On Fri, 5 Sep 1997, Kimberley A. Selle wrote:
> the references to the
ship having been to Christian Hell - the characters only said that because
they didn't know what else to call it.
NH: That's one way to read it, and it makes sense. But I think you'd
*have* to read it in; it was nowhere in the text of the film. (As Nalo
puts on her writing group hat): If your audience has to guess at and
assign meaning to elements of your text, then you get wildly different
readings, according to what people want to see there. Which can be fun
if you're doing it deliberately, but I doubt that they were.
> Personally, I found myself wondering why, if they truly believed that the
ship had become alive, they didn't try some form of communication. It is
a new life form, isn't it?
NH: Oh, ditto, big time! At one point, one of the crew members
explicitly tells the captain that she believes the ship is producing the
phenomena as some sort of reaction to them as foreign bodies. In other
words, it's allergic to them. Now me, I would have immediately been
flooding the air with huge doses of Claritin, then I would have hauled
out the Universal Translator and started broadcasting "We come in peace"
on all channels. Whoops, sorry; didn't have enough sleep, and I'm
getting wingy. Dumb movie. On a happier note, I just saw John Sayles'
new film "Men With Guns." Not a particularly feminist movie, so I'm not
going to go off on too long a tangent here, but it does contain some
elements of magic realism, and it's beautiful, and doesn't take the easy
way out, and doesn't resort to too many broad stroke stereotypes. Big
budget doesn't have to mean insulting to the intelligence.
-nalo
>
"There are two kinds of dates; the kind that you go out with, and the
small fruit that you eat."
-my aunt
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