver messages in patterned, melodic tones - think of Tony Blair as the great example. Even though a speaker might be saying nothing meaningful in that way politicians have, it is worth at least considering that it's possible to trick the listener's brain into thinking they've actually been presented with a lot of meaningful information just by presenting what they say with the right amount of structure.
So I suppose that's my review. Under the skin is a great little idea, well filmed and tremendously well acted but containing very little dialogue. I preferred The Grand Hotel Budapest which as well as being sumptuously shot (it reminds me a lot of Jeunet's films like Amelie, with heavily saturated, almost cartoonish, colour and precisely framed shots) is crammed with witty dialogue - and witty dialogue is really hard to write. It contains a lot of information concisely presented.
*Or Meta-IV, to give it it’s Star Trek name.
**Or possibly a Fall album.
