ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME
Click on image to view trailer.
• directed by Al Holmes and Al Taylor, 2012; written by Brian Greene and David Hwang; narration by Kate Shindle.
• original score by Philip Glass; performed by Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, conducted by Louis Scaglione.
• performed in the Kimmel Center concert hall, as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival and Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. April 24, 2013.
To hear Brian Greene and Philip Glass, click here: Listen.
________________________________________________________________________
One of the key ideas that inspired the founding of the Center for Media and Destiny is the need for a sane human destiny grounded in the artistic-philosophical merger of cosmology, ecology, and technology. In that synthesis is the best hope for finding a meaningful existence for humanity in a vast and ancient universe.
What a great surprise to see that artistic-philosophical merger so perfectly expressed in Icarus at the Edge of Time, the multimedia performance piece based on physicist Brian Greene’s book of the same name. Though the book and multimedia performance are targeted to teenagers, adults can enjoy the inspiring ideas, too. In fact, considering the deplorable state of science education in America, many adults should see the film. Fortunately, Brian Greene was in attendance in Philadelphia and gave a clever scientific introduction to the film, with a 30-minute explanation of Einstein’s relativity, gravity, and black holes.
Imagine an arts festival and science festival collaborating to produce an inspiring and philosophically challenging work of art regarding human destiny, instead of the endless apocalyptic scenarios cranked out by Hollywood. As movie fate would have it, I saw Icarus and Tom Cruise’s Oblivion on the same day. What a striking contrast! More on that contrast in a moment.
Icarus at the Edge of Time debuted at the 2010 World Science Festival in New York City and has played in other major cities around the world. Levar Burton — the actor famed for his outstanding performances in Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation — was the live narrator for the debut. Greene founded the World Science Festival in 2007 to show that “science is so much more than what kids often experience in the classroom — it’s not just facts and figures, but is instead a daring journey of discovery.” For Greene, “the ‘Icarus’ performance, melding music and film with the story of a courageous boy challenging a black hole, and suffering a fate that dramatizes one of Einstein’s greatest insights, captures this spirit.”[1]
Everyone should know the myth of Icarus, the boy who disobeyed his father and used wax wings to fly too close to the sun, thus melting the wings and sending the boy crashing back to Earth. The meaning of the myth is twofold — 1) children do not question or disobey your father or mother, 2) do not aspire too high, as you will come crashing to Earth. Greene cleverly transformed the myth of the past into a tale of the future, where humans have embarked on a voyage to meet another civilization discovered on a planet orbiting a nearby star.
Icarus conceiving his flying machine.In Greene’s version, “Icarus” is recast as an innovative and courageous teenaged boy who invents a flying machine that can handle the forces at the edge of a black hole. Of course, Icarus rebels against his father’s instructions to not depart the spaceship and fly to the black hole. Unlike the past Icarus, whose wax wings were melted by the sun, this future Icarus takes his flying machine on a journey to the edge of the back hole.
As he approaches the edge, also known as the “event horizon,” time slows down drastically for the boy because of the immense gravity of the back hole. Meanwhile, time moves at a normal rate for humans on the spaceship, and the boy will never return to the spaceship or his father because thousands of years have passed. But, the boy’s flying machine tames the forces of the black hole and he eventually meets up with other advanced future civilizations who have apparently harnessed the power of black holes to navigate vast cosmos.
As the story of Icarus unfolded, the music and visuals provide a spectacular synthesis that is only enhanced by the live narration. Rather than show an entire spaceship, Holmes and Taylor provide shifting abstractions that serve to enhance the story much better than CGI realism or overwrought special effects. The images on the screen often resemble a mix of abstract and representational paintings, thus allowing the music and narration serve their functions to support the theme, plot, and tension of the story.
The story is of a boy who rebels against his father to pursue a great scientific-technological breakthrough that changes the future for the better. Icarus shows a real rebel, a rebel with a cause, in contrast to the mostly counterfeit rebels who have dominated our culture since James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Of course, the “rebels” celebrated in today’s culture don’t contemplate the cosmic destiny of humanity amidst the vast universe, as Dean does in the planetarium scene inside Griffith Observatory in Rebel Without A Cause.
L.A. teenagers contemplating the cosmic void in the planetarium at Griffith Observatory.
Considering the intellectual ambitions of Icarus, it is worth revisiting that planetarium scene, where a group of Los Angeles high school students gather to hear an astronomy lecture. As the students gaze up at the starry skies projected on the dome, the lecture delivered by Dr. Minton (Ian Wolfe) dryly offers the following summation:
The last of us search the heavens and stand amazed, for the stars will still be there, moving through their ancient rhythms. The familiar constellations that illuminate our night will seem as they have always seemed: eternal, unchanged, and little moved by the shortness of time between our planet’s birth and its demise. . . . And while the flash of our beginning has not yet traversed the light years into the distance, has not yet been seen by planets deep within the other galaxies, we will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came, destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire.
Exploding star obliterates Earth and humanity disappears from the cosmos.Dr. Minton pauses as the planetarium dome flashes brilliantly to illustrate the death of Earth in a collision with a star. The expressions on the students’ faces range from awe to terror to bewildered to bemused (the look on James Dean’s face, of course). As the exploding light subsides, Dr. Minton concludes:
The heavens are still and cold once more. In all the immensity of our universe and the galaxies beyond, the Earth will not be missed. Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of man seem trivial and naive indeed, and man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence. That's all. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much.
With technologies far more powerful than anything imagined by Galileo and Newton, Griffith Observatory was a temple to human curiosity about the starry skies and human existence. In Rebel Without a Cause, the Observatory offers a much darker vision of the cosmos and human destiny, or the specter of the big bang in the shadow of the atomic bomb and the Cold War. In the planetarium, science and technology projected a vast universe that seems radically indifferent to human existence and the fate of our species and planet. This classic and overlooked scene presents the existential and philosophical challenge that humans have avoided since we were dislodged from the center of the universe by every telescope, from Galileo to the Hubble Space Telescope.
So, what’s left for humans to do to prove their cosmic worth? In Rebel Without a Cause, the answer is tribal warfare, typified by the knife fight between Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) immediately after the cosmic lecture. And that is where are today. Two decades after the demise of the Cold War, the Terror War and tribal warfare dominates the worlds of politics and news media.
Modern science has revealed a vast and ancient universe, a universe in which contemporary philosophy has failed to provide sufficient meaning for humanity. As Stephen Hawking said in The Grand Design, “philosophy is dead” in its failure to keep up with the cosmological discoveries of contemporary science. Into the voids of the universe and the voids of cosmic meaning, fundamentalists (of all stripes) have projected their deities so they can imagine themselves and their prophets at the center of a universe 10,000 years old, while reversing centuries of secular progress on Spaceship Earth in a retreat to premodern mythology.
Thr famed sky house in Oblivion. Is it sunrise or sunset for the future?The yearning for a mythical past should not be surprising, considering that pop culture and Hollywood are filled with apocalyptic futures. Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise, is the latest sci-fi film to portray an apocalyptic destiny, where the extraterrestrials seek to wipe out humanity in the twenty-first century.
When not battling extraterrestrials, clones, and drones, Cruise lives in one of the coolest space age houses (think Zaha Hadid meets Frank Lloyd Wright) in film history, yet yearns for simpler times living in a cabin in the woods, shooting hoops, and wearing a faded Yankees baseball cap, as if these are signs of authenticity. Unable to imagine anything original about human destiny, the film collapses into clichés and pop culture mythologies, in a premodern future apparently populated by noble warriors and supermodel moms. When homes by Zaha Hadid and Frank Lloyd Wright are replaced by a hut fitting for the Unabomber, then the space age is reversing to the stone age and the future is facing “oblivion."
What is missing from our cultural narratives is an optimistic vision of a human destiny grounded in a merger of art, cosmology, and ecology. That’s why many more apocalyptic futures are coming to theaters in 2013 — Star Trek Into Darkness (featuring Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, et al), After Earth (starring Will Smith), Elysium (starring Jodie Foster and Matt Damon), World War Z (produced by and starring Brad Pitt), Pacific Rim (directed by Guillermo Del Toro), and on so on. And this is just for the summer of 2013! It’s too bad that hundreds of millions of people will see these apocalyptic films, while maybe only thousands will see Icarus at the Edge of Time.
All of these apocalyptic films are what make Icarus at the Edge of Time so timely, so refreshing, so unusual. There are no evil extraterrestrials, no annihilations of humanity, no terrifying tomorrows — just the inspiring story of a boy, technology, courage, creativity, and curiosity, all told in a universe knowable via science, art, and human reason. In that sense, perhaps Icarus at the Edge of Time is also at the edge of a better future.
[1] Michelle Michalos, “’Icarus at the Edge of Time’ Opens the 2012 Science Festival,” Thirteen (WNET, NY), May 21, 2012. Web site accessed May 9, 2012. http://www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/2012/05/icarus-at-the-edge-of-time-opens-the-2012-world-science-festival/
________________________________________________________________________
We welcome your feedback. If you have comments or would to submit a review for this site, please contact us at the links provided. Thanks.