Happy Birthday, HAL

Good afternoon, Gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on the twelfth of January, 1992.

Into thin air . . . VERY thin air

Movies set in outer space have a built-in method of creating tension: the ever-present threat of exposure to a near-vacuum. There seems to be little consensus, though, among the films that exploit this danger as to what really happens when a body is exposed to such conditions.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey
After retrieving the body of a crew member whose oxygen line was cut during an EVA, astronaut Dave Bowman returns to his ship only to be locked out of the shuttle bay by the ship's HAL-9000 supercomputer. Unable to convince HAL to open the door, Dave manually unlocks a hatch and prepares to be thrown from his shuttle pod into the vacuum of the empty airlock — without a space helmet.

Length of exposure:

• approximately seventeen seconds

Effects:

• Dave bounces around a bit in zero gravity while holding his breath, but otherwise shows no symptoms of exposure.

Outcome:

• Dave survives the experience, then suits up to confront the homicidal HAL.

Total Recall (1990)

Total Recall
After activating a mysterious machine deep beneath the surface of Mars, Douglas Quaid is blown to the planet surface and exposed to the thin, oxygen-starved Martian atmosphere.

Length of exposure:

• approximately three minutes

Effects:

• Quaid's face, neck, and tongue swell and his eyes bulge almost out of his head as he thrashes around on the ground.

Outcome:

• The machine begins to generate massive quantities of oxygen and a breathable atmosphere quickly forms. Quaid's face returns to normal, and despite some traces of blood there are no visible signs of permanent damage.

Event Horizon (1997)

Event Horizon
Justin, a crew member apparently possessed by the evil spirit haunting a derelict spaceship, steps into an airlock and begins the automated and irreversible process of opening the external door.

Length of exposure:

• approximately 104 seconds

Effects:

• The veins in the Justin's forearms bulge and eventually tear through the skin. As blood spurts from his eyes and mouth, he convulses and loses blood pressure rapidly.

Outcome:

• The ship's captain, outside the ship at the time and wearing a spacesuit, catches Justin as he floats into space and returns him to the ship. The ship's doctor patches him up offscreen and later states, "He won't be pretty, but he should live."

Mission to Mars (2000)

Mission to Mars
During a spacewalk in orbit around Mars, mission leader Woody Blake misses his target and begins to fall toward the planet. Realizing nothing can be done to save him and not wanting his wife to die trying, Woody removes his helmet.

Length of exposure:

• two seconds until death, indefinite exposure afterwards

Effects:

• Air escapes from Woody's helmet and appears to crystallize as Woody's face freezes instantly.

Outcome:

• Woody's lifeless and frozen body continues to fall toward Mars while his crewmates watch in disbelief.

Outland (1981)

Outland
A worker at a mining facility on Jupiter's moon Io inexplicably locks himself in an airlock-protected elevator. The lift lowers the man to the moon's surface, shedding air pressure as it goes.

Length of exposure:

• at least 47 seconds

Effects & Outcome:

• While we're not shown the gruesome demise, we do see the final result: the elevator door opens to reveal the man on his back, dead, with what look like intestines on the outside of his body and a laceration on his leg. Blood is splattered over the elevator walls.

Uncomfortable deception

In these two scenes from very different movies, characters put themselves in awkward situations in order to mislead others.

2001: A Space Odyssey

During a layover at a space station while en route to the moon, American scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd meets a Russian colleague who invites him to sit and have a drink with some friends. After some pleasantries, Floyd is questioned by one man about apparent problems at the American moon base, Clavius. When told that telephone communication with Clavius has been impossible for the past ten days, and that a Russian shuttle was denied an emergency landing there, Floyd claims to be unaware of any problems and becomes silent. When the Russian man persists, asking Floyd about rumors of an epidemic at Clavius, the cornered Floyd sheepishly explains that he is unable to comment on the situation. Floyd's discomfort is palpable, his soft-spoken manner and feeble responses giving the sense that he is being violated, but also concealing something. It is not until his arrival at Clavius that we learn Floyd's manner and answers were part of a deliberate deception to keep Clavius isolated while its crew investigates a discovery of incredible cosmic significance.

A Dry White Season

Donald Sutherland plays Ben du Toit, a white South African who discovers the truth about his country under apartheid. After his black gardener is killed while in police custody, Ben seeks justice, alienating his disapproving wife and daughter in the process. He and a small group of cohorts secretly collect affidavits from witnesses to police brutality, which Ben hides in his garage for eventual publication in a sympathetic newspaper. Under constant surveillance by the police, Ben knows he won't be able to deliver the papers in person, so he offers himself as a diversion instead. In a heartbreaking scene, Ben meets with his estranged daughter and asks if she would keep the papers safe for him, knowing she will betray him and take the decoy package to the police — but also counting on her to do so.

Double feature: Red River and There Will Be Blood

There's a scene in Red River (1948) where John Wayne, as frontier settler Tom Dunson, arrives at a seemingly arbitrarily chosen tract of land and claims it as his own. When agents for a man named Don Diego, who lives 400 miles away, south of the Rio Grande, arrive to dispute this claim, Dunson shoots and kills one of them and sends the other back to Mexico with the news. After burying the dead man, Dunson surveys the land that is, by his thinking, rightfully his:

My land. We're here, and we're gonna stay here. Give me ten years and I'll have that brand on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house will be down by the river, and the corrals and the barns behind it. It'll be a good place to live in. Ten years and I'll have the Red River D on more cattle than you've looked at anywhere. I'll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make them strong, make 'em grow. It takes work, and it takes sweat, and it takes time. Lots of time. It takes years.*

That scene, and the one immediately following, which jumps 15 years into the future to show that Dunson does indeed succeed in raising that many cattle, establishes Dunson as a driven man who has a plan and the will to see it through, regardless of — in fact, aided by — legal and moral uncertainties. He is a man with the requisite ego to act on Manifest Destiny.

The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood (2007) show Daniel Plainview to be equally driven. We see him working a claim on a silver mine, alone, enduring an accident which leaves him with an apparently broken leg and possible internal injuries, before he arrives in the nearest town (presumably after crawling through the dessert to get there) to cash in. While Dunson associates (genuinely or not) his claim with the future success of the country, Plainview's goals appear to be more solitary. The work of both men, however, advances the infrastructure and, mostly, the economy of the developing nation.

Both of these films are Westerns — Red River more obviously so, set amid the trappings of traditional Westerns like cattle drives, American Indians, and quick-draw shoot-outs, but There Will Be Blood also, for much of it is set in the last period of the Old West amid not the territorial but the economic expansion of the country. Both lead characters are bold, brave, determined to stake a claim on the frontier and defend it above all else, bullying, not always likable, at times detestable, at times amoral, at times immoral. In short, most likely the kind of people who really did settle the American West. Both films show these men attempting to realize a difficult plan in pursuit of wealth, and becoming increasingly isolated as their bludgeoning personalities make it increasingly difficult for them to work with others.

The men are also similar in that they each adopt (officially or not) boys who have been orphaned by the same enterprise the men pursue. These boys act as the men's sons, and serve as counterweights to their adopted fathers' unscrupulous wills. Dunson takes in Matt, a boy orphaned when his wagon train is attacked by Comanche Indians. Plainview adopts H.W. after the infant's father is killed while working on Plainview's oil rig. Each boy is an aid to their new father: Matt by using his easy rapport with the cowhands to smooth over tensions caused by Tom's increasingly belligerent behavior, H.W. by giving Daniel the appearance of a man with family values, which helps during negotiations with families and small towns for land and drilling rights. Tensions develop between father and son when the sons eventually act on their own initiatives. Matt alienates Tom when he wrests control of the cattle drive from a near-homicidal Dunson, and Daniel viciously disowns H.W. when H.W. reveals plans to start his own oil company in Mexico. Without the support of their sons, both men fall into greater anger and bitterness.

The two men also have a conflicted relationship with religion. Tom appears to be a Christian, with "I'll read over him" (in reference to reading scripture at a funeral service) becoming his refrain. His devoutness is called into question, however, by the fact that some of the men he reads over are men he has himself killed. Daniel is more obviously at odds with religion. After paying lip service to landowners concerned about his religious beliefs, and after being humiliated by Eli, an ambitious preacher on whose father's land Plainview builds his fortune-making rig, Daniel's "victory" over Eli (and, symbolically, the Church) at film's end seems to cap not only his freedom and career, but his unspoken life's ambition.

I'm finished.

* Though I am not suggesting 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of a potential triple feature, this speech of Dunson's nonetheless reminds me of the prehistoric segment of that film. After being visited by the monolith, the primates discover that bones can be used as weapons. There is dramatic emphasis on how one group uses bones to kill members of another group, allowing the former to expand and dominate. Prior to this, however, emphasis is placed on the killing of an animal for food; shortly after the kill the group is shown eating meat, presumably for the first time, and eating lots of meat — a piece of raw flesh dangling from practically every primate hand. The infusion of that much protein into their diet — and this is something I picked up elsewhere, not directly from 2001 — allowed carnivorous primate brains to grow larger, giving them an evolutionary advantage and allowing them to expand and eventually evolve into the dominant species. Dunson's mention of beef, hungry people (by which he doubtless means White settlers), and time — "lots of time" — brings to mind this evolutionary process. While it doesn't qualify as an evolutionary advantage, certainly their great numbers, and not their weapons alone, enabled White settlers to overwhelm the native civilization (at least according to "Hollywood history" — see mentions of the relentlessness of the white onslaught in Dances With Wolves and Little Big Man, e.g.). Such numbers needed infrastructural support, and the raising of cattle contributed not only to that infrastructure, but to the need to annex more and more land on which to raise more and more cattle.