NOT using the panel discussions of the most
recent World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City in August 2016 (to which
I was invited and had a friend pay my membership! [Thanks, Paul!] but was
unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on, rail
against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy
of the Program Guide. But not today.
My wife and I
re-watched the movie, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, starring Ben Stiller.
The screenplay was based on a short story of the same name, written by
well-known humorist, James Thurber.
Apparently they
really have nothing to do with each other, so I’m going to treat the Stiller
movie as a science fiction flick.
Why SF and not
Fantasy?
It involves both
psychology (soft SF) and technology (hard SF) – and advances in technology and
how they affect society (classic hard SF)…
The premise is how
advances in technology will affect society, in this case, how the internet
affects the lives of people whose employ was in a paper magazine that depended
on physical film images; at its heart, the kind of SF we all enjoy reading –
the book I’m reading now is an exploration of what post-humanity will be like
when our psyches can be uploaded to vastly more advanced computers and how that
might overtake the biological Human. John C. Wright’s COUNT TO A TRILLION is no
more hard SF than Stiller’s TSLOWM.
The psychology is
obvious and where in Thurber’s TSLOWM, Walter never moves from his imagination
to any kind of reality at all, Stiller’s Walter begins his life lost in a sort
of fantasy world, he enters the real world and begins to bring some of those
fantasies into reality.
Of course, the
only way he can do that is by the application of everyday technology – a combination
of jets, helicopters, ocean-going vessels, cars, subways, elevators,
high-altitude/low temperature gear, and eHarmony (an online dating site)…
Most importantly
to me, however, is that the movie is inspiring. While I can’t say exactly why,
I do know that as a writer, I tend to live in my head as Walter did. I can also
say, though, that I’ve had my fair share of adventures as a missionary in
Nigeria (where we experienced a coup d’état)
and I helped perform a puppet show on national TV; Cameroon where we
experienced an attempted coup d’état, stepped
on a scorpion in the middle of the night, and came down with malaria; and
Liberia where nothing of “adventure” happened except that we traveled up and
down the coast and I walked along a black sand beach. I was also in Haiti for
two weeks, helping to lay the foundation of an orphanage. I guess traveling
with a band counts – twice – counts too…two summers running a Bible camp in the
center of the Chippewa National Forest and actually SEEING wild timber wolves.
Having lunch with Newbery Award-winning author Kate di Camillo. Meeting Mary
Grandpre, artist of Scholastic Book’s HARRY POTTER books and a cover of TIME
magazine…I have a “real” letter from Madeleine L’Engle, a response to a letter
I wrote her, as well as a different one from Anne McCaffery and another from
David Brin…
I was the Science
Museum of Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year in 1997…
OK, so I’m not
exactly an example of Thurber’s Walter Mitty; but I’m certainly not Stiller’s
Walter Mitty, either. It’s Stiller’s Walter Mitty, though who is the character
of a science fiction movie. While it doesn’t involve space or time travel, it
does involve MIND travel as we got to see what he was imagining – saving the
dog from a building about to erupt into a fireball; the guy who came out of a
LIFE Magazine ad from the Himalayas to talk to Cheryl; being Benjamin Buttons to Cheryl's Daisy Fuller; plus a few others I can’t
recall (and can’t seem to find listed anywhere). For a moment, we see what he
sees – or where he goes when life isn’t going in the direction he wanted it to. It's a sort of...time travel or psychotic adventure that moves me to want more in my life.
So there you have
it – why I think Stiller’s SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY is a science fiction
film rather than a fantasy film and why it is SF in the very best of the
tradition.
No comments:
Post a Comment