A Thing that looks like a Police Box, standing in a Junkyard….
It can move anywhere in Time and Space….
“…..it shifts shape again and comes up in the form of Christ The Carpenter,
and Says,
“Do You Know Me?”
and Kirk said,
“Oh, nowI know Who You Are.”
And He Says,
‘How Strange You Didn't Know
These Other Forms of Me.’
Really, what Gene had written was that this 'thing' was sent forth to lay down The Law; to communicateThe Law of The Universe, and that as time goes on The Law needs to be reinterpreted.
And at that time 2,000 years ago, The Law was interpreted by this Carpenter image. As time went on, The Law was meant to be reinterpreted, and The Christ figure was meant to reappear in different forms.
But This Machine malfunctioned, and it was like a phonograph record that got caught in a groove and kept grooving back, grooving back, grooving back. It's important to understand the essence of all this and reinterpret it as time goes on.
This was a little heavy for Paramount. It was meant to be strong and moving, and I'm sorry it never got made."
"I handed them a script and they turned it down," Roddenberry stated.
“As we wrap up here and I sweep my head clear at last of all things Green Lantern, one reader (hi, Colin McKenzie!) talked about feeling understandably uncomfortable with the ‘cop’ aspect, the stated ‘police procedural’ nature of the book, particularly at a time when in both the USA and the UK way too many policemen were being caught overstepping their bounds in horrific ways.
I grew up with a deep distrust of the police; the police dragged my dad from sit-ins and demonstrations, the police threw him in jail, the police turned up at the door to threaten him. I was raised with a working-class distrust of authority that is generations thick. It took a while to cure myself of instinctively flinching at the sight of a squad car and feeling immediately guilty in the presence of the Boys in Blue.
As I grew older, as I made more effort to take people as they come and give them the benefit of the doubt without prejudice, I met a few police who seemed okay sorts, decent types. Fuck only knows what it took to retain their Humanity in a culture that has been exposed again and again of late as a cesspit of Wrong but I was able to relate to them, have a laugh, and get on as with normal people. They do exist among the ranks.
Nevertheless, it’s hardly controversial to point out that police on Earth are often corrupt, often on the take, often as happy to enforce unjust laws as they are to ignore the law altogether. In short, my last inclination would be to valorize the police in my work.
Were I to write a story about policing in our real world, I would of necessity be compelled to examine some fairly grimy corners of the human experience, it’s true.
The Green Lantern Corps, being fictional, can comprise a finer caliber of polisman! The Rules of the DC Universe allow for the existence of a genuinely trustworthy, honorable, courageous and selfless form of cosmic law enforcement and those were the rules Liam and I chose to play by.
When I decided to approach The Green Lantern as a police procedural in the style of a weekly TV show then, I was borrowing the format and translating it into a science fiction context, rather than attempting to make any meaningful comment about the real life nature of policing on planet Earth which, as is the case with so much human activity tends to exemplify what happens when stupidity, brutality and prejudice are given free license and dangerous weaponry.
Nor was I using the opportunity to comment on the way cop shows romanticize or fetishize law enforcement. I was trying to use cop show tropes to demonstrate what might be the same and what was very, very different about regular policemen compared to Green Lanterns.
Our ‘re-imagining’ of police procedural began with the Guardians of the Universe, the council of blue-skinned immortals overseeing the activities of the Green Lantern Corps. In the past, the Guardians had often been portrayed as geriatric, out of touch, bureaucratic or authoritarian but Liam and I chose to take a different track and to portray them as wise sci-fi monks with an ancient profound understanding of how the universe really works.
Our Guardians are supremely attuned masters born of an unimaginably ancient race of sages. The ‘laws’ they administer correspond to the Hindu concept of Dharma or the Chinese ‘Tao’, ‘the Way’ or ‘Road’ of Zen.
It takes Olympian suspension of disbelief to imagine an authority that is entirely benign, selfless and still effective - such a chimera does not exist on our planet except in our stories – but the attempt to put aside the constraints of the human condition and actually think about how a cosmic law and order enforcement agency might function without falling prey to the problems of earthly policing can be, if nothing else, instructive and gave us our context for the Green Lantern Corps.
Jordan’s twisty character bio saw him begin life as a glamorous test pilot before deciding to chuck it all in and sell insurance. The insurance gig lasted only until Jordan decided that the wandering life of a toy salesman was the natural next step.
Jordan’s writer, my hero John Broome, gave Hal the soul of the Beat Generation, imprinting a rootless, searching-for-America restlessness that became the foundation for various takes, including our examination of the character. Considering Hal Jordan in the round, it was easy for Liam and I to emphasize his Beat nature and amplify his cosmic Kerouac, Dharma Bum dimensions!
To call the Green Lanterns ‘cops’ is simply to translate into comprehensible terms what they really are which is some combination of knight errant/sheriff/Beat cop/area manager and more…
There is always another story to be told using these characters, of course, one that more closely comments on or reflects events in the real world but that wasn’t our story in this case and the general OTT extravagance of our approach would, I suspect, have been more inclined to trivialize serious contemporary issues.
Thankfully, my job no longer depends on pondering these and other such imponderables on a daily basis!
As peers and admirers alike stood in line to congratulate Hal Jordan on his achievements, he quietly slipped away in a blaze of emerald into the shadows of space without any great fanfare and so too I made my exit into the aether, the either and the other.
Liam switched to illustrating Batman: Reptilian from Garth Ennis scripts, while writing and drawing his own spectacular graphic novel series Starhenge, (the first remarkable volume The Dragon and the Boar will be available from Image Comics on July 6 - if you liked where Liam was going in the latter issues of The Green Lantern, this is the fabulous flowering of those experiments – Arthurian Celtic Futurism barely covers its scope).
As for Hal Jordan, he flashed that wry grin, thumbed another ride and took to the Road once more, passing out of our stewardship as he’d passed in turn through the hands of John Broome, Denny O’Neill and Geoff Johns among many others. Forever young, self-assured and iron-willed, he lives on, reinterpreted through the personal filters of future creative teams for as long as his IP delivers on the balance sheet!
Reading through it all again for this retrospective, I’m proud of our work on The Green Lantern and look back on it fondly. I think the whole thing – including Season 1, the Annual, Blackstars and Season 2 – hangs together as a tight and complete portrait of a complex, contradictory veteran character who’s seen and done it all.
Despite the intrusion of doubt and loss, the entire enterprise was driven by a spirit of relaxed imaginative play and a desire on the parts of Liam and I to goad one another to new heights of invention.
My own work on The Green Lantern Season 2 – especially the somewhat scrappy experiments on my part in the final two issues - encouraged me to go deeper into those seeming flaws and mistakes in search of inspiration and new energy, which then gave rise to the Xanaduum project with its focus on fragmentation, collage, compressed information, charged symbolic imagery and textual overload.
Season 2’s nimble response to bad times and painful feelings, its willingness to adapt and try different things, its privileging of art over commerce showed me where to go next with my comics.
Liam and I had creative freedom and a joyful working relationship on a book where anything could happen and very often did, and the result, we hope, is a thematically tight collection of interlocking short stories that add up to a timeless portrayal of Hal Jordan as we saw him after his decades of character development.
Although my last extended run on a monthly superhero comic sometimes felt like one of Jordan’s test flights – a full throttle take-off and climb to altitude, wing flex, pulling Gs, busting through harsh turbulence up there on the edge of the sky, followed by a steep white-knuckle landing that called for a bit of improvisation and imagination to bring the bird home – in the end, The Green Lantern worked thanks to the absolute trust Liam and I had in one another’s divine madness!
You, sir, would Fight to The Death against a Knight who is not Your Enemy, over a stretch of road you could easily ride around..!!
We want a window
hatch (v.1)
early 13c., hachen, "to produce young from eggs by incubation," probably from an unrecorded Old English *hæccan, of unknown origin, related to Middle High German, German hecken"to mate" (used of birds). Meaning "to come forth from an egg," also "cause to come forth from an egg" are late 14c. Figurative use (of plots, etc.) is from early 14c. Related: Hatched; hatching.
hatch (n.1)
"opening, grated gate, half-door," Old English hæc (genitive hæcce) "fence, grating, gate," from Proto-Germanic *hak- (source also of Middle High German heck, Dutch hek "fence, gate"), a word of uncertain origin. This apparently is the source of many of the Hatcher surnames; "one who lives near a gate." Sense of "opening in a ship's deck" is first recorded mid-13c. Drinking phrase down the hatch attested by 1931 (the image is nautical).
hatch (v.2)
"engrave, draw fine parallel lines," late 14c., from Old French hachier "chop up, hack" (14c.), from hache "ax" (see hatchet). Related: Hatched; hatching. The noun meaning "an engraved line or stroke" is from 1650s
£50
hatch (n.2)
"that which has hatched; action of hatching," 1620s, from hatch (v.1).
hatch (n.3)
"engraved lines or strokes," 1650s, from hatch (v.2).
Entries linking to hatch
hatchet (n.)
c. 1300 (mid-12c. in surnames), "small axe with a short handle," designed to be used by one hand, from Old French hachete "small combat-axe, hatchet," diminutive of hache "axe, battle-axe, pickaxe," possibly from Frankish *happja or some other Germanic source, from Proto-Germanic *hapjo- (source also of Old High German happa "sickle, scythe").
This is perhaps from PIE root *kop- "to beat, strike" (source also of Greek kopis "knife," koptein "to strike, smite," komma "piece cut off;" Lithuanian kaplys "hatchet," kapti, kapiu "to hew, fell;" Old Church Slavonic skopiti "castrate," Russian kopat' "to hack, hew, dig;" Albanian kep "to hew").
Hatchet-face in reference to one with sharp and prominent features is from 1650s. In Middle English, hatch itself was used in a sense "battle-axe." In 14c., hang up (one's) hatchet meant "stop what one is doing." Phrase bury the hatchet "lay aside instruments of war, forget injuries and make peace" (1754) is from a Native American peacemaking custom described from 1680. Hatchet-man was originally California slang for "hired Chinese assassin" (1880), later extended figuratively to journalists who attacked the reputation of a public figure (1944).
hatchback
type of rear door of an automobile, 1970, from hatch (n.) + back (n.).
hatchery
hatchling
hatchway
hash
See all related words (6) >
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Definitions of hatch from WordNet
1
hatch (v.)
emerge from the eggs;
young birds, fish, and reptiles hatch
hatch (v.)
devise or invent;
Synonyms: think up / think of / dream up / concoct
hatch (v.)
inlay with narrow strips or lines of a different substance such as gold or silver, for the purpose of decorating;
hatch (v.)
draw, cut, or engrave lines, usually parallel, on metal, wood, or paper;
hatch the sheet
hatch (v.)
sit on (eggs);
Synonyms: brood / cover / incubate
2
hatch (n.)
the production of young from an egg;
Synonyms: hatching
hatch (n.)
shading consisting of multiple crossing lines;
Synonyms: hatching / crosshatch / hachure
hatch (n.)
a sloping rear car door that is lifted to open;
Synonyms: hatchback / hatchback door / liftgate
hatch (n.)
a movable barrier covering a hatchway;
Etymologies are not definitions. From wordnet.princeton.edu, not affiliated with etymonline.
"diversion, amusement, mirthful sport," 1727, earlier "a cheat, trick" (c. 1700), from verb fun (1680s) "to cheat, hoax," which is of uncertain origin, probably a variant of Middle English fonnen "befool" (c. 1400; see fond). Scantly recorded in 18c. and stigmatized by Johnson as "a low cant word." Older senses are preserved in phrase to make fun of (1737) and funny money "counterfeit bills" (1938, though this use of the word may be more for the sake of the rhyme). See also funny. Fun and games "mirthful carryings-on" is from 1906.
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fun (v.)
1680s, "to cheat;" 1833 "to make fun, jest, joke," from fun (n.). Related: Funning.
fun (adj.)
mid-15c., "foolish, silly;" 1846, "enjoyable," from fun (n.).
Entries linking to fun
fond (adj.)
late 14c., "deranged, insane;" also "foolish, silly, unwise," from fonned, past-participle adjective from obsolete verb fon, fonne (Middle English fonnen) "be foolish, be simple," from Middle English fonne "a fool, stupid person" (early 14c.), which is of uncertain origin but perhaps from Scandinavian. Related: Fonder; fondest.
Meaning evolved via "foolishly tender" to "having strong affections for" (by 1570s; compare doting under dote). Another sense of the verb fon was "to lose savor" (late 14c. in Middle English past participle fonnyd), which may be the original meaning of the word:
Gif þe salt be fonnyd it is not worþi [Wyclif, Matthew v.13, c. 1380]
funny (adj.)
"humorous," 1756, from fun (n.) + -y (2). Meaning "strange, odd, causing perplexity" is by 1806, said to be originally U.S. Southern (marked as colloquial in Century Dictionary). The two senses of the word led to the retort question "funny ha-ha or funny peculiar," which is attested by 1916. Related: Funnier; funniest. Funny farm "mental hospital" is slang from 1962. Funny bone "elbow end of the humerus" (where the ulnar nerve passes relatively unprotected) is from 1826, so called for the tingling sensation when struck. Funny-man was originally (1854) a circus or stage clown.
"In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.
I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world’s two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?
Was everyone crazy?
Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant? No one had answered those questions, as far as I could tell. Like Descartes, I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that led me to it.
I once read of a particularly insidious practice at Auschwitz. A guard would force an inmate to carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other—and then to carry it back. Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance—“Work will set you free”—and the freedom was death. Carrying the salt was an act of pointless torment. It was a piece of malevolent art. It allowed me to realize with certainty that some actions are wrong.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, definitively and profoundly, about the horrors of the twentieth century, the tens of millions who were stripped of employment, family, identity and life. In his Gulag Archipelago, in the second part of the second volume, he discussed the Nuremburg trials, which he considered the most significant event of the twentieth century. The conclusion of those trials? There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially, cross-culturally—across time and place. These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.
What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.
Meaning as the Higher Good
It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.
Jung observed that the construction of such a moral hierarchy was inevitable—although it could remain poorly arranged and internally self-contradictory. For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it’s a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities. It’s Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty. It’s Batman or the Joker. It’s Superman or Lex Luthor, Charles Francis Xavier or Magneto, and Thor or Loki. It’s Abel or Cain—and it’s Christ or Satan. If it’s working for the ennobling of Being, for the establishment of Paradise, then it’s Christ. If it’s working for the destruction of Being, for the generation and propagation of unnecessary suffering and pain, then it’s Satan. That’s the inescapable, archetypal reality.
Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.
If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses, which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.
If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?” Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.
You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.
Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.
There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to exhilaration.
Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself manifest in his every word and gesture.
Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.
Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.
Do What is Meaningful, not What is Expedient.
“I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years and not all of 'em was good.”
He once said, "How do you get all of that"... meaning the Holocaust... "into a two-hour movie?" I think he found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn't bring himself to treat it directly, which is why he used the form of a horror film to treat it indirectly. I believe Kubrick, possibly consciously, has solved a kind of problem that history has, which is that it's very hard for many people to connect emotionally to a gigantic big k*ll we hear about in the past. People who don't have direct family experience of it themselves may hear the statistic. You know, h*tler, among other things, k*ll 6 million Jews in his Holocaust. 6 million's a number too big. I mean Stalin is reputed to have said, you know, "You k*ll one person, it's a m*rder and a tragedy. "You k*ll a million people, it's a statistic." He was talking about a psychological fact. And, you know, Stalin himself was... what is it... starved about 3 million people in the western Ukraine in the '30s on purpose. My point is it may be that Kubrick was conscious of having offered a kind of way to bridge that inability to feel for those gigantic statistics in that, if you go and see The Shining innocent the first time and are terrified... you're just terrified and you'll always remember being terrified... and then go back aware of what the symbolism and the general larger pattern meanings of the movie are, then you can begin to make something of a connection, saying, "Oh, my God." I remember being terrified for the individual little Danny and Wendy here. And that feeling is actually being... is for people who are symbols of v*ctim of all kinds of horrendous genocides. And of course, his wife has subsequently talked about, you know, how close he came to making his Holocaust movie, The Aryan Papers, but that he got mom and mom and more depressed and was relieved when he had an excuse not to do it. He used Schindler's List as saying, "Ah, it's already been done." I mean, that struck a bell with me. And I've done a lot of stories as a journalist about people who study... either talked to people who are v*ctim of horrors or study it. And there's... Freud talked about it as the contagion. The depression seeps into you. It's... you know what... Kubrick had a wonderful comment about this when somebody asked him. "Isn't it true that your movies are showing us "just the horrendous side of humanity. You know, that's awful bleak." And Kubrick said, "Ah, but there's something very positive about it as well. "And that is, it shows at the very least that we can get our minds around what that horror is." And Danny, from the beginning, has his mind all over the problem. He's looking at it. In a way, Danny's big wheeling back and forth, up and down the hallways... Danny is learning that hotel. He's learning all the horrors. He's seeing them. But they're just in the past, and Hallorann gave him the secret. He said, "Remember, Danny." Remember what Tony tells him. Remember what Mr. Hallorann said: "They're just like pictures in a book. They're not real." Now, that's a really important lesson. People who shine, who see through history, understand that the past simply does not exist except in one place. And that's the present tense instant of the mind, remembering. That is, exactly... that is a place you can go to somehow and yet it doesn't exist. And so Hallorann tells Danny, "You're gonna see some horrible things." Apparently, he told him. "You're gonna see some horrible things, "but remember, they're not real. "They're like pictures in a book. They no longer exist." That's a key to not getting depressed about it. And that's... You see, this is a movie about what the past... how the past impinges, any past, and about how to get over that and how not to be a v*ctim of history. You know, if you doubt what I've written about it, just go see the movie. I've figured all this out from just seeing the movie. It's there. It's obvious, and most people who went and saw the movie said, "Oh, my goodness. It IS there."
The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times (the twelve strokes of midnight) which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section.
The solo violin enters playing the tritone, which was known as the diabolus in musica ("the Devil in Music") during the Medieval and Baroque eras, consisting of an A and an E♭—
in an example of scordatura tuning,
the violinist's E string has actually been tuned down to an E♭
to create the dissonant tritone.
The first theme is heard on a solo flute, followed by the second theme,
a descending scale on the solo violin which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section.
The first and second themes, or fragments of them, are then heard throughout the various sections of the orchestra.
The piece becomes more energetic and at its midpoint,
right after a contrapuntal section based on the second theme,
there is a direct quote
played by the woodwinds
of Dies Irae, a Gregorian chant
from the Requiem Mass that is
melodically related to the work's second theme.
The Dies Irae is presented unusually in a major key.
After this section the piece returns to
the first and second themes and
climaxes with the full orchestra playing very strong dynamics.
Then there is an abrupt break in the texture
and the coda represents The Dawn breaking (a cockerel's crow,
played by the oboe) and the skeletons returning to their graves.
The piece makes particular use of
the xylophone to imitate
the sounds of rattling bones.
Saint-Saëns uses a similar motif in
the Fossils movement of
The Carnival of the Animals.
The progression and melody of the
minor waltz are similar to the jibes (e.g. "their sweethearts all are dead") of the Sailors' Chorus in
"Helmsman/Steersman,
Leave Your Watch,"
which begins the third act of Wagner's earlier opera,
