Reading stories of independent movie makers is fun because their backgrounds, methodologies, ideals are all different. But one theme is curiously similar (except for their love of films): how difficult a task it is to make their films. On that point, sometimes they sound as predictable as Hollywood stars reading the description of their roles aloud with lifeless eyes in promotional interviews. Is the movie industry an eternal uphill battle, in which Davids (indie creators) fight against Goliaths (studio executives, bank loan officers, unappreciative families)? In other words, is it unfair?

At a glance it looks so. On one extreme we have Transformers, a US $200,000,000 project destined to dominate the earth. On the other extreme we have Blue Valentine, a $1,000,000 project aimed at winning the hearts of the audience. And far off the scale, there are $1,000 projects from my friend Enrique Amador, aimed at sharing personal visions (and perhaps some lunacy). As Brad Pitt, playing Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane in the movie Moneyball, says: “There are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4QPVo0UIzc&w=500&h=281]  

The movie industry’s hierarchy triangle might look like a flat line because the skirts are so wide, but it’s still a fair world because most movies that get distributed compete within the same conditions: appearing in the same venues, asking for the same amount of money, and most importantly, taking the same two hours from the audiences’ lives. The fairness becomes more apparent when the movies hit households: Each film is just a piece of software listed in a shelf (or hard drive). Whatever differentiating factors—stars, special effects, intrusive ad banners—exist, they all get dissolved in the screen, forcing the movie to answer one question from the audience: Is it worth my time?

There are service industries that carry the same level of “unfairness” in the cost structure, but they aren’t necessarily “fair” at the consumers’ end. Take the restaurant industry for example. The original cost per meal at a three-star restaurant might be $200. The same index for McDonalds might be $1. (Still expensive? Here is my 20-cent recipe: rice + two eggs = combo meal.) The cost ratio between the top and the bottom is 200:1 as in the movie industry—I am graciously ignoring the bottomest players—but the venue, price, and time all vary. In the end, there are many yardsticks to measure a meal’s worth: Can I afford it? Is it delicious? Can I make out with her afterward?

The “fairness” doesn’t mean the movie industry is “better” than other service sectors. By some economic definitions, it might not even qualify as a legitimate industry: The initial cost is not reflected at all in the final price. How could it exist in this capitalistic society?

The reason the media cites unfairness is because it is indeed unfair and difficult from the producers’ point of view. But what ultimately matters is what we, the consumers, think. The movie industry might be structured in a vertical hierarchy, but from our point of view, it is totally flat.

There are historical events that force us to question our very existence: 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the Fukushima incident, and Twilight. What made that book series a global phenomenon was more enigmatic to me than what or who actually caused the September 11 attacks. So I decided to decipher the biggest mystery of the past decade, by reading the book. (The 9/11 Commission Report was too intimidating, and I thought maybe I’d get some hints about what women like. These are minor issues, of course.)

Fortunately, there are plenty of audio recordings on YouTube, thanks to 3 million die-hard fans. I didn’t need to spend my money, or truth to be told, get caught buying—or reading—the book. Taipei is a small city.

The book certainly is engaging. The high school set-up is familiar to all of us, including the feeling of isolation in a new community. Each chapter contains a surprise (that mysterious boy is a vampire, for example) that is also reassuring (he never kills fellow classmates). The non-threatening world view is more apparent in the lack of daily adolescent survival wars: attention, grades, sexuality (or lack thereof), family. The most symbolic—or unforgivable—example is this: The protagonist is a black sheep who never gets bullied.

This is a world that is easy to immerse ourselves into because few things distract us from identifying with the main characters. (There is even one for me: the guy who eyes her but is destined to be friend-boxed forever. I know how you feel, buddy.) Yet that safeness is achieved by the lack of an important element in its universe: a real person.

The protagonist, from whose viewpoint the entire world is constructed, seems to be observing everything but one thing: herself, as reflected by her friends and family (vampires don’t reflect anything—one ageless rule this book kept intact). In our teenage years, our ego-inflated fragile self-consciousness was what consumed our lives more than anything. But whether we like it or not, that was what kept us in reality away from the mirage in our heads. Without knowing who she really is, the protagonist of Twilight is “an empty shell for the target audience to project themselves onto and empathise with,” as the movie review site Dark Horizon says.

A Japanese writer once said a book’s worth can be measured by how much you have changed after reading it. That’s not likely to happen with Twilight, for either its readers or characters. The protagonist might physically advance (sex, childbirth, conversion to vampire follow up in sequels), but she will be mentally trapped forever in her teenage days, like her fellow vampires who can still tolerate being high school students after living for 200 years.

A good book amuses us, which is a hurdle Twilight no doubt passes. It might even qualify as an entertainment classic, judging by the size of readership. But it is not a great book, at least for me, because it fails to do one task all great books achieve: show us who we really are.

P.S. What about the “What women think” part? Here you are: the essence of becoming the guy lusted by young girls according to Twilight. I have made the list easier to achieve, by waiving the requirement of being a kosher vampire.

• Be immaculately beautiful
• Understand every single detail about her and be around her 24/7
• Be passionate and caring for her but be detached from everybody else
• Wear designer clothes sans logos (= really, really expensive ones)

P.P.S. I recommend reading the entire review of Twilight: New Moon on Dark Horizons. I bet it is far more engaging than the movie itself.

While the parallels to "Romeo and Juliet" are laboured on thick, more fitting a comparison is "Moby Dick". What else is Edward if not a pale white force of nature, and Bella the protagonist so utterly consumed by her obsession to him much to the detriment of everyone around her.

A while ago TechCrunch picked up an ebook to suppress, not to promote, its sales because it dealt with a controversial topic: how to be a successful pedophile. The book did disappear, but not before its sales got boosted by 100,000% thanks to this unexpected PR boost by a high-profile media outlet. Any PR is good PR, after all. Techcrunch admitted that the result did not go according to plan.

We first posted on this because some of us weren’t cool with the fact that a book that made it easier for pedophiles to commit their crimes was so easily accessible via Amazon. Our post drew awareness to how sketchy this was but also attracted thousands of Internet looky loos who thought it might be funny to buy the book.

Is there a winner here? Amazon suffered from negative publicity and eventually caved under pressure to pull a (bestselling) book out off its shelf. And for us readers, a precedent for censorship has been established. Bookstores will naturally start backing off from controversial materials.

And we all know that the source issue, child abuse, will not be solved by pulling a guidebook from retailers. The effect is more symbolic, if it exists at all, as in Michael Moore’s petition asking Walmart to stop selling guns.

Furthermore, labeling a thing “dangerous” and trying to hide it is the best way to make it more desirable. I once read that Thailand newspapers used to put graphic photos of dead bodies on the front page to attract readership. Some people inevitably complained, so the media duly complied—by adding a black bar over the victim’s eyes. I can imagine how it affected subscription rates.

Probably the most effective way to get rid of a dangerous object is to make it look like it never existed. But that’s what censorship is about: eliminating unwanted social elements without a trace. To keep discussion fair and healthy, we have to bring the topic up front. How do we tackle this dilemma?

I suggest looking at this issue from a different angle. Instead of thinking about ways to suppress pedophilia, why don’t we discuss this subject more openly? According to Wikipedia, up to one third of all people have some kind of sexual experience with a pedophile. That might be an exaggeration, but according to my experience, pedophilia is far more common than AIDS or bird flu, life-threatening issues we love to discuss partly because they rarely exist in our daily lives.

I know at least one person who experienced sexual abuse as a child. On the surface the damage looked “cured” because the person had a strong mental shield walling it off. But in close proximity, I started to see the scar inside still infecting the body, eating the soul from the core. Ironically, the mental shield aimed at strengthening the spirit was also allowing the psychological damage to thrive for decades, protected from the external world. Pedophilia must be the most convenient form of crime for the offenders because the victims also support hiding the traces, probably more aggressively than the perpetrator.

Even more sadly, this person was trying to compensate for the scar by abusing the people around, especially the close ones, unconsciously and without control. Pedophilic experience had made this person a living robot—or even a zombie—who automatically acts according to the “programming” implemented earlier in life.

Opening a public discourse about pedophilia is not about creating a vent for child abuse, or posturating that being attracted to young, vulnerable kids is healthy or normal. I am saying that we shouldn’t treat such a common phenomenon as something that doesn’t exist. We might still not know how to cure this disease. But we do know this: a psychological scar does not automatically heal itself—I reluctantly believe this, after witnessing how the “mental shield” works. But sunlight can help. It’s time to bring this issue to a visible level and watch, discuss, and treat it just like we treat other abnormal psychological states.

(Note: There are many spoilers. But even if you haven’t seen the film, it only gets better once you understand what it is about. I will explain why.)

The Hurt Locker, the 2009 movie that brought Kathryn Bigelow the first Oscar for a female director, does not allow the audience to feel catharsis. I watched that film on the big screen with a friend and we both came out of the movie theater with a shared but unspoken opinion: What was that about?

The movie worked fine until midpoint. A loner bomb defuser with an attitude (played by Jeremy Renner) keeps clearing up difficult assignments relying on his instinct and ignoring official protocols. Fellow soldiers are constantly annoyed by his go-fuck-yourself attitude but cannot help but admire his skills. It is a modern-day spaghetti Western revived in the desert of the Middle East.

But in the second half, the protagonist starts to drift off the high note. He takes revenge on the wrong person and along the way, shoots his colleague in his thigh by accident. In the climax scene, he fails to defuse a bomb, letting an innocent guy wrapped in explosives waste his life. He leaves the army, starts a peaceful but boring civilian life. Everything is downhill.

I was waiting for a resurrection at the end, thinking: It cannot end like this. The final twist did come, but equally uneventfully: He went back to the battle field and was standing at a corner of an Iraqi street, wearing a protection suit. And that was it. How could a Hollywood film offer such an anti-climatic ending?

I finally got a clue when I was listening to a Japanese movie critic/journalist Tomohiro Machiyama's seminar (in Japanese, sorry) where he explored a common theme that runs through two Oscar-contenders of 2009, Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker: A man’s transition from a big boy to a mature adult by realizing his calling, even though that calling is nothing glamorous. Now I get the reason why the former bomb squad commander went back to his old job, even though he failed miserably at his last mission and became disillusioned: Because he has accepted the fact that defusing a bomb is the only thing he could do well.

The movie does not vindicate his decision by showing what happens later, because that’s not the point. Knowing who he really is and getting down-to-earth by choice, that’s the point.  Had my friend and I known we were watching a mid-life crisis drama in disguise of an anti-Iraq war movie, we wouldn’t have been disappointed. Okay, let’s admit: We wouldn’t have seen the movie in the first place.

Why am I talking about this movie now, almost two years later? Because recently I have also consciously narrowed down my future career path to a few options. It was a scary decision. I used to believe throwing away life’s possibilities was about getting old, or even worse, dead. Some part of me still thinks so. But the rest tells me that knowing myself and walking the too-well-known road consciously has nothing to do with age. It’s that we are so stupid that we don’t realize what we should truly embrace until we hit a crisis.

P.S.
The movie’s central theme—men’s mid-life crisis—also explains why Kathryn Bigelow, a female director, was able to shoot the film. Male directors are too close to this subject. They go to the extreme and ignores it or glorify it. Think of any movie that includes a 40-year-old hooking up with a girl half his age (which means 50% of Hollywood films—now you are getting the big picture).