Myths for Machines

Mars Rover Opportunity

When the Mars Rover Opportunity rolled onto the planet’s surface it started up its systems and played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”.

It’s a song drenched in nostalgia for a type of sleek, streamlined machine that represented escape and romance for young adults. It hadn’t been Bruce Springsteen’s era. He wasn’t sentimental about a vanishing age. He was just sharpening his wits, learning how to tell stories for his own time by first re-telling the stories that had filled him with wonder. I think that NASA, by giving Opportunity this song, has given the machines that inhabit Mars – Spirit, Opportunity and now Phoenix – myths of their own.

Phoenix landed on Mars recently with a library on a disc strapped to its hull, with visions, dreams and nightmares Earth-dwelling humans have had of Mars. It includes messages from writer/scientists Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, the telling of “War of the Worlds” by both H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, and excerpts of books by J G Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. And a video explaining Phoenix’s mission and giving its specifications and workings.

When I heard Bruce Springsteen perform “One Headlight” with the Wallflowers, it struck me that it could be added to Opportunity’s collection of myths.

Spirit and Opportunity continue to operate long after their termination time, heroically battling the malfunction of their own components and the tough Martian climate to send back footage from Mars. “One Headlight” is an ode to a stoic machine. A disillusioned Cinderella dies of a broken-heart and a grieving Prince Charming bravely faces the realisation that there’s no happily ever after. He didn’t need a magic coach, he decides he could have driven himself and Cinderella through life with a trusty old machine with one headlight.

 

 

Getting Smarter

 

It was purely by chance that I happened to read deep sea explorer Dr Robert Ballard's cold war thriller, Bright Shark, this week. I saw it in the library's catalogue while I was searching for one of his other books and requested it on a whim. The details are exceptionally vivid. He spent the early part of his career in the US Navy on missions using unmanned submersible craft to locate the wrecks of submarines that sank with their experimental nuclear weapons.

The novel is set (and was published) in 1992 but concerns an Israeli submarine that sank in the 1950's, so there are goofy old-school spies from Russia and America and Israel and Britain. If Buck Henry and Mel Brooks had gotten a hold of this and made a movie it could have been given the Get Smart! treatment. There's even a female commander as chic and sharp and sardonic as Agent 99.


Get Smart! television series 

When I checked my e-mail today there was a trailer for a Get Smart! movie, based on the tv series, on the Yahoo! home page.

  
Trailer from new Get Smart movie

I’m sure there can’t be too many 60’s t.v. shows left to re-stage as movies: Mr. Ed perhaps, or F. Troop, but — call me paranoid – I’ve started seeing references to the Cold War everywhere. The new Indiana Jones movie is set in the 1950’s, with nuclear testing and Roswell style aliens in the plot. And Alex Ross’s column in the New Yorker this week talks about psychological warfare waged through music.

The idea of using music in psychological warfare goes back to at least the Second World War, when Soviet forces under siege in Leningrad defiantly broadcast Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony into no man’s land and the Office of War Information relayed jazz and other democratic sounds into Nazi-occupied Europe. During the occupation of Germany, from 1945 to 1949, the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), took control of German musical culture, discouraging nationalism and encouraging progressive approaches among younger composers. In the course of writing a history of twentieth-century music, I examined the records of OMGUS at the National Archives, and, while I was there, the invasion of Iraq began. The U.S. Army’s conspicuous disregard for Iraqi cultural heritage made for a stark contrast with the meticulous planning documented in OMGUS’s records.

In Get Smart!, the t.v. series, the K.A.O.S. agents posing as a psychedelic band called The Sacred Cows used music as a mind control device.

Max and 99 and the Sacred Cows

The cool absurdity of the war movies of the cold war era was thrilling to me. The dark humour of M.A.S.H., Catch-22, and especially Doctor Strangelove.

 

I must have a high threshhold for irony because I accepted Doctor Strangelove as something plausible, but when I found the original review from the New York Times I was astonished to see Bosley Crowther worked-up and spluttering about it.

Stanley Kubrick's new film, called Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across. And I say that with full recollection of some of the grim ones I've heard from Mort Sahl, some of the cartoons I've seen by Charles Addams, and some of the stuff I've read in Mad magazine.
For this brazenly jesting speculation of what might happen within the Pentagon and within the most responsible council of the President of the United States if some maniac Air Force general should suddenly order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union is at the same time one of the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that has ever been on the screen. It opened yesterday at the Victoria and the Baronet.

My reaction to it is quite divided, because there is so much about it that is grand, so much that is brilliant and amusing, and much that is grave and dangerous.

New York Times review of Doctor Strangelove. By Bosley Crowther.  Published: January 31, 1964

Television came late to the rural outpost in Australia where I lived as a child. But I was immediately entranced by Get Smart! and Roadrunner cartoons. I was inspired by Max’s shoe-phone and other techno-communications devices and desperately wished for an Acme catalogue to have a look at the devices Wile E. Coyote was ordering. I learned, soon enough, that these were not auspicious sources of wisdom for a young would-be engineer.

My favourite cold-war music is the series of albums made by David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the Hansa studios in Berlin, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti is quoted in a Wikipedia entry saying that Red guards would shine their searchlights through the production studio window. For reasons that infuriate me and drive me to despair my communications devices work about as well as anything created in the C.O.N.T.R.O.L. workshops, or ordered from the Acme Catalogue, so in order to have music while I write I’ve been calling up videos on YouTube and listening to them, without watching them. A new favourite is a version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” from the Hansa sessions, a song about lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, by the Wallflowers. I heard the sound of helicopters and buildings being demolished while the Wallflowers played and figured it must be from a Cold War movie soundtrack, with a backdrop of the sound of the Berlin Wall falling. But it’s from Godzilla !!! Which side had the covert gargantuan lizard operative?

Wallflowers perform David Bowie’s Heroes from the movie Godzilla