Autorreferencia

En Edad de Oro hay un interesante post sobre sonetos autorreferentes.

Si se me permite la insolencia de establecer una analogía entre poemas y programas - programas de computador, mecánicos y estériles - diría que el equivalente a los sonetos autorreferentes en el campo de la programación son los Quines.

Un Quine es un programa que imprime su propio código fuente. Es decir, el resultado de ejecutar el programa son las mismas instrucciones del programa.

Construir un Quine no es difícil, aunque a menos que el lenguaje de programación incluya instrucciones destinadas específicamente a listar programas - lo que es un poco como hacer trampa - tampoco es tan trivial como parece a primera vista.

Kurt Godel hizo amplio uso de la autorreferencia en las Matemáticas para probar su famoso Teorema de la Incompletitud, que dice que para cualquier conjunto de axiomas -excepto los más triviales- hay afirmaciones que son ciertas bajo esos axiomas, pero que no pueden ser probadas a partir de ellos.

Me pregunto si hay algún análogo poético para el Teorema de Godel. Ahora mismo no se me ocurre ninguno.

Una amena discusión de dicho teorema, y de la autorreferencia en general, puede encontrarse en el libro Gödel, Escher, Bach: un Eterno y Grácil Bucle de Douglas Hofstader. Como el título insinúa, parte del libro se dedica a explorar la autorreferencialidad en la música de Bach y en la pintura de M. C. Escher.

Para más información, ver el post "Autorreferencia" en La Explanada de Avente.

Ayer me compré un traje

Y la primera pregunta que me hice una vez realizada la compra fue: ¿será éste el traje con el que me entierren? Pregunta morbosa, lo reconozco. Pero también natural a partir de cierta edad, me parece.

¿Me equivoco quizás respecto al procedimiento usual en caso de defunción? Cuando uno muere, ¿es necesario comprar un traje especial destinado específicamente a que te entierren con él?

El traje es de color gris, con rayitas blancas.

Automatic programming

It's a shame that automatic programming isn't more like automatic writing. I would love to know what an application programmed by my subconscious would look like. I bet it would have GOTOs, lots of them. The repressed always returns.

Possible idea for a science fiction story: a world where the act of programming is considered to be inspired by the gods. There could even be "code literalists" who oppose any refactoring of legacy applications for religious reasons.

And what about a sect of programmers/mystics? Computer code is very well suited to kabbalistic interpretation, I think. I would go as far as saying that, for most Perl programs, it is the only possible one...

Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream

The daily commute

It is undoubtedly true that a large part of the population of a polis were "city-farmers" and that was possible because the great majority of city-states were so small. If the territory of a city-state as a circle with the city in the middle, a territory of 200 square kilometers would have had a radius of 8 km. People could well walk 5–10 km every day (or ride a donkey) to go to and from work. That is something many modern historians find diffcult to conceive but to which they need to acclimatise themselves: in ancient times people’s daily mobility was much greater than is normally allowed, and it seemed entirely natural for farmers to go out of the city daily to their plots and back again.

(Mogens Herman Hansen: Polis, an Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State)

Someone should write a history of the daily commute. What? Too trivial a theme, you say? Bah. If there's a history of the toothpick, I don't see why there can't be a history of the daily commute.

Bonus points if the author makes it the central, all-explaining factor in his vision of History. Like the idea of class struggle within marxism, the daily commute would lay at the heart of every acceptable historical narrative. For example: the fall of empires could be explained because the commutes got too long, leaving no time for actual work and causing rebellions by exasperated, disheveled workers. Or: great efflorescences in art begin when commutes get long enough for bored people to start pondering some artsy project to pass the time.

By the way, IBM says commuting will be less tiresome in the future:

IBM's contention that driving will become safer and less aggravating may be particularly tantalizing for many. The company said that during the next five years, a "wave of connectivity" between vehicles and roadways will help keep traffic flowing smoothly, drive down pollution and get you to your destination easier, "without the stress."

(from this article in Computerworld)

Yeah, sure.

Van Helsing, Job, mesías

(Spoilers para la película "Soy Leyenda".)

"Soy Leyenda" consigue hacerte sentir una gran empatía por el personaje interpretado por Will Smith. Es casi como el programa de Mercer descrito en la novela "¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?" de Philip K. Dick...

La película es más sutil e inteligente de lo que cabría esperar de un blockbuster; ciertamente está a años luz de engendros como "Transformers". Me fascinó la interacción entre Neville y los vampiros, como estos últimos son más inteligentes de lo que Neville cree, y terminan usando su deseperación y ansia de compañía humana para hacerle caer en una trampa similar a las que él mismo les tiende.

No se dice explícitamente, pero se da a entender que lo que motiva al líder de los vampiros es rescatar a la vampiresa que Neville ha capturado para probar en ella su vacuna. Como en la novela, Neville es a la vez Van Helsing (porque combate a los vampiros) y una inversión de Drácula (un "monstruo" que ataca cuando todos duermen y que intenta convertir a la novia de un personaje en un "mostruo" de su mismo tipo, es decir, un humano).

La película también asigna al personaje de Neville otros arquetipos que creo recordar no se enfatizaban tanto en la novela. Neville es un mesías (ver la portada de la revista "Time" colgada de la puerta del frigorífico) que busca la salvación de la humanidad. Un mesías rechazado por aquellos a los que intenta salvar:

[while the Dark Seekers try to break through a plexiglass door in Neville's laboratory]

Neville: [screaming] I can help. I can save you. I can save everybody.

(imdb)

Neville es también una especie de Job, un hombre que sufre la pérdida de todo lo que le es más querido: su mundo, su familia, y finalmente el último lazo que le quedaba con ésta, su perro. Lo que, en cierta forma, explicaría el insatisfactorio final de la película: el libro de Job en la Biblia también concluye de manera nada convincente...

A theodicy for cosmic catastrophe

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

(H. P. Lovecraft)

Imagine millions of inhabited worlds being sterilized, and turning into dead wastelands. Imagine thousands of civilizations coming to their end, never to rise again. Not because of their own follies but instead crushed by the dumb, indifferent, and utterly inescapable machinery of the universe. That may be happening (or has already happened, if you take into account all those light years...)

Tens of millions of stars, including those with orbiting planets, are likely in the path of the deadly jet, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.

If Earth were in the way - and it's not - the high-energy particles and radiation of the jet would in a matter of months strip away the planet's protective ozone layer and compress the protective magnetosphere, said Evans. That would then allow the sun and the jet itself to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.

And what would that do life on the planet?

"Decompose it," Tyson said.

(from here)

Of course, if the Rare Eath Hypotesis is correct, instead of witnessing a cosmic holocaust on an uninimaginable scale, we are just watching a rare and interesting celestial phenomenon. See also: the Fermi Paradox.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker is now avaliable for free on manybooks.net. I strongly recommend the book; it's a seminal work of science fiction. One chapter deals with an extraterrestial civilization, of a technological level comparable to our own. They discover that their planet is slowly losing its atmosphere, and there's nothing they can do about it. The next centuries will be the last.

The human protagonist is horrified by this perspective:

The thought of the disaster which almost certainly lay in wait for the Other Men threw me into a horror of doubt about the universe in which such a thing could happen. That a whole world of intelligent beings could be destroyed was not an unfamiliar idea to me; but there is a great difference between an abstract possibility and a concrete and inescapable danger. On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.

(Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker)

However, a philosopher of the alien race sees things differently. He intones a prayer of absolute acceptance to the remote (and perhaps altogether nonexistent) creator of the universe, the Star Maker:

"Even if the powers destroy us," he said, "who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent." But I protested, "What theme could justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds."

Bvalitu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, "If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right."

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, "And if after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it only the sharp tang and savor of existence. But to call it this is to say little."

(Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker)

This is a beautiful and chilling passage; one of my favorites in all science fiction.

Farenheit 451

This article on The New Yorker about the decline of reading brings to mind Bradbury's Farenheit 451. That book is not really about censorship: as Bradbury himself has stated -to the surprise of many- in a recent interview, it is about television destroying interest in literature. Critic David Pringle was very perceptive when he said as much in his volume Science Fiction: the Best 100 Novels. IIRC, he thought that Bradbury was being overly hostile to new forms of media; had the book been written in more recent times, it would have attacked videogames, too.

The novel was successfully adapted to film by Truffaut (gotta love the opening title sequence). Nevertheless, if Farenheit 451 is really about movies and television overthrowing literature, there is an inherent paradox in adapting it. And I very much doubt that Frank Darabont can do a better job than Truffaut.

But, who cares about what Bradbury really meant, anyway? The death of the author and all that.

Nature reclaiming the works of Man

A staple image (we could say a cliché, if it wasn't so effective) of post-apocalyptic stories consists in having wild animals prancing through the empty ruins of what formerly was a busy urban center, or some other place sinonymous with civilization and man-made environments. I am Legend does this, at least judging from the trailer. So do Children of Men (the deer in the nursery) and Twelve Monkeys (the escaped zoo animals Bruce Willis encounters on his initial excursion).

Much of the rural imagery from the works of the Romantics included aestheticised, picturesque ruins from a previous age (usually, although not always, Classical temples, columns and statues). Early on, I noticed similarities between these images and images of the modern city in ruins in various Science Fiction films or read descriptions of in Science Fiction novels. It occurred to me that the image of a well-known city in ruins was a powerful one that people might use in a variety of ways to express a variety of ideas. What does it mean? Why the fascination?

That quote comes from Where London Stood, a site dedicated to literary depictions of the City in Ruins, and which itself seems to be abandoned. Sad... but oddly appropiate!

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote the following about the Romantic infatuation with ruins:

Civilisation is not "just there," it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation- you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and, vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle. The romantics of every period have been excited by those scenes of violation, in which the natural and infrahuman assaults the white form of woman, and they have depicted Leda and the swan, Pasiphae and the bull, Antiope and the goat. Generalising the picture, they have found a more subtly indecent spectacle in the landscape with ruins, where the civilised, geometric stone is stifled beneath the embrace of wild vegetation. When your good romantic catches sight of a building, the first thing his eyes seek is the yellow hedge-mustard on cornice and roof. This proclaims, that in the long run, everything is earth, that the jungle springs up everywhere anew. It would be stupid to laugh at the romantic. The romantic also is in the right. Under these innocently perverse images there lies an immense, ever-present problem: that of the relations between civilisation and what lies behind it- Nature, between the rational and the cosmic.

(José Ortega y Gasset: Revolt of the Masses)

I suppose the definitive Romantic/Postapocalyptic tale would be Mary Shelley's The Last Man, a roman à clef with barely concealed versions of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as characters. It's kind of boring, though, and mostly of historical interest.

Eastern bloc retrofutures

Check out this series of covers from old soviet and eastern bloc science fiction magazines posted at Dark Roasted Blend (link spotted at Bodly Go.)

Tropes and Patterns

Generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories - that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean Seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a God who is crucified on Golgotha.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

The storytelling tropes collected in TV Tropes (warning: the site can consume hours of your life) are, in a way, analogous to software designs patterns, only for fiction writing. Although some should be considered antipatterns more than anything else...

One can daydream about expressing all those tropes in a machine-understandable form, and feeding them to some kind of automated story generation device.

See also The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, The Big List of RPG Plots, The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés and Strange Horizon's Stories We've Seen Too Often. Let's not forget Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, either. More pop-culture goodness at Don Marksteins's Toonopedia, Scott Shaw's Oddball Comics, and of course at Superdickery.

Through other eyes

Laguagehat has a post on Proust as a sf writer. The following passage is quoted:

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is...

With that same premise, R. A. Lafferty wrote a story both funny and profound, unsurprisingly titled "Through Other Eyes". It is part of his collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

As the story begins, eminent scientists Gregory Smirnov and Charles Cogsworth have just completed their exploration of the past using a Time Machine. They were present at the most important events in History, they have met the central characters face-to-face. And they were bored. The great events were not as spectacular as advertised, and ended too soon. The kings, poets and philosophers turned out to be an uniformly dull and annoying lot. For example:

"I wasn't too happy with Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his!" Three hours he had them all busy curling his beard. "And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?"

"No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound."

(R. A. Lafferty: Through other eyes)

So, the Time Machine was a failure. But they have a new toy to play with: a device that allows one person to see through the eyes of another, not only in a strictly visual sense, but in the sense of inhabiting the other person's particular experience of the world.

"As he grew older Charles Cogsworth came to many signs that the world he saw was not the world others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world."

(ibid.)

They soon test the machine on friends and associates:

"He is a greater man than I [...] And he lives in a better world."

It was a better world, greater in scope and more exiting in detail.

"Who would have thought of giving such color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. [...] It is a finer sky that I have known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins."

(ibid.)

The problem comes when Cogsworth tries to see the world through the eyes of his enchanting female colleague, Valery Mok. The results are not what he expected:

"And to her the grass it self is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. He sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them."

(ibid.)

This fiery view of the world is too much for Cogsworth, who ends having to spend six weeks in a sanatorium to recover. He now regards Valery as a base and excessively sensuous creature. Conversely, Valery finds Cogsworth's experience of the world to be stale and dead:

"Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass. [...] How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn't know you were dead like that. [...] By the way, who gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don't you even know that blood is red?"

"I see it red."

"You don't see it red. You just call it red. That silly color isn't red. What I call red is red."

(ibid.)

"Redness" is the canonical quale. Laffety's story serves as a good illustration of the inverted spectrum thought experiment in Philosophy of the Mind. The essay "What it is like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel also touches on related themes.

Analíticas

Recibir los resultados de un análisis de sangre me enerva sobremanera.

No sólo porque el colesterol esté muy alto (que lo está) o los leucocitos muy bajos (que no me acuerdo si lo están o no). Es más bien el descubrir que tu sange no es una substancia simple, sino una mezcolanza de fluidos diversos en delicado equilibrio.

Aunque todos los numeritos se mantengan dentro de los límites recomendados, la mera constatación de tu pluraridad sangínea basta para recordarte lo efímero y poco esencial que es tu cuerpo. Lo que tiene partes se descompondrá algún día, y por si fuera poco está sujeto a paradojas sobre su identidad, como la del barco de Teseo. Por cierto, en nuestros cuerpos hay más bacterias que células propiamente humanas.

Por las venas de los dioses olímpicos fluía una sangre enrarecida e incolora. Las analíticas que se hiciese Apolo no le harían preocuparse por los triglicéridos o la bilirrubina. Como mucho, habría una línea avisando de excesivos niveles de icor, que podrían resultar venenosos, no al mismo dios, sino a los mortales cuya sangre salpicase.

Me desagrada tener estructura interna. Por dentro yo quiero ser de barro, como los golems del folclore judío. En mi opinión, los cuerpos de Adán y Eva deberían haber seguido siendo barro después de su creación. ¿Cómo habría transcurrido el crimen de Caín si Abel no hubiese tenido sangre, la cual -una vez derramada- clamase a Dios por justicia? ¿Habría permanecido Caín impune?

Y ya que hablamos de la sangre de Abel, apuesto a que tenía el colesterol alto. Recordemos que Abel era pastor, y ofrecía a Dios sacrificios de carne. Caín en cambio era agricultor y probablemente seguía una dieta mucho más sana, aunque menos sabrosa.

Uno se siente tentado a reescribir Génesis incluyendo una forma alternativa de pecado original, que tuviese que ver más con la simple gula que con el ansia de conocimiento o de igualarse a Dios. Después de todo, cuando salimos a la calle nos encontramos con más obesos que Faustos. De manera análoga, el asesinato de Abel podría reinterpretarse como el producto de una rivalidad entre cocineros que compiten por la atención de un cliente muy selecto (o de tres, según se mire). La hipercolesterolemia sería entonces la marca de Caín.

Tengo que dejar de comer tanto chorizo.

Edit: un bonito recordatorio del horror de la carne, y de lo deseable que resulta tener un cuerpo mineral, o incluso etéreo, se puede encontrar en el relato de Terry Bisson They're made out of meat.

Ancient Germany Map

This post at Strange Maps is very interesting. Kind of makes want to play Darklands...

One branch of the suebi tribe mentioned in the post eventually settled in Galicia.

Edit:

After the kingdom of the Suebi was conquered by the Visigoths in 585, Braulio of Zaragoza (590 - 651) depicted the region as "the edge of the west in an illiterate country where naught is heard but the sound of gales".

(Wikipedia page for suebi)

Broken swords

If swords are phallic symbols, then what to make of the recurrent "sword that was broken but now has been reforged at last" motif so common in epic fantasy novels? Consider for example the sword Narsil in LOTR.

My take is that the motif is really a metaphor for the overcoming of a long period of sexual impotence, maybe with the help of the elven alchemist Viagh'Grah.

Palabras que suelo confundir

asébeia y asabiya (y también aristeia).

El concepto de asébeia es interesante. Que una religión carezca de dogma no implica que carezca del concepto de impiedad.

El concepto de asabiya, central en la obra de Ibn Jaldún, lo encontré por primera vez en el libro "Los moriscos del reino de Granada" de Julio Caro Baroja.

Dicho concepto también juega un papel importante en las teorías cliodinámicas de Peter Turchin (teorías que el resto de sus colegas historiadores no parecen tomar demasiado en serio).

Four Paths to Utopia

In Gray’s telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaeda’s technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian “war on terror” are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.

(Scott McLemee: What Price Utopia?)

That "Black Mass" book by John Gray sounds interesting. But perhaps I should read Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millenium" first. It has been sitting in my "to read" pile for a long time.

The halting problem and qualia

"Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input."

(Wikipedia entry for the Halting problem)

The undecidability of the halting problem is a well-known result in the Theory of computation. There is no Turing machine that can both solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs AND be garanteed to always achieve the answer in finite time. Turing Machines tasked with solving the halting problem may themselves never stop!

Now, imagine that the functionalist conception of the mind is the correct one. That means some Turing machines, when run, can have (produce?) minds, and qualia. Obviously, not all of them do. I don't think a machine that continuously writes in a tape an alternating sequence of ones and zeroes -or my computer for that matter- is as conscious as me. (Though my computer is certanly evil.)

So we need a way to decide which computations produce minds and qualia, and which don't. This could be a pressing issue in a post-singularity scenario, where computation is pervasive and a bewildering menagerie of vastly different minds and bodies have come into existence. In that scenario, the problem of other minds would be no mere solipsistic daydream, but a very real issue and a matter of utmost concern. Why?

Contingent facts, like that every human brain has been shaped by the same evolutionary processes, ensure that we all have roughly similar bodies and minds, and that we experience roughly similar mental states and qualia. If I pinch somebody, I can be pretty sure that he feels pain. For one, I feel pain when pinched, and his body and nervous system are structurally similar to mine. Also, he might complain in a language I can understand, or simply start wailing.

After the singularity, we would have no such anchors. Every sufficiently complex algorithm being executed in the universe could turn out to be a mind. Perhaps a completely alien one with which communication would be impossible (like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris). Or perhaps a mind very much like ours living in a simulated environment, only the algorithm is such that we can't easily realise that (imagine for example a mind running on obfuscated code). Unknowingly stopping the execution of such an algorithm would be tantamount to involuntary mindslaughter.

So, should we refrain in the future from ever closing our screensavers? That doesn't seem practical. What we need then is a Turing machine which, given the description of another Turing machine, can predict if the execution of that machine will produce a mind. We could test our screensavers with it, to check if we are morally allowed to close them.

But, what if the "is-there-a-mind" problem turns out to be, in a way, analogous to the halting problem? If any possible Turing machine for solving the "is-there-a-mind" problem may itself develop a mind? If a machine cannot "detect" pain without feeling pain, or "detect" love without falling in love? That would bring with it a host of difficult issues.

I think this is a nifty premise for a science fiction story. (If such a story already exists, I'll be pissed off. One would like to have an original idea once in a while.)

Rereading Vance

Jeff VanderMeer recently reread Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. A few months ago, Robert Silverberg did the same.

Elizabeth, The Golden Age

The storm threatens the Spanish Armada; the spaniards, fearful, turn to prayer. And to whom they pray? Well, to the Virgin Mary, of course! They are catholic, you see. (Also pay attention to the rosary sinking into the depths. SYMBOLISM!)

That got me thinking. I realized that Elizabeth was being portrayed as another Virgin Mary, in a way. Consider the repeated emphasis on her virginity, or the light that bathes her during the failed assassination attempt, which can only be described as a saintly aura... or maybe the glow was a just a toned-down version of The Power of Love?

Anyway, Cate Blanchett looks better as a warrior queen in armor than as a bipolar Virgin Mary, in my opinion. Someone make a Boudica movie and give her the part, please.

The spaniards are depicted as the bad guys through and through, no doubt about that. I was puzzled mid-movie because torture against members of a religiously motivated insurgency was being portrayed as neccessary for the safety of the kingdom. In our post-Guantanamo days, this is a complete no-no for movies. But near the end, the film pulls an unconvincing (and unhistorical, though I may be wrong) plot twist that shows all the torturin' to be ultimately counterproductive.

All things considered, the movie is more than just anti-catholic: it is anti-religion in general. Protestantism seems to be used as a mere placeholder for our enlightened modern ideals of toleration. Not a lot of protestant religious fervor is shown.

The best way to enjoy the film is to accept its outrageousness and embrace it as a camp masterpiece. Revel in the pretty images that come by every now and then, and improve the dreadful dialogues in your head as they are being perpetrated.

The moment when Elizabeth asks John Dee about the battle, and he prophetizes that one great kingdom will end but doesn't make clear which one, is reminiscent of the Delphic oracle's answer to Croesus.

Lastly, I really liked the figure of the jesuit assassin, though he was woefully underutilized. Jesuit assassins are the most entertaining part of the black legend's imaginarium, in my opinion. More movies should feature them (the albino killer in "The Da Vinci Code" was the only remotely sympathetic character in that cinematrocity). Another jesuit assassin appears in the comic Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot. What are some other examples?