Reviews of Sunday
May. 21st, 2002 03:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grinninfooleThis past weekend I saw the last episode of X-Files and the play Copenhagen, which just finished a run at the Colonial theater in Boston.
X-Files was extremely disappointing, though hardly surprising. While some of the episodes of the past two years have been quite entertaining, the show has long overstayed its welcome, and the attempt to shift from a focus on Mulder and Scully to Doggett and Reyes came far too late to make any real difference. The show was driven by Mulder's personal connection to the conspiracy and the way it drove him to pursue it in hopes of finding his sister. The attempts to forge a similar personal connection between Doggett and the 'super soldiers' was too obviously contrived. Moreover, X-Files derived much of its interest from its villains, but once the conspiracy had been destroyed by aliens, and then Smoking Man and Krijeck killed, there wasn't really anyone left to hate. Sadly, Chris Carter seems to have fallen prey to the same ailment that transformed Chris Claremont from the deft master storyteller of the heyday of the X-Men in the 70s to the boring hack of the early 90s, who kept shoveling out the same shit over and over.
Copenhagen was terrific. The script was written by Michael Frayn and addresses the controversy over the famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr in Copenhagen in Sept. 1941. The incident fascinates for many reasons, but the simplest is that Heisenberg went to talk with Bohr about developing practical uses for nuclear fission, at that time a newly discovered phenonemon and a hot research topic, but nothing anyone could use for anything. But, almost everyone who knew of it almost immediately saw its potential for making bombs. (Charmingly, the one exception I know of was the man whose theoretical insights made fission intelligble, Albert Einstein--at least, so said Leo Szilard.)
Anyway, Heisenberg had been one of Bohr's most gifted students, and between them they had created much of classical quantum mechanics (the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation). Heisenberg, in particular, is known for his formulation of the Uncertainty Principle, which is actually an extremely precise expression of just how much one could possibly know about an elementary particle's position and velocity. (not everything.) Bohr, who was famous for his willingness to embrace contradiction, was perhaps best known for the concept of Complementarity--one can see electrons, protons, etc. as particles or as waves, but not both at the same time, and in order to follow it one way, one must abandon the other.
Thus, both Bohr's and Heisenberg's work had a nebulous quality, an concern with talking as precisely as possible about what was irreducibly imprecise. Frayn's script drew connections between their work and its physical implications to the murkier matter of human memory and behavior. Why do we do what we do? The quandary over why Heisenberg went to see Bohr sees as a useful exemplum, but the larger question spills over as the three characters (Bohr, Heisenberg, and Bohr's wife Margrethe) attempt to make sense of it, replaying the action, the conversations and their interpretations of them several times over. I was especially struck by the irony that Heisenberg became a pariah after the war for his willingness to stay in Germany and do physics, even under Hitler, while Bohr remained the beloved and much-lauded father-confessor of European and American quantum physics, despite the fact that Heisenberg never did any work on any atomic bomb, and could with some justice claim to have personally subverted any attempts to begin such for Hitler, while Bohr made critical contributions to the development of the implosion bomb used on Nagasaki, ultimately enabling the murder of 250,000 people.
For me, the play rang true. Heisenberg's inability to explain his reasons for going after the war, his confused accounts of his hopes for talking with Bohr, ultimately derive from the fact that he doesn't really know. For eight years, I have wondered (and others have sometimes asked me) why I my affair with Susan. I knew it wouldn't last, that it would hurt, and that in the end I would lose her and possibly my friendship with Bill, too. I did it anyway, and I can provide several clear and rational justifications for it, but in the end, I did it because I wanted to do it. I don't know that I could have chosen to do otherwise, so powerfully did I want it. (Want her, really.) My friend James recently took me to task for my affair with Sabbath, citing my earlier affair with Susan and questioning my judgement. This is fair, but I really had and have no better answer than that I wanted to.
Anyway, folks who don't mind having their brains stretched should see Copenhagen if they get a chance.
X-Files was extremely disappointing, though hardly surprising. While some of the episodes of the past two years have been quite entertaining, the show has long overstayed its welcome, and the attempt to shift from a focus on Mulder and Scully to Doggett and Reyes came far too late to make any real difference. The show was driven by Mulder's personal connection to the conspiracy and the way it drove him to pursue it in hopes of finding his sister. The attempts to forge a similar personal connection between Doggett and the 'super soldiers' was too obviously contrived. Moreover, X-Files derived much of its interest from its villains, but once the conspiracy had been destroyed by aliens, and then Smoking Man and Krijeck killed, there wasn't really anyone left to hate. Sadly, Chris Carter seems to have fallen prey to the same ailment that transformed Chris Claremont from the deft master storyteller of the heyday of the X-Men in the 70s to the boring hack of the early 90s, who kept shoveling out the same shit over and over.
Copenhagen was terrific. The script was written by Michael Frayn and addresses the controversy over the famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr in Copenhagen in Sept. 1941. The incident fascinates for many reasons, but the simplest is that Heisenberg went to talk with Bohr about developing practical uses for nuclear fission, at that time a newly discovered phenonemon and a hot research topic, but nothing anyone could use for anything. But, almost everyone who knew of it almost immediately saw its potential for making bombs. (Charmingly, the one exception I know of was the man whose theoretical insights made fission intelligble, Albert Einstein--at least, so said Leo Szilard.)
Anyway, Heisenberg had been one of Bohr's most gifted students, and between them they had created much of classical quantum mechanics (the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation). Heisenberg, in particular, is known for his formulation of the Uncertainty Principle, which is actually an extremely precise expression of just how much one could possibly know about an elementary particle's position and velocity. (not everything.) Bohr, who was famous for his willingness to embrace contradiction, was perhaps best known for the concept of Complementarity--one can see electrons, protons, etc. as particles or as waves, but not both at the same time, and in order to follow it one way, one must abandon the other.
Thus, both Bohr's and Heisenberg's work had a nebulous quality, an concern with talking as precisely as possible about what was irreducibly imprecise. Frayn's script drew connections between their work and its physical implications to the murkier matter of human memory and behavior. Why do we do what we do? The quandary over why Heisenberg went to see Bohr sees as a useful exemplum, but the larger question spills over as the three characters (Bohr, Heisenberg, and Bohr's wife Margrethe) attempt to make sense of it, replaying the action, the conversations and their interpretations of them several times over. I was especially struck by the irony that Heisenberg became a pariah after the war for his willingness to stay in Germany and do physics, even under Hitler, while Bohr remained the beloved and much-lauded father-confessor of European and American quantum physics, despite the fact that Heisenberg never did any work on any atomic bomb, and could with some justice claim to have personally subverted any attempts to begin such for Hitler, while Bohr made critical contributions to the development of the implosion bomb used on Nagasaki, ultimately enabling the murder of 250,000 people.
For me, the play rang true. Heisenberg's inability to explain his reasons for going after the war, his confused accounts of his hopes for talking with Bohr, ultimately derive from the fact that he doesn't really know. For eight years, I have wondered (and others have sometimes asked me) why I my affair with Susan. I knew it wouldn't last, that it would hurt, and that in the end I would lose her and possibly my friendship with Bill, too. I did it anyway, and I can provide several clear and rational justifications for it, but in the end, I did it because I wanted to do it. I don't know that I could have chosen to do otherwise, so powerfully did I want it. (Want her, really.) My friend James recently took me to task for my affair with Sabbath, citing my earlier affair with Susan and questioning my judgement. This is fair, but I really had and have no better answer than that I wanted to.
Anyway, folks who don't mind having their brains stretched should see Copenhagen if they get a chance.
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no subject
Date: 2002-05-21 09:02 am (UTC)the x-files was so boring that dan and i ended up half-watching it while working on our websites and taking the time to make juvenile obscene gestures at each other every time the dialogue attempted to be profound. while the x-files certainly overstayed its welcome, making nose-picky faces at dan while he's flipping me off just never gets old... :) (yes, we are in junior high)
Re:
Date: 2002-05-21 09:08 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-05-22 08:23 am (UTC)OHHHH!
Date: 2002-05-21 10:39 am (UTC)Re: OHHHH!
Date: 2002-05-22 08:24 am (UTC)Re: OHHHH!
Date: 2002-05-22 08:25 am (UTC)S.