"Get Out" Got Medieval

 "Get Out," Jordan Peele's racial horror film, uses medievalism as brilliantly as it uses milk and Fruit Loops to inform the audience about character and context. In particular, Jeremy's knight's helmet, which he uses in place of a ski mask to cover his face as he carries out his nefarious pursuits, conveys a great deal about that character, and about the way that white supremacy often relies on medievalism. 

Why a knight's helmet? It could easily come off as goofy or absurd. Mark Twain mined this object for its comic potential in Connecticut Yankee, and more recent cultural offerings, like "Role Models," have poked fun at LARPers and SCA-types. Yet, within the context of a horror film about race in America, it makes perfect sense that Jeremy carries out his misdeeds in medieval cosplay. The knight's helmet can be read as a reference to the Knights of the KKK (founded as a "kinder" KKK in 1975), and it signals the persistent link between white supremacist ideology and medievalism, present since the 19th century. Twain himself laid the blame for this at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, whose early 19th-century historical novels Waverley and Ivanhoe were extremely popular in the American South (and elsewhere). Scott (according to Twain) romanticized life on the grand agricultural estate, sentimentalized aristocracy and rank, and promoted illusion instead of reality. 

"It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them....Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war."

The opening title credits of "Gone with the Wind" make this link between the antebellum South and medievalism plain: "There was a land/of Cavaliers and Cotton fields/Called the Old South.../Here in this pretty world/Gallantry took its last bow./Here was the last ever to/be seen of Knights and their/Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave./Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered./A Civilization gone with the wind..." The Old South becomes the continuation of an (imagined) courtly, western European Middle Ages, both equally consigned to the past. 

Yet racial and ethnic diversity throughout the medieval world were not uncommon. Jeremy's knight's helmet is the perfect prop to signal his adherence to a false narrative of history, a narrative that rests on erasing Black people from history, whether it's the history of the medieval world or of the United States. 

Creating Lives in "Black Mirror" and "Ex Machina"

Netflix has just announced that it will produce another dozen episodes of "Black Mirror," hallelujah. The brilliant series interrogates later-capitalist techno-modernity and the shifting boundaries between self and object--specifically, our personal computing devices. This broad topic--humanity's relationship to intelligent computers and robots--has been explored recently in the new tv show "Humans" on AMC and Alex Garland's Biblically inspired film, "Ex Machina." But "Black Mirror" tackles gender in ways that complicate and enrich the narratives of human-machine relations, and that are not replicated elsewhere.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in a superb essay out this summer in the NYRB, explored "Ex Machina," Spike Jonze's "Her," and the lineage of sentient machines in the western cultural imagination, arguing that the current crop of films and tv shows are less about machines that become like humans, and more about humans that become like soulless automatons. Mendelsohn used examples to describe both what he calls the "economic" kind of robots--machines that replace or augment human labor--and the "theological"--sentient objects made in their makers' images. Both groups of objects include those gendered as male (Talus, Frankenstein) and female (Haephestus' handmaidens, Ava). 

Many tales of the sentient machine have an erotic charge. Ava, the SAI droid in "Ex Machina," was made, like her "sisters," to fulfill her creator's sexual fantasies. Of course, this goes all the way back to Pygmalion's statue of Galatea, whom Pygmalion created, adored, and used sexually before she was "brought to life" by Aphrodite. In fact, in every example that I can think of, when this story--of the creator and his uncannily life-like creation--appears with erotic elements, the creator is male and the created object is female. 

Like "Ex Machina," "Be Right Back," the first episode of the second series of "Black Mirror" also takes up the limits of the human creator and the human-machine relationship. But unlike the other examples, the machine-being in "Be Right Back" is male, and the creator who calls him into being is female. Martha (Hayley Atwell) and Ash (Domhnall Gleeson)* move to a new house; Ash, addicted to his smart phone and social media updates, dies in a car accident; Martha discovers she's pregnant. She pays a service that mines Ash's entire online presence to create a simulacrum of him, first as a disembodied AI program, and then fully embodied in a synthetic form that is almost identical to Ash. As Martha, pregnant with Ash's child (we see them having pretty banal, and--to Martha--unsatisfying sex earlier), prepares to create a new life, she practices by bringing an old life (Ash) back. The synthetic version of Ash is eerily servile and literal-minded, but he is also an improvement on the "real" Ash in some ways. For example, he is a much more satisfying and skilled lover, something that delights and also discomfits Martha. 

By making the creator figure a woman and the object a man, Charlie Brooker, the writer, highlights the importance of gender in creation stories in a way that is ultimately far more interesting than Garland's patriarchal "Ex Machina." Martha "creates" Ash just after she discovers that she is pregnant, and key moments of bonding with the synthetic Ash occur alongside hallmarks of her pregnancy, like when she shares the first sonogram image with the disembodied AI Ash. Brooker juxtaposes the narrative of natural creation (pregnancy, baby) with artificial creation (synthetic human replacement) and asks, how are we responsible for what we create? Martha grows to regret her synthetic creation, but she cannot destroy or abandon it. Part of the reason why is hinted in the poignant coda, which shows that the synthetic Ash is still "alive," but banished to the attic, where he is visited once a year by Martha's other creation, her daughter. This "father" is the only father her daughter will know. 

*Of course, Domhnall Gleeson is the sacrificial Caleb in "Ex Machina."

The Dung Heap of History

The past is shit. 

This is what I learned on a recent trip to the UK. I happened to be in York during the filming of the pilot of "Knifeman," a new AMC drama about a controversial 18th-century medical figure. The production team used the Shambles (the oldest street in York) and the area around the Minster to stand in for Georgian London. Although the book on which the tv show is based claims it is about the birth of "modern surgery,"* far from looking "modern," the extras all looked as pre-modern and disgusting as possible: muddy clothes, bad teeth, and dirty faces and fingernails. 

(*Someone better tell the people making "The Knick" that "modern surgery" started two centuries earlier.)

Later, I went to the Jorvik Viking Center, and learned all about the Vikings. I learned about their incredible long-distance trade and kinship networks; their love of finery, such as imported silk, amber, carnelian, and gold; and their scientific expertise. I also learned that they were giant poopers; viz. this massive human turd (this is apparently a sponsored object, and is officially known as the "Lloyds Bank Coprolite"), unearthed by archaeologists several decades ago. 

But that's not all: The ride through the recreated streets of Viking York (complete with fabulous and creepy life-size automata) concludes by passing a man straining in the privy, complete with vocal and intestinal sound effects.

Later, on a trip to the Roman fort, Housesteads, along Hadrian's Wall, the first thing our guide showed us was the well-preserved latrine. Her prop was a sponge on a stick, similar to the ones the Roman soldiers (and civilians? unclear) used to clean their bums after doing their business in the brown tent. A few days later, a fellow hotel guest, after learning what I do for a living, asked, "Why study the Middle Ages? Wasn't everyone just wading around in their own shit?"

Why is there such a fixation on the dirtiness of the past? Certainly, human waste can reveal a lot of important information about diet and disease in a population. And everyone poops, after all. Latrines are no less interesting or important than bathhouses or aqueducts or temples. The focus on the privy in Viking York, the chamberpots of the 15th century (at Barley Hall) and the close stools of the 16th century (Edinburgh Castle), and Roman latrines can, at first glance, be a way to close the temporal gap between then and now, between them and us.

But the focus on plumbing, hygiene, and bathing is also a way to widen that gap, to say that people in the past were more primitive and less intelligent than we are; that their tolerance for filth and dirt was higher than ours because they didn't know any better, not because they didn't have the same options that some of us have now. This false sense of superiority is what Monty Python brilliantly sends up in this clip from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
 
Here's what else I learned on my trip. Yes, our guide in Barley Hall, Master Paul, showed us the chamber pot. But he made sure to discuss the stringent regulations in 15th-century York that governed the disposal of waste (human, animal, and manufacturing). Contrary to popular belief, people did not fling the contents of their chamberpots out of the window and onto the street (especially after the 14th-century plague pandemic). The Neolithic (ca. 3200-2500 BCE) settlement at Skara Brae, in Orkney, contains an elaborate system of drains to wash away household and human waste, and each of the small houses contains a small "necessary room." Over 5000 years ago, Stone Age people, using stone tools, built an entire village with indoor plumbing. 

In many ways, people who lived long ago were the same as we are. They had less sophisticated tools, but not less sophisticated minds. We'd do well to remind ourselves of that, and to extend that same compassion to the millions of people in the world now who live amidst sewage, effluvium, and garbage. Contempt for those on the dung heap of history can so easily be transposed to contempt for those on the dung heap of global poverty. But most people don't want to live in their own filth. If they do, it's not because they're ignorant or irrational or subhuman, it's because they don't have another option.

Railing against Inequality

Rail travel is making a comeback. Not actual rail travel (at least in the United States), but fictional rail travel. Dystopic rail travel.

Katniss on her way to the Capitol.

 A very special train, Snowpiercer (Le Transperceniege in the original bédé) is the vehicle for the continuation of humanity in the film (and bédé), and also for the continuation of economic stratification under global capitalism. In the Mockingjay trilogy, Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, and Effie travel throughout Panem via luxury rail. Both dystopian sci-fi narratives examine economic and political oppression and injustice, income inequality (a bloodless phrase for a life-or-death fact of life for so many people), and the immoral decadence of the wealthy few at the expense of the impoverished many. And in both, the extravagant railway cars, gourmet food, sumptuous furnishings, and spectacular amenities clearly convey the gulf between the starving, dirty, huddled masses and the privileged few who get to to enjoy them. 

Locomotives, or trains, first appeared in the middle of the 19th century, but they didn't really begin to incorporate high-end luxe amenities for first-class passengers until railway travel became more widespread in general, at the end of the 19th century. The opulence of long-distance trains, such as The Orient Express, is legendary: servants, fine china and crystal, sterling silver, elaborate meals, and plush carriages for those wealthy, often upper-class, passengers who could afford a first-class ticket. And for the rest? Trains, like ocean liners, are large enough to make the gulf between first-class and third-class passengers impossible to cross. Although it's not easy to use an airplane bathroom in first-class if you're traveling in economy class, one still shuffles through the first- and business-class (and economy "plus") seats on the way to those awful seats in the last row that don't recline, and the crafty economy air traveler can swipe a pillow or a blanket from an unused seat. 

As a mass transportation technology, trains are better able to convey vast differences in passenger status than airplanes (or any flying transport). Their length makes it possible to have different entrances, different amenities, and different experiences for passengers, according to the cost of the ticket. And they hark back to the Gilded Age of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when the gulf between the haves and the have-nots was similar to what it is now. No wonder that the creators of genre books and films have turned to them to realize a vision of a dystopic society that looks a lot like later-capitalist modernity. And no wonder that they're thriving today.

Chess & Mind

I recently started learning something new: 
chess.

The Lewis Chessmen. 

 

I never played it, I didn't know anyone who played it, and my total exposure to chess came from books and films in which people played chess (see: Searching for Bobby Fischer, Fresh, The Lymond Chronicles (especially Pawn in Frankincense), The Americans, Cairo Time, WarGames, The West Wing, etc.). In the cultural artifacts that introduced me to the game, it was always heralded as something really hard. When a character plays chess in a story, it tells the audience that the person (Fresh, Jed Bartlet, or Francis Crawford) playing is always several steps ahead of the people around them. Chess players think ahead, they can strategize, they can "see the whole board." And the mathematical nature of chess, especially (so I'm told) at its highest levels, lends itself to computational technology. (I vividly remember the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup.) 

But I confess that I'm confused about how and why chess became a yardstick for intelligence and, in some cases, for humanity, insofar as "human intelligence" is a proxy for what makes us uniquely human. Humans have been building calculating machines for millennia--even before chess was invented. Why is it that the element of human intelligence that is the *easiest* to reproduce with machinery became associated with chess, and used as a marker for intelligence itself? When did this start to happen? And what does this reveal about historical theories of mind and cognition--have they changed sufficiently over the past centuries to reveal any changes in terms of the importance chess as a measure of intellectual capability?

Check Out BBC Doc "Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams"

BBC Four just aired a cracking documentary on automata, written and presented by historian of science Simon Schaffer. It's really good, and you should watch it. It covers early clockwork machinery, jacquemarts (bell-ringers) and clockwork automata, minaturization, revolution, fraud, and the replacement of human workers with machines. I particularly liked the section on Schloss Hellbrunn (which I shall be visiting later this summer) and the way that the "Mechanical Theatre" depicts the nobility's idea of a utopian society, complete with perfectly regular laborers. Schaeffer makes some interesting connections to the fact that horological and artistic innovation rested mainly on low-paid, low-status artisanal workers; these artisanal workers ended up displacing themselves when captains of industry built machines, using the same principles as elaborate, richly decorated luxury automata, to replace human labor. 

Schaffer's expertise as a scholar is in early modern science, and he concentrates in the documentary on the automata of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have a few small emendations to offer to Schaffer's narrative. Although it's true that the regularity of clockwork machinery became used as a metaphor to understand the human body in the early modern period, early modern automata were not the first to mimic natural forms. The ancient Greeks, especially in the Alexandrian School (3rd-1st centuries BCE) designed fabulous automata (driven by pneumatics and hydraulics, rather than the verge-and-foliot escapement and falling weight drive of the early modern period) in the forms of animals and people. And Arabic engineers, in the ninth and thirteenth centuries, wrote detailed treatises on how to build programmable, musical fountains; mechanical servants; and elaborate clocks. It's also interesting to note that in the Middle Ages, descriptions of automata in narrative texts often describe them as perfect servants and as enforcers of different kinds of behavior. 

Still, the documentary is a treat, and if you're interested in automata, horology, or the history of technology, you should see it.
 

Medieval Star Wars!

This is the perfect mashup of "medieval" and "robots."

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  I feel like the talented Chawakarn Kongprasert has illuminated my psyche.

TDKR About Actual Knight

Medieval Robots' London correspondent, JB, directed me to this excellent piece on TDKR by Gavin Mueller over at Jacobin. Mueller rightly dismisses the vague nods to Occupy and the 99% as smoke and mirrors and makes a far more interesting assertion about the underlying ideology in the film: it is a critique of capitalism in favor of neo-feudalism. 

You should read the whole essay; it's quite good. I have only a few things to add to his reading of Bruce/Batman as a feudal lord. Bruce's anti-capitalist (and anti-Dagget) stance and his role as Gotham's benefactor go hand-in-glove. In BB, Bruce's father tells him (and the audience) that the Wayne family is responsible for the water supply and public transportation system in Gotham. While I'm not a true fanboy, and am sure that others can recite chapter and verse about the ins and outs of Wayne Industries, it does seem that, until Bruce's parents' death, Wayne Industries and the Wayne family are pretty entwined. This supports the feudal reading that Mueller proposes: a wealthy family with a lot of influence steps in to provide basic services that the State cannot. Bruce continues this tradition as Batman, initially as a corrective to the famously corrupt GCPD and an alternative provision of public safety. But it's because Bruce is so wealthy and because of his position of authority in Gotham that his role of Batman is more like that of a feudal lord than a masked vigilante. A constant thread running through all of the Nolan films is that Batman is protecting his fiefdom city from internal and external threats. 

Mueller's take focuses more on the feudal trappings of the ancien regime, which is fitting, given the overt references to A Tale of Two Cities in TDKR. Yet core aspects of the plot within the trilogy actually reference medieval lordship. Feudalism is a problematic term within medieval history these days. Yet the idea of the more powerful (economically and militarily) lord or castellan stepping in to control (or protect) a geographic area or group of people in the absence of a more powerful central authority is, at the macro level, a good place to start when thinking about economic, military, social, and political structures in the eleventh century. This is exactly the role of the Wayne Family/Wayne Industries and, later, Batman. But, as Mueller also notes, there is a strong element of medievalism to Nolan's films, as well. Batman is, in the last two films, the Dark Knight. Batman and Bruce have specific notions of honor, and BB and TDKR feature Bruce on different quests--to conquer his fear, to find R'as Al Ghul, to become Batman, to rise up as Batman once again.

Medieval is the new modern, indeed. Believe it.

Lost Robot Weekend

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about talking heads recently, and haven't had as much time for blogging. But I was delighted to have a serendipitous encounter with two robots this weekend.
1) The Waffle-Bot. He makes waffles drenched in syrup, follows you around, and then forms an emotional attachment that leads to a life-saving intervention. Thanks, Waffle-Bot!

2) "The Punishment of X-4," Ben Hargrove's  Ken Cosgrove's short story about a frustrated robot that exercises the only choice available to it. I always knew I liked that Ken Cosgrove. The shout-out to fantasy and sci-fi literature makes perfect sense in this episode, too. The first episode of "Star Trek" is only a few months away (September 1966), and sci-fi and fantasy fiction were hugely popular in this period. But it looks like the Campbells and the Drapers just don't get it.

Recapturing History, They Capture the Castle

A keen-eyed former student drew my attention to this bit of awesome: A German building contractor will soon begin building a Carolingian monastery town near Messkirch. Wait, there's more: The whole monastery is based on the plans drawn up in the ninth century by Abbot Haito of Reichenau. Yes, the plan of St. Gall. And, of course, the whole thing will be built entirely by hand, using only materials that were available in the ninth century. So that means no plastic tarps, and all nails will be forged on site. Please, please tell me that this will become a reality tv show. I would totally pay for premium cable to see this.

Crusader Bible, Morgan Library M.638, fol. 3r.

 

The article took me down the rabbit hole of other sites like this one. For example, the Château de Guedelon, in Burgundy, and the Ozark Medieval Fortress (started by the same man, Michel Guyot, who started the Burgundian project). I think these kinds of projects are pretty neat, as they give a sense of the complexity and duration of the effort involved in building a cathedral or a monastery town. And the experiential nature of the work has already yielded some important insights about medieval building practices. And if you want to learn any more about experiential history, I suggest you re-watch Timeline (2003): Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly, Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, Frances O'Connor, Marton Csokas, and Lambert Wilson (who was fucking amazing in Of Gods and Men). It's almost like Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, and Marton Csokas were warming up for Kingdom of Heaven (2005).


 

Reel Robots

Who in Hollywood decreed that we have to have at least one robot blockbuster per quarter? After the fairly execrable Transformers 2: Dark of the Moon this summer, we've got Real Steel to look forward to in October.



Rocky-meets-robots with Hugh Jackman and Kate from Lost, who was just the worst. It's like if Rocky had decided to get into Battlebots instead of going to the Soviet Union.



The trailer and featurette look good. I mean, the f/x look good. But I don't really get it: the robots look good but it's not clear why we're supposed to care about them. It's hard enough to give a crap about the Autobots and Decepticons. I'm not saying that audiences don't or can't care about robots in the movies. But we tend to like our robots to be more like humans, like Wall*E, R2D2, Starbuck, and Roy Batty--alien enough to interrogate and critique humanity, and familiar enough to elicit a profound emotional response.

But robots that are just machines ("we can just fix that"), or are primarily machines, like the fighting bots in Real Steel, can't do that. It's the distinction between ED-209 and RoboCop: one's a soulless automaton, the other is a character that we can relate to and that forces us to examine the porous boundary between human and machine.


Side note: I think it's fascinating that the best Battlebots look nothing like humans. They're all low to the ground. Battlebots *would* be a more interesting film subject: the people who labor over them, obsessively tweaking each aspect, and the way that the most successful bots expose the limits of biological design (unlike the Real Steel fighters, who look like a cross between RoboCop and Iron Man), in much the same way as Hugh Herr's prosthetic mountaineering legs and feet.

Level Up

Synchronicity abounds!

Just yesterday I put my copy of A Dance with Dragons aside to watch the trailer for The Knights of Badassdom.

Tyrion Lannister is back as a POV character (Huzzah! the only Westerosi with a sense of humor) and I was happy to see Peter Dinklage show up in chain mail as a LARPer.

But, of course, we have Gary Gygax, the co-founder of D&D and creator of Gen Con, largely to thank for the fact that LARPing is now part of the mainstream. Today (July 27) is Gary Gygax's birthday, and my pal Ethan Gilsdorf has the lowdown on the planned memorial statue in Gygax's honor in Lake Geneva, WI.

Cleopatra's Automata

I recently finished reading Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, and was delighted to come across a reference to the mechanical marvels for which Alexandria was known.

"A center of mechanical marvels, Alexandria boasted automatic doors and hydraulic lifts, hidden treadmills and coin-operated machines. With invisible wires, siphons, pulleys, and magnets, the Ptolemies could work miracles. Fires erupted and died down; lights flickered from statues' eyes; trumpets blared spontaneously." (p. 70)

From the 3rd through the 1st centuries BCE, Alexandria was known as the center of mechanical engineering. The "Alexandrian School" (not the same as the famous library and gymnasium complex in Alexandria, but related to it) was a group of engineers and architects who designed, built, and wrote treatises on how to make elaborate automata and mechanical marvels of the kind that Schiff describes.

What were these devices? Ktesibios (ca. 300-270 BCE) designed a water-pump, a pneumatic catapult, a hydraulic organ, and mechanical birds that trilled the hours on a water-clock. Later engineers refined and expanded Ktesibios' machines, designing drinking fountains (for water or wine), mechanical serving girls, and elaborate theatrical and religious tableaux, including maenads worshiping at a shrine of Dionysus. Cleopatra's contemporary, Hero of Alexandria, designed numerous and elaborate automata for pageantry and stagecraft, including the kinds of sound and visual F/X that Schiff described in Cleopatra's pageantry during her triumphant return to power in 47 BCE. You can find one of the texts, Hero of Alexandria's Pneumatics, translated from the Greek, on-line at Google Books. The diagram above shows one of his designs: Hercules slaying the dragon. Instead of fire, the dragon spits water on Hercules. Maybe not as scary as fire.

It's too bad that Joseph Mankiewicz didn't include these mechanical marvels in his version of the events, but I guess that the incendiary love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton was the only special effect he needed. I wonder if the new biopic, starring Angelina Jolie and rumored to be directed by David Fincher, will include some automata. I hope so!

Social Network Anxiety, or We Are All Courtiers

It's Oscar season!

Both Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together, and "The Social Network" seem to have the same humanist viewpoint and message: social networking sites and the machines that we use to "keep in touch" are tools that we use to fake intimacy, treat each other like objects, and obsess over our self-presentation.

In "The Social Network," we meet Mark as he is utterly failing to have any kind of face-to-face human connection with his girlfriend, Erica.

His response to her break-up, and her assertion that he's an asshole, is to take the intimate details he knows about her and share them with his blog readers. His readers form a community who provide Mark with a way for faux-intimacy--by sharing intimate details and personal thoughts. At the same time, Mark builds a program that allows men to treat women like objects (or farm animals) and laugh.

And then at the end, Mark, the billionaire who could buy Mt. Auburn Street and turn the Phoenix into his billiard room, is friendless and alone, engrossed in his creation--the site where we can all be friends.

Turkle and others have pointed out that sites like Facebook are ways that people develop and present their personae. The teenagers that Turkle talks to about these sites are completely aware that they're presenting themselves as characters; that is, they don't mistake their on-line profiles for their truest or most vulnerable selves. But Turkle's point, and Aaron Sorkin's and David Fincher's, I think, is that true intimacy and human connection happens when we interact with people with whom we can be a person, not a persona. Mark and Eduardo's obsession with final clubs is a way to get elite status and be "cool," a way to take on a different persona, in the hopes that it will transform their personalities. At the end, Mark, told by Erica that his nerd persona is overshadowed by his asshole essence, gets told by another pretty lady that his assholism is just his persona--he's just trying too hard to be a jerk.

Perhaps Turkle's and Sorkin/Fincher's viewpoints are humanist in the historical sense, too, arguing that the social network is a kind of semi-public, courtly sphere in which we carefully curate our selves. Sprezzatura and Renaissance self-fashioning, welcome back!

Kells Bells!

I recently watched "The Secret of Kells" . It's an animated feature about the Book of Kells, a late-eighth century illuminated Gospel book and one of the most widely-known medieval manuscript books in the world. At Kells, in Ireland, Young Brendan, nephew of Abbot Cellach, is supposed to be helping his uncle build the fortifications around their monastery/town, but he'd rather contemplate the wonders of the scriptorium and run errands for Brother Aidan, a master illuminator.

Brother Aidan is a refugee from the Vikings, who attacked his monastery on Iona and killed everyone who couldn't escape. Abbot Cellach knows the Northmen will be coming to Ireland next, and he is fiercely determined to build a wall around his monastery that will keep out the marauders. Cellach is a pragmatist and a planner, and he hopes to shepherd his flock to safety in the face of the invasions. Aidan, a survivor, knows that nothing can keep the Vikings at bay, and instead focuses on his work--illuminating the Gospel--as a way to create something enduring that will bring light and hope to others. Brendan, a budding illuminator, gladly helps Aidan, and defies his uncle and abbot by going outside of the walls to find materials to make ink.

In the forest Brendan meets Ainslie, a fairy, who is able to talk to the animals and make the terrifying forest seem more hospitable. She takes him under her wing, shows him the forest and gets him what he needs, even at significant risk to herself. (This film has a few parallels to that other encounter narrative of 2009: "Avatar.") Ainslie's family have, it seems, been killed by (Christian) settlers Crom Cruach, the big bad who lives in the forest, but she doesn't hold this against Brendan (in his little monk's habit), even when he puts her in danger--repeatedly--for the sake of the Book. I'd have told him to take a hike.

The animation is enchanting. Abbott Cellach looks like a Byzantine ikon, with his red hair, high cheekbones, and long nose. The Vikings were terrifying, although they did remind me of the Bugs Bunny classic, What's Opera, Doc? The animators did a great job of making the animal and plant motifs in the Book of Kells visually coherent and part of the landscape of the forest around the monastery. And the moment when the Abbott sees the finished book is quite powerful. The animation jumps out of the screen (despite being in 2-D)--the intricacies of the designs glimmer and turn, making the entire page into a holistic organism.

That said, I can't get behind the "How the Irish Saved Civilization" slant of the film. Yes, the Vikings were terrifying marauders. And yes, it's nice to see a film that celebrates the importance of learning and books. But it's never made clear why "the people" would rather have a beautiful book to give them hope than stronger fortifications. Is it because they're Irish and a naturally bookish and literary people? And I thought that the parallels between Christian monks and pagan Vikings could have been better fleshed out: The Vikings have no respect for Christian symbols or human life and the Christians (esp. the monks) have--according to our fairy guide--no respect for nature, fairies, or the symbols and beliefs of the people who came before them.

Agora

I recently watched "Agora," a 2009 film starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar. It is nominally about Hypatia of Alexandria, a late 4th-century philosopher and mathematician who taught in the Academy. According to the film, Hypatia--a true bluestocking--overturned the established Ptolemaic cosmology and anticipated Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler by about 1200 years.

But this is really a film about religious extremism and its revolutionary capabilities to unmake and remake cultures. The Christian community in Alexandria (initially composed largely of slaves and the poor) eventually revolts against the established pagan cult (whose members are the long-standing ruling class of the city) and forces all pagans to convert or be stoned to death. Hypatia--an independent woman, a pagan, and a public intellectual--is intolerable to the new Christian ruling elite, and she embodies the old order that persecuted Christians and worshipped idols. Hypatia herself is not portrayed as religious--her pagan faith is barely evident--but she refuses to marry, convert, or quit her studies. Most of all, she refuses to stop questioning her beliefs; she begins the film as an ardent believer in Ptolemy's cosmology and in the perfection of the circle, but when one of her students questions the many complications of the Ptolemaic system (epicycles on epicycles) on aesthetic grounds, she begins to rethink all of her assumptions and ends up positing a heliocentric cosmology and planets with elliptical orbits.

The Christians, on the other hand, are portrayed as anti-intellectual and dogmatic (there are a few exceptions, such as the Prefect of Alexandria, who converted only for political reasons), especially as their numbers grow and they become more and more powerful. (The Jews of Alexandria don't feature prominently in this film, although they are loathed and massacred by the Christians for being rich, powerful, and crass, a stereotype that I was dismayed to see given such prominence.) They take over the great Library at Alexandria, destroy many of the classical texts held therein, and insist on the literal truth of the Bible.

But the Christians aren't entirely villainous, nor are the pagans proto-Enlightenment figures of tolerance and rationality. In the first half of the film it's clear that the Christians in Alexandria are the poorest members of the city, and Christian charity and egalitarianism are very much in evidence. The pagans own slaves (and beat them) and speak longingly of the days when Christians were thrown to the lions for their entertainment. This complicates the story in interesting ways, especially in light of the Christians' later control of civic, religious, and cultural life in Alexandria.

This film has some real flaws, but also some extraordinary beauty. The CGI shots of late antique Alexandria are fantastic, and I'd love to show that clip in a class. It's easy for students to underestimate the size and grandeur of ancient cities, and it would also highlight the difference between the cosmopolitan eastern Roman Empire and the comparatively poor and rural western Empire, especially during the late antique period. And "Agora" could also be a useful film to show in a class dealing with the Christian revolution. Historically accurate? No. Historically evocative? Yes.