One of These Things is not like the Other ...

[Welcome readers of Pharyngula.  If you want to look around, my "Best of 2007" posts would be a decent place to start.  Or with my first "Best of."  Or with the second.  Or you could remind yourself why this place looks familiar to PZ's readers.]

I've been a fan of Tarsem Singh since being hypnotized by "Losing My Religion" in the 90s.  His feature film debut, The Cell, somehow managed to make me forget I was watching a movie starring Jennifer Lopez.  The trailer for his next film, The Fall, is now available, and it looks as stunning, hallucinogenic, and inscrutable as his past work.  There's a hitch.

Viewers aren't supposed to laugh uncontrollably during previews for epic tales told by recuperating soldiers to little children.  Yet I did.  I still want to see the movie, mind you, but the incongruity is so jarring, so unexpected ... I'll stop there.  Watch the preview and experience it for yourself:

Then join me in the comments to discuss it.

Comments

[Justin]

I immediately thought of Borges and the Chinese encyclopedia, but the fit isn't great because Charles Darwin isn't a category of person. But perhaps it's the paradigm instance of the category, and it's

the Indian, The ex-slave, an explosives expert, [the soulless atheist], and The Masked Bandit. That would be a terrible cast of characters indeed.

[SEK]

the fit isn't great because Charles Darwin isn't a category of person.

I beg to differ. Right now, in another window, I'm reading David Starr Jordan's "The Making of a Darwin" [JSTOR], which is all about how Darwin is a category of person (who, circa 1910, American universities had difficulty producing).

[Justin]

I am duly humbled. Must study more ordinary language. "He's no Darwin, that's for sure..."

[John B.]

This thing looks amazing.

Re "Charles Darwin": It's hard to know from the trailer just how Darwin will figure in this film, but it reminds me of that scene in Ulysses where Stephen and Bloom are in the cabman's shelter reading a newspaper over the shoulder of another occupant there and then later, as they walk toward Bloom's house, having a discussion about, among other things, the effect of artificial lighting on the growth of nearby trees. In his book on Ulysses, Hugh Kenner points out that Fritz Senn has found a copy of that June 16, 1904 paper, and on one of its pages is an article about precisely that subject. Kenner doesn't have a fancy rhetorical term for this device but cites it as an instance in which events/"news" not directly mentioned in the novel nevertheless shape subsequent action within it, thus heightening the novel's verisimilitude. Perhaps, then, "Darwin" will perform a similar but larger function in this film: a sort of cultural lens or cultural frame through which the story assumes a shape or direction that it might not have otherwise. In any event, surely the explicit naming of an easily-identifiable historical figure in a narrative that, at least in the trailer, appears to be mythopoetic in nature has the effect of connecting, however tenuously, "our" world to that of the film.

Maybe Darwin's conclusion in a story like this simply makes our world feel more magical than we tend to think of it as being? That wouldn't be such a bad thing to have the movies do for us.

[Antimatter Spork]

I really hope that Darwin is an ass-kicking character who will, just by being awesome, convert thousands of young people to the study of science.

Also, I might see this film just because of Beethoven's Seventh.

[Wally]

1) Thank God others feel the Munchausen vibe too.

2) The Cell had an insufferable 'film school final semester' vibe to it, and the resolution was awesome in its embrace of every cliché ever uttered, ever, but it looked good. And this film looks like it. Which is good; except for how bad the other one was. Which makes me think that this 'good' is really 'badgood,' and we all know how that shit goes.

3) How come no one's giving Lee Pace the love? The man's the best thing about Pushing Daisies and one of the best things about Wonderfalls, let's throw him a bone.

4) The catalog made me wonder whether, like being an 'explosives expert,' being 'the ex-slave' or 'the Indian' was a full-time job; maybe the whole thing is a spoof on manipulative identity politics, the trailer is meant as a backhand indictment of Lee Pace's guilt-powered liberalism (he even treats that monstrous fucking child like a human being, the sentimental fool), and the hidden message is that if these guys could only get accepted for who they really are, they would be freed from this hell of Psych 101 Cliffs Notes and would never again have to sign on to a film made by a goddamn one-named man.

[Ian]

Hmm, based on the name of the film and some of the scenes in the trailer, I'm inclined to think that the girl and the soldier are meant to represent Eve and Satan in the garden of Eden.