Following the Rules

First, an apology. In my last post I implied that I would be doing a post on Cory Doctorow's stories next, and this is not that post. I still plan on writing one, but I realized last night that I had forgotten about (and hence, hadn't read) his most recent short story collection, Overclocked. Since I was planning on discussing his stories as a whole, I figured that I should probably wait until I had, in fact, read all of his stories before I did the post. Since no one actually reads this blog, this explanation is a bit superfluous, but just in case you were looking forward to such a post, now you know that you'll have to wait.


Now that we know what this post is not about, let's move on to what it is about. On Saturday I sat down and watched the whole Evil Dead trilogy. I'd heard good things, and I had already seen Army of Darkness at some point on TV, so I was interested. I dig Bruce Campbell largely because of Army of Darkness (from which the picture on the right of him as Ash comes), and Bubba Ho-tep (which is about 10 types of awesome). So I wanted to like the Evil Dead movies, and I was hoping they might even be scary. However, when all was said and done I was left feeling rather flat.

Most of my problems were with the first two movies. They weren't particularly scary, and the reason why contributed to my overall dissatisfaction with them. It comes down to something simple: they didn't follow any rules. Now, I know what you're thinking. Rules make for predictable, cliched, crappy movies. It's a good thing if a movie doesn't follow any rules, especially a horror movie, since you don't know what's coming. And I agree with you. Sort of.

See, you're talking about what I would call "rules", with quotation marks. "Rules" like the first Scream movie made fun of and deflated.

• If you say "I'll be right back," you won't.
• Your car will never start on the first try when you most need it to.¹
• Etc.

"Rules" are stupid, and are the product of unimaginative storytelling. They're not actually anything the characters have to follow (and in many cases, following these "rules" often seems supremely stupid). To their credit, the Evil Dead movies do a good job of ignoring many of these "rules". So what's my problem? What the hell are rules sans quotation marks?

Rules dictate how characters act in a story, and can't be tampered with without taking the viewer/reader out of the story. They are generally implied, which allows for some wiggle room on the writer's part ("There's nothing in the rule book that says a giraffe can't play football!"), but they shape what you, the entertainment consumer, will accept in a narrative. Let's use a simple example: If you were watching an episode of Law and Order and one of the detectives flew off a la Superman to chase a perp, you would probably shake your head and change the channel.² But if you were watching an episode of Justice League Unlimited and Superman flew off a la Superman, nothing would be amiss. The rules are different for the two shows. Crime procedurals: no flying people. Superhero stories: flying people OK. Or another example: the very notion of a deus ex machina relies on the existence of certain rules for storytelling. If there were no limits on what a character can do or what can happen in a story, then there would be no need for a term to describe a device that cheaply gets around such limits.


So back to the Evil Dead movies. The rules were really ambiguous, if not non-existent. What exactly causes one to turn into a Deadite (the main monsters, like the one pictured to the right)? It's not as simple as being bitten or touched by a Deadite or else everyone would have turned into one, and much sooner, too. In both of the first two movies, something (not shown, the camera takes its point of view) comes through the window and turns someone into a Deadite, and in Evil Dead 2, Ash gets turned into a Deadite (temporarily) after being attacked by something similar. So maybe that's it? Except several others turn into Deadites after being attacked by their newly Deadite friends, or after being killed. Plus, Ash turns into a Deadite again at one point with no provocation beyond being out in the (admittedly evil) woods. So it's not really practical to be scared about the possibility of someone turning into a Deadite, because it seems completely arbitrary.

Related to that is the question of exactly what the evil forces around the cabin can do. As I mentioned, they can definitely break through the windows of the cabin. They have some control over the interior of the cabin, as evidenced by a pretty great scene where everything (the lamp, the chair, everything) starts to laugh menacingly, which gets to Ash. But they seem stymied by the doors. Okay, this seems pretty consistent, doors are stronger than glass, after all. Except late in both movies, the Deadites break through the doors. So why did they wait? Or did the doors weaken? And in the first movie, a Deadite trapped in the cellar the whole movie suddenly breaks out in the end, no problem. Again, why the wait? So it's not really practical to be scared about the possibility of a Deadite getting into the cabin, because they will eventually, when it's least convenient.

And just how dangerous are the Deadites, anyway? In Evil Dead, one of the Deadites sits in a doorway mocking Ash for several minutes, even allowing Ash to draw a shotgun and aim it at its head, but doesn't attack until later. In Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, we see scenes where Deadites do something to characters offscreen that causes a geyser of blood. We later see (in the former case) the character's skeleton, implying that his flesh was removed from his bones in a very violent manner almost instantaneously. But Ash mostly gets hit with more conventional attacks involving fingernails, biting, punching, and occasional weapon use. No instant-filet attack here. So it's not really practical to be scared about how dangerous the Deadites are, because it depends on how important of a character you are.

Do you see the recurring theme? By failing to set up rules for the Deadites, the movies make the viewer (or at least this viewer) stop caring about what's happening, because it all seems to be without rhyme or reason. There's no tension, because one can simply assume that something will attack after a certain interval, no matter what the characters do in the meantime. This means that no matter what the characters do the outcome will be the same. Why watch a movie where the characters' actions are pointless?

At this point it's probably easy to accuse me of overanalyzing these movies. I should just enjoy the fast pacing of the trilogy, and the slapsticky aspects of the later two. But it's hard to enjoy a movie where I don't care what happens, no matter how stylishly whatever it is does happen. Army of Darkness suffers the least from these problems, and so is the one I enjoyed the most. In fact, before seeing the first two and noticing these things, I liked AoD better, because I didn't notice the few times these problems did appear.³ I didn't set out to pick these movies apart, and I didn't devote any extraordinary mental effort to finding these problems. They are obvious and grating.

Good stories follow internal rules. These can be pretty loose; in Gravity's Rainbow, for example, all manner of absurd things occur, including a pie fight taking place in midair between a hot air balloon and a plane, but within the framework presented, this is fine. Even tight rules can allow for good stories. John Carpenter's The Thing has very simple rules.

• The Thing can look like anyone.
• Every cell of the Thing will do whatever it can to survive, and replicate to the best of its ability.
• Fire will kill the Thing.

That's pretty much everything you need to know about the main menace of the movie, and it's everything the characters know. In all instances, the Thing follows these rules. And yet these simple rules make for a movie about which it is pretty much required to use the words "tension" and "paranoia" when reviewing it. I held my breath several times when watching that movie, I gasped, and most importantly, I was completely absorbed.

When characters follow the rules it allows one to get into the story and to understand why the characters are acting the way they are. When there are no rules, or the rules are broken, you're not shocked or delighted like you might be when the "rules" are broken. You're confused and all of a sudden all-too-aware of the artifice of the whole venture. This is definitely not a good thing.

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1. Evil Dead kinda does this one, as there is a scene where a car will not start until after several tries, but there is no imminent danger present, so I'll give it a pass.

2. This channel would almost inevitably also be showing Law and Order, though.

3. AoD is really an action-comedy, and a very slapsticky one at that. It's easy to miss the inconsistencies at first, because here they are almost always in the service of some gag or another.

Everything and More: A Review, I Suppose

This summer, with no job to speak of, I'm finding myself with a lot of time on my hands. This is not something I'm used to, but I'm somehow managing. I've been doing some light reading, going through books at a good clip. At this point, I've read most of Cory Doctorow's novels (still have his short stories to go), and I'll probably write another post about those once I make it through them all. Today, though, I'm writing about the book Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, by David Foster Wallace.

A couple of things to start off: First, David Foster Wallace is best known (to me, at least) as the author of Infinite Jest, a massive novel about addiction, consumption, family, tennis, and a few other things besides. It plays hard with narrative form, toying with chronology and containing about 100 pages of endnotes which are crucial to the story and must be read. I really enjoyed it, and it even got me watching tennis (although I mostly just watch the majors). Second, the book is about the mathematical development of infinity, from the Greeks to Georg Cantor, the mathematician who discovered/created most of the important proofs related to infinity that allow mathematicians to work with infinite sets in meaningful ways. So, a book about math by an author I dig? Of course I picked it up. These two things (i.e. the book's author and subject) likely will not motivate you as strongly as they did me, so I am attempting to add one more reason to that list with a positive review.

The book's content is strong, with a good overview of the development of infinity and how various problems of interest over the years spurred mathematicians to deal with (or in many cases, ignore) infinity and related concepts¹, and how prevailing attitudes towards the infinite affected these developments². So it's not just math; you get a good helping of history and philosophy as well. In this way it is similar to the book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. I didn't like that book very much, though; it read too much like a series of magazine articles that sought to hype their subject material unrealistically. I can only stomach so many statements about the terrible power of the Void, i.e. zero. Anyway, this book is better, and less worried about the importance of its central concept (even though it is important).

And the math isn't too bad. The book was written with a reader in mind who had done well in high school math, but didn't necessarily do math in college. I would say that if you have taken a first-semester calculus course, you definitely have enough math background to read this book. Even if you haven't, as long as your eyes don't completely glaze over when somebody mentions math, you can read this book with a little effort. I mean, Zeno's Paradox is the problem given the most time in this book, and I'm pretty sure I saw that explained in a Meg Ryan movie once. Not that I watch Meg Ryan movies. Damn.

Of course, this very reduction in complexity to make the book more palatable to the general reader can be somewhat frustrating to someone who is familiar with the math being discussed. It can seem that important details are being glossed over; still, one gets the impressions that such decisions were made carefully after much tweaking to see which details could be pared down. Wallace acknowledges this glossing in at least one example, so he's not unaware. Overall, the math comes off well (most importantly, Cantor's diagonalization proof, central to his results on the relative size of certain infinities, and related proofs are presented well), but I did find the discussion of Cantor's work on the Uniqueness Theorem for Trig Series³ to be murky. (To be fair, part of this is undoubtedly my tendency to confuse sequences and series; there is a difference.)

But what makes the book great is Wallace's style. It's conversational, humorous, and knowledgeable. It reads like a series of entertaining lectures by a cool professor given to small asides and allusions to interesting facts that he just doesn't have time to cover. Wallace spins off footnotes like nobody's business⁴, and this is often where he sneaks the funniest remarks. He's not shy with parenthetical remarks, either. I would often count 3 right parentheses at the end of a sentence, meaning he had doubly nested parenthetical statements. It was the first time I could think of prose that reminded me of LISP in any way. In short, it's written in the sort of focused but cross-referenced (so to speak) style I like.

So, if you're curious about infinity, and want to read a book that traces it from the Greeks and Zeno to roughly the present day, I recommend this one. If someone ever told you to read the book Zero: A Biography..., read this one instead. And hey, I'll probably have another post up in a week or two about some fiction, if that's more your thing.

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1: Good example here: the creation of calculus to deal with a wide variety of physical problems. Calculus requires one to use infinitely small quantities, but there was about a century of hand-waving about these before mathematicians figured out exactly why they could do math using such quantities.

2: Another good example: The Greeks as a culture didn't have a concept of infinity (or zero), and this was part of they reason they didn't manage to create calculus about 2 millenia before it ultimately came about. At least one Greek mathematician, Eudoxus, had the right idea, just no way to even acknowledge the infinities involved.

3: Don't worry if that sounds crazy, it's the hardest math in the entire book. It's not typical.

4: A device I'm rather fond of, clearly.