The Hidden Room (movie review)

This was 2 of 2 of the two “The” movies I picked out at MMU: The Glass Key and The Hidden Room.

Jealousy and triangles are the stuff of novels and real life melodrama more generally, so I’m hardly making a deep point if I point out the relevance of triangles to Noirs as a genre. It’s just noirs are adjacent to murder mysteries, or more colloquially “who done its” although who committed the murder is not always the point.

As omniscient viewer-voyeurs, the Hollywood norm, we knew all along that the Brit guy was holding the American guy in a hidden room because the latter had been cavorting with his flirtatious wife, who liked to flirt with guys and who thinks her hubby is a jerk. 

The jerk (he is a jerk) decides to seek revenge and devises this plot to off the next dandy boyfriend type to come along, and he happens to be this unlucky American dude, with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks (other side of Atlantic) accent and everything (crude manners).

I like how the movie starts out with the older gentleman set, boomers by today’s standards, although that’s all wrong, sitting around smoking and drinking and carrying on about relative values of currencies, the way older male grownups tends to yak when running in packs (clubs) like this. 

Humans often like to segregate by gender; males like their pyramid hierarchies (called soldiering). These were the old United Kingdom imperialists watching their empire go on in but fragments, in breakup mode.

One could argue the beginning of the end was the American Revolution itself, but this isn’t a history movie, it’s a detective movie, a noir.

The other main hero, aside from the captured American (which American puts up a good front even though his would-be murderer is hellbent) is the Scotland Yard detective, the quintessential “mind like a steel trap” dude, the Columbo of this story, a British Peter Falk. 

Our culprit boomer feels hounded from their first meeting, which of course clues our detective to the man’s guilt: his sense of smell (the odor of fear) leads him by the nose to the hidden holding chamber, just in time to frustrate the murderer’s objective.  

Another monkey wrench: his Breaking Bad style bathtub had been drained of its body-dissolving acids, meticulously transported from another secret room back at headquarters — a dog trick, literally. This story is clever in that way, by getting a cute dog into the action.

So the jerk culprit boomer doesn’t even get the satisfaction of killing his victim and yet he’s caught with murderous intent, and, plot twist, even though we think that means the American gets the girl (the flirtatious wife), all he really wants is her dog (and vice versa), whom he’s bonded with in captivity, and she’s gracious enough to let that happen. 

Another triangle is solved.

Two Frame Animation

2-frame GIF: IVM ball coming and going

Spyder IDE; Python source for GIF

Believing in Universe (School of Tomorrow)

LOL 1900s

For Pythonistas

 

BACKGROUND READING ON SYNERGEO

Drifting Apart

The Roaring 20s

Like many in my senior cohort, kicked back in a McMansion maybe, in Beverly Hills, what I like to do with my time is check out the long arc of history as seen through the filmmaker's lense. That includes, but is not limited to, the Hollywood movie makers. They didn't used to have so much competition as they have today. 

Likewise I believe my Lazy-boy chair peers are glad for the Criterion Collection, which in the rabbinical tradition glosses the films with lots of behind the scenes peeks, along with scholarly commentary, to provide more context. Context matters.

I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.

The theme of the evolving roles for good guys and bad guys, star heroes and villains, with supporting characters, is especially pronounced when the film is self consciously doing a "great sweep of history" angle. 

They were all good guys in WW1, sharing the same foxhole. But in returning to civilian life, they'd gravitate to different scenarios based on luck and character. Bogart plays an especially villainous dude. Cagney is the more likable, but too full of himself to realize how clueless he is with respect to women.

I learned a lot listening to the followup analysis, including from the director himself from the 1970s. I'll be weaving what I've learned into my own internalized tapestry of world history; something we should all be working on. If you need an excuse to pay people (so they don't starve or turn to criminal activities), pay them to improve their internalized world models. 

Don't let them turn out like those RAND Corporation or Brookings people: pathetic when it comes to understanding how the world moves on (the original title for this film).

Consciousness Studies

When doing philosophy in the Wittgensteinian vein, we like to take inventory, of the many ways in which a given word, the one under study, gets used in actual practice. 

We cultivate our ability to conjure up all the ways in which we use “consciousness” for example, or just “conscious” versus “not conscious” versus “unconscious” and so on.

The EMT (emergency responder) wants to know of  X is conscious, meaning aware of X’s surroundings, responsive to stimuli. 

But then you’ll get a guru stepping in to talk about “levels” of consciousness, with “higher” and “lower” as possibilities.  People talk about “raising consciousness” which would seem to have not much to do with the EMT’s meaning.

Sometimes “conscious” means “sentient” i.e. we think sensations must be happening. But other times we might say “this sentient being has no consciousness” meaning in some sense “no sense of self”. 

But what does it mean to sense a self? We have to keep taking inventory, multiplying the number of special case examples. 

To sense a self has to mean knowing a difference between sense of self and sense of other. This is what Wittgenstein would call a grammatical remark vs some deep truth or empirical finding. It’s “deep” in the same way “grammar” is deep, he’d famously put it.

Clearly, when we stop to really think about it, the number of language games in which “consciousness” figures is quite large, and then comes the game of explaining the “essence” of consciousness. 

Per Wittgenstein, that’s just another game, typically philosophical in nature, with the connotation (in his writing) of empty wheel spinning. 

Who says there needs to be some “essence” to which all these usage patterns must distill at the end of the day? Bad philosophers? Weak thinkers?

We might want to shift away from “consciousness” in some contexts, giving preference to the word “awareness” and emphasizing its “of otherness” focus, as in defining otherness we likewise define not-otherness, meaning self. 

Awareness is a of a self-otherness dichotomy. 

Do we need “self awareness” on top of simply “awareness”? Judging from common English, we need that nuance, yes.

So is awareness the same thing as consciousness then? 

If your mental model is there’s this Thing, call it C for Consciousness (what it is, in itself) and Awareness and Consciousness are both labels for that Thing, then yes, “same thing” is apropos. 

However, those following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps have learned to question the questionable dogma that there’s this Thing, this spooky essence. 

We have the operational utility of these words, and get our work done with them. 

Who says these terms are actually “labels of” or “pointers to” some Object (i.e. the “true meaning” per this particular superstition)? Weak thinkers? Dogmatists? 

What does a pawn on the chessboard point to, as its meaning? Not the right question, right? Pawns don’t “point”. So now consider “consciousness” to be your pawn, your tool, your artifact. Use it however. And good luck making it point to some Thing. We all suffer from fevered dreams from time to time.

More Bizmotica

Bible Studies

One of the many benefits of practicing Quakerism is one is not beholden to a chain of command when it comes to beliefs handed down from "on high" (snicker).

I classify unprogrammed Qs (as distinct from the evangelicals) as one of those practices not that into what we call "head beliefs" i.e. some credo one should be prepared to stand and recite, like a loyalty oath. 

Per Karen Armstrong, Some Protestants are really into that; they think religion is about "what's in your head" in terms of whether you've absorbed Calvinist eugenics or some other Genesis-based racism (anything invoking "Noah's sons").

However, we do recognize everyone is entitled to a private "bag of beliefs", much like a spleen, a personal organ, and one engaged in filtering out the old while training for the new. 

T-cells and B-cells (antidote beliefs, the immune system) get a workout, as the macrophage dogs force-retire the red blood cell imposters, no longer able to perform their role. Everybody needs a healthy counterintelligence system.

Whether one wants one's private bag audited by others is a different matter. What others might be available? We have Clearness Committees for those wishing to enter a peer review process.

If you plan to go out into the world advertising your Quaker status, while meanwhile unfurling some elaborate ministry, you're expected to gain clearness and support from your local meeting, or else be prepared to explicitly state that you've bypassed that route. 

Thanks to this workflow, established over the centuries, other Quakers will know that, if you're out there sounding crazy, you might be doing so on your own recognizance, with no meeting expected to back you up.

We have a lot of Quakers exercising this freedom, well-complemented by the Bill of Rights, should the happen to be US-American or akin to same. These Qs not officially "released" -- meaning freed from committee work -- so as to speak their truth to whatever powers.

In my own case, I wanted to protect local Qs from having to vouch for my ministry in any way and so laid down my membership without lowering my level of participation. 

As far as my ministry goes, according to my version of Quakerism, all meeting positions are open to non-members, including clerk, as to be a member mostly means to be openly publicly a Quaker, not afraid to journal and/or list oneself in the public domain. In terms of workflow, unprogrammed Friends pride themselves on transparency and inherently have no secret rituals, even if they deal in confidential information.

As a non-member, I was cleared by Oversight (so-named back then) to clear members for membership. I saw nothing the matter with performing this role, as an "experienced Friend" as Friends called me. However other meeting-goers did express their reservations about my faith and practice, as would be expected. 

That's back when I joined QuakerQuaker, a discussion board devoted to hashing out (threshing about) such issues. Said board seems these days moribund, probably because the attempt to upgrade the underlying framework failed.

From my angle, many non-members are more courageous than members in this respect.  Some are just shallow status seekers.