My Favorite Pixar Movies

It’s time for me to admit an innocent pleasure: I’ve loved just about every film made by the experimental film company, Pixar. Many of my readers could have probably guessed that I have a soft spot for Pixar films and have no doubt throughly enjoyed many of the same films themselves with their friends and family. However, so throughly enjoyable are these films that I want to take this space and acknowledge some of my favorites, in case you missed them the first time around or at least so we can have the pleasure of considering them yet again, together.

Toy Story

I loved everything about Pixar's first film and its Pirandelloesque scenario of “toys” exiled into some terrifyingly meaningless limbo. “Buzz” Lightyear is an astronaut whose rational, positivistic outlook is challenged when he finds himself imprisoned with a menagerie of fantastic creatures in the incomprehensible alien landscape of a giant child’s bedroom. 

This film begins the cycle of “collapsing allegories” where bewildered protagonists encounter seemingly symbolic characters  (such as the cowboy Woody, voiced by Clint Eastwood, who claims to be in Hell for the prostitutes he killed). Yet the further the narrative progresses, the more problematic interpretation becomes, until an overdetermined semiotic saturation point is reached and the hypernarrative implodes into a purely asemic cinema.

Favorite Moments

• Mr. Potato Head’s Oedipal ocular castration
• Woody’s “tears in rain” speech
• “Hell is other Toys” –Woody

Discussion

This wonderful picture also made film history, being the first feature film to be rendered entirely from direct neural imaging from the director’s John Lasster’s brain. The control process by which the director’s vision was rendered by slave brains was at this point quite crude, which accounts for the film’s relatively low resolution and the occasional images of the director’s mother’s nude breast, typical of early ENGRM films .

A Bug’s Life

This is by far the least popular of Pixar’s films, no doubt because it is Pixar at it’s most nihilistic, depicting a brutal class struggle that eschews any Marxist soteriology in favor of an unending Master/Slave dialectic. A devastating and brutal film, even by Pixar standards, which presents the mind numbing reality of mass death as well as any documentary on genocide, well before its notorious final shot, which reveals the action of the film and the new “triumphant” hegemony of the ants as taking place on the face of the dead child from Toy Story. Men, gods and any kind of normative ideals are killed for mere senseless sport in this film, on a scale that is incomprehensibly vast and meaningless: truly, a bug’s life. 

At the same time it has, I think, the most catchy songs of any Pixar picture, composed and performed by Bruno S, who has the title role as Flick. 

Many critics denounced the film’s unrelenting nihilism, which they felt particularly inappropriate for a film aimed at children “who ought to be learning the optimistic truths of dialectical materialism” and counter to the spirit of solidarity, in favor of a “decadent fashionable pessimism." 

Monsters, Inc. 

Pixar’s adaptation of Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté is cinema at its most Sadean. Udo Kier is at his most lovable as Scully.

Cars

Set in the world of Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army, Cars is as much a tribute to Bunuel in its structure as Kubrick in its content. Gary Numan stars as Numan, a former astronaut who ostensibly suffers from post-mission amnesia, who now hosts an award winning children’s television show whose theme is “things have faces and we wipe the faces off.”

Dissatisfied with his job and his icy sadistic relationship with Nico (played by Deborah Harry), Numan circuts the city looking for “forensic clues that are the condition of the possibility for an antinomial murder yet to happen.” When he discovers that his bosses are just giant cockroaches (Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, in cameos reprising their roles from A Bug's Life) he quits his show and takes a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel. 

Even though it is not clear that anything happens at the snowed in resort (anything that wasn’t going to always already have happened anyway), Numan is arrested and sent to an unusual prison apparently run by the Residents. After the eyedrops and maze of naked women have their salutary effect, Numan is released into the Marines, where he becomes a donut-eating crack shot who assassinates the President. For this he is immediately given flowers and award and the camera pulls away for its final shot of Numan being applauded by an audience of Numan clones on a planet where Gary Numan (or rather, anthropomorphized cars that look like Gary Numan, as all the characters in the film are indeed rendered as anthropomorphized cars) are the only form of life. 

Favorite Moments

• Numan teaching children that the face in the mirror is a stranger and you should not listen to anything it says.
• David Bowie’s cameo as Grady.

Discussion

In many ways the negative critical response to this film documents its success as a film where “identification with the action on the screen is questioned, indeed rendered impossible. Cars holds a mirror to its audience, but its audience are a bunch of fish or sapientless lichen and see nothing” ( “Asperger’s –the movie” Unwatchable Weeky).

It also marks the only collaboration to date between Randy Newman and Gary Numan.  

Finding Nemo

In this feature length adaptation of Heidegger’s  Gelassenheit  (“Discourse on Thinking”) an amiable little clown fish goes in search of his lost child, encountering many lovable characters along the way whose illusions about life and existence are utterly destroyed. 

Favorite Moments

• The surfer turtle dude who talks for a solid thirty minutes, recounting each of the films of Ingmar Bergman before dying of a deliberate on-screen heroin overdose.

Nemo: Then what are we to wait for? And where are we to wait? I hardly know anymore who and where I am. 

Gill: None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves.

Pixar had already acquired a reputation for uncompromising and relentlessly existentially honest children’s films that were only sometimes appreciated by the general public. As one exasperated reviewer related their child’s reaction:

“Why, mommy? Why? Why? Why?”

“Why, what, dear?”

“No, mommy –why.”

The Incredibles

Another bold and outrageous film that dares to ask if a family with extraordinary abilities should be limited by slave morality. With Alejandro Jodorowsky as Zarathustra. 

Ratatouille

Pixar’s most conceptual film is an esoteric meditation on the process of its own becoming. Remy the rat pulls on Linguini the idiot's hair to control his actions, just as director Brad Bird yokes the slave brains that animate and render the film in an unholy creative union that is beyond pleasure and pain. 

Even as someone who embraces cinema and expression at its most extreme, the idea of a rat cooking food for people is just unbearable.  

WALL*E

This film tells the story of its titular robot who is no sooner released from a robot insane asylum than walks into Bier Himmel where EVA is being mistreated by her robot pimps. As the pimps treat everyone universally badly, WALL*E and EVA escape to Post-Consumer Earth, which is a wild wasteland, having been fought over in successive atomic wars by apes and men.

Things look up for the couple as WALL*E gets a new job on an extermination team, retasked by Starship Troopers as a mass grave digging machine. However, things turn for the worse as WALL*E’s superiors are revealed as to be themselves giant cockroaches. EVA returns to prostitution and the Earth is destroyed. 

This was unfortunately Bruno S. final film, as his brain was destroyed by filming.

All these wonderful family films are included in Pixar: God is Dead: Everything is Permitted, A Collector’s set, in 10 discs or Rights Managed Recoverable Memory Engram Concept.

Inspiring Canine Tales Reconsidered

Proponents of canine virtue and Sunday School teachers are fond of recounting the loyal vigil of Hachiko, an Akita, for his owner, Professor Hidesamuro Ueno. Every day, the story goes, Hachiko would come to Shibuya Station to greet his master returning from his classes on the train. In May 1925, the professor suffered a sudden cerebral hemorrhage and died, never to return to the same station –or so the story goes.

Undaunted by his repeated failure to appear, Hachiko continued to visit the station and await his master -for the next decade, with a promptness and unfailing faith in his return that has filled out many a sermon or heart-cockle warming.

However, this moving and sentimental tale takes on a new light when it is revealed that Hidesamuro Ueno actually suffered no such sudden and inexplicable illness at  all. Rather, Professor Hidesamuro Ueno had, in fact, cruelly faked is own death for the express purpose of escaping the dog's company, which he felt had grown onerous. Unable to face his dog directly, the perfidious teacher had elected simply to never travel by the same station.

The reality of the narrative becomes still more disheartening when we realize that the dog undoubtedly knew this and consciously used the sentimentality of his vigil to deprive his former master the possibility of ever returning someday to his house as he had originally planned. The professor was forced to take an apartment farther from the University of Tokyo. Eventually the Professor’s absence from home and dog’s persistent vigil caused an enormous loss of face for the Professor, who resigned in disgrace and never returned to Tokyo, ending a promising academic career.

Given these sad, but undeniable facts, we cannot help but consider that this poignant story which originally seemed a parable of undying loyalty, love and sincerity, horrifically is the opposite of all these things, being in actuality a narrative of dissimulation, betrayal, revenge and a bitter contest unto death, where is shown not that the dog may surpass us at our best virtues, but that may equal us at our lowest.

Book: Hachiko, Implacable Shaming Dog

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June Lockhart described the television program Lassie as "a fairy tale about people on a farm in which the dog solves all the problems in 22 minutes, in time for the last commercial.”

Invariably these problems revolved around encounters or crises that the boy had, from which the intrepid rough collie was either able to directly extricate or bring appropriate help.

This melodramatic scenario is actually based on fact, but the facts themselves are disturbing.

The fictional Lassie’s rescue of his hapless boy owner and stories like it no doubt have their origin in the story of the unfortunate Lucien and his dog Sultan in post war southwestern France. The boy and the dog had been exploring a series of concealed caves when the boy became trapped in a narrow passage.

Human help was indeed summoned to the boy's rescue, but seemingly inadvertently. The dog had indeed attracted much attention to itself, but only in its frantic and somewhat futile attempts to secure or purchase a gun.

Immediately previous to this, the dog had in fact, successfully purchased some curious supplies that significantly qualify his ostensible rescue efforts, including beer, pornography, condoms and dog food.

Things grow darker still when we examine the further contents of the sack the dog had assembled from the boy's home to bring to the scene of the cave. Whereas it did contain some salves and medicine, its manifest seems to suggest, on one interpretation, that this is only because it was included to facilitate some wholly diabolical, prolonged, highly unnatural and sadistic ordeal in the unknown seclusion of the caves and their unknown network, consisting, as it does, of wire, wire cutters, pliers, shears, various knives, knitting needles, masking tape and lipstick and other feminine cosmetic articles taken from the toilet of the boy's mother.

Though these disturbing details were overshadowed by the relief at the boy's rescue, they became the object of perplexity and suspicion in due course. The dog precipitously vanished one night, though whether he took flight or fell to some rash sanction remains unknown.

Indeed, if we follow the story past its usual popular terminus, the incident really has an air of tragedy or disquieting mystery, as the dog's disappearance did not end the intrigue. Rather, the sinister import of these usually omitted details eventually came to cast their penumbra of uncertainty and suspicion on even the boy himself, who now sometimes received mysterious packages, whose contents remain unknown, save that they were often wrapped in foreign and Asiatic newspapers with a spoor of spice and feculence.

Some in the village were not above the libelous speculation that the event had more deliberate contrivance, either before or after the incident, than generally attributed. There was speculation to the effect that the accident concealed or was the unplanned sequela to some planned clandestine rendezvous with the dog, the deliberate and unclean purpose of which was a subject alluded to only in the briefest, most blasphemous, most drunken oaths in the local pubs. During the war, the town had been spared little and lost much. Recriminations and accusations as to who colluded with the Germans and the Vichy government were kept in check only by fear of counter accusations. Were the contents of the sack intended not for the boy, but for collaborators hidden in the caves? Germans, even? Why was the boy allowed to roam on his own in an area where the Germans were known to store arms and supplies? Or as tipsier tongues had it, had the dog and the boy stumbled upon a network of caves decorated with unknown prehistoric drawings depicting the unthinkable, as at Lascaux? Did others, as folktales said, await their rendezvous?

The boy's eventual choice of career did nothing to dispel these rumors.

When, after a few years, the young man failed to report to duty, the family made great haste to declare their child dead and end the matter presumptively.

Though many years after the event, the caves were promptly declared a public hazard and dynamited. Even its entrance was thoroughly effaced and wholly subtracted from public record, lest it become the locale of tales and ghost stories.

Books: Robbe-Grillet, Lucien et Sultan, Cahaix, Les Dormeurs dans la Terre

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Of history’s great dogs, surely one of the greatest was Fala, FDR’s beloved Scotch Terrier, whose presence at the signing of the Atlantic Charter places him at the scene not only of America’s entry into the Second World War, but as one of the architects of the post-war order. Fala’s very public role in politics, as the host of public relations films showing a day at the White House to his integral role in rebuffing FDR’s critics founded and invented a critical role for the First Dog that every White House pet has followed on, but never equaled.

However, Fala’s very loyalty to his president is the tragedy of his downfall, the scandal of which, too, has no equal.

Fala truly could not accept FDR’s passing, a death that cruelly bereft him of seeing the war he had so foreseen and fought so bravely come to an end. Unlike the cunning Japanese Akita previously discussed, Fala genuinely expected and wished his master’s return.

For all his loyalty and canine instincts, Fala did not truly understand the democratic process. When Harry S. Truman came into office, Fala could only see the former vice-president as a usurper and murderer. Even living at Val-Kill, Eleanor herself was to report the little dog sulking about, Hamlet-like, brooding on a perceived un-righted wrong.   

This much, at least, is undisputed and documented historical fact. As for Fala’s tragic downfall, many observers would agree that Fala continued to make trouble for the Truman administration. From McCarthyism to general strikes, there seemed to be no side that could not find a fierce, scrappy ally in Fala, as long as they challenged Truman. Yet, in as much as some conspiracy theorists would associate him with Torresola and Collazo, firm evidence is lacking.  The former First Dog spent his remaining days at some distance from Washington, or anywhere Truman went. He died only three years later.

His rehabilitation followed immediately with his interment next to his beloved master, for whom he may have been willing to bite anything, even high treason.

Books: Fala: Architect of the New World Order, The Littlest Traitor

Tom Ronca’s Godzilla: The Naked God (Godzilla Without Mercy)

Dear Tom,

Thank you for sending me your script for "GODZILLA: THE NAKED GOD/ GODZILLA WITHOUT MERCY" -I hope I am not wrong in interpreting those to be the titles of your proposed script, as these are what is written all over the outside packaging, cover and elsewhere. There are other things written as well, but these strike me as good titles and the other expressions are harder to make out as you have very thoughtfully recycled pages from "Jugg Thugs" as material for wrapping, binding and printing your script.

I really enjoyed your script and feel that it is simultaneously a bold departure -a re-re-reboot -as well as a thoughtful tribute to the long tradition of Godzilla films. In fact, the fact that you so obviously know that tradition well and hold in the same high regard as many fans makes some of your more aggressive and outré choices somewhat baffling.

After Godzilla vanquishes Gigan he does things... these things are not traditional or canonical. Once a foe is dead, Godzilla typically just turns and walks into the ocean. He leaves. He does not take further action against an already dead enemy. Specifically, he does not rape or abuse their corpses.

It's true, as you say, that Godzilla is a monster. Yet, nowhere is it implied that he is this kind of monster. I really suggest that you change this scene. Maybe some music?

Likewise, it is true, as you say, that Godzilla is an organic being. An enormous organic being with proportionally large bladder and bowels. There is a reason previous films have not chosen to depict this in any great detail. There is no official treatment of how Godzilla disposes of his wastes, but it is certainly not “down each of King Ghidorah's severed necks, as promised."

Most of the scene in Paris is fine, as far as it goes. I do not think it is necessary to subtitle Godzilla and Mechagodzilla's roars in French. In any case, the French text you have provided appears to be Serge Gainsbourg lyrics anyway.

It is less clear why you think this whole exchange between the two is necessary. Why should being in France change either Godzilla or Mechagodzilla's well-established behaviors? They do not NEED to talk. Emphatically, Godzilla does not NEED to challenge Mechagodzilla to a "jerk-off contest on the Arc de Triomphe." Mechagodzilla is a ROBOT. What purpose does this rather sordid episode serve since Godzilla waits until Mechagodzilla "whips it out" and then "pounds his shiny faggot ass"? This scene seems both explicitly homoerotic and violently homophobic and more along the lines of Crusing than a traditional Godzilla film.

Another endemic problem I see with your treatment is equally serious, and, I fear, will prevent anyone from taking it seriously, indeed, even finishing it. I understand there is a conscious attempt here to recapture the naïveté and innocence of one's first encounter with Japanese film and perhaps even some effort is deliberately directed at reclaiming such stereotypes. Nonetheless, your treatment instead comes off as severely handicapped with respect to race. Specifically: it's totally racist.

Some of the peculiar constructions used in the early English dubs relate to the technical problem of matching Japanese lip motions with English words. This does not reflect the reality of how Japanese people talk. In reality, Japanese people are perfectly capable of speaking perfect, fluent English, or any other human language. There is no real reason for everyone to talk in a kind of crude, forced pidgin, particularly during the love scenes.

Furthermore, it seems as though the Japanese have no actual language of their own. For example, you have the newspapers headlines read: INVLADERS FLOM SPLACE! Furthermore, no Japanese News Agency refers to itself as “Slant-Eye Witness News,” and with good reason.

Were that the only problem with your treatment. Instead, in every scene Japanese people are described as either: 1) eating rice, 2) making cars or electronics or 3) "committing seppuku." Also, Tom, not all Japanese women are geishas, nor are geishas exactly what you seem to think they are. Your description is more like a Hooters with Kabuki make up. Geisha are not strippers. They are not ninjas. They are generally not robots. I know you have seen things, things that may have convinced you otherwise, but Wikipedia assures me this is so.

Likewise, Teppanyakki, though delicious, is only one mode of food preparation in Japan. The General’s suggestion that they “go to Benihana’s” makes no sense as Benihana’s is an American restaurant and is unlikely to have a branch in the cafeteria of a super-secret base. The wise-cracking Teppanyakki chef is indeed one of your most original (and least racist characters) in your script. From his monologue are we to suppose he is Mickey Curtis' character from Fires on the Plains? The one who ate people? Didn’t he die? In any case, I would like to suggest that relying on him narrate segues between scenes, though charming, is perhaps unnecessary

In a related vein, the ethnicity of the Xliens, as you describe them, seems problematic. I agree with that your characterization of them as "tiny, clever, cunning and deceptive" is consistent with their previous portrayal.

However, you go on to say that they are also "greedy, gold-loving, usurious, controlling CNN and the source of all wars." Tom, where are you going with this? You know what I am talking about. The Xliens always wear black, but you have them now wearing little tiny skullcaps. The alien salute is now "mazel tov." The fact that Mel Gibson is interested, I think, seals my point here.

I understand the well-established tradition of exploring ethnicity through science-fiction and fantasy you allude to. Yes, the Vulcans and Ferengi can be thought of as self-constructed projections of post-racist ethnic fantasy identity that reclaims bad stereotypes. The fact remains that the Xliens, as you describe them are the crudest and most objectionable of stereotypes, being basically a race of hamburglers from space that speak Hebrew.

I think it is highly appropriate that you include Mothra in the lineup. I assume you mean "Mothra" and not "Mothera" as it is typed in the treatment. Less appropriate seems to be your treatment of the twin fairy princesses. The fairy princesses are indeed, tiny and beautiful and go everywhere together. I have no doubt that they do indeed love each other. However, Tom, NOWHERE, NOWHERE, IN NO MOVIE are they portrayed as having an incestuous lesbian relationship. Yes, Tom, I have seen that yuri manga, but these fairy princesses are unrelated. The island they live on is called "Infant Island" not "Ultra-Lesbos." Mothra does not protect the island against "men with their weapons of war and their stupid penises." I cannot help but think that some confusion or synaptic misfire has clouded your writing with respect to these characters as I cannot make even sense of such passages as "Mothera has now entered the clitoral stage." The passages I can understand, such as the mechanism of the "activating twin fisting power" strike me as unfilmable now that Bob Guccione is dead and do not redeem your treatment of its problematic homophobia any more than Showgirls does Basic Instinct.

Finally, as a writer of little more than para-literary pastiche myself, I have no objection to mixing genres or "cross over" characters from another series, even a radically different one. And yet the deus ex machina of having Mork from Ork appear at the end seems totally forced and implausible. Never mind that you have him emerge from "an egg vomited out of the Fonz's interdimensional vagina." I know these characters have met before. I recall your previous script that explains the Fonz's "void orifice." I understand that it, and the repeated, rather shabby treatment of Mindy McConnell are a well-established part of M/M BDSM fan fiction. All these things speak against their inclusion in a Godzilla picture, much like your suggestion for an all King Crimson soundtrack. And, again, many of the characters in the sex abattoir of the fifth act are from Taxi, not Happy Days (please see attached chart).

These are, of course, simply my reactions to a fine and original script. However, I feel these are the logical and reasonable observations that any reader would make, any reader who is not already wearing a red and silver Orkian travel suit with a zip up egg mask. Perhaps this is where the genesis of and work shopping of some script elements has gone astray?



Your script for Transformers 3, however, is brilliant. I would not change a thing (well, maybe just one suggestion). I do not know if the people in charge of this profitable franchise can be interested in a script where the Transformers neither transform, nor speak, nor move, but I sincerely wish they could be. Perhaps if Jim Jarmusch were involved, rather than Michael Bay. As it is, your script represents a series of hour long monologues of the main characters complaining about their problems to semi-trucks, race cars and jet fighters that never respond. I was particularly moved by Shia Labeouf’s complaints about his mom, though, again, I sense the script way not be best served by the conventions of slash fiction here and threatens to trivialize the theme of incest.

Also, I really don’t understand what to make of this scene:

SHIA LABEOUF

Mom, I just want what every other kid has got. Some cool friends, going to parties, a regular hangover. Just to wake up and not be worried about anything other than a term paper. I’ve been running so long, Mom, so long, ever since I met these machines. I feel like I’m old, really old. Older than Dad. As old as they are.

SHIA’S MOM (Played by TOM RONCA)

I know honey. You have an extraordinary fate. A lot of lives are shaped into something, different, something amazing, something that other people will read about by sheer force of circumstance. But not you. You always would have seen a bit more. You would always have to go a bit further. Maybe father than anyone has ever gone. Trust me on this, you’re not missing much –one drunken kegger is much like another. Now rub this oatmeal on me and put the chew toy back in my mouth.



This is an intense scene, Tom, and very much more along the lines of the New Trangressive French Cinema than anything really legal. But it's very confusing. 

To begin with, when you write "Shia Labeouf" you mean his character, right? Because this is a movie script. It is not real.

Likewise, by "Shia Labeouf's Mom" you mean his character's mom, right? Because she keeps calling him Shia and "Shia Labeouf" call her "mom" and sometimes "Tom" and frequently "Tom Ronca." In fact, I think she refers to herself as "me, Tom Ronca, your hot mom," more than once.

I know this scene is important to you Tom, because you have described it many, many times to me. And also the altered pictures you sent.

I honestly think it’s a good script, Tom. I really think that were Shia Labeouf to read it, he might indeed be as impressed as you say he will. I think the pictures really detract from what I take it you are trying to say here. So my heartfelt advice is for you to stop sending them. Stop sending them, Tom. Stop. Let your script with its highly original elements and eloquent moments speak for itself and not be drowned out by endless of series of highly vocal autoerotic performances left as voicemails that end “That was for you, Shia, baby. Love, Mom.” Because I think those might be misinterpreted, much as your legal counsel has stressed. 

Anyway, thanks for sending your scripts. And merry xmas.

Van

Some Unusual Qualities of Particular Labyrinths

The mirrors in the so-called "Palace of Narcissus" actually served a distinct purpose, as do mirrors in palaces generally, to serve as simple surveillance systems controlling vulnerable points of access, such as stairs. It is for this reason true that, as the lyrics of the lay go, the number of mirrors proliferated as the number of actual personnel in the palace declined. However, the importation of more and more mirrors into the palace was rather the effect of fewer and fewer personnel (the mirrors being needed so fewer and fewer guards could control the same amount of space) rather than as folklore has it, the cause.

Further, it has been mathematically demonstrated, that, owing to the well-understood laws of optics, it is wholly possible that the palace’s main chamber could have contained numerous blind spots, because of, and not despite its mirrors.

It is, no doubt, by the cunning exploitation of this geometry and physical fact that the victims of the palace were dispatched, by assassins unknown, rather than strangled by their own reflections, as legend has it.




The Labyrinth of the Minotaur, it is said, possessed unusual acoustics. This we read in the excellent "Encouraging Voice of the Labyrinth."

It is said that the "fatherly voice" in the labyrinth is "heard everywhere and at all points equivocally." Further, that the Minotaur could hear everything that happened in the labyrinth equally well, from any distance or position, as though it were occurring in the folds of his ears. This is the unstated reasoning behind the author's claim that time and space did not exist in the labyrinth for the Minotaur, for whom it is completely transparent and intelligible monad. The author then goes on to identify the Minotaur as God, as Mithras, in whose catacombs there is terrible enlightenment, or as Moloch, to whom all children are ultimately sacrificed.

As for the unfortunate children of Thebes, it was said that the sound of their own footsteps or voices were alienated from them, appearing to approach them from behind in a distorted form, perhaps owing to the same sonic dynamics that gave the Minotaur his omniscience. Perhaps further, the victims of the labyrinth were so chased by their own magnified footsteps and panicked voices into delivering themselves into the den of the Minotaur himself.

If so, this perhaps explains how the Minotaur had complete and instantaneous intelligence from every point in the labyrinth: the Minotaur may have occupied some central location to which all the passages of the labyrinth conducted and magnified all sounds.




If any of this is plausible, even possible, it provides a possible context for an explanation of the enigmatic "voice" of the labyrinth. It is the distorted and pitch shifted echoes of the doomed youths themselves as they grope their way to their doom. Both the voice and the encouragement are chimerical.

Its author could certainly not be the Minotaur himself, who is described universally in all accounts as mute.




"Our Life Now" is the title of an artwork noted at the Venice Biennale 2048 for its shockingly high casualty and fatality rate, even at a Biennale where lethal and near lethal artwork were very much in vogue. The labyrinth section of the installation begins with a highly realistic scale replica of a mall shopping arcade in Hong Kong in the late 20th century, whose glitzy twists and turns eventually become those of an Egyptian tomb, which alludes directly to the author's previous collaboration on the retail sarcophagus of Madonna and his still earlier work on the "hidden retail spaces of the dead.” *

This museum quality replica actually holds the mummified body of Norman Mailer, a fact that is only revealed in the following darkened chamber, where viewers are forced to endure a reading from Ancient Evenings read by a Mailer lookalike.

The viewer's only escape from this ordeal is to discover the concealed secret door that leads out of the reading, as the passage by which they entered is slowly filled in with sand during the reading.

The secret passage opens up onto a maze whose walls are virtual advertisements that patrons must negotiate using eyemice or I-GUIs. Revolutionary at the time, this maze of ads is now a staple at tradeshows, air and infospace musems and arcology condo displays. Indeed, the viewers are inclined to believe they have reached the end of the installation as the virtuspace commercials are for the very corporations that sponsored the exhibit.

Instead, the maze itself collapses and the viewers instead find themselves in the very real freezing mud of a trench in Le Mort Homme in 1916. Viewers have no sooner taken positions to view the bleakened craters of the field before them, when sharp whistles announce an incoming enemy assault, in this case, wave after wave of celebrity lookalikes with live historically accurate ammo.

A pitched battle generally ensues between the panicked art going public (which has the advantage of position) and the waves of hardened celebrity imitators, ultimately descending into extremely vicious hand to hand close quarter combat as the celebrities overrun the trench, using such improvised trench combat weapons as sharpened shovels, Grammys, Emmys, Cable ACE Awards and Academy Awards. This is where most casualties occur as the art going public usually has little more than the Biennale schedule and artist's statements to defend itself.

*Very different in its signification than the artist’s Universal Centotaph for Tom and Suri Cruise, Whose Circumference is Everywhere and Whose Center is Nowhere, which consisted of several strains of engineered bacteria carrying various slogans, such as “EXTREME WEALTH BRINGS ITS OWN WOE, WHICH HAS NEITHER SYMPATHY NOR DIGNITY” and “WHOM GODS WOULD DESTROY THEY FIRST GIVE AN INCOMPETENT PUBLICIST” as well as samples from Cruise’s most famous films that can only be played back on the now obsolete 120 BB (gram negative) gPod. ("Pain and Information Aesthetics" NAND, Vol X).





The very undecided and deeply problematic nature of the Labyrinthus Pareidolia on Mars makes its inclusion on this list controversial. Aresologists, exoarcheologists, Marsologists and geologists remain violently divided as to whether the structure is a natural formation, alien artifact, giant facbot printing error, hoax or advertising campaign from the future or symptom of material planetary mental illness. As such they have differing opinions and analyses as to whether the “friezes” “faces” and other depictions of the labyrinth depict Martian mythology or history, attempts at therapy, or “a trailer for the extinction of the human species.”

This leaves aside the perennial controversy over whether or not there is Afterlife on Mars.



Most Marsologists maintain that Mars as a natural phenomenon effectively ceased to exist with the successive printer errors of the Mars Condo Society and that as rogue facbots and frankenweiners have effectively remade the planet, Mars has effectively been not so much terraformed as “anthropomorphized,” and, as such, Aresologists have no actual object of study (Aresology actually being a branch of human and post-human cultural studies). On the whole, Marslogists wish to continue the venerable tradition of empirically based intersubjectively available science and reject the operational premises of Aresology as wholly lacking any intelligible criteria for its purported phenomena or testable hypotheses or statements, being not so much a science as a catalog of pseudo events and quasi experiences.

Aresologists, in turn, cite the catastrophic events, unexplainable data and failure of the missions previous to Mars Condo One as dispositive of the peculiar cybernetic and psychological phenomena of Mars having some indigenous origin and point to the continuing vexing presence of Martians as indicative of phenomena that cannot be accomodated in traditional natural science, no matter how our concepts of space, time, cause and identity are modified, but rather can only begin to be described in a new framework that accepts such paraphenomena as Martian Spiders as "para-phenomenologically pseudo-real abstractions as given reals."

Despite, or rather because of this, there is actually quite a lot of consensus as to the proposed demolition of the labyrinth and any other observable structures on Mars. However, rather than a preemptive strike on Mars in a presumed Earth-Mars War, as some critics have claimed, this is simply to, in the words of one Nobel Prize Laureate “place man back in his proper position as a thinking being and re-enable the regularities that are the conditions of possibility for natural science.”

Nature

Adorable cub foxes nom down on precious baby ducks. Then an elephant comes and stomps on them.

Two white wolves trot briskly through a vast landscape that swallows them in the slow tracking helicopter shot.

Narrator: These endangered wolves have a difficult task. They can hunt for days without any sight of prey.

The wolves are tiny, like little escitalopram tablets lost in rumpled bed covers.

Up ahead, there are tons of caribou, scattered like rice, clogging up the hills.

We cut back to the wolves, nails clicking across an infinite ice cube tray.

More shots of caribou. There is a shitload of caribou.

The wolves are lost in a vast incomprehensible nothing, like specks on a whiteboard that might not even be there, like there’s something wrong with your eyes.

Meanwhile, elsewhere: too much caribou.

Another helicopter shot of the wolves, circling, circling. This time, we can even see the shadow of the helicopter on the ground. How close are we going to get? Even the wolves see us, now.

The next shot is of the wolves riding in the helicopter, their heads out the window, tongues lolling, fur waving, golden eyes looking all around. They howl with delight.

Then in the next shot, a wolf runs down a caribou. Wolves are everywhere now, shaving off the slow trailing parts of the herd, like someone rounding off, slicing off the outlyers on a graph.

The narrator explains this intervention: it is more of a lie to pretend that we are not here, not part of, but somehow separate from nature; that we are somehow behind a fourth wall, as though we ourselves were not inhabitants of the Earth with a helicopter.

Besides, says the narrator, I am God.

The vast city of an anthill explodes in slow motion, millions of ant citizens tumbling end over end.

Another shot of a vast apocalyptic plume annihilating the hill. We see ants trying to hold onto precious eggs, flying through oblivion.

A close-up of the explosion: it looks like Mount St. Helens. Only as the shockwave clears, we can see its cause: a Timberland clad boot.

The narrator looks down upon us and smiles. We notice that he is holding a gun. What kind of documentary is this?

It is night now. The elephant’s eyes, the narrator tells us, are not better than our own. However, the camera’s eyes are like the cats. The cats see the elephants clearly.

A large adult elephant charges at the pride: I can’t see you, but I am fucking huge.

The cats would like a tasty baby elephant. They scoot in, casually, like they were looking for a day care center for their cubs. The elephants encircle their young, kicking dust. They create an impenetrable grey wall. An iron fucking wall, says the narrator.

The elephant’s eyes are like our own, but we see what the lions see, like Jason in the Friday the 13^th movies.

The cats have found a smaller, isolated elephant they can take down.

The pride is thirty strong. Soon the young elephant is running.

One cat keeps getting on the back of the elephant and holding on, clearly wondering why the rest of the pride isn’t helping. It’s like a Far Side cartoon.

But there are too many of them. The force of narrative will bring the young elephant down.

We cut to the rest of the elephants, standing around, looking at the young elephant’s yearbook, silent. Lightning.

The narrator describes the cruel, erotic beauty of the pitcher plant. Cruel, erotic? Those are his words, said with a cultured accent that indicates no disapproval. He describes the oral licking ministrations of the insects to the pitcher plant in somewhat overly precise, salacious language. In turn, each insect loses its grip on the “smooth, sweaty, veiny lips of the pitcher, sliding to the pungent abyss within.”

We watch an ant drown. Then a grasshopper. A few more insects, rather more than would seem necessary for educational purposes. The narrator keeps calling these, the “unfortunate lovers of the pitcher plant.” He continues, describing how their putrefaction in the pitcher plant’s “womb” feeds it. We see extensive underwater shots of the pitcher plant’s “dungeon womb.” Her “victims” hang upside down, suspended, rotting.

We then cut to a parallel shot of luminous bodies in an amber liquid. The tinkling we hear cues us that it is ice in a glass. We see the narrator sitting in an expensive leather chair. We see him surrounded by pitcher plants. He is in a high-end clothing boutique. A skinny girl half his age is trying on new clothes, to his obvious pleasure. Issues of National Geographic and Yacht Slave lay scattered about with leftover streaks of cocaine on them.

We are in a jungle canopy. A tribe of monkeys has isolated and corned a young member of a rival tribe. They run him down.

The monkeys dismember and feast on the body. Most of the body is hidden by blood stained leaves, but sometimes the victuals picked out are all-too discernable –fingers are sucked on, the ripped skin of the face and a scalp is contemplated like a Halloween mask. The filmmaker plays the atrocity theme from Cannibal Holocaust. The monkeys then blow each other. The receiving monkey snowballs the other.

We cut to the monkeys in the back of a speeding sports car. We are in Vegas with the narrator. He takes the monkeys to the casinos, to the buffet and shows. This is not a problem, as this is Vegas. The narrator has a really nice suite, the kind that looks like Mike Tyson’s private jet, only bigger and with more nudes that shoot Kahlua from disgraceful parts of their bodies.

The monkeys are in the master bedroom, jumping and defecating on the bed. They seem to be encouraged off camera. It’s like Girls Gone Wild. A figure enters the shot. It is the narrator. He blows a white powder up the monkeys’ noses. This seems to drive them insane. The narrator puts some hardcore pornography on the HD wall screen, which spills across the bed.

We are in a basement somewhere. The monkeys look bad. They are strapped to tiny kid’s chairs. The narrator is reading something in a cracked slurred voice. It’s La Philsophie dans le Boudoir. We see he has something in his other hand. It is a buzz saw.

We cut to a shot of the narrator in sunglasses, on the deck of a speedboat, his head flying above the spray. We hear his voice over.

I am not cruel. I am not kind. I am not generous. I am lavish. I am not excessive, but I am everywhere excess. I am erotic. I am the only god there has ever been, the god of necessity.

From this momentary lapse into something, we return to the great white orthodoxy of nature documentaries, the shark.

We think of the shark as a killing machine. Yet sharks exhibit many social traits. They are curious. They have complex groups. They are like us.

However, the shots we see of the sharks are of them rolling in a sea of red and white, churned by fins, gliding past severed chunks of monkey.

Less than three hundred years ago, less than a blink in the history of the earth, men used other men much as they use stock animals today.

At this point, it seems as though the documentary has become unhinged in time as well, as we see the rigging of an old sailing ship. We circle around it in a helicopter, as we did the wolves. The treatment of the rigger is curious: we scrutinize it as though examining an intricate web or anthill.

Nature is intolerant of any excess.

Black bodies, still in chains, fall overboard. This happens at some distance with some detachment, so at first it is hard to tell what is happening.

But in nature, nothing is wasted.

Sharks swim among the struggling slaves, devouring them. It is not clear if these are supposed to be the same sharks.

We cut back to the narrator on the boat. We see the crew of the documentary. The narrator is not miked. He is gesticulating and smiling. The crew seems to be arguing with him. The narrator starts taking off his clothes. We can make out his words before he jumps off: “I’m going to rape a fucking shark.”

After the credits, we realize we probably should have sent the children to bed sooner.

At the bottom of the screen, numbers come up. Then we are back in the studio of our local PBS affiliate. Our local PBS personality is there. We’ve seen them since we were children. We’ve lived here all our lives. The narrator from the documentary is there, too. He seems different on the studio cameras, but is still somewhat larger than life. He looks older, like he just got off a plane. He says very little, other than the importance of quality programming.

We understand. We have seen all he has shown us. We know our role in the cosmos. We know that even our knowledge is something we do in it. We grasp our responsibility. We pick up the phone. We hug our children and nuzzle their brows as we saw the mother foxes do. We try, try and be better human beings.