Film: the new novel

John David Ebert

Surveying with one glance the current state of Western literature--and by literature, I mean novels, poems, and plays, but also the traditional nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of philosophy--compared to what it looked like in, say, the first half of the twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall quality. Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, which starts off promising, but reads more and more like an outline for a novel; or Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, which is so self-consciously affected that it reads like a caricature of Faulkner; or even a master like Thomas Pynchon, whose Mason & Dixon goes in and out of focus, one is inevitably perplexed by the awkwardness of the performance. Even when considering the absolute best that the novel of the past thirty years has to offer, such as the works of Italo Calvino--If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is the ultimate experiment in authorial self-consciousness--or Patrick Suskind, whose Perfume reads like the rough draft of what should have been a larger, more detailed work, or W.G. Sebald, whose beautiful Austerlitz is a haunting and lovely piece of prose poetry--one still has the feeling that these are micro performances at best, utterly lacking the magnificence of those Cretaceous giants Mann, Proust, Joyce, or Musil. Rather, with Calvino, Suskind, and Sebald, who represent the last stragglers of the European literary tradition, we are dealing now not with behemoths but with rather tiny, glittering green lizards scurrying about in the underbrush while the new mammals of electronic culture stalk about the scene.

The classic work of nonfiction, like The Waning of the Middle Ages or The Revolt of the Masses, The Gutenberg Galaxy or A Study of History, has vanished altogether, to be replaced by dull and unliterate books by boring academics with no sense of literary style whatsoever.

While it is true that more books are being published than ever before, a close inspection of the average level of quality offered by most publishers reveals them to be the literary equivalent of fast food: trashy Barnes and Noble-type coffee table books with more pictures than words; computer and business books; cookbooks; graphic "novels"; pop fiction bestsellers. Worse, the books that pass for "real" literature, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Toni Morrison's Paradise or Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, are really just frauds masquerading as literature, rip-offs from great novels of the past displaced to modern, or exotic, settings. The handful of real artists out there practicing real literature--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie--grows ever smaller, while the frauds, and the public's inability to discern the difference between them, proliferate.

Literary essays like this one, meanwhile, are thought to be irrelevant in a predominantly electronic culture, and old-fashioned modalities like poetry and drama have all but dwindled away, patronized by ever narrower and more specialized audiences. Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture, furthermore, has complained of the alarming increase in spelling errors on public signs, while the books of Neil Postman bemoan the inability of the MTV generation to articulate itself in anything but a Burroughsian patchwork of broken sentences.

The usual explanations given for this decline of literacy assume that the electronic media are at fault, that they are in the process of eroding the cognitive structures built up by century upon century of sedimentary developments made in the technology of reading and writing. First, the Semitic invention of the alphabet, with its abstract letters enabling thought to move around in a new kind of intellectual hyperspace in which concepts are no longer so tightly nailed down to images (as they are in Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sumerian cuneiform); then, the Greeks throw in vowels and invert the Hebrew direction of reading from right to left; then, with the printing press, and the near simultaneous discovery of depth perspective in painting, an even more abstract mental phase space is created, one in which objects are unified by the eye into a linear series of movable blocks that must be arranged in a careful sequence (hence, the inward relationship between the advent of the "still life" in painting and the uniform arrangement of words on a page of printed text). But all this, the current theory goes, was changed with the advent of electronic technology. With its everything-all-at-once, light-speed reconfiguration of culture, electronic technology melted down the kinds of intensely private mental spaces opened up by a reader's relationship with the printed word into a collective "Here Comes Everybody," with an initial phase of nation states crashing into each other and eroding geographical boundaries followed by a second phase of individuals invading each other's privacy with telegraphs, telephones, televisions, satellites, computers, and now cellphones. This radical "cooling off" of our culture, as McLuhan put it, has resulted in an implosion in which privacy has become a thing of the past, while the entire planet has become a Truman Show-style movie set in which everybody is busy looking over everybody else's shoulder.

While there certainly is something going for this explanation, I don't think it's the full story, because if we just blame electronic technology, then our thesis isn't broad enough to account for the gradual erosion of literacy in ancient civilizations like Egypt, China, and Rome. To take the last as an instance, illiteracy had saturated the Roman Empire like spider cancer, long before the collapse of the empire in 411 c.e., for in the so-called Golden Age of Augustus Caesar, Virgil, Horace, Livy, and Ovid were masters all, but when, just a handful of decades later (around 60 c.e.), we get to the Silver Age of Nero, with Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius, there's a general falling away of literary ability. Lucan is not as good as Ovid and Seneca's plays were written not to be performed but to be read aloud because the gladiatorial shows had put the theater out of business. Why go see people faking death when you can watch the real thing? Seneca's plays, consequently, are so crudely violent because he had to compete with the arenas. In the next, and last, generation of Roman literature, with Martial, Juvenal, Suetonius, and Valerius Flaccus, there is a further falling away, for Suetonius, in comparison to Livy or Tacitus, is a minor historian, and Flaccus's version of the Jason and the Argonauts legend is a withered stump by comparison with Apollonius's Argonautika. By the time of Marcus Aurelius--who composes his Meditations in Greek--a mere couple of decades later, Roman literature is finished. After that generation, from about 150 c.e. on, there are no Roman writers whatsoever. What happened to them? Western Roman civilization goes on for another three centuries without anybody writing a thing.

I think the German philosophers had it right, and that the anti-intellectualism evident in dying societies as they shift into the brutal politics of empire and the creation of a Universal State--think of the burning of the books in the time of the first Chinese Emperor Shi Huang Ti, under whose reign the Great Wall was built--is just a natural process akin to the senility of old age. In the German Romantic tradition that produced Nietzsche, Spengler, and Thomas Mann, the intellect was thought of as a mere flower produced by the vital and instinctive forces of nature, a flower that wilts and dies with the onset of nightfall. But to a good old-fashioned American with a monkey wrench in his hand, such organic morphological processes sound like hokey mysticism, so gadget-minded American scholars are always looking for a cause, since they look at everything the way a mechanic would ponder the automobile engine under the hood that's making that funny noise. To Americans, everything is an automobile engine.

In saying that the real reason literacy is declining is because our society is growing senile, what I am really trying to express is my feeling that the ascendancy of electronic media is a symptom, not a cause--a manifestation, that is to say, of the Zeitgeist. When consciousness changes, new media are invented in order to express the interior phenomena of those changes. Then those new media begin affecting older media in detrimental ways. Most philosophers of media have got the problem backwards in assuming that new media just happen upon the scene and are found ready made, and only when the users pick them up are they changed by the new technologies. Yes, the medium is the message; but the question McLuhan never answered was, why this new medium at this particular time and place?

Every cultural epoch favors a particular medium as the vehicle for expressing its Zeitgeist: in the eighteenth century, classical music informed everything from lace cuffs to the wearing of wigs to the wild curves of Baroque architecture to the style of painting in Watteau and Goya. Then, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the novel became the primary art form, while classical music was beginning to fall apart (Nietzsche's criticisms of the theatricality and bombast of Wagner's operas are evidence of the first symptoms of decay in that medium). The novel, originally, told the story of the middle classes by focusing on a unique individual and showing his rise from rags to riches, or else his migration from the countryside to the city would demonstrate the transition of the lower classes from ownership of farms to ownership of the means of production. Like a massive object in space that is so dense it warps the space around it so that other bodies are caught in its gravitational pull, the rise of the novel changed all the other media of the nineteenth century. The drama and the epic, for instance, become more prosaic under its influence: Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (the first Russian novel) are both essentially narrative poems that have been given the contours of novels, while Ibsen and Hebbel get rid of poetry altogether and just have their characters speak naturally. Even classical music is affected, for it is at just this time that the opera, hitherto a light and dainty medium, like a sonnet, begins to grow into novel-length proportions.

One of the surest signs that the novel has entered its twilight, however, is the gradual erosion of the ideal of originality in film and popular culture, an ideal that was actually the novel's whole raison d'etre. The first novels--Don Quixote, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe--were "new" because of their departure from all traditional modalities of storytelling, like the epic or the romance. The protagonists, as their titles indicate, were not recycled heroes or legends from the Middle Ages, but three-dimensional and original, essentially "novel" human beings whose stories had never been told by anyone before. The ideal of the Elizabethan age, by contrast, had been not originality but artifice--that is to say, how well you could take an old tale and retell it anew. Shakespeare takes Hamlet over from an earlier play by Thomas Kyd who, in turn, had taken it from the chronicles of ancient Danish history. Lear is based on an episode out of Spenser, and the lives of Marc Antony and Julius Caesar were well known from the pages of Plutarch. As a new medium, film, like the epics, dramas, and romances of the Middle Ages, is based primarily on interpretations of preexistent works--either of literature, comic books, television shows, or older movies. The films of Stanley Kubrick, for instance, are almost all based on novels, and so, likewise, are a significant portion of the works of filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. Whereas no novelist in his or her right mind--at least prior to the late twentieth century--would ever consider recycling characters and plots from Tom Jones, Moby Dick or Remembrance of Things Past, remakes of old films, or American redos of European flicks, are so common that they invite comparison to the Greek and Roman practice of reworking the same fixed stock of myths over and over again, like Oedipus Rex, which is refabricated by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Seneca, or Jason and the Argonauts, which was rewritten many times. Stephen King's pop novels Carrie and The Shining, for example, have each been filmed twice, once for the big screen and once for television. The same goes for Dune, Lord of the Rings, and the various incarnations of pop-culture myths like Tarzan, Batman, and Superman. The postmodern tendency to rework classic novels--such as Michel Tournier's recasting of Robinson Crusoe in his novel Friday, or Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, or Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea--is a testament to the decline of the novel's influence on culture generally, pointing instead to the rapidly soaking stain of popular culture and its influence on all things highbrow.

In contrast to the experience of reading the best that the modern novel has to offer, it is the medium of celluloid that, these days, now impresses us with its ease and wealth of creative energy, a kind of Mozart-like exuberance and abundance of vitality, although this doesn't mean that there aren't lots of bad movies, just as there have always been bad novels. But in films like Goodfellas, Schindler's List, Titanic, or Lord of the Rings, it is evident that the director has so mastered his craft that not the slightest self-consciousness is apparent, something that I am afraid I cannot say with any confidence about even the best modern novels. They are all self-conscious because the anxiety of influence has saturated the medium so thoroughly as to make it nearly unworkable. You cannot improve upon Joyce, Mann, Dostoyevsky, or Proust, whatever your ambitions as a writer; at best, you can hope to achieve only a vague approximation, as Thomas Pynchon did with Gravity's Rainbow--his agon with Joyce--or Doris Lessing with her underrated Shikasta.

Film, on the other hand, is only just now becoming fully assured of itself; it has a past, furthermore, that certainly can, and is, being improved upon, for Bunuel, Antonioni, John Ford, and Orson Welles, however great they were, can be bettered. Film has no Shakespeare, Joyce, or Picasso whose shadow so intimidates all those who come after as to virtually paralyze the performance, although in the line-up of directors like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, David Cronenberg, and others, one does begin to sense the same aura of legendary greatness that was associated with Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian, once the medium of oil painting had attained, with them, the period of its high mastery; or in classical music, the generation straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that produced Haydn, Gluck, Stamitz, the junior Bachs, Mozart, and Beethoven; or, in the novel, the group that included Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Flaubert, and George Eliot.

When a medium is still vital, it contains a kind of reservoir of potential energy that enables even mediocre talents to routinely turn out finished masterworks. Think of the paintings of a minor artist like Vasari, for example, which are as beautiful as any of Raphael's, but his achievement exists within a style already initiated by Raphael. Or all those obscure Dutch painters living in the time of Rembrandt whose works are so good, in fact, that they often stump even the best efforts of the experts to discern authentic Rembrandts from imitators. But as the medium ages, its possibilities begin to wither, and the number of artists able to turn out polished work dwindles, and consequently, only the rarest geniuses--who appear less and less often--can achieve any effect at all.

Take the evolution of classical music: in the time of Mozart and Haydn, when it was at its apogee, there were hundreds of obscure composers whose music is qualitatively indistinguishable from those two; and then, as the medium begins to decline, we move from Mozart to Beethoven--and just by comparing the sheer output of Mozart's oeuvre to the almost constipated productions of Beethoven, who lived much longer, gives one a sense that something in the medium is already exhausting itself. Wagner had to focus absolutely all of his life's energies to milk the very last drops out of this classical style; in the twentieth century, Mahler's greatness rests upon a mere ten shattered symphonies. Nowadays, in contemporary "classical" music, we've got people like Penderecki or Ligeti or Karlheinz Stockhausen, but like academic specialists, their tastes are so refined that they appeal to only a very small circle of listeners. (Philip Glass is certainly well known, but the kind of thing he's doing is no longer really classical, and only barely qualifies as "highbrow.") These individuals, however great, are really only isolated masters who stand out against a background of overall very poor performance.

So, while the West's classical arts of form vanish into the past, the various media of popular culture--comic books, movies, and rock and roll--have filed onto the stage. Since 1968, film in particular has achieved its plateau of mastery. My observations, of course, will be met by purists with scorn, for a glance at the Sight and Sound top-ten lists that are issued by critics every decade will show just how fond they are of old school garbage like Battleship Potemkin or The Rules of the Game or Open City. This is not to say that there aren't any true masterpieces on those lists, for films such as Ugetsu or Andrei Rublyev are timeless, but the fact that such lists consistently overlook films like Apocalypse Now, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Alien indicates either a generation gap or, more likely, a prejudice against visionary and metaphoric films in favor of those in the realist modality.

Peter Biskind, for instance, in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, thinks of the Golden Age of cinema as the seventies, when the directors of the New Hollywood began to take chances with such European-influenced films as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, and so forth; but this brief epoch, he insists, was ended by special-effects blockbusters, beginning with Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977. Actually, such films signified a new tendency toward the mythic and the symbolic that was just beginning to surface into the mainstream out of the ghettoes of science fiction and fantasy, films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Solaris (1972), Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), and The Exorcist (1973). But since Biskind favors "realism"--the golden days of which were, indeed, Hollywood in the early seventies--he sees the predominance of this type of visionary, special-effects-laden film as announcing the decline of cinema in the late seventies, whereas from my point of view as a culture historian with a preference for the mythic and the symbolic, the eighties was precisely the decade when these great visionary, or if one insists, "science fiction," films, really began to take off, movies like The Thing, Blade Runner, Altered States, The Shining, Brazil, Videodrome, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, The Dead Zone, The Hunger, The Terminator, Aliens, The Fly, Dead Ringers, The Abyss. Only a fool would regard such a list of neo-classics as a "decline" in any sense.

At the dawn of cinema, the realistic and the visionary tendencies--what the literary critic Harold Bloom has called the Chekhovian and the Borgesian modes--were already evident in the contrast between the Lumiere brothers and George Melies. The Lumieres filmed such banalities as the arrival of a train at a station, or people sitting around playing cards, whereas Melies, generally credited with the invention of special effects, was the pioneer of visionary cinema and was preoccupied with filming things like robots or rockets voyaging to the moon.

Indeed, when one looks back through the history of cinema up until the late 1960s, one notices that what has generally been regarded as its mainstream work has been predisposed toward the Lumierean style of realism. There are visionary films, to be sure, which have been and are appreciated--The Wizard of Oz, the work of the German Expressionists, the films of Fellini and Bunuel--but the preponderance has been tilted most decidedly in the direction of realism. It is surely no accident that what has been generally regarded as the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, is a realist film; although the film is a technical master-piece, its content is merely a shallow exposition of the cliche from the Gospels that asks, "What doth it profit a man if he gaineth the whole world and yet loseth his soul?" (Borges, in his review of the film, is one of the few who got it right: "... Citizen Kane will endure as certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have 'endured'--films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious.")

Mythologically inspired works of art, moreoever, have never been rendered realistically, for myth is the visionary modality par excellence, and most of the history of art in civilization has been composed in the symbolic mode, whether we are looking at the Great Pyramids or a Greek vase painting or a Hindu sculpture. In fact, whenever an artistic tradition has shifted into realism, it has almost unfailingly been linked with the decline of a particular development, as Nietzsche pointed out, for example, in The Birth of Tragedy, when he argued that the Greek drama ended as a great work of art when it was overtaken by the Apollonian Rationalism of Euripides. The decline of Hellenic sculpture, likewise, and of Egyptian relief carving in the Eighteenth Dynasty, or of Chinese painting during the Manchu Dynasty, were all marked by the predominance of realism.

Film, therefore, has been primarily realist in its aesthetic--at least until the last three or four decades of the twentieth century--because it originated in an epoch in the West in which the arts as a whole were declining into realism, and so it bears the character of this epoch within it. But with the rise of such mythologically inspired films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Apocalypse Now, it has been evident that a shifting in aesthetic sensibilities has been taking place in cinematic history, one, furthermore, that is exactly the opposite of Nieztsche's thesis in The Birth of Tragedy, for instead of a decline into Apollonian realism, film is shedding its realist carapace as it ascends into the visionary tradition. Perhaps the fact that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the first fantasy-special-effects-laden film to win Best Picture signifies a benchmark in the Academic history of cinema.

If any film can be regarded as pivotal in this shifting of celluloid sensibilities from the realist to the visionary mode--the classic mode, in fact, of most of the world's great literature--then it is surely Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, like Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Botticelli's Primavera, is one of those truly epochal works of art that announce, in seed form, the major themes to be developed and worked through by an entire generation of artists.

2001 sounded an overture of themes later developed by such directors as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, David Cronenberg, and hordes of lesser imitators. Cameron has remarked, for instance, that his viewing of the film at age fifteen set him on the path toward becoming a great director: "As soon as I saw that, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker." Steven Spielberg, likewise, was said to have played 2001 constantly on the set during the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and indeed, his film's climactic mother ship was put together by Douglas Trumbull, the special-effects master Kubrick had hired for 2001.

In addition, the primary theme of the fall, sinking, and capture of man by technology depicted in the HAL 9000 sequence was later reworked by such films as Westworld, The Terminator, Star Wars, The Truman Show, and Existenz. The story of Anakin Skywalker's descent into the biomechanical skeleton that consumes him; or of the murderous robot Ash in the film Alien; or the armies of sentient robots bent on eliminating human beings from the planet in Cameron's Terminator films; or the way in which Seth Brundle's teleportation device in David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly attempts its own feat of genetic engineering by cross-breeding the genes of a fly with those of a man; even Cameron's portrait study of the sinking of the Titanic as a microcosm for the breakdown of civilization; all are reworkings of Bowman's battle with HAL.

Whereas Kubrick was one of the last of the dying geniuses whose literary sensibilities shaped an entire epoch of Western civilization that has come to be known elegiacally as the Gutenberg Galaxy, Steven Spielberg is a prophet of the electronic age, for his work points the way into the future of film as the medium for that age. Kubrick's work is part of an elegy for the sinking ship of Western literature, and as time goes by, I predict that directors who share his kind of literary temperament, like Franics Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Philip Kaufmann, will become more and more rare, while the future belongs to the George Lucases, Steven Spielbergs, and Peter Jacksons. I do not, however, regard this as in any way dismaying, for unlike the elitists, I believe that film should be a roller-coaster ride. I've got books at home to read. When I go to the movies, I want something from the screen that I can't get from the page.

In a way, Spielberg's 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind picks up where 2001 left off. At the end of that film, we saw the beginnings of the descent of a messianic Being from the stars headed toward a troubled, overly mechanized Earth. Close Encounters picks up from the vantage point of the human beings on earth below gathering in millennial expectation of a messiah, like the Jews of Edessa or Jerusalem at the turn of the Magnus Annus two thousand years ago. Roy Neary becomes for us a sort of prophet of this messiah, a John the Baptist figure crying in the wilderness of the coming of the savior. Gathered together among the empty fields and deserted highways of country roads, the expectant await the arrival of their god from the heavens who will fulfill their millennial eschatology. Spielberg's film is an examination of what Toynbee in his Study of History called "the internal proletariat," those who are in a disintegrating society but not of it, and who secede from it in order to form their own Universal Church which will become the chrysalis of the next great civilization, as the early Jews and Christians among the Romans awaited their savior who would deliver them from the shallow materialism of the dying classical society.

This motif of the human individual singled out by cosmic powers for a privileged vision of the architecture of the cosmos was actually a narrative precedent set by the apocalyptic literature of the Hebrews. In 1 Enoch--written along with the Book of Daniel around 160 b.c.e--Enoch, the grandfather of Noah, is taken up into the vault of heaven for an initiatic vision of the universe. The Sons of God who cohabited with human females in Genesis 6 to produce monstrous ogres have caused Yahweh to decide, like James Cameron's extraterrestrials in The Abyss, that he will unleash an enormous flood to wipe out giants and men alike. Thus, both 2001 and Close Encounters belong in the literary tradition of the apocalyptic narrative. The Mother Ship that descends from the heavens at the climax of Close Encounters, for example, is a duplicate of the image of the New Jerusalem that sinks down from the Heavens onto a mountain top in the Book of Revelation. Thus, the films of Kubrick and Spielberg, far from being merely cotton candy entertainment, continue and develop the traditional themes of the Western canon, and must be seen as carrying on the great visionary tradition that the mainstream novel as a respectable literary medium abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies. (Gravity's Rainbow, in 1973, is the swansong.)

James Cameron's 1989 film, The Abyss, moreover, is the chronological sequel to these works, and as such, embeds them within it, for The Abyss resumes the sequence begun with the approach of the Star Child toward the Earth in 2001 and continued with Spielberg's Mother Ship descending from the heavens, for Cameron's narrative takes us even further downward, to the bottom of the ocean floor, where the film's protagonist encounters an ancient civilization of aliens who, over millennia, have managed to gain control of the earth's water systems. In the director's cut of this film, the aliens show their lone visionary that they intend to wipe out human civilization with a gigantic flood, like Yahweh, unless it reforms its belligerent ways.

In Kubrick and Spielberg's 2001 film, A.I., Cameron's floodwaters have nearly engulfed the entire world, submerging its coastal cities. A.I. is the answer to the problem that was set up in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for its concern is the birth of the human from the carapace of technology within which he has cocooned himself. What does it mean to be human, the film asks, in a world in which technology can perform wonders that hitherto were possible only in the realm of myth? The Sumerian god Enki, shaping the first human beings out of riverine mud; the Babylonian god Marduk, taking the idea from Enki, creates primal man from the blood of the slain god Kingu; Yahweh, in imitation of the Egyptian god Khnum, who makes man on a pottery wheel, scoops Adam up out of the ground and rolls him together like a Neolithic ceramics craftsman; Judah Lion, like the mother in A.I. who pronounces the seven words that will magically cause the boy robot to love her, utters the sacred syllables that will awaken his mute Golem into being; such deeds, once performed by gods of myth and characters of literature like Faust and Frankenstein, are now, at the turn of the millennium, being transformed into fact, for human cloning has become a reality.

A.I. is a piece of artifice about a mechanical boy who desires to become human and so, in a way, it is the exact opposite of the story set up in George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, which tell of a human boy who gradually becomes a machine. In A.I., the boy is discarded into the wilderness once his "mother" no longer has any use for him; but out of his love for her, he spends his life seeking the Blue Fairy, who, he learned from his mother's bedtime reading of Pinocchio, has the power to change him from a robot into a real boy. Thus, A.I. answers the problem set up in 2001 by making clear that it is the depths of our emotional commitments that make us human, not our problem-solving intellect, which spins forth technology from itself like silkworms spinning delicate threads from their bodies. The boy's love for his mother, whose image he holds with such reverence that she becomes a goddess to him, draws him onward through the perils of one ordeal after another. And the film's penultimate image of the boy in his amphibicopter on the ocean floor, locked in prayer to the Blue Fairy, is a vision of intense human spirituality, inviting comparison to a penitent before the Virgin Mary, thus reminding us of the kinds of spiritual depths that make us human.

Clearly, the way in which these filmmakers draw upon and amplify each other's ideas is exactly the way in which the great literary artists of the past have woven the Western canon together out of continuities between their works. Joyce, for example, in writing his masterwork Ulysses, was consciously carrying on a tradition extending back to Homer, and building Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg, among others, into his epic, just as the great temple architects of the late dynasties of Egypt would build bricks from earlier, discarded temples into their edifices as a way of incorporating the past. Thomas Mann, likewise, wrote his novels in a conscious effort to build upon the lower stories of the construction begun by Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche before him.

Thus, the myths of a civilization come into being through the construction of these kinds of continuities between artists. The only problem is that Western literature gradually stopped doing this type of thing after World War II, possibly because, as W.G. Sebald hints in his Austerlitz, the horrific excesses of that war cast doubt upon the value of the European tradition itself, and as a result, a loss of confidence sapped the energies of its artists and writers. Perhaps this is the clue then to the exuberant invention of American popular culture, for America is still new to the world and has plenty of creative energy to draw from, although its lack of respect for the traditions of Europe is both blessing and curse, for it enables the production of such "questionable" culture as comic books, movies, and rock and roll.

So it is clear to me, at any rate, that the kinds of literary and mythic richness that used to be handled by great literature of the caliber of the Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost, is now being done in film. These works of art, looked at in their own terms, can now provide us with the kind of densely textured experiences that one used to be able to find in works of literature like Ulysses or The Magic Mountain.

Thus, it is in film, and most especially in mythologically inspired film, that the great questions, which were once posed by the contemporary novel, are now being asked--that is, the really big questions, the very posing of which indicates the essential nature of our being as a questioning, thinking kind of being in a world among other beings, questions such as: Who are we? What makes us human? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

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