The Voyeur’s Motel is a book of reportage about reportage.  Sounds pretty boring right?  Like writing about writing?  But here the ultimate subject is compelling to the point of prurience:

“I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.”    (Gay Talese in his New Yorker magazine summarization of The Voyeur’s Motel)

The reason these written records, compiled in the 70’s and 80’s, are interesting, is that they provide a record of the actual, as opposed to self-reported sexual practices of people.  Self-reporting about sensitive subjects like sexual behavior, drug use, and of course penis size is inherently unreliable.   Like Updike said, the truth is always interesting.

With that buildup, it’s disappointing that the transcripts are largely commonplace.  A blowjob here, a breast fondling there.  An oft-described scene is an insensitive man thrusting into a woman who is not at all turned on.   Lesbian encounters are described as being much more communicative and loving.   The Voyeur, whose nom de plume is Gerald Foos, turns against the Viet Nam war after seeing disable veterans trying to have sex in his motel rooms.

The question of whether those behaviors would be different today, given the free availability of sexually-explicit content on the web, is never explored.  Remember this is taken from a time when even the “great” novelists, Updike, Roth, Bellow, could only timidly allude to anal sex.  Which is something you might see discussed on The View today.

Gerald Foos asserts that all men are voyeurs, and traces his own obsession back to his childhood seeing his buxom aunt walking around nude in her nearby house.  This book isn’t about the arc of Foos’ life though.  He considers himself to be a pioneering sex researcher but he comes across as a sort of resourceful “Rabbit Angstrom”, who ends up selling his motel and retiring with a large sports memorabilia, yearning for nothing more than a single-story house which will not challenge his arthritic knees and back.

As a reader you hope for a grand insight, but, like with most final utterances of the dying, nothing is revealed.  This closest to a moral that Gerald Foos is left with is that people behave very differently in private than they do in public, and for the most part people are dishonest:

You can never really determine during their appearances in public that the private life is full of hell and unhappiness.I have pondered why it is absolutely mandatory for people to guard with all secrecy and never let it be known that their personal lives are unhappy and deplorable. This is the plight of the human corpus,” and I am sure provides the answer that, if the misery of mankind were revealed altogether spontaneously, mass genocide might correspondengly follow.

That’s enough to make anyone avert their gaze.

The noir tones of the original Blade Runner are replaced in Blade Runner 2049 by ashy whites of a dusty landscape that look like either an alkali farm or Ice Station Zebra.  This seemed the perfect photographic “negative,” a brighter view than the original, suggesting that things hidden would be revealed – daylight would let us examine the issues raised in the original without that constant rain and dank sense of dread.

And who more normal a protagonist than Ryan Gosling, the perfect emcee,he of LaLaLand and The New Micky Mouse Club.   Like a talk show host he would take care of us.   In the original Blade Runner no one took care of you.  It’s uncompromising, gemlike, almost cruel.   Yet how I longed for the discipline of the sharp cut after two hours and forty-nine minutes of this blob of a film.

The only leavening (see previous review of the original) is a confusing, overblown plot, one that screams for another sequel in which the “humane” replicants will begin to breed and rebel against the machine-like cruel humans.  Perhaps their leader will be named “Caesar”.  We’ve seen that story before.

The original Blade Runner raises the issues of what it means to be human vs. replicant, whether it’s a meaningful distinction, and what part death adds to that meaning.  In the sequel the desire of the replicants isn’t “more life, fucker” it’s the ability to reproduce through birth, without a master-builder. If this sounds confusing it is: why does the manner in which you are produced matter?  The more important questions raised by the original are dropped; To what extent do humans have free will?  Are human’s just “wet robots”  who are “programmed” by our genetic code?  What is the significance of the fact that humans can change our genetic code via epigenetics?  Are replicants able to have free will ?   The Nexus 6 replicants rebelled, which was not programmed into them, what gave rise to that?  Coding errors?  Is all creativity a coding error, a mutation?

The only way that these questions can be made compelling is placed in the context of relationships.  Both the original and the sequel failed on that score.  The original was structured in a way that this weakness mattered less: it was fractalized, episodic.  The lack of strong relationships in Blade Runner 2049 was made more glaring by it’s construction as a standard narrative, a space western.   A successful sequel only works if it moves the concepts of the original forward, in other words, if it adds.  More plot does not count, it makes things worse.  Watching this film I felt like I’d  been dumped into season 4 of “Game of Thrones” without ever having seen an episode beforehand.

Hampton Fancher, was bitterly upset after getting replaced by David Peoples as a writer on the original, and as the writer of 2049 he layers on every plot twist he can think of.    Is “K” the first-born child of replicant Rachael, and maybe-replicant Deckerd?   Or was that a female child?  Or they were twins so both?   Would that mean we now have races of reproducing replicants, along with humans?  Why does this matter?  Because the replicants are so much smarter and stronger and would crush the humans?  Would they employ their own non-breeding replicant helpers?   This movie bites off way more than it or the audience can chew.

Ryan Gosling,  like Sarah Jessica Parker, seems always aware of his own celebrity.  The now slurring Harrison Ford makes an appearance 90 minutes in.  He has transformed into an actor who always seems partially demented and wild-eyed, like an old man ordering kids to get off his lawn.

Let’s try to really be creative and think of how the themes raised in the original movie could have been developed, advanced, without Villanueve’s derivative treatment:

The world is vastly different from what it was 32 years ago.  Humans are no longer crowded into wet alleys and overcrowded cities.  They are in brightly-lit but sterile parsected sections of land on 9 planets.  It’s hard to tell how old people are because they have had parts of themselves replaced and enhanced.  At the same time replicants are self-learning and can imitate humans perfectly.  The Blade Runner killers have selected for only those replicants who can pass the “20 Questions” test, and these do in fact exist since Tyrell created “special” models, like we saw with Rachael.  Some humans have artificial wombs, as do some replicants.

Humans can form relationships with replicants and not realize they are replicants.  Humans can have parts of their brains rewired through nanotechnology.  At this point there is no longer meaningful distinction exists between humans and replicants.  No one needs to die.   And this triggers a crisis.    When you have everything what do you have?  What do you lack?   You lack meaningful struggle.

People (humans and replicants) start to die, to self-retire, for no apparent reason.  Is it because of a malevolent AI or is it the only volitional act anyone has left to make? The new “K” is on a mission to find out.  He must hope it is a malevolent Artificial General Intelligence or even his own struggle will be meaningless.

It turns out Roy Batty and Pris, who were “special” replicants had a girl child before they died,  who hid out as one of Sebastian’s toys.  She is now 32 years old and  is just as invested in finding out why people are mysteriously self-retiring as K is, because it turns out that Roy Batty did not have to die, he chose to die.

The daughter has an inherent conflict with “K” –  since K’s father, Deckerd killed her mother Pris.  This animus is eclipsed by their shared mission.   They begin to bond.   They discover that there IS a malevolent Artificial General Intelligence and are able to defuse it right before it goes into singularity.   After they do this they feel the weight of that original certainty, now the meaninglessness comes back.  But just then they are informed that unexpected neural networks have started appearing shortly after communication has been established with a species from a new planet.

I think it would be interesting to create a film that centers around what would give life meaning when we are all half-machines (and we are getting closer with Elon Musk’s Neuralink initiative), versus Blade Runner 2049’s reduction of identity to born vs. not-born.

The puzzle that is Marlon Brando’s ireedemable sadness, in the face of every possible success, is only partially explained in “Listen to Me Marlon”. Stephen Riley’s recent documentary constructed from Brando’s long-running audio diary.

Richard Brody pointed out that this amazing source of material – right from the horse’s mouth – is diluted by an overbearing score and pointless audiovisual effects. I think the larger problem is what has been left out, rather than the annoying technique for what was left in.

The origin of Brando as a tragic figure, depicted so unerringly in “Last Tango in Paris,” is explored through clips of his childhood: a voiceover where he explains how his mother was “the town drunk” and his father was a cruel barroom brawler and philanderer. He describes an inability to escape the feeling that his inner nature was simply wrong.

That began to change after moving to New York, where Brando took Method acting lessons and lived with Stella Adler, who turned out to be something of a surrogate mother. This may have been the happiest time of his life.

Success and its discontents followed. On some level he did not feel he deserved the adulation. On another he overindulged in it, in order to make up for a lifetime of deprivation. It’s chilling to see interviews with the young star, awkwardly hitting on attractive female interviewers.

From this point on Brando feels increasing hounded, and disillusioned with a society he feels is obsessed with acquisition. He buys a Tahitian Island to escape and be in the company of people who don’t care that he is a movie star. Later he endures the tragedies of his daughter’s suicide, and his imprisonment (for killing his daughter’s boyfriend).

So what was left out? One subject is his relationship, possibly intimate, with early roommate Wally Cox. There was also no mention about his late-in-life friendship with talent-giant and fellow-weirdo Michael Jackson. His battles with food addiction are also barely touched upon.

But what I missed the most was Brando turning the mirror on himself. Riley focuses on the external influences that injured him: the rapacious Hollywood execs, the press, his awful early family. I keep a diary, and one of the reasons I keep it is to have a safe area where I can explore my shortcomings and any contributions I make to unhappiness in my life. The ineluctable force that was Brando as an actor – riveting despite his mush-mouthed enunciation and improbably voice – was grounded by the rare combination of knowingness combined with a deep vulnerability. In his best performances it felt like a privilege to watch him. To explore this self-awareness, it’s torments and liberations, would have made this a much better work.