Joseph Turner — code name Condor — works at the American Literary Historical Society in New York City. The organization is actually a branch office of the CIA. He and his youthful coworkers read, analyze, and computerize various spy stories, mysteries, and periodicals for the CIA’s mammoth intelligence gathering operations.
One rainy day while Turner is out to lunch, the rest of the staff is brutally murdered. Scared out of his wits, he contacts the CIA and is told to go into hiding. When he does arrange a meeting with the CIA, he is fired upon and his best friend, along to help identify the contact, is shot by another agent. Terror grips Turner. He abducts Kathy Hale, a photographer, and in her apartment in Brooklyn tries to unravel the mysteries surrounding the executions.
Three Days at the Condor works on two levels: as an examination of the covert activities within the CIA and as a somewhat curious look at the development of a relationship through shared stress. Robert Redford is just right as the paranoid Turner, a bright young man unexplainably put in a harrowing situation. Did the slaughter of the American Literary Historical Society staff stem from his inquiry to CIA headquarters about a mystery novel only translated into Dutch and Arabic? Perhaps someone in higher places was doing unauthorized intelligence work and Turner stumbled onto his scheme. Can Turner now determine who’s out to silence him? Director Sydney Pollack, (The Way We Were, Yakuza) orchestrates the zigzag storyline into a labyrinth of effective scenes, revealing Turner’s fright and his own special brand of grace under pressure.
Faye Dunaway gives a well modulated performance as the woman who is kidnapped by Turner at gunpoint and forced to serve as his host. Her initial fright turns to anger as he brutalizes her. But then, through the bizarre intermix of their wants and needs, the two develop an uneasy relationship. Sex is one part of the bond drawing them together; intelligence the other. She helps him solve the mystery and come to terms with his conscience. He helps her to a new understanding of her loneliness. Faye Dunaway, moving from her standout role in Chinatown to this notable performance, proves that she is one of our better actresses.
Also featured in this gripping suspense story are Cliff Robertson and John Houseman as two Central Intelligence Agency officials and Max Von Sydow as a hit man used by the CIA on various contacts. In the wake of Watergate and the recent probes on the CIA, Three Days of the Condor has a resonance with the general mood of public uneasiness about secrecy in high places. We can empathize with these characters and their paranoia. Although it doesn’t really make any sophisticated political commentary on the activities of the CIA, this movie does work as a thriller for thinkers.
H.R. Giger, who most famously created the monster design for Alien (and less famously, prior to that, artwork for Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune adaptation), is a pleasant old man at the end of his life in the new documentary, Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World, much of which follows Giger, his wife, and friends puttering around his cluttered home of many years.
Dark Star is a nicely puttering little movie, refreshingly unlike so many modern docs, those that consist largely of talking heads speedily edited together with rapid-fire clips, so as not to bore audiences. Defensive movie-making, this is called. It’s assumed documentaries bore people, so they’re now edited as jauntily as possible, to keep things moving. Dark Star has very few people sitting down for proper interviews. There are a few, scattered throughout, but they’re not there to relate Giger’s history. Instead they talk about him as a man and as an artist, or talk about his art, or about how he and his artwork affected their lives.
No chronological story is told here. A certain amount of old footage is included of Giger as a younger man, but there’s no narration over it. It’s more that Dark Star, a Swiss production directed by Belinda Sallin, gives an impression of Giger’s life and work, and does so in a gently paced, meandering way. Which style I liked quite a bit. By its nature it was slow to grow on me, but the more I watched, the more the picture was filled in, and the more I became absorbed in it.
At one point I began wishing they’d just show more of his artwork up close, instead of showing shaky shots of it hanging on the walls of his house—and almost as if reading my mind, the movie went into a section showing off his artwork. Well played, Dark Star, well played.
Giger’s art is generally described as being “biomechanoid,” or some other made up word like that. One thing’s for sure: it’s unique. Nobody paints like Giger. Once you’ve seen anything he’s done, and you have, because you love Alien and like me have watched it 500 times, his work, any of it, is instantly recognizeable. It’s all women and bones and machines and warped little children, birth and sex and death, all in the same painting, all happening at the same time.
Well. I’m not going to try to describe his art. Look for yourself. Whatever, exactly, it is, it sticks its fingers deep inside the human psyche and wriggles them around.
A small part of the movie focuses on Alien, with some nice footage of Giger constructing the space-jockey set, and an old interview where he explains that his original alien egg opening—a slit—looked too much like a vagina. “This movie is going to play in Catholic countries,” he was told, so he had to make it less sexual. His solution? Two crossing slits, i.e., two vaginas in the shape of a cross. Take that, Catholics!
There’s no mention of Giger’s earlier, unused work for Jodorowsky’s unrealized Dune project, but again, this isn’t a comprehensive look at Giger. It’s a meandering one. Eventually it meanders to a little Swiss town where Giger grew up. His mother, it turns out, was a huge supporter of his art, though initially Giger worried—as one might expect—about what reaction his parents would have to the things he painted.
Giger spent most the money his art brought in on still other creations. Like the kid-sized, haunted house-like train set in his backyard, which we get to ride around on. Also toward the end of his life, he participated in the creation of a Giger museum in Switzerland to house a large portion of his work, much of which he’d slowly bought back from collectors over the years. For the museum’s opening, Giger signs books and posters and body parts. One of his male fans pulls off his shirt and turns around to reveal his entire back tattooed with one of Giger’s images. “Very nice work,” mutters Giger. One tough-looking, tattooed young man has his art signed, shakes Giger’s hand, and walks away crying. Giger’s work had a profound effect on many people.
Giger died in 2014, shortly after the completion of Dark Star. He does look a bit like he’s near his end while being interviewed. He doesn’t have a lot to say. What comes across clearly is a man who’s satisfied with his work, who got to do exactly what he wanted, who didn’t feel he’d failed to accomplish anything he set out to accomplish.
Picture this: a movie that takes place mainly during the day, on a picturesque Scottish island. There is very little action in the movie; it’s mainly a police procedural, with a stony-faced, prim and proper policeman questioning the local population. The film contains almost no violence, except for a very brief scene towards the end. Indeed, what earns it its “R” rating is nudity; a few scenes of naked women dancing. Other than that, it could air on broadcast television with no cuts.
Moreover, did I mention this film has a number of songs? It’s not exactly a musical, but there is fast-paced nursery rhyme-like patter, a few ribald drinking songs, and a ballad performed by one of the aforesaid nude dancers.
There’s almost no blood, no sinister torture chambers, no howling dogs on desolate foggy moors; instead there is only a quaint little village in a quiet part of the world. I ask you, with such a setup, can a film really be scary?
Comes the answer: this is possibly the scariest movie I have ever seen.
It follows Sgt. Neil Howie, a devout Christian police detective, who is dispatched by seaplane to the remote Summerisle to look for a missing girl. The townspeople are not unfriendly, but not exactly helpful either, referring Howie to Lord Summerisle, the nobleman whose family has administered the island’s affairs for generations.
During Howie’s investigation, he sees odd things. Strange rituals out of centuries past, like maypoles and disturbingly explicit fertility rites, quite at odds with his conservative Christian beliefs. When at last he meets Lord Summerisle, he confronts him about the unsettling things he has witnessed, and Summerisle acknowledges that, as part of a program to revive the island’s agricultural output, his grandfather gave the people back their ancient, pre-Christian folkways, to entice them to believe in the Old Gods of the Harvest.
Howie is appalled and horrified, and in view of everyone’s refusal to aid him in finding the missing girl, begins to suspect that she has been sacrificed to their Old Gods in some sort of bizarre druidical ceremony.
I really liked Howie, who is played perfectly by Edward Woodward. His refusal to compromise his beliefs, and unwavering resolve to find the missing child no matter what stands in his way, make him easy to root for. And also perhaps easy to… but no, that would be saying too much. This is not exactly an unknown film, but it would be wrong to spoil it.
The late, great Sir Christopher Lee is also fantastic as Summerisle. Offhand, I’d say it’s his best role. In fact, he said it was his best role. Of course, playing a charming but sinister aristocrat was pretty much Lee’s standard, but the devil is in the details, and it’s how he plays it that makes this interesting. He seems relaxed, almost easygoing, compared to the straight-laced Howie. But, let’s just say he has another side to him…
Okay, but what makes this movie so scary? I did say it might be the scariest film I’ve ever seen, after all. I can’t spoil it, but if I’m going to make such a bold claim, I have to try and justify it somehow.
Those of you who made it all the way through the sprawling post I wrote about the Metal Gear Solid 2 book a while back may remember that I made reference to a non-fiction book called The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. Blackmore is a student of Richard Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist. Dawkins coined the word “meme” as an analog for “gene” in the realm of culture. A “meme” is a unit of information; a word, a phrase, a song, a mannerism, a belief, that is transmitted through human culture, by a process not unlike evolution.
Dawkins derived his neologism “meme” from the Greek word mīmēma, which means “imitation.” And just as Dawkins described genes as “selfish,” memes likewise seek only to replicate themselves, so much so that we can analogize memes as if they were beings with conscious desires.
It’s all quite interesting, and Blackmore takes Dawkins’ idea and runs with it, arguing that the human brain evolved as a kind of super-powerful meme replicator, and our capacity for imitation of memes allowed us to evolve into the dominant life-form on the planet.
As she explains:
Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us… they are selfish like genes, and will simply spread if they can.
Elsewhere, Blackmore proposes the following thought experiment:
Imagine a world full of hosts for memes (e.g. brains) and far more memes than can possibly find homes.
Of course, as Blackmore takes pains to point out, it’s not as if these memes are literally flying around the world, taking over human brains and using them to replicate themselves. It’s just that, ah, they might as well be. It’s not literally true, but it’s a good model for approximating the behavior we see in the world. (Anyone who has studied Economics will be familiar with this sort of thing.)
However… there is something curious about all this. Because there is another Greek word Dawkins might have used instead, that describes much the same phenomenon. The Ancient Greeks tended to model human thought as the work of external entities—e.g. inspiration being given from Apollo, lust from Eros, and so on.
The Ancient Greek word I’m thinking of is daimōn, from which we get the modern word “demon.” “Meme” and “demon” even sound somehow similar, with the same phoneme as the central component. Now consider Blackmore’s hypothetical rewritten:
Imagine a world full of hosts for demons (e.g. brains) and far more demons than can possibly find homes.
In an instant, we have transformed the work of modern scientists (one of whom is famously an atheist) into something that sounds like what the wrinkled old woman living in a strange cabin in the woods tells the horror movie protagonist.
And this is what I find curious: the superstitious ancients described the world as inhabited by invisible spirits that took hold of people’s minds. The modern memeticists describe the world as inhabited by invisible memes that take hold of people’s minds.
If I tell you that I got an idea for a story when “out of the blue, it just popped in my head,” you would nod understandingly. If I said I got the idea when “the God of Fiction whispered it in my ear,” you’d think I was a bit of an oddball, at best. Yet, for practical purposes, the two are the same.
So if you say someone is possessed by a demon, it seems strange, but being possessed by an idea is totally normal.
Coming back around to The Wicker Man, this is what makes the film so scary. At the end, we see people who are possessed by something. We could argue all day about whether it is some true supernatural force or merely certain memes which they have learned to imitate; memes handed down from an ancient tradition dating back millennia. The film, like all great horror, leaves much to the audience’s imagination.
Practically speaking, it doesn’t much matter, does it? The fact is, there is something—call it a demon, a meme, an idea, a fashion, a spirit, whatever name suits you—that can take hold of human minds and compel them to do things that seem unthinkable to those immune to the phenomenon.
And that’s the ultimate horror of The Wicker Man. Here, in this bucolic setting, we gradually uncover the darkest impulses that lie in the hearts of human communities; primitive urges predating everything we call civilization. A base need for rituals that give meaning and provide a sense of power, of grandeur, even, to those craving it.
Unnerving, unsettling, disturbing and uniquely memorable, The Wicker Man is one of the greatest horror films ever made.
1973’s “Serpico” was almost a much different movie. By that I don’t mean a different spin or a different genre. I mean there were some dramatically different creatives first attached to the gritty biographical crime drama. Sam Peckinpah was once in line to direct but eventually backed out. But the kicker was Robert Redford and Paul Newman, both relatively fresh off working together in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting”, were set to star with Redford playing the titular character Frank Serpico. They too left the project.
It was a bumpy road, but soon Sidney Lumet was brought in to direct. Even more notable, Al Pacino was given the lead role. Written by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, “Serpico” was an adaptation of a 1973 book by author Peter Maas. It told the true story of New York City police officer Frank Serpico who came face to face with rampant police corruption. It was a gutsy film for its time and it received criticism from some within the NYPD and other groups who claimed the feature overlooked key parts and underrepresented key people from the true account.
Early on we see Frank Serpico as a young ambitious Italian who graduated from the New York Police Academy and was eventually stationed at a hopping downtown precinct. He starts as a patrolman but his feel for the street gets him promoted to a plainclothes officer. But he quickly begins seeing the underside of the department. And when he refuses to take a $300 payoff, Frank breaks an unwritten rule within the fraternity that puts him at odds with many of his fellow cops.
Pressure mounts for Frank to fall in line but he continues to resist, going as far as to become the eyes and ears of the commissioner. With a target on his back from both within and outside the department, Frank finds himself buckling under the pressure. Pacino’s performance organically evolves throughout the movie, turning his character from a well-intended but naive idealist to a hardened and stressed-out cynic. Pacino’s appearance mirrors the change, going from clean and buttoned-up to blousy shirts, bucket hats, and sandals.
Pacino would go on to win a Golden Globe and be nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. While the script doesn’t always do his character favors, Pacino is able to keep both his character and the story itself centered. He’s helped by a solid supporting cast featuring John Randolph, Jack Kehoe, Barbara Eda-Young, Tony Roberts, and Biff McGuire. Look close and you’ll also catch a couple of fun uncredited appearances by Judd Hirsch and F. Murray Abraham.
“Serpico” certainly had its detractors mainly among those who felt it veered too far away from the true account and was a little too selective in how it chose to focus its story. But as entertainment goes it works well as a big city crime drama with a sprinkle of neo-noir flavoring. And in the end the strengths of Lumet’s direction, Pacino’s performance, and Arthur J. Ornitz’s gritty cinematography are more than enough to get past the film’s handful of stumbles.
Dark City” by Alex Proyas resembles its great silent predecessor “Metropolis” in asking what it is that makes us human, and why it cannot be changed by decree. Both films are about false worlds created to fabricate ideal societies, and in both the machinery of the rulers is destroyed by the hearts of the ruled. Both are parables in which a dangerous weapon attacks the order of things: a free human who can see what really is, and question it. “Dark City” contains a threat more terrible than any of the horrors in “Metropolis,” because the rulers of the city can control the memories of its citizens; if we are the sum of all that has happened to us, then what are we when nothing has happened to us?
In “Dark City” (1998), all of the human memories are newly fabricated when the hands of the clock reach 12. This is defined as “midnight,” but the term is deceptive, because there is no noon. “First came darkness, then came the Strangers,” we are told in the opening narration. In the beginning, there was no light. John Murdoch, the hero, asks Bumstead, the police detective: “When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?” Bumstead is surprised by the question. “You know something?” Murdoch asks him. “I don’t think the sun even exists in this place. I’ve been up for hours and hours, and the night never ends here.”
The narration explains that the Strangers came from another galaxy and collected a group of humans to study them. Their civilization is dying. They seek to find the secret of the human heart, or soul, or whatever it is that falls outside their compass. They create a vast artificial city, which can be fabricated, or “tuned,” whenever they want to run another experiment.
We see the tuning taking place. All humans lose consciousness. All machinery stops. Changes are made in the city. Skyscrapers are extruded from the primordial materials of the underworld, architecture is devised, rooms are prepared for their inhabitants, props are set in place. Aided by a human scientist, the Strangers inject memories into the foreheads of their test subjects. When humans awaken, they have no memory of the day before; everything they remember has been injected from a communal memory bank. If a man commits murder one day and then is given a new identity, is he still capable of committing murder? Are men inherently good or evil, or is it a matter of how they think of themselves? The Strangers need to know.
Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) has developed an immunity to the devices of the Strangers. His latest memory injection was incomplete. It was administered by Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a scientist who works for the Strangers but has no love for them. Murdoch wakes in a hotel room with the corpse of a dead woman; the script for the day has made him a serial killer of prostitutes. Schreber warns him he is the subject of an experiment but has proven resistant to it. The Strangers are coming for him, and he must flee.
That sets the story into motion: Murdoch wanders through the city, trying to discover its underlying nature; Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) tries to capture him, but will gradually be won over by Murdoch’s questions (he is programmed as a cop, but not a very good one; he keeps complaining, “no one ever listens to me”). Then there is the torch singer, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), who remembers that she is John’s wife and loves him, and that they met at Shell Beach. Everyone says they know how to go to Shell Beach. But no one seems able to say exactly where it is.
The Strangers occupy the bodies of human cadavers. Most of them are tall; one is in a child’s body but is no child. The alien beings themselves, living inside the corpses, look like spiders made of frightened noodles. They can levitate, they can change the matter of the city at will, they have a hive insect organization, they gather in a subterranean cavern to collectively retune the city. This cavern has visuals reminding us of two Fritz Lang films: the underworld mechanisms in “Metropolis” (1927) and his “M” (1931), with the pale faces of criminals rising row above row into the gloom.
In October, I went through “Dark City” a shot at a time for four days at the Hawaii Film festival, with moviegoers who were as curious as I was. We froze frames, we dissected special effects, we debated the meaning of the film, and our numbers even included a psychiatrist who told us of the original Daniel Schreber, a schizophrenic whose book on his condition influenced Freud and Jung.
Sometimes during the shot-by-shot analysis, we simply froze a frame and regarded it. Some of the street scenes echo paintings by Edward Hopper or Jack Vettriano. This is not only a beautiful film but a generous one, which supplies rich depth and imagination and many more details than are really necessary to tell the story. Small wonder that the name Bumstead appears, perhaps in honor of Henry Bumstead, one of the greatest Hollywood art directors. The world created by the Strangers seems borrowed from 1940s film noir; we see fedoras, cigarettes, neon signs, automats, older cars (and some newer ones — the world is not consistent). Proyas wrote the screenplay with David S. Goyer and Lem Dobbs; the screenplays Dobbs wrote for “Kafka” and Goyer wrote for “Batman Begins” contain some of the same notes sounded here.
Proyas likes deep-focus compositions. Many interior spaces are long and narrow. Exteriors look down one street to the vanishing point, and then the camera pans to look down another street, equally long. The lighting is low-key and moody. The color scheme depends on blacks, browns, shadows and the pallor of the Strangers; warmer colors exist in human faces, in neon signs and on the billboard for Shell Beach. “I am simply grateful for this shot,” I said in Hawaii more than once. “It is as well-done as it can possibly be.” Many other great films give you the same feeling — that their makers were carried far beyond the actual requirements of their work into the passion of creating something wonderful.
I believe more than ever that “Dark City” is one of the great modern films. It preceded “The Matrix” by a year (both films used a few of the same sets in Australia), and on a smaller budget, with special effects that owe as much to imagination as to technology, did what “The Matrix” wanted to do, earlier and with more feeling.
The poignancy of “Dark City” emerges in its love stories. At a crucial point, John Murdoch tells Emma, “Everything you remember, and everything I’m supposed to remember, never really happened.” Emma doesn’t think that can be true. “I so vividly remember meeting you,” she says. “I remember falling in love with you.” Yes, she remembers. But this is the first time they have met. “I love you, John,” she says. “You can’t fake something like that.” And Murdoch says, “No, you can’t.” You can inform someone who they love, and that is what the Strangers have done with their memory injection. But what she feels cannot be injected. That is the part the strangers do not understand. Emma has a small role but it is at the heart of the movie, because she truly knows love; John has still to discover it — to learn about it from her.
The Strangers are not evil. They simply proceed from alien assumptions. They are not even omnipotent, which is why Murdoch, Bumstead and Schreber have relative freedom to move about the city. At the end, we feel a little sorry for them. They will die surrounded by happy beings whose secrets they could not discover.
Notice an opening shot that approaches the hotel window behind which we meet Murdoch. The window is a circular dome in a rectangular frame. As clearly as possible, it looks like the “face” of Hal 9000 in “2001.” Hal was a computer that understood everything, except what it was to be human and have emotions. “Dark City” considers the same theme in a film that creates a completely artificial world in which humans teach themselves to be themselves.
“You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man. Start learning what life is about now son.”
Killer of Sheep is that rare film that eschews plot and story lines for human experience. The movie opens in the past with a reprimand to young Stan, and to us as well. We join Stan in the present, his wife and children in the seedy Watts section of Los Angeles. We will live with them for only eighty-three minutes, but in this short time, director Charles Burnett will present us with life in all its flawed beauty. What we learn is up to us.
The origins of KOS are well known. While studying at UCLA, Burnett began making ample use of the universities film lab and equipment. Dismayed by Blaxploitation film, which dealt with stereotypes (most of them criminal), Burnett drew inspiration from Neorealism and the work of Vittorio De Sica whose work explored the lives and emotions of the everyday man. Non-actors fill most of these roles in true De Sica fashion. Burnett had originally envisioned a three film series about Stan and his wife, but limited funds and equipment use (UCLA wanted their lab back) has only left us with a small portion of Burnett’s epic.
Raising a family in deteriorating Watts, Sam is a man of much mileage who has long since run down. Despairing of personal hopes and dreams, he works at a nearby slaughterhouse where cool detachment has become his way of life. For Stan to admit his total desperation would be suicide. Instead, he is a sleepwalker doing the things he must to survive. Insulated and isolated, Stan is almost unreachable by those who love him.
Burnett got his start in photography and much of KOS is just that—pictures and music. We are observers of a certain kind of life here and perhaps the most touching thing about this film, is the fact that Burnett trusts us with his vision. We walk around his neighborhood taking in the sights, making up our own minds about what we see. Many of these wordless scenes can be viewed as small vignettes or parables that attempt to explain black life as a whole: A child laying under a train while another playfully steals his shoes, Kids jumping across rooftops heedless of danger, or Stan’s lonely dance with his wife as they are unable to connect physically or emotionally.
If pictures tell stories, Burnett’s choice of music provides context and commentary on his social backdrop. Sheep hanging in the slaughterhouse suggest it is “A Mean old World” (Little Walter) indeed. Paul Robeson’s “That’s America To Me” underscores the harsh reality that the American Dream is only a fantasy for the impoverished. Earth Wind and Fire’s “Reasons” is a record played by Stan’s child who sings along while Stan’s wife puts on makeup, arranges her hair and dress for her man who has long since lost interest. Burnett shows his genius here by cutting between the two rooms, showing us daughter and mother listening to the same song, which has a different meaning for each of them. When Stan’s wife looks in on their child it’s a bittersweet moment. Here is a little girl singing along to an adult-themed song about love. When Stan’s wife appears in the frame we wonder if she is the embodiment of what this child will become. Will her fate be the same as her mother?
Although the movie has its share of bleak moments, if Stan were merely a miserable man, this wouldn’t be much of a film. His refusal to admit his situation (“We ain’t poor! I give stuff to the Salvation Army!”) belies his inability to climb out of it. A man can live without many things, but honor is not one of them. There’s also humor in Stan’s son, who is always in trouble (he likes a little bit of cereal with his sugar and milk), Stan’s adventure buying the used motor, or the gang drinking in the windowless car. There is a tenderness as well. Stan loves his daughter. She is the only thing that can still touch his heart. When he plays with her, you know that beauty and love still exist for him—even in the darkest places of his soul.
Although Killer of Sheep owes much to De Sica and the Neorealist movement, it is fundamentally different in the fact that there is no crisis that changes Stan’s outlook. In Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Umberto D. (1953), crisis creates change. KOS provides no such easy outlets and we are left pondering hard questions with no easy answers. At the end of the film Stan’s circumstances haven’t changed, but he has. His view is not one of acceptance or understanding, but determination.
As Stan drives the sheep to the killing floor, we realize there is no hope for his situation. It’s for his children that he does these things now, in hopes they will leap across the void that separates these separate American existences. Is he a defeated man? Perhaps. That’s a question Burnett wisely leaves in our hands, rather than moralizing. Stan might not have the stars to play with nor the moon to run away with, but he has some things money cannot achieve—namely his community and the love of his family.
When new life comes to the neighborhood, it grows at the personal cost and sacrifice of others to sustain and nurture it. We see this in the death of the sheep and perhaps the death of Stan’s hopes and aspirations, which are unfulfilled. Stan does have hope for his children, and this hope has returned him to the human race and drives him on. These things, like the sugar that sweetens his son’s cereal, temper his life and help him to see that perhaps his journey on this earth is not so bitter after all.
After the Crash 