conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Cathedral, North, Shore with the genre: Arts & Photography, Performing Arts?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Films of Steven Spielberg'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Films of Steven Spielberg
  The balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
  The film adaptation of the novel avoids this sense of nightmare, replacing it with dreamlike surrealist sequences serving to show how attractive the war is to Jim, a great adventure, and thus avoiding the novel's critical edge.
  Although Empire is the closest Ballard has come to a conventional novel, it retains elements of the science fiction and horror which mark his other work. In the preface to Crash—at the time of writing the next film project of David Cronenberg, master of body horror and director of The Fly and Videodrome—Ballard claims that "science fiction represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century." He attacks the mainstream modern novel, identifying its dominant characteristic as "its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of 20th century consciousness."
  Ballard denies that this is a true picture of twentieth-century consciousness, suggesting instead that the real subject matter of the mainstream novel is a rationalization of guilt and estrangement. But, he claims: "if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivete and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind's possibilities."
  Ballard writes horrifically (in Crash he also writes pornographically) about the modem world as a warning to his readers. We have appropriated both the past and the future into our present, rewriting them, recreating them, trying out possible futures.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A slave economy also substantiates immortality fantasies. In creating wealth, slavery creates extra, "free" time for the master—which is to say, more life. Working "for nothing," slaves produce "plenty" as if from thin air. They turn out goods which themselves, like slaves, aggrandize the owner by signifying more life. The suppression of individuality in slave labor led to rude versions of mass production as far back as late antiquity. In Schindler's Polish factory virtually anyone can learn on the spot to run the machinery. Ironically, the anonymity of the industrial process enables it to shelter any number of technically unqualified workers. From this dehumanized energy comes the factory's stock of military mess kits that supports the Nazi project of conquest. Later in Czechoslovakia, Schindler's workers actually produce artillery shells. Part of the magic of slavery is that it can be used to create the conditions for still more slavery, a dream of infinitely available energy.
  Captive sexuality likewise serves immortality fantasies. Although Jews are officially contaminated untouchables, Amon Goeth's anguished ambivalence toward his Jewish housekeeper dramatizes the cost of grounding personality in sadistic mastery. Throughout the war economy, dominance gives the SS elite access to pleasure through control over desirable bodies—youthful, "undying" bodies. Yet even as glimpses of pretty young women and breasts repeatedly evoke life and nurture in the film, they also expose the numbness in the conquerors. Hoping to be selected for survival, women in a labor camp use drops of their own blood to rouge their cheeks to a stronger semblance of vitality. Playing desperately at makeup, parading naked as at a slave or livestock market, they endure a nightmarish industrial parody of mate selection, hoping to be selected for life by men crippled in their sexual feeling. Slavery tends to deform and subvert the social categories devised to control it, as in imperial Rome where slaves played an astonishing variety of roles. A quality of theatricality may evolve in social relations as a means of stabilizing fundamental contradictions. Schindler's Jews impersonate skilled craftsmen to satisfy Nazi rules. When a real construction engineer reports a real technical problem to her SS boss, by contrast, he has her shot on the spot for stepping out of her assigned role as witless slave.
  Predictably enough, the longer Schindler associates with "his" workers, the more fully they emulate his theatricality. Stern, for instance, uses his self-effacement to move through protean guises; including accountant, foreman, and advisor. The film imagines Schindler's factories gradually turning into play spaces in which Jews fool the SS to preserve life. From backstage, as it were, the workers equip Schindler the master thespian with props and even sexually beguiling actresses to keep his Nazi audience spellbound. Like a harried but resourceful stage manager, Stern provides indispensable lists of gifts and bribes and sets the stage for Schindler's wily comic scripts.
  By the war's end Schindler himself has taken a moral stand against the regime and begun to use theater strategically. His business operations become more and more brazenly fictional. Following his lead, the workers in his Czech munitions plant are paradoxically able to restore healthy meaning to labor by deliberately turning out trash. Like their boss, the businessman-playactor, the workers too become artists of a sort, creating a parodic arsenal and facsimile weapons for a script that will ultimately triumph.
  Sympathy and cinematic art make it easy to forget that Schindler's List is not simply an opening onto the past but also a product of the Hollywood "dream factory" in postindustrial America. Of all the possible stories about the Holocaust, why invest so much in this one?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A slave economy also substantiates immortality fantasies. In creating wealth, slavery creates extra, "free" time for the master—which is to say, more life. Working "for nothing," slaves produce "plenty" as if from thin air. They turn out goods which themselves, like slaves, aggrandize the owner by signifying more life. The suppression of individuality in slave labor led to rude versions of mass production as far back as late antiquity. In Schindler's Polish factory virtually anyone can learn on the spot to run the machinery. Ironically, the anonymity of the industrial process enables it to shelter any number of technically unqualified workers. From this dehumanized energy comes the factory's stock of military mess kits that supports the Nazi project of conquest. Later in Czechoslovakia, Schindler's workers actually produce artillery shells. Part of the magic of slavery is that it can be used to create the conditions for still more slavery, a dream of infinitely available energy.
  Captive sexuality likewise serves immortality fantasies. Although Jews are officially contaminated untouchables, Amon Goeth's anguished ambivalence toward his Jewish housekeeper dramatizes the cost of grounding personality in sadistic mastery. Throughout the war economy, dominance gives the SS elite access to pleasure through control over desirable bodies—youthful, "undying" bodies. Yet even as glimpses of pretty young women and breasts repeatedly evoke life and nurture in the film, they also expose the numbness in the conquerors. Hoping to be selected for survival, women in a labor camp use drops of their own blood to rouge their cheeks to a stronger semblance of vitality. Playing desperately at makeup, parading naked as at a slave or livestock market, they endure a nightmarish industrial parody of mate selection, hoping to be selected for life by men crippled in their sexual feeling. Slavery tends to deform and subvert the social categories devised to control it, as in imperial Rome where slaves played an astonishing variety of roles. A quality of theatricality may evolve in social relations as a means of stabilizing fundamental contradictions. Schindler's Jews impersonate skilled craftsmen to satisfy Nazi rules. When a real construction engineer reports a real technical problem to her SS boss, by contrast, he has her shot on the spot for stepping out of her assigned role as witless slave.
  Predictably enough, the longer Schindler associates with "his" workers, the more fully they emulate his theatricality. Stern, for instance, uses his self-effacement to move through protean guises; including accountant, foreman, and advisor. The film imagines Schindler's factories gradually turning into play spaces in which Jews fool the SS to preserve life. From backstage, as it were, the workers equip Schindler the master thespian with props and even sexually beguiling actresses to keep his Nazi audience spellbound. Like a harried but resourceful stage manager, Stern provides indispensable lists of gifts and bribes and sets the stage for Schindler's wily comic scripts.
  By the war's end Schindler himself has taken a moral stand against the regime and begun to use theater strategically. His business operations become more and more brazenly fictional. Following his lead, the workers in his Czech munitions plant are paradoxically able to restore healthy meaning to labor by deliberately turning out trash. Like their boss, the businessman-playactor, the workers too become artists of a sort, creating a parodic arsenal and facsimile weapons for a script that will ultimately triumph.
  Sympathy and cinematic art make it easy to forget that Schindler's List is not simply an opening onto the past but also a product of the Hollywood "dream factory" in postindustrial America.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Jonathan Lemkin is a filmmaker and screen writer whose credits include Devil's Advocate, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Demolition Man, and A Big Disease with a Little Mess.
  Ilsa J. Bick is a child, adolescent, and forensic psychiatrist in Fairfax, Virginia. She has written many scholarly articles and lectured widely on psychoanalytic interpretations of science fiction literature, film, and television.
  Andrew Gordon is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Florida where he teaches courses in American Fiction since 1945, Jewish-American Fiction, and Science Fiction. His publications include An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980) and an anthology (edited with Peter L. Rudnytsky) Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (2000) as well as numerous essays and reviews.
  Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, curator for invertebrate paleontology at the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and serves as the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. Stephen Jay Gould died in 2002.
  Originally published in 1953, it is available in a new paperback, Plume, 322 pp., $12.95. The best scholarly treatment of the affair, which I have relied on throughout, is Mutiny on the Amistad by J Howard Jones (1987), recently reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press, 271 pp., $12.95.