The Cabinet Explores the Old West: Introduction

One of the many things I have my dad to thank for is my love of Westerns. This isn't anything he actively encouraged, like playing sports, and if he had, chances are I'd enjoy watching High Noon about as much as I enjoy watching the Super Bowl. He influenced me simply by watching Westerns all the time when I was growing up. It took a while for the constant exposure to the genre to develop into a full appreciation of it, but at some point over the last ten years, Westerns came to occupy an equal place with the trinity of horror, science fiction, and fantasy as one of my favorite movie genres.

Unlike the trinity, however, Westerns don't seem to have much appeal beyond professional film critics, film students, and dads over 40. After watching my DVD copy of The Hills Have Eyes for the first time, Vicki looked at me and said, "Who would own a movie like that?" Yet, she has watched it several times since then and can't seem to get enough of the horror genre. She's never had such a strong negative reaction to a Western, but she will never watch one with me. Last summer, my friends and I spent two weekends watching the entire Star Wars series, but I couldn't convince anyone to spend a few hours watching Once Upon a Time in the West. Mention Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter at a social gathering and someone will share a story about wearing a costume to a midnight showing of one of the movies, but quote Clint Eastwood asking, "Who's the fella' that owns this shit hole?" and you'll likely be shown to the door.

As frustrating as this is, I understand why the Western genre has less appeal than horror, science fiction, and fantasy: it's perceived to be boring. I used to share this perception, and I think it stems from the following misconceptions about the genre:

1. Westerns are to Dads What Soap Operas are to Moms

I'll be the first to admit that for most of my life I associated Westerns with being at home bored with my dad in the same way that I associated Soap Operas with being at home bored with my mom. If you view Westerns in this way, try an experiment: Watch an episode of The Young and the Restless and an hour of The Searchers to determine which experience is more painful. You'll realize it was far better to be at home bored with Dad. Moreover, moms eventually come to their senses and evolve out of their Soap Opera phases (at least mine did), whereas dads continue watching Westerns, indicating that something about the genre makes watching the movies a worthwhile experience. I don't remember my mom ever rewatching an episode of The Days of Our Lives, but my dad has seen The Magnificent Seven at least a dozen times.

2. All Westerns are about Cowboys Fighting Indians

At some point during my childhood when I was waiting for John Wayne to finish off the Apaches so I could go to the pool, I must have wondered, "Doesn't Dad ever get bored watching cowboys fight Indians?" The answer, of course, was no, but it was only much later that I understood why. A lot of Westerns do involve cowboys fighting Indians, but in the good ones, these fights are never simply between "good guys" and "bad guys."

A good example is John Ford's Fort Apache, in which Henry Fonda assumes command of the Fort and remains determined to use military force to convince Apaches to return to the reservation despite the protestations of John Wayne, who has direct experience working with the Apaches, understands why they have left and has negotiated a deal with them to return. The movie is clearly about a conflict between the US military and the Apaches, but it's also about internal conflicts among military officers about the best way to manage this conflict. Moreover, Wayne traces the cause of the conflict not to the Apaches' decision to leave the reservation but to the actions of the corrupt US official who runs a store that's supposed to provide the Apaches with food and supplies. This level of nuance is not limited to Fort Apache, and in later Westerns, the conflicts between cowboys and Indians become even more complex.

Of course, it's also simply not true that all Westerns are about such conflicts. It's perhaps just as common for one to portray the completion of the transcontinental railroad and its taming effects on the Wild West. Several deal with the difficulty that wandering gunslingers and outlaws face dealing with the fact that the lawlessness that has enabled them to thrive is coming to an end. Many are about honor, some are even about love, and High Noon, which shows Gary Cooper torn between his love for his new wife and his sense of duty to his town, is about both.

3. The Old West Just Isn't Very Interesting

If I were given the following choices and asked to select the character with the most interesting weapon, I have to admit that I wouldn't choose a:

a. Django: machine gun that he stores in a coffin

b. Luke Skywalker: lightsaber

c. Gandalf: staff

d. Leatherface: chainsaw

As much as I enjoy watching Django drag his machine-gun-filled coffin through the desert, it doesn't have the same ability to captivate an audience as a Jedi's lightsaber, a wizard's staff or even a chainsaw wielded by a madman in a dead skin mask. For pure entertainment that transports for you two hours to a time and place that you'll never visit in the real world, you can't beat science fiction, fantasy, and horror. However, the West in Westerns becomes much more interesting when it's recognized for the mythic setting that it is rather than simply a representation of an historical time and place. It's mythic both in the sense that the plots of some of the best Westerns bear little resemblance to what actually happened in the West, but also in that the themes explored in these movies have a significance that's not limited to one point in American history.

The example of Fort Apache illustrates this point as well. While reading the description, if you were reminded of the US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan, you're not alone. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott examines these parallels in a commentary on Fort Apache and the enduring significance of the Western: A.O. Scott on Fort Apache.

If, like the younger me, you tend to avoid Westerns because they just don't seem very interesting, I hope I've encouraged you to give them another chance. If you're not convinced yet, but I have at least caught your attention, watch for future posts that will attempt to explain the appeal of several different Westerns. At the very least, thank your dad for boring you with cowboys robbing a train rather than with a melodrama about bored rich people having affairs.

Chickens, Reverse Evolution and "Carnosaur"

The cover story of the October issue of Wired discusses a palaeontologist's plans to reverse engineer chickens in an attempt to create a dinosaur: How to Hatch a Dinosaur. Because of the evidence that birds descended from dinosaurs, Jack Horner believes that by manipulating the regulatory genes that determine which bodily features a chicken develops he can genetically reprogram a chicken embryo to grow a tail, teeth and hands and thus become a "chickenosaurus." Other scientists interviewed for the article agree that Horner's proposal is theoretically possible because although chicken genes are programmed differently than dinosaur genes, bird cells do retain the ability to form dinosaurs. As the article puts it, "Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves."

It's an intriguing article, but it leaves two important questions unanswered:

1. Why no mention of the movie Carnosaur?

Obviously Jurassic Park is the first movie that comes to mind when anyone discusses resurrecting dinosaurs, and the article does mention this movie, for which Horner served as a consultant. He doesn't believe the movie's premise is plausible because the DNA preserved in amber breaks down too fast. However, the Carnosaur series, released around the same time as the Jurassic Park movies, is more closely related to what Horner is proposing. It's probably been ten years since I've watched the Carnosaur movies, so my memory of them is a bit fuzzy, but I remember them well enough to know that the creature referred to in the title is created by a scientist who manipulates chicken genes. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what happens next. I expected more from a magazine written by nerds for nerds.

2. Why even create a chickenosaurus at all?

This, of course, is the more troubling question. The article only hints at an answer when it quotes Horner as saying, "When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist--and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur." I had the same dreams, as I'm sure other kids did, but I'm guessing that when most of those kids grew up, even the few who became paleontologists, they accepted that they can't have a pet dinosaur. Horner's motivations seem to be simply that it is possible and that it would fulfill his childhood dream. She might have been insane, but at least the scientist in Carnosaur had a clearly defined reason for creating her monster: she believed that the earth still belonged to the dinosaurs, and she wanted to help them reclaim it.

What bothers me is not that Horner might be defying God, it's that he seems to be wasting money and that he could be making it more difficult for other scientists to secure funding and gain popular acceptance for controversial but worthwhile projects. He has already received some funding for the project, and presumably, he submitted a proposal detailing the reasons for pursuing the work and identifying its scientific benefits. They aren't articulated in the article, and the fact that he doesn't emphasize them in any of his quoted statements in the article or in the video interview posted on the Wired website suggests they aren't his main concern. It reminds me a bit of when I worked as a university composition instructor and received funding to travel to popular culture conferences and present papers on horror movies. It was fun, but I can't say it was a legitimate use of the university's limited resources. I wish I was joking when I say that these conferences typically featured multiple panels on "Hello Kitty."

I'm clearly not a scientist, but I do understand the concept of basic research simply for the sake of research with no specific goal in mind, and I agree that funding for this kind of research should continue. However, it's also reasonable to expect that when the funded research bears a close resemblance to mad science that the one conducting it be responsible enough to emphasize its potential benefits. They don't even have to be direct benefits for humanity, but when none are articulated, it makes one wonder how the money used to fund such research could be better spent.

A potential effect of Horner's project is that it could cause more headaches for other scientists conducting controversial research. These scientists are often perceived as Frankenstein-like figures, and researchers like Horner only encourage this stereotype. Despite the fact that the work of these Frankensteins often results in very tangible benefits to humanity, it is often met with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Horner might just ensure that a few more villagers sharpen their sticks, light their torches and join the angry mob.

Running

Lately, I've been running longer distances and more frequently than I ever have before. Although I could say this is because I want to be healthy and in good shape, I'd be lying if I said these were the motivating factors. What really inspires me is that running enables me to become a cyborg and gives me an opportunity to listen to metal. I'll explain.

Cyborgs

One could argue that because I'm rarely without my iPod touch, I'm almost always living as a cyborg. However, I disagree for the same reason that I don't think my girlfriend Vicki is a cyborg even though she's rarely without her Android phone. Becoming a cyborg involves a more intimate merging of human and machine, like, for example, using a bluetooth ear piece that rarely leaves your ear. It can be removed at anytime, but while it's in place, it essentially becomes part of your body.

Running with a Nike+ iPod Sport Kit has a similar effect. It becomes a supplement to the nerves in my left foot, which do a fine job of letting my brain know when my foot feels pain, but can't determine how far I've run, my average pace or how many calories I've burned. When the chip in my left shoe alerts the receiver in my iPod that I've run two miles and a friendly sounding voice tells me I've reached the half way point, I can't help but to imagine myself as a character in a science fiction movie and wonder about the ways in which technology might be enhancing our bodies in the near future. The fact that I can become this character again every time I put on my running shoes means that exercising is almost as fun as watching Blade Runner.

Heavy Metal

To say that Vicki and I have different tastes in music is a bit like saying Satanists and Mormons have different tastes in God: it doesn't even begin to describe the gap seperating our musical preferences. This has resulted in our own version of the Cold War's deterrent of Mutually Assured Destruction. I know that if I try to play Cradle of Filth when we ride in my car, The Chipmunk's Christmas will be waiting to pierce my eardrums the next time we ride in hers. She likes to describe heavy metal as an assault on the ears, and although any metal band would take this a compliment, it's not intended as one. I hate to admit it, but I do have to acknowledge that I can understand why her ears find metal so offensive.

When I run, I can always listen to metal without assaulting anyone's ears but my own. Running also provides me with the perfect excuse to create new playlists and buy new music.

If I'm able to complete my four miles tomorrow, it won't be from a desire to tone my legs. It'll be because I don't want to miss the next episode of my sci-fi adventure and because I need an excuse to buy Entombed's "Wolverine Blues."

Introduction

If I could start my own magazine, it would cover real science and science fiction, fantasy and horror, heavy metal music, technology, Westerns, travel, dogs, running, chess, politics, the Middle East and US involvement in the region. Since the only common theme tying these topics together is that they interest me, I don't think my magazine would have much of an audience. While I don't expect this blog to have much of an audience either, I know I'll enjoy writing it. If you happen to stumble upon it because you share some of these interests, I hope you'll enjoy it too. For an explanation of the title, check out the following Wikipedia entry: Cabinet of Curiosities.