Monsters from the Id!

A lobby card for MGM's Forbidden Planet, 1956

We watched Forbidden Planet on TCM the other night. I hadn't seen it since I was about ten, when BBC2 showed it as part of a series of classic science fiction films, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s. The movies were shown on Tuesday nights, I think, and I was allowed to stay up late to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Creature from the Black Lagoon on the condition that I got ready for bed first. The imposition of pyjamas only heightened the shivery tension as a boy crawled curiously to the edge of a still-glowing crater or a woman with startling hair was stalked by a blank-eyed alien impostor.

It's partly due to this early immersion in the science fiction genre that I tend to approach most films from its golden age with a nostalgic indulgence that pretty much anaesthetises my critical faculties. If there are improbably-designed ray guns and impassive alien invaders bent on slowly carrying human females up flying saucer gangways, I'm willing to tolerate dialogue that sounds like it was written the night before shooting by a recent Hungarian immigrant.

Your mother, understandably, doesn't share this aesthetic blind spot, so the fact that she endured all of Forbidden Planet without protest suggests a film whose appeal may not be limited to those who were once a certain kind of 10-year-old boy.

In fact, Forbidden Planet is a sublime film. It is extraordinary to look at, with its soaring, immaculately-painted backdrops and its laboriously hand-rendered special effects. It is a subtly powerful moral fable of human imperfectibility. It also has a really cool robot called Robbie and, as your mother noticed but I must have missed, a girl with a prodigious collection of short, futuristic skirts.

So, what's it about?

Well, it's about a planet, unsurprisingly. The planet is called Altair IV, and is the location of a human colony. Nothing has been heard from the colony since its foundation twenty years ago, and a military spacecraft, under the command of Commander John J. Adams (a very young Leslie Nielsen: try to see him in this role before you see him in the comedies of his later years; it will make his presence less jarring), has been despatched to find out what happened to the colonists.

Adams and his crew discover that Altair IV has only three remaining inhabitants: Dr Edward Morbius, who accompanied the colony expedition as a philologist (of all things), his daughter Altaira (she of the astonishing skirt collection) and the aforementioned Robbie the Robot, whose intelligence and advanced capabilities are a constant source of amazement to the new arrivals.

When the Commander and his men set out to discover more about the disappearance of the other colonists and about Dr Morbius and his decidedly odd ménage, they find the philologist to be less than forthcoming and his charming but utterly naïve daughter to be more than a little distracting.

Eventually, though, Morbius relents and admits Adams and his scientific advisor 'Doc' Ostrow to an amazing subterranean complex which, he explains, was built by the Krell, the former inhabitants of Altair IV who were suddenly wiped out 200, 000 years before.

The Krell, he tells them, were an immensely sophisticated civilisation with technologies far more advanced than man's. By way of demonstration, he shows them an "educator machine", part of a bizarre "nursery", designed to train the intellects of Krell children. Morbius has used the machine to "double" his IQ, but will not allow Adams or Ostrow to try it, insisting that it is far too dangerous.

Ignoring Morbius's warning, Ostrow sneaks into the nursery and tries to use the educator. He emerges staggering and raving, clearly undone by the machine. He manages to to impart a cryptic final message to Adams before expiring:

"They forgot one thing, John. Monsters! Monsters from the Id!"

I won't spoil any more of the plot, if only because I'm hoping the two of us can watch the film together some time before you're old enough to refuse. Suffice it to say that Ostrow's last words allude to the fatal flaw that led to the demise of the Krell.

Remind me, when we do get around to watching Forbidden Planet, to talk to you about the parallels between the film and Shakespeare's The Tempest, and about how it embodies Aristotelian ideals of tragedy.

Oh, alright then. Just watch out for the skirts.

Illegitimately Morose (3, 7)

This is the Crosaire crossword from today's Irish Times. It's a cryptic crossword, and I find it pretty difficult, although serious crossword people (what are they called? crossword fans? crossworders? crossword solvers?) probably wouldn't rate it.

I don't manage to complete it very often, and when I do, I go around feeling smug and pleased with myself for the rest of the day.

This is an immature and somewhat pathetic reaction to solving a pointless puzzle, but there you are. I'm counting on fatherhood to deflect attention from some of the more egregious flaws in my personality; I'm hoping that people will begin to think of them indulgently as foibles. At the very least, I'm hoping that my own offspring will think of them indulgently as foibles. That means you.

Of course, I'm probably not fooling you by pretending to be archly aware of my own conceitedness. After all, I've just taken a screen grab of the crossword I managed to finish and posted it on the Internet. Not the behaviour of a well-adjusted and self-aware adult.

I could try to justify it on the grounds that this is your Rough Guide to Earth, after all, and that knowing how to do cryptic crosswords could conceivably be useful to you one day. But then I'd have to actually explain cryptic crossword clues, and this isn't an option because:

(a) if I were qualified to do that, I'd be solving them all the time and wouldn't be crowing about it on the Internet, and;

(b) I'm completely knackered after finishing this one.

So, let's just let this slide, OK? Cut the old man a little slack? I might just remember it during crucial negotiations on bedtime or pocket money, know what I mean?

Good. I'm glad we understand each other.

What The World Needs Now

Sunset: an oil refinery in Kazakhstan

I do hope you realise you're getting all your energy from a non-renewable source?

I'm sure you've been wondering about the long tube and the squishy thing it's attached to (it's called a placenta). Well, in fact that whole arrangement is a kind of power supply. It's quite a sweet deal, really. You get all the meals you need for the whole duration of your stay in there piped directly to you, without ever once having to get up to go to the fridge or answer the door to the pizza guy.

I'm afraid it's not going to last forever, though. When you get out, I'm afraid the placenta thing kind of expires and you have to graduate to new dining arrangements. But don't worry, I know the placenta has convenience going for it, but eating on the outside is going to be a lot more fun. You'll see.

Anyway, the reason I bring up the matter of your energy supply is by way of analogy with our supply here on the outside. You see, we use a non-renewable source too. And although the pipework is a bit more complex, it's a lot like yours inasmuch as we depend on it pretty much absolutely.

Sorry, I'll try to be more specific. There's this stuff called oil, right? Oil is a thick, black liquid found underneath the ground. Scientists think oil probably began to be formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic creatures died and sank to the sea bed. A layer of sediment, which gradually hardened into rock, was then laid down on top of the organic goo that used to be the creatures.

Over a very, very long time, the heat and pressure underneath the rock made the goo into oil. Bound up inside the chemistry of the oil is all the energy that the trillions of tiny creatures absorbed from the sun over millions of years. It's an enormous amount of energy, and because it's so highly concentrated and relatively easy to release (you just burn it, basically), we've been using oil to power almost everything we do.

In fact, we've built a vast, global economy whose existence was possible only because we can do things like travelling 500 miles through the air in a single hour, or assembling a computer that can assemble a computer, things we've only been able to do because we've had oil. Or, more accurately, because we've had enough oil to make it cheap, which allows the whole global economy thing to keep expanding.

And expanding is exactly what it's been doing, at least for the last thirty years or so. Every year, the people who keep the economy going are able to do a little bit more flying and assembling and so on because they made some money doing these things last year and so they can afford to buy more oil.

I know what you're thinking. Why can't the economy just stay put for a while? Why does there always have to be more flying and assembling and buying of oil? Unfortunately, the need for constant expansion is built into the system underlying the whole global economy thing, which is called capitalism. We'll come back to capitalism later, probably when we're trying to figure out how to pay somebody to take care of you while we're out working.

So, the economy keeps growing, and needs more oil each year to sustain that growth. The trouble is, the oil is running out.

I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? It comes from compressed microorganisms and it takes aeons to make. There can only be so much of it down there. You probably saw this coming, and you're just a foetus. No offence.

Well, we didn't see it coming. We've been having too much fun with with the economy. If we fancy a kiwi fruit, which contains about 50 calories of energy, we can have one flown in from New Zealand, consuming about 5000 calories of energy in the process. If we need to bring our child to a crêche, because we need to go out and assemble more assemblers so that we can afford to have more pieces of fruit flown in from a different hemisphere, we can just hop into an SUV, a vehicle the size of a small whale, and consume more energy on the way than would be required to care for the child at home for an entire week.

Of course, some people did point it out. A chap called Marion King Hubbert first came up with what's now called the peak oil theory back in the 1950s, but it all seemed like a lot of fuss over something that was a terribly long way off. Even if it did happen--it was probably just a Communist plot, but just supposing it did--well, by then it would be the twenty-first century and we'd have jet packs to get around and enormous computers built into mountainsides to figure out ways to fuel them.

But the twenty-first century is here, and there's no sign of the jet packs. The computers are powerful alright, but they've got smaller, not bigger, and they're mostly used by people sending each other movies of cats falling from tables. And the oil really is running out.

I shouldn't mock the jet pack optimists, I suppose. I tend towards the optimistic view myself. That is, I do believe it's well within the limits of human ingenuity to devise technologies that will eventually allow us to to replace our oil-based ones.

The trouble is, ingenuity is only a part of it. The scientists and engineers we need to start being ingenious about this have to eat kiwi fruits and drive to crêches too, which means that someone has to pay them to be ingenious. As long as there's still money to be made the old way, the economy doesn't have any interest in this kind of ingenuity.

Governments are a litte bit better. The government of Sweden recently announced that that country will be completely free of its dependency on oil by 2020. The government of Ireland, on the other hand, seems to be banking on the jet packs.

So, enjoy the free grub while it lasts. Pretty soon, you're going to have to start thinking about where your next kiwi fruit is coming from.

Refusing to be Drawn

Muhammad, as depicted in a controversial cartoon.

Have I mentioned religion yet? No? Right.

Well, religion is a popular thing out here. It comes in four or five main flavours, although there are lots of local variations. Religions are really sets of beliefs, and usually have an associated moral framework, or views of certain behaviours that derive from the beliefs.

Seems reasonable enough so far, doesn't it? The problems really begin with the beliefs themselves. Take Christianity, for instance, a religion that started about two thousand years ago and which remains very popular. It has since split into a number of what are called sects, although none of them would accept that description. This is another thing about religion: to keep a religion going, I mean, a proper, millennium-straddling, continent-devouring religion, you need to maintain, in addition to the other weird beliefs that are your stock-in-trade, an absolute and impermeable conviction that your lot are right and all the rest are somewhere on the spectrum between those who are sadly deluded and those who are soon to be steeped in molten lava for eternity as punishment for their lack of theological discernment.

Christianity is founded on the belief that a being called God created the universe (well, "the heavens and the Earth") in six days (I know, I know, how come there were days before there was a rotating Earth?) and then had a bit of a rest. This God then created two people, called Adam and Eve, from whom every other person ever born was descended. This part has reproductive implications that we'll talk about when you're older.

Everything went fine for a couple of thousand years. People lived to be enormously old (a guy called Methuselah lived to be 969, apparently) and begat lots of sons (presumably, they had to beget a few daughters too, but the Bible, a collection of very old texts where most of this stuff comes from, is relatively silent on this point). Then, things started to get away from God a little, and the people he had made drifted into "wickedness".

When this had happened before, he had tried flooding the planet. You might think, given that God can do anything (this is called omnipotence), that he might have simply made new people that were incapable of wickedness, if he was so upset about it, or made some adjustments to the old ones. But no, only a big flood would do, at least for the God who appears in the parts of the Bible called the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God seems to mellow quite a lot. He decides to take a new approach to the wickedness issue, and sends his son to Earth in human form to sort things out. Well, maybe sort things out is the wrong phrase. You see, Christians believe that God's son took the human form of a man called Jesus of Nazareth, who really did exist.

Now, Jesus himself seems to have taken quite a reasonable approach to the problem of correcting people's behaviour, once you accept that correcting people's behaviour is in itself a reasonable objective. He began preaching to crowds of people (there were no blogs in those days). His themes were unobjectionable, even admirable. Love thy neighbour. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

But the preaching, apparently, wasn't the point, or at least wasn't the whole point. The plan was that Jesus would die for our sins. I must confess to being hazy on the details of this arrangement. The death was to be some kind of atonement, clearly, but whether it covered future sins or only those already committed I'm not sure. For that matter, I'm not sure quite how Jesus's death atoned for anything, and why God couldn't have engineered some kind of forgiveness solution without having his own child incarnated and executed by the Romans, but then there's a lot I don't get about religion.

The point of all this is that religion involves believing things for which there is no evidence. Quite often, it involves believing quite elaborate and outlandish things for which there is evidence to the contrary. For example, there's a lot of evidence that people evolved from other animals over millions of years, a process that does not accommodate the whole Adam and Eve scenario.

Of course, individual religious people don't arbitrarily decide to believe something bizarre. Beliefs are handed down through generations, acquiring venerability along the way, and are usually part of a greater cultural and social fabric. There are many quite sane people who would describe themselves as religious, but to whom many of the tenets of their particular religion would not be literal beliefs, but traditions of emotional value. This is all well and good.

On the other hand, there are religious people who accept the tenets of their faith with absolute and unflinching literalism, no matter how absurd or even dangerous they may be. For instance, some members of a Christian sect called Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to allow their children to receive blood transfusions that may save their lives due to their belief that a passage in the Bible prohibits them. That the passage refers opaquely to abstaining from blood, and was written many centuries before blood transfusion was even conceived of is of course secondary to the obscene moral dysfunction that allows a person to put any religious belief, bizarre or not, above the life and health of his or her own child.

And then there's Islam. Islam has origins in common with Christianity and Judaism, so some of the God stuff is similar. Islam, however, reveres a sixth century prophet called Muhammad, to whom they believe the tenets of their faith were revealed directly by God, or Allah. This much is no more or less wacky than most religious beliefs.

Muslims (adherents to Islam) also believe, based on their interpretation of a passage in their Koran, which contains all the stuff God is supposed to have revealed to Muhammad, that you're not allowed to draw pictures of Allah or Muhammad. With Allah, the idea was that he was too great and majestic to be depicted by human hand. I'm not sure how this got extended to Muhammad, who actually had human hands himself, but that's how things stand in Islam.

Interestingly, depicting any living things is discouraged in Islamic tradition. This oddity persisted right through the middle ages, a time when Islamic scholarship was flourishing while Christian countries had descended into brutality and ignorance. It gave rise to artifacts like the beautifully illustrated herbals in which all the plants are strangely stylised, their anatomical detail carefully distorted in a strange attempt to depict them and yet not depict them at the same time.

Anyway, you can't draw Muhammad, if you're a Muslim. That's another thing about religion. They all tend to insist on doing certain things and, more commonly, not doing lots of other things. Of course, these prescriptions and proscriptions are generally applicable in theory, but in practice, religions are normally content to apply their rules only to their own members, if only to avoid embarassment. There's not much point in the Pope admonishing, say, the Maori people of New Zealand for eating meat on Fridays (I didn't make that rule up, by the way; that's a Catholic one).

Sometimes, though, some religious people do get the idea into their heads that everyone, not just people of the same religion, should observe all the odd rules they've made up. Now, clearly, this is not a tenable position and one that is likely to meet the objections of non-believers. If I stop someone in the street and tell him that he must take off his glasses because Naktush, a God made of discarded tractor tyres who lives in a cave in Venezuela, prohibits the wearing of spectacles, I shouldn't be surprised if he fails to comply. Or if he starts to back away uneasily.

This week, though, many Muslims professed to be not only surprised but angered when cartoons showing Muhammad with a bomb in his turban which had originally appeared in a Danish newspaper, were reprinted by other papers across Europe. The other papers did this in support of the Danish paper, which was under attack from Muslim critics in Denmark. It was intended as a demonstration of the freedom of the press, a very important part of the democratic system, and a concept which sadly does not have much currency in many countries, including some where Islam is the dominant religion.

Now, you could argue that the cartoon itself relies on a lazy stereotype (the association of Islam with the violence of some of its fundamentalist adherents), that its likelihood to give offence was not outweighed by any great journalistic merit and that perhaps a poor editorial decision was made. But this is all beside the point.

The point is that in European democracies have achieved their freedoms at great cost, and those freedoms are precious. They are also utterly beyond the jurisdiction of any religion. It's worrying that many Muslims don't seem to accept this.

Of course, it's not that simple. Nothing ever is. A lot of the anger that's being expressed about the cartoon (or cartoons; I think there were twelve of them) is really anger about what is perceived by some as widespread aggression towards Muslim countries by the West. It's about the continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's about the inexcusable mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel.

These are real grievances, but it's disheartening that they are being expressed in religious terms. As we've seen, religions are founded on propositions that are irrational and often bizarre. Conflating political disputes with religion is unlikely, therefore, to clarify or help to resolve them.

Adding violence hardly helps either, and it's a sad irony that some Muslims have reacted to a stereotypically murderous image by threatening the lives of innocent Danes, including humanitarian workers.

So, that's religion for you. You can make up your own mind when you get out, obviously, but personally I don't recommend it. Apart from all the stuff about not being allowed to get a blood transfusion or draw pictures, there are usually services at least weekly, not to mention prayers and other extramural activities. It can be a real drain on your time, especially when it's the weekend and the weather is nice.

By the way, you've been in there for just over seventeen weeks now. I know you've probably got everything just the way you like it and you're starting to feel at home, but this means we're almost at the halfway mark. We're really looking forward to seeing you very much now.

There are only five months left, and there are all kinds of things I haven't described to you yet: chimpanzees, credit cards, eucalyptus trees, iPods, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the feeling of clean sheets. And of course there won't be time for most of these things, and even those things we do have time for I probably won't explain properly.

But that's OK. You really have to see these things for yourself.