Installment 33

The Casablanca Problem

At the end of November, io9 released its selection of 19 science fiction movies that could, in Annalee Newitz's words, "challenge your preconceptions about reality and force you to rethink your place in the universe." A very bold statement, that, and while I disagree with some of her choices (your life must be incredibly brief and/or remarkably shallow if James Cameron's Avatar changed it, and while I admire Duncan Jones's Moon, I find little to call it life-changing… and hey, where is Slava Tsukerman's hallucinogenic Liquid Sky or Shinya Tsukamoto's batshit insane Tetsuo: the Iron Man?), I find many of her other choices, from Fritz Lang's arresting Metropolis to Andrei Tarkovsky's sublime Stalker, inarguable.

Inarguable but, also, largely unremarkable.

I have few qualms with many of the titles. Any list that believes classic sf movies such as Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, experimental fare like Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, and little-known gems like John Sayles's Brother from Another Planet, to say nothing of two I'd never heard of (Born in Flames and Teknolust), have the potential to rewrite your view of the universe is one I can easily get on board with. But the selections also give the experienced viewer pause, and compel a significant question: shouldn't you have seen many of these already? Even if you had to switch off your television as Jeff Goldblum dissolved John Getz's arm vomiting a corrosive enzyme in David Cronenberg's The Fly, shouldn't you at least have known something about it before adding it to your Netflix Instant Watch queue? More importantly: we already know that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, and the siblings Wachowski's The Matrix are cinema classics, movies that have changed not only how people thought but how moviemakers approached their craft; how much more often must one mention them?

Annalee's list, for all of its many strengths, seemed an obvious example of the Casablanca problem.

Here's how it works. You ask somebody who professes a fairly extensive knowledge of cinema to name ten great movies. They do so. Did either Casablanca or Citizen Kane make the cut? How do you judge that list based on their inclusion (or lack thereof)? If neither movie made the list, how does that person justify their absence? If they list either or both, then how do you know that this person isn't a poseur, adding them out of necessity? In either case, how seriously do you take the list?

Although the Casablanca problem references movies exclusively, it extends to genre novels, stories, and movies on a far too consistent basis. Reviewing some old Usenet posts on the best fantasy novels of the 20th century, I found solid recommendations from widely-read individuals (to say nothing of esoteric titles, such as Joe R. Lansdale's The Magic Wagon), but on almost every list, and seemingly without fail, was J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. A sampling of science fiction lists found something similar; while each participant showcased a wide array of taste, in the majority of cases either Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) or Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy featured prominently. (It happens with mystery novels as well; while individual lists show incredible diversity, one always finds Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.)

Television fares little better, and in fact in some cases is even worse. Perhaps a top ten list of great science fiction television might exhibit a good deal of uniformity -- one simply doesn't see the same level of consistent quality in television, at least not in science fiction -- but while often recent lists will cite such tangential fare as Person of Interest, Fringe, or The Big Bang Theory, the one show, in any iteration, that fans and critics reference as one of the greatest is Star Trek. Yes, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits also get their share of nods, but somehow lists always find room for Star Trek. It's the Casablanca problem again, though this time with William Shatner (or Patrick Stewart) instead of Humphrey Bogart.

So when it comes to science fiction movie lists, any time I see justifiably given recognition of the truly groundbreaking classics, a part of me winces. In the case of Annalee's list, the absences of some personal favorites didn't bother me -- yes, Tetsuo: the Iron Man may change your life, but not necessarily for the better -- but the, well, almost predictable choice of classics did. As much as I love 2001: A Space Odyssey, as often as I mention Bladerunner, a part of me simply doesn't want to mention them when discussing great science fiction movies. It would be like asking somebody about their favorite band, and their response is "the Beatles." We know their influence, and, as a Facebook poster once replied, we shouldn't trust anybody who doesn't like the Beatles, but their mention becomes too easy, and crowds out somewhat more esoteric and thus personal choices.

And this is where I found Annalee's list to truly shine.

As stated earlier, I had never heard of Lizzy Borden's Born in Flames or Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust until Annalee's list hit the interwebs. Now that I've read her capsule reviews of each, I'm adding them to my Netflix queue. Born in Flames tells the story of feminist revolution, the punk scene, and utopia, all turned in a documentary style (like an adaptation of Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless scripted by Alex Cox and directed by Paul Greengrass) that sounds like something I wish I'd caught when I wandered the streets of Houston in my early teens. The more recent Teknolust deals with sexual cyborgs out to find themselves; Annalee's synopsis makes it sound a little like a somewhat tame retelling Richard Calder's Dead Girls with the perversion still intact.

Reading the descriptions of both, I felt a smile across my face. Yes, here were things unknown to me, which sounded strange and compelling and so different from the standard entries. Without knowing it, and without having seen either (yet), Annalee's mere mention of these two odd titles had already changed my life.

I wasn't in Casablanca anymore. And it wasn't a problem.

Derek Johnson's critical work has appeared on SF Site, SF Signal, and Revolution SF. His first novel, the erotic thriller, Murder, Most Likely, written in collaboration with SammyJo Hunt, is forthcoming from Rebel Ink Press. He lives in Central Texas with the Goddess.