Cricket Cocktails and Martian Ziggurats
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A herladic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets." - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
I'm not proud of this, but Coloradoans like myself are raised with cheerfully undisguised prejudices about our neighboring Western states.
I was a child when I first heard the phrase "I'd rather push my car across Nebraska than drive it across Kansas," to which I probably responded with a knowing laugh and a high-five.
I still remember the proper response to anyone asking directions to Utah: go west until you smell it, then north until you step in it.
Texans and Californians were obnoxious invaders: flanking us from the west and the south, constantly moving in and driving up property values.
I was also raised to consider Arizona and the desert southwest in general to be a parched hellscape full of dusty loners, toxic politics, irradiated mutants and man-eating vinegarroons, whatever those are. But after spending a long weekend with my snow-birding parents in Tucson, that last one turns out to be only partially true.
Tucson is in fact a lovely place, at least in winter, and the Sonoran desert surrounding it is so cinematic that every iPhone snap becomes a still from some old cowboy movie. There were wild boars (the Pixies serenaded them as Havalina) foraging for shells from the pecan tree in the front yard of our rented house, and bobcats strolling around like they owned the place in the back. We lived on a diet of enchiladas and prickly pear margaritas, and we contemplated the ancient Hohokam petroglyphs on the rocks. We watched rockets chemtrailing across the sky every evening, and we tried not to think about who owned them. Saguaro cactuses out of a Road Runner cartoon towered majestically, and a literal roadrunner darted across my path one afternoon as we were zooming across the desert on rented electric bicycles.
We also toured Biosphere 2: the simulated space colony where a team of scientists isolated themselves for two years in the early '90s on a mission to prove... something or other.
The project was intended to prepare mankind for the colonization of the Milky Way, like Bruce Dern's spaceship in the goofball '70s space opera Silent Running. It may also have been intended as a prototype for dystopian housing after an environmental collapse, depending which "Biospherian" you asked.
It was a media sensation at the time, and if you're at least my age you probably remember Peter Jennings and Connie Chung updating us on it regularly. You may also remember the minor scandal which ended the original experiment: the air filters weren't keeping the oxygen levels at the survivable point, so they had to vent it with fresh air, basically invalidating the experiment. The animals kept dying but cockroaches flourished. Their agriculture didn't produce sufficient calories, so they were dangerously underweight and presumably quite grouchy. Eventually the funders of the project brought in Steve Bannon (yes, literally Steve Bannon) to fire everyone and take over, which went about as well as you would imagine.
The most important thing they managed to prove is that humans don't flourish when cooped up with two years worth of their own farts, though that hypothesis probably requires further peer review.
The facility is still out there if no longer hermetically sealed: a series of Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic domes and sci-fi pyramids in a gorgeous expanse of high desert, now operated by the University of Arizona as a tourist-friendly center for environmental research.
We gawked at the preserved living quarters of the original team, including their discarded red jumpsuits, and the kitchen they used to brew banana wine. We also toured the various simulated biomes, including a Savanna grassland, a tropical rainforest, and a warehouse-sized "ocean" with simulated tides and actual coral reefs.
Googling around afterward we came across this clickbait headline from The Guardian:
Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong
It sounds like a sci-fi movie, or the weirdest series of Big Brother ever. Eight volunteers wearing snazzy red jumpsuits seal themselves into a hi-tech glasshouse that’s meant to perfectly replicate Earth’s ecosystems. They end up starving, gasping for air and at each other’s throats – while the world’s media looks on.
But the Biosphere 2 experiment really did happen. Running from 1991 to 1993, it is remembered as a failure, if it is remembered at all – a hubristic, pseudo-scientific experiment that was never going to accomplish its mission. However, as the new documentary Spaceship Earth shows, the escapade is a cautionary tale, now that the outside world – Biosphere 1, if you prefer – is itself coming to resemble an apocalyptic sci-fi world. Looking back, it’s amazing that Biosphere 2 even happened at all, not least because the people behind it started out as a hippy theatre group.
We eagerly streamed the Spaceship Earth documentary that night, and it's a great story if not quite as spicy as the Guardian piece makes it out to be. No one actually seemed to "go mad," although there is a pretty hilarious anecdote about the exhausted Biosperians waiting forever to be released as a loquacious Jane Goodall wrapped up a very long speech during the project's closing ceremony. I actually found that "hippy theater group" fairly sympathetic, and funded as they were by a sympathetic Texas oil man, they managed to produce a lot of cool stuff in their time.
Movies You Missed
I've been reeling from some sort of malaise/political horror/poster's block all year, and thus, you have been deprived of my opinions about the Academy Awards. So let's cover this. I loved Anora, and to a lesser extent The Conformist, A Real Pain, and The Substance too. But as usual, the best movies of the year were undercompensated. If you missed any of the following, you should fix that.
Nickel Boys
I missed this in the theater, which is a shame because I don't just think it was the best movie I saw last year, I think it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. I keep this list of the best movies for some goofy reason, and Nickel Boys is now on there at number 19, between Army of Shadows and Mean Streets.
People, there was a movie this year that was better than Mean Streets. If you haven't seen it, fix that.
The Girl With The Needle
As much as I admired the recent Nosferatu remake, it comes off as poseur goth bullshit compared to this modern-day German Expressionist nightmare. I'm not going to tell you anything at all about the plot, so that you can experience it the same way I did.
La Chimera
Is this what they mean by pure cinema? Here's what I think that term means: the film is sort of about itself. The intentions and inclinations of the filmmakers are present in every shot, and even if you aren't sure what's going on with the story, you're immersed and fascinated by the mood, the light, the filmmaking itself. I put this on the list as well, at 50, between Being John Malkovich and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
La Chimera was largely shot in Umbria, where Maya and I spent some time over the summer, and it just nails the vibe of the place. I had never seen anything from Alice Rohrwacher, the director, and now I want to track all of her work. Also, this movie wins best poster of the year.
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World
This furious, hilarious movie is streaming on Mubi and is hands down the greatest thing involving Ewe Boll in any way. On my list at 75, between Don't Look Now and Triangle of Sadness.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This political thriller was filmed secretly in Iran and nominated for the Palme d'Or. The director had previously been arrested and jailed for "propaganda against the regime" several times, and was forced to flee to Europe with some of the cast, often on foot, after this one came out. It's amazing that this movie even exists.
The Fall Guy
Respectfully, if you didn't like this movie, you might just not like movies. Wall to wall: The Fall Guy is about charismatic people doing amazing stunts and saying genuinely funny lines. The best joke is about carbohydrates. There is also a stunt dog who was trained in French, so at one point Ryan Gosling calls him a "bon garçon," which is Murphy's new nickname.