{"id":163913,"date":"2023-04-06T14:45:59","date_gmt":"2023-04-06T18:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163913"},"modified":"2023-04-06T17:18:36","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T21:18:36","slug":"its-nineteen-seventy-nine-okay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/04\/06\/its-nineteen-seventy-nine-okay\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Nineteen Seventy-Nine, Okay"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Artistic rendering of a double black hole, 2015. ESA\/Hubble. Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, licensed under CCO 4.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

It has been more than ten years since I wrote these words for this magazine\u2019s website: \u201cAt last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab\u2019s doomed enterprise in\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2014about Robur\u2019s doomed enterprise in Verne\u2019s\u00a0Ma\u00eetre du Monde<\/em>\u2014about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film\u00a0The Black Hole<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And now maybe we can approach the same topic from a different angle, as the contortionist said on prom night. Refuse to accept that it is your fate to refuse to accept your fate. The only way not to be driven insane by it is to be insane from the outset.<\/p>\n

The Black Hole<\/em>, 1979. It amazes me that a group of people could make a movie about being afraid of a hole, being attracted to a hole, feeling excited and curious about going into a hole, feeling concerned that, while on the one hand it might not be such a good idea to go into the hole, on the other hand maybe all the best things in life will become possible only after you have gone into the hole, and so on. It\u2019s not the feelings that amaze me; I feel them all myself. It\u2019s the idea that $20 million and a crew of more than a hundred crew members should have been devoted to dramatizing, over ninety minutes, an idea that any healthy child could express in a single simple sentence. Go ahead, smart guy, write that sentence.<\/p>\n

Briefly: The USS Palomino<\/em>, in deep space, approaches a black hole into which a nearby and apparently derelict ship, the Cygnus<\/em>, mysteriously does not fall. While the crew is examining this ghost ship, the Palomino\u00a0<\/em>incurs structural damage and is about to be drawn into the black hole itself when the Cygnus<\/em> comes alive and tractor-beams her aboard. Robots escort the crew of the Palomino<\/em> to the bridge of the Cygnus<\/em>, where they find the mad genius Dr. Hans Reinhardt, an Ahab with a black hole for his white whale. While the Palomino<\/em> awaits repairs, it becomes clear that many of the \u201crobots\u201d who work on the Cygnus<\/em> are in fact undead human beings, cyborgs built from its former crew. Reinhardt\u2019s plan is revealed: to drive the Cygnus<\/em> into and through the black hole.\u00a0The survivors of the Palomino<\/em>\u2019s crew seize a probe ship and escape from the Cygnus<\/em>, but both ships are drawn into the black hole. We see a scene of Reinhardt in torment, imprisoned in a robot body in the fires of hell. But the probe ship passes through cinematic psychedelic turbulence into a realm of heavenly light.<\/p>\n

My paperback copy of Alan Dean Foster\u2019s novelization of The Black Hole <\/em>has a perfectly timed error in its final lines.<\/p>\n

They blended, flowed together, thought itself strained beyond its normal borders under the unimaginable force of the collapsar. [\u2026] They were themselves \u2026 and yet something strange and new, a galactic sea change that produced all the above and a new unified mindthing that was KateCharlieDanVincent also.<\/p>\n

Dimly they\/it perceived the final annihilation of a minuscule agglutination of refined masses\u2014the Palomino<\/em>. It was gone, lost in an infinite brightness. They\/it remained, content and infinite now as the white hole itself. [\u2026]\u00a0An atom of Charlie to a nine-world system, a molecule of Kate to a local cluster of stars, a tiny diffuse section of Holland spread thin over a dozen galaxies.\u00a0Yet they could still think, for thought does not respect the trifling limitations of time and space. They were still them and this new thing they had become\u00a0spread substance, and they now had an eternity in\u00a0Their thoughts spanned infinity, as did their finely [sic]\u00a0which to contemplate the universe they had become \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We see shades here of the bleshing <\/em>(blending\/meshing) of Theodore Sturgeon\u2019s 1953 novel More Than Human<\/em> that so inspired the Grateful Dead.. <\/em><\/p>\n

What we have in The Black Hole<\/em> is a fundamental mythological or religious question\u2014Should I eat the forbidden fruit?\u2014disguised as a sexual-combinative question, the urge to merge. It\u2019s a primally captivating issue. You can\u2019t tear your eyes away. And yet the story is not complicated enough to be interesting. An array of cutesy robots, ready to be sold as toys to the viewing demographic, and I had them all. A bunch of dopey, obvious, hard-sell talk about \u201cRight out of Dante\u2019s Inferno. <\/em>[\u2026] Every time I see one of those things [a black hole], I expect to spot some guy in red with horns and a pitchfork.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t tolerate the dopey or the obvious, then you won\u2019t have much fun with big-screen science fiction made in 1979. In 1977\u2019s Star Wars, <\/em>we were attacked by the father: Darth Vader. <\/em>In 1979\u2019s Alien<\/em>, we are attacked by the mother: the spaceship Nostromo<\/em>\u2019s computer, called \u201cMother\u201d by the crew, as well as (in the form of the pregnancy-evoking chest-burster) childbirth itself. No one can deny that these movies are full of thrilling feelings, but they aren\u2019t any fun to think about. Mommy and Daddy and me: I\u2019ve heard of it.<\/p>\n

But maybe once you cross the event horizon of your birth, there\u2019s no way to escape the gravity well of your family. Here he is again, some guy in red with horns and a pitchfork:<\/em> your father was just a man, and sometimes Dad was bad.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father,\u201d writes Freud in \u201cA Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,\u201d his 1923 account of the Christoph Haitzmann case. \u201cBut we should expect religions to bear ineffaceable marks of the fact that the primitive primal father was a being of unlimited evil\u2014being less like God than the Devil.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what The Black Hole<\/em> is about: the search for God the Father. Dr. Kate McCrae\u2019s father was an original crew member of the Cygnus<\/em>. Some dialogue:<\/p>\n

\u201cUSS Cygnus\u2013Doctor Kate, isn\u2019t that the ship your father was on?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDoctor Reinhardt\u2014my father, where is he?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dear child, I\u2019m sorry to dash your hopes, but your father\u2019s not with us any more. He\u2019s dead. A man to be proud of. A grave personal loss to me. He was a trusted and loyal friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat Reinhardt sure loves to play God, doesn\u2019t he?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We all know that the ability to perceive similarities is related to the inability to perceive differences, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to compare the twinkling readouts of the Cygnus\u2019s bridge to the stained-glass windows of a church. This is not merely the belated, insistent hallucination of a God-haunted five-year-old boy in Kentucky: my inner child becoming my outer child, at last.<\/p>\n

Doctor Reinhardt, dying, says or thinks, \u201cMore light,\u201d the famous last words of Goethe. And we will see a ghostly Reinhardt-like figure fly into white light ahead of the escaping probe ship, rhyming (if it is Reinhardt) with Goethe\u2019s last-minute angelic rescue of Faust from Mephisto: \u201cA peerless treasure, stolen shamefully: \/ The noble soul that pledged itself to me \/ They snatched from me,\u201d in Walter Kaufmann\u2019s 1961 translation.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as she enters the black hole, we hear Doctor Kate\u2019s final individual thoughts: \u201cReinhardt murdered my father, my father, father. Where is he?\u201d<\/p>\n

And, as the crew is merging or bleshing<\/em> (see above), we can faintly hear one or all of them thinking: \u201cChristmas morning, Christmas morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit like William Friedkin\u2019s 1973 film, The Exorcist<\/em>. You went looking for God, and you found Satan\u2014Well, okay, it\u2019s not what you wanted, but how much did you miss by?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Donald A. Wollheim attempts to address the dopey\/obvious issue in his anthology The 1979 Annual World\u2019s Best SF. <\/em>\u201cScience fiction\u2019s boom year,\u201d he announces. \u201cNever before has science fiction reached as wide an audience nor been as popular [\u2026] Much of this boom must be attributed to the film Star Wars<\/em>, which has now been followed by equally expensive productions such as Battlestar Galactica<\/em>, Superman<\/em>, and a host of more due to appear in the next months, including such as Buck Rogers<\/em>, a new Star Trek<\/em>, and more major and minor imitators.\u201d He assures us, though: \u201cFor the thousands who think that science fiction is all Star Wars<\/em> and Battlestar Galactica<\/em> and similar cinematic comic strips, it is good news to know that the authentic sf, the stories that perk your imagination and feed your brain, are still being turned out by fine writers.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am delighted to hear it, and not a bit surprised, as Octavia Butler\u2019s Kindred, <\/em>J. G. Ballard\u2019s The Unlimited Dream Company, <\/em>and Doris Lessing\u2019s Shikasta<\/em> were all published in 1979. May I examine some specimens of this 1979 science fiction that feeds my brain?<\/p>\n

Confused, Alex sat back on his protumous, automatically shielding his rear fighting limbs. He realized he didn\u2019t know where he was. Thinking back, he retracted and extruded his lower eyes. He\u2019d been at the Party; he knew that much. Singing and glorching with the best of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a post-Dune<\/em> Frank Herbert, glorching with his cowriter F. M. Busby in the lead story of Wollheim\u2019s 1979 anthology.<\/p>\n

Ballard\u2019s novel The Unlimited Dream Company<\/em>, 1979: Blake crashes his airplane into the Thames, and becomes a priapic, Dionysian god as jungle vegetation fills the streets of Shepperton\u2014the sky god, descending to combine with the wet earth, makes the plants grow. A true story. It\u2019s not science, and it\u2019s not fiction, and it never was.<\/p>\n

Brian Stableford\u2019s novel The Walking Shadow: A Promethean Scientific Romance<\/em>, 1979: Paul Heisenberg accidentally discovers time travel, and, leap by leap, arrives at a far-flung future in which \u201cthird-phase life\u201d has absorbed, subsumed, digested, and assimilated all distinction, all difference, all individuality.<\/p>\n

In the old biocosm there had been individuals, and thus competition between individuals, and thus complex behavioral strategies, and thus\u2014ultimately\u2014intelligence. In the new biocosm there were no individuals, but only life. [\u2026] There was no behavioral strategy, save for that of the system as a whole, which was simply to survive and to grow, not to reproduce. There was no conceivable need for the evolution of intelligence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The way the future used to be. If William Friedkin\u2019s masterpiece Sorcerer<\/em>, about four men driving dynamite trucks through the jungle, had been the big hit movie of 1977 rather than Star Wars<\/em>, not only would The Black Hole\u00a0<\/em>never have been made, but now, forty-six years later, we would be living in a different world. What is life like? Does your life feel like having magic powers and saving the galaxy? My life feels like driving a truck full of dynamite over a mountain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s<\/em>\u00a02013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection\u00a0<\/em>The Correspondence\u00a0was published in 2017.\u00a0His writing has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0The Paris Review,<\/em>\u00a0Esquire,<\/em>\u00a0n+1,\u00a0and elsewhere, including<\/em>\u00a0The Best American Essays\u00a0and\u00a0The Best American Travel Writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe way the future used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[14569,47709,67827,200,9243],"class_list":["post-163913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-14569","tag-action-movies","tag-featured","tag-science-fiction","tag-the-black-hole"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIt\u2019s Nineteen Seventy-Nine, Okay by J. D. 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