Words of prey

I realize I’m a little late to the party but I had to write a few words about Birds of Prey, the short-lived TV series from 2002. I checked out the first few episodes over the weekend courtesy of Netflix after learning that my childhood playmate Dina Meyer starred in it as Batgirl. I hoped to discover it was kid-friendly and that I could show it to Jonah and Archer and then boast to them that I knew Batgirl.

Unfortunately, when Dina assured me it was kid-friendly, she must have meant young-adult friendly. Or maybe she just meant that it’s more kid-friendly than the Saw films, in which she also stars. At any rate it wasn’t age-appropriate for a four- and a six-year-old. But that’s not the only reason I wouldn’t show it to them. Nothing against my friend from the old neighborhood, who did a fine job with what she had to work with, but I have some serious problems with the show’s premise.

Birds of Prey takes place in the city of New Gotham, some years after a cataclysmic confrontation between Batman and The Joker. The Joker lost, but on his way out of town he murdered Catwoman — Batman’s true love — and attempted to kill Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, Batman’s protégé. Barbara survived, paralyzed below the waist. Batman vanished from New Gotham, apparently driven to despair by the Joker’s targeting of the the two women closest to him. Under the new alias Oracle, Barbara Gordon presides over a super-high-tech crime-fighting lab from which she supervises The Huntress, a heroine with Matrix-style superpowers of combat and wardrobe and who, by the way, is the secret love child of Batman and Catwoman. Together, with the help of a third babe with mental superpowers who joins their team, they battle a variety of supernatural foes stalking New Gotham, most of them under the direction of the scheming Dr. Harleen Quinzel, once The Joker’s groupie and now a respected, unsuspected mental-health professional and director of Arkham Asylum.

OK, where to begin?

Batman has a daughter he doesn’t know about? With Catwoman? Well, I might be able to buy the with-Catwoman part — maybe (mustn’t their love remain unconsummated because she chose the wrong side of the law?) — but considering the importance of Batman’s own parents to his mythos, it’s tone-deaf to make him a daddy too and then make him (a) unaware and (b) absent.

Speaking of which, Batman’s gone? What about the terrible graveside vow he made to his parents? He just broke it? What, does he think crime in New Gotham is over now that The Joker is defeated? I’m sorry, but Batman would never simply up and leave town, I don’t care how much he has suffered — especially with Barbara Gordon still alive and still fighting crime despite suffering even more directly than Batman from The Joker’s attack.

Supposedly Batman dealt The Joker some sort of total final defeat. What kind of “final defeat” leaves The Joker free to murder Catwoman, cripple Batgirl, and then skip town? And where did The Joker go after leaving New Gotham?

And why “New” Gotham? What happened to “Gotham City”? Feels like some sort of not-your-father’s-Oldsmobile nod to the kids watching the WB network. (And look what happened to Oldsmobile.)

Back to those parting shots from The Joker. His attacks are mere executions. There’s nothing Joker-like about them. We actually get to see the attack on Batgirl. He knocks on her apartment door and shoots her point-blank when she opens it. With a handgun, one that shoots bullets, not a telescoping boxing glove. He doesn’t blow up her apartment. He doesn’t drive a wrecking ball into the side of her building. Where’s the jack-in-the-box spraying poison gas? Where’s the robot clown with spinning razors for hands? Where’s the sadistic glee, the cackling laughter? If he was capable of this kind of attack before, why did he wait until he was “defeated”? And how did this master criminal get the drop on Batgirl and merely cripple her, not kill her?

And why in the world would crimefighter Barbara Gordon, daughter of the police commissioner, simply open her apartment door to The Joker?

Speaking of, where is Commissioner Gordon? He’s never mentioned.

About Dr. Quinzel: how did The Joker’s kooky moll become a professional psychiatrist, administrator, and evil mastermind? “Harley Quinn” is flighty and ditzy, the very opposite of the restrained, duplicitous, organized schemer she’s portrayed to be here. Judging from other incarnations of her character, she should be doing no more or less than constantly searching for The Joker and looking for ways to bring him back to New Gotham.


Tag line reads, “Batman’s
little girl is all grown up.”

I could let all of those other problems slide if it weren’t for the thing that bothers me about The Huntress: she has superpowers. Why would the daughter of Batman and Catwoman have superpowers? Why would anyone in Gotham (sorry: New Gotham) have superpowers? The Batman universe is appealing largely because there are no superpowers. Yes, I’m aware of Superman/Batman crossover stories, and that you can’t have staple Batman comic-book villains like Clayface without superpowers; but my Batman universe — the one on TV and in movies — has mostly stayed away from the supernatural. I like the idea that with nothing more than a bottomless pile of cash, a preternaturally capable manservant, and a will of iron, I could be Batman.

Finally: isn’t it a little sexist to call a show about three hot chicks Birds of Prey?

Oh well. Someday Jonah and Archer will get to make up their own minds about it. But consistent storytelling matters to me. I’d almost rather they see Saw first.

Couldn’t I be a little less right all the time?

Preface: It’s remarkable how quickly, after all we’ve been through, it’s becoming irrelevant to bash George Bush. Of course some of this is by his own design: he’s sitting out the election to prevent harming McCain’s chances (any more than McCain and Palin are harming them themselves), and everyone’s bashing energy has shifted to more prominent targets. Very likely, once the election is over, we’ll be hearing a lot more about Bush as he gives the world whatever final fuck-you he has in store; but for now, I’ve got this blog post that I’ve been tinkering with for weeks, and if I want it to have any relevance at all I better wrap it up and push it out the door now, ready or not. Here ’tis.

Global finance in total meltdown. Major cities half obliterated. Peak oil (and peak helium, platinum, indium, zinc, copper, phosphorous…). Deteriorating soil quality in the heartland, and plummeting water tables — in fact, water shortages everywhere. Polar ice caps disappearing. Fishing stocks depleted. Our protective global magnetic field weakening. Vast methane clouds pouring out of their ancient undersea vaults. The U.S. Constitution in tatters.

Not that long ago, when my friends and I would get together and discuss our biggest concerns, they were along the lines of, “With the world so peaceful and prosperous, how will we keep our kids (when we have some) from growing up into spoiled trust-fund brats?” We were looking for solutions a little more subtle than worldwide strife and deprivation to teach them some humility, but I guess worldwide strife and deprivation will have to do. It worked for “the greatest generation,” after all. (Careful what you wish for!)

Honestly, it’s almost worth it to see everything turning to shit all at once, just to be able to say that, when I warned four years ago that the world couldn’t afford another four years of George Bush — that no scenario of devastation was too far-fetched — I was exactly right. It wasn’t hyperbole when I said George Bush could destroy the world. He now has.

Ahh.

Of course the destruction of the world could have taken many different forms. Here’s one way I’ve thought it might happen. Don’t you just know that this is exactly how Bush would respond to this kind of crisis? Imagine with me now…

EXT. GOLF COURSE - DAY

            AIDE

    Mr. President, Space Command has
    detected an extrasolar object in a
    geoconverging orbit, exhibiting
    nonballistic maneuvering capability.
    Here's the report: "Alien starship
    will reach earth in three months."

            BUSH

    "Space Command"?  We have one of
    those?  You're shitting me.

            AIDE

    Yes sir, but the report --

            BUSH

    OK, you've covered your ass.  Now
    watch this drive.

INT. UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

            AUTO EXEC

    Dammit, Dick, these new CAFE rules
    are killing us.  Building more
    fuel-efficient cars adds almost a
    full percent more to the cost of
    manufacture!

            ASSISTANT

    But the public wants these cars and
    will pay a premium --

            AUTO EXEC

    The public?  Bah!  You're fired!

            ASSISTANT

    But the free market --

            AUTO EXEC

    Get out!  ...Sorry you had to see
    that, Dick.

            CHENEY

    I know how it is with these kids who
    "care."  Say, don't I remember
    reading something highly classified
    about an alien starship...?

            AUTO EXEC

    A what?!

            CHENEY

    Oh it's probably nothing... except
    it's just what the doctor ordered
    for your fuel-efficiency problems.

            AUTO EXEC

    Thanks Dick, you're the best.

            CHENEY

    Yes.  Yes I am.  Fuck you.

INT. OVAL OFFICE - NIGHT

            BUSH

    My fellow Americans, an alien
    spaceship is approaching earth.  It
    will arrive in two months.  Top
    scientists have analyzed it and
    determined it is likely that its
    intent is hostile.  I urge the
    Congress to release one point six
    trillion dollars to fund my
    planetary defense program.  In the
    meantime, this government is taking
    all possible steps to ensure the
    safety of all Americans.  I have
    suspended fuel-efficiency rules so
    that automobile manufacturers can,
    ah, include lead shielding in the
    passenger cabins of all new
    automobiles as protection against,
    er, a possible alien death ray.

INT. PRESS ROOM - DAY

            MILBANK

    Yes, Harvey?

            HARVEY

    What is the president's response to
    reports that MIT scientists have
    deciphered transmissions from the
    alien ship and determined its
    mission is peaceful?

            MILBANK

    The president sees through that
    transparent ruse.  I direct your
    attention to this report, released
    yesterday by the NSA, pointing out
    that Al Qaeda operatives received
    the same transmissions.

            HARVEY

    Of course they did, everyone on
    earth rec --

            MILBANK

    Next question -- Paul?

INT. U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES - DAY

            A REPUBLICAN

    Madame Speaker, I move to end debate
    and vote on the proposal to release
    the one-point-six-trillion dollars
    that our commander-in-chief requires
    to defeat the Al Qaeda terror
    spaceship.

            PELOSI

    Very well.  If there be any opposed
    to the proposal to fund the
    president's Al Qaeda space-defense
    program --

            KUCINICH

    Hang on, that spaceship has nothing
    to do with Al --

            PELOSI

    Shut up, Kucinich.

          (bangs gavel)

    Without objection, the measure
    passes.

INT. ALIEN STARSHIP

            LIEUTENANT

    Commander, sensors indicate a
    massive missile launch from the
    planet's surface.

            COMMANDER

    Target?

            LIEUTENANT

    Computing... sir, I don't
    understand.  The missiles are
    heading straight for us, but --

CUT TO:

INT. WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

            ADVISOR
          (frantically)

    --those missiles don't have enough
    fuel!  It's what I've been trying to
    tell you!  They're intercontinental
    missiles, they can't even achieve
    low earth orbit, let alone--

CUT TO:

INT. ALIEN STARSHIP

            LIEUTENANT

    --our geostationary orbit is far out
    of range.

            COMMANDER
          (sighs)

    I had hoped for a cultural exchange,
    but I can see these people are both
    warlike and stupid.  Incinerate
    planet.

            LIEUTENANT

    Aye sir... planet incinerated.

Let’s hope that if aliens do come — or whatever the next disaster is — it’s not in the next seventy-seven days.

Son of Superpest

As I’ve written before, my mom once adopted the nickname Superpest for her ability to wheedle conciliatory goods and services from large corporations that had failed or wronged her in one way or another. Her secret weapon: dogged reasonableness.

Early last year I took the plunge and got a big plasma Philips TV for the living room. Between that and my DTS sound system I was in home-cinema heaven! But after a few months I noticed an intermittent problem: when turning on the TV, sometimes the display was distorted in one of a couple different ways.

Wrong Right
Wrong Right

Sometimes there was no picture at all. Turning the screen off, waiting a few seconds, and turning it on again usually fixed the problem. Sometimes a second power-cycle was necessary.

The problem only happened a few times per month and so was extremely hard to diagnose. A succession of authorized repair centers variously (a) tried and failed, (b) pretended, and (c) refused to fix it. Over and over again, I directed appeals to Philips, only to be referred to another local service center, who would eventually send me back to Philips, which would assign me a new case number and the cycle would repeat. Add in several unanswered phone calls and letters and you can see how this stretched into more than a year.

Finally I sent them this letter:

To whom it may concern,

Eighteen months ago I purchased a Philips plasma TV. For the past twelve months I have been trying to get a defect in that TV repaired. The lengthy saga of those attempts involves incompetence, unresponsiveness, and evasiveness among a variety of authorized service centers, along with miscommunication, misunderstandings, and other less outlandish obstacles. A detailed chronology is enclosed.

A few weeks ago a technician from C—-‘s TV visited my house to inspect the unit. His opinion was that it could not be repaired. For one thing, the problem is very hard to reproduce. It happens only two or three times a month. For another thing, if he went with his guess and replaced the circuit board that he suspected was the culprit, any replacement he might try would come refurbished from Philips, not new, and would be likely to have its own quirks. He didn’t want to see me trade one minor problem for another possibly worse one.

He had a point. The problem I’m dealing with is minor: occasionally when I turn on the TV, the display is garbled or blank, but I can fix it by turning the TV off and on once or twice. He said that, if I’m lucky, the problem isn’t a circuit board at all but is due to bad grounding. His parting suggestion was that if I observe the problem again, I should try fiddling with the wires and the connections and rapping on the components in the path between the TV and ground.

Since his visit I have observed the problem two more times, and I followed his advice, but to no avail. The problem persisted until I power-cycled the TV. I despaired of launching yet another go-round with Philips customer service seeking some sort of resolution to this problem, certain that I’d end up chasing my tail once again. But then I had an idea:

I can live with having to power-cycle my TV two or three times a month. My main concern is that the problem will worsen somehow, to the point where my ability to enjoy the TV is substantially degraded. Maybe one day I won’t be able to fix the problem by turning the TV off and on. Maybe one day the screen will remain persistently a little garbled.

So here is my proposal to you. As long as the problem remains an occasional minor annoyance, I will live with it and leave you guys alone; however, if it should significantly worsen, then even if it is out of warranty you will replace the TV with a new, comparable unit and a new warranty at no cost to me, since the problem has existed since the TV was under warranty and remains unaddressed despite my own best efforts.

If this proposal is acceptable to you, I would appreciate a written acknowledgment, however I will also consider a lack of response (within two weeks of your receipt of this letter) to be an acceptance of this proposal. On the other hand, if this proposal is not acceptable to you, I must unhappily resume my efforts to get this problem resolved and insist that you take new steps to remedy it.

Sincerely, etc.

Two weeks passed and I heard nothing. Another couple of weeks later I got a call from Philips: “Your replacement TV is on its way.” Yesterday it was delivered and installed.

Yay! Chalk one up for dogged reasonableness (and for maintaining a detailed chronology of phone calls, repair visits, and so on). The moral of this story is that customer service costs money, and eventually it’ll impact their bottom line less just to give in to your reasonable demands. Or kill you, but for big-screen-TV-peace-of-mind that was a risk I was willing to take.

The anti-Clone-Wars

My kids saw The Clone Wars when it was in theaters earlier this summer. Mercifully I didn’t have to; they went with a friend’s family. I’d seen and heard enough to know that, if the three prequel films were so bad that they made me “retroactively dislike Star Wars” (as I have been fond of hyperbolizing), The Clone Wars was so toxic it could have put me off movies altogether.

After they saw the movie we were subjected to many days of Anakin this and Count Dooku that. The occasional four- and six-year-old Yoda impressions were pretty amusing, but the rest was hard to take.

We hadn’t realized that the theatrical release was only an extended commercial for the new TV series, and we might never have found out (we don’t have cable) except that we were staying with friends in Seattle when the show premiered and the kids got a double dose of it, goosing their fervor.

But then the situation was defused by something that I wish I could say I had planned, because in hindsight it was obvious that a new batch of adventure stories with better writing and better acting and stories that actually engage the intellect would cleanse that Clone Wars garbage from my sons’ developing minds:

Classic Trek!

We’ve watched a couple of episodes a week for the past few weeks and the kids have stopped saying “roger roger” and “young Padawan.” They are now talking about “beaming down to the planet,” “repairing the anti-matter nacelles,” and “red alert, all hands to battle stations!” It warms my heart. Here is the birthday card that Jonah made for me a few days ago. It depicts the entire family in bed, watching an episode of Star Trek.

(It’s strange that he depicted an old-style aerial antenna on top of the TV. Watching all of this 1960’s programming may be affecting him in ways I hadn’t previously suspected — just like when Spock was trapped in that ice age and reverted to the primitive behavior of the Vulcans of that era!)

Coincidence fatigue

Part 1.

The first time I heard the song, “Going in the Right Direction,” by Robert Randolph and the Family Band, I thought this lyric sounded familiar:

I was lost
I thought the losing dice were tossed

Wracking my brain for a minute produced the answer: it’s also a lyric from the song, “Just In Time,” an old standard from mid-century.

Part 2.

Out of the blue several days ago, Andrea calls me and asks whether she should buy a group of discounted tickets to an upcoming Cal Bears game. “College football?” I asked. (I was right.) I said sure — it’d be fun to take the boys, and maybe a friend or two, not that it had ever occurred to us before to go see a live football game. We’re baseball people (and we barely manage even to see that once a year).

Part 3.

Our friends Michael and Julia are buying a house! I’d previously offered my help moving their belongings when the time came. But when the time did come, it coincided with the Cal Bears game. “I can help later in the day,” I told them apologetically, “but meanwhile, if it helps, we can take your son (Jonah’s friend) to the football game with us so he doesn’t get in the way.” Oh my God, came the reply: their son is already scheduled to go with his aunt to the same game. This, from another family that has exhibited no particular interest in football before now.

Part 4.

Driving home from Point Reyes this afternoon, the song, “Going in the Right Direction” comes up in my thousand-song MP3 shuffle. As usual I idly try to remember the name of that other song that has the same lyric, but this time I draw a blank and then forget all about it. The very next song that plays is a Mel Tormé rendition of “Just In Time.” I am gobsmacked. I explain the coincidence to Andrea. She hears the identical lyrics. Shrugs. I do the verbal equivalent of grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her, but she is unimpressed despite the long odds.

My only explanation is that she has coincidence fatigue from the business with the Cal Bears tickets.

Boy heaven

We did an amazing thing today.

As usual, Andrea had to drag me out of the house to it. I’m getting over a cold and all I wanted to do was catch up on blogging and work and Netflix discs, all of which sounded more interesting than driving to Point Reyes Station to see the culmination of the Giacomini Wetlands restoration project. But Andrea insisted, and I’m glad she did because she was right as usual, and it was amazing.

It’s a former marsh that was walled off from Pacific tides sixty years ago with a series of levees to create pastureland for cattle. Eight years ago the land was purchased by the National Park Service to begin a wetlands restoration project, which it turns out is a lot more complex than merely ripping out the levees. It’s taken from then until now for the project to reach its climax, which happened at high tide this morning. The public was invited to trek across the former ranch as water poured through a brand-new levee break and flooded the land for the first time in three generations.

Turnout was huge. Hundreds of nature-lovers showed up on a crisp, picture-perfect autumn morning to walk across a vast flat range of grasses and overturned dusty soil where construction machinery had been hard at work. A shallow channel was dug into the ground, making a straight line for the open water that we could see on the horizon; and when we’d walked far enough across the pasture, we came to a spot where a trickle of water was turning the dusty channel bed damp. As we watched, fingers of mucky water reached inland, inch by inch.

We stepped out of the channel onto the grass, which lay a few inches higher, as the water slowly overtook the spot where we’d been standing. Jonah and Archer tentatively placed their feet in the new muck.

A few minutes later they were notably less tentative.

All the grownups in the vicinity participated vicariously in Jonah’s and Archer’s delight at tromping through the mud, splashing in a dozen brand-new streams, pitching pebbles, ripping up tufts of grass, and conducting miniature impromptu soil-engineering projects. One onlooker commented to us, “Boy heaven.” (Lamentably, we saw almost no other children with anything approaching the liberty that we gave Jonah and Archer to explore and get absolutely filthy.)

Wherever we saw a limb of water, we could watch it reach into the low places in the land, rills of water filling one tiny depression after another. In some places the matted vegetation underfoot would grow first squishy and then splashy. Now and then a field mouse would emerge from a flooding hole and head for higher ground. Clods of dry soil would darken, crumble, then melt into thick dark mud through which Jonah and Archer gleefully trod. (We’re amazed it never sucked their shoes off.) Newly flooded sections of the plain bubbled noisily long after the last bit of earth was covered up.

When the tide began sluggishly to reverse itself, we retraced our steps through the pasture — at least, those parts of it that were still dry — returned to our cars, and reconvened a few miles down the road for a champagne celebration with the Park Service rangers and scientists for whom this was not merely an incredibly cool way to spend a Sunday morning. That it had been a lot of hard work was obvious, as was their satisfaction at its outcome.

Brush with t3h h4wtness

Several days ago, my sister Suzanne was “friended” on Facebook by Dina Meyer, the actress, whom you may best remember as the other woman in the love triangle in Starship Troopers.


Don’t let the alien-ichor-spattered battle armor fool you. It’s a romance.

The friend request included no explanation beyond the message, “OMG!” So Suzanne started sleuthing and enlisted my help and our dad’s.

Thanks to ye vasty Internet we learned that Dina Meyer grew up in Forest Hills, New York — just like us. She was born in 1968 — right between me and Suzanne in age. She has an older brother named Gregory — just like an early-childhood playmate of mine (who had a younger sister named Dina). The clincher came when our dad recognized Dina’s mom in a picture of the two women.

Gregory and Dina were neighbors in our apartment building, just the right ages for me and Suzanne to play with. They had a different last name then. Our playdates (though in those days they weren’t called playdates) also included Jackie and David, two other neighbor kids who were just the right ages for us.

Eventually, Dina and Gregory moved away. As I learned just recently, their parents split and their mom remarried, which must account for the new name. Later our own parents split, and a few years after that our dad remarried — and weirdly, Jackie and David became our stepsiblings!

And now, because you know I’d never leave you hanging, here’s a picture of Dina literally using my sister (bottom left) as a stepping stone to stardom. (Those Hollywood types are all the same.)

Blogjam!

Geez, the end of October, already? So much has happened that I haven’t blogged about — my birthday, another Disneyland trip, a Seattle trip, the pathetic but exhilarating (but pathetic) implosion of the McCain campaign, finishing Anathem, and a little thing called the global credit crisis.

Over the next few days I will attempt to break this “blogjam.”

What are the odds?

Our PlayStation 3 is not just a gaming console; it is our entire living room entertainment delivery system. It has replaced our DVD and CD players, and with its front-facing USB port I don’t even need CD’s; I just load up a thumb drive with music, plug it in, and play.

I have a thousand songs on one of those thumb drives, and I always play them in “shuffle” mode. Yet it seems that there is always a lot of overlap between one listening session and another — the same songs that I heard yesterday are in today’s mix. You’d think that with a thousand songs to choose from, it would be a while before I hear the same song twice, unless there’s something not sufficiently random about the PlayStation’s song randomizer.

I was all prepared to fire off an indignant letter to Sony’s customer support department when I decided I first needed to understand exactly how unlikely was the overlap I was encountering.

Figure that a “listening session” includes twenty songs. There are 339,482,811,302,457,603,895,512,614,793,686,020,778,700 (339 duodecillion) different ways to choose twenty songs from a collection of a thousand. This result is given by the combinatorial formula:

n! / k!(n-k)!

where n is the number of items to choose from (1,000, in this case), k is the number of items to choose (20), and “!” is the “factorial” operator that means “multiply the preceding number by every other number between it and 1.” Five factorial, for instance, is written “5!” and is equal to 5×4×3×2×1, which is 120.

The combinatorial formula above is sometimes abbreviated “nCk,” pronounced “n choose k.” The very very big number is the result of calculating 1000 C 20.

So there is a vast number of possible listening sessions. But in how many ways can one listening session overlap with another? Let’s consider a second listening session that doesn’t overlap at all with the first. The way to think about this is that the first listening session “used up” twenty of the available songs, leaving 980 to choose from — specifically, 980 from which to choose 20, or 980 C 20, which is 225,752,650,356,644,030,123,857,337,771,499,346,518,885 (225 duodecillion).

So of the 339 duodecillion ways to choose 20 songs from a thousand, 225 duodecillion, or 66%, do not overlap — but that means that 34% do overlap. There is a one-in-three chance that at least one song in the second session will be the same as one in the first.

This was a stunning result to me. I never expected the odds of an overlap to be so high.

That doesn’t mean that the PlayStation is working correctly, necessarily; it’s my impression that I’m getting multiple-song overlaps, and I’m getting them much more than one-third of the time, so the PlayStation still may not be adequately randomizing its playlist. But this result does send me back to the drawing board to gather objective data about just how much overlap I am getting.

Wait for it…

[This post is participating in Mystery Man’s Tension blog-a-thon.]

In preparation for this blog-a-thon I have been thinking for days about suspense in the movies and I now know exactly what makes it work.

Take the scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing in which Kurt Russell has tied up everyone, taken blood samples, and then poked each blood sample with a hot wire. He has reasoned that if one of them is really the Thing in human form, then every part of it can live on its own, be capable of shape-shifting, and so on. Even a blood sample from the Thing will have a survival instinct and should try to evade a hot wire. One by one he pokes the wire into a petri dish of blood. Poke… sizzle. Just plain blood. Poke… sizzle. Just plain blood. If he finds one that’s not just plain blood, what will it do? What will the tied-up “person” do when revealed to be the Thing? The scene is enormously tense because we don’t know whether something is going to happen, or what it will be when it does. That’s suspense.

Hmm, come to think of it, maybe that’s not suspense. I’m remembering now that when I saw Batman Begins, my heart was pounding like a triphammer in the scene where young Bruce Wayne exits the opera with his parents into a dark alley. I knew exactly what was about to happen, and I desperately didn’t want it to. Maybe that’s what suspense in film is all about: letting the audience see the bad thing coming before the characters see it. This was Hitchcock’s usual approach, so there must be something to it. It’s the same dread I felt as Matt Damon’s son was winding up to jump into the swimming pool in Syriana.

But then how to explain the even greater tension in similar scenes in Schindler’s List and Pan’s Labyrinth — scenes in which a sympathetic character is at the mercy of a psychotic military commander pretending at kindness that you know can explode at any second into depraved cruelty? We don’t know what horrible whim is about to be indulged, we just know that it’s gonna be bad, real bad; and there will be no escape for the victim, and no repercussions for the psycho. In these cases the evil is all too credible — the psychopath is recognizably human, not a cartoon; and the victim is someone in whom we’re invested, and with whom we identify. Maybe the secret of movie suspense is simply to depict fully realized, three-dimensional characters in bad situations.

This would certainly explain why the suspense in parts of Maria Full of Grace was so unbearable. People say “the suspense was unbearable” and they don’t mean it literally; but I do. I literally had to stop the movie because I was so keyed up and fearful of what would happen next. More than once. Why? The peril in which Maria places herself in that film is no greater than that endured by hundreds of other heroines in hundreds of other movies; in fact you could argue it’s much less. But the vérité style of the film, the simple and sympathetic depiction of an ordinary person in desperate circumstances, and the unflinching portrayal of a nerve-wracking ordeal combine to make an excellent film almost unwatchable.

Then again, maybe you can have suspense without such close identification with the characters. Consider the scene in Aliens where Ripley and Burke and a few surviving Marines have barricaded themselves in a room, rifles at the ready, while a motion sensor shows a veritable army of aliens closing in on them. Nothing against the writing or the performances in that film, but I don’t think it’s character that makes that scene suspenseful. You just know shit’s coming, which brings us back to the first point I was trying to make. (The scene ingeniously ratchets it up a notch when the motion sensor paradoxically shows the aliens already inside the room, even though the door is still barricaded. When the characters realize the aliens must be in the suspended ceiling, there are a few moments of even more suspense as one of them climbs up to poke a tile out of the way and have a look.)

So there you have it. Movies create suspense when you know something bad is about to happen, but you don’t know what. Except when they don’t, in which case they create suspense by letting you know exactly what’s coming. And if they don’t let you know exactly what’s coming, or even whether anything is, they can still create suspense by building real characters and suggesting that something might.