Stalled and Going Into a Spin

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My current Work in Progress, WIP, is stuck with me not having added any new text to the project in about two weeks. This is usually an indication that if a project is not dead then it is in critical condition and scarcely alive in the Intensive Care Unit.

It has been a very long time since a novel sized project of mine has crashed and burned without reaching a completed manuscript and even far longer since one has crashed so early in the process. Having an unfinished manuscript is a bit of an embarrassment and something that ignites guilt and a little depression, prompting motivation to get the thing some forward momentum. But I think before I do that, I need to understand why it stalled and how I can recover this aircraft before it discovers that its altimeter has reached an AGL of zero.

The novel before this one, my gay, 80s, San Diego-centric, ghost story, written sans outline, was a great variation from my usual authorial practice and I am very happy with the results. (Even if to date I haven’t found an agent that shares that opinion.) I started this next project also without an outline and between that lack and the nature of the story, large spread out with what I hope to be a collection of important characters but lacking a single point of view carrying it through, I think those factors are why it is struggling.

So, my recovery plan right now is to stop work on the manuscript itself and revert to an outline. Make sure I know the various characters that are exploring the multiple themes of the novel and then resume writing. If that fails then it would be best to move on to a new project, something, perhaps, less ambitious.

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Movie Review: How to Make a Killing

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Glen Powell, displacing Benedict Cumberbatch as the actor now found in everything around you, stars in the black satire as Beckett Redfellow, this bastard son of a disinherited daughter from a massively wealthy family.

StudioCanal

As the patriarch of the family, Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris) placed his vast 28-billion-dollar fortune into a trust to avoid estate taxes, the disinheritance of Beckett’s mother is no barrier to Beckett inheriting the fortune. What is a barrier is the 7 people ahead of him in the family tree. A chance encounter with his childhood crush, Julia (Margaret Qualley) ignites Beckett’s drive to eliminate the people standing between him and the vast fortune, a program made riskier and more fraught with Beckett’s affections torn between Julia and a new woman in his life, Ruth (Jessica Henwick.)

Adapted from the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman, the source material that also inspired Kind Hearts and Coronets writer/director John Patton Ford updates the material to current times, making the satire of wealth and privilege sharp but without ever stopping the story to pull out a soapbox for a lecture. The movie unfolds as a flashback with Beckett recounting his life and crimes to a priest as a framing device that neatly provides a witty and wry narration. The failure of many voiceover narrations in movies is that they lack character, the distinctive voice and point of view that elevates them from mere exposition dumps to genuine vehicles of insight. Beckett’s narration provides enough warmth and vulnerability to make the character empathetic while never fully excusing his acts of murder for mere monetary gain. Powell’s deep reservoir of charm serves him and the film well, keeping the audience engaged and on his side, concerned for his fate as events spiral out of his control.

Jessica Henwick as Ruth isn’t given a lot to do here, but she does well with what is handed to her in the script.  As the ‘pure’ love interest in contrast to Qualley’s ‘corrupt’ love interest Henwick breathes life into a character that is given little depth beyond voicing the counter-ideology that wealth is far from the real meaning of life and that value can be found in service. Henwick is also a performer who with only modest changes to hair and make-up transforms greatly. I failed to recognize her as Peg, one of my favorite characters in Glass Onion, a tribute to her underserved talent.

The more biting and dynamic female role is given to Qualley’s Julia. A woman who at first appearance seems to be quite likeable but as the story progresses reveals that she operates with little to no empathy for anyone, not even Beckett. I have become quite a fan of Qualley’s work having seen her now in three films, this one, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, and Honey’s Don’t. (I skipped The Substance knowing that certain sequences, ones that have nothing to do with the central spectacle of the film, possessed a high probability of triggering a migraine.)

Few people arrived for the late Saturday evening screening that I attended which is a shame. How to Make a Killing is not going to make box office history nor change the course of film in the 21st century but it’s entertaining, well made, and with a point of view that many other supposed satires lack.

It should be seen.

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We are the Harkonnens

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Late Friday evening, early Saturday morning, President Trump, in coordination with the nation of Israel, initiated ongoing military actions which were the equivalent of war, against Iran without bothering to obtain, even consult with, the Congress of the United States of America, the sole body given by our constitution with the authority to declare war.

Do not misconstrue, by deliberate intent and misrepresentation or by casual, clumsy reading, that my opinions here in any manner or way voice support for that theocratic despotic regime of that nation. The Islamic revolution brought no freedom to the Iranian people but moved them from a secular despot to a theocratic one. My concerns at the moment though are for the American people and the rot that is corrupting our national system.

Trump did not ‘sell’ the American people on this war. He did not spend days or weeks laying the evidence and case that this action was essential to our security and safety as a people or as a nation. He did not go to congress, one that is entirely controlled by his own political party and has shown repeatedly that there is no debasement that they will not endure to place his will into action, to gain their consent and authorization for the military misadventure. Trump did not rally our allies, he did not build a coalition to generate international support for this attack. He, along with the Prime Minister of Israel, two charter members of the ‘Board of Peace’ of which Trump is Chairman for life, charged ahead with their plots and plans to decapitate the Iranian leadership sans any congressional authorization or approval — blatantly unconstitutional.

Trump’s supporters will inhabit the spectrum from full-throated support to shamed silence and deceptive ‘what-aboutisms’ to deflect from this authoritarian action. People who are quick to push their pocket constitutions into your face, screaming ‘Unconstitutional!’ at even the mildest firearm regulation will suddenly fall quiet about this abuse of executive power and privilege. If they speak at all it will be to declare criticisms of Trump to be ‘unpatriotic’ and the product of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

How long will this war last? I don’t know, no one knows. Once begun such things have a life of their own. Iran is striking back, after all they were attacked without warning or declaration of war, making the Trump administration more like the Harkonnens of Dune than the founding fathers. It is very hard to win a war purely from the air and I doubt that this administration possesses neither the spine nor the stomach for ground action. We have started a war on a footing that seems highly unlikely to produce a clean definitive resolution.

The Islamic Republic of Iran may fall internally, creating a power vacuum that apparently Trump and his allies hope will be filled by kinder, gentler people. Though if history is any guide the kind and the gentle generally do not outcompete the cruel and vicious in filling power vacuums. Rebellions may be built on hope, national strategies should not be.

The Islamic Republic may withstand these blows, in which case the hope is that the new leaders are cowed and subservient to America and Israel’s wishes. That too strikes me as an unrealistic outcome. Any new leadership must not only manage external forces, such as the implacably hostile American and Israeli positions but internal stresses which range from insurrectionist forces and the desire of current forces, such as The Islamic Revolutionary Guard, unwilling to surrender their own power. Pride and ego will be powerful determining forces in the post-conflict environment and people who have been humiliated are disinclined to be submissive. People die for pride.

I have no hope that the Republicans in charge of the House or the Senate will find the backbone to live up to their oaths and so it will fall onto the American people to replace them this fall with men and women who will.

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When Art Hurts

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I am not talking about the production of art, though that also sometimes inflicts nasty emotional pain. No, what I am referencing is when the art you consume, in my case film & television, strikes you in a deep and emotional context that the creators may not have intended. Last night I watched the most recent episode of HBO’s hit series The Pitt about the disasters and triumphs in a fictional Pittsburg hospital’s emergency department. It’s a fantastic program with every aspect of production, writing, and performance absolutely stellar.

One of the multiple storylines going on in the episode unsettled me, leaving me to wonder in terror if what I watched could possibly be my fate. Panic attacks are not part of my emotional make-up. I learned this about myself 30 years ago. While working in a gas station on the night shift, people would come in bloodied from assaults and accidents, and I maintained my calm, but with this particular plot, my heart sped up, and my discomfort made me want to turn away. I am not going to reveal which storyline. It’s not really relevant to my mindless meanderings. This is about how art impacts us and sometimes in wholly unintentional manners and how that impact might even lead us to change the course of our lives. I certainly will be thinking long and hard about it for at least the next week and images from the episode continue to haunt me.

The last time something like this struck me so very personally was the summer of 1984. Ghostbusters, which gets a shout-out in my most recent novel, released that summer and along with my friends, we ventured to the multiplex for this comedy that essentially asked nothing of its audience save the suspension of disbelief. But it turned out to be a little painful for me, at least on a first viewing. My emotional trauma, slight as it was, lessened with repeated viewings.

And what was it that hurt me, personally, in that silly broad comedy?

Lewis Tulley, Central Park West.

When Lewis Tulley, perfectly performed by the terribly talented Rick Moranis, made his first appearance on the screen, chasing his doomed crush for Dana (Sigourney Weaver) I physically cringed. It seemed that all of my doubts and insecurities had been given form and portrayed for everyone to see and to have a good laugh at. Of course, no one else saw it that way. Not the strangers in the auditorium, not my friends sitting next to me. My reaction — a product of my own doubts and insecurities  –was just that, my own creation. It took a long time before I could watch that performance without a twinge of embarrassment, but it did eventually come.

The Pitt’s episode hit just as hard as Ghostbusters did, but on a totally different vector. And I must remind myself of a truth I uncovered many years ago: Self-perception is the least reliable human trait.

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A Starship Troopers Reboot? Color Me Doubtful

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Sony is reportedly looking at a fresh adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s young adult novel Starship Troopers. The book has been previously brought to the silver screen in 1997 by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, but that interpretation took the route of being a satire and in my opinion a terrible film. Yes, I know it has its fans, but I am not one of them and the point of this piece is not to debate that film or even the themes of the novel. No, I am here to say why I think this novel is nearly impossible to adapt as a film or television series.

Heinlein was the gateway drug that seduced me into fiction reading. Prior to being forced to read Red Planet for a book report I consumed only non-fiction, after that one novel, my course was set, I mention this so you understand that I come at this analysis from a position of someone who admires the author and the novel.

Starship Troopers has no plot.

It has a story, and it has a very strong point of view as the author ruminates, lectures, or rants, choose your preferred descriptor, on service, duty, and patriotism. The story has young Filipino Johnny Rico going from being a callow youth with self-serving interests, he only joined the service because of a girl, to a leader of men with a deep and dedicated sense of duty. The protagonist’s journey from boy to man is the story. To me story is the transformation of the character. Plot on the other hand  is the mechanical aspect of the tale, the objective and obstacles that challenge the protagonist. I can illustrate my views on plot vs story with two James Bond films.

Casino Royale has both plot, Bond tries to bankrupt Le Chiffre so he will be inclined to betray his clients to save himself, and story Bond opens his heart, making himself emotionally vulnerable only to be betrayed, becoming the cold man who uses women but who never trusts.

Moonraker has only plot. Bond must discover and stop Drax’s plan to eliminate humanity and reseed it with his eugenically perfect population. As a person Bond experiences no transformation, no growth. He ends the movie the exact same character as he was at its start.

Starship Troopers has story, Rico’s transformation into an adult but it has no plot. The war that supplies the narrative with its action scenes starts off-page while Rico is in basic training for his military service and the novel ends with the war still raging. There is no special big mission that drives the book from start to end. The ‘capture the brain bug’, something that would take place in a movie’s third act and might be the spine of an entire film, is not established prior to its introduction. In terms of a 3-act structure, Establishment, Conflict, Resolution, Starship Troopers simply doesn’t fit.

The novel is first and foremost a polemic of Heinlein expounding or hectoring (again you choose) the reader with his views on duty and sacrifice. Given that, I hold to my reservations as to how you can make a film adaptation that is both a good film and faithful to a controversial novel that is built around a series of classroom lectures.

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The ‘Dead Men’ Project: Film, 1 The Bribe

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Having acquired the DVD from San Diego City Library my quest to watch every movie in the compilation comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid begins with the lowest scoring movie, 1949’s The Bribe, starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price.

MGM

Federal Agent Rigby (Taylor) is sent far from any US jurisdiction to a small island off Central America and the fishing hamlet of Carlotta to investigate a criminal ring smuggling war surplus aircraft engines onto the international black market. Had the feature opened this way it might have been a better movie, instead it begins with the most tired of film noir tropes, particularly when done badly, the voice-over. To make this overused technique even less appealing the voice-over is spoken in second person. So, everything we see Rigby narrating that he did he describes ‘you’ did. I myself have never found a piece of fiction where the second person works, it always keeps me at a distance, unable to submerge myself in the story being told, either in prose or in cinema.

Anyway, Rigby finds the married couple that the fed believe are running the smuggling operation, Elizabeth (Gardner) a nightclub singer and Hinton (John Hodiak) her drunkard of a husband. Naturally, Rigby falls for Elizabeth and she for him though the production code keeps their mutual feelings chaste. Rigby’s cover as someone simply looking for sport fishing had apparently the half-life of one of James Bond’s covers and he is approached by Bealer (Laughton) who offers him a bribe of 10,000 dollars to simply leave the island. The real bribe of the title however, is the threat to drag Elizabeth down with the criminals when she had actually been ignorant of it all unless Rigby ‘plays ball.’

At one point the movie makes extensive use of rear-screen projection so performers on a boat set might appear to be out on the open sea, marlin fishing. While this technique may have been acceptable to audiences of the 40s and 50s to modern eyes it screams its tricks like a poor stage magician. Which is a shame as the sequence boasts what in better handled hands could have been a tense and dynamic scene of attempted assassination.

There are no real surprises, or twisty plot reveals and if The Bribe didn’t boast a cast of well-established stars by 1949’s reckoning, it would be an adequate ‘B-Picture.’ The only real standout moment in the movie is the final chase when Rigby pursues the ringleader Carwood (Price) through a festival and into a massive ground-level firework display. Some shots are clearly the leads, Taylor and Price, dashing through exploding fireworks and others are stunt performers with their features well hidden. Elements of this climax were used in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and are what intrigued me the most, igniting my curiosity to see just how and why such a scene occurred.

The DVD is going back to the library and while The Bribe made for a passable lunch time viewing it is not a noir that is going to live for very long in my head or my heart.

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Minneapolis Proclaims: Don’t Tread on Us

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It has been heartbreaking and inspiring to watch and hear the events unfolding in the city of Minneapolis. Heartbreaking that our government flooded the streets with masked, unidentified thugs in unmarked vehicles acting with at best reckless abandon and quite arguably murderous intent against that community. Inspiring that the people of Minneapolis came together in profound unity, organizing networks to protect, assist, and safeguard their fellow community members with everything from people who stood watch in the freezing winter temperatures to those standing outside the center where the thuggish government released people into the snow and ice without cold weather gear, without their possessions, making sure each and every one was safe. That, to me, is the spirit of America, the Spirit of 1776, not the arrogant parading about with long guns trying to intimidate your fellow citizens.

It would seem that the architects of this pogrom failed to see that this sort of reaction might occur. They had no real plan to deal with a community that not only refused to assist them but actively and with deep and wide coordination opposed them. Why? Why were they so blind to this possibility?

I think it is because the people behind this heinous operation, the attempted occupation of an American city are at heart, racists.

Most people have a very difficult time getting out of their heads to see the world from another’s point of view.  People tend to think that everyone thinks and feels the way that they do, that they see the world through the same lens. In fact, they are ignorant of their own lens and assume that they objectively see reality and not an interpretation that has been filtered by their own history and biases. One of the more challenging aspects of fiction writing, and one not every author published or not achieves, is successfully climbing into that point of view that is alien to your own. It is a difficult task at the best of times, requires not only effort but sustained practice, and with a charged subject such as religion or politics it can be nearly impossible. Overlaid with the disease of racism, it becomes unthinkable.

The thought that people, particularly white people, might come together for their neighbors when their neighbors had darker skin and spoke accented English or foreign languages, risking their own liberties and lives is utterly alien to the racist. They wouldn’t get in the way; They wouldn’t risk anything of theirs for someone who wasn’t like them. As such they were blind to people who see community as something that transcends color and language.

It is not over. Not in Minneapolis, not for America, but Minneapolis shows us the way, Minneapolis gives us hope and now we must find our courage as they found theirs.

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Movie Review: Dracula (2025)

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Dracula, written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897, is one of the most adapted pieces of fiction in the English canon rivaled, perhaps, only by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The number of

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adaptations and the various media are almost beyond count. The famed vampire has been in London’s swinging 70s scenes, hunted the darkened streets and bayous of Louisiana, stalked victims aboard starships in deep space, and even blackmailed into hunting down criminals like a superhero (Dracula Returns, Robert Lory.) But after waves and truly out-there reimaginings filmmakers returned time and time again to the Stoker original novel, its 19th turning into the 20th century setting, and adapting once again that primal source material.

Filmmaker Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, The Professional, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, to cite a few) has released his own take on literature’s most famous vampire. Written, produced, and directed by Besson, Dracula, released in other markets as Dracula: A Love Story, is so loosely bound by the source material as to stretch to breaking the very definition of adaptation. (It causes me to remember that there was once a screen adaptation of a Shakespearean play with credit Additional Dialog by William Shakespeare.) People familiar with the novel Dracula will recognize a fragment of a scene here and there that echoes something of what Stoker penned, but nothing more than a faint and nearly imperceptible shadow of that original text. Gone is Doctor Abraham Van Helsing, replaced by Christoph Waltz (the principal reason I ventured to see this feature) as a priest, part of a Vatican-ordained order of vampire hunters. Following in the recent canon alterations (or desecrations depending upon your point of view) Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones) once again is portrayed as a man so tormented by the loss of his true love at the hands of his enemy that he has forsaken the Church and God, that he is cursed with the terrible affliction of vampirism, leaving him to haunt the centuries searching for the reincarnation of his lost love. Much of the film’s runtime, 2 hours and 9 minutes, is dedicated to Dracula’s backstory, following him through four centuries of searching and loss. Given that the film’s main action takes place after all of that backstory, this creates in the film a powerful sense that the movie is mostly exposition. This Dracula shares a thematic element with del Toro’s Frankenstein, a deep sympathy for the monster at the center of the tale. While it can be argued that Shelley imbued her text with such feelings for the creation, no such sentiment is in Stoker’s novel. This is the inevitable consequence once you introduce any hint of a tragic origin for the famed vampire. By the end of the film Besson abandons any considerations for the Count’s numerous and slaughtered victims, keeping his sympathy entirely for a vampire with whom Besson has crafted a nobility absent from the source material. This rendition, in addition to transplanting the story from England to Paris, contains mind-control perfumes, elaborate choreographed dances with scores of performers, and culminates with the Austro-Hungarian Empire assaulting Castle Dracula with troops and cannon.

On the plus side, Caleb Landry Jones turns in a performance that sold me, for the most part, on his portrayal as an Eastern European nobleman. To my untrained ear I detected no flaw in his accent and his bearing and delivery all contributed positively to the air of a man for whom power was a birthright. I do wish that hair and make-up had dyed his hair black, a blonde Transylvanian nobleman did stretch my credulity as much as the count being a master chemist whipping up mind-control perfumes.

Besson’s Dracula does strike me as the most thematically Christian rendition of the material. Most vampire movies and television programs will use the cross warding as a gimmick, a way for the characters to save themselves when confronted by a thing that vastly overpowers them, but here the story and its resolution actually turns on Christian theology.

And that made the final resolution unacceptable to me for what is yet another rendition of the ‘red shirt’ problem. In my final section I will spoil the ending of the film so you can bail out here, knowing that I cannot recommend this movie at theatrical prices, at best wait for it to come a streaming service you already subscribe to.

After the army and assorted characters have successfully assaulted and gained entrance to the castle, and after Dracula had slaughtered literally scores of men, Waltz’s priest confronts the vampire and implores him to renounce his heresy. For Dracula to accept God’s love and forgiveness, which Dracula does and then allows the priest to destroy him with a silver stake.

So, Dracula, a vile and evil creature who for hundreds of years has visited terror and death on the people of Europe, is in the end forgiven and granted absolution even as he stands in a hallway littered with the corpses of men he killed. These nameless characters died not to end a great evil, and in the end their sacrifices achieved nothing. It was not by their blood and lives that the Priest walked into the castle. They were mere spectacle, giving the conclusion some action.

It is Christian to believe that honest and true repentance will grant you God’s absolution, but it makes for a terrible movie ending and it is particularly rankling when once again we are being asked to accept a monster as subject of our sympathy and empathy.

 

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The Spy Spectrum

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While the Spy craze of the 60s is long behind us with only the property that ignited that boom, Bond, James Bond, still commands the attention of popular culture — that phrase always implies to me that there is an unpopular culture. Stories of spies and espionage continue to be written and produced. In my opinion there is a spectrum upon which stories of the covert services are told and the ends of that spectrum are anchored by the authors that towered over the field during the height of the ‘spy boom’, Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

Ian Fleming created James Bond, the first novel, Casino Royale, written just before Fleming’s marriage with the author plucking the character’s name off a birding book because he felt the name had a grey forgettable quality to it. While that originating novel had a few not too spectacular gadgets and battled the spy services of the Soviet Union not global criminal empires it wasn’t long before those elements were introduced, then became mainstay tropes of Bond’s adventures. Bond’s stories are adventures, filled with colorful characters, beautiful willing women, fantastic technology and always with clear heroics both in the nature of the threat and the heroic people fighting evil, unredeemable bad guys. (We will set aside that in Casino Royale Bond in the confines of his private thoughts muses on the ‘sweet tang of rape’ an aspect of the character that was mercifully never translated to the screen.)

John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, crafted espionage fiction that very much reflected the real world. His characters were not the fantasy of ‘gentlemen spies’ but working people trying to do their best in a system that in order to achieve its goals often employed the same despicable tactics of the enemy until recognizing one from the other became nearly impossible. Disillusionment is a common theme in le Carré’s work, work which questioned whether our methods define us no matter the nobility of our ends. What gadgets exist in le Carré’s world are ones that actually exist or at the very least are very possible, here you will not find powerful electro-magnets that can pull boats to you from yards away. Heroes often find at the end of the missions not that they have triumphed over evil but rather that they have employed evil, often for questionable results. It is a world so thoroughly gray one wonders if any color can be found anywhere.

The explosive success of the Bond movies dictated that swarms of spy thrillers would flood the screen chasing that sweet, sweet box office money. Most of these, The ‘Matt Helm’ and ‘Flint’ movies sit quite comfortably near the Fleming end of the spectrum, attempting to dazzle the audience with derring-do and fantastic gadgets. Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ series mixed the style of Fleming’s fantastic plot with le Carré’s cynicism placing this series near the middle of the spectrum. Get Smart the successful spy parody series is clearly at the Fleming point, if not far beyond it. It would be difficult to imagine a similar program for le Carré’s style of fiction, after all how funny can a parody of the dark, cynical, and morally gray world of le Carré be?

Slow Horses, currently adapted into a quite successful series on Apple TV, hews closer to le Carré than to Fleming, there is a distinct lack of gadgets, and the world the characters inhabit very much mirrors the gray and morally questionable world that is found in works such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but overlaid with a modern ironic sense. Here there isn’t the common mistake of confusing cynicism for wisdom, but rather a recognition of the flawed world, the flawed systems, but an understanding that beyond all that somethings are right and somethings are wrong.

I find this spectrum a very handy method of classifying espionage fiction, how likely it is to resonate with me. It’s even applicable at the espionage genre is adapted in all sorts of new and exciting way, such as Charle Stross’ Laundry Series which clearly take it’s parody aspects from Fleming with all sorts of fantastical gadget, combined with a sharp satire of office and corporate culture while battling Lovecraftian forces beyond comprehension.

The spy trope is alive and well, even if we don’t have as many as we used to and its pleasing that we still get both our glorious heroes inspired by Fleming and dark cynical take that follow le Carré.

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Art Is Choices Not Prompts

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With generative A.I. getting more and more capable in nearly all areas but particularly in creating video imagery there have been a number of voices, not industry voices mind you, proclaiming the death of Hollywood with some short video piece that they crafted.

The videos are impressive for what they are, a machine mimicking the data that has been fed into it, but there is so much more to a film, a novel, a painting or any other art than how it appears in its final form. Art is about the choices the artist made along the path of creation and not just the final product that was created.

Some artists are very intellectual, plotting out every detail of their art, knowing with deliberate decision why everything is the way it is, why that color was employed and not some other hue, why the character has that particular name. Other artists work more from hunches and intuition, making decisions on the fly, exploring the piece as they create it. Why that color? It just seemed right. Both types, and every type in between, are making choices, and those choices in aggregate create what is the style and voice of the artist. It is the sum of the choices that let us look at a movie and tell the difference from one directed by James Cameron and one directed by Steven Spielberg, why a song by Taylor Swift doesn’t sound like one from Danny Elfman, why a novel from Kazuo Ishiguro hits different than one from Gail Carriger.

That voice that is generated by the thousands and thousands of choices made by the artist is a product of the artist, the events of their lives, and the way they see and interpret the world around them. It is why only they could have produced that one piece of art, because it is a reflection of everything that they are, had been, and how they are interacting with the world at that exact moment of creation.

Generative A.I. does not make choices, it uses probability on what the next word, or pixel is going to be, probability that is derived from the blending of all the similar data that it has been fed. Mind you, that is still a vast powerful tool. An A.I. powered grammar review will nearly all the time catch when you have typed “tub” when you meant “tube” making it a powerful assist in catching those nasty little errors, but it has no voice. Generative A.I. has no opinions on the world, it has never suffered heartbreak of love not returned nor the heights of joyous love that is returned. It’s an impressive parrot regurgitating with stunning ability what it has been fed, but by that very nature what it creates is bland, without the strong point of view that makes art last.

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