The Shores of Another Sea: Are we Running out of Creativity?

 

If the universe is fractal, then its structure is fully contained in every sub-element of it. So, a single novel may be a tool to understand the whole universe. Here, I explore a 1971 novel by Chad Oliver titled, "The Shores of Another Sea," featuring a front cover that could compete for the worst book cover in history. But it may have been the first science fiction novel to describe the interaction of primates, baboons in this case, with aliens, and, perhaps, the origin of the 2001 movie series "The Planet of the Apes." It seems that, nowadays, we are getting many creative ideas from old sci-fi novels. Have we run out of creativity? I am afraid it may well be. 

Novels have become mostly an archeological item, so, reading one from 1971 has the flavor of an excavation among the ruins of an ancient civilization. It is perhaps much more than a hyperbole, considering the pitiful state of the civilization that we call "The West" nowadays. And this strange object that came out of this virtual literary trench may tell us something about our present conditions. Where has our creativity gone? Possibly, we lost it forever,

But let's examine this book and see what we can learn from it. Its most remarkable feature is that it may have been the first to deal with the interaction of aliens with a non-human, but humanoid, species on planet Earth. Baboons, in this case. Could this novel be the origin of the 2001 series "Planet of the Apes"? It may very well be. The origin of much of our contemporary filmography is in earlier novels. Just think of how "Avatar" is a remake of the old novel by Ursula Le Guin, "The Word for World is Forest" (1972). 

As a novel, "The Shores of Another Sea" is a good example of the rule that says that you should always write about things you know well. Here, Chad Oliver has done an excellent job in describing a world that, as a professional anthropologist, he knew very well. He uses his experience in Kenya to describe the "Baboonery" -- a remote outpost where the protagonist manages a small enterprise dedicated to capturing baboons and then shipping them overseas to zoos or for medical experiments. Of course, most of us have no direct experience with living in Kenya, nor with dealing with baboons in the wild. But, as readers, we can understand the consistency of the background of the story. It is a world that makes sense. 

So, Oliver uses the basic elements of a typical science fiction plot: you start with a "normal" situation, ordinary, quiet, predictable, and you add a supernatural element that gradually overturns the certitudes of the characters of the novel. You see this technique at its best in a movie such as "E.T." And it works great with "The Shores of Another Sea." The reader is immediately captured by the mix of the exotic, but predictable, world of the baboonery, and the strangeness of "something" that came from the sky that makes baboons behave in unexpected ways. 

Unfortunately, the novel doesn't keep its promises. As we keep reading, the magic slowly dissolves. The aliens never take an active role in the story, the baboons keep behaving strange, but we never learn what the aliens want to do with them. Most of what we are told about the aliens comes from arbitrary trains of thought of the protagonist, that would shame Sherlock Holmes in terms of deducing something out of nothing.

The end of the novel is especially disappointing. The author, clearly at a loss as to what to do with the plot, recurs to a truly cheap narrative device: having the young daughter of the protagonist being kidnapped by the aliens. Then, the protagonist cleverly manages to get her back, the aliens depart, and it is the end of the story. 

So, a narrative failure. Nevertheless, it was a creative attempt to innovate in science fiction. We see here a new take on the interaction of aliens and humans, using the baboons as an avatar of the Aliens, who seem to prefer to deal with them than with humans. It is a characteristic of novels that they can try new ways, even at the risk of utter failure. Today, with novels having nearly disappeared from the literary horizon, our fictional universe has moved to the serialized movies that we watch on Netflix. But creative innovation is not, and cannot be, the same thing. A movie involves a much larger effort (and money) in comparison to a novel. So, sponsors are not willing to take risks, and we are not seeing anymore the kind of personal effort that may lead to innovative ideas. Movie scripts are often just mediocre, although they may still be truly bad in narrative terms.  

So, it may well be that movie fiction is running piggyback on the great science fiction season of the 1960s and 1970s. But it is like mining fossil fuels. Great idea, but they are running out of them. Will we run out of narrative ideas?  Could be, and then? It is known that civilizations fail and disappear when they can't imagine a different world. And it seems that this is what's happening to us.

The red lips of the monster: how dreams die before the civilization that created them

I can understand that someone wanted to do a sequel of the 1951 movie, "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" -- it was a wonderful movie. Guillermo del Toro did that with "The Shape of Water" (2017), but what sense did it make to provide the new version of the creature with bright red lips? It truly escapes me. Did they think it made the amphibian man sexier? 

For some reason, it seems that civilizations on the brink of collapse lose the capability of interpreting the world around them. You could say that dreams die before the civilization that created them dies. And that seems to be what's happening to us. We don't seem to be able anymore to create believable narratives.

A good example is the recent movie "The Shape of Water" (2017) Guillermo del Toro. An interesting movie on several counts, but a narrative disaster. How is it that we can't create a decent plot anymore? It has to be something deep inside the belly of our civilization. But let me examine this movie in some detail.

The cycle of the humanoid aquatic monsters started with the first "The Creature of the Black Lagoon" (1951). It was a good movie, considering the kind of movies produced at that time. It had action, mystery, a breathtaking pace. And the story was fascinating, with the monster falling in love with a human woman. So I can see how Guillermo del Toro wanted to start from there to pursue a related idea: to explore the sexuality of people who are handicapped or marginalized -- even seen as monsters.

The new version of the story can be seen as successful in many respects, and indeed it has good points. Mainly, it is kept together by a truly stellar cast of actors, especially the character of Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins. But the film is an abject failure in narrative terms. It has credibility holes so large that an aircraft carrier could pass through them. 

Just as an example, there is this dangerous monster kept chained in a pool in a high-security government facility. The chain is not so short that the monster can't reach people with its arms, and we see that he snapped off two fingers from one of the characters of the movie. Nevertheless, the security of this place is so poor that it can't prevent a cleaning lady from entering the room to have her lunch while sitting on the edge of the pool and befriend the monster by offering him boiled eggs -- come on!

The real problem is not so much the credibility of the plot, it is its predictability. The evil guy is evil, the good girl is good, and about the pathetic Russian spy, you can see from the first scenes that he will be betrayed by his friends -- hey, Russians are supposed to be evil, aren't they? Given these elements, the movie plods along, as exciting as a Catholic mass.

Let me say something more about the main evil guy of the movie, the character named Strickland (a suitably evil name for an evil guy). Michael Shannon does an outstanding job playing him, but the result is disastrous nevertheless. The problem is the same: lack of subtlety, or, which is the same, predictability. As a character, Strickland is overdone from the first scene when he pees in a urinal in front of the cleaning ladies and boasts that he never washes his hands afterward. It is just embarrassing for everyone, including for the viewers.

I would say that the sin of the screenwriter was to be so nasty on Stickland who is so abused, physically and mentally, in the movie that he may generate some sympathy on the part of the viewer. People have a certain dignity that you shouldn't deny anyone, not even to a character in a movie. So, Strickland has two fingers bitten off by the creature and he suffers because of that throughout the movie. In the final scene, he is hit hard on the face by another character, and then killed by the monster. But what's truly bad is how his privacy is invaded: what sense does it make to show him to us while having sex with his wife? That's a totally gratuitous scene: it has nothing to do with the plot, nor with the fact that Strickland is evil. Again, even a movie character should be entitled with a minimum of personal privacy.

I would say that there exists a general role in literature: the mark of a bad writer lies in despising one's characters. Conversely, a good writer is someone who cares about his/her characters, no matter whether they are evil or bad. Think of the prototypical evil character of Western literature: Shakespeare's Iago in Othello. Shakespeare himself is somewhat baffled by Iago's evil behavior, but he never mocks him, nor enjoys having him suffer punishment. That's why Shakespeare is Shakespeare (and Del Toro is not Shakespeare).

An example of a writer who made the mistake I am mentioning is Gustave Flaubert when he describes the death of his heroine, Madame Bovary. Flaubert indulges in describing all sorts of gruesome details related to the death of the poor lady. In a sense, it is a retribution for the behavior of a person who, at her time, was considered evil. But, apart from that scene, Flaubert's novel is a masterpiece in the art of storytelling and the writer is clearly symphatetic to his character, although he judges her morally flawed. The Shape of Water instead, fails over and over in the mistake of belittling its characters. For this reason, it is only a shadow of something that could have been but wasn't. And probably never will be.