The toxic legacy of Michael Crichton

February 15, 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano

“I’m telling you, *this is the way modern society works* – by the constant creation of fear.” The cover of Michael Crichton’s fourteenth novel, *State of Fear* (2004), courtesy of my local library. London: HarperCollins (cit. from Prof. Hoffman’s tirade on p. 456).

When Crichton addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999, he gaslighted the scientific community by saying that stereotypical portrayals of mad scientists and other negative tropes in the movies were absolutely normal (“Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?”).

The End of the (Jurassic) World

February 13, 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano

*Cadillacs and Dinosaurs*!? Nope, wrong franchise. *Jurassic World* release poster (2015). © Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment, Inc. Source: IMP.

When a graduate student of Stephen Jay Gould went to the movies to watch Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster tentpole Jurassic Park in 1993, he lamented that the animals depicted in the movie – in particular the Velociraptor, called raptors – were “the same old, ordinary, dinosaur shit-green” (Gould 1996: 230). When Gould reported his student’s colourful impressions in a studious review of the movie, he duly noted that Spielberg tried to experiment “in early plans and models” with the “bright colors” you would expect in a birdlike animal evolutionarily closer to birds than lizards and other reptiles. However, in the end the production team decided to revert to dull, dated, and monochromatic reptilian hues (Gould 1996: 230). They had already renounced the hissing serpent-like tongue for the raptors featured in the first shooting tests for the kitchen attack sequence – and that was quite enough, thank you very much.

If you only knew the power of a worn-out VHS

April 26, 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano

Dang, it’s gonna take more than one whole minute to rewind all that tape, provided that the VHS cassette does not get stuck inside the VCR! … and you thought you had issues with your movie loading slowly on Netflix! Ah, kids these days…Author: Groink (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source: Wikipedia — Dang, it’s gonna take more than one whole minute to rewind all that tape, provided that the VHS cassette does not get stuck inside the VCR! … and you thought you had issues with your movie loading slowly on Netflix! Ah, kids these days…
Author: Groink (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source: Wikipedia

I was born eight months after the release of Return of the Jedi in theatres. For all intent and purposes, the Star Wars saga was over. But its legacy was just beginning. It might have been 1991 when I got hold of a worn-out VHS on which my sister had recorded The Empire Strikes Back live from a commercial broadcaster. There was no fancy sticker on it, no logo, no information whatsoever. It was just a black box with a brownish magnetic tape visible through the transparent plastic and a badly handwritten title on the spine. Nothing that could prepare me for what was I about to experience.

Narrator, mendax, sciens: creating meaning in a world of stories

September 14, 2020 Leonardo Ambasciano

We are made of stories - and these are some of stories I am made of. An amazing project over one year in the making, by Italian artist Emiliano Troco. Oil on canvas, © 2020 Emiliano Troco

Human cultures are neural environments extended throughout time and space. Cultures reach out to the ancestors. They explain the origins of everything. Thunders, earthquakes, life, death. They connect the most remote past with the future. And in the process, they provide meaning. Cultures make sense of all that happens. In the skies up above, on earth down below. Within us, between us, among us. Our similarities, our differences, our emotions, our thoughts. Everything is culture, and culture is everything.

Unhorror, Propp’s universal grammar, and box office successes

August 20, 2020 Leonardo Ambasciano

Horror comes in many shapes and forms… Private collection.

... quiet… quiet … BANG! Darryl Jones has recently suggested to label unhorror the blockbuster, mainstream “marketization” of the post-millennial horror, which compensates for its depoliticized and polished nature by the implementation of the now “dominant aesthetic technique” called scare-jumps or “jump-shocks”.

The (neurochemical) medium is the message

April 24, 2020 Leonardo Ambasciano

“Movie Theater at Shibuya.” Author: naoyafujii (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Cinema provides a virtual environment specifically engineered to stimulate our cognitive and sensorial inclinations – for our own entertainment. The cinematic experience itself is an embodied simulation based on illusory stimuli able to elicit the mirror neurons of our brains – putting us effortlessly in the characters’ shoes and making us feel what they feel (Gallese and Guerra 2012; Gallese and Guerra 2015). The illusion does not stop at emotionally connecting to the characters’ adventures. We intuitively transform opaque cinematic techniques into flawless narratives (e.g., converting an illogical jump cut into the natural blink of an eye).

Plus ça change... From scary stories around the campfire to horror hyperreality

December 11, 2019 Leonardo Ambasciano

Original poster for the Spanish 1966 horror movie El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde). All rights reserved. Source: IMDb — Original poster for the Spanish 1966 horror movie El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde). All rights reserved. **Source**: IMDb

Perhaps no other cinema and literary genre has already experienced the same exploration of genre variations as horror. Giant ants, blobs, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, humanoid monsters, shapeshifting creatures, living dead, living meteors, interdimensional demonic books, mind-controlling aliens, bloodthirsty hounds from hell, televisions as infernal gateways, invisible bloodthirsty dinosaurs… yes, you read that right: El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, Spain, 1966) features an invisible prehistoric reptilian creature hatching from a fossilized egg after being inadvertently awakened by controlled explosions carried out by a group of archaeologists. Given enough time and a competitive environment, every cinema genre is set to exploit a mind-blowing number of variations of its own tropes, but horror truly stands out. Is there anything that has not been thrown at the wall by horror producers to see if it sticks? Is there a limit to what can be literally thought of? And, most interestingly, why are we so addicted to horror?

The stuff stories are made of

October 13, 2019 Leonardo Ambasciano

“Campfire & Starlight.” Author: Martin Cathrae (CC BY-SA 2.0).

We are made of the same stuff stories are made of.

Stories are a reflection of ourselves, for better or worse. An aspiration, a model, an inspiration, a cautionary tale. Everything is a story - and stories are everything. Stories have a tangible neurophysiological effect, as they alter the neurotransmitters in our brains and subtly influence our moods almost unbeknownst to us. We cannot live without stories, without scripts, without schemata. We constantly hear the little voice in our head telling stories about us and for us every single moment of our life. You are probably hearing my post read out loud in your head as a story right now.

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